(PvE) Retribution Paladins in the future?

[Herjeee]

(PvE) Retribution Paladins in the future?

Hello! To start with, my in-game name is Aelieana, and I play on Ragnaros (EU). The current expansion has shown some disturbing problems with the Retribution Paladin, and I'm not that fond of its current state. I just want to talk a bit about the spec, about what could be changed to make this a competetive spec in mythic progression. At the moment, the majority of guilds choose not to take a Retribution paladin with them. Even if they do, it would likely only be one. So, what could be done to the spec?

Just to be clear; I'm not a hardcore retri theorycrafter and I'm not playing around with numbers. That's for somebody else to do. Therefore I may be wrong in with some points. I also don't want to bring in Seraphim and EmpS in the talk, since FV is the talent to go with in this tier, and since FV is also very competetive in most cases.

(One thing; Can't have links since I haven't posted that much...) :P

Strengths/Weaknesses
What is our strengths? As a paladin, we have a good toolkit. Hand of Protection, Hand of Sacrifice, Hand of Freedom, Lay on Hands etc; lifesaving abilities that could change an encounter from bad to good. The problem is, you won't take a Retribution Paladin with you for that. That's what you take a Holy Paladin for, or maybe you have a Protection Paladin in your raid roster. Just read the description of the specs:

Holy: (Invokes the power of the Light to protect and to heal)
Protection: (Uses Holy magic to shield himself and defend allies from attackers)
Retribution: (A righteous crusader who judges and punishes opponents with weapons and Holy magic)

First of all, the Retribution spec is a dps spec. We're supposed to do damage. Not throwing Hand of Protection here and Hand of Sacrifice there. At the moment we're doing medium single-target dps, and when it comes to cleave or AoE, it's just not reliable (all these procs). We can't be excellent at everything, but making us okay on everything is neither good. What do you want us to do? Do you want us to do great ST damage, to burst down packs of adds or do sustainable cleave? There's a reason why you don't take a retri paladin with you in early progression. You better take classes/specs that shines on those fights, not somebody who does okay everywhere and maybe a bit worse in some situations.

Seals
To be honest, I don't feel that our seals make any real difference. They are boring, and then I think of Seal of Truth and Seal of the Righteousness. Can't you make them affect your playstyle in a much greater way? For example, when using the talent Empowered Seals your Seal of Truth adds a 20% haste buff while your Seal of the Righteousness adds a 10% attack power buff. What about making these seals apply these buffs when not using Empowered Seals, but you can't apply both? This invites you to choose between more kinds of playstyles; fast or hard-hitting (or you could choose to play with Empowered Seals). I think this could make seals a bit more interesting.

Single-target
We are not known for high, sustainable damage. For us it's more about periods of amazing burst, and in between our Avenging Wraths we fall down like a stone to the ground. The question is; do we fall too much, or aren't our cooldowns doing enough damage? Also, do our hp-builders and hp-finishers do enough damage? A lot of our abilities hit like a wet nuddle, and when looking at logs it's actually our mastery that carries our dps (wait, did I see a mastery nerf?)
When talking about logs, let's just look at the purest ST-fight in BRF, which is Gruul. Retribution paladins, if lucky, can barely cross the 50k dps line. On the top we find Arcane Mages, Feral Druids and BM Hunter which all can do 10k more. We are only doing medium damage compared with all the other dps specs (Check Warcraftlogs statistics).

Cleave
Cleave. There's always fights with cleave, and do we shine in this situations? Not really. How do we actually cleave as a Retribution Paladin. In a two-target cleave we stack censure at both targets and switch between casting Final Verdict and Divine Storm (if you use FV). Divine Storm is really the only ability that does damage to both targets. Light's Hammer does some damage, but it's still not that high, AND your targets have to stand in it for the whole duration (14 seconds – be prepared to scream to the tanks). Just to add, our Divine Storm doesn't really hit like a Divine Storm should hit. It's more like a Divine Gust. Did you also say we can glyph Exorsism? How dare you speak that word!? I can't really understand why this ability is still a thing, but Blizzard wants us to keep it and does everything to make us use it.
Let's take a look at some logs again. Hans and Franz is the best example of a cleave fight, but it's not ideal. How do we to there? We are further down than Gruul (Check Warcraftlogs statistics). Just to say it; you can do pretty decent dps when there's 2+ targets, but then you gotta pray to the rng gods for a real procageddon.

