Too late, they either fix everything or revert the ret buff.
Those are the two options, Blizzard already opened Pandora’s box. They need to suffer for it now.
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Just don’t nerf rogues please?
Sorry, but paladins only have 1 B tier dps spec. So to be fair, that is all you will get as well.
You’re not wrong - but it’s a matter of degrees. We are pulling ahead of (scaling better than) Ret - this is true. But we’re not scaling much better than average. We’re not scaling as well as people say we should be.
From the sims I’ve been running, if you compare all the primary dps specs - that is, the top dps specs for each class, Fury stays second last by full Ulduar BIS.
IMO this doesn’t undermine Rets case for a buff at all - but it does cast a question mark on how much Fury will actually catch up in this iteration of WoTLK. From the ICC sims I’ve looked at it looks like we’ll get to A+ tier by ICC. So, we will scale but no as well as predicted.
One class that’s simming poorly compared to others for Ulduar is Hunter. Survival is great now but gets bumped down to lower middle while Marks doesn’t really catch up. There’s enough going on here with physical damage scaling that I think Blizzard shouldn’t just draw a line under reviewing Ret but should look at other classes.
When we look at role balance it doesn’t really matter how many specs you can choose from, it matters how well your best spec in that role is doing. A part from outliers I don’t think Fury is doing that well - we’re second last (Ret is last) for the whole phase when comparing against the other class best dps options.
Ulduar was slated to be a pretty awful tier for warriors, and they’ve got a bit of an exponential scaling going on with gear. Naxx stuff did almost nothing for you. Ulduar wasn’t going to either, but the ilvl buff let you leapfrog over Ret (if not for that, fury would have absolutely deserved a temporary buff for this phase along with ret).
ToGC won’t fix everything but it should start being noticeable as your added damage starts getting you even more rage that leads to more damage… Which is the cycle that should eventually make fury pretty strong by the hilariously powerful gear in ICC. I don’t think it will bring them to the absolute top, but at least to the point where no one is questioning if their DPS is good.
I don’t mind blizz tweaking terrible class balance here and there for other struggling specs when identified. It’s not always easy to do changes that they can isolate completely to PvE like they were mostly able to do with Ret here though.
It wasn’t terrible - in the way it is now. But it wasn’t where they “popped off”. My point though is that the item level buff isn’t translating into a Warrior buff as predicted as our scaling is about average.
Something people say a lot and it’s a but wrong is that “Ret doesn’t scale with secondary stats but Fury does”. That’s not really true. Haste is nearly a dead stat for Fury. We get good mileage out of crit - to a point. In the end it makes us pretty average. In TBC and Vanilla the claim was true but not Wrath.
Warriors scale well off primary stats (Strength derived AP specifically) - and armor pen. We don’t really come online until we can hard cap Armor pen.
Fury is doing and set to do a lot better than Ret - but worse than everyone else in Ulduar even with the ilevel buff. The problem is that Fury is our only competitive raid option and it is second last out of all the other competitive raid options but we have no falling back to another class role. Only the promise of being super good in ICC - which may or may not actually happen. The consistent improvement due to superior scaling that both Blizzard and yourself reference isn’t something I’m seeing evidence for.
Paladins are already 20% of most servers… now they gave ret paladin a 10-15% buff they will easily be 25% of all servers very soon.
Complete joke of a game. WOTLK+++++ has been so botched its unreal.
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Great, sweet… one class will only be playable in the final phase when everyone quits the game.
how wonderful an idea for an entire class to be completely irrelevant for 99.9999% of the entire expansion.
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Anyone else realize that the Thread starter was just trolling? I mean he makes a post and hasn’t been back.
Rets were fixed and able to deal meaningful damage in Wrath. But they were never god tier DPS, even in ICC. yes in trash/aoe they could out burst almost anyone, but that was IT.
I tanked, healed, and dpsed as Paladin IN OG Wrath. As dps we were never chart toppers, and I was ok with that, because we weren’t bottom of the teir meme worthy like they were in classic and TBC.
To the OG POSTER, if you read the patch notes you’d realize that this “BUFF” is minuscule in compared to what would be needed to make rets even come close to what Warlocks can do.
Who said anything about warlock dps? wtf?
They have by far the best tank spec in the game
They have 1 of the 2 best healing specs in the game.
Now they get leap frogged ahead of 6-8 different DPS specs because of cry babies on the forums.
BM, Marksmanship, Feral, Balance, Fury, Arms, and a few others should be absolutely outraged by this gigantic buff they gave ret paladins… and dont kid yourself. 10% DPS is a massive buff for a game that is supposed to have absolutely 0 class tuning.
And then you remember they gutted fiery warriors who gained a tiny 1% dps buff in minutes. Game is scuffed.
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ret has struggled almost every expansion
This is
literally
the case for any class when they receive PvE buffs. And once again, Retribution wasn’t the only class to receive buffs in 3.1. If you had specifically asked a dev “Why is X class receiving Y buff?”, they’d have told you it’s because they think it’s weaker than it should be.
The fact that you have a link to an isolated comment made by a dev in a Q&A series dedicated specifically to Paladins isn’t the “proof” you think it is. 
Do you have any evidence of the devs talking broadly about all specs and specifically singling Retribution out as being an unviable meme spec? No. Because it wasn’t. So maybe stop treating this quote like that’s what it is.
