Wishful Thinking + ....

Wishful Thinking + Ignorance + Arrogance = Blackweb. The guy is a conspiracy theorist, has a persecution complex and believes he has or can garner much more influence than he likely ever will have. This is a guy who didn't know 6 months into TBC that Crusader Strike was normalised and scaled significantly with Judgement of the Crusader (at the time). Indeed he said that his paladin did more damage at 60 than 70... but then given that he knows nothing about the class it's not too surprising, he probably geared for Spirit or grabbed Hunter +Agility mail.

He's now posting that the 'old' vanilla beta paladin was an invention of Bill Roper/Blizzard North. Unfortunately for Blackweb Roper left Blizzard to form Flagship Studio's before July 2003, one and a half years before WoW was released, and at the time he was part of the team overseeing the WoW project rather than having any sort of day-to-day input into design. Of course, the reason that he is posting this is clear, to reinforce an imaginary barrier between 'old' WoW and 'new' WoW (i.e. WoW featuring Furor), which may work if Roper left because of internal division within the development team. Unfortunately this isn't the case, Roper outlines in his July '03 interview with Gamespy that he quit due to friction between Vivendi and Blizzard North i.e. a lack of new projects and funding for his team. Which is curious given that WoW was still in development, unless you realise that they weren't really involved in the project. Other interviews dating back to 2001 feature him in the role of 'Director of Developer Relations', not WoW Game Designer.

On gaming sites featuring WotLK information Blackweb has posted the same tired old theories that Furor a) hates Paladins as a concept because they tanked better than Warriors in EQ, b) has a whole lot more influence than one would expect from a raid designer on class design (he would have some, but that much? puh-lease), and c) That Tom Chilton, Rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan somehow weren't designers of WoW (needless to say, utter crap). It's this sort of concentrated idiocy that gives Paladins as a class the reputation for being whiners even amongst people who don't venture into the official forums or even play the game.

I wish that archives of the official forums went back as far as 2006 (and that searching right now is borked). I seem to recall Blackweb being mocked by Gregthegreat and Benediction (amongst others) not because he advocated for Ret Paladins, but instead because he had not the first clue of Paladin game mechanics and posted suggestion after suggestion amounting to making Paladins carbon copies of Warriors whilst still being able to heal (before the changes in 2.0 were announced and we knew how much health pools would increase). He's stated numerous times that he is great at PvP yet quite obviously does not use the Arena (neither of his Paladins have >1500 rating nor any S2/S3 equipment) and runs under the assumption that 80k honour kills actually means anything other than a rather severe symptom of OCD and/or having played the game since October 2005.

The official forums are now going to be packed with this narcissistic douches inane ramblings, such as 'who was the lone voice in strident opposition to the nerf of our class-defining ability?', and incoherent accusations for the next couple of months before he leaves due to mockery as his lack of knowledge and critical thinking skills become apparent. And that can't come soon enough.

If I had a soapbox I'd urge Ret Paladins not to be tempted into backing this dead horse and instead wait until we get firm information on Wrath changes. Then we can post some logical and coherent feedback, as we did in 1.9 and 2.0, to get push the developers towards positive changes. Following down Blackweb's path we are likely to see the forums descend into yet another flame-fest, causing the Dev's to ignore it until well after Wrath is released and it's too late for anything but minor changes.