The end of Ret Blogging? or the end of Ret?

Drunkenclod, have you been drinking again?....

Sure, but not right now, at this moment I'm quite sober and have noticed a sobering trend going on. THE DEATH OF RET.

No, I don't mean Blizz is eliminating the Ret class, nor do I think everyone's going to stop playing as a Ret pally and switch to a DK (or other class) alt. But I've been having this feeling of...well... apathy towards my Ret Pally ever since this latest patch went live; actually it's even more twards WOW in general, but since Ret is my default spec I think it's causing my happy feelings of Ret to vanish. The sense of "Fun" is going away. Turns out it's not just me. Other Rets are feeling the same way (I bet other classes are as well, but I'm sticking to RET for now).

Let's see what's changed in patch 3.1 for me. Perhaps the best thing to do is to compare what I WAS doing in 3.0 and what I AM doing in 3.1

GOLD FARMING / DAILIES - Before 3.1 I was grinding out dailies on a regular basis, and enjoying it. My stash of gold had dwindled to a couple thousand and I needed to get it back up. I also needed Holar Rep for a shoulder enchant, AND farming plenty of ore for AH sales. After 3.1 it seems less important. I'm back in the 6-7k gold range, with nothing realy to buy. Added rep isn't going to get me anything besides an achievement point, and I swear there's only so many times I can joust an opponent in the Argent daily before I just get tired of mashing the same 3 buttons, in the same pattern, against the same opponent, in the same circle... well you get my drift.... Gold Dailies have lost their "luster".

PvE - Before 3.1 I was going raid and heroic content like mad (for me anyway) traditionally I wan't a fan of raiding, but in patch 3.0 the best gear came from 25 man, and excellent gear from 10 man, even a few 5's if I saved the badges. I ran everything from 5 man heroics to 25 man OS and even pugged Naxx a couple times. I looked forward to a nice 25 man OS group each week and VOA. (VOA will be addressed later as part of Wintergrasp)... After 3.1 it didn't make much sense to bother with 5 or (outside of Uldar) 10 mans at all. I mean the gear is so poor compared to Uldar or high level Arena that unless you've just hit 80 your gear is better already. Even old 25 man content gear is "average" for the veteran player but nothing to look forward to.

That leaves me to try and pug Uldar, which I havn't evn tried considering how hard folks say it is, and my PvP guild sure doesn't run it.... Leaving me no real gear upgrade outside of VOA and Arena... so let's look at those.

Wintergrasp/VOA - Before 3.1, ah wintergrasp was excellent. Sometimes laggy but overall playable. Sweet daily honor and enough turnaround to make it interesting. Also it was pretty easy to pick up a pug for 10 and 25 man after victory... And that pug would down the boss 80-90% of the time after the 1st month or so.... After 3.1 Wintergrasp gameplay was similar enough, but VOA bit the big one. Harder to get PUGs together. And when you did a large argument ensued on whether to do both bosses - just 1 - which one to do 1st and of course the people that left in disgust when the 2nd boss didn't go down, leaving you to wait and find replacements. I've HEARD this is somewhat better so after a couple weeks of leaving VOA alone I'm going to give it another shot. Wintergrasp remains one of the last interesting things going on. I hope the former glory days will come again. Not sure if the fact the honor goes back to weekly from daily will cause another round of fail though.....

Arena - Before patch 3.1 the season itself was very frustrating to play, BUT it was easy enough to get more then enough arena points. In fact I could outfit both specs in a couple months and still have left over points. The only problem was that the gear was sub-par. After 3.1 New season, new gear, and it's GOOD gear. But it takes a long time to get the gear. More honor is needed for each piece and (for most people including me) I'm getting around the same number of arena points....... Add to that the problem of any PvPer not having an upgrade path for a weapon... and the fact that you get the same # of points for a team rating of 150 as you do for 1,500 it just doesn't give you as much incentive to do a ton of arena. For the average player 10 games a week is as good as 50, especially in 3's and 5's.

BG's - Before patch 3.1 well overall OK with SOTA replacing AV as the main place to go for honor, a lot of grinding but the gear upgrades were huge. After patch 3.1 BG's the same but better queuing and improved AV again... another uber long grind for gear but this time it's more of an incremental gear upgrade rather then seeing a huge stat boost from crafted blue gear.

Playstyle - Here's the deal, a Ret Pally is all about DPS. In PvE DPS it's fairly similar before an after the patch. Gear and talents provide some improvement but other classes have similar improvements so compared to others our DPS numbers on the raid charts haven't moved much. In PvP we received nerf after nerf.. no exorcism, less burst, bubble dispellable by warriors and priests, and of course (for many) Armor upgrades with no Weapon Upgrade. This means life is harder for RET in PvP... In fact blizz thinks the playstle is so "broken" their giving it a new overhaul once again... we'll see what this does for Ret but I'm not holding my breath; I expect either it's great but they wind up nerfing it so severely it sucks again... or their attempts to make it more "interesting" will realy just make it "harder"

So is it just me? Am I jaded? I don't think so.... look at the blogs I link to. There's 7 Ret Pally Blogs and they used to be updated multiple times per week, some every day. None of them except for Eye for an Eye have been updated recently... and what does E4E post? That he's not doing as much in WOW and is going to stop blogging regularly.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.