Ret suggestions for 9.0

Classes Paladin
1

Some suggestions will be minor, some major, others experimental, etc. Here goes.

(1) Scrap tier 15. It’s boring and the only thing worth salvaging is the Execution Sentence animation.

(2) Tier 30 is another filler tier. Scrap it and bake Blade of Wrath into the baseline BoJ proc. Hammer of Wrath should be on a more impactful tier where it can do more damage, or generate more holy power, or something. It’s so neutered right now.

(3) Tier 45 is pretty good. Only suggestion I would make is Fist of Justice reduces HoJ’s cooldown by a flat 30 sec. Maybe also make Repentance instant with a revised cooldown and duration (for Ret only obviously).

(4) Tier 60: replace Divine Judgment (dead talent) with Empyrean Power, which should have a spell alert. Give Consecration a secondary effect to make it more appealing. Make Wake of Ashes baseline and have it stun aberrations in addition to demons and undead (flavor). Create a new talent to round out the tier.

(5) Tier 75: replace Eye for an Eye with Divine Protection (more versatile) or, better yet, Ardent Defender. Cavalier should reduce the cooldown of Divine Steed by 5 sec in addition to its current effect (minor buff).

(6) Tier 90: JV has been a dead talent all expansion. It even loses to Selfless Healer as a leveling talent. Reduced holy power cost? Free after a killing blow? Heals you even if the damage is absorbed? Or, replace it with something new. Next we have Word of Glory which is mandatory for mythic+ and useless in PvP (40% reduction). I don’t like talents like this, although I admit it is fun in mythic+.

(7) I think tier 100 is very well designed. Divine Purpose shouldn’t deal such reduced damage in PvP though. No one takes it anymore.

(8) PvP talents: I haven’t used Cleansing Light, Divine Punisher, or Luminescence once this expansion. Jurisdiction isn’t terrible, but would benefit from being combined with another talent. Vengeance Aura should be an aura: remove the greater blessings limitation.

(9) Unbound Freedom is awesome and Ret has been so much more fun ever since it was added. This goes to show how far a single change can take a class.

(10) Moving onto baseline changes. Crusader Strike, our filler attack, doesn’t need two charges. Give this to Blade of Justice (it will feel great with the proc. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already).

(11) Crusader Strike is basically an auto-attack that generates holy power and it always feels bad when you reach that point in the rotation where you have to use it. Suggestions?

(12) Greater blessings are boring. Make them raid buffs: Might is Battle Shout and Kings is Fort. Or, get rid of Might and have Kings be a unique buff that increases all stats by X%. Raid buffs are fun because they’re impactful, it’s fun to watch your raid light up, and you can cast them on people passing by out in the world. Holy and Prot can get these greater blessings as well in the interest of making classes feel more cohesive again.

(13) Give Ret back Blessing of Sacrifice. At character select back in the days of yore I chose paladin, not Retribution.

(14) Delete Rebuke from the class. A few other specs in the game could stand to lose their interrupt as well. Prot will be fine without it with their Avenger’s Shield spam.

(15) Replace Cleanse Toxins with Cleanse (dispels magic). Druids and shamans should not have magic dispel.

(16) Replace Blessing of Sanctuary with a PvP talent that reduces Blessing of Protection’s cooldown to 30 sec, but removes its entire duration. It’s a physical debuff dispel, and yes, it can still be cast on yourself while under the effect of a physical CC.

(17) I’m not sure if this is possible since Holy Light is a very different spell than it used to be, but I miss having this big, inexpensive heal I could cast if no one was attacking me. Ret only having Flash of Light, and therefore no choice in what to cast, feels very one-dimensional. I think the word I’m looking for is “pruned.”

(18) Bring back Turn Evil. Replaced by Repentance or Blinding Light if you choose to talent into one of these. Blinding Light lasts 12 sec against demons, undead, and aberrations.

(19) Exorcism must return as well, but I’m not sure how to go about it. Obviously it should deal increased damage to demons, undead, and aberrations (and we’re not balanced around this - it’s just free damage and paladins do a little better in certain situations. WoW is an RPG, deal with it).

