Yeah, not really though. Nothing other much stronger classes/specs can’t provide.
My classic PVP title outranks yours, guaranteed.
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Yeah, in the olden days, Ret had Seal of Blood for a while. But they scrapped it because they wanted to reduce Ret’s on-demand burst damage for pvp. The developers at the time felt Ret could put out too much burst too quickly. So, they gave us SoV instead, to make our damage ramp up. But now it takes forever to get underway.
You’re good people
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Truly wrathbabbies are weak in mind and spirit. You didn’t see the absolute degenerates nonironically playing vanilla ret crying for buffs, and that spec was legitimately more engaging to play than this version of ret.
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What an engaging, insightful post- truly this man’s take has changed my views.
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If you look at the timeline of Retribution throughout the original Wrath launch, they were OP at the beginning from Prepatch onward and got nerfed every patch from there on just about, so that Ret in Ulduar is topping DPS meters but Ret in ICC is middle of the pack, even despite all the crazy set bonuses. Now, since we have a hybrid of the end-game patch but early-game gear, Retribution is absolutely awful.
It’s extremely sad where Retribution is right now, coming off a high from TBC where we actually did pretty well without being OP. Considering how popular the class is, this is clearly unhealthy for the game. Most people remember Ret being top dps in early Wrath and Ulduar, before it was nerfed and while we still had Seal of Blood, as well as much better in PvP. The class was clearly over-nerfed throughout the expansion and the EXTREMELY OP tier set bonus in ICC is the only thing that could bring us up to middle of the pack by fixing Haste scaling.
The major issue is, we have very poor stat scaling with Hit & Expertise because we have both spells and melee abilities, we still miss Exorcisms while melee hit capped, and stats like Haste/Crit as well lack scaling. T10 fixes Haste scaling by allowing Divine Storm to reset on an auto-attack. T9 fixes Crit scaling by allowing Righteous Vengeance DoT ticks to crit themselves. Without these 2 set bonuses, the class just lacks any real proper scaling outside of Strength, which is a linear additive DPS stat with a stat weight that never changes.
A major issue is that all of our abilities hit for similar small amounts, we are constantly casting low-damage dealing spells, none of the spells pack a weighty “punch”, they are all just indistinguishable yellow spell, indistinguishable yellow spell… unless you’re cleaving, and even then we just get owned by real AOE classes like Boomkin. I mean, Ret Paladin was being out-DPS’ed on Anub’arak for awhile there by Prot Paladins! on warcraftlogs.
Why does SoV take so long to ramp? How come CS and DS don’t stack it, but Hammer of the Righteous does for Prot? It takes us a long time to get to our full stacks, they can be dispelled so it’s useless in PvP, imo it’s a very poorly-designed seal that is only the way it is because they needed to make a hybrid of it with Seal of Blood when that got removed
The argument that Ret is justified in being low DPS because they bring utility is a very shallow argument when you look deeply into each utility that Ret provides, and the fact of the matter is that almost every one of our utility is unnecessary and provided by some other class or a number of them that the average guild would have (boomkin/ele/assa/arcane/2 paladins/pain supp/gs/other dsacs) so the average ret paladins is most likely only providing one or two of these buffs, if that, and for many of them, none of them outside of a 4th-5th raid damage cd every 2 mins.
I think for a lot of us, the love we had for this class has died or is dying. Ret discords are drying up, activity is slowing down, people are rerolling, etc. Most of us have played Ret in TBC or vanilla, or Retail as well. As someone who really likes the class it’s just plain sad to see. ATM Ret is seemingly a dead class for the optimal raid set-up, you just don’t want to bring one. Even worse than Boomkin in TBC, since they at least brought some raid DPS increase utility. And we are expecting to be much worse in Ulduar.
I’m not expecting Blizzard to fix class balance issues, and I’m not even sure I trust anyone to do it properly, but if they did I think the most obvious first choice for a buff is Retribution (I know people say “What about Fury” since Fury is currently below Ret and that’s a good question because Fury is screwed as well - but Fury will be in a much better place than Ret in Ulduar and TOGC)
And if you want a good way to tackle the problem of our personal DPS, imo you need to fix stat scaling.
T9/T10 set bonuses fixed us by making Crit and Haste scale better, respectively.
Both of these being implemented as a talent could fix the issue, or at least help greatly.
Another great idea is to give us a unique raid buff, because right now we aren’t needed for any raid DPS buffs in 25mans for 95% of raids.
We tested this on the sim, specifically adding the T10 set bonus only to our T7 bis set, and it was a modest DPS increase of about 5-8%, which honestly doesn’t even begin to fix us, but it’s a start.
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@alayde
Pretty sure canitnerd is just trolling for responses lol. Quite funny.
I think a lot of people here are commenting with the perspective of more casual or “dad-guilds”.
OGB, I presume, is in a guild that’s considered hardcore just like my own. We won’t bring ret paladins into our speed runs because they just don’t do enough damage on the top end. All the utility they bring can be covered by classes that do 1.5x the amount of damage and all the bop/salv/sac utility is covered by just bringing 2 holy pally.