Just a note to make your life better, you can actually post links if you turn it into inline code `like this`! 
I was so happy when I found this out.
Anyways, let’s actually dissect the posts you linked:
- Retribution performing lower than most pure DPS classes means it was actually performing better than at least one of them (Hint: It was Hunter).
- Retribution was performing lower than some hybrid classes (Death Knights, and I think it was Shaman?), which means it was also outperforming some of them too (Warrior, Priest, Druid).
In the next part of Brindelia’s post which you didn’t quote, they mention:
This part of their post was a criticism of the vast number of threads stating that Retribution was OP in PvP.
Here Brindelia attributes issue of Retribution being underpowered in PvP to a lack of utility, not damage.
And now Ghostcrawler’s statements:
…Because they were way too powerful.
In BC, no one took Retribution seriously as a DPS spec, because it was weak. In Wrath, they did take it seriously, because it was strong.
Retribution Paladins are paranoid about going back to being in the “minor leagues”. As in, they’re currently strong/viable, and they don’t want to be weak/unviable again.
Everything in this archived thread is consistent with what I’ve been saying, which is that Retribution was a solid DPS spec that was relatively high on the meters. Not S-tier, but a good DPS spec nonetheless.
And let’s remember that this was a thread posted by someone who was upset that Retribution was extremely strong, and nerfed significantly because of it.
See above… 
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Glad you included the 10% chance when you hit a fire mage. Huge nerf there for sure.
Posting in a buff fire mage thread.
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Agreed, we should have a hit talent like so many other classes/specs.
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I made the jump this weeks raid.
Im now TTW Fire main spec and FFB dual spec, the double fire spec.
Just say no to Arcane.
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Bm hunter buffs when?
Reliable might be appropriate wording to describe it, it’s easy and straightforward which means you can relatively predict how much DPS the ret is going to do, there’s a low skill ceiling so there’s only so much you can do but if you had a choice between a good ret player and a terrible, idk affliction warlock, it presents a choice.
Retribution can of course do things that some other DPS can’t, including heal themselves and almost never go oom (although mana isn’t a big problem normally)
But it isn’t right to pretend that they’re S or A tier, they’re B at best but not due purely to damage, which is evident by their post in that Blizzard thought it’s 3.1 performance was too low, that is to say, it’s damage was too low compared to it’s competition and needed to have it’s seals overhauled …or removed to buff it to where we see it now.
I don’t think anyone here has said ret was unviable, it did enough DPS to match boss requirements even in it’s weak 3.1 state, it was just at the bottom of the meters until a bunch of mobs spawned to get smacked by storm and consecration. (Assuming similar skill, we’ve all had that one guy seems to just seems to be half afk)
What I and others are fighting against is the misconception that ret was nerfed in ICC, it wasn’t, that ret was somehow just super duper in 3.1 and if we go back to 3.1 ret will be super duper again but it won’t, it was only truly exceptional at the very start of the expansion, eventually in ICC it’ll be around middle of the pack.
You’re not wrong about any of that, and I actually totally agree. But still, Retribution’s reliability is not the reason why they were strong, in the same way that Arcane Mage’s simplicity has never been the reason why it excelled.
I think that high complexity can make a spec’s performance worse per capita (See: Feral Druids), but I don’t think that logic holds up in reverse.
Oh, I don’t think Retribution was ever S-tier. The closest they ever got to it was with T10 and Shadowmourne, and even then it would be better to give to somone else. They were A-tier at launch, and remained roughly B-tier for the rest of the expansion.
And that’s all in terms of damage. No sane person would ever try to argue against the incredible utility that Paladins bring to a raid. And of course let’s remember that the majority of utility a Paladin can bring isn’t spec-exclusive.
As I said to Woopee, “it’s performance is too low” is precisely what the devs thought about every single class that got buffs. Retribution wasn’t the only spec to be buffed. I would never go so far as to say that the post you linked is “cherrypicked”, but let’s remember that you’re pulling the quote from a Q&A specifically about Paladins. So of course, when explicitly asked a question about Paladins, the response is “Yeah, Paladins need a buff”. This doesn’t mean that they were uniquely weak.
And let’s also remember that in those days, Blizzard generally took more to balancing things through buffs rather than nerfs.
Oh, I don’t disagree. Honestly, I kinda hate using that word because people have very different definitions of what viability is, and there are also people who use it way too loosely. The way I see it, there are only 2 situations where I agree with Retribution (even in Phase 2 Classic) being called unviable:
- They’re perhaps “unviable” (i.e., if you brought only Retribution for DPS) in some hard modes
- People who prioritize min/maxing thinking of bringing a weak DPS as an unviable option
Everything else is hyperbole.
I mean, I think it kinda depends on your definition of “super duper”.
If we brought back the exact same Retribution that existed in 3.1 OG Wrath, it would be stronger than the Retribution we have in Wrath Classic. Your own source of evidence suggests this (Better than all Hunter, Warrior, Priest, Druid specs).
I don’t think Retribution was ever S-tier in Wrath PvE. But it certainly was never neutered to the point of standing shoulder to shoulder with Frost Mage and Sub Rogue.
which makes it even worse when you don’t have any spec good while paladin has at least two good specs