[7.0 Retribution Paladin] Guide and Discussion

[Floross]

Can someone tell me how some rets are doing 500-600k + DPS on Nynthendra Mythic ? I read the logs and i don't understand how are they doing 2M+ damage from VT's while I never did a +1M VT (at 862 ilvl).

They have legendary cloak and % damage increase from finishers is bugged? just a bug in the fight that we can cheese some way or is there something im missing ?

Read somewhere it's a bug and it's been reported but no one knows what's causing it. Sorry.

[Demsi]

So i managed to get on the PTR and test out the reworked crusade, i honestly had fun with it, as it was pretty much the hammer of wrath spam that we had before with sanctified wrath, but it felt pretty powerful when you pick Greater judgement with it, but the stacking is a problem, you get 1 stack each time you use judgement, there is no way you can reach 15 stacks that way.

[VainEldritch]

So i managed to get on the PTR and test out the reworked crusade, i honestly had fun with it, as it was pretty much the hammer of wrath spam that we had before with sanctified wrath, but it felt pretty powerful when you pick Greater judgement with it, but the stacking is a problem, you get 1 stack each time you use judgement, there is no way you can reach 15 stacks that way.

You can if you unlock Wath of the Ashbringer. Add to that relics like Shieldmaiden's Prayer and you can get 30 seconds on AW/Crusade and you can hit 15 stacks with close to 10 seconds for maximum pewpew.

[Morally Grey Storm]

This says it all. AtA is a massive boost, immediately upon getting it. It's nearly on-demand burst, it's massive HP generation, and it's much-needed AoE.

If you don't get it right away you're gimping yourself, that's just an objective fact.

As for opinions:

The fact that you consider utility spells that use Holy Power "finishers" says a lot about where you're coming from. Have you even looked at the other classes trees? They don't have nodes directly relating to all of their utility spells either - especially when they're talented as is the case with Ret. If your Artifact boosts a talented ability that you don't spec into it's a wasted node. This is just a ludicrous argument to make.

I do, in fact, think that SoV being able to be offensively dispelled is fine considering that: We have reduced duration forbearance. We can attack through BoP and bubble. We can have bubble on a 2.5m CD. Despite your anecdotal evidence, Rets are performing fine at the moment in 3v3, are very strong in 1v1, and have the same weaknesses to offensive dispels as we always have. Go figure.

We also have new utility (talented): a constant AoE pulse of Disease/Poison Dispel, which is insanely strong passive utility. We have a built-in snare on one of our rotational abilities alongside the untalented snare itself, or a single-target speed boost to hand out. We also have one of the very few ways in the whole game to remove silence from a player, on a relatively short CD. We have a massive melee-based defensive CD in EfaE, as well as finally getting a cheat death mechanic.

Do we have weaknesses? Sure. Are we the steaming pile of dogshit that you'd have everyone believe we are? Not even close.

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It is what most of us do. If you had tried to come into our raids this week as a Ret without having AtA, for whatever reason, you'd have been benched. Last week when we were doing Heroic you'd have been benched as well. There's just no way that anyone should take someone seriously who claims to be held back by the spec when they wilfully choose a sub-optimal progression path.

Storm's criticisms are all based around PvP, which is fine - but if I had a Ret on my RBG or 3v3 team who didn't have AtA I'd be benching them too.

As per usual, good job on waving off the bulk of my post.
Gotta fit your agenda of driving home those ad hominems.

Once more: AtA does not help with aforementioned Ret issues. No matter how you level up, your mobility will be low, your tools will be dispellable, and so on.

As for opinions,
ES suddenly is an "utility spell"?
Where's that coming from?

SoV being virtually useless against any team with dispel is okay because we have short forebearance?
Now that is indeed ludicrous.

Speaking of anecdotal evidence, 1v1s, really?

Why would you list all of these "insanely strong utilities"? Why would you skip the opportunity costs of taking these talents? Built-in snare? What? You mean - talented melee-range pvp snare? Because snaring in melee is very important. Our problem is not staying in melee, it's getting in melee. With which l&o does not help.
E4E? Seriously? There are at best 3 physical damage- exclusive classes, so this talent is somewhat slightly less useful and great then you make it look like.


Do we have weaknesses? Sure as sure. Tons of. Are we a great spec to play, like you would have us believe? Not even close.

But hey, let's attack me some more on the basis of they way I leveled my weapon.
That's a lot more interesting, and is supposed to make my points moot and wrong.
I've made a mistake. I've a mistake! But who's infallible here?
Who is infallible shall throw stones at me. Not you.

[ThePants999]

It wont make a big difference to casual or semi progressional players like myself, but for players like Laurcus who are in mythic progression guilds it matters, a lot.

