paladin no more fotm who stays paladin

[Revved]

If you're topping the meters overall throughout a heroic, you're either MUCH better geared than the rest of the group, playing with newbies. Yes, the damage is shit compared to equally geared and skilled players, no doubt. But on the other hand, I've never seen a hunter heal a complete heroic bossfight because the healer died because he stood in the first lava pool that appeared. Neither have I ever seen a rogue instantly heal the tank for 110k, or seen a warlock make one of his teammates completely immume to physical damage for 12 seconds, or a mage who could transfer a nice amount of tank damage to himself. And then I don't mention the turn evil, repentance, decent interrupt, great healing support, regular and reliable AoE stuns, complete threat reduction and a total 6 second stun with HoJ.

Yes, the spec needs a reliability fix for sustained DPS (damn you Art of War), and ofcourse the spec is missing a lot more compared to other DPS specs, but I've seen a lot of happy teammates in the heroics that I've done. Be it healers, tanks and/or DPS. And I love it.

[Liminal]

everyone brings utility... Ret doesn't have some kind of monopoly on it.

It seems people are forgetting that we are a DPS spec. Our job is first and foremost to damage.

[Deleted]

Which we cannot do with any consistency.

I can't believe we've ended up in such a piss poor state.

[Requital]

Which we cannot do with any consistency.

I can't believe we've ended up in such a piss poor state.

I can lol I called it in October when I posted it all over and people said things like " Blizzard will fix us " haha

[Rlyskilled]

Balanced at 85 Req

[belfpala]

Balanced at 85 Req

I just realized... they never actually mentioned WHEN during level 85 balance would manifest...

hmm.

[Deleted]

I started raiding as a ret pala in TBC, got it to 80 in WotlK :P (yes that long:P)
In Wrath I started playing warcraft more and more, and eventually got a ferm faceroll dps spot in a guild that cleared icc10 waaay before cata.
I enjoyed playing ret in LK, however it wasn't challenging at all... I put my attacks ascending from good to less good on the numbers 123456890, 1 being the top attack.
Often I just dpsed, just rolling my finger aroud these buttons and often looking away and still doing top or 2nd dps (no the guild wasn't bad, and i couldn't beat DK with shadowmourne).

Now we arrived in cataclysm and good god was I horrible with the rotation, it took me a good 2 weeks to perfect my playingstyle in hc's.
Sure on dummy I can do perfect rotation but in hc;'s it was different... I realized I missed the experience that other players had from vanilla/TBC where you had to move from stuff and don't take damage.
I managed to get my rotation going while working the meachanics of the bosses, yes grim batol cleared while doing average group damage and staying alive.

After these 2 week and some I had my first guild raid on past wednesday, and about equally geared with others in my guild. and I'm pleased with how ret plays in it.
We got omnitron to 25% and i was 2nd on dps while being constant on 10... ofc everybody can gear up even further and much may change.

Conclusion: I liked how the ret spec became very difficult for me and costed me lots of focus in order to get myself raid ready... now I am done I can say I like playing this, unpredictable rotation and environment.
It requires much more focus and is more interactive/rewarding than it was in wotlk, I like it very much.

Maybe retribution just requires more commitment to get it under control.

Greets Peloponnesus
(yes that cool)

[Requital]

I started raiding as a ret pala in TBC, got it to 80 in WotlK :P (yes that long:P)
In Wrath I started playing warcraft more and more, and eventually got a ferm faceroll dps spot in a guild that cleared icc10 waaay before cata.
I enjoyed playing ret in LK, however it wasn't challenging at all... I put my attacks ascending from good to less good on the numbers 123456890, 1 being the top attack.
Often I just dpsed, just rolling my finger aroud these buttons and often looking away and still doing top or 2nd dps (no the guild wasn't bad, and i couldn't beat DK with shadowmourne).

Now we arrived in cataclysm and good god was I horrible with the rotation, it took me a good 2 weeks to perfect my playingstyle in hc's.
Sure on dummy I can do perfect rotation but in hc;'s it was different... I realized I missed the experience that other players had from vanilla/TBC where you had to move from stuff and don't take damage.
I managed to get my rotation going while working the meachanics of the bosses, yes grim batol cleared while doing average group damage and staying alive.

After these 2 week and some I had my first guild raid on past wednesday, and about equally geared with others in my guild. and I'm pleased with how ret plays in it.
We got omnitron to 25% and i was 2nd on dps while being constant on 10... ofc everybody can gear up even further and much may change.

Conclusion: I liked how the ret spec became very difficult for me and costed me lots of focus in order to get myself raid ready... now I am done I can say I like playing this, unpredictable rotation and environment.
It requires much more focus and is more interactive/rewarding than it was in wotlk, I like it very much.

Maybe retribution just requires more commitment to get it under control.

Greets Peloponnesus
(yes that cool)

Conclusion Ret is fun when progression doesn't matter and consistency is not relevant.

[Deleted]

nr2: paladins takes more skill to play "good"

After playing a paladin for 3.5 years, it seems to me that the current build is more about fast reflexes to track those lucky RNG procs than about actual skill or knowledge.

Although tracking procs isn't that hard to me, the most annoying thing is the system's complete unreliability. In one fight all your attacks generate that 40% HP, you can get Exo and HoL procs constantly and sometimes quicker than you can utilize them, while the next fight gives you zero procs of anything and you end up doing half your average dps. Less fucking annoying RNG and more reliability, please.

[belfpala]

After playing a paladin for 3.5 years, it seems to me that the current build is more about fast reflexes to track those lucky RNG procs than about actual skill or knowledge.

