My Ideas to improve Retribution

Classes Paladin
1

I’ve played a Paladin since 2005, and always had one as a main. I love the class. I’ve seen all variations, from Shockadins blowing up warriors in full Brutal Gladiator’s gear. To the seal-swapping, Divine Storm one-shotting people. There is no happy medium with Paladins though, either we do insane damage and no healing, or hit like kittens but have ridiculous defensive capabilities.

By far, my favorite version of ret was the way that they played in Cataclysm, where we felt like a true hybrid. We didn’t hit too hard, but just enough to get by, and had good support abilities and healing.

Why are we being out-healed and out-DPS’s by every single other class out there? A rogue? Demon Hunter? Death Knights? Even HUNTERS?!? How does this make any sense?

So, here are some of my ideas on how I would like to see ret improved upon and be at an even tier with some of the ridonkulous classes out there.

  1. Inquisition, Base line talent. For each holy power spent, lasts for 15 seconds. 4% increase to all damage and healing, reduces the effect of slows and snares on the paladin by 15%

  2. Hammer of Wrath, baseline ability (I know it’s coming in Shadowlands) 40 Yd. Range, usable only on targets that are below 30% health. (Damage buffed to make it an actual execute ability)

  3. Divine Purpose becomes baseline, but nerfed to a 10% increase in damage, and 5% in PvP

  4. Bring back Exorcism, remove Blade of Justice, Your judgment has a 40% chance to cause your next exorcism cast to be instant, cost no mana, and 100% critical strike. 30 Yard range.

  5. Eye for an Eye, 1.5 min CD, causes 40% of spell damage to be reflected back to the target for 12 seconds.

  6. Reduce the cooldown of Hindrance to 20 seconds. OR, bring back Pursuit of Justice, judgment causes you to move at 50% increased speed for 8 seconds.

  7. Restore Word of Glory to it’s original glory. Cause it to be a strong single target heal, that splashes healing to nearby allies. Give it a 30 second cooldown so that it cannot be spammed even with fast holy power generation.

  8. Selfless Healer, for every Holy Power spent on an ability, increases the healing of your Flash of Light and reduces the casting time by 15%

  9. Bring back specific resistance auras, so that we aren’t completely useless against caster classes.

  10. Crusader Strike, 2 charges, 5 second recharge reduced by haste, causes 110% weapon damage as holy damage.

  11. Templar’s Verdict, 3 holy power, causes 150% weapon damage as holy damage, and increases the damage of your next judgment or exorcism on the target by 50%

  12. Make blessing of Sacrifice baseline across all specs.

  13. Give us our old Blessings back please. Across all specs. Maybe not as powerful as they were, but a 5% buff to all stats from kings would seem fair. Blessing of Might if there is no warrior in your group…

  14. Hand of Freedom, 20 second cooldown, increases the speed of the target by 20% and makes them immune to root and snares for 8 seconds.

  15. Holy shock as a baseline ability, it’s effect changes depending on your specialization. Protection, heals an ally and reduces the damage they take by 10% for 10 seconds. Holy, well…same as it is now… Retribution, heals an ally or causes a small damage over time effect on the target, while they are under the effects of this small DoT, increase all holy damage done to the target by 10%

I know that a lot of these are wishful thinking, and will probably never be considered. But I feel as if they are fair, and not overpowered at all in the sense of the game, compared to all other classes right now.

The purpose of these changes would be to make the Paladin again more of a melee and caster hybrid, give them an actual rotation to follow, that ramps up damage as it goes. I would like to see us be able to do something other than burst, while I love our burst, it’s predictable, and easily countered.

If the Blizzard gods are out there, please at least consider some of these ideas, “Help us Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.”

7 Likes
2

I am for all this.

3

This is actually good ret changes.

But also divine purpose should just go back to proc from any ability, and prevent it to proc back to back like earlier this expansion.

