Fix Ret Paladins Megathread

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Ret/Shock:
-Divine Storm: Deals Holy damage instead, reduced mana cost.
-Art of War: Refresh DS as well, in addition Seal costs reduced.
-Improved Hammer of Wrath: Reduce Mana Cost on HoW
-Wrath: Reduce mana cost to Consecration
-Seal of Command: 100% proc rate, gains benefit from Imp Seal of Righteousness/Imp SOR affects all seals. (Light, Wis, Jus, etc etc)
-SoM: No longer normalized, bring back cleave.
-Seal of the Crusader: No longer reduces physical attack damage done, judgment deals damage and it’s Judgment stack up to 5 for each of your auto attacks on the target.
-Righteousness: Crit enable
-Purifying Power: Lower mana cost of Holy Wrath and/or make it instant cast and lower mana cost of Cleanse.

Prot:
-Aegis: Also enable Holy Shield to block spells and more charges. Reduces chance to be crit by 6%. In addition your ranks of Redoubt increase Aegis proc chance and when it procs if you have Reckoning it will proc.
-Avenger’s Shield: Attacks can refresh CD and lower base CD.

Holy:
-Healing Aura quality of life book, buffed by Improved Devotion Aura.
-Light’s Grace: In addition your Holy Shock’s and Flash of Light can cause your next Flash of Light to be instant cast or lower the mana cost of your next Holy Light by 80%.
-Beacon of Light: Infinite duration unless swapped/death/etc
-Horn of Lordaeron: No longer affects strength/agi. Instead makes your next 3 Holy Light’s auto crit and instant cast.
-Divine Sacrifice: Causes you to be immune to silence and interrupt mechanics as well. Any healing done to other party members also affects you.

Personally: Purifying Power, Rebuke, Inspiration Exemplar should have been quality of life books.

2 Likes
142

Lol, WF is a horde spec. You already get so much utility in a raid, kings allowing your melee hunters to run lone wolf. Mp5 for casters, LoH to fix an o snap moment, are you a melee class or a spell caster? I mean instant spell caster with DS, CS, judgment. We give you WF but priests and warriors get shattering throw and Mass dispell. Ive seen 1 pally bubble and kill 3 people defending LM. Yeah, definitely not broken being able to so 100% dmg while immine to everything. Then be able to heal to full, then LoH. Like christ, BoF to avoid kiting. You get WF, we get blood lust. You want shaman buffs, go play a shaman.

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i agree but before, nerf horde racials, remove hardiness from orcs and give a rep % racial. Remove war stomp and Stam%, also remove berserker from trolls and give everyone the rep racial.

get away divine shield and loH, give death grip to paladins for loH and reckoning rune on wrist slot for divine shield. Lets go.

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More mana.

145

You keep using anecdotal evidence to make a point about Paladin PvP immunity. No one is disagreeing that bubble as an ability is OP. But that is literally all we have to survive:

1-2 shot from mages
1-2 shot from warlock
1-2 shot from Boomkins
1-2 shot from Spriest
1-2 shot from Shaman
1-2 shot from Hunter
1-2 shot from Rogue
…etc

The entirety of the Paladin community agrees that paladins are completely under balanced - our Runes are a joke (considering how hard some of them are to get). Our damage is subpar and non-engaging. We are the bottom of the barrel of all melee. Nobody wants to heal as a paladin because it’s has nothing new or interesting this season. Shockadin is still NOT viable and Pally tanks are the only thing we have that feels real. There’s a literal entire discord where every Paladin across all the servers get together and theory craft for days and days and it’s basically unanimous amongst anyone who actually understands Paladins past playing one for 5 mins at level 25 that there IS a huge under balance for them. And as shamans being a faction counterpart and having so much more - doing so much more. Shaman tanks were literally top five DPS in phase 2… Ele shamans being a top caster. Enhance Shamans being a Top DPS and INSANE for PVP. That’s actually unreal that this is even a conversation when we compare the two. The only thing shamans are meh in are maybe resto but I don’t know enough about that.

