Wave Of Buffs for Ret Coming in 5.2 ? (blue post)

[Austilias]

you talked about nerfing ret burst and buffing sustained dmg/mechanics. What happended to that idea?
We don't think the reaction from Ret players would be good overall. Would have to weigh that cost.

The most recent updates. Wouldn't hold my breath for a 'wave of buffs' when we have a class designer who thinks low sustained damage/high burst is an approved class philosophy among those who play it.

[thegoodrogue]

you talked about nerfing ret burst and buffing sustained dmg/mechanics. What happended to that idea?
We don't think the reaction from Ret players would be good overall. Would have to weigh that cost.

The most recent updates. Wouldn't hold my breath for a 'wave of buffs' when we have a class designer who thinks low sustained damage/high burst is an approved class philosophy among those who play it.

That was about a week or 2 ago.

[Austilias]

That was about a week or 2 ago.

That's even worse then; had plenty of time to retract such a foolish projection of what the Ret playerbase thinks.

[thegoodrogue]

That's even worse then; had plenty of time to retract such a foolish projection of what the Ret playerbase thinks.

They said they are doing "damage tweaks" towards the end of the PTR, but as I said its probably going to be just a straight damage buff instead of actually fixing what is broken, however 5% or w/e would I guess affect sustain. Cleave is boring, and inquisition clunky in PvP.

[Deleted]

I don't understand why people pay so much attention to where a class is on the stacked rankings. The actual DPS difference between all of the melee specs, except for Rogues, is less than 5%. Now considering all of the different variables that go into raiding, less than 5% is hardly a huge difference. Add to that the problem that there are probably far more good rogues, warriors, and DK's out there than Rets, and the difference really isn't that huge. Just to make sure people don't misunderstand this statement though, what I mean is that Warriors, DK's and Rogues have always attracted a high amount of players to their DPS specs for serious raiding. Sure there are more Paladins than Rogues out there, but a lot of those Paladins are most likely Holy and Prot. Ret hasn't been perceived to be a good raiding spec for a long time, so most people that are serious about raiding probably go towards some of the more consistently perceived strong classes of Rogue, DK, Warrior. This creates an effect where the lower end of the top 200 of those classes are probably more skilled than the lower end of Rets.

I can see that point, but being at 5% from DK, which is 5% away from war mean we are 10% behind others CaCs. Feng is somewhat a "good" fight to compare dps : no gimick +X% dmg, few adds to AOE, light movement if strat is strictly followed. and believe me, war and DKs will burn your ass down if they know their buttons.

[Snuzzfizzle]

No, but we do scale well with weapon damage and high haste and high mastery, while, for instance, a class like Feral really only cares about mastery way more than other stats. Or a warrior and crit.

Either way, Ret is in a middle of the pack spot and getting good set bonuses. And... as they've said 100 times, they are doing concept changes not tuning sweeps.

---------- Post added 2013-02-01 at 01:17 PM ----------



I have never once struggled as much as people bitch. Now, you're right, I don't do heroic raiding and spend all day bitching and moaning at logs, but other classes have it worse than us.

Why bother posting if you have no idea what you're talking about?
In 10m, I'm doing around 20k DPS less than our mages. I'm usually the worst or second to worst DPS in our 10m heroic raid. I've got an ilvl of 508 and I'm getting top 20 ranks on WoL for Retris, so it can't just be my own fault.
I'm the raid leader of said raid and I had to bench myself for Sha of Fear Heroic progression because Ret damage is so terrible for p2.

I can't even do more burst damage than our Owl/Mages anymore.
Hell, I wouldn't even want to have a Ret in our raid if it wasn't for me playing it.

[Valedus]

Why bother posting if you have no idea what you're talking about?
In 10m, I'm doing around 20k DPS less than our mages. I'm usually the worst or second to worst DPS in our 10m heroic raid. I've got an ilvl of 508 and I'm getting top 20 ranks on WoL for Retris, so it can't just be my own fault.
I'm the raid leader of said raid and I had to bench myself for Sha of Fear Heroic progression because Ret damage is so terrible for p2.

I can't even do more burst damage than our Owl/Mages anymore.
Hell, I wouldn't even want to have a Ret in our raid if it wasn't for me playing it.

Quote from pages ago. Anyway, as has been said a thousand times in this thread, tuning sweeps won't even happen for probably 3-4 weeks. They are still working on concept and mechanics changes. Glyphs (the original post of this thread) will most likely never be flat dps increases. And I'm sorry to hear you had to bench yourself, but this is the first I've ever heard of top Ret's being forced to bench themselves to down a boss, and I doubt Blizzard let it go live. Especially when guilds downed that same boss a while back and I'm sure your group has better gear than they did.

And doing 20k less dps than mages doesn't mean much when Blizzard has 1. admitted they are too strong right now and 2. are nerfing them.

