Clarification on the Ret Paladin thingy

As I'm sure I've explained in the past, I no longer play on arena teams on the live servers.

Quite simply, I do not have the willpower to spend hours making enough gold to allow me to swap between arena specs and raiding specs on a weekly basis, or whenever it is called for to do so. It qould quickly cost me a fortune, a fortune I'd rather spend on stuff like consumables so I can actually raid... more better... more goodly... and yes...

HENCE.

I play arenas almost exclusively on the PTR's, which has some very odd, and some very zany things that come with it.

The first odd thing about PTR's is that you can transfer your character over, and whatever items he has on him, will come over.
For example, I can borrow 6000 gold from various people, log out, transfer my character, log in, give all the gold back, and have a character on the PTR who has 6000 gold waiting for me.
Thus making for some... dare I say it... fucking weird economics.

Oh, yeah, and being able to open the AQ gates is really cool. I do it every time. Or try to.

The second odd thing about PTRs is that sometimes... sometimes people make pre-mades. Sometimes you can make pre-made toons, pre-built 70 characters that come in all sorts of fanciful epics.

What this means for a 70 player is a chance to try out another class, and see how it plays.
I, for example, have discovered I absolutely loathe playing a rogue, and yet have immense amounts of fun playing a resto druid. Who knew?
Anyway, the horrible downside of this are people who are, like, level 30 on the live server, and really have no clue how the game works.
These are the people you see in Shattrath, a 70 mage in Arena S2 gear, proudly wearing spirit gems, asking in trade "WTF ARE [Badges of Justice] for?!"

So when pre-mades are allowed onto the PTRs, some very, very interesting things occur.

One of those interesting things are total and complete PvP nubs trying to do arenas with their complete and total nub friends.

One of the most common sights I see are Retribution Paladins, running around in S2 gladiator gear, weilding that big arse sword. Without fail, these people seem to be blood elves, and they all seem to band together and spend their talent points by committee.
Their ret trees look like someone scribbled over it with a crayon, and they attempted to use said scribble as a way to spec into the tree.
Oh, yeah, and the S2 arena gear is atrocious for Ret Paladins. Absolutely horrendously budgeted pieces, with the itemization trying to cover strength, intellect, stamina, spell damage, resilience, and melee crit rating together, resulting in a bunch of sad, decrepit plate pieces.
And we all know how awesome crit rating is... on PvP gear...

So. Let's combine these facts.

We have a bunch of poorly specced Ret Paladins running around, in poorly itemized gear, who have no fucking CLUE how to play their class.

You get the picture yet?

Yes, I realize ret pallies can be a dangerous foe when played well... like, if they're covered in various S3 gear and Black Temple gear, they can beat me. When I'm not frost spec. *cough*

But these Paladins are not skilled. They're gear is barely passable, their spec is laughable, and not one of them has ever played a Paladin past level 4. You can tell.

On live servers, I've been beaten by... 3 Paladins. Once in AV, by some hardcore dwarf dude from Black Dragonflight coated in S3 super gear and Black Temple ret gear.
Once in AB by some hardcore dwarf dude from Black Drago... wait a minute...
The guy from EotS was ALSO some hardcore dwarf dude from Black Dragonflight!

Ok, so it was the same guy.