So basically, warriors can deal only physical damage.
3.5-4k extra armor + ret aura chews em up pretty good, not as good as rogues. Also block chance, and I use a force reactive disc.
If a ret paladin pvps against a (smart, skilled) arms warrior, and the paladin uses a 2 hander, assuming relatively equal gear, the paladin should lose.
It what context are you using consecrate? It uses up a debuff slot so I hope not in raid. If so, you’re gonna be making a lot of people angry pushing their more important debuffs off.
Yes, it does. Test it all you want. It will knock off other low priority debuffs, like shadow word pain, shadow weaving, corruption curse of agony, winter’s chill, etc.
It even used to have a debuff icon. The display icon was removed in 1.9 but it remained taking up a debuff slot mechanically.
I have plenty of logs showing it knocking off my curse of weakness for example.
It does take up an invisible debuff slot as you say, but it’s pretty rare that it pushes off anything important. It’s one of the stronger DoTs if you have room for one.
While yes, the absolute ret average is fairly low, an upper quartile paladin competes pretty favorably with the averages of most other classes. A good ret isn’t holding your raid back unless your entire raid is high performing.
In a casual guild, a good ret is fine, and not competing with many players that will be blowing them out of the water. You probably won’t find many strict meta speed run guilds tolerating the spec though.
The upper 25% of Ret Paladins competes favorably with the lower quartiles of Rogues and Warriors. But compare Rets to the upper quartiles of their counterparts? Not so favorable.
Ret:
Upper Quartile - 246 to 371
Rogue:
Lower Quartile - 207 to 273
Upper Quartile - 458 to 679
Warrior:
Lower Quartile - 172 to 254
Upper Quartile - 497 to 790
A good Ret is on-par with a barely above average DPS of any other spec, save for Balance Druids.
In a casual guild, a good anything is fine. Doesn’t make Ret good, nor does it mean we’ve missed anything in the past 15 years that suddenly makes that the case.
Assuming we’re using consecrate in a casual or try hard raid then you pretty much only have 3 necessary debuff slots and those are SA, FF and CoR. Everything else is inconsequential unless your tanks aren’t well geared and you absolutely need those demo shouts and curses of weakness.
Yes, Ret is the lowest dps spec when looking at absolute numbers and averages, and are definitely far behind rogues/warriors/mages (just about everyone is).
It’s not so far behind the rest of the dps options, many of which are still brought to raids, to matter. Rets will sometimes beat the rest of the pack on fights, and it brings more than enough dps to clear anything in the game just fine.
Sure, you don’t bring them when min/maxing for the fastest speed clear possible, but there’s also no sense in perpetuating the idea that they are bringing down your raid by existing.
Like in every other case, the player is more important than the spec they choose to play. Any of the specs can be a valuable addition to a raid team. A guy thats a terrible ret paladin will probably be a terrible rogue/warrior, and you’d still be better off taking someone else.
Pretty standard debuff list, it has only 1 real flex spot, sometimes two if the boss is not one with a taunt mechanic involved. Maybe you give it to a paladin to consecrate, maybe you do something else with it. Just saying, those 16 slots disappear faster than you think if you aren’t paying attention to what your raid is doing.
A vast majority of those aren’t required except CoR, Sunder, Faerie Fire and those are not likely to ever fall off. 13 of those debuff slots can be ‘flex’. What point are you trying to make here?
Yeah, thunderfury using 2x slots, and mind flay using one is also kind of obnoxious.
Leaves basically 1 flex, 2 if you just accept some push off with taunts. Gift of Arthas can be replaced depending on group comp, as can hunter’s mark.
Honestly though, most guilds won’t notice much loss if they just let stuff get pushed off, as none of the really important things are particularly vulnerable to push off.
So long as you don’t have your locks all stopping shadowbolt spam to overwrite each other’s DoTs all day anyway.