If you like anecdotal stories about an experience that has made you define your opinion on a class. Making your way into booty Bay 20 yards out. See a shaman smacking a paladin while he’s trying to run away. Run in to assist him. Pally #1 bubbles and heals himself, while Pally #2 and the Shaman fight and within .3 seconds #2 has 10% hp. BUT WAIT he brought the Shaman down to 25% so you bubble hoping the Pally #1 will kill him. NOPE instant riptide take the shaman to 100% HP. While Pally #2 heal himself in bubble, that Shaman 2 shots the other paladin. You try to go in and fight… But oh you are then 2 shot also. Then the shaman spam laughs on your 2 body’s and tries to camp you so you can’t get into Booty Bay.

It was 2v1 I had full Rank 7 gear and the other Pally had full emerald gear. We both bubbled - we both stunned- and we both couldn’t do enough damage to the shaman stop him from taking down BOTH of our full HP bars twice EACH, while we could just barely do enough damage to bring his HP below 20%. His Riptide heals for as much as our Lay on Hands with practically no cooldown. Our fastest heal barely heals us - our hardest hitting heal takes forever to cast - and the only thing that could do what he did has an hour cooldown. That should not be possible AT ALL. It wasn’t a skill issue, it was not fun, and he knew what he was doing because he knew he could do it and blizzard is not going to stop it. Paladin’s bubble is there because we can be feared, and kited, and get bursted down by almost everyone before we can actually play the game. We have no speed boost, we have 1-2 ranged abilities with LONG CD’s. It needs to be tuned up across the board on every spec to be on par with shamans. Or shamans need to be nerfed to hell and brought down to the gutters with us. End of story

1 Like
146

Yea! Why would Blizzard allow someone to stop me from killing a healer in 0.2 seconds! It’s so unfair!

You sound like an impotent child. Opinion discarded.

147

The bubble meme only really works on BS engage in AB, while basically winning that fight for free is annoying, I don’t think pally needs any drastic changes in that department. I do wish there was better counterplay, or really any counter play however.

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My main point is if you want paladins to be EVEN MIDDLE tier dps, without breaking other aspects of the game, like PVP. You need to do something about bubble and bop. Not to mention the fact that it is one of the only classes that can get their healers out of CC’s.

Their toolkit is NOT conducive to high or even middling dps. They need to pick one, Rets need to either have higher dps, or surrender parts of their toolkit. Because as things continue, rets are going to get more unmanagable.

Shamans have problems, they lack defensives, especially in pvp. Their burst is definitely too high, I saw this tanking in phase 2, couldn’t hold aggro off of them, and none of them were willing to be tanks, that isnt balanced, but this is a paladin thread. And anytime I point out a problem with paladins, its “but shaman.”

The other issue I see is this, a lot of classes are being shifted over to specifically magic damage, rogues are now doing a TON of poison damage, making paladins damage mostly magic means it is unmitigated, on plate, like my damage is on them, which I take issue with. They need to add SOME TYPE of magic mitigation. I personally think specifically for warrior.

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Every ret paladin would trade 50% damage reduction during bubble for a proper set of runes and getting rid of this fast attack weapon speed exorcism crap.

2 Likes
150

From Surv - one of our moderators and theory crafters in light club:

core issues:

  • fast weapons & som normalization: weapon speed is way too important, some peopel don’t like the fast weapons, they will need to keep creating 2.0 speed weapons for us to ever upgrade our current weapons. compounded by the SOM buffs. ACP will never go away unless nerfed.
  • gcd limited: art of war is so frequent that exorcism takes precedence over everything else, we end up doing our other spells more and more rarely. we don’t have the space to cast utility let alone consecration, judgement, and starting to delay CS more and more. this also relates to the next 3 issues:
  • exorcism prio: exorcism is so powerful and other spells are weak enough that we are becoming a 1-spell andy quickly.
  • crit scaling: thanks to new spells and exorcism procs, vengeance uptime is almost maxed already. due to limitid GCDs as well, crit has trouble scaling past this point as we cannot spend the art of wars or increase veng uptime.
  • cleansing: gcd limited makes it really a huge sacrifice to cleanse people and there is so much cleansing in ST. mass cleanse would be great, something that matches poison cleansing totem or mass dispel.
  • windfury: should be easier to get than needing a feral druid to give up their tank rune.
  • mana consumption: while its pretty manageable with JOW, this is mostly because we are prio’ing cheap exorcism over everything else, and hardly cast cons. only at the end of fight when we start hammering does it get bad, and at some point you are forced to stop hammering and only use it to fill gaps in between exorcisms.
  • command & divine storm now obsolete: self explanatory, even on cleave fights 1handed HOTR is way better. its kind of perverse that DS can’t even beat a 1-hander using HOTR, and this is compounded by HOTR being able to use SOM which is just way better.
  • threat generation is way too high compared to everyone else, but tanks are doing insane threat so for the time being its not the biggest issue.
  • seal dispel resistance.
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I don’t use hammer of wrath over Purifying Power, like many other paladins, the DPS increase of a an 8 second Exorcism is much higher than the increase you’d gain from casting Hammer of Wrath. It’s better to leave it out of the rotation entirely and just focus on casting Exo.