You'd be surprised some of the things I've seen other ret paladins doing. Looking at some of my parses, I'll often have double or more the number of HoWs (I guess they're messing it up when they have wings?). Some are still using a single filler rotation, for example, or not using Inquisition (even trash pulls in heroics tend to last long enough for Inq to be worth it).

But I agree, fast reflexes are a factor. I can't count the number of times I've delayed using a HoL or AoW proc because I reacted a fraction of second too late and a lower priority attack went through.

And then there's luck...

[ShockASU]

I've been holy for as long as I can remember and I love it . No more boredum/snoozefest that I was used to in Wrath. These changes have brought a breath of fresh air into the paladin class. Not only holy but ret and prot as well.

[ForrestAnthony]

what the person above me said pretty much

[Deleted]

i rerolled holy since ret blows... its just not fair to your guildies to bring less dps into a raid just because you want to be ret :/ The only positive thing about ret is that they have holy radiance and lay on hands.

Just think about ret mastery, which is the only non-passive mastery in the game atm! it gives us very little, if any dps boost at all (last numbers i saw rated mastery 0.05 vs 1.0 for strength, or in other words 1 strength is worth 20 mastery rating) and compared to other masteries that just increases damage done on certain abilities (dk, mage, hunter, feral....)

Also what is up with inq? Increased holy damage by 30% and then they remove most of the holy damage from retribution :/

I definately wont be respeccing my leveling ret/secundary specc before both mastery and inq is fixed.

Anywho, healing (in everything but random heroics and pug raids) is much more enjoyable now and offers a good challenge in raids so i wont be voting for ret back anytime soon, blizz can wait till i tire of healing.

[Requital]

I've been holy for as long as I can remember and I love it . No more boredum/snoozefest that I was used to in Wrath. These changes have brought a breath of fresh air into the paladin class. Not only holy but ret and prot as well.

Yes everyone that does not take progression serious is having fun with slap happy random Ret we get it.

[Nillo]

Balanced at 90 Req

Fixed

i rerolled holy since ret blows... its just not fair to your guildies to bring less dps into a raid just because you want to be ret :/ The only positive thing about ret is that they have holy radiance and lay on hands.

Just think about ret mastery, which is the only non-passive mastery in the game atm! it gives us very little, if any dps boost at all (last numbers i saw rated mastery 0.05 vs 1.0 for strength, or in other words 1 strength is worth 20 mastery rating) and compared to other masteries that just increases damage done on certain abilities (dk, mage, hunter, feral....)

Also what is up with inq? Increased holy damage by 30% and then they remove most of the holy damage from retribution :/

I definately wont be respeccing my leveling ret/secundary specc before both mastery and inq is fixed.

Anywho, healing (in everything but random heroics and pug raids) is much more enjoyable now and offers a good challenge in raids so i wont be voting for ret back anytime soon, blizz can wait till i tire of healing.

Pretty much the same for me - I haven't bothered going back to Prot/Ret after playing a few weeks on the beta just because both specs feel so goddamn wrong.

[eldritchknight]

I'm not a huge fan of ret at the moment. Everything feels entirely too random - between cooldowns, procs, and holy power generation, it feels more like I'm just hoping things will go right rather than having any actual control over my output. My damage is usually fine in heroics, but when I vary between having four buttons I can press at a moment and NO buttons I can press because of the mechanics, it just doesn't really feel solid. Hell, half the time I end up doing something sub-optimal because I get a HoL proc as I'm pressing a button.

Now, I'm not saying I want to go back to the older ret style. I thought that was boring as hell. I just want to feel a little more in control of my DPS output.

I am enjoying the sort of off-healing utility a ret can bring to dungeons right now. I don't always run with the most geared healers, and having the ability to toss out a 30k+ crit on WoG from time to time is pretty cool. Hell, there have been times when the healer has died and I've kept the fight running until we finished just with WoG heals and the tank using cooldowns.

I'm just having a lot more fun as holy at the moment. Holy was boring as anything before, and now it's dynamic and interesting. Holy was always going to be my mainspec, so ret will just sit on the back burner.

[skrump]

I came here to comment on how holy power did very little to make ret any less faceroll but wll judging by the Dps ret is putting out blizz is still trying to thin out the herd.

[/flex]

I have played ret since BC. I have seen a lot of changes in the spec and to be honest i really do enjoy the new playstyle
more than what it has been in the past.

BC rotation was boring and damage was laughable. Wrath was faceroll and we were gods. Now you have to be more aware
and manage resources. As far as dps i seem to be able to keep up for the most part but rng is a bitch sometimes

I agree that the spec still needs some work but i will stick with it.

[SuperomegaOP]

your only doing 10 or 11k dps......... this is on trash right?

back in my old guild our top warrior would do 14k dps on trash and didnt even have all the heroic 277 gear

[gtkashi]

They took what was a fairly boring, but at least somewhat systematic DPS method and put a bunch of procs in it. Like procs everywhere, because procs are neat.

Divine Storm was nice because it was new and would surprise you. It helped fill in gaps in our rotation so you could keep hitting buttons.

That's been replaced because they don't want us to hit a button every GCD (except we kinda still do anyway.) Now we proc holy power so we can use TV which might also proc holy power. Sometimes TV procs for free, and then we can maybe get another proc of holy power off of it so we might be able to use it again right away. Then sometimes Exorcism procs for free and we might get a holy power proc from that. In AOE fights we can switch to divine storm, which for some reason only has a 40% proc for holy power in spite of being on a shared cooldown with crusader strike.

So it really comes down to "I heard you like procs, so we put a proc on your proc so you can proc while you proc."