If you had tried to come into our raids this week as a Ret without having AtA, for whatever reason, you'd have been benched. Last week when we were doing Heroic you'd have been benched as well. There's just no way that anyone should take someone seriously who claims to be held back by the spec when they wilfully choose a sub-optimal progression path.

But this is all irrelevant to the players you're talking about. Serious progression players had both A2A and Echo, via the long route, before raids opened. Who cares what they did before that?

[Rothg]

There's no point in ever rebutting your opinions because you argue with the stubbornness of a mule. You're not actually here to discuss anything, you're here to bitch and pretend to be an Imperial Guardsman. We get it, you're mega grimdark.

What I'm saying is that going the long way to AtA without respeccing is the wrong way. Objectively. It's sub-par. The fact that you went that way and also bitched about how bad Ret isn't surprising, because you chose a suboptimal path.

It's just interesting to see that it turns out that the most negative person around here chose an inferior Artifact progression path, all while bitching about how bad Ret is.

Literally all he ever does is bitch about Ret, anecdotally. I think the best thing for this forum would be if everyone just stopped feeding him.

[Grapemask]

Just to randomly address a couple points I see through these last couple pages of people bickering and being dumb:

The respec route may be the ULTIMATE SUPER BESTEST route. But it's not a night and day increase over the not-respeccing route. Frankly, I'd say the sanity you save over holding onto your AP like a weirdo, and the fun you have from actually leveling the thing naturally, is well worth the very small gains.

In general, that's a problem with a lot of the ret community since ElitistJerks faded away; EJ had the practical "common sense" injected by folks like Exemplar, but now people only focus on what number is at the top of the heap, without noting that it's only a few decimal places off from more practical things. The fact is that if you put a guy who went respec route against a guy who didn't, and all of their gear was the same, from one fight to the next they're going to trade spots for top damage. They're close enough that the dozen variables in DPS calculations overlap the margins.

We're sort of in the same place for DPS stats. You don't need to hit the sim after every piece of gear. The trend is that roughly everything that isn't mastery is roughly equally good now, with maybe versatility (and sometimes haste) poking up a bit more. Get enough haste that your rotation feels less frustrating, then grab whatever drops so long as it isn't mastery heavy. Yes, the sim will maybe say x stat is better than y - until you get 1 point more and then the whole thing flips on its head - but that doesn't matter. You're going to crit one extra time, your weapon is going to strike for a higher number inside of it's range, or some completely random event that will make your DPS still turn out different than it should have been, because these margins are incredibly small.

[ThePants999]

Just to randomly address a couple points I see through these last couple pages of people bickering and being dumb:

The respec route may be the ULTIMATE SUPER BESTEST route. But it's not a night and day increase over the not-respeccing route. Frankly, I'd say the sanity you save over holding onto your AP like a weirdo, and the fun you have from actually leveling the thing naturally, is well worth the very small gains.

In general, that's a problem with a lot of the ret community since ElitistJerks faded away; EJ had the practical "common sense" injected by folks like Exemplar, but now people only focus on what number is at the top of the heap, without noting that it's only a few decimal places off from more practical things. The fact is that if you put a guy who went respec route against a guy who didn't, and all of their gear was the same, from one fight to the next they're going to trade spots for top damage. They're close enough that the dozen variables in DPS calculations overlap the margins.

We're sort of in the same place for DPS stats. You don't need to hit the sim after every piece of gear. The trend is that roughly everything that isn't mastery is roughly equally good now, with maybe versatility (and sometimes haste) poking up a bit more. Get enough haste that your rotation feels less frustrating, then grab whatever drops so long as it isn't mastery heavy. Yes, the sim will maybe say x stat is better than y - until you get 1 point more and then the whole thing flips on its head - but that doesn't matter. You're going to crit one extra time, your weapon is going to strike for a higher number inside of it's range, or some completely random event that will make your DPS still turn out different than it should have been, because these margins are incredibly small.

Thumbs up. Good post.

[Deleted]

Are deadly grace and old war close? Much easier for me to get deadly grace atm

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So when are you guys using AtA in your priority? I'm conflicted between using it off of CD and using it when I have 0 HP, as its hard to get those two requirements to cross over all the time. Apart from when I need on-demand burst I'm still trying to figure out the best way to abuse this talent.

Normally on 1/0/occasionally 2 HP, it does a lot of damage and it helps keep the rotation going, for me the last thing I want to do is stand there doing nothing

[snackfeat]

Are deadly grace and old war close? Much easier for me to get deadly grace atm

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Normally on 1/0/occasionally 2 HP, it does a lot of damage and it helps keep the rotation going, for me the last thing I want to do is stand there doing nothing

Old war is way better than deadly grace for us.

[Deleted]

Old war is way better than deadly grace for us.