It may not be very often that your Exo CD goes beyond 8 seconds but when it does happen and you end up waiting 15 whole seconds to cast another exo, it can be devastating for your overall DPS.

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A few notes of thought to an updoot here to throw in for the Prot pallies

-Aegis: Reduces your ability to be critical struck by 6%. Each rank of redoubt increases Aegis proc chance. Aegis also procs your Reckoning talent. Each time you block you gain 5% of your maximum mana.
-Avenger’s Shield: Reduced CD and your attacks have a chance to refresh it’s CD.

But yea if they could do 2 changes right now that could help bandaid: Imp HoW and Wrath reduce mana costs of HoW/Consecration

153

I’m still of the opinion that Crusader strike ought to go back to a 4 second CD. 75% of weapon damage is pretty paltry when you have to use it with a really fast but low damage melee weapon, it would also help fix the some of mana regen problems we’re seeing as soon as someone forgets to keep Judgement of Wisdom on the target or forget to buff Blessing of Wisdom or not having Nightfin Soup buff up.

Really if you’re missing any of these, you’re going to have mana issues especially on fights like Eranikus that require you to use AoE abilities to deal with trash.

154

Here are some ideas I had recently.

Core ability: The Paladin is the only class that lacks many core abilities/talents to fulfill its 3 distinct roles which prevents him to be viable so I think it would help to have some quests or books (same as enhanced blessings for example) to give the class what it needs.

  • Crusader Strike: book as a quest reward instead of rune.
  • Hand of Reckoning: book as a quest reward instead of rune.
  • Templar’s Verdict (2 Handed Weapon required): book in SM Cathedral (Scarlet Commander Mograine).
    6% mana base - 10 seconds cd - 10 yards range
    An instant strike that causes 135% weapon damage as Holy.
  • Word of Glory: book in Scarlet Monastery (High Inquisitor Whitemane).
    Instant - 40 yards range - 10% mana base - 10 seconds cd
    Calls down the Light to heal a friendly target for (XX% spell power) its healing is increased by up to 100% based on the target’s missing health.

Rune: Many runes are at best badly designed, at worst punishing (ie Fist… I mean Guarded by the Light). With the undocumented change on SoM we are forced to play a fast weapon gameplay that doesn’t look like Ret, especially now with a 1H weapon, so I tried to rethink some runes to help us being competitives and less exo spam like.

Hand of Reckoning

  • Removed.

Seal of Martyrdom

  • Removed.

Aegis (gloves): With HoR removed I thought this rune would be the perfect candidate to receive the RF buffs but I haven’t determined yet how many % to put on the additionnal threat for Holy Shield.

  • Increases your block value by 30% and damaging melee and ranged attacks against you have a 10% chance to increase your chance to block by 30% and increases the threat generated by your next Holy Shield by an additional XXX%. Lasts 10 sec or 5 blocks. Effect not cumulative with Redoubt.
    While you know this ability, the threat bonus from Righteous Fury is increased to 80%.
    Additionally, while Righteous Fury is active, damage which takes you below 35% health is reduced by 20%. Righteous Fury will remain active until cancelled.

