This should just be stickied
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As long as a guild needs to gear people to progress to future content, ret paladins will be needed to equip paladin required gear.
If there is no other paladin online or at 60 then they’d be stuck with you, and raids can be completed without having 40 people total.
Extra paladin buffs will help with other dps going more out with threat reduction and so on.
Using the word “viable” tends to have a much more severe consequence to the answer of no. Then you have people answering no. What can you trust?
Ret paladins are perfectly viable and can even be competitive and optimal. Why then are people saying they aren’t? They are too lazy or ignorant to define the specific scenarios that make their statements true. When you require clarity it’s best to receive actual facts. To get factual information you have to expect and require details that qualify as true. Hence the debate.
Clerics are my jam in DnD. I wish WoW priests were more like them.
I think that these are definitely some of the problems alongside the fact, that a vast majority of players either have zero experience testing the class and specialization themselves, have been stuck in an echo-chamber where stigma is recited more readily than fact and also the fact that not many players have actually attempted to push them as far as they can possibly go due to the afore-mentioned factors…
The reality is alot of peoples opinions now days have been shaped through these said echo-chambers in conjunction with private server experience. We know for a fact that paladins are one of the most buggy classes on private servers and no specialization more-so then the retribution tree. So rather then creating one more echo-chamber of speculation and schematics how about we let the game speak for itself…
We know Retribution Paladins are viable, it isnt a point of debate its fact. they have the ability to push out the damage required to meet all dps thresholds in the entire game and that therefore by literal definition instantly confers the status of viable:
Viable
vʌɪəb(ə)l
adjective
- capable of working successfully; feasible.
We know that they bring the utility of a holy paladin being freedoms, bops, lay on hands, off-heals, judgements, blessings, auras and most importantly dispells (a consistently overlooked factor is that you cant dispell while you are healing, you can dispell while you are doing a dps rotation; this factor alone ensures a ret paladin will undisputedly be able to output a FAR higher rate of dispells then any other paladin in the raid)
And we know that ret paladins in specific scenarios can perform competitively and even optimally. What we dont know is how well, this is due to a lack of players driven to push the mechanics to its furthest extent in a purely authentic and correctly scripted environment unachievable on any private server.
So what do we have? a class which can undeniably perform Viably, a class which can occasionally perform competitively and even optimally and a scenario where the extent of its ability and performance is not even known…
the only conceivable outcome? Wait until classic, stop spreading biased mis-information, and accept the fact there will be Retribution Paladins, we will be PvPing, we will be PvEing…
WE ARE COMING.
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Except again, people who make these threads are more wondering about if a Ret Paladin is worth the slot or if they can be a Ret Paladin and be accepted in raids.
If you read the OP then even though the title mentions viable, the OP is asking about “why not just bring another class that ultimately does the job better?”.
You getting caught up on the word viable is completely missing the point of what people are asking(or being willfully ignorant of it).
Also if you want to be such a stickler for semantics then keep in mind when you say that Ret Paladins can be optimal that if something else is even 0.1% better than the Ret Paladin is, by definition, not optimal =P
I think you need an english lesson you see the title of the topic is
Ret paladin viability
and in english viable means:
Viable
vʌɪəb(ə)l
adjective
- capable of working successfully; feasible.
so no matter how many circles you do in your head you are fundamentally and irretrievably wrong in every single sense of the word.
Rets can do the job. The only difference is going to be those that know they are viable and those that are so biased against them (and other hybrids) for some reason that they refuse to bring them. Those biased people are the minority. It is rare that you will be denied a raid spot simply because you are x spec/build.
I’m not calling into question a Ret Paladin’s ability to meet DPS thresholds. I’ve argued and provided the math showing that any class in the game can meet any DPS threshold in raids in other threads.
I’m saying that the real question people are after is “Why bring a Ret when something else is better?” and “How many people will be biased against me if I roll a Ret Paladin?” depending on the thread.
In this thread’s case, the OP is asking the first one.
