Breaking the Mold?

For a long time, I had this preconceived notion that “pure classes” generally perform their job better than “hybrid classes”.  For example, a warrior’s main job is being a tank.  There’s no way that he can ever spec Arms or Fury and produce more damage than a rogue, for example.  Furthermore, the fallacy would continue that there’s no reason to bring a non-protection spec’ed warrior, right?  Continuing on this thinking, classes like paladins or druids can never really be efficient at much of anything since warriors will always be better.

As a whole, this seems to be proven mostly false, at least in my experiences.  I know druids that make great tanks.  I know paladins that make great healers.  I know priests that bring a lot to the group by providing decent DPS and using Vamperic Embrace and Vamperic Touch to help keep their group alive and full of mana.  Kind of unfair that all the hybrid classes can change roles without having to level another 70, and the DPS classes (rogue, mage, warlock, hunter) have to keep DPS’ing.  (I know, I know… cry me a river, right?)  But that’s not really the point of this post.

So, if you can heal, then you can be a healer (priests, paladins, shaman, and druids).  If you’ve got plate or high armor, you can be a tank (warriors, druids, and paladins).  And then everybody can DPS, right?

The only caveat to that last statement is that I have yet to really understand what a retribution paladin brings to the raid table.  Sure, there’s another blessing: awesome.  You can consistently have some judgments up that either heal melee or restore mana, where as your healing paladin is probably too busy healing to renew the judgments.  These effects would also be raid-wide, while a shadow priest only influences his 5-man group.  But on many occasions, I have heard that their DPS is “abysmal”.  Maybe it’s like the shadow priest: they’re not meant to be on top of the damage charts, but the additions they bring to a group help others to do well.  I don’t know.  Patch 2.3 was supposed to be a huge boost to the viability of a DPS’ing paladin.  Maybe that helped enough to make them raid viable once again.

This whole thought process came up because we had a Retribution Paladin apply to our guild.  My first thought, along with the other officers, was to ask him to respec tank, because that was what we wanted.  He’s willing to do that, but has the DPS purplez, where the tanking set is only blue.  To avoid burn-out of players, I tend to want them to play the role that they enjoy the most, as long as we can accommodate that.  So, I don’t know… maybe we have a new Retribution Paladin.  I’ll have to let you know how that turns out.

Anything else you can think of that I should consider about Ret Pally’s?