Affliction will probably be stronger for ICC prog, particularly H LK.
But for sure good UH’s will be topping meters for a long time in ICC.
It’s a stretch to look at the relative number of rets getting hard mode kills compared to all rets?
That seems like exactly the data you would be looking at.
Rets were struggling hard there. Guilds were dropping them because their DPS is bad, just like you don’t bring a frost mage for replenishment. (Frost was beating us in damage)
Well, yeah, warriors that get an early DBW also see an early spike. TaJ isn’t close to 1000 DPS in phase 3 gear. It just makes ret scale a lot better with the rest of their gear.
Nah, the rets that got it on the ptr didn’t jump that high. It needs the rest of the phase’s gear to be THAT insane (including shadowmourne) because how hard it hits depends on how hard we hit.
You hit the buttons as they come off cooldown. The sims between worst possible priority and best is like… a few hundred dps different. So long as you are hitting buttons, you are playing ret like 95% optimally.
They are slated to remain among the best specs in the game when fully geared. Ret isn’t going to be leaving fury in the dust. The only spec noticeably above fury because of buffs is feral.
I’m basing it on the fact that the world first shadowmourne took about 6 weeks after shards became available, so 7 seemed a pretty reasonable point (1 week after the fastest back then, which was on hard mode drop rates). 6 might be the norm with the few extra guaranteed drops.
So yeah, 10-14 weeks is still a long wait if the ret is second pick.
They wouldn’t even be in the running in many guilds if they hadn’t been buffed, because you’d just sit the class that basically can’t break 14k DPS without shadowmourne.
I forgot how DKs and warriors are around 14k DPS in best in slot gear without shadowmourne… oh wait, they aren’t…
(That’s where pre-buff ret is)
Looking at one specific boss which many guilds weren’t even capable of doing early in Ulduar to form your argument about representation? Yeah, that’s a stretch 
And again you’re ignoring that one is extremely contested and one is not. And TAJ is more powerful for ret than DBW for anyone else.
The ret in my guild was already quite competitive in our PTR tries without his absurdly broken trinket. And already beating me on half the TOGC fights.
Not buying it, sorry.
Also you’re singlehandedly keeping this thread focused on ret, my guy. You could just stop posting and let us complain about feral instead.
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Doesn’t matter if this thread is about ret, feral, China, or toe fungus.
Nothing will be changed unless one class when specd in their highest dps spec shoots 10% or more ahead of everyone else in damage or falls below by the same margin.
Also real data matters, not sims. Blizz have never balanced their game on sim data and I don’t expect them to now.
That just means they’ll change nothing, or wait til P5 when it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m sure that’s acceptable to you, being one of the lucky few with inauthentic buffs.
I hope that you are incorrect if the highest dps spec is one with a buff they should never have gotten. I’d like to think they would be a bit more proactive in monitoring their silly botched feral buff.
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I just don’t think highest or lowest matters to them as long as nothing is breaking the floor or ceiling.
I mean, they said their intent was not to buff ret to be competitive with the highest output specs, I think it’s reasonable to assume that was also not their intent with feral, which also has exceptional utility. If it turns out that feral is as OP as it looks like it will be, it should have its buff reverted before the end of the phase. But I agree that they probably won’t change anything, at least not until P5. I hate the half-assed class balance efforts that WotLK Classic has received.
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It wasn’t just Algalon.
But yeah, that’s exactly where you want to be looking.
The hard fights where guilds that had choices in what was best to tackle the fight were most optimized.
If ret is not good there, it doesn’t matter if it’s only a small handicap once the fight is easier.
It perfectly highlights the problem: ret wasn’t good or wanted in high end raiding.
I’m not. It doesn’t matter. Ret doesn’t magically become better just because one good trinket is uncontested. It just might spike up a bit a tiny bit earlier than the top fury your guild probably also prioritizes DBW on.
And he is only capable of this because of the buffs.
TaJ wouldn’t even bring him to where he is now if the buffs were reverted and he got it week 1.
It’s not nearly as strong in phase 3 gear as it is in full phase 4.
Nah, it’s all the people complaining that ret is too good and shouldn’t have been buffed (while ignoring that ret would just be trash tier if they hadn’t been buffed) doing that.
Pre-buffs, even with TaJ, without shadowmourne in full ICC BiS, ret was capping out around 14k DPS. That’s god awful compared to everyone else. With shadowmourne, ret was still going to be doing less DPS than frost DK or fury warrior (no Smourne), any rogue, or feral druid (unbuffed)…
Why would you even consider giving ret that weapon when you could take ANY good melee and get better results than the legendary weilding ret?
