downtime planning specs should exist for the sake of existing. im sorry you like cat but dislike how it plays. but theres alot of people that like these types of spec. not every spec can or should be gcd packed.
the current top dps in the game is a rng consistent overtuned mess of a spec and sin is the second to go spec in keys. funny how we are pretending sin isnt second place in boss damage in mythic raiding and the 2nd dps togo in keys. a downtime spec.
I recognize that we each have our own opinions on downtime specs—it’s a subjective preference, not an objective rule. My personal experience just happens to be with Feral, and from that perspective:
I’m not denying that Assassination Rogue exists or that some people like downtime. I simply prefer a fluid playstyle, and so far, the downtime introduced into Feral hasn’t brought the benefits or tuning it needs to feel satisfying.
There’s a good reason Retribution Paladin remains the most popular DPS spec—even if it’s not always the top DPS in terms of throughput. It’s fluid, smooth, and fun, without making you feel resource-starved. Personally, I’d rather not chase the flavor of the month; instead, I’d like to see other underperforming specs receive the buffs and improvements they need to feel just as enjoyable.
In my opinion, Tradu’s mistake here is rolling into these forums claiming that the resource gravy train needs to end. People do NOT like nerfs, whether it’s to damage, resource generation, defensives, or even utility. The goal should always be to both make specs more fun to play but also to make them more competitive with each other regardless of gameplay pillar the player is engaging with.
its the most popular spec cause its piss easy, has good visuals, and was strong enough to hide any of its little mistakes back in dragonflight.
lets not pretend its about fluidity when its really just about “its melee beast mastery” level of easy
feral has always been a poo,.ling low downtime planning spec. theres no reason to change it toi make it gcd capped. play ret paladin
I appreciate your take, but I think we might be talking past each other. Calling Retribution Paladin “easy” because it doesn’t struggle with resources doesn’t necessarily disprove the idea that it’s smooth and fun to play. Ease of use can be one factor, but solid tuning, fluid rotations, and strong visuals also matter a lot.
As for Feral: it’s not that I want it “GCD-locked” to the extreme, but I do want a more satisfying flow and enough power to match other specs. If you personally prefer downtime-heavy gameplay, that’s fine—some people enjoy it. I just believe Feral shouldn’t feel punishingly slow or underpowered while adhering to that style.
the rotation is fluid because its easy, theres no cd. you just slam things that glows overcap all your resource and still perform good. the only thing you need to watch out for is making sure youe es and wake are synced together. ease of access is the biggest factor why its really popular, pre rework ret had the visuals and fantasy but still wasnt this popular cause it wasnt “easy” and i use the term loosely cause pre rework was still easy it was just sync 4 cds together every 1min that people somehow failed at
God your wrong.
You just want ret to go back to hitting 1 spell and waiting 3 sec for another one.
Also, “easy,” is subjective.
You keep using this word “easy”. This whole game is objectively “easy”. Sure some specs are “easier” than others, but every single spec is “easy” to play.
The complexity comes in the combat environment be it PvE or PvP.
There’s no denying that specs that feel good with their resource are the ones that interact with their resources in a healthy and consistent manner tend to perform better than specs fighting against their resource.
Downtime itself isn’t exactly something that’s enjoyable to most in games, looking at specs like Feral with a whopping 20% downtime and then something that feels good (right now) to play like Arms/Ret/WW who only have 5-7% downtime are drastically different in regards to how often the downtime occurs and when it occurs they still flow nicely, people coming in wanting more downtime are off their rocker.
if you waited 3 seconds to cast anything then again you are playing ret wrong since the start. you have been spreading misinfo on every thread you shill since the start so again. piss off.
ret doesnt interact with its resource in a healthy or consistent manner, our resource means nothing because we generate so much of it, also it doesnt help that the gap between generators and spenders is so small that you can overcap hopo without worrying about spenders cause A) spenders are weak and B) stuff like blade of justice and judgement almost rival the power of a spender
again some specs are allowed to be slow and be based on planning. like how some specs are allowed to be gcd capped. i highly suggest playing those gcd capped specs if you dislike feral so much.
yes very single spec is easy to play, easy is subjective. but in the case of beast mastery and ret paladin, the skill ceiling and floor is so low that is comical.
im not asking for ret to become this turbo hard spec that punishes everyone if you so much as breath the wrong way. i just want my resource to matter and my spenders to feel good to press. like spenders should feel like
Only you would take that literally, which shows the shallowness of your intelligence. We argue bc we want a nice fluid spec and you argue that specs need to be overly convoluted, slow, require the player to do mental math between every cd, run 20+ addons to track procs and uptimes, and the spec must have baseline 15+ rotational spells. This is your opinion and nearly noone agrees.
