Ret PvP Tuning and Redesign Feedback 12.0.7 / 12.1

Classes Paladin
1

Hello,

The following is feedback regarding the current design of Retribution Paladin in Midnight and how myself and many other Ret Paladins would like to see it change.

The problems:
Ret has a very controversial toolkit, filled with many abilities that extend arena games that are typically reserved for healers or tank specializations. While a lot of these abilities like blessing of sacrifice, blessing of sanctuary, and blessing of protection have existed for a long time, their strengths when paired with recently acquired arena lay on hands + empyreal warding (Lay on Hands usable in arena and now ignores dampening and mortal strike effects) have created an environment where Ret Paladin can ignore certain “mechanics” of solo shuffle (rapidly increasing dampening) when compared with regular arena.

These utility spells, paired with their ease of use and the popularity of Retribution Paladin in general due to the architype of the specialization has lead to Blizzard repeatedly nerfing the damage of Ret Paladin over and over down to the point where it is now one of the lowest DPS specializations in the game along with very low impact burst spells (if you’re reading from a PvE standpoint this must be shocking) but retribution has a -18% PvP modifier on all damage, Vengeful Wrath nerfed from 50% to 20%, Divine Purpose nerfed from 10% to 6%, Avenging Wrath nerfed from 20% to 15% (soon in 12.1 to 10%), Empyrean legacy nerfed to 15%, Hammer of Light nerfed by 30% and probably a few more abilities and talents I missed here or there (namely Healing Hands/ Word of Glory).

Because of these “tank tools” nerfs on Ret damage are doing nothing except making the class extremely boring to play and to play against. The Ret Paladin cannot contribute meaningfully in stun kill windows anymore and lacks consistent damage yet the same tools that people complain about remain in play, extending solo shuffles and making games damp and boring.

The Solutions:
As it stands I think Ret Paladin damage in 12.0.7 could use a legitimate 30% buff on both Final Verdict and Hammer of Light. Currently a Final Verdict on a player with 24% versatility buffed by greater judgment (20%) and Holy Flames (5%) only deals 27k damage. That is as much as a single RAGING (Not Crushing) Raging Blow as a fury warrior that is enraged and Ret Paladin does not have a mortal strike to compound the regular damage of its abilities.

What I am suggesting below are talents that I believe would best be addressed to add damage, more specifically ROTATIONAL BURST back into Ret Paladin’s toolkit.

-Trade offs for more burst and damage in the kit.
-Lay on Hands
Nerf either Empyreal Ward(Lay on Hands once again affected by dampening) or overall value. This will significantly reduce Ret’s overall impact in Solo Shuffle which is currently where Ret is complained about the most while not significantly nerfing Lay in 3v3 where Ret Paladin is currently not nearly as good.
Could consider removing Lay on Hands from rated PvP but this would require compensation buffs to Word of Glory/ Eternal Flame. Would require buffs to Hpal.

-Sacrifice of the Just
-Make this a 1.5min cooldown (or 2min but go to 30%). This would allow classes with 1min, 45sec burst goes to have more opportunities for kill windows.
-Final Verdict reduced from 20yd range to 12yd range for SIGNIFICANTLY more damage, more than what would just require the ability to be tuned correctly. Could be done via a talent to give choice.
OR

  • Consecrated Ground/ Hallowed Ground removal.
    -Searing Glare becomes an effect that medallion can remove. (This in turn gives a reason to run Holy Reprieve
  • Divine Shield can no longer be used during Forbearance during PvP. This would allow Rets to look to Holy Reprieve more often and offer more kill windows into mismanaged cooldown usage by the Ret Paladin.

The Rotational Impact:
There are also problems with the current Ret Paladin damage breakdown in PvP that are attributing to a lack of fun for the player.

Herald of the sun:
Dawnlight is making up far too much of the breakdown, with Radiant Glory, Burn to Ash, and Morning Star Dawnlight is often your #1ability in your damage breakdown and that is before factoring in Suns Avatar (which as of Midnight has become a much lower part of the breakdown). This seems to have caused other rotational abilities to have far too little of an impact per button press which removes burst and enjoyment from the specialization.