(20) Bring back Divine Intervention. It was hilarious and occasionally useful.

(21) Add a minor glyph that replaces Divine Steed’s graphic with that of Speed of Light (from MoP and WoD). Not everyone likes the horse and SoL is a cool graphic in its own right.

(22) I should probably get ahead of this before someone brings it up: seals and auras. I really enjoyed Empowered Seals in WoD, but that wasn’t for everyone and there have been more bad seal system designs than good ones. As for auras, they’re cool in theory but boring in practice. I’d rather our utility come from more active sources. How about we just give paladins baseline Crusader Aura so our friends can keep up with us.

4 Likes
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I agree with nearly everything on this list, but I would like to add a few things/make a few changes:

Remove Divine Steed altogether, and replace it with Long Arm if the Law, or Pursuit of Justice.

Completely remove Blade of Justice in favor of Exorcism.

Make Hammer of Wrath baseline, and deal significantly more damage, so it may properly fill the role of an execute.

Revert every animation, especially Judgment and Divine Storm, to those of WoD or earlier. Our animations were absolutely better in the past, especially the two I just mentioned. Those two are absolutely hideous right now, and I hate using them.

9 Likes
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God threads like these where people think they are making ret suggestions then go to speak about game design things that should apply to all classes… they would never do that to be honest

Lol no. Ret weakness is caster, we have no ms effects. Removing kick means we can’t kill any healer and we’re back at caster literally casting everything in our face without punishing them ever. That’s just plain dumb and stupid if we don’t get any tool to counter casters.

So a blessing of sanctuary because it removes physical stuns. But it removes bleeds and physical snares? So sanc but worse? Yeah no, keep sanc and change bop to 2min or 2.5min cd, 4sec duration.

What you are trying to say is you want wog back to its original iteration bit the 4.2 version, 3 holy power cast a heal on the target, 20sec cd. So you have the choice between tv, ds, es, inq and wog? Yes.
Also replace wog in talent tree with the 4.3 selfless healer reduce the cooldown to 10sec and have 50% increased healing on ally. We could even push it with last word talent making it having 60% crit chance on target below 35% max health.

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I miss DI, exorcism and giving people kings or might. Ive never liked building holy power. I wish they would give us some spells back. Blade of justice is boring.

3 Likes
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Scrap the entire spec and start over from scratch. It’s never been well designed. I’ve played it for 10 years out of stubbornness and it’s never not felt like a load of crap.

Holy Power is absolute garbage. Get rid of it. Combo Points without Energy makes for a dull, mindless resource. You just smash abilities as they come off cooldown then dump on your ST or AoE finisher.

It’s a stupid spec, and thanks to Legion, it’s loaded with stupid animations now as well.

5 Likes
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a better rotation honestly i like the current version of ret but it just feels slow even with 20% haste i can do all my rotation and still feel like im just standing there waiting for my abilities to come off cd.

the only issue i see for ret is rotation.

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Stop, I can only get so erect.

I mean let’s be honest, it’s very unlikely anyone who can make changes will read this. But yes, I would like class to determine whether or not you have an interrupt or dispel rather than role. This is how the game worked from Vanilla through Wrath, it was changed in the worst expansion this game has ever had, I’ve complained about it on the forums for every expansion since because I guess I enjoy complaining, and just recently, I assume thanks to the release of Classic (which no, I don’t play), the devs are finally starting to realize that they strayed too far from class design with all their overemphasis on spec and role.

There was a dev interview regarding this a while back on YouTube. It was with Ion Hazzikostas if you want to look around for it.

Worked just fine in WotLK. If you truly believe there’s no way to design a DPS to be effective in PvP without an interrupt, then I think you’re just unimaginative.

It would remove Blind or Karma and be available again 30 sec later to dispel something else. It has a 15 sec shorter CD than Sanctuary. It can be cast on yourself while in a Kidney. I’m amazed you don’t see the potential, particularly if we got magic dispel back. That should be our defense against casters, btw: dispelling all their hard work.

If you want to play a more typical melee DPS, there are sooo many options out there. Is it really such a great sin to want classes to be a little different from each other? Blizzard used to have this philosophy called concentrated coolness, but that was thrown out the window a long time ago. And then sliced into tiny pieces. And burned. And staked, locked in a coffin, and dropped in the Mariana trench so that it may never rise again.