i took it literaly cause the “slow and clunky” pre rework ret spec you think exist. never existed. you didnt need to run 20 addons or weakauras, you didnt need to do anything complicated. all you needed to do was sync 3 1min cds together and THATS IT. the spec was never slow unless you had giga low haste
you need more addons to run ret today than pre rework btw (auto attack tracker, expurg tracker, radiant glory tracker, hol tracker)
the amount of rotational spells between pre rework and post rework dragonflight is nearly the same you goober. in tww its going back to it cause divine hammer might actually be good enough to run rotational
bert yo8u have no idea how to play ret nor its history so pipe down
Please think about changing Winning Streak tier set bonuses. Winning Streak has multiple RNG factors (gaining and losing stacks) that can wildly affect performance from 1 pvp match or 1 boss pull to another. The negative rng effect here is just not fun, I dont want to feel bad about spending Maelstrom Weapon, it should only ever feel good but with this set it will feel bad as you might remove your stacks even with the 4 set in mind.
For example, the Enhancement shaman 4 set gives you 2 seconds off Doom Winds whenever you gain a Winning Streak stack, and 4 seconds off whenever you lose the stack(s). This means in 1 match I could have had Doom Winds on a 24 second CD or less constantly, and in the next I’m unlucky and its a 42 second cd or 36 second cd instead, drastically altering Windfury damage output. This is also not something that is noticeable right away, you have to remove multiple stacks multiple times before getting noticeable cdr which will not feel good either.
I think the Jackpot set bonuses are far more fun because your 2 set is rng but when it procs it will be very noticeable for most, and your 4 set gives you a guaranteed jackpot proc when you use your main CD which will feel good. This set has no negative effect and only 1 form of rng with built in guaranteed procs.
Winning Streak will feel awful to play with, might even require tracking it and I am not a huge fan of that either most of us track enough already.
To be clear, I do not think these tier sets are ‘lazy’ by any means, if anything probably far more complex than current tier sets as they are still spec specific but with a much bigger variety in how they play and are designed. Not necessarily a good thing though, I vastly prefer my current tier set which is very simple over the s2 Enhance tier set for example.
It feels bad on Sin. Artificial even.
They definitely are lazy and should immediately be scrapped. No one asked for it and the excuse of “we are trying something new” just doesnt hold up and they could have made 2 piece sets to test this kind of thing in a 0.5 patch. You dont mess with tier sets. Theyre a staple of the game itself.
Been a while since I played Veng, but this seems like this is a nothingburger. Who’s going to cast the hunt if it resets midway thought a trash pack just to not have it up for the next pull cause you reset the CD and now you’re just hoping it drops back off with another proc before the next pull? Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t see Veng getting an appreciable amount of more hunt casts per dungeon unless this thing is proccing all the time.
They are not lazy though, I have no idea how you can think that when looking at these. Do you realize they are still individual and based on spec? It is still a spec specific tier set, the outlaw rogue set doesn’t do the same thing the assassination rogue set does, etc. If anything again these are more complex to deal with, because every tier set now has this 1 thing for each role that every single spec interacts differently with.
It is not any lazier than what we got before.
“Your storm strike, ice strike and lava lash damage is increased by 10%”
“Your feral spirits summon an additional feral spirit”
Compare that to what the enhance set is now. Calling these lazy just looks bad because it isn’t true. Now to be clear they are bad, at least winning streak is, but they are not lazy. They are just as spec specific as before.
And to be honest I actually like the Jackpot one a lot. It’s pretty exciting and again it is spec specific. Ele sham proccing fire/storm ele is huge, and the 4 set making that guaranteed during ascend will be really fun+the dmg bonus to lava burst/lightning bolt. Winning streak just sucks and should be scrapped or reworked to have no negative effect, it’s awful. But jackpot is good.