AoE
AoE is like cleave. We rotate between Final Verdict and Divine Storm (at the moment this is the thing to go with for both AoE and cleave, because of Divine Gust for the other talents). Let's take the adds at Operator Thogar as an example. When the adds come, you should have pooled up some holy power to burst them down. After having spent those holy powers you get two scenarios:

1. Your action bar starts shining up your dark room and forces you to take on your sunglasses. You do some very good damage, but not amazing.
2. You have to find a flashlight to try to see your action bar because nothing procs, and then you start to cry when you fall to the bottom of the dps metre.

Where a warrior could pop Bladestorm, we have to pool up holy power and rotate between a ST-finisher and our AoE-finisher. Light's Hammer does help a bit, but it's far from an excellent cooldown. Because of the chance of getting a decent pull, we can pull out some pretty good numbers (Check Warcraftlogs statistics), but then you can't have five others pop Bladestorm, Combustion or Cataclysm, and you also need to have some luck with your procs.

What can be done?
First of all, make us good at something. As long as I'm competing with the best at ST, I don't really care if I do under average at multi-target fights. I don't want to be in the raid because you need a BoP or some sacs. I want to drive away the evil with the power of the light! So, what can be done? Well, I have some ideas.

Seals: As said earlier in this post. Make them cooler and more game changing. As it's now they don't really do anything different.

T90: Give us something more powerful. Holy Prism is at the moment a dps loss, Light's Hammer's duration is too long and it's too stationary, while Execution Sentence doesn't really execute. Give us an ability for AoE which turns us into a being of light that radiates light around us and does some serious damage to our enemies. Give us a cooldown for single target that empowers our weapon with light to do some kickass damage to the big, fat boss in front of us. Cmon, can't we have anything badass? Yes, we have our wings, but they have a two minute cooldown and is still just one cooldown.

Exorsism: Why do we have this boring spell? It's lowest in our priority (and is why you love using this with our tier bonuses), and it's a reason why it is. Just get rid of it, and replace it with a strong version Holy Wrath which actually does decent ST-damage and AoE.

Hammer of the Righteous: When do I use this ability in a raid? Rarely. Either buff it or make it give you an additional holy power when it hits 3+ targets.

Divine «Storm»: This ability doesn't really hit how it should hit like. Please, give it a little bit of love, and instead remove our Empowered Storm proc.

Hand of......: I don't really care about them. As said, I want to be chosen because of my damage, not my shiny toolkit of Hands. Let the Holy and Protection Paladins do this job and let us handle the killing.

These are just some ideas for what you could do with the spec. Just give us some love. I don't want us to top the dps on all fight. As long as our dps is competetive in some kind of fights, then I'm happy. I love this class, I love this spec. I don't want to reroll hunter or warrior. The lore and aesthetics of this class, that's what makes me like it. Don't let the warriors of the light stay in the shadows.

Feel free to discuss this if you want. There are things which are problematic with what I've said, and something may be a good thing to do. I'm not an expert. I just want to share some thoughts with you.

[Xenocidic]

While we no longer have the active 6.0 ret PVE thread, the 6.2 thread is just as good for discussing all the things you brought up - don't know if you ignored it cause you thought the thread was purely theorycrafting, but it is also our discussion thread for all issues and topics PvE ret...which this falls under.

[Herjeee]

While we no longer have the active 6.0 ret PVE thread, the 6.2 thread is just as good for discussing all the things you brought up - don't know if you ignored it cause you thought the thread was purely theorycrafting, but it is also our discussion thread for all issues and topics PvE ret...which this falls under.

I see. I just thought that my post was so large that I rather make my own thread.

EDIT: I'll just throw in some of my ideas in the 6.2 thread and talk there. Was in a write, write mood last night, heh.