No, I’m talking about Holy Light as it was Vanilla through WotLK. Not that I have anything against WoG from Cata, or the version from MoP / WoD - they were all pretty cool.

As for your seal system idea, I’m all for trying out fresh ideas like that. I wish the devs would try truly experimental changes during the alpha of an expansion. And if they don’t work out, so what? Scrap it all and just refine the combat system we already have.

I don’t know, there are probably too many specs in this game and too few devs.

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Mobility:
Scrap Divine Steed entirely and bring back Long Arm of the Law. If Long Arm is too much to ask, then make Blessing of Freedom also increase your movement speed by around 70%, increase its cooldown by 5 seconds, and give it a second charge. Then introduce a glyph for Freedom that changes its visual to Divine Steed for those who like it, and another glyph that changes its visual to Speed of Light.

Bring back the WoD Final Verdict animation.

Bring back Auras. We’re Paladins, we use Auras. It’s a class staple. Thematics are important.

Bring back the WoD Final Verdict animation.

Make Hammer of Wrath baseline.

Bring back the WoD Final Verdict animation.

3 Likes
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Druids still have hibernate, turn evil should come back.

As it has been said many times, long arm/emancipate playstyle was great. Just reduce the dmg bonus to TV to 15% instead of 25 and shorten judgment cd to how it used to be. Reduce TV damage and buff everything else to balance things out with our increased uptime IF we get long arm/emancipate back(ret pvp thing).

Hammer of wrath should be baseline, sacrifice would be nice for all specs again. (not sure if it ever was available for prot but it was for ret)

You can’t do this unless you redesign everything, and I mean everything like when Cata came out, can’t do it w/o breaking prot and ret in the process.

This might be too much to ask but maybe let people chose their animations via glyphs? All those files exist already, personally I found WoD’s TV really awkward and while Cata’s TV was just your mongo hit, the slash animation on the target and the sound was badass.

^ Especially in the era of chaos bolt and greater pyro.

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I will admit I do miss the Seal of Blood that blood elves got. It was a good way of breaking cc you use it and when you do dmg you take dmg. I used it to break fear and what not as your constantly doing dmg as ret. and it would break any cc ability in pvp and most in pve. yes it was hard on healers but if played right a paladin could toss it on themselves keep from being cc’ed and then replace it. That old flavor of uniqueness that certain races of specs got was amazing until blizz decided to make the game blander than vanilla ice cream.

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What i want to see is Paladins get a leap or charge. And I know asking for a charge wouldnt work. But every paladin npc that attacks has a leap look at WOTLK Tirion Fordring leaps to him hitting him with the ash bringer. almost every paladin npc has a leap but we just cant seem to figure it out i think is a tragedy that needs to be fixed

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It’s true it “worked” because in vanilla and tbc we would just randomly oneshot them with gimmicky procs like seal of command and reckoning and defensive cooldown were almost inexisting. Same thing during wotlk. Since we didnt have any ms type effect or interrupt we had way higher damage to counter the fact we didnt have any tools. But in current days a melee without ms would be miserable. Mythic+ is a thing and there are a lot of important casts to deal with to not wipe. In pvp, it’s essentially the same thing, a firemage will spam greater pyroblast and kill you in 3 cast and you couldn’t have done anything against it at all. Same goes for destro lock with fears and chaos bolt. You will fight and have no way to even win.

Now a thing I would agree on if we didnt have any interrupts would be a ms for magic damage, so reducing magical damage done by the player. Or some other tools to actually punish those casters without having an interrupt. Reflecting magical damage?(old Eye for an eye, but better designed)

I hope you understand what you are asking for. You’re asking for a physical trinket on 30sec cd. Reverse magic is 1min cd. Our sac that dispelled during legion or mop was 2min cd. So to be fair it needs to be a 1-1.5min cd not really needed and such effects are kinda cancerous in the game. See reverse magic, desecrated ground, icebound fortitude.

