Ladder Resets

[smegged]

Consider the neutering of class skills and abilities that has to result when you try to balance a game that features 25-man raiding alongside 3v3 competitive player vs. player. It's insane, really. For those who were around in the beginning of WoW, remember how radically different the classes were from each other? Balanced, no; but you have to admit they were extremely unique.

Thank-you for saying this, Bolty. This is one of the things that really bothered me when I came back to WoW in February. I remember coming up to a big AOE situation while running a dungeon in a pug group. Since we didn't have a mage or warlock in the party, I made a comment like, "This might be tough without an AOE dps class in the party." I could feel the confusion in my party at my comment when I was told, "What do you mean? We have a paladin and a death knight."

Similarly, when I got Divine Hymn, I thought, "People must love to have priests in their raids to right them out of bad situations." Then I found out that *every* healing class had a raid-wide super healing ability. It was then I realized that truly all dps were interchangeable, all healing classes were interchangeable, and all tanks were interchangeable. Maybe at the bleeding edge of hardcore raiding, where 1% differences are important, some distinctions could be made about which classes are preferable. But pretty much I kept thinking, "What's the point of having so many different classes if they can all effectively do the same thing?"

I completely disagree with you on this point. I loved the fact that they made DPS classes interchangeable, tanks interchangeable and healers interchangeable. When I first started playing WoW was right after the buffed the prot pallys with Burning Crusade. I leveled entirely as a tankadin and ended up raiding. By the end of my time with WoW I was maintanking not because my class was better, but because I was a better tank than the warriors, death knights and druids in my guild. I like the differing styles and I like that they made all classes viable for PvE, while keeping them unique.