The Art of War: Added Word of Glory and cut the reset cd in half

  • Your melee critical strikes reduces the cooldowns on Holy Shock, Exorcism and Word of Glory by 50%, and the mana cost of Holy Shock and Exorcism is reduced by 80% plus the mana cost of your next Word of Glory is reduced by 100%.

Guarded by the Light: No need to explain why

  • Removed.

Wrath: Added mana cost reduction on Consecration

  • The mana cost of your Consecration is reduced by 80% and its damage can now be critical strikes, and damage from your Exorcism, Holy Shock, Holy Wrath, and Consecration spells gains additional critical strike chance equal to your melee critical strike chance.

Improved Hammer of Wrath: Added mana cost reduction on Hammer of Wrath

  • Hammer of Wrath is now instant and the cooldown on Hammer of Wrath is reset each time it damages an enemy below 10% health and its mana cost is reduced by 80%.

Holy Prism: Not sure if it’ll be enough for Holy

  • 3% of base mana 40 yd range
    Instant 15 sec cooldown
    Fires a beam of light that scatters to strike a clump of targets.
    If the beam is aimed at an enemy target, it deals (XXX% of Spell power) Holy damage and radiates [(XXX% of Spell power) * 1] healing to 5 allies within 30 yds.
    If the beam is aimed at a friendly target, it heals for [(XXX% of Spell power) * 1] and radiates (XX% of Spell power) Holy damage to 5 enemies within 30 yds.
    The cooldown on Holy Prism is reduced by 50% after getting a critical effect from your Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Holy Shock heal spell.

Communion with the Light (gloves): The mana regeneration tool for us and our teamates

  • Your Judgement gives you 5% of your maximum mana per 3 sec for 15 sec and causes Replenishment.
  • Replenishment - Your party and raid members within 40 yards will also receive 2% of their maximum mana per 3 sec for 15 sec.

Empowered Seals: Not sure if it’s too powerful or not but I think this could be interesting/fun

  • Your Seal of Light, Seal of Wisdom, and Seal of Justice now also deal 10% weapon damage as holy when triggered and your Judgment of Justice reduces the target’s movement speed by 25%.
    Your Seal of Righteousness now deals 50% of your melee attacks as Holy (normalized weapon damage).
    Your Seal of Command has a 100% chance to be triggered on all your melee attacks when wielding a 2 Handed Weapon (yes on cs, tv, ds and auto of course).
    In addition, if your active Seal is dispelled it will disorient the dispeller, causing it to wander aimlessly for up to 3 sec.

Unbound Freedom:

  • Blessing of Freedom increases movement speed by 45%, and you gain Blessing of Freedom when cast on a friendly target.
155

You remember, Glinda, he’s cousin of the Rochester Askedforpallybuffbackinwraths?

Stopped by last year for Purim?

Mostly I heard you asking for:

  1. A weapon made just for you that was like the weapon that I can’t use from this previous phase but more for you so I guess restricted to only paladin?
  2. Zeal from Diablo which would be a five-hit wind-up smack in the face
  3. And to not have your best weapons be difficult to farm, or have CDs, or be expensive BoEs like flurry axe - and I think we can all agree we’d all love that not to be true of our beloved class of choice.

So, no. If you look at what you wrote, lion’s share of it is pointy stuff and what you do with it. The problem with a lot of “Fix Paladins” posts that I see cris-crossing the fora is they leave some important bits out.

You have had not one but two two-handed swords served up to you in STV. Two. When you say Flurry Axe I think Thrash Blade, which honestly, I’d probably have a hard time if I were thinking about what to use for my MH if I were tanking, but… not so much for DPS. Parasomnia is gorgeous and the human racial makes it just-that-much-better.

Looking at archon.gg, which is where I kinda get my look-see at where the class can be, holy paladin is 3/5 for healers in popularity and throughput, ret is 7/14 for throughput, 10th in popularity, and prot pal is top of the boards 1 in pop, 1 in throughput.

Pretty good I’d say.

But I get it. Honest. Bear with me. I remember a long time ago in Phase 2 when people said warrior didn’t need a buff but really we were Arms or Fprot for tanking, and pointing out how the 5% has it leaves out the 95% that made it possible.

I am stoked to hear whispers of Sunwalkers coming.

