Retribution survivability

Hi all,

I have been away from WoW essentially since early BfA, but I’ve returned to play. I noticed that in M+, my self sustain and survivability just feels really weak.

Yeah, I understand that means more kicks and more avoiding stuff, but the reality is that nobody plays perfect all the time and I find myself especially vulnerable on weeks with lots of visual group damage and thanks to the spectacle of pee floors and divine storminess sometimes it’s hard to see everything going on.

ANYWAY, I just feel so squishy with no real way to easily block damage or restore health without sacrificing a lot of damage/uptime for poor output.

The ways I see that I can prevent damage on self/recover:

  1. Shield of Vengeance
  2. Divine Shield, BoP, OR LoH.
  3. Word of Glory
  4. Hard casting FoL

Now to the issues I am finding with them:

  1. It seems to be just a worse version of AMS…it prevents less damage, it is on the global so it can sometimes not be cast in time AND it also costs damage since it uses up a global.
  2. These are pretty powerful I’ll admit, but they themselves are on such long cooldowns, 2 are on the global cooldown, and share a common debuff. Additionally, other class’s defensives have CC breaking effects that are rolled in automatically, like IBF and Lichborne, which strangely are also not on the GCD. Ret has some of these CC breaking utility, but they are on separate abilities and are also on the GCD. Executing any of these means more chances to get hit by damage and die or lose damage output.
  3. This one’s on the GCD just like Impending Victory and Death Strike, but unlike those two abilities, it costs you at least 2 globals worth of resources via HP, and just heals less. The other two classes get a freebie every so often and have to sacrifice much less damage and time in order to cast them. In the case of the DK, they can quickly convert an entire runic power bar into lost health.
  4. What more to say here? This is totally a worst case scenario. It heals for poop and you effectively CC yourself by doing it.

I ended up taking a point away from a a damage talent in order to try out healing hands or selfless healer (healing hands seemed much better, even if it costs damage).

Also let’s talk about mobility. We often rely on speed abilities to avoid damage. Both Warriors (charge/heroic leap) and DK’s Death’s Advance are OFF the GCD…meanwhile Divine Steed is again tied to the damned GCD.

Anyway, I just find myself often frustrated with not being able to correct mistakes like the other classes can when I hop on my alts.

I’m not saying we need more damage or even more healing, just need to take these abilities off the global.

Am I alone in this? Yes, I do know I need to L2P, but that’s a given anyway.

What I’d like to see is Healing Hands baseline (so you don’t have to sacrifice a DPS talent), make WoG, Divine Shield, Shield of Righteousness, Divine Steed, and BoP off the global. That would make it feel that much better without really changing much.

I’ve lucked out on my DK “alt” and collected 4 pc Tier already and am thinking of making the switch.

3 Likes

If you want to walk threw the valley of death “without taking much damage”. If you want to be a follower of darkness and decay… Then yes swap mains.

If you want to maintain your reputation with the light and paladins everywhere. Stay the course, suffer and die for your sins!!!

3 Likes

Yes. This is what Ret is.

Or you take the less throughput approach and just take JV and have free sustain.
It doesn’t really matter much anyway as Ret is a trash tier spec for all content (especially now they nerfed the one thing working for it in PvP), so taking a bit of a performance loss to actually be able to play doesn’t seem like too large of a cost.

It is a waste of time they just gutted the only thing ret had and gave meaningless buffs.

Yay 10%tv damage so instead of doing 22k tvs I can do 24k tvs good job blizzard

Good thing I got the rewards before this garbage.

You got a 30% wall instead of 20%. Thats a 50% increase to your wall.

No reasonable paladin uses dp because the cd is too long.

We need major help defensively, mobility wise, and now we have absolutely mid teir burst without an MS lol such a joke worst melee in the game

1 Like