And if you don’t give it to the ret, why would you bring the ret? Just bring the better performing frost mage if you need replenishment, or arcane if you need 3% damage…
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that a class wearing a legendary is topping meters. Legendary weapons are supposed to be over the top.
Feral beating them out is weird.
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Yes, nerf feral.
But that’s not even really something worth discussing. Most agree on this point.
I’m literally trying to stop talking about ret and YOU WON’T LET IT GO. You’ve been arguing in circles about ret in this thread for 500 comments.
Feral also wasn’t even bad enough to warrant being buffed in the first place. It was at least as good as buffed ret.
4 Likes
Agreed.
I can appreciate them wanting to fix the rotation. They’ve been generally trying to improve the QoL of spec rotations that have to do weird things to maximize them.
They just needed to tune it so it wasn’t a DPS gain (because feral was always part of the pack for DPS, the buff part of it pushed them to the top). They skipped the tuning part.
They tried to tune it and somehow forgot that Naturalist affects bear and PvP and also forgot that they could have put that Naturalist nerf on the OoC glyph they added so it wouldn’t affect bear or PvP. Just embarrassing.
What’s funny is that the unholy change actually made it more jank to play in some ways.
Yeah, I was annoyed when they didn’t include that on the glyph.
It was the perfect opportunity to fix the error, but instead they acted like a glyph swap that didn’t matter was enough of a nerf to correct their mistake (it wasn’t).
lol. TAJ is literally close to the dps gain Rets get from Shadowmourne, and one million percent shifts the Ret from meh to chad in a heartbeat. No other class can get anything close to that in a single drop.
I swear dude, I played Ret until late Ulduar, and don’t even think the class needs to be nerfed, but you are single handedly making me want to nerf them from your responses on this thread.
lol. idk why this made me laugh.
this guy is fanatical. he would tell you the earth is flat, if he thought it would help ret on the meters.
He has me rooting for ret nerfs. I hate gaslighters.
ps: That statement is mostly true. they simmed literally hitting random buttons and it was like 90% optimal. And since most ppl don’t play optimal in the first place, yah… Just hit buttons.
That’s why i say the spec isn’t fun. button mashing, and everything feels the same.
So because it’s easier to hit Ret’s Sim numbers you expect them to do worse than other specs?
This is honestly getting a little wild my dude.
Sure does suck to be all the specs Ret leapfrogged.
Combat rogues really should have planned better and performed worse in Ulduar if they wanted to be top tier in ICC.
What is this, post #4 where I point out that buffs don’t need to go from one of the worst specs in the game to one of the best? Are you going to engage with it this time?
Tone it the hell back from being top 3 melee due to arbitrary buffs they received in Ulduar. There are many ways to reduce the magnitude of the buffs and still keep Ret relevant.
This is where Unholy is, SM Ret would likely beat SM Unholy with 0 buffs.
Pretending your numbers are real and reasonable when you use the worst case scenario for Ret but the best case for other classes is a joke.
Only when you have shadowmourne and the rest of your best in slot.
It’s still a big upgrade, but nowhere near as big in phase 3 gear.
It’s a multiplier to our scaling. It’s significantly better the better your gear is.
No, it’s because ret basically doesn’t outperform their sim values by much. The high end parses of ret are not as far above their average like they are in other specs, which is why high warrior parses tend to beat ret even when the sims have them tied.
Eh, ret was above pretty much all of those specs in original wrath, so it kind of sucked to be ret that was leapfrogged by literally everyone else because of modern play.
How far do you have to tone it back, really?
They aren’t top 3 melee without shadowmourne. They always were with it back in original wrath. Why is it now a problem?
What’s an acceptable value of Ret DPS with a legendary that doesn’t leave them struggling to keep a raid slot without it?
Death Knight has higher performing specs.
Why should paladin’s best DPS spec be weaker than or on par with other classes worst options? Ret’s best case scenario without these buffs was a bench warmer in any guild that cared about being optimal, or the guy they brought into split runs to gear the real DPS faster.
sm ret would have zero chance vs unholy, unholy has way too much free cleave/aoe damage to ever be beaten by classes that sim remotely close to them in ST, they aoe everything around them passively and its a key part of their complete dominance, after number 1 single target dmg and cooldowns that allow them to ignore 75% of the raid mechanics in the game