Ret paladin viability

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
776

So then if holy paladins offer pretty much all the same support, why bring the ret over a holy? Or is that ret’s utility just becoming redundant after the already exiting holy paladins, making another mage a better choice?

The problem is that everyone is looking at this from a solo player perspective. Do ret paladins bring great utility to a raid, yes… But so do the other 2 specs. So do other classes. You’re going to have 39 other people there, im sure there’s going to be at least 1 other paladin. That’s the big issue. If your utility is already covered, there’s not really a need for you. An actual healer, or an actual DPS becomes a better use of that raid spot.

777

Yes a warrior or rogue may bring more DPS, but do either of them bring a BoP, lay on hands, aura coverage, and blessing coverage, along with that DPS? A holy paladin may bring much of the same utility and be able to heal much better. But can it bring that utility and bring DPS along with it?

The big one Nightfall yes a offtank warrior can use it but what if theyre tanking? or weaving in the other debuff axe annihilator then the uptime on nightfall drops, you can have a hunter wield nightfall and it may have more uptime then a retribution paladin but then their personal dps falls to nearly nothing. The retribution paladin can wield it with nearly no penalty’s other then its personal dps, and from tests done can almost if not outright beat a hunter’s uptime with the weapon.

-Sinclaire -Torch-

778

If you’re only bringing the highest dps, you could get away with only having 25-30 people in the raid. There is no raid boss in vanilla that has such a close dps check that rets, ele or enhance shaman, moonkins, or any dps spec in the game cannot meet as long as they are contributing.

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779

The thing is that, in an optimized raid, you wouldn’t want a Ret Paladin.

Yes they bring BoP, Lay on Hands, etc. but you should already have 4-5 Holy Paladins which offer more than enough coverage of Paladin utility. No they don’t bring DPS, but a Ret Paladin’s DPS is not a major asset to them on account of it being among the lowest, if not the lowest, in the game.

If you’re that dedicated to bringing Nightfall a Hunter is still better since the Ret Paladin is going to drop their DPS down as well by using it plus Seal of Righteousness to maximize procs. If you want a second, have your off-tank do it.

The reason to bring a Ret Paladin would be if the person is a good player who is a competent raider, and the fact that when you have 40 raid spots to fill out 99.999% of raids wont have the luxury of perfect optimization on top of having great players.

It’s kind of a case of “There’s not a specific reason to actually bring a Ret, but as long as they’re a good player there’s also not a big reason not to bring them”.

(on a completely random note apparently each character on your account here is an entirely new account according to the forum software, so if you get squelched on one you can post on another character on the same account)

780

FYI - my guide was originally written way way back on Feenix and then ported over to Nost and then Elysium so take what I wrote with a grain of salt as it was written during a very different time as each of those servers were very bugged through various iterations where the following bugs were rampant such as:

  • Holy Resistance existed
  • Seal/Judgement of Command were on spell hit/crit table
  • SoC/JoC didn’t work with Sanctity aura
  • SoC/JoC didn’t scale with spell damage
  • Hammer of Wrath didn’t work with Sanctity or spell dmg
  • SoR/JoR did NOT trigger procs

The only workaround was to use Seal of the Crusader + Consecration as we had two beneficial bugs with them.

  • Seal of the Crusader did not suffer a damage penalty
  • So it provided 40% melee haste + the AP bonus
  • Consecration scaled with AP which meant that SotC actively boosted it

Now Archeon/Holystrike/My father’s brother who’s given name is Thomas accused Smiter and I of abusing game mechanics and hacking by using SotC + Cons as our DPS rotation back on Nost, but WTF else were we supposed to use?

SoC/JoC not scaling with anything and being resisted in both PvE AND PvP?!?!?
SoR/JoR not triggering procs at all?!?!?

781

the life drain on Corrupted Ashbringer scales at 100% of spell dmg dude

it’s BiS

782

^^^ what Arrtilarr said ^^^

784

we don’t know if imp SoR talent scaled with spell dmg or not during vanilla

i wrote up a bug report for it - but without additional sources to back it up - we won’t know until classic launches

that being said, this is what I found:

Re: A Guide to Paladin Tanking | 3/13/2006 2:52:11 PM PST

Improved Seal of Righteousness - Tier Two: 5 Talent Points

Increases the damage done by your Seal of Righteousness by 15%. Our basic holy damage generator and our main proactive ability to hold aggro. While an additional 15% may only add 6-7 damage with a fast weapon at level 60, thats an additional 6-7 of holy damage thats helping you generate threat and keep that mobs attention. Also, the 15% is factored in after +spell damage is calculated, meaning that this bonus can potentially be much greater.

@GuybrushGit had originally asked for additional evidence before so this morning I decided to look at the actual Effect listed for the spell in the database and compare it from Vanilla to TBC when it was confirmed without a doubt that it did in fact scale:

Improved Seal of Righteousness: The percentage increase in damage from this talent is now applied after all bonuses from items and effects which increase your spell damage.