This means that our guild is hard stuck to bring certain classes/specs to the raid. The viability of ret is that it frees up a lot of those slots for flexibility. We bring an arcane mage for example for the 3% damage buff, but in a speed run scenario its not ideal because arcane mage mana is kinda sus; regardless, the tradeoff is still worth it because arcane is nearly doubling ret dps in single target. Now say if ret was doing better than average or even average damage: This mage can now spec to fire because ret brings that 3%!
That being said I truly know that this is a smaller edge case in the player base, but it is also a community that consists of some of their most dedicated players.
As of right now I am still having fun with the class. I find that the utility I bring in our farming split raids is hella satisfying and I know I’m not there for my single target dps… I just look at it as if I’m in an incubation chamber until ICC 
In fact, that’s the only reason I probably get rostered is just to KTLO for the ret JUST IN CASE they might be useful for some gimmick later on.
Just gotta find fun in the game that exists outside of comparing pp sizes on a third-party site.
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Adding this here as requested by Swedge, one of the big movers and shakers in the Paladin Discords:
"“But ret’s a support class!”
Yes, and you bring support classes if their presence actually enhances a raid’s performance in some way.
So what actual support does ret bring in, say, Ulduar? Basically nothing.
- 3% damage still provided by arcane who with better raid dps in classic groups + ilvl buffs will still have short enough fights for arcane to pump, you’re better having one mage stay arcane than bringing a ret
- 3% haste provided by Boomkin who do better AoE and better ST damage
- 3% crit debuff provided by sin who are still relevant even as combat scales in T8 because they are the best armor debuffers in a meta where warriors begin to do respectable dps (and even then you have ele sham at a push)
- enough replenishment already provided by surv hunter and spriest who have far more favourable damage profiles
- blessings already given by prot and holy palas, most classes only really need two
- JoW can be kept up by prot pala, it’s the only consequetial judgement. holy gives JoL intermittently
- attack power reduction can be given by many other more meta specs
- AM/hands provided by holy/prot
This isn’t like late TBC where an ele shaman did very low personal dps, but provided sufficient party dps through totems and lust that it would be favourable to bring one in terms of raid dps and in terms of loot distribution.
If you bring a ret, they will want mostly the same gear as your other, better, physical dps specs. And they’ll do absolutely the least damage in the game while doing so.
Ret is balanced around cleave (2-3 persistent targets e.g. Illidari Council, distinctly different from AoE fights), and a cleaving-oriented tier bonus that they don’t have atm.
Ret will be a good choice for 3% damage buff etc. later when they scale to mid-pack with set bonuses, but for the next 2.5 phases they will be next to useless.
A small dps buff to make them a decent alternative to provide some raid buffs in T8-9 is sorely needed."
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We tested this on the sim, specifically adding the T10 set bonus only to our T7 bis set, and it was a modest DPS increase of about 5-8%, which honestly doesn’t even begin to fix us, but it’s a start.
I just tested it in p2 bis by putting on 2 random t10. 7224.78 +/- 192.26 vs with t10 7953.76 +/- 237.96 ~ 10%(730~dps) bump yeah. This is kinda ignoring the fact that some of the t10 items will have much higher stat values and possibly a higher overall haste rating on all of the gear.
My raid dad suggested baking that 2pt10 bonus into a glyph would be a decent trade-off.
- That way the ret has to sacrifice another damage dealing glyph to gain it
- Blizzard wouldn’t have to ALTER an existing tier set bonus (this means that t10 2p is effectively a free’d up glyph slot)
- This means less work for blizzard and less chance for bugs?
- You could easily add the distinction of “not usable in pvp” for the glyph.
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Was t10 not usable in pvp? Or is the idea this glyph doesn’t work in pvp until t10, but then it goes away because now the set is available?
Yeah I’m just spitballing here. It seems one of the major concerns was that “ret too op in PVP”.
i really dont think the set bonus would be OP in PvP anyway, even if it did make it’s way into PvP. Ret is already like slightly below average in pvp as it is (considering people play PREG instead of Ret)
Also kind of laughable. I think Ret is a bit of a flop in PvP also, when everyone is gravitating towards playing the Preg/Pret hybrid spec with a 1H wep.
Hey man, I’m just trying to assuage the actual pvpers! I’m aware of preg! Had to get my libram afterall.
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It’s hilarious that Shield of the Righteous is a better single-target DPS ability than Divine Storm, and not by a small margin either.
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thats what we’re doing wrong we need to be shield twisting
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This actually made me laugh out loud, kek
If you die to threat and your not a tank, you need to learn how to play your class. There is more to it than putting a big number on the board.
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In a WoWhead interview with Technical Designer Kris Zierhut, he said:
“In regards to Class Balance, Blizzard stated that Patch 3.3.5’s balance was heavily influenced by Arena.” Kris Zierhut went on to explain, “As for Death Knights, they went out the door - they were way too overpowered. Players kept finding new ways to make Death Knights more powerful than we intended, and I don’t think any of the nerfs to Death Knights over Wrath of the Lich King were ever unjustified. And I’m worried they will be too strong again in Wrath Classic, players will probably find new ways to make them too strong. We will be watching class balance closely, and my perspective is we should just let it be, unless a class is pushed out entirely and the community says ‘this class is complete junk, we don’t even bring them anymore’ and then I think we should take a look at it”
well we are there. we are at that point. people don’t bring ret anymore. the community agrees, ret is complete junk.
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