Blizzard will not make another tremendous rework so soon. For now their design is about ret being more melee focused and less ranged than we’ve been. I’m not against that if we have proper tools like better gap closer options. Every other pure melee doesnt have the problem of mobility that ret has, because they were already a melee spec so their mobility were designed accordingly like rogue having shadowstep and immunity to movement imparing effects on sprint, auto slow poison, dk having grip, 70% undispellable snare and their sprint removing slow and roots on use and their passive cannot be slowed below 70% and when used below 100% and granting a mini sprint, enhance having an on use 30% movement speed bonus and can not be reduced to 100%, charge, etc, etc. While with rets it’s like they were scared to give them mobility while having ranged attacks so we could smack everyone from range and never be peeled.

Now that we lost all our ranged attacks and being more designed around being a melee we could bring back final verdict a 12 yards tv and gives a bonus damage and 100% more range to divine storm to still be melee, but a melee having 12yards ranged attacks to counter our low mobility. And of course scrap divine steed to give a better gap closer. They could also increase the duration of law and order to 6sec instead of 3.

Well that i’m not against but current version of both spell have 1-2k difference in healing, longer cast and cost less mana. I’m fine with only keeping flash of light which makes more sense as a hybrid to have a quicker heal to cast.

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Most of these spells still exist from Shackle, to Banish, to Control Undead. I wonder why shamans never got an ability to take control of elementals. But yea, I want paladins to have a broad anti-evil kit. I want my RPG elements yo.

You’re definitely right: you can’t take away Rebuke without reverting a lot of changes made in Cataclysm, an expansion released almost nine years ago. I think it would be worth it, though, because this game is more fun when class rather than role determines your kit. Yea, Ret needs to deal good damage to be viable, but why isn’t it allowed to have Blessing of Sacrifice?

Did you know that during the Legion alpha, the devs made it so only Prot had Hand of Reckoning, and Holy was the only paladin spec with any sort of dispel? I guess they realized this was too extreme because it didn’t go live that way, but it shows where their heads were at.

I think specialization unique abilities should be few and far between. Holy should continue to have Beacon, obviously, and a talent row that modifies it. Avenger’s Shield for Prot, Divine Storm for Ret - stuff like that. But was it truly impossible, over the course of several expansions, to make the seal system part of an engaging combat system? Why add Blade of Justice when the whole class could have Exorcism? Why is HoW a Ret talent instead of a baseline ability for the whole class? Should one spec really have a resource system that the other two don’t share?

That’s how I view class design. I hope it makes other paladins think a little, even if ultimately they don’t agree.

Mythic+ is all encounter design. When designing a new batch of dungeons for 9.0, the devs could easily make interrupt mechanics less common than they were in BfA, and scary magic debuffs more common.

As for PvP, good luck to that mage trying to get Poly to stick on my healer.

So now my suggestion isn’t too weak, it’s too powerful? It would be fine for Ret to have this because we would be a DPS without an interrupt. You’re trying to have it both ways where Ret can’t possibly be effective without an interrupt, but if I suggest alternative utility to counteract that weakness, then suddenly Ret is OP.

What I want is for Ret to be worse than other melee DPS at actively disrupting, but very good at dispelling. Yes, it is somewhat reactive, but that’s intentional. There are twelve classes in this game now and they can’t all be designed to be some ultra slick ninja 360 noscoper. At least not if you want class to mean something.

Just as Cata gave every healer magic dispel and every DPS an interrupt, it also gave every healer the same three casted heals. Homogenization: it’s bad for an RPG.

Forget about Ret for a second. All these years later, after rolling back some of the changes to casted heals (Divine Light was deleted), Holy can’t function in PvP without a PvP talent that increases Holy Light’s healing by 50%. I know this is a whacky idea, but maybe, just maybe classes should be designed around their own kit and you shouldn’t try to make specializations who share the same role but are from different classes operate in the same way.

And that’s it for me. I’ve reached my yearly “complain about Cata class design” quota and so I won’t be around for a while.

(This didn’t fit anywhere else, but it’s time to give Ret and Prot an AoE rezz. Back in Vanilla, all paladins did a quest to learn Redemption in Elwynn Forest. The idea that my spec is suddenly not healy enough to have a flavor / convenience ability is galling. Do I look like a rogue? No? A warrior, maybe? No, not that either? Then give me a good rezz.)

