Dealing with the Plate-wearing Elephants in the room

For starters, I'm NOT talking about you warriors out there. You guys are fine the way you are.

And EVERYONE who's played WoW, especially players on the PvP servers, should know what I'm talking about.

Since the release of the 3.0.2, 2 classes have ABSOLUTELY DOMINATED the servers: DK's and Ret Pallys. Look at the server censes (Censuses? Censii?) and you should see an OBVIOUS trend, ~30-40% of players are DK's or Paladins (Numbers supported by various census sites). Anecdotally, I don't think i've been in a 5-man dungeon that hasn't had at least one paladin and one DK in it. I even ran ramparts once with my mage, a priest and 3 DK's. The VAST majority of these Paladins are Retribution build. I think its also the reason we see so very very many Horde players popping out BE's these days. I haven't started a Horde toon in over a year, but I'm betting a stroll around Org would show a LOT of BE's. On the plus side, the players who are sitting behind the screens on these toons are good role-players: The BE's in lore have a strong proclivity for douche-baggery, and these players are no different.

The Paladin problem showed up when they "Fixed" the retribution tree in 3.0.2. I don't know why they did this, I've never played a Paladin past level 15, so I have no idea what the talents there were like. I suppose they wanted to make a leveling build, maybe? Whatever the reason for the "Fix", this is half the reason that the PvP AND PvE environment has been such a pain in the ass. Ret Pallies are so powerful, no one wants to play anything else.

The Death Knight problem I think is a little more complex. Again, my experience PLAYING the class is very limited: I have one DK, she's level 58, and barely leaves SW and IF. To me, shes a mule and a blacksmith. That's it, and I'm okay with it. I personally HATE The way the class plays, but lots of people love it. The way the class plays is not what this post is about, the sheer NUMBER of DK's is.

The DK is a hero class. My next post has a set of guidelines about what that should mean. I won't enumerate them here, but The DK succeeds on counts 1, 2, and the first half of three, and fails on the later points. See more about my ideas for the heroic classes in the next post.

Like I'll mention, I think its okay for these characters to be marginally more powerful at levels except level 80. I can understand that, it makes the Hero class FEEL heroic at those levels. Also, I can even understand making them MUCH more powerful for a set time (e.g. a few weeks or months), at ALL levels, THEN giving them a planned nerf. This would get players to roll DK's initially, then rope things in later and let the classes normalize themselves again. If this was the plan, it hasn't happened. They remain OP'd almost 9 months following the release of the patch.

The problems DK's and Ret Pallys cause is that it has become very difficult to put a group together. DK's can tank, and Pally's can tank and heal. There are HORRID shortages of players playing these roles. If these DPS build weren't so popular due to being so damned OP, some of these players may play tanking builds, or maybe even healing builds. Hey, i know its a longshot, but every little bit helps. The players behind these screens may not give a shit about healing well, but they may make at least passable meat-shields to park in front of my DPS.

Essentially, this post is doing what the community of Non-plate wearers has been clamoring for months: NERF RET PALLYS. DO IT NOW! They're the single biggest problem here. I don't care how, just fucking DO IT.

As for DK's, I have a set of possible solutions, but they should be balanced to the rest of the classes, maybe a level above, but thats ALL!!

The developers know about these problems, the developers joked about these problems at Blizzcon. I just pray they get to it soon.

More to come soon.

-FrozenVoodoo