Retribution Feedback [Midnight] — It's Positive!

Classes Paladin
1

Blizzard has convinced me to play Retail again for the first time in nearly 10 years. Here’s why.

BACKGROUND:
Ret paladin since 2005.
Last full expansion played: Legion.
I played the end of Cataclysm, MOP, BFA and S1 of Dragonflight for the Elite PvP rewards (quit after the Ret rework nerfs).

Retribution is simply in a good state. Nearly every historical issue plaguing the specialization for years is being addressed.

THE GOOD:

  • Final Reckoning merged into Execution Sentence
  • Hammer of Wrath merged into Judgment
  • Divine Toll now works like it did in Shadowlands, but better, with Divine Resonance and Divine Exaction (Templar). Synergizes extremely well with Improved Judgment granting 2 charges of Judgment; allowing you to toss Judgments all over the screen
  • Divine Wrath now extends the duration of Radiant Glory. So you can choose between 30 second Avenging Wraths for 12 seconds (merging with Wake of Ashes) or 60 second Avenging Wraths for 24 seconds (with a haste boost and macroing with Execution Sentence)
  • Guided Power moved to the Class tree (from Specialization tree)
  • Divine Hammers moved into Templar tree (from Specialization tree)
  • 8 second Divine Steeds with Unrelenting Charger (Templar) matching Blessing of Freedom’s duration
  • Blessed Champion and Blade of Vengeance essentially making all of your attacks cleave 5 targets
  • The classes utility value is more automated, with Blessing of Freedom, Sacrifice, Dawn, Lightbearer and Holy Ritual having passive and automatic triggers; thus the Paladin retains his value to his group without sacrificing DPS
  • Shield of Vengeance merged with Divine Protection. You used to have to macro these together, now you get a shorter cooldown with a free Improved Divine Protection thrown in.
  • Lowering the penalty of Forbearance. Forbearance was simply out dated; it was irrelevant the second Mass Dispel mechanics entered the game.

THE BAD:

  • There’s a 5 second dead spot in our rotation that sometimes results when nothing procs and you are stuck auto-attacking until abilities come back up.

  • Due to Divine Toll’s changes necessitating Improved Judgment over Boundless Judgment and Wake of Ashes new functionality with Templar, Holy Power is sitting capped at 5 a lot of the time with no way to spend it.

  • Automatic passive sacrifice mechanics (providing group utility) like Dawn and Worthy Sacrifice combined with a reduction to passive self-healing

    • Efforts were made to alleviate Paladin survivability issues caused by this by providing damage reduction through Sanctified Plates, Blessing of Dusk and Forbearance duration reductions, but it still feels bad with automated mechanics like these constantly chipping away at your own health bar. For some reason Blizzard has a philosophy of Paladin’s having to damage themselves in order to do anything—even in SoD with Seal of Martyrdom. It’s very annoying. Talents like Brought to Light that will heal you a moderate amount on enemy defeat (or Sacrosanct Crusade in Templar) doesn’t fix being chronically stuck at 85% hp from Dawn. I believe their intent was to force healers to toss the Paladin heals regularly to get action from Lightbearer’s splash healing utility, but it feels bad man

  • Holy Ritual changing from healing the target of any blessing for a moderate amount to only healing targets blessed with Sacrifice or Protection for a major amount

  • Crusading Strikes swing timer being slowed by 50%

    • Thus offsetting 2 talents of Zealot’s Fervor that speeds it up by 40% LOL!
    • Is it really necessary to penalize a simple transformation of a button press of a garbage lowest-tier ability to trigger on auto attacks by 1) cutting the resource generation in half, 2) removing the 20 yard range increase, 3) slowing the attack speed by half AND 4) requiring a 7 freaking talent investment just to maximize the benefit of doing it??? I LOVE Crusading Strikes, it was a wonderful idea with Blessed Champion! Let the button mashers headbutt Templar Strikes, chasing the dopamine hit of successfully getting the secondary follow-up that will be interrupted half the time in competitive PvP if they want and leave Crusading Strikes alone! Crusader Strike sucks. Micro-managing Templar Slash sucks. Crusading Strikes is awesome.

  • Divine Spurs and Steed of Liberty are useless. Paladins already struggle with mobility, Spurs just makes it even worse. And you can macro Freedom into Steed and gain over twice the benefit of Steed of Liberty anyway, as well as more utility since now you can cast a full duration freedom on multiple people instead of only yourself during steed.

  • Lightforged Blessing, Eye for an Eye, Golden Path and Selfless Healer are all bad. No one is spending a whole talent point for 1% of your HP in healing or damage reflection.

