IDK what happened to my other post, but you are right - even if you added both T9 and T10 set bonuses and fixed haste/crit scaling, it’s probably still not even enough to fix us, though it’s a start. We’re 20% below Feral Druid, and Feral is already on the very low end excluding Fury. Ret is officially a dead class if nothing changes and nobody is going to bring them to important Ulduar runs. It will stay dead at least until T9 when things start picking up again.
There’s a number of large changes that happened throughout Wrath:
–Divine Storm being changed from Holy to Physical
–Crusader Strike being changed from 110%/6sec to 75%/4sec
–Seal of Blood being removed halfway through Wrath and being shoe-horned into Seal of Vengeance at the last minute, causing our single-target seal to be slow-ramping and making all of our judge and auto damage dependent on 5 stacks of a magic dispellable debuff
–Righteous Vengeance being changed from 40% crit damage on specific abilities like Exorcism to 40% and then 30% ignite-style DoT damage that we see today
and many more. Any of these changes can be re-evaluated, reverted or tweaked to benefit Ret.
The stat scaling is our major issue, as our stat weights are much lower for most stats than other classes. Haste, Arpen, and Crit in particular are much worse for us than other classes. Righteous Vengeance doesn’t do enough to provide good Crit scaling.
All we have is Strength, and Strength is an additive DPS stat, not multiplicative. Multiplicative stats like Hit or Expertise are less valuable too, because we are a spell-melee hybrid, so it doesn’t apply to all of our damage. And even when we are hit capped, we still miss Exorcisms and get partial resists constantly for our spells. We are just a very poorly designed hybrid class all-around.
Yes Fury is in a similar position, but Fury will be much better off in Ulduar, where we will continue to get worse.
People making the arguments that “you should have known Ret was going to be bad and therefore shouldn’t have played it” well everyone knew Ret wasn’t going to be great but this? This is exceptionally bad, most people didn’t expect it to be this bad. Should we just all reroll then? Are we okay with saying “let’s just have Retribution not exist as a class in the meta”? Yes we can all just respec to Prot/Holy and be a slave to the meta… but is that what we really want? I thought we valued more classes being viable?
Most of us have played Ret since Vanilla/TBC, and we have been second-class citizens the entire time, with a class that is written in spaghetti code and underperforms consistently, always being a support class with lackluster DPS and poor gearing avenues, only getting a bit of brief sunshine with seal twisting in TBC – and now the class we love is dying in front of us. Ret discord is miserable now, everyone just laments all the time about how little damage we do and how much we are holding our raids back and what things could be like if we were actually good. And this isn’t even to get started on PvP, where I think we also need some serious help to be viable.
It also just feels like Rets get the bad end of the stick compared to everyone else. Our Libram of Divine Judgement was manually disabled at level 80 by Blizzard for some reason, because it was better than our garbage green quest libram from borean tundra in cleave scenarios and Blizzard thought it was too strong for us to get 200AP sometimes when we judge, yet rogues get to use Felstriker and spellcaster daggers and vanilla energy-generation set bonuses to do the highest AOE dps in the game? Like why would they do that? It feels spiteful and targeted.
People saying “It’s okay that you’re only doing 75% of the DPS of bottom barrel DPS dealers because you bring utility” well you’re just wrong. For most guilds, the ret provides zero utility, or very minor utility. 3% damage? provided by mage. 3% crit? rogue or ele. 3% haste? boomkin. DSAC? already have 2, and gs, and pain supp… aura mastery? holy paladin has it. blessings? we already have 2-3. so yes, a ret paladin’s damage is important, since it’s really all they bring in most 25man scenarios.
I mean I seriously wish I could post pictures of the Statistics chart on Warcraftlogs to show some of you guys really how bad it is. We only out-DPS prot paladins by about 100 dps on Anub’arak, our best fight, a 3-target cleave. We’re talking literal trash here, barely above the tanks most of the time. It’s not just that we are not topping DPS, we are not even viable. Ret community agrees that Ret is basically a dead class, and that you’re kind of griefing your raid by playing it. You are actively harming the raid by playing Ret.
Blizzard probably won’t change anything, and I don’t expect them to. But I’ve also lost the will to play Ret. Blizzard said they would look into any classes that are junk, well if this isn’t junk then idk what is…