1 Like
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Very casual player, but here are my thoughts.

(1) Disagree. Some fine tuning may be needed (ask the Mathhammerers), but doesn’t need scrapping. One of these talents just replicates the effect of a popular Legion legendary. Zeal is re-imagined from Legion and Execution Sentence was brought back for those who like that style of super burst.

(2) Blade of Wrath already partially baked into Blade of Justice. (this was a request from Legion going INTO BFA)
Hammer of Wrath baseline would be better than as a talent. As for neutered – not really. It’s near exactly as it was from WoD, including Wings Synergy, and deals good damage.
(3) The merits of a flat reduction vs spenders reducing the cooldown would be interesting to have (it may exist on the old forums, but I have never seen one).
Instant Repentance could be fun.
(4) The idea for Divine Judgment is not innately bad, however, its competitors are simply better. I think if it were on another row and re-tuned a bit, it could be competitive.
Alternatively, if both consecration and wake of ashes were baseline, it would simply be a matter of finding 2 new talents to take their place.
Based on Wake of Ashes class fantasy and origin, I don’t think the stun vs. Aberrations makes sense. Undead and Demons stun yes, but not aberrations in general.
(5) Cavalier and/or Knight Templar being available to more Pally specs would be awesome.
Not sure about Eye for an Eye vs. Divine Protection. The former is very Ret flavored, the latter would be more core to Paladin as a class.
So I’d leave that up for debate.
(6) Justicar’s vengeance in Legion was awesome. It was neutered in BFA due to its burst potential.
I think the neutering on Justicar’s Vengeance went too far. They need to increase its damage (including bonus vs. stunned targets) and healing back up — it already has a PvP damage debuff to mitigate any shennanigans there.
With the increased damage, it becomes a viable solo talent.
(7) Nothing to add here
(8) Agree on Vengeance Aura (it used to be like that but was nerfed to only be for people who had blessings on them). You may not have used Divine Punisher, but I’ve seen major Ret PvPers use and suggest it. Cleansing Light been a situational suggestion. Lumnescence I concede --> I haven’t seen a major Ret PvPer use it.
(9) Agreed. Having Divine Cavalier make us immune to roots/slows while it is in effect would also be nice.
(10) - (11) Disagree that it doesn’t need 2 charges nor that Blade of Justice does. I think a substantially shorter cooldown (or none at all beyond the GCD) would be better alternatives.
(12) No Blessing of Might. Got rid of it in Legion for a reason. We were taxed for it.
Unless it is brought back without said tax, No.
Kings used to be a sort of buff like you said, but it was changed in Legion. Having it raise stats like that again could be nice. Alternatively, its shield is really low and doesn’t recycle very often given how low it is. Perhaps make it stronger and/or cycle more quickly (if we’re not going down the stat increase route)?
(13) Agreed
(14) No. On all fronts.
(15) While having a full blown dispel would be nice for Ret, for the moment, having it cleanse poisons and diseases has been fine mechanically and thematically.
Disagree on druids and shamans comment.
(16) No
(17) We have a variety of ways to heal. Very few things use mana anyway. I don’t know about you, but my Flash of Lights tend to heal me up pretty quickly anyway in the situation you describe.
If it came back it’d be okay, I simply don’t see the point of it given our alternative healing options (and your example doesn’t make a compelling case)
(18) I think just bring back Turn Evil full-stop.
Leave Repentance and Blinding Light as talents. They do not replace Turn Evil.
(19) Agreed. The old version of Holy Wrath (where it was a Holy Damage channeled ability —> NOT THE LEGION VERSION) as well.
(20) Sure
(21) Sure
(22) I think if seals come back it should be via said Empowered Seals talent. Basically we would ONLY have them if we talent into them, given the massive effect they could potentially have (POTENTIALLY) on gameplay.
Auras coming back could be fun. Even if it’s simple ones like the Sanctity Aura increasing everyone’s holy damage (not just our own) or Crusader aura for everyone’s mounted speed (not just our own).