Why do players overrate ret?

[ShamanWiz]

My experience totally jives with that. Ret can't generate enough burst against targets with good resilience, and it doesn't have enough movement/control-impairing effects to compensate for that. In reality the only possible way to try to succeed with Ret in high-rating situations is an extreme amount of skill.

I find that too many people's opinions about the matter fail to make a distinction between what it's like to faceroll people in lvl 80 blues and zero resilience in BG's, versus playing the real competitive arena game. Ret was too powerful against undergeared/underskilled opponents, but the resulting nerfs made PvP at a high level extremely difficult.

Youre pretty much right, in arena ret can do decent damage and burst and with wings its amazing, but as soon wings are seen they aim for the ret asap!

[underdogba]

Let me give you some real world numbers to demonstrate what I'm talking about. I ran an AV and wrote down some average damage numbers from Recount.

My ret paladin toon has decent gear, a mix of Wrathful and Relentless, with a 264 PvE weapon.

Here are my highest average crit damage instants --

Exorcism - 4054
Judgment (Righteousness) - 4042
Divine Storm - 3405
Crusader Strike - 2918

Other crit dmg --
Seal of Righteousness - 847 (can't crit)
Righteous Vengeance - 275 per tick
Melee - 2545 (@3.3 speed with self-haste effects)

Let's construct a crude model of what can happen in the absolute best case scenario over the course of 4 globals. The highest damage arrangement in total would be the following (because this allows CS to come back up off CD) --

(1) CS <- 1.5s -> (2) Judge <- 1.5s -> (3) Exorcism <- 1.5s -> (4) DS <- 1.5s -> (5) CS

Let's even be generous and say I was able to get 2 whole melee hits in (even though this is a total of 6 seconds, which is only enough time if I get lucky with parry haste).

If the stars align in the most unimaginable way and every single one of these abilities crit, on average over the course of 4 GCDs, I can do 24,263 damage. (This is counting every instant, two melee hits, RV ticking, and every Seal hit triggered by melee hits or eligible instants).

Who can that kill? Only an 80 in PvE gear. If in the course of those 6 seconds, the target gets any heal or absorb of any kind whatsoever, it's game over.

Now to get a more realistic approximation of real world numbers, since obviously assuming crits on every single eligible attack is completely ridiculous, let's assume that I'm going to crit about 30% of the time (fairly reasonable assumption considering the effects of crit from gear + buffs - target resil). As a crude approximation, let's just assume everything in my earlier sample crits (this assumption, if anything, biases the calculation against the point I'm trying to make).

If you take that 24,264 figure and create a weighted average by halving it to find a non-crit total, (12,132), then take 30% of that damage and double it, you come up with an underwhelming 15,770 total damage (granted this is ignoring some effects like the 3% bonus from the meta, but as a rough approximation it's very much in the ballpark).

That is a far cry from the 3.0 era of QQ about being global'ed down. The all-crit calculation I gave above is actually very consistent with the anecdotal stories we were hearing, because around 24k damage in six seconds would totally faceroll an 80 in blues and PvE epics like most pvp'ing players were equipped prior to the introduction of resilience gear in WotLK.

[ShamanLicksYourFace]

I don't think players overrate Ret.