Retribution DPS 4.3 PvE

[Jonuts]

I'm fairly certain that they're making it a holy-only spell (spec, not damage), so we won't use it at all as ret or prot, which I'm fine with. I die a little inside every time I have to press that stupid button while I'm dps'ing.

Except, it's such an awesome spell. Be honest, you'd *LOVE* that button if it wasn't a mandatory part of your SINGLE TARGET rotation. It's so bloody useful! Undead? Stunned. Elementals? Stunned. Dragons? Stunned. FUCK YEA! It should be one of the coolest buttons on your bar. Except it's rammed down our throats in very unfriendly ways. Remove it from the single target rotation, and viola! Problem solved. Instead, they're getting rid of Holy Wrath and keeping Holy Power. Fucking idiots

[BDF]

I'll take it. It's at least a 3% DPS increase just looking at the uptime alone, not including the effects of cooldowns with it.

Not to mention how this inflates the stat value of mastery, and the upcoming tier's itemization is slightly more friendly to ret paladins than firelandslolhaste

[Tyrionlol]

Not sure why people are still under the impression that Ret palas are bad.. The few fights where I offspecc ret I can compete with our main raiders, altho I've been rather lucky with offspecc gear but either way they are almost full 391 most of them.

[Fredzilla]

Not sure why people are still under the impression that Ret palas are bad.. The few fights where I offspecc ret I can compete with our main raiders, altho I've been rather lucky with offspecc gear but either way they are almost full 391 most of them.

And I'm sure you could also keep up with the mages and spriests from vodka and blood legion and all of them, right? Saying you do good in your own raids doesn't mean anything for the spec as a whole.

[Jonuts]

Saying you don't compete with the top .001% of players says alot less than "I'm competitive with 99.999% of the player base". That's a 2 way street.

[BDF]

Saying you don't compete with the top .001% of players says alot less than "I'm competitive with 99.999% of the player base". That's a 2 way street.

However when you compare classes to one another you typically want to look at people guaranteed to be getting the most out of their class to try and reduce the player skill variable in the comparison.

[Jonuts]

However when you compare classes to one another you typically want to look at people guaranteed to be getting the most out of their class to try and reduce the player skill variable in the comparison.

Why? Why would you base all assumption off of unrealistic scenarios? Realistically speaking, almost noone will be in the top 500 of players. It's like being middle class and worrying about which fork to eat the salad with if you're invited to the white house for dinner. It's a waste of time, effort, and thought. If you don't raid in shifts and compete for world firsts, what these players do with the various classes is meaningless. The sooner people realize that, the better.

How well my class performs compared to people I will actually meet in the game, and raid with in the game, *THAT* matters. Sure, I'd love to better parity at all levels of play, but I'm not WORRIED about how well a Ret Paladin stacks up to a Fury Warrior in a guild that gets a world first. If you think the class is holding back your DPS, news flash, it's not. Did you kill heroic rag pre-nerf? Did you farm Sinestra? if you did all this, and regularly compete for world firsts, then I take it back. The class might be holding you back. If you DON'T do all this, then the class isn't holding you back, you are.

Hell, look at my guild, Fallen Chapter. I'm certainly not a member of the raid team (or even on the same continent as their raiders..), but one of their best DPS is a ret paladin (Which is why I probably couldn't get on their raid team even if they raided at times I could meet...), and you're not gonna look at the accomplishments of the FC raid team and say "He's only good because the rest of the players are shit". They're not. They're a high end guild, but with a shit-ton of accomplishments to their name, and all quality players. At their level of play (Which includes farming rag for fun), Ret is just as competitive as any other class. These are some of the best players I will ever meet.

No, the only problem is, they need to fix the perception that ret paladins can't compete. They can compete and then some, in PvE.

[BDF]

None of us are saying that ret pallies are dead weight, but we are saying that all things being equal, ret paladins are behind other classes and we want to be more in line with what, say, a frost dk or fury warrior are pulling.

It's that 'all things being equal' line that is important there, and it's why people typically pick out top-end guilds, because the players there are all of very high caliper and of any environment it can be the most telling of who one class can fare against another.

A class should NOT be balanced around an average or below average player who uses them in ways outside of design, thus gimping themselves.