[Deleted]

First of all I appreciate you took the time to make this long post. I wonder if all the retribution paladins out there who escaped LFR and mindless PvP at the BRF entrance would make such a post then maybe someone will notice. Though I think it's a long hard road out of... wait... to see a blue post. Even if there would be 50 posts like yours flooding the forum I sincerely doubt anyone else besides ret players would notice. Unless some random mage would pause for 3 minutes from his arcane studies and post something like "OP! STFU! Nerf!" etc. It's been done before hahahaha!!!
Now really, I can relate to almost everything you've said here. I'd also like to have a spot for progress and being taken for my good performance and sustained DPS (I'm being just a little bit ironic here). But in reality I fear I'm taken when there's absolutely, positively the need to have more than 2 HoPs in the raid and the extra melee interrupter with a trigger-happy finger and his eyes on the enemy cast bars... Again, as I said in Solsacra's thread on 6.2, the overall utility we can bring to the raid can easily be covered by other classes (other externals) while the DPS we bring is easily surpassed to the point you'd rather choose a ranged instead.
Of course I'd love to see improvements and play my main (not some ranged alt) and I don't mind at all when I'm asked to use my hands of xxx at the right time. Hell, I'm not even that much bothered with the easy prio rotation ret has at the moment (49 conditions in Hekili for the single target) compared to the utterly horrifying and complex hunter rotation (15 conditions in Hekili, yeah!) as long as I would actually do some consistent damage and not have a 2-7k difference each week at the same boss. But this is what it looks like for us rets in this expansion, and as much as I'd like to see a bit of love from Blizz, I'm afraid we're just going to have to do with what we have and make the best of it, for it's not going to change anytime soon. Yeah, it pisses me off, it's taking alot from the "fun" part of raiding and it makes me barely being able to keep my spot as a "raider". But I'm silly enough not to learn from past experiences and hope for a better future with each new patch. And as long as there will be silly ppl like me who love their rets to the point of questioning their ability to choose properly, Blizz is not going to do anything.
I'll be honest, I reached a point when I'm not even comparing myself with other melee classes. Not even with other paladins! I'm comparing with myself each week and I'm happy when I did not die, not being at the rock bottom of the meters and not rolled gold again (Pro tip: I'm an enchater hahahahaha!!!). Peace!

[Deleted]

"I want to be chosen because of my damage, not my shiny toolkit of Hands"

Then go play a mage, their damage is usually the best

[Shieldi]

"I want to be chosen because of my damage, not my shiny toolkit of Hands"

Then go play a mage, their damage is usually the best

This is true. paladins, being a hybrid class, are brought to raids because of their utility, not their amazing damage

[Deleted]

This is true. paladins, being a hybrid class, are brought to raids because of their utility, not their amazing damage

The hybrid tax has (according to Blizzard themselves), supposedly been a dead concept for 4-5 years. Can we stop perpetuating this sort of ridiculous nonsense, please? Every DPS spec in the game is supposed to be roughly equal in terms of output, so let's stop excusing Blizzard's miserable attempts at balancing with design concepts that they themselves have not claimed to adhere to for over half a decade.

Thank you.

[Shieldi]

PTS pls.

Whether Blizzard says the hybrid tax is a dead concept or not doesn't make what I said any less true, ret paladins are more or less in the middle to low end of the pack and aren't really useful over any other dps beyond their hands.

[Deleted]

PTS pls.

Whether Blizzard says the hybrid tax is a dead concept or not doesn't make what I said any less true, ret paladins are more or less in the middle to low end of the pack and aren't really useful over any other dps beyond their hands.

This is not even remotely relevant point. The OP speaks to the current state of Ret and what needs fixing - brushing it off with "oh we're brought for our hands not our DPS" is the definition of a pointless comment when the fact of the matter is that we are not brought for our hands, either.

Ret paladins are simply not brought by top-end guilds bar Scrubbusters, and for a very good reason. Unlike traditionally underpowered specs like Elemental or Shadow Priests, who have very noticeable niches (stacked AoE and multi-DoT'ing for single-target DPS gains, respectively), Ret is literally just "a worse version of spec X" at every single conceivable job in a raid. It needs a fix - direly so.

[Shieldi]

You're right, I don't disagree with ret needing some fixing, but I would prefer to see that as some kind of utility that they offer, which holy/prot paladins can not.

[Deleted]

Unique utility is never, ever, from a raid balancing standpoint, a good idea. Why? Because it is either powerful enough that it can be stacked and abused, or completely worthless. Just look at Aspect of the Fox for an example of a unique raid utility that was over-the-top ridiculously powerful.