4

im new to ret and i just leveled this guy in this expansion and my two cents are the rotation is still clunky i feel like there is an ability or two missing thats makes the rotation off.

the next i see is the off healing isnt as good as it used to be and im assuming because of the mana nerf 4 flash of lights and im out of mana…lol.

the damage is there its just the other stuff to me.

5

Since you are playing with Righteous Verdict, I would recommend using Divine Purpose as your final talent choice, those pair really well together and will be kinda RNG, but help with some of the “clunky” play a little bit, since right now your build is almost all based on when your wings are up. Also, HASTE, that will help alleviate some of your downtime while playing Ret.

6

What I would like to see in pvp is a Ms Effect we could put it on Exorcism. I know quite a few classes have them but its crap to be working on a target just for them to be healed to full in three cast.

So you could make it where Exorcisim dose what it would be doing but then it would debuff the target with a ms effect. And then if we hit the target due to a proc with Exorcisim again have it just refresh the timer of the ms effect.

We should make the timer of the Ms effect just a few seconds longer than the cd for Exorcisim. It should be able to be up 100% of the time to make it like the other classes with the effect.

1 Like
7

Thank you guys for some of the feedback, trying to keep this post alive a bit I guess.

Hopefully some people will see this and it will make a little bit of a difference. It would be a big overhaul, but I feel that Retribution Paladins shouldn’t be limited to just whacking stuff with big melee burst, while it’s fun to two shot things with wings up, it’s hard to set up sometimes.

Paladins really shine in their ability to mix holy spells and melee abilities, and I feel like they should return back to that play style. Like I said before, Cataclysm was a very good representation of how Retribution paladins SHOULD play.

Anyway, thanks again. Look forward to hearing more feedback from people.

2 Likes
8

I’m against Inquisition since Cataclysm.

They took it away because some of us said it’s not fun to have a mandatory buff we have to keep active at all times. Then they brought it back and made it “optional”. (It’s optional but parses higher…so “optional”.)

I feel the Retribution rotation is really complex. If you look at the rotation on Wowhead, it’s all, “If you have this Artifact Power, you priortize this over that, unless you have this other one, then it’s that over this with the new one first…”

“If you have this buff, make sure to press this button unless there are multiple enemies, then you press that button if there are two or more enemies. Otherwise, press this other button…unless you have talent X. Talent X always takes priority unless you have this Artifact Power passive. In that case, if [secondary stat] is under 20%, then do rotation C. Otherwise…blah blah blah.”

I need a flowchart!

tldr
It’s complicated and there’s some plate spinning involved.

1 Like
9

  1. im opposed to making inquisition baseline purely because of how much of a hassle it is to juggle a buff; i think its fine as a talent.

  2. hammer of wrath? ok - im reserving judgement on this until i see shadowlands changes fully emerge. i recall liking it for killing off targets if they survive past templar verdict hits, which has been the norm for several expos now.

  3. 10% kinda makes this proc worthless, i would rather it be how it is now as an optional talent. OR they would have to do more about stats to make our mastery damage scale better.

  4. blade of justice is fine as is. if exorcism returns, it should merely be ret’s “holy shock”; as you mention in a later item. having both gives ret too much range power for whats supposed to be a melee class.

  5. if shadowlands brings back skills like divine protection, having an option between that or eye for an eye as our"ret spec modification". i like this idea

  6. hinderance and or freedom buffed within reason, i’d rather have a better balance of these 2 spells than bring back more movement speed passives or spells.

  7. unsure about this, flash of light really should just be buffed to be a strong (ahem and actually make it worth putting on my bar Blizzard) single target heal and keep word of glory in the category of “group healing/utility”

  8. the risk of something like this will be resurrecting the classic paladin’s “unkillable” status. Paladin healing should be good, but constrained so that it can’t be spammed nor tempo’d to “live forever” so long as you stay in combat.

  9. eye for an eye would help combat this, and depending on how they reintroduce devotion aura, having resistances too may be redundant.