When compared to other passive hero damage talent spells such as slayer warrior or Fatebound rogues Dawnlight is taking up a much higher % of damage in PvP relative to the actual spells that are pressed in the rotation.

Templar
-Divine Exaction was too strong early xpac and then Ret was blanket nerfed (15%) + Vengeful Wrath nerfed because of this ability. Then the ability was nerfed and the blanket nerf was never undone leading to the entire Templar tree becoming uncompetitive in PvP. (No situations where Templar would be taken instead of Herald).
-Divine Hammer is not something that is as effective in PvP as it is in PvE due to the nature of moving in PvP.
-Gameplay loop of pressing Hammer of Light to deal big damage and then stacking lights deliverance from empyrean hammers to proc free Hammer of Lights should feel good but tuning of Hammer of Light makes it extremely ineffective in PvP killing the whole point of the gameplay loop.

Final Thoughts:
12.0.7

  • Flat buff FV 30% and call it a day for now. FV is currently dealing 27,000 on a 24% vers target, buffing it 30% would net (current value of holyflames+greater judge) x 1.3 = 35,100 that is still less than an unmodified Fury Warrior rampage (45k), Arms Warrior overpower (39k), Dispatch w/ Gravedigger passive (45k), Raptor Strike/Swipe w/ Strike as one (45k)
  • Buff Hammer of Light 30%

It currently deals less than a Final Verdict when talenting into Seal of the Templar in PvP. Essentially killing the whole point of the spell outside of providing undisputed ruling procs now that divine exaction is nerfed into uselessness.

12.1

  • Address the utility bloat by targeting spells previously mentioned that are particularly powerful in solo shuffle.
  • Add meaning burst damage back to the rotation. (For those of you unaware despite a 15% buff on final verdict in 12.1 the overall % of a players HP that the ability deals is going down in an all modifiers max damage comparison. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm5dA5eRp24&t=409s
5 Likes
Retribution Needs a Real Pass on Defensive/Utility Overload
2

Thanks! I think most rets (that have played since before we had so much utility) would agree that the spec is not as satisfying to play as it used to. The “kite other melee with jurisdiction” felt op when we first got it, but now I think it’s pretty obvious it’s holding the per-hit damage of FV back quite a bit. I think jurisdiction has to go

I don’t get why they’re buffing crusading strikes next patch, especially by a number as large as 42% attack speed. If ret needed a pve numerical buff why not just aura buff us? Maybe just maybe it’s an accident and it was supposed to only be 5% less penalty (15% reduced auto attack rate), but I logged on the ptr and it was increased 15%.

Lastly, the utility we have is too frequently available for how strong it is in PvP. Going into every shuffle round with bubble bop and lay is a lot more problematic in shuffle than in 3s. Maybe they can make lay unaffected by ms, but affected by dampening, making rets have one less “get out of jail free card” in deep damp.

Overall I’d say it’s obvious ret utility puts it beyond other specs, so we pay the price with lower damage and burst. I like doing damage, not being a cheerleader for whatever dps partner I have lol. Remove jurisdiction, nerf sac cd to 1:45, make lay affected by damp, make our wall unusable while stunned. In return give us wayyy more damage

2 Likes
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I don’t think this is just a Ret issue. It seems like because we have this utility that is apparently god tier. It seems that all specializations suffer from DPS, Tanking and Healing. It’s no surprise we are seeing a trend with getting buffs because we got nerfed/pruned so horribly.

Every class has utility but paladins became the poster child. I’d even say we got lumped up with augmentation but as a support class. Which I mean would actually be really cool if we could perform or behave that way. lightsmith comes to mind but it is nothing in terms of throughput.

A lot of scenarios have happened were we couldn’t even use those utilities because we have to focus everything into our damage/healing/tanking to even compete at the low bar.