All Ret needs is some sort of niche we excel at. Traditionally, that's been single-target burst, and hopefully it gets that back in 6.2.

[Shieldi]

That is a valid point, I see the error in my thinking. I really do like the idea of ret having less damage than other melee dps but being in demand anyways due to raid utility, but with the presence of holy paladins they would never get a spot on anything relevant |:

[Meiffert]

Well, as for current situation, let me just make a little comparison of ret paladins and dps warriors.


Single target dps: this is pretty straight forward, warriors just do a little more damage on fights such as Gruul.

Cleave: on 2 or 3 targets, warriors are actually pretty strong while paladins are the weakest class and therefore way worse (just look at fights like Iron Maidens).

Burst aoe: warriors have Dragon Roar, Ravager and Bladestorm to kill those waves of adds, paladins have 25 % chance to Divine Storm, pretty clear.

Execute phase: so what if you need to burst the boss quickly during some sort of soft enrage in last 20 %, which is a pretty common mechanic, for example on Darmac, Blackhand or Iron Maidens? Paladins burst for the same as they do at any other point of the encounter (which is already below average), because they can always execute during cooldowns. Warriors execute phase is possibly the best in the game.

Mobility: warriros can Charge, Intervene, Heroic Leap. As a paladin you can press that W button really hard.

Utility: Hand of Sacrifice = Vigilance. Then you have Hand of Protection, which is usually worth casting on about 1 fight per tier, since most physical abilities and debuffs are simply flagged to ignore it for some reason and 10 minutes cooldown Lay on Hands compared to Rallying Cry which is not very strong, but not situational raid wide cooldown.


I believe that warriors are currently overall a lot stronger and a better pick in almost any situation.
They are also unfortunately one of the 3 weakest dps classes and in guilds that care about progression, they have been benched or asked to reroll for this tier, or at least the harder bosses.



So what can be done in the future? I just don't know. There are some decent ideas by Solsacra and others, but I personally don't hate the current playstyle.
I dislike 2 things: we don't scale well enough because we don't have any interaction between our class mechanics and (secondary) stats and Exorcism being somewhat silly. (Why do we have a longish cd and cd reset mechanic for an ability that doesn't benefit from mastery, doesn't proc seals and is generally the weakest filler button that we hope to never need to press?)
Maybe something like having Exorcism autocrit and having it's damage increased by our crit percentage. Somewhat boring and unoriginal (other classes have similar mechanics), but it could help.

That being said, some mechanics could be changed for better in the future patches or expansions, but the biggest issue right now is that we are so incredibly weak. Warriors are already so weak that they are borderline not viable and paladins are way weaker in almost every way.

(And please don't give me the "if you are not in top 10 guild, everything is viable". Just because you CAN eventually overgear encounters and clear instances with 19 people doesn't mean that a healer doing 0 healing or dps not hitting anything is viable.)

[Urthearso]

In 6.2 the t18 gives us back a burst niche that we used to have and we can excel at burning Bosses in important Phases.
As an ADDITION to this burst we bring nice support.

[Deleted]

Warrior cannot give two freedoms, protections and sacs to their teammates. Warrior cannot make himself immune to all damage for 8 seconds and heal tank for like 250k with an instant spell. Utility and support is the hallmark of the paladin class. Say what you want about hybrid tax, but either deal with it or reroll a pure DPS class.

Ret paladin strenght is ST burst, this will be "returned to" in 6.2. Lookslike Blizzard just wanted to experiment with RNG and wild Holy Power gain in T17. Admitedly our ST burst is too high and it affects both our pvp and pve, due to few reasons:

- the possibility of Holy Avenger. Because we have the option to take Holy Avenger and stack it with Avenging Wrath, our burst needs to be somewhat balanced around it, and this leaves our damage feeling quite underwhelming without CDs or procs. Honesly HA should either be completely reworked or made baseline (in probably bit tamer version) so our class can be properly balanced around having it, instead of just the possibility of having it.

- mastery and holy power. Our mastery affects our Holy Power finishers (locked behind Holy Power and gcds, CDs - like Holy Avenger, and unreliable procs), Hammer of Wrath (execute phase and tied to a 2 min CD) and Crusader Strike. Crusader Strike to encourage meleeing by making it worth over Exo and Judgement. But the other spells just further backload our damage behind cooldowns, situational conditions or procs, making us again, more bursty and reliant on unreliable enablers (procs) leaving an underwhelming feeling about our damage when CDs are down and we don't get any procs.