  10. im ok for the majority of our damage to be magic, but making every strike holy dmg and scale hard with mastery may have the unintended consequence of giving us insane dps when combined with item effects or syncing with another class’s spell

  11. im ok with how judgement works currently

  12. id say make sacrifice more interesting, but yes; sacrifice for all paladins

  13. id rather not being back % stat buffs, but they are slowing bringing that back so why not?

  14. agreed, 20 may be too quick, but something like 20-30 seconds so there is a window of CC on us for fairness.

  15. word of glory(old single target), holy shock, or exorcism, not all 3 at once.

1 Like
10

I’d really like to see Word of Glory (as it exists now) baseline with a talent that removes the charges placed alongside a strong DPS CD like Wake or even our 100 tier. This would allow Paladins the option to sacrifice DPS for better offheals.

11

If your raid group needs you to off heal that much, then you need more/better healers. Off healing is well and good, but damage is key to success. More dps(that do mechanics) has been the key to succeeding in tight fights (my guild’s first ashvane kill had 2 healers and 12 dps).

What our niche should be, is being able to pump dps and cheese mechanics, whether that is defensive cooldowns, or oh crap healing abilities (maybe a baseline word of glory), or Legionlike hardiness (off tanked a boss or two for 10-15 seconds waiting on rez to come off cooldown, would have not been able to do that cata to wod).

1 Like
12

Why would it be wrong to need off heals, paladins are a hybrid after all. There doesn’t seem to be anyone having problems with healers doing dps, why with a hybrid dps doing a little healing.

13

Or the fact that other classes have a ridiculous amount of self-healing even, that doesn’t even require them to break out of a regular rotation. Selfless healer is garbage, but the only thing worthwhile to take in PvP, but even more useless if you just get kited all the time since you can’t build up the charges. I’m just saying, a lot of other classes bring quite a bit more utility to the table than we do. Lay on Hands is nice, but we can’t use that in even rated BGs? Why?

I’m just saying it would be nice to have the option to trade out DPS for healing if we need to. And raiding isn’t everything in this game, a good player should be throwing off-heals when they can, if they aren’t, then they’re not being useful.

2 Likes
14

On the healing side: getting back Supplication (FoL 50% increased healing plus guaranteed crit on mob/player kill) and baking in old Sacred Shield (50% chance for FoL to crit on SS target) into Greater Blessing of Kings (hell, just call it Sacred Shield again) would be dope.

15

So you want to keep up both sacred shield and inquisition? No thanks

16

Where…did I mention Inq? Or do you speak of the situation now?
Sacred Shield/GBoM would be limited to 1, same duration as now…no problem with keeping it up.

17

I mean sacred shield in wotlk, mop and wod was an active ability you had to use to refresh it every 30sec. Do you really want to waste gcd to refresh both inquisition and sacred shield?

1 Like
18

Not sure about anyone else, but I miss the days when we didn’t have Holy Power. Also really miss Exorcism in it’s WotLK state where it would hit multiple targets.

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19

If you want to heal and dps, then roll holy. A dps has two jobs, do damage and fulfill mechanics. If we are expected to dps and heal, then we will not excel at either. With flex raiding, why bring a dps that does mediocre dps (and you can bet our dps will suffer if they make us a hybrid), and doesn’t heal as well as a dedicated heal (and they will not make our healing anything like a dedicated healer) when you can bring a healer that heals like a regular healer and does a little dps?

The current meta (that has been in effect since cata and is not bloody likely to change) is that fights are dps races against either soft enrage mechanics or a hard timer. Dps specs need to pump out dps, not waste globals fixing mistakes from people who mess up mechanics.

1 Like
20

If you want to plain dps then roll a warrior etc.

Yet holy paladins are able to do both an still excel in the healing role. Ret would be no different and it has been done before. Also not every part of the game revolves around raiding.

You’re assuming that they would have to offheal rather than it being an option. The Dps wouldn’t take a hit if you played it like one, it would only take a hit if you choose the to consistently offheal. And of course its not going to be as good as dedicated healer. Healer’s dps isn’t anywhere near a dedicated DPS either and the lose out on hps when they do.