Pally Wars!

Rohan of Blessing of Kings made an interesting post regarding the warring factions of the Paladin class, which I'd like to make a few comments on as well.

Rohan breaks down the various Paladins into 4 factions: Holy, Prot, Ret and Hybrid, who want all of the trees to keep the hybrid concept going, as in nothing too specialized for a role and therefore gimped in others, and further states that Holy and Ret are at each other's threat because each gave up the other's ability (damage and healing respectively) and want to pretend they lost nothing by antagonizing the other group. Further, there's an indirect suggestion that the hybrids are the only ones who really prefer the hybrid nature and everyone else just wants to do only one thing.

I enjoyed doing the hybrid thing...back in 5 mans....before Burning Crusade. I was great at it too. Grab the extra mob, offheal the injured rogue, beat the face in of the boss, etc. A 31 point ret build was actually good at doing anything - I'd top healing charts in ZG, be in the top 5 for damage when healing wasn't needed, offtank a few fights here and there. The great thing was that protection was so broken that none of its skills worked properly, and you were just as well off leaving the whole spec alone and just slapping on sta/def gear as a Retnoob. Hell, there was a protection tanking guide in the forums back in the day, where the writer said to not stack defense, so that you could get crit and actually utilize redoubt and reckoning. Not insulting the author, but that's how badly prot was built. Meanwhile, healing just required that you understood downranking, as FoLr1 and HLr4 were kings for mana efficiency.

But once you start raiding, you can't do all of the jobs at once. If I wanted to heal, I'd swap in healing gear. If I wanted to DPS, I'd swap in DPS gear. And I've had a REALLY understanding guild this whole time. We have something like 9 Paladins, of whom 4 are Prot, 2 are Ret and 3 are Holy.

There are two things that prevent trying this whole hybrid thing: 1, most guilds are not that understanding, and 2, BC almost demands specialization.

You're not going to see resto shamans dps'ing a fight. You won't see Prot warriors dps'ing either (unless you're desperate), and you're very unlikely to see a feral druid heal. It's the nature of the way they designed the game. Specialization is everything. Raiding requires it, and we needed a fix. They gave it to us in a way that limits our hybridization, granted. But OT was never a great skill for us, and there's still nothing stopping us from doing a little OTing: RF still gives us 1.3 Holy threat, which is enough to keep off healing aggro at the least. And really, we still have that third option, healing, which means we can use our hybrid skills, so long as we're willing to swap out gear before a fight. I've kept people alive when healers were dropped in raids, but it's very touch and go - if the healers are down, the raid will almost certainly soon follow.

I wish this game were one where I could go into a fight and reasonably expect to help out in any role needed - tanking, a little healing, a little dps'ing, but this isn't possible designed as it is, so I do what I can, and in this version of the game, if I spec Ret, that means I DPS. Period.