  • Like with Lightforged Blessing, Empyrean Power, Tempest of the Lightbringer, Sanctify and basically all talents that modify Divine Storm are bad because either the proc rate is too low or Divine Storm isn’t being used often enough due to priority anyway; especially with the way Judgment and Wake of Ashes is now functioning.

  • Paladin Class tree is struggling for talent points. There’s too much utility that is essential to modify baseline abilities. We cannot afford to use things like Turn Evil or its support talents or Blinding Light, let alone support talents for things like Rebuke, Consecration, Word of Glory, etc.

    SUGGESTIONS:

  • Merge Fear No Evil and Stoicism (crowd control reductions)

  • Merge Lead the Charge and Obduracy (movement speed modifiers)

  • Revert the restriction on Holy Ritual to heal on all Blessing casts

  • Merge healing and armor modifier talents in the Class tree for low priority abilities—these things are not worth talent points invested into them and they have miniscule impact on gameplay anyway. It’s just clutter being used as a filler to force a pre-requisite unlock.

  • Increase the proc rate of abilities like Divine Purpose to combat 5 second rotation auto-attack dead spots.

  • Consider adding back the 20 yard increase to Crusader Strike—especially if you’re going to keep the 50% attack speed reduction to Crusading Strikes. Being consistent is nice, it doesn’t make sense that this is literally our only ability/holy power generator that is less than 20 yard range LOL why???

  • Self healing is still a problem for Retribution; the hybrid class reasoning no longer applies if the core utility of our class is sacrificing our HP for our party members.

    • Perhaps it is intended that these Paladins go Herald for that, while sacrificing group utility talents in favor of personal DPS go for Templar?

  • Consider extending the duration of charges from things like Divine Toll/Resonance to allow us to spend Holy Power so we don’t sit capped at 5 while we manage charges of Judgment.

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2

Wow. Old school, huh?

Welcome back, bruh.

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Fair assessment for the good.

The bad I’ve some things I want to bring to your attention.

I assume you’re playing with CSAA (Crusader strikes auto-attack), try using Templar Strike.

They left the choice there but the spec doesn’t seem to be designed around it being the default anymore.

For the better IMO after playing with it for the past 3 years.

How? Wdym? Just use a spender, they don’t have any cooldown.

I get how you feel, at the same time, if these effects aren’t for you, I feel they are marginal enough that you can comfortably choose other talents that still bring something useful albeit niche to the table.

For better or worse, most of the effects in the general tree are low impact to begin with which allows us to be somewhat flexible in what we choose to take.

There’s some stuff to unpack here.

CSAA has been here for 2 expac and now 3 with Midnight, it’s not a new idea or talent.

Is it necessary to penalize it?
Yes
You weren’t here when it happened but basically, spenders became less and less “important” in the past 2 expac because HP generation drastically increased.
Chief among this increase was CSAA.

When this talent initially hit the PTR, they let it give 1hp per swing without any nerf and it was absolutely bonkers.

It’s basically similar to what it used to be.
Again CSAA has been here for a while and how it worked before is that it would give you 1 HP every 2 swings.

Now it give 1 HP every swings but it’s half as fast, so tomato tomato.

CSAA never hit at 20 yard before, it had 8 at most in the past expac (dragonflight), I think you’re confusing it with BoJ.

Steed of liberty, maybe.

But not spurs.
There’s often no functional advantage to have 8 sec of steed and instead you might be better served by a shorter duration and more accessibility over time.

Here lies the point in itself, as I said higher up, the talents being meek is the reason why we can switch them up so easily if we don’t like one or another.

This makes no sense what’s so ever.
I don’t know what you’re talking about and I suspect this is because you haven’t played retail in forever.

DS is your AoE/cleave spender, if there’s 2 target, you use DS.

If you play in M+, you take most of these talents.

Lighforge Blessing work on every use of DS.
Empyrean Power is proccing consistently at the rate it says it does.
Tempest of the Lightbringer is uncapped so it hits more than 5 targets.
Sanctify is bad, no one uses that, it’s even worse now because of the refocus on spender damage as well.

When making a core for M+ , I end up with 4 talents left that I can put pretty much anywhere (on BETA tree*, what we have now live are the new trees without the 3 additional points).

I won’t review the suggestions based on the negatives you listed since they seem to come from misconceptions about some of the spec inner workings and it’s talents.

I feel most of them are “solved” or at least explained by understanding where the current abilities comes from and what were the intentions of the design team for Ret going into Midnight.

For example

The concept of “hybrids” have been evacuated from the game a long time ago but that’s not something you would be aware of given the background you shared.

There’s no intent for Ret to go some way or another to be able to heal more, that’s not your role.
Ret is a DPS with flavorful healing.
The only reason Herald has more healing oriented talents is because it’s shared with Holy and Blizzard, when they created Hero talents, decided to create 3 Hero talents per class instead of 6.
Which meant overlap between specs for them to get to choose between 2 and some weird cross overs for Classes with multiple roles.

