It’s not a problem of community perception. Your problem is just that Retribution is flat out bad in mythic keystones. They don’t bring any utility that matters for keystones other than an interrupt (which almost everyone has) and DPS that is solid/decent but nothing special. You can’t blame “community perception” just because the community can perceive obvious facts
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When people say “utility” for keystones they mean abilities that don’t directly do damage, but add more DPS to the group. Heroism is utility. Brez is utility (dead person being alive = more dps). Any type of AOE CC that helps you do larger pulls is utility (bigger pulls = more dps).
You are right though that anything else just doesn’t count. Ret has utility that matters in PVP, like blessings of sacrifice/protection/freedom and strong word of glory offheals. But none of that stuff matters one bit in keystones
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Ret is fine and Blizzard can’t change player perception, only players can.
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Like I said, on the margins when you don’t have the DPS and mitigation. What also allows you to do bigger pulls is being able to kill them quicker.
The problem at this point is even if hero/lust only came from the bottom 5 specs, all things being equal you’d probably be better off without it because the 2 to 3 burst windows you’d get probably isn’t going to make up for one DPS doing 25-36% less DPS for the whole instance.
And right now, hero lust comes from some of the top specs.
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That would be quite a mathematical feat considering 8 dps specs have heroism 
I get your point, it’s still all about DPS, but certain utilities like heroism give you a bump above just where your personal raw DPS sits. For example you wouldn’t take an enhance shaman over a windwalker monk based on heroism, but you’d surely take them over a Ret Paladin or DK even though their DPS is slightly lower
Is that not perception though, along with the entire point of my post was to call out the fact that it lacks serious PvE utility. In PvP it’s one of the better specs due to it’s burst windows and utility geared around having oh crud buttons to save a single player that’s in trouble. Ret isn’t perfect, and neither is windwalker monks, as windwalkers revolve around spinning crane kick procs. All I want though is just better tuning and utility to make things more even so that specs like ret can see more play. Personally I play all three specs on my paladin, with holy being my strongest, prot being my second and ret thing my third for obvious reasons. Yet I like ret and want to play it more often, yet I can’t and it simply sucks.
The problem I have with this discussion is that the letters “PvP” were mentioned at all.
That’s a major problem all specs have from time to time; if they’re already strong at PvP, the devs seem loath to give needed buffs on the PvE side, despite there being (at least) 3x the amount of play on the PvE side as the PvP side. It’s also why, since probably back in Cata, I’ve been asking to have instanced PvP completely separated from PvE – and by that I mean separate abilities, or have the ones that carry over to both have completely different damage profiles depending on what you queued for. Each type of play has a chance to ruin the other and vice versa.
I’m just sitting at around 225 right now and running mid-level keys, because I chose to main something else for a change this xpac, but when I do get to play keys now I find the burst AoE to be impressive (as Kyrian) and you can have a reasonable shot at sustaining good AoE damage at a level above your ilvl by learning how to stagger CDs, which conduits to take, etc. Single-target burst, however, isn’t fantastic. The best band-aid at the moment would be to remove the cooldown on Hammer during Wings and make that baseline.
They probably won’t do that, though, because of … the impact it would have in PvP, and for how to fix that, skip back to my earlier paragraph.
On the utility side, I’m OK not having a lust, because almost too many specs have it already. Instead, give Ret a baseline AoE CC. Or make Word of Glory an AoE heal like it was in BfA. Basically, Ret needs another “oh ****” button for something other than damage.
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Nah, they usually balance off PvE and don’t care if something bleeds over into PvP.
They already kind of do this, but also want to keep things similar to people can hop between content without their char changing entirely. They do have the ability to tweak stuff in just pve or pvp.
No that’s not how it works. Blizzard has no problem buffing warriors or mages (or any class really) in PVE even though they dominate PVP. It’s easy to do PVE and PVP buffs/nerfs independently, and Blizzard will do so any time they feel like it.
The reason they aren’t going to buff Ret in PVE is because you already have very good tanking and healing specs, and you are supposed to play those. If you want to PVE, then tank or heal, period. They are never going to make Ret good in PVE because you aren’t supposed to DPS in PVE (not necessarily my opinion on it, that’s just Blizzard’s position). Ret is allowed to be good in PVP since you can’t tank there.
I think they could leave the abilities labeled exactly the same, but change the damage profiles and passive effects and accomplish whatever they want, so long as they would actually tune things more than once a quarter. The excuse of “we don’t want to tune things too often” is worse than not tuning it often enough.
Then they need to apply the same logic to WW monks and Balance druids, both of which have been skimming the top levels of PvE content all xpac. The “hybrid tax” doesn’t make sense anymore on any level once they started giving out relevant self-heals to rogues, hunters, letting mages Ice Block and heal to full, etc. If throwing out a heal to another person is going to invoke the “hybrid tax,” then those heals should be frequent and meaningful.
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WW monks are allowed to be good since Mistweaver is garbage and Brewmaster is good but not particularly meta. They need to be able to play something.
Feral Druids (and Enhance Shamans) pay the same hybrid penalty as Ret, but Moonkin/Elemental are exempt since they are ranged and more ranged DPS is always needed.
None of this is remotely fair, just the way Blizzard designs things. They created 14 billion melee specs and only want 1 melee per dungeon group. So they have to make a bunch of them terrible, just how it is
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???
what, that is not true at all