While Ret is one of the specs that I’ve been playing longer than almost any other, I found myself in legion, and especially BFA, unable to force myself to play ret for any extended amount of time. After giving it more thought, and hearing from other people about why they find ret’s playstyle to be unengaging, I’ve come to the conclusion that Ret suffers more than anything from a lack of interactivity between its abilities. At its core, all your doing as a ret paladin is generating and spending holy power. There isn’t much to ret’s gameplay outside of purely building and spending. I think judgment could be reworked to provide some sort of interaction between other abilities in Ret’s kit to make the playstyle a bit more interesting. My idea is as follows:
Judgment no longer generates holy power, but empowers the next ability you cast to have a significant bonus effect, depending on the ability, focused on applying a new mechanic that benefits either Single target or AoE.
since we know we’re getting consecration back baseline in Shadowlands, lets start with that, since this ability is in essence just a fire and forget damage puddle slapped on into our already haphazardly cobbled together rotation. When empowered by Judgment, Consecration becomes Radiance. The paladin radiates light for X seconds, dealing ticking holy damage to all enemies within X yards of the paladin (this is essentially a consecration that moves with the paladin, similar to the glyph we had in WoD). While radiance is active, each cast of divine storm increases the damage of Radiance by X% (think gathering storm for frost DKs). This adds some usability to a spell that otherwise just sits on the ground and gets walked out of in AoE, or otherwise is just a holy power filler in single target, and creates an incentive to play the usage of holy power on divine storms within the radiance window to ramp up our aoe damage, rather than just mindlessly casting divine storm because its our aoe button and we have literally nothing else to care about in AoE.
Templar’s Verdict: empowering Templar’s Verdict with judgment causes templar’s verdict to leave a dot on the target, dealing holy damage over X seconds. Casting crusader strike and blade of wrath on the target extend the duration of the dot by X seconds per holy power generated. subsequent casts of templar’s verdict increase the damage of the dot by X%, either up to a cap, or with no cap and the damage being limited to how long you can extend the dot. This provides further synergy to both our single target spender and our builders, giving them some other function that just holy power generation and adding a secondary goal to our abilitis other than just dealing flat damage.
These are just shower thoughts, and there are probably more interesting things that could be done, but personally I feel I would enjoy playing with a mechanic like this. I think Ret desperately needs some interaction between its abilities to make it feel like there’s a purpose to what we’re doing, other than just pressing our do damage buttons in order.