Edit: Also, again, as I said before, I'm not saying Ret is a top tier spec in PvE. I'm saying that number tuning isn't even happening yet and still people are flipping out that these glyph changes don't affect them. Also, that top parses that someone posted a few pages back also put that boomkins should be below you. So why didn't you bench the boomkin first?
And, boomkins are just as much of a burst class as Ret is. Arguably more so if they get procs.

[Reith]

I don't understand why people pay so much attention to where a class is on the stacked rankings. The actual DPS difference between all of the melee specs, except for Rogues, is less than 5%. Now considering all of the different variables that go into raiding, less than 5% is hardly a huge difference. Add to that the problem that there are probably far more good rogues, warriors, and DK's out there than Rets, and the difference really isn't that huge. Just to make sure people don't misunderstand this statement though, what I mean is that Warriors, DK's and Rogues have always attracted a high amount of players to their DPS specs for serious raiding. Sure there are more Paladins than Rogues out there, but a lot of those Paladins are most likely Holy and Prot. Ret hasn't been perceived to be a good raiding spec for a long time, so most people that are serious about raiding probably go towards some of the more consistently perceived strong classes of Rogue, DK, Warrior. This creates an effect where the lower end of the top 200 of those classes are probably more skilled than the lower end of Rets.

You're not playing the same game I am, so what are you doing in a WoW thread?

[Deleted]

snip

Whole Elegon fight is a DPS rollercoaster.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

I don't understand why people pay so much attention to where a class is on the stacked rankings. The actual DPS difference between all of the melee specs, except for Rogues, is less than 5%. Now considering all of the different variables that go into raiding, less than 5% is hardly a huge difference. Add to that the problem that there are probably far more good rogues, warriors, and DK's out there than Rets, and the difference really isn't that huge. Just to make sure people don't misunderstand this statement though, what I mean is that Warriors, DK's and Rogues have always attracted a high amount of players to their DPS specs for serious raiding. Sure there are more Paladins than Rogues out there, but a lot of those Paladins are most likely Holy and Prot. Ret hasn't been perceived to be a good raiding spec for a long time, so most people that are serious about raiding probably go towards some of the more consistently perceived strong classes of Rogue, DK, Warrior. This creates an effect where the lower end of the top 200 of those classes are probably more skilled than the lower end of Rets.

So your theory is that "better players" play a "better class" because retribution isn't viable for raiding, isn't that kinda what this whole fucking thread is about? Besides, a lot of what draws people to other classes is that those classes have 2 or 3 dps specs while paladins have 1. So if arms is shit for one tier they can go fury, blizzard would have to fuck up on a biblical scale if they make 2 specs in the same class worthless. Paladins on the other hand is stuck with 1 dps spec, if you find yourself playing a currently underpowered spec (holy/prot/ret) you have to change roles which means new gear + gems/enchants/glyphs AND you have to learn how to do the other roles AND pray that your guild accepts your change of role. At the same time mages, hunters, locks, rogues, warriors and DKs hit a button, change a few gem and reforges and go back into the raid team.

And it's not 5% difference between top melee spec and bottom melee spec if you only take the top performing spec of each class atm. Also look at current PTR, rogues getting buffed, WW monks getting buffed, Enhancement getting a few changes... warriors aswell. Then rets get trolled (I hope) by GC claiming that they don't know how to fix retribution or they won't do it because fucking-P-fucking-V-fucking-P-fucking

[Velshin]

I just don't get it is retribution really that hard to be balanced? I mean we see classes like mage for example, that class... not even one period of time durning wow history become underpowered or unplayable or average compare to other classes it's either so OP or very powerful...why? I just don't know I guess retri is one of the hardest specs for blizz to balance which they either make us OP or very underpowered. Don't get me wrong in pve retri is not that bad atm but if we compare it to other classes like fury or frost dks...well you know the answer.

I guess the only solution is to put another dps spec to paladin class. Making it with 4 specs similar to druids now. By doing that well...maybe just maybe /pray that if Retri is weak or not viable we change to the other dps spec which I guess could be the official shockadin or something like that.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

I just don't get it is retribution really that hard to be balanced?

PvP, if we do too much damage our stuns and bubble alongside with other abilities gets overpowered insanely fast. Ret has either been OP or broken ever since arena became popular.

[Velshin]

PvP, if we do too much damage our stuns and bubble alongside with other abilities gets overpowered insanely fast. Ret has either been OP or broken ever since arena became popular.

Which is exactly the thing that pissing me off...because we only have one dps spec if we are like druids things will be way much better.