Vanilla Talent
Improved Seal of Righteousness
Rank 5
Instant
Increases the damage done by your Seal of Righteousness and Judgement of Righteousness by 15%.
Effect #1 (6) Apply Aura #108: Add % Modifier (8)

TBC Talent
Improved Seal of Righteousness
Rank 5
Instant
Increases the damage done by your Seal of Righteousness and Judgement of Righteousness by 15%.
Effect #1 (6) Apply Aura #108: Add % Modifier
Value: 15

Based on this assumption, I asked a very knowledgeable Dev friend if he could take a look at this and to tell me if I was missing something - his reply - “I dont see any difference on those two pages, apart from the value of the modifier (8 vs 15 as you said).”

The theory that Killerduki and I have regarding the 2.1 patch notes is this:

Improved Seal of Righteousness: The percentage increase in damage from this talent is now applied after all bonuses from items and effects which increase your spell damage.

  • in Vanilla, Imp SoR scaled with spell dmg from gear/items only
  • in TBC, Imp SoR scaled with spell dmg from gear/items but also all other bonuses on top such as an on-use spell damage trinket, Sanctity Aura, One-Handed Specialization and Holy Guidance which further boosted your spell dmg by 35% of your total Intellect when 5/5

Because they specifically state “all bonuses from items and effects” rather than just spell damage from gear.

this is how it looks on the Classic Demo - at least as far as the data mining from Wowhead:

Effect
Apply Aura: Modifies Spell Effectiveness (8)
Value: 14%

788

I am interested to see what viability actually is behind the classes as the knowledge of mechanics has greatly increased. I do wonder if its just tuned to a point where there is no viability beyond what we did see then. Furore and Tigole had a notorious bend against hybrids that was well known back in the day. This stifled them in balance, or at least that was the excuse at that time. I would really like to see hybrids capable of doing more with current knowledge.

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789

At this point I’m taking everything with a grain of salt.
All I know for certain is that I plan on rolling a pally 2nd and I’m going to see how everything settles out then.

790

“If you’re that dedicated to bringing Nightfall a Hunter is still better since the Ret Paladin is going to drop their DPS down as well by using it plus Seal of Righteousness to maximize procs. If you want a second, have your off-tank do it.”

Um since I actually did the testing for each class/spec that can swing Nightfall, allow me to illuminate you…

Average Nightfall debuff uptime:

  1. Melee Hunter ~45%
  2. Ret Paladin using SoR/JoR ~40%
  3. Prot Warrior using Hamstring + PvP gloves + ZG necklace ~30%

Personal DPS output potential:

  1. Ret Paladin
  2. Melee hunter (does 40-50% of the Ret)
  3. Prot Warrior

Yes, a Melee Hunter will have a few extra seconds of debuff uptime over the Ret Paladin but their personal DPS is going to be absolute dog $hit comparatively.

That being said, the BEST overall use of Nightfall is to give all 3 players a Nightfall to swing (Ret + Hunter + Prot Warrior) - that way you can achieve an average debuff uptime of ~80% overall.

Likewise, the Prot Warrior should also weave Annihilator to 3x stacks, then switch to Nightfall, then back to Annihilator to refresh and back to Nightfall…rinse…repeat.

797

Given that I can’t seem to find solid info on it, is there anything that points to what the actual proc chance of Nightfall is in real Vanilla?

Testing is great and all but private servers, as close as they are, still have inaccuracies when it comes to server side things that they had to guess at.

801

every item/weapon’s proc rate is an estimation on private servers but an educated one - it may fluctuate once classic launches but at least our testing provides a good place to start theory crafting as to what each class can achieve for debuff uptime

804

I hope that you will invest your time into playing on legit Classic WoW once it comes out rather than investing your time in a wasteful way on the private realms. They are a bit too corrupt for my liking.

806

ive wanted nothing but that very thing for years now - but also don’t lump all private servers together as if they are one and the same

some are super shady and some are horribly scripted but lightshope is the closest thing to blizzlike that will ever launch

807

I guess we will find out soon since the Classic WoW team has an actual 1.12 server and client running to mirror from.

808

the blizzard devs have their work cut out for them though - the classic demo was riddled with major bugs as well - so take that with a grain of salt too lol

811

Oh I know, but if we’re all honest with our selves then we all know that was just a dog and pony show and not anything remotely representative of the actual finished product.

813

The thing is that unless something really weird is going on with Nightfall, then the math doesn’t really line up with what you’re saying.

If we assume a 10 minute(600 seconds) test:

  • At 3.5 speed, the weapon will be swung 171 times
  • For Paladins, this means 342 total chances to proc Nightfall using SoR
  • For Hunters the global CD is 1.5 and I’ll add 0.25 for human reaction + lag so at 1.75 seconds that’s 171 + 342 = 513 total proc chances.

This means that the Hunter is getting 50% more chances to proc the weapon and on top of that, every time the Paladin gets a chance to proc it they’re using 2 proc chances at the same time.

The hunter’s proc chances are more spread out due to it being from Wing Clip spam, meaning that the Hunter should waste less procs than the Paladin and get more chances to proc it.

In order to make your numbers line up Nightfall would have to be doing something weird with its proc chance which, while not impossible, I would question where the private servers got that it should be doing that.

815

I have not tried playing Nightfall at any point ever but it could be something so simple as our mana just is not endless.

Use of consumables like mana pots would be required, and the correct enchant… although there are those gloves that could make our mana endless, but that does not come into play until early mid AQ.

Nightfall does not even show up until BWL because that’s when the item plans appear in game.

So before then during MC it’s not even part of the game.