As such, criticism about their ability to heal others are somewhat moot because they aren’t meant to do so in any meaningful capacity on an extended period in the first place.

You have LoH and you can choose to forgo DPS to cast SOME WoG before going OOM very quickly.

I hope this helps adresse some of your points.
Great energy, keep it up!

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I remember when I was the #1 retribution paladin on my server. I got that simply because I was the only retribution paladin listed on my server, lol.

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I hear you, man, and I remember those days.

I’m an old ol’skooler as well. Played this game when it was just called Warcraft.

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Am I confused the Blessing are all in our Pally Tree and if you building your build right you dont even have Freedom anymore which sucks. and then making us take a point for dispel of poison and disease is wrong. I dont know am I missing something with blessings?

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It’s the pre-patch of Midnight and those trees are Midnight trees.

In Midnight, you get 3 more class tree points.

That’s what you’re missing.

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For the love of god…please do not use chatgpt on the forums!

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My pally in Prot out dps my Ret by at least a factor of 2X and my weapons and shield are the same item level I am really frustrated it was different pre patch

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You are exactly whats wrong with ret

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The idea they are pushing is if you dun ‘‘need it’’, you dun have to take it and and shift that point to somewhere you think is more useful.

Personally, freedom is never out of my build, in fact Unbound Freedom is not either, i always take them together becuz it means i get to walk faster and someone else as well. The tank need to go a longer distance then normal to group up, like the pull right before the church itself while the rest of the gang remain outside? Here’s a freedom for you so u walk faster.

The healer taking too big a gulp of a drink after a fight? Here’s a freedom to help u get back into action faster. Or that hunter who decide that the roadside flower looks cooler then my sword? Come on man, we need you upfront. And all of these is on top of any actual mass movement mech etc like the fight in the courtyard of church.

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It hurts every time I think about it.

I know, I know - no one cares Yekal.

But why are Rets class flavor spells so bad?
Ret gets FoL and WoG because they are a Paladin - it wouldn’t make sense for them to not have them!
…except they shouldn’t be used if you can do literally anything else to avoid using them

Wishing Blizz would just give Rets a different slice of the Paladin Class fantasy if they insist on Off-Healing being doo doo.

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I’ve always wondered why Blizzard doesn’t improve the auras.
They have a PERFECT example with the paladin from Diablo 2.

They could expand the repertoire of auras.

Something similar to Holy Freeze, to provide a constant slow on enemies.
Holy Fire, to constantly inflict fire damage on enemies (could be something exclusive to Herald).

And for these offensive auras to have a range no greater than 12 yards.
These are just examples.
I’m not saying they should do it.
But auras are SOMETHING that defines the Paladin.

Well, maybe it doesn’t define it as such, but it’s something that would be good to expand.
Something that’s more than just use and forget.
Btw, I miss the era when we had Librams and could swap them out depending on the situation.

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They act as group buffs.

1 group buff per class max.

If more of them actually had any relevance then “ideal” comps would always require 2 paladins which is “unjust” because you then put more pressure for Paladin to exist when they are already popular.

It’s one more buff to balance encounters against as well.

The reasoning becomes clear when you push the idea a bit

What happens if they have 5 auras that are actually useful?
You need a full group of Paladin in a 20man group, it’s a bunch more people rolling on plate.

It’s ridiculous and unfair to other classes in terms of opportunities.

That’s the rationale.

Diablo is not an MMO, doesn’t play or have the same objectives as WoW.
You can only make groups of 4 and you have more classes than that so you’d never have the opportunity to have them all anyway so it frees the design to be more aggressive.

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I know Blizz don’t read these, but if they could just make Ret’s auras 1~2% stronger baseline it’d go a good way to help Rets feel recognized. These auras wouldn’t stack with other pally auras, just overwrite.

Then…
All Pallys get access to (some level of) “the good stuff” (Rets don’t get, nor should have Spellwarding and BoP in PvE)
Some pallies get WoGs that actually do something
Other pallies get “Greater” Crusader/Devotion/Concentration Aura
->Realistically, a 4% DR aura (instead of 3%) won’t rock the boat and make a group want a Ret instead of a Prot, but the Ret can now better mislead his guild into thinking he has a spot on the Raid.

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Not really. According to some on the beta, our dps is dog$#!+ now, near the bottom.

That being said, we’re only in pre-patch and I’m sure there will be various tuning in the future.

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I agree with this. If you look at the other defensive buffs available, you have 5% stamina from priests and 3% vers from druids which is 3% damage and 1.5% DR (so basically 4.5% total). Bumping devo to 5% would put us in line with the others.