I firmly believe that our burst is way too high, not only because our cooldowns work so well off one another, but because they both enable very high damage output from our core mechanic. I'd prefer if our burst was reduced (by making HA baseline and balancing around it and shifting mastery benefits into other abilities or reworking mastery completely) in favor of more sustained damage. Would make us a much less frustrating and more healthier class in both pvp and pve to play as, and against.

As for your seals - I think they key lies with judgement, as it has since vanilla. But Judgement can already be a very interesting ability with use of glyphs and talents. By default it's just low damage ranged holy power generator. With talents and glyphs, it's a gapcloser, ranged slow, healing buff stacker and buff activator. Seals already feel impactful with the Empowered Seals talent. While I would love to see some interplay between seals and judgement by default, I think the talent system provides enough as it is.

[Meiffert]

Warrior cannot give two freedoms, protections and sacs to their teammates. Warrior cannot make himself immune to all damage for 8 seconds and heal tank for like 250k with an instant spell. Utility and support is the hallmark of the paladin class. Say what you want about hybrid tax, but either deal with it or reroll a pure DPS class.

Look, I'm not against some classes having better utility while others do better damage in general. That's a decent idea that could work just fine in my opinion.
The problem is that at this point paladin utility is NOT good at all. It is not the worst I admit, but it's at best average.
You say we can spec into giving our teammates double freedom. That's nice, but how is it usefull in PvE? I tried Freedom on Kromog (when he slows the tanks and they can't move out of smashes or into hands in time) and it just didn't work, they were still slowed. I tried Hand of Protection to remove Impale (which is a physical debuff) on Blackhand and it didn't work, the debuff wasn't removed. Next pull I tried to Protection the player as he was targeted to prevent the application of the Impale debuff instead, it didn't work either, they still got it.
Almost all the raid boss abilities are flagged to ignore Protection and Freedom for some reason. I have no idea why because these mechanics are exactly what could make paladins viable despite their low damage output.

Blizzard decided that they don't like this model of utility compensating for damage so they try to balance both instead. They added some extra utility for classes that had too little and removed spells like banners and devotion aura from classes that had too much. I actually believe that the utility is better balanced than it was in the past and they are making further steps to improve it (like removing Fox which is too strong at this point).

Ret paladin strenght is ST burst, this will be "returned to" in 6.2.

I firmly believe that our burst is way too high, not only because our cooldowns work so well off one another, but because they both enable very high damage output from our core mechanic. I'd prefer if our burst was reduced (by making HA baseline and balancing around it and shifting mastery benefits into other abilities or reworking mastery completely) in favor of more sustained damage. Would make us a much less frustrating and more healthier class in both pvp and pve to play as, and against.

I don't understand where you came up with this. Do you have any evidence for this claim?
Before I rerolled from ret, I was rank 1 ret paladin on proraiders and rank 2 on warcraftlogs all-star, so I'd like to think that I didn't press the buttons that badly.
Yet my burst was one of the weakest in our guild. I prepotted, used all cooldowns and after 10 or 20 seconds I was 12th on the damage done on Skada. Almost every class in our raid group was bursting a lot higher than me.




Also I don't PvP, so I don't want to make any big claims about the state of ret there, but a couple people told me that ret paladins are already too strong in PvP and burst too much, so if they were buffed it would break the PvP balance.
I looked at the leaderboards at the first page (top 50 players) in every category (2v2, 3v3, 5v5 and RBGs) and I found exactly 1 ret paladin, which was rank 49 in one of the categories. That somewhat leads me to believe that paladins are on the weaker side in PvP as well, but as I said, I don't PvP myself, so it is entirely possible that I'm missing something obvious.

Either way they could buff abilities that don't really contribute to burst too much (seal damage, censure, judgment and exorcism, or just make some abilities different in PvP combat (if burst is too strong, just make Holy Avenger not stackable with Avenging Wrath in arenas/rbgs just like Lay on Hands cannot be used there).

[Urthearso]

This thread is about PvE Ret ... t18 doesnt affect PvP so "Ret paladin strenght is ST burst, this will be "returned to" in 6.2." is just PvE