So i've been doing a few days of PTR testing and am making a post regarding what I have seen thus far.
PvE
The new Retri rotation is allot better than the current live state. It is more predictable and you don't need to constantly be looking at it. This helps in many ways because now you can actually look at the environment more instead of watching cds all the time. The procs are actually not too bad and your damage don't really rely on luck as much as it does on live. This is good news for all pve players as dps was far too random before and hard to balance. I think now ret can pull decent dps in raids especially with fights with target switching due to the new SoT stacking faster than before, this used to be a major setback before in most cata fights as a lot of switching is needed and allot of fights don't allow 100% uptime on boss. The new mastery is very nice and works well (I've been told there's a bug on beta where it don't scale with Inquisition) once it is able to scale with inquisition.
There are still few minor issues that I believe need looking at though.
- We cannot proceed with single target rotation on trash pulls due to Holy Wrath breaking nearby cc. This is a major issue that needs to be resolved. I feel that Holy Wrath was forced into the single target rotation for ret. I think another filler is at demand.
- Something that has caught my eye is Holy Strike (old paladin ability) on the mmo champion paladin forums. This ability should be prioritised over judgement and holy wrath and doing less damage than Crusader Strike.
- Description: 'This ability consecrates your weapon and increases the damage of the next attack by % (something like that). I feel it will work well in the rotation we have so we can have less frequent use of Holy Wrath in single target fights. (or check out my HoW idea on the pvp part of this post and use that as filler instead, i also prefer the HoW idea above this one)
- The Holy Wrath mechanic is not a fun one. I feel its just a dull attack that hits close to nothing on Single target/AoE. Most people use this ability mainly for the AoE stun on big pulls (depends on type of mobs).
With that aside the rotation looks much more appealing than before when considering PvE play.
PvP
Allot of people have been complaining about ret pvp for a long time now. Some complain that it is dreadfully bad and some say its incredibly overpowered. Atm, not many can call retribution paladins even a half decent at pvp.
- The spec's mechanics dont allot it to perform well in pvp (Holy power generation/easily dispel-able/easy to control/snare-able gap closer/melee with no snare/Impossible to keep inquisition up with new mechanics etc etc). These can all be arguably fixed without changing too much to the actual spec.
- One change can change the whole table around (depending on what the change is). Personally I feel holy power plays a huge roll in us not being able to do damage to most kitting classes as it is on prt.
- One reason would be keeping Inquisition up. Keeping this buff up is a major improvement to dps as a whole and as it stands it is near impossible to generate holy power enough to use it frequently and still pull several Templar's Verdict attacks.
- The implementation of Sacred shield is good one. On live retribution is very easy to get down fast without him/her popping any cooldowns. I feel that this ability is though too powerful and scales too well. Also, it being passive makes is allot less attractive as most healers today want you say as close to 100% as possible instead of staying at 30-70%ish so that you can keep getting this buff every 30sec. I feel this should be use on short cd (30secish) and have same effect it currently has but tuned down by a decent amount so that it is not overpowered.
- I also feel that its weird how ret has arguably the worse self healing capabilities from the mdps. I think the Judgement of Light effect needs to be re-implemented into the game and things like 'selfless healer' removed. I am happy as a dps to have the job to use HoF/HoP etc on part by looking after their hp gets too much of a job and is not fun.
- Another thing holding us back is that all of the major cooldowns are all dispellable. i noticed that some on the ones dispellable on live are no longer dispellable but cooldowns are one of the ret paladins main souses of of damage and survivability. With classes like hunters, mages, priests, shamans being able to dispell allot of our cooldowns it really makes the spec extremely weak as almost 50% of classes since they can counter it without any problem.
- Retribution paladins are the only melee dps that has not got a movement slowing effect they can use on other players. I understand that this is supposed to be done on purpose but 'fight of arms' in pvp is to strong atm to not have one (with current spec mechanics anyway).
- Possible fixes could be adding a snare to Hammer of Wrath. Hammer of Wrath damage has gone down by about 50% as I can see on ptr. It is possible to make this a filler in the rotation (fixes pve issues aswell without implementing Holy Strike) as it is no longer viable finisher and the Avenging Wrath effect previously made ret hard to balance. A ranged snare could be added into the retribution rotation through this ability and would fix many issues of the class considering pvp. Though with this change a new mechanic would have to come into play considering that all dps specs do more damage when target is below 20% (this can be done in many ways as seen before with many classes).
- Atm, the spec does not feel 'retribution' enough. I think the Eye for Eye talent should be implemented deeper into the retribution tree and have some special 'retribution effect' that allows for better mobility throughout the battlefield. Possibilities of ideas could be: Refreshes the cd of HoF when you have more than 1 movement slowing effect on you. Another could be to allow Eye for Eye to stack a debuff to the target when they attack you that causes damage/snare the caster of the spell instead of causing a percentage of the damage to them aslo. it feels too much like retribution aura atm and is not fun ability.
- Also I understand that all 3 specs benefit from Pursuit of Justice but i dont think it is a holy/prot ability. This is another ability i feel should be deeper ret as it separates the spec more so you actually 'feel' like a retribution paladin instead of a prot pally with a 2h and no Avengers shield.
With some work i feel that ret can be a fun spec to pvp with and a viable choice when compared to other mdps for serious arena and rated bgs. Atm, it mainly lacks any major benefits of actually being ret instead of a warrior/dk etc or even a prot paladin.
Thats all i have so far, thanks for reading and feel free to post ideas/opinions etc
Thanks for reading!
---------- Post added 2011-01-18 at 03:43 PM ----------
ill add this: http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/7...1811152844.jpg
its screenshot of how dps is like with fill tier 11 gemmed/enchanted, hit/exp capped and reforged into mastery>crit=haste (i know that mastery dnt scale with Inq yet). DPS goes up and down from 13.8k-14.5k depending on cds used recently etc (at the time was sustained at 14.1k but censure ticks effected it when i stopped attacking) Also we get up to 19k burst with wings and guardian popped at beginning.