[Fredzilla]

None of us are saying that ret pallies are dead weight, but we are saying that all things being equal, ret paladins are behind other classes and we want to be more in line with what, say, a frost dk or fury warrior are pulling.

It's that 'all things being equal' line that is important there, and it's why people typically pick out top-end guilds, because the players there are all of very high caliper and of any environment it can be the most telling of who one class can fare against another.

A class should NOT be balanced around an average or below average player who uses them in ways outside of design, thus gimping themselves.

This, pretty much. They play the class the the best of its ability, thus we can see the actual potential of one spec against another. I'm usually in the top 2 dps for my raids, but I still know that that doesn't mean anything for the spec as a whole and I know that, all things being equal between our raiders, I shouldn't be that high on the charts.

[Vodalos]

It's the same thing for all of us. I am usually in the top 3 DPS in my guild but I have a crappy stuff compared to them. Our Warrior got 2x378 2H weapons (the blade and the axe) and I'm just behind him on the DPSmeter and I only have the 365 crafted 2H blade.

[Jonuts]

but we are saying that all things being equal,

And yet, all things being equal, at a specific value, Paladins are outdone. All things being equal at all other values making up 99.999% of the player base, I see no evidence of this. That the people who get World Firsts find Paladin performance lacking at their level of play is *NOT* a Paladin problem, it's a world class player problem.

Comparing "potential" is just silly, when almost noone will live up to said potential. It's as baseless as judging which car you're taking the kids to soccer in by how well it handles at mach 3.

I might not be coming across very clear. It's not that it isn't a problem, it's that it's *NOT* the massive problem people make it out to be. It means some numbers can be tightened up a bit, not that all is lost and I need to delete my Paladin (Most other other design decisions however, do generally seem to mean that...)

The way this entire argument started, I stand behind my comments. I'd rather be just as good as every other class as far as the 99% of the player base is concerned, the weak at all levels of play other than absolutely skill capped.

I'm usually in the top 2 dps for my raids, but I still know that that doesn't mean anything for the spec as a whole and I know that, all things being equal between our raiders, I shouldn't be that high on the charts.

That's because you don't understand ret very well. Ret is perfectly fine for DPS output. Every paladin that intends to play well and uses the resources they have to play well will compete with every other class perfectly fine. Did that dot class beat you because they multi-dotted? Too bad, so sad. That's not your class being sub-par in numbers, it's the encounter favoring multi-dotting. You and all the melee behind ranged? It's not because PALADINS are in a bad spot number wise, it's because they can't design an encounter that isn't overly punishing for Melee. You out DPS'd by a warrior? It's not because Warriors deal ZOMG SO MUCH DAMAGE TROLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!, but because the player was better. If thinking the class can't perform lets you sleep better at night, more power to you. Oh, and saying "I can play class X better than Ret Paladin in similar gear" isn't evidence either, unless you can conclusively prove that your skill with the mechanics of class X and Ret are the same, and the difference is more than standard variances you get from RNG (Crits, damage range on hits, procs).

I've seen zero hard evidence that a Ret Paladin that is (arbritary number scale) 8/10 in equal gearing (lets assume magical perfect stat distributions on all gear to remove the bias of better side grades, since that's a gear issue, not a class issue) is going to do less than an 8/10 warrior. All the "evidence" we have essentially says "People who register at 11 on a 1-10 scale can't do as much with Paladins as with other classes". The only time I consistently see a ret paladin at the bottom, it's because the player has no understanding of how to play the class or with large gear differences. Where a Paladin lies in reality is, frankly, *FAR* more important than where they lay on paper. Reality > Theory for practical applications after all.

[Fredzilla]

And yet, all things being equal, at a specific value, Paladins are outdone. All things being equal at all other values making up 99.999% of the player base, I see no evidence of this. That the people who get World Firsts find Paladin performance lacking at their level of play is *NOT* a Paladin problem, it's a world class player problem.

Comparing "potential" is just silly, when almost noone will live up to said potential. It's as baseless as judging which car you're taking the kids to soccer in by how well it handles at mach 3.

I might not be coming across very clear. It's not that it isn't a problem, it's that it's *NOT* the massive problem people make it out to be. It means some numbers can be tightened up a bit, not that all is lost and I need to delete my Paladin (Most other other design decisions however, do generally seem to mean that...)