I actually would go as far to say reworking paladins into an actual support class would be cool AF With boosting every other class similar to evokers at least with Ret and holy.

You don’t nerf Paladins Healing, Damage and Tanking because of utility. Fix the utility man.

4

So you’re saying that the Jurisdiction talent should be nerfed?

Going back to the DF rework, this “capacity” was part of a tradeoff justifying not having Ret have to much mobility or gap closing capacity.

This was a design choice for the entire game.

Are you suggesting this should be changed just in PVP or for the entire game?

PVP already have issues with talent/abilities not doing what they say they do numerically in PVP, having a whole talent partly nullified in what is essentially a QoL improvement seems like digging further into an already misleading and opaque system of “rebalancing” for PVP.

I know Ret being partly mid-range is a subject of contention and that some people often argue it should be fully melee which is a legitimate position.

I just don’t know how you do that without re-opening that mobility box as well.

Queue people crying over “Wings of Liberty”

And spite all the players actually playing the current roles because they like those?
Not happening.

You’d have better odds of asking for a 4th spec oriented toward support.

5

Yeah these changes are going to be mostly pvp oriented. In pvp ret should do more damage, but, seeing as it is already very very strong without good damage, we (pvp rets) think nerfing utility/op aspects of the kit would be a good tradeoff.

If you just buffed our damage to be like dk, then every single comp would run ret.

(again pvp in mind, I think the utility is far less gamebreaking in pve)

1 Like
6

PvP only change. Could even come in the form of a PvP talent seeing as they pruned SO many of them over the last two expansions and the remaining ones are mostly useless. Ex. Final Verdict loses 8yds of range but now deals 50% more damage or something. Or it just functions with a lower range in PvP and Blizz gets more strict with accurate PvP tooltips.

1 Like
7

IIRC…

I remember cataloging how many PVP talents each spec had in TWW and ending up with Ret being literally the only spec with 7(?) PVP talents and shaman specs with 8-9(?) and then every other spec in the game had at least 10 or more (something like that).

And then they added 1(?) to Ret during TWW if memory serves me right.

Still like 2-3 talents behind which is something in my book.

8

DON’T TOUCH MY BOATS!!!

/body is incoherent

9

If that meant giving the other specs more teeth but less support I’d be fine with that.

tired of having blessing from literally 20 years ago that haven’t changed.

Ironically I use ultimate sacrifice and spellwarding and those feel potent AF

10

That wouldn’t.

Each classes have overlapping spells across specs that act as it’s utility.

DK’s have death grip, AMZ, AMS and various slows and locking abilities.
Warriors have shouts and crowd control and Rallying Cry, can remove shields and bubble.

That paladin utility is oriented toward supporting other players is just being coherent with the Paladin archetype.

The only thing a support spec would do is extend that utility beyond a single other player.

So you’d probably have temporary blessings affecting 5 players at once.

I’m not saying that you’d get 5 BoP/Spellwarding (that’d be silly) but that the gameplay would most likely revolve around the idea of “blessing” your party on a larger scale.
There’s multiple ways to go about it.

Similar to Augvoker but with a Paladin veneer.

You could have slight adjustment to the basic utility, I could imagine Blessing of Sacrifice fulfilling a role similar to Zephyr.

But I digress, I don’t want to derail from Lvladen topic.

11

Yeah one thing in mind is the PvP talents like freedom that will remove all roots from everyone but it still only keeps freedom on one player.

Than protection gave 10%-30% DR to all party members while making the target immune

I kind of wish spellwarding was put into the holy toolkit. It’s all I run in PvP and it’s awesome could even throw on a 10%-30% spell damage resistance to it and have both BoP and spellwarding available but keep it on the same CD

Also removing aura mastery from the global table

I completely understand divine shield but aura should not be.

someone mentioned just lowering all the CD times which could be argued as well. Some are way too long.

Paladin counter play is far behind other classes that have such low CDs.

12

If the devs could read they’d be very upset!

Great feedback tho