One more thing that I don't get it..which is happening since the dawn of time in this game....why whenever something is not right about ret either dps wise or self heal or whatever it takes months and months to be fixed. I mean even before patch 5.1 when it was ptr we knew that retri will suffer so much with the pvp power nerf of self heal we knew about it before the official release of the patch....then booom 1 or 2 months later Blizz noticed "Hey ret self heal is bad let us buff it next patch" I mean we players who don't work in blizz company saw that we had the vision of ret self heal will be gimped why not heed us when we exactly know what will happen even before the patch release why we must wait 1 or 2 or even 3 months to get a fix? got what I mean?

[thegoodrogue]

IMO Revamp it, the twist is it's exactly like Wrath.

[Ianus]

today i wish i rolled f warrior at beginning of expac and not this piece of garbage dps spec..thats what happens when u are lore fan of the class... what an idiot am I.. GC should delegate responsibility of balancing paladins to someone else cause obviously he is incompetent..

[Rocketsauce]

I'm really interested in your definition of roller coaster WoL. I see a damage peak at 350k at the beginning, evening out between 70k and 90k, then once CDs are back up a jump to 370k, evening out to 90k+, jump to 800k+ for execute.

Monk started at 230k, dipped to 30k, back up to 144k, down to 88k, up to 210k, dip in between phases, jump to 350k, dip to 40k, then a back and forth bouncing between 110k and 230k, then a jump to 600k for execute.

The Mage has about six jumps in DPS, most likely for minor CDs, then dips lower than you at a low of 36k. Final burst at 680k.

Shaman burst up to 350k in beginning, with a bunch of dips between 40k and 120k until next CDs, at which point he jumps to 350k again. Rinse repeat then 766k peak for execute.

Not even going to go over the DK, he continuously bounces between 50k and 130k with an execute of 400k.

Last your warrior keeps flattening out at 70k as well, except for a bunch of random jumps.


So, now that we have analyzed your entire raid, not just you, do you think your "RetCoaster" is any more extreme than the other classes? With the exception of your insane execute, you don't burst higher than several classes in the guild and simply don't have as many peaks as they do. On the other hand, you have a consistent DPS output of 80k+ in between CDs, while almost every other class in your raid dips below 40k at several points during the fight, points during which you stay at 80k+.

It seems that Ret has some of the most consistent sustained damage out of any class, while being less randomly bursty than Warriors, DKs, Ele Shamans, etc. This entire thing is actually starting to seriously puzzle me, as Rets have been bitching about TERRIBLE sustained damage ever since MoP launched. Then I check out actual logs, and you guys are the most consistent class out there. Not as many jumps as other classes in between CDs, but also not nearly as many dips as other classes.

---------- Post added 2013-02-03 at 03:29 PM ----------



Quit with the bitching, Mages have been receiving nerfs all expansion long. Fire was nerfed significantly in 5.1 and through hotfixes while Arcane is getting nerfed in 5.2,

Warlock commenting in the ret forum is pretty funny. Also, what if I told you I tunneled the boss and still barely came in 2nd(total damage, 3rd dps)? Elegon is indeed not a good fight to judge dps on, however the other fights I dps on are equally terrible to judge. Gara'jal doesn't record right, spirit kings is lawltastic for melee, and Elegon. Other fights I dps are Heroic protectors, Sha, and Vizier. So technically, Elegon is the best "dummy-esque" fight I have to compare on.

That being said, the mage who came in 2nd on dps is 5 ilvls lower than me with ONE piece of T14 gear. Please tell me more about how bad they are.

[Vash The Stampede]

PvP, if we do too much damage our stuns and bubble alongside with other abilities gets overpowered insanely fast. Ret has either been OP or broken ever since arena became popular.

I think that it has more to do with what spec Paladins play. The Paladin class is one of those classes that people will jump on if it's somewhat good. Look at what happened in WOTLK, where everyone and their grandmother rolled a Ret Paladin. Nearly all Holy Paladins went Ret as their main spec. Blizzard knows this, and is literally afraid the game will have nothing but Ret Paladins running around. They'd rather have Holy Paladins then Rets running around the game, as Rets just take the spot of another dps. A melee dps at that, which is already overcrowded. You'd think that after bringing in another melee class in the game that they'd do something about all the melee classes in raids?

Classes like Rogues and Warlocks are unpopular not because of mechanics, but because they don't have all the flashyness that Paladins get. Hence why Blizzard decided to give Warlocks green spells in 5.2. They'll probably do something similar to Rogues eventually.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

My guild runs with max 4-6 melee, the fewer the better. On sha heroic we were 2 rets and a rogue. Only fights where melee is "needed" is interrupt fights that has spells spamming. Like heals on wind lord and water/lightning bolt on protectors and that job can fall to tanks aswell, and shamans, and holy paladins, and ranged 20+ sec interrupts.
ATM there's a huge benefit to not take melee in many fights, bad design or intended?