The way this entire argument started, I stand behind my comments. I'd rather be just as good as every other class as far as the 99% of the player base is concerned, the weak at all levels of play other than absolutely skill capped.



That's because you don't understand ret very well. Ret is perfectly fine for DPS output. Every paladin that intends to play well and uses the resources they have to play well will compete with every other class perfectly fine. Did that dot class beat you because they multi-dotted? Too bad, so sad. That's not your class being sub-par in numbers, it's the encounter favoring multi-dotting. You and all the melee behind ranged? It's not because PALADINS are in a bad spot number wise, it's because they can't design an encounter that isn't overly punishing for Melee. You out DPS'd by a warrior? It's not because Warriors deal ZOMG SO MUCH DAMAGE TROLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!, but because the player was better. If thinking the class can't perform lets you sleep better at night, more power to you. Oh, and saying "I can play class X better than Ret Paladin in similar gear" isn't evidence either, unless you can conclusively prove that your skill with the mechanics of class X and Ret are the same, and the difference is more than standard variances you get from RNG (Crits, damage range on hits, procs).

I've seen zero hard evidence that a Ret Paladin that is (arbritary number scale) 8/10 in equal gearing (lets assume magical perfect stat distributions on all gear to remove the bias of better side grades, since that's a gear issue, not a class issue) is going to do less than an 8/10 warrior. All the "evidence" we have essentially says "People who register at 11 on a 1-10 scale can't do as much with Paladins as with other classes". The only time I consistently see a ret paladin at the bottom, it's because the player has no understanding of how to play the class or with large gear differences. Where a Paladin lies in reality is, frankly, *FAR* more important than where they lay on paper. Reality > Theory for practical applications after all.

But the whole point is that while we may be able to, in practice in our own personal raids, be able to keep up with or outdps other classes, we have to work harder to achieve the same numbers those other classes do (or get extremely lucky). If, in theory, ret was on par with other dps classes, I would be farther ahead of the people I already outdps, but that would be a better thing for my raid overall since bosses would do quicker.

I don't like the fact that I have to be completely on top of my rotation the entire fight to only just tie with some other dps who has to put in half the effort to achieve the same numbers.

[Butosai]

next patch you should be rewarded for your efforts.

[Deleted]

The 4pc still boggles my mind. Rets are already burst-monsters. So how about increasing that burst?

Let's look at some numbers when you factor in all your cooldowns on how big the difference is to your non-CD damage.

GoAK: 20% STR
AW: Flat 20% Damage done
4pc Zeal: Flat 18% Damage done
Add in a trinket, lets say Essence which is 1277 STR additional or AoK which is 2700ish Mastery
Maybe pot? Golemblood 1200 STR.

We're talking some stupidly high burst here. Not sure if I like that.

[Deleted]

I must admit I like that.
I love it when my world of logs graph looks like a rollercoaster, only rivaled by arcane mages. I feel that even though my averaged potential may be lower than that of other classes I can still contribute amazing damage when it really counts (e.g. last phase Ragnaros)

[Fredzilla]

next patch you should be rewarded for your efforts.

I'm hoping that the sims aren't terrible off of what I'll see (relatively speaking) on the bosses in dragon soul.

[Naididae]

Just to throw it out there:

Remember that small delay we had in gaining holy power when our divine purpose was a chance at making some skills (including judgement) give holy power? Back in 4.0.3 I think.
Well, the current t13 2 set bonus has that small delay, sadly =/
It sucks for CLCRet/CLCInfo.

[Rio]

Just to throw it out there:

Remember that small delay we had in gaining holy power when our divine purpose was a chance at making some skills (including judgement) give holy power? Back in 4.0.3 I think.
Well, the current t13 2 set bonus has that small delay, sadly =/
It sucks for CLCRet/CLCInfo.

Are you sure this isn't PTR lag or any type of lag on your end? Maybe a delay with power auras? I haven't heard anything about the T13 2-set delaying like our delay that we had in 4.0.1(4.0.3 whatever).. Maybe I need to get out more.

Haven't tested it myself yet though, obviously.

[Naididae]

Yeah I'm sure. Using CS works fine.