The thorns effect of old ret aura is an out dated mechanic. If you’re letting people be hit by loose mobs as a prot paladin tank, they’ll die.
If it’s updated to be a damage reflect to all damage instead of just melee hits, it could become problematic in raid environments.
Tough spot if we want the aura to actually be useful.
What would you suggest assuming that it buffs party and raid members and has a range of 40 yards?
i believe this ability is fairly situational as it requires a party members to die.
PvE
party members dying is very bad for the group in raid, m+ and even in heroic dungeons making this ability a shadow in comparison to concentration aura or devotion.
maybe useful for questing in groups but even then i’d rather have the damage reduction.
PvP
you would really only want to use this in battlegrounds where your teammates are dying frequently around you. but again, dying in any content is bad for your team. in a 2v2 scenario, if your teammate dies, you are almost surely to lose unless they managed to trade making it a 1v1 situation. this ability becomes a little better in 3v3, but it is something you wouldn’t start with. you would want concentration aura for your healer, so they can heal more freely. this would require swapping to the ability last minute if you know a teammate is about to die.
this ability has a cool idea but having it revolve around the death of a party member seems redundant, especially when having wings makes you a target for CC or even just as the next kill target.
possible changes
do i think this should go back to its “former classic glory”? no. dealing passive damage is boring and would still lose out to other aura’s in my opinion.
i think a reasonable option could be something like:
“movement impairing effects have a X% reduction to all party members within a radius of the paladin.” or
“gives X% chance to be immune to incoming root effects and gives a X% permanent movement speed increase”
in PvE this could be useful in many situations in m+ or raids because getting out of the fire faster is always good for your team. and since m+ is more or less timed, moving quicker through the dungeon is useful, even if it is just in between pulls.
in PvP, no one likes to be rooted. and having the extra option aside from a 25 second cooldown on freedom, and a 2 minute trinket cooldown, i would use this alot against various compositions in arena seeing as how there are now so many classes with a heavy root effect: mages with frost nova, dk chains of ice, druid roots ect. i don’t know about anyone else but it feels bad when you have to bubble just to be able to get out of a root when everything is on cooldown.
i think it would fit in with the lore and give this class something it truly needs mobility wise to keep on par with some of the other melee classes. divine steed is great, but when you’re slowed by %75 it doesn’t matter.
my 2 cents from your friendly neighbourhood crusader 
Great post! Ret is a damage spec. Any ret aura should be associated with increased damage, preferably holy damage. A simple reflective damage buff may be boring but it is extremely effective in group pvp and pve.
The classic ret aura is simple but extremely effective. Ask any rogue in pvp and ask your damage meter in group pve. No, it is not a big single target buff but it is an aura which is a support ability or group buff.
In SL, Ret Aura is completely useless. I cant emphasize enough just how useless it is. Ret Aura is an empty placeholder that most Paladins will never use except in unrated battlegrounds. It is useless for questing, dungeons, raids, group pvp and only marginally useful for solo or unorganized pug pvp such as unrated battlegrounds. Devotion aura isnt that great but it is still better than ret aura for ret.
UNDERSTAND THIS DEVS, IF THE CURRENT RET AURA WERE REMOVED FROM SL, FEW IF ANY PALADINS WOULD MISS IT.
I personally love the new Ret Aura. I practically have wings up all the time in bgs. However, I would prefer it to be a passive applied to AW when anyone within any aura dies. Its current iteration does not fit the feel of the support style that auras once had. I like the idea of the 3-5% dmg reflect, though, I feel it should apply to any direct dmg and the initial tick on dots. Otherwise dot classes would probably die very quickly to a paladin lol.
Agreed. Battlegrounds is the only scenario where the current ret aura would be effective.
Not only effective but very fun! I do not want to see it go but it definitely does not feel like a “Ret Aura”
Good news, you don’t have to, because there’s a PvP talent that is Ret aura, but better, called Ultimate Retribution, have a look at it, it does the exact same thing, but better, you get wings from it just by people getting low health near you, not dying, and additionally lets you cast rez in combat with a reduced cast time when someone dies near you.
It must be ret only pvp talent. I do not recall seeing that option when specced as holy. I also do not want to spend a pvp talent on something that I already have as a passive.
Honestly, they need to scrap the concept of any sort of damage-gain or thorns-effect Auras. They don’t work. They’re never going to be tuned to a sufficient degree to ever mean anything, and the game simply doesn’t work the way it did when Retribution Aura was a thing. And even when it was a thing, it still wasn’t anything great.
Blizzard doesn’t even balance Paladin throughput around Retribution procs. It’s considered a nice little bonus aura by them. You still default to Devotion [or Concentration, now, if you need it.]
1% of nothing is still nothing, though. They will never scale Ret Aura to any meaningful levels if it’s back to being Thorns-lite. It’ll still be what it was when it was a talent- bait.
To me, I think bringing back Sanctity Aura and making it a 3% damage increase aura would work great, Ret Aura being a damage reflect is cool and all but part of me feels like that won’t compete with damage or interrupt reduction.
To enlighten us on what Sanctity Aura was. Sanctity aura was a single talented holy damage buff for ret in wow classic in addition to the 2 talent buff to ret aura which was baseline.
I still like the idea of a damage reflecting ret aura like the classic ret aura.
That’s what it was during vanilla, it was not only ever that. In WoD it was exactly as the poster above you described, a raidwide 3% damage buff.
That being said I don’t see why we should be fighting over getting one or the other back, we should get them both… It’s not as if that would be overpowered.
That was only for 1 version of wow, in TBC (talent in the improve version) & wrath it does increase overall dmg by 2%(TBC) & 3%(Wrath).
Like you I would also prefer a dmg election for ret aura, what they need to do with aura is something more like this. [if you like my ideas, please post on the original post too to push it up to get more attention toward it, & hope blizz reads it]
This is a good post in that it highlights the inherent redundancies between seals, blessings and auras when applied to the current wow paladin class. Blizzard has decided, maybe rightly that each class should be largely self-sufficient rather than having two rows of buffs supplied by other classes in raids. But Paladins are different, we are or should be a support class. It is easy to overstack buffs in a support class. I think that is why, of the three, seals, blessings and auras, blizz chose to go with auras, the most iconic paladin support ability.
I think your ideas are good but I don’t think that there is any way that blizz is going to give ret aura a % damage buff. If we did get a % damage buff, it would be paid for by reductions elsewhere which we do not want.
Lets start with a scalable, flat damage reflection aura that starts at about 50 damage and can scale up to maybe 150 with gear. That would be a lot of damage when looking at the party or raid but not so much that it could unbalance the game.
you made a very good point, so i went & change my idea to be based on the pally’s stats instead of a flat %
If you can distill your proposal down to 1-2 sentences, that would fit in an in-game tooltip, I will add it to my original post.
Retribution aura ins’t a thing in pvp and classic ret was monkey 
. I don’t think retribution aura has ever been useful besides a 1%ish dmg buff through reflect.
At this point an actual concern would be what happens at 60 when numbers are more reasonable and we’re only useful in 12 sec dmg windows, oh wait now it’s 8 seconds.
Ret aura was very effective in classic pvp.