Horde has some great things going for it right now in PvE. Alpha I didn’t like at first, because I want to generate my own threat, but the synergy of Shield Slam, Alpha, Vigilance, and That One Shadow Priest Who Cannot Be Controlled is awesome. Shamanistic Rage is bonkers for blue rage people - I don’t get it, but they love it.

And I get Ogb’s frustration with this phase’s BiS being last phase’s or seemingly out-of-reach - but some of that is “discovery” of what other classes’ burdens were” - ferals had to put up with the Same Damn Head and MCP for two expansions, and warrior has always been an expensive grindy affair. That’s not to chide you - that’s to say I understand.

Ret is expected to bring a lot to the table support wise, and yes, your blessings are in a lot of ways better than the horde’s - you cross party boundaries which totems do not, and you dispel, aggro dump and emergency heal better than shamans can. The Horde has alchemy and priests to deal with magic debuffs, and you guys don’t have to talk hunters into using lion - ‘least I hope not. Not as often, anyway. Do you?

So, retribution folks, I think Amideus was on the right track talking about the class fantasy - not because I want to hear about Arthas and Varian and the Burning Portal of Gul’Steve or whoever. I mean when you think of a ret paladin, what are the three first superpowers that pop into your mind? What’s the one thing they really shouldn’t be able to do well without breaking the class design?

I’m asking because I hear Sunwalkers might be coming our way and I want to hear what you enjoy about the class. What it should do.

Dual wield I don’t think is too much to ask. Or staves or Holy Hand Grenades. But from the standpoint of someone who has always played Tauren and is looking at retribution paladin real hard because, frankly, looks like fun, can you tell me what one is supposed to be? Because from where I’m sitting you guys are doing ok, tell me some of the good parts.

-Horse

1 Like
156

Can we stop trying to make a bunch of books for free spells?

Pretty please?

Yes, I would love to run Alpha and Decoy
It would be amazing to have Overload and Dual Wield Spec at the same time
Shammy rage as a book would awesome so I could run any of the other ones…

But that would all be a bit silly because the whole point of the runeslot system is to have build CHOICES, not just get abilities.

The QoL books for smoothing out buffing and non-combat utilities was a great idea. Making Shadowfiend and Commanding Shout a book was a POOR choice as it has people calling for free spells so they can effectively have 9-10 runes instead of 7. (We didn’t need either shadowfiend nor commanding shout, which makes that can of worms all the smellier.)

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No.

The difference is all the other classes have offensive kit baked in the original wow.
Paladin has nothing except judgment every 10 sec (8 if talented).
So yeah excuse us for asking a kit that won’t force/pigeonhole us into only 1 choice.

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And enhancement shamans had NOTHING built into their defensive or offensive kit.
A spell absorb totem and getting back up after we’ve been killed.
A ranged dispellible slow
No hard CC
No Defensives

Pardon me while I ask for books for:
Shammy rage to be a book and be 30%-40% DR
Capacitor totem so we can stun
Hex Book so we can Polymorph

(psst: no.)

Runes are there to fill the holes in your spec, or change your spec up a bit if it was already set to go, like Mages. Books were meant for QoL upgrades…not combat spells. That’s my point.

(I have no problem with asking for upgrades or modifications to existing runes, particularly something like making martyrdom give more mana back or something like that- but asking for extra abilities is silliness.)

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I agree that shaman are way too OP compared to paladins. But I think the solution is nerfing shaman, not buffing paladins :expressionless:

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You can’t say enhance had nothing in the offensive kit when Storm Strike is a 31 talent points.
The only thing Ret had was seal of command.

15 sec cd to prevent a spell is not bad.

And our ccs are dispellable too you know?

Shammy rage with 30%-40% DR? You can have it but not on 1 min cd.

While the other two hm… Don’t know how it would fit right now.

Here, it’s not a question of adding just a spell to improve an already existing gameplay. Here, it’s about creating gameplay that doesn’t exist in the first place.
That’s the nuance.

And the rune system shows its limits when it comes to Paladin.

Martyrdom is bad and if Blizzard removed it in the past during WotLK, it’s no coincidence.
I hope it’ll rot in some dark places and never return.