Is there a way to quantify it? I really can't play much atm and if the dps gain isn't that huge I won't have to farm as many herbs

[Rothg]

Is there a way to quantify it? I really can't play much atm and if the dps gain isn't that huge I won't have to farm as many herbs

Old war does about twice as much damage for me as deadly grace. Sometimes 115% more

[OrcsRLame]

So when are you guys using AtA in your priority? I'm conflicted between using it off of CD and using it when I have 0 HP, as its hard to get those two requirements to cross over all the time. Apart from when I need on-demand burst I'm still trying to figure out the best way to abuse this talent.

Well, the best thing to do is play like a robot and hit it at 0 HP right when it comes off cooldown. Failing that, I'm pretty sure that delaying it to use at 1 or 0 HP is better than hitting it when it comes up and getting little to no HP out of it.

However, if you delay it even a little, you do lose a whole Wake of Ashes, as you absolutely do NOT want to delay Crusade unless that is the last Crusade you'll use in a fight. And you need Wake to stack Crusade faster. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I have had some pulls where I go full robot mode and don't make any mistakes, but more often than not I end up losing a Wake so I can hit Crusade right as it comes up. I'm bad.

[Chickat]

Is http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T19P.html simming with or without tier 19 4 set? It would make no sense to have it simming with it, but it does say tier 19 so I want to make sure. Also, what item level are they using to get 300k dps? Im getting around 195-220k based on procs in my patchwerk testing at item level 845.

[stolker]

Is http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T19P.html simming with or without tier 19 4 set? It would make no sense to have it simming with it, but it does say tier 19 so I want to make sure. Also, what item level are they using to get 300k dps? Im getting around 195-220k based on procs in my patchwerk testing at item level 845.

T19 isn't the class order hall set. It's the nighthold set and its bonuses are sick as fuck.

[Chickat]

I never said it was, but they are simming those numbers with the tier 19 pally set or just a set item level? If so, what item level?

[Deleted]

I never said it was, but they are simming those numbers with the tier 19 pally set or just a set item level? If so, what item level?

The sim is done at ~842 ilvl and a 870 Ashbringer with 3x Wrath of the Ashbringer. You can see that if you take a look at the "gear" and "profile" section in the details of the sim (just need to scroll down a bit).
The sim is using pretty optimized gear (aside from a kinda random Mastery/versa waist and neck, all items have Crit/haste):

# Gear Summary
# gear_ilvl=842.00
# gear_strength=10183
# gear_stamina=17964
# gear_crit_rating=6747
# gear_haste_rating=7714
# gear_mastery_rating=2169
# gear_versatility_rating=1229
# gear_armor=3965
# set_bonus=tier19p_plate_2pc=1

Pretty good amount of haste and crit (which should explain VB in the sim). The Setbonus is the Arcway/CoS one (Versa proc). In addition almost all thinkable damage increases are included: FCM (pretty much our best trinket), 10% more whitehit damage (CoS ring), Neck enchant, Potion, SoV full damage value on cd, triple WotA relics, three active BoM, augmentation rune...
Furthermore, there is almost zero human error involed in sims (WoA overcaps HoPo slightly, that's it... and it's propably the best you can get without delaying it too much anyway).
Unless you have the most efficient gear for your ilvl and you're using every possible damage source (You won't be able to use SoV for damge on a dummy, I doubt you waste potions for your tests, and if you're alone there are neither three BoM sources nor heroism), you won't come close to the dps displayed in sims.

[Vuagnon]

I would love to see JV unavoidable like overpower, also granting an absorbtion shield equal to the damage it deals when at full health.

[Deleted]

please reread my comment and come again.
But to root out any false information about waiting for max stacks... You have a maximum duration of 35 seconds on crusade, FCM has a duration of 30 seconds. According to basic math that's a difference of 5 seconds. You will need considerably more than 5 seconds to reach 15 stacks, it´s closer to 10-15 seconds. So following your advice, the absolute best case, your crusade will expire with 5 seconds of the trinket buff remaining.
Do you really want to advice rets wasting a 1/6 of a very strong effect? And remember that is the best case. Realistically you advise rets to waste a 1/3 of the buff.

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stats yes its a fucking legendary and has haste on it to. the effect? well maybe pvp and questing and mythic+ trash but raiding nah

dude faulty counter meassures has a duration of 8 seconds http://www.wowhead.com/item=137539/f...ure&bonus=1826 so yes you really want to wait for full stacks of crusade for using it since otehrwise it will be gone either before you reach fulls tacks or shortly after

[Deleted]

dude faulty counter meassures has a duration of 8 seconds http://www.wowhead.com/item=137539/f...ure&bonus=1826 so yes you really want to wait for full stacks of crusade for using it since otehrwise it will be gone either before you reach fulls tacks or shortly after

Read the trinket description again carefully.