You can say the number of people biased against them is in the minority and that it’s rare you’ll be denied a spot but that’s a subjective answer. In Vanilla, it appeared to vary from server to server.
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If you’re so sure abour retribution paladins being viable, please make a viable talent set up for a dps paladin and share it because honestly i can’t figure out how that makes any sense (wowhead has a talent calculator for classic but i can’t link it)
You can say that for pretty much any class. Some people hated mages and didn’t want to invite them or didn’t want the competition. Some people hated pet classes and refused to bring them to stop them from random pulling. There were even people who flat out refused to have anyone but a holy priest healing their group.
No matter what class you roll, there’s bound to be someone who’s going to overlook you based on what class you play. Rets will still manage to find groups.
classic.wowhead. com/talent-calc/paladin/AvAQAcwE_w3DcA
Would be a typical ret spec.
Sure, but it would be silly to act like hybrids who weren’t healing didn’t get more hate on average due to the fact that their damage output was lower.
I’d say some Rets will find groups but I don’t know as many guilds, even casual ones, will want to bring more than a handful of hybrid DPS.
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DPS hybrids tend to be rarer than pures anyways so that’s not necessarily a big issue. Trim that down by those who don’t raid and that’s even less. The guilds I knew liked having hybrids because they were better in times where things went wrong so they could off tank or off heal in emergencies but still dps when things were fine.
I had something similar to that in mind. They way i understand yours, you would be using judgement with seal of the crusader and then autoattacking with seal of command, right?
This question would forever end if Kings went back to the top of ret, there would simply be no discussion left. Someone would be ret, in every_single_raid. Maybe not more than one, but by god that one would be there, like the token feral.
Yes, you judge SotC for the debuff and use SoC for the active seal.
We would almost certainly be talking about “Ret should only be brought as a healer using 20/0/31 for Kings” instead.
Cause the thing about Paladins in Vanilla is that you really only needed 20 points in Holy to be able to heal 95% as effectively as any full healing spec Paladin with the right gear.
Even in 1.12 you should be able to heal as 20/0/31 or 21/0/30 depending on how you feel about Repentance vs Divine Favour.
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The question would at least stop being about if the spec should be brought, but rather what it should be doing.
In actual vanilla most if not all paladins were either ret or prot, as raiders. Up until 1.9 holy was the absolute joke spec. No one went further than ~14-17 points or so if memory serves.
That’s vanilla to me. This whole lolret, and ret can’t raid junk came from tbc and beyond.
What did ret paladin’s do in raids? the same thing every other paladin did. Their job, which is whatever the heck the raid leader decided was needed.
The whole lolret comes from Vanilla, specifically in reference to Ret Paladins that wanted to be full time DPS.
Ret Paladins in particular have a lot of people who insist they want to be a melee fighter.
The same people insisting that Ret can be competitive in raids are the people who are thinking of it as a DPS spec, not as a support that does whatever needs doing.
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We probably need some clarification on this from someone like Theloras. I was confused by this as well. But I test ran some numbers and it seems that you want to keep JotC up, but use SoR instead of SoC. This is based on the following constants from Theloras’s ret guide which can be googled.
-SoR spell power coefficient for 2H: 12.5%
-SoR rank 8 damage: 20-71 (avg 45)
-SoC 70% base weapon damage at constant 7procs-per-min
-using a random craftable 2H sword, “arcanite champion”
-spell power at a modest 100
The numbers would probably be even more in favor of SoR if each SoR proc creates an additional chance to proc other equipped chance-on-hit effects, but I don’t think we’ll know that for sure until someone can actually test the numbers on a true blizz server.
A couple of other things:
I have not run the numbers to see how slower weapons improve SoC damage, but if I’m reading Theloras’s guide correctly, that is the claim. Also not sure how all of the server bugs affected private server numbers and how far off they are from reality.
Lastly, I’m not claiming that this means Pallies can DPS as well as pures, just trying to clarify what the optimal seals and judgments are for those who wanna raid ret.