[Nairobi]

I think that it has more to do with what spec Paladins play. The Paladin class is one of those classes that people will jump on if it's somewhat good. Look at what happened in WOTLK, where everyone and their grandmother rolled a Ret Paladin. Nearly all Holy Paladins went Ret as their main spec. Blizzard knows this, and is literally afraid the game will have nothing but Ret Paladins running around. They'd rather have Holy Paladins then Rets running around the game, as Rets just take the spot of another dps. A melee dps at that, which is already overcrowded. You'd think that after bringing in another melee class in the game that they'd do something about all the melee classes in raids?

Classes like Rogues and Warlocks are unpopular not because of mechanics, but because they don't have all the flashyness that Paladins get. Hence why Blizzard decided to give Warlocks green spells in 5.2. They'll probably do something similar to Rogues eventually.

I never really got this mentality, but perhaps it's because of the reason that I play and the way I choose to do so.

I mean, is that really why people choose a class? REALLY? Spell effects and flash, not substance? Are we at a child pageant? It reminds me of the days in Vanilla when you could make a fortune selling shitty enchants in trade by putting "GIEFS KEWL GLOW!" at the end of your sales pitch. Me? I'll stick with Crusader, and it's boring white aura over minor beast-slaying anyday...to follow this long metaphor. Give me something with substance, usable utility and notable power increase over something that looks cool any day of the week.

Given that GC wanted to work DS into ret's rotation because "a lot of paladins* love DS cause it looks so cool and flashy" *SOURCE NEEDED, I guess I shoudn't be surprised that people clamor for looks over substance, but can we NOT balance a class around who has the flashier spell effects? He already said "sorry, we cannot/will not edit your burst cooldowns to lower times because we don't want that much flash on the screen at once". Really? THAT'S the reason? Not for game balance, or stack rankings, not for PVP equality or encounter design? No, god forbid we fix burst damage because GC doesn't want to overload us with sparkles.

Same with the proposed back-line fixes to rogues if/when this doesn't provide a rise in class population: "Rogues get a bit of love in 5.2,but what if history holds and their pop still doesnt grow.What will be your next step if any?
Great question and we don't have an answer to share yet. We are looking at more exciting visuals."
Surely, THIS will revitalize the class.

My other favorite gem of his from the tweeter-box:

will you give back Ret paladins their divine purpose?
Unlikely. Despite the good arguments we hear, we're convinced many Rets would complain about forcing RNG on them. (Source)

you talked about nerfing ret burst and buffing sustained dmg/mechanics. What happended to that idea?
We don't think the reaction from Ret players would be good overall. Would have to weigh that cost. (Source)

We heard a lot of great ideas and suggestions that we asked for, but decided to ignore them all. We literally got feedback from the community on what they want, and decided that they probably wouldn't want the suggestions from that feedback... I....WAT?...

It feels like I'm taking crazy-pills! /Mugatu

[thegoodrogue]

Someone (could be confused with an idiot) from these forums asked for a better set bonus than the Holy TV one and we got some abomination of a design (the lightning bolt with Divine Storm). However, GC can't take actual advice/design ideas that aren't about daily quests or "why can't Paladins use daggers, HURR?". I understand a lot of the user base does do dailies and are concerned with "casuwhale" content. However this balance and fun aspect reaches down to them. (How fun is using HotR and seeing small numbers? How fun is it when SUPER DUPER CRUSADER strike hits for approximately 1 soggy noodle? How fun is using HotR on 2 targets, usually what is confronted even doing dailies? How >fun< is our mastery? How fun is it for "casuwhales" to see a decently sized number crit and then a non-crit for ~30-40% of the initial hit?)

I understand we probably need a HUGE revamp to be considered "fun" but the way GC is taking it is down the ole Mount Boring. The best thing that happened to ret was the spell graphics changes (TV, etc). Even easier rotation than Cata, less variety of spells to use (consecration, even though it was a mana hog you still wanted to use it, RIP Wrath Consecration rotation). I liked Wrath, no holy power for a heal that feels weak AF in PvP, choose between FoL and Exo, MORE HOLY DAMAGE. Even speaking in a PvP (paladin in general) sense, you could play prot if you wanted to be OP with the SAME gear!

Ret isn't really "fun" in any sense of the game. PvP, -50% damage debuff, but at least you are immune, no fancy Blink, Disengage, charge, shadow-step abilities, etc. Nothing "FUN", PvE, you have some utility, a simple stun, mediocre/shit damage, BoP, a Sac that can sometimes kill you, and......................

I may just be talking out of my butt since I've had little sleep, but please remind me why paladins should stay ret, or just go to a superior class/spec such as DK/Warrior/Rogue(-20% ALL damage raid CD next patch...)/Shaman? (and yes all of those are better in PvP AND PvE)