It seems nice; I hope it does not cleave and break CC like everything else in the game currently. I might actually play Frostfire with this in 2s. I do not really play 3s. I hate Frostfire for PvP at the moment because without cancelaura management macros, its a cleaving nightmare, and 11.1 will be slightly better, but damage for Frostfire bolt build will be worse without the extra flurry procs. Also, calling down a meteor is bunk because it breaks CC so much in 2s. Players like to stack and run behind a pillar, and it has a wider range than meteor slightly; comet misses players a lot due to delayed dropping, poly tracking, player movement, and more. Meteor does not, and meteor leaves an 8-second dot, so you can’t weave meteor with polys. Almost making comet completely ineffective, and not having 45-yard displacement kind of stinks. Plus, Frostfire forces you to play DB+Ring in melee range and other weird talents like Ring of Fire. At least they are making Ring of Fire a crappy talent; I hate taking that thing so much. Plus, Spellslinger still has no dispel protection, and there are many other things wrong with the Frostfire tree, like applying a dynamic amount of haste and screwing up perfect Re-CC timers. Actually, time anomaly does the same thing. I am glad there is a 3% intellect alternative, but it needs to be closer to +6% intellect. Plus, we are still advocating for things like ‘Mastery’ secondary stat in PvP, which is very bad. If you need to buff Frost damage in PvP, apply a hotfix, or fix our talent systems and stop making PvP Frostmages take a garbage stat like Mastery.
You can read about my Frost Mage feedback here; this is post 2/2; post 1/2 is above it:
Both threads talk about CC breaks, dispel protection, and/or displacement range.
Thanks again,
Frostyownz
They should just ban all addons/macros in PvP and make an officially supported UI. I am sick of being OCD and /afk’ing in 2s when my UI is not perfect. I do not understand why they can’t do 1/10 of a second CC timer tracker, cooldown tracking on teammates, and other things.
Plus, if my alter is bugged, I usually just AFK, which is usually a game bug when you /afk while Alter of Time was up from the previous game. I do not think it is even macro or addon related. 
I would probably be 100-200 rating higher every season if I did not AFK from all the keybind, macros, arena123, addon, and other issues. Like it took me a few weeks to figure out Arena123 in DF because you needed Advance Interface Options addon after they changed how it operated in LUA when used against LoS, out of range, stealth targets, non-humanoids, spirit form, etc. in DF for whatever reason. Apparently to combat scripters and abusers. No idea if that worked or how it worked? Lol.
Just kill addons and macros and give players the option to bind each spell to arena123 or focus123 if they want to in the keybind settings. Would save me a lot of headaches and not give players who spend 3-6 hours/day playing a 5-10% advantage, simply because they have a better UI without bugs and track CDs, etc. Ugh!
It’s actually a 20% disadvantage for me to use addons and macros. Not the 5% advantage it should be because I just AFK when 1 thing is wrong with my UI or macros or I forget to cancelaura excess fire and it breaks polymorph. For this expansion, its like a 20% rate for this at the moment. So crazy.
The Hunt isn’t Vengeance-specific, which is counter to their own announcement that 4pc bonus is spec-based. Plus, this is almost exclusively a capstone we’d take with Aldrachi Reaver, not with Fel-Scarred.
Class: Paladin
Specialization: Retribution
Content: Raiding + Mythic Plus
Usefulness: This will be most useful during burst windows and AoE. It will be least useful outside of cooldown windows. See below for more detail.
Problem #1
We are flooded with Resources/Holy Power already. We are already pressing Templar’s Verdict almost every other global due to passive generators like Crusading Strikes and Divine Resonance. This devalues the 4pc proc greatly.
Problem #2
Templar’s Verdict is close in damage output compared to our generators (ex. Judgment/Blade of Justice/Hammer of Wrath). This just makes pressing TV numerically not exciting.
In addition, our generators extend Shake the Heavens (for Templar), so this proc can lead to a poor gameplay loop and losing Shake uptime earlier than expected.
Solutions
To remedy this, the 4pc should have the value increased to at least a 20% bonus to holy power abilities.
The 2 sets are literally the same and the 4 sets are shoehorned buffs intended to fit each spec. It literally is lazy. Just cause finding a way to shoehorn something in requires thought doesnt mean its not lazy as this all still overall required significantly less thought than unique set bonuses tailored to each spec with a goal of changing rotations or ideal talents. The mental gymnastics youre doing is incredible.
Testing this out on the PTR, it functions a lot worse than expected, and is a fairly weak and uninspired tier set.
The Frostbolts DO NOT interact with any frostbolt talents. There is no interaction with Death’s chill, cold front, or slick ice.
This may be good from a “we aren’t locked into these talents” perspective, but then this makes this tier set a weak proc on a chance.
Compared to other tiers, which get a buff, or a proc, or uptime on their CD like combustion frost gets a weak damage ability with minimal visual.
To make it at least somewhat cool, make it look like the frost bolt volley from Necrotic Wake, and have it interact with the Frost Bolt talents in the tree, then the tier set would be at least worth getting. TBH at current tuning, it’s really not good.