Retribution Aura - When any party or raid member within 40 yards dies, you gain Avenging Wrath for 12 sec.
I know I’m not the first to raise this as an issue, but I find it absolutely unbelievable that the devs think that this iteration of Retribution Aura is okay to go live. I was actually really excited when they announced that auras would be returning. But how anyone can look at RA and not see the gameplay it promotes as completely degenerate is just unreal.
Retribution is a much better ability as a passive. Choosing to toggle off an aura that helps my allies in favor of an aura that buffs me on their death is toxic. And it’s definitely antithetical to the class fantasy of the paladin.
Blizzard. Please change this. This aura will either never get used, or cause fights when people accuse paladins of letting them die so they can pad numbers.
There’s a number of different ways to make this ability more creative:
Thorns aura.
Allies get increased attack power.
Allies can proc bonus holy damage.
Generate holy power on ally damage taken.
Ally crit chance increased.
Ally crit damage increased.
Reduce cooldowns when allies take damage.
I mean come on. Any of these work better than toggling RA for a self buff after one of my allies is already dead.
I remember someone around here saying that it must be because the main dev in charge of paladin found his gf in bed with a ret pally main. Yeah… that’s my go to on why this is happening now.
Part of the problem is there are no dedicated devs for a given class anymore. When they got to Ret (or paladin in general) they just slap some rough ideas they got on their last toilet session on it and call it a day.
“Erm, Retribution Aura, what to do about this? Uhmm, it sounds conspiciously like that Retribution passive that was almost unversally hated by the the Ret community…yeah, let’s slap this onto Ret Aura, sounds about right. Ta-dah!”
I really wish ret aura would be deleted from the class. Ret passive isn’t any better than the aura because it still encourages the same degenerative gameplay that ret aura does, so it should be deleted as well. Some of the alternatives OP posted would make for a good replacement. The problem with some of them is that they aren’t “auras” at all because they only help the paladin.
All auras the pally has should benefit the entire party/raid and shouldn’t encourage degenerative gameplay like gaining a benefit when an ally dies.
I’m ambivalent about Retribution as a passive because it fits with the idea of avenging a fallen comrade. To me that’s fine, although I’m aware of degenerate gameplay involving a coordinated group telling their lowest DPS to go die so that the top paladin can parse.
I also think having an aura benefit the paladin personally is fine as well. Take the pvp talent Vengeance Aura. With the increased crit, my off heals can potentially be more effective and with increased damage done, I can kill the thing that’s hurting my allies faster.
Do you have beta access? I’d like to put this up under Paladin Class feedback or General Feedback. I’m not sure whether its quantity or quality that can make Blizz listen at this point.
Because the devs care more about thematics and role playing than functionality.
There is two kinds of nerds out there. The ones that play dungeons and dragons and care about the lore, and roleplaying, and their character backstories, etc. And the ones that min-max damage, theory craft builds, and make spreadsheets to run M+30 keys. The people making decisions in WoW aren’t these kind of people.
I’m just hoping that the auras we have are just place holders to get people into the idea of using auras again and that “soon” they will reveal the real auras they had planned to give us all along.
How do you know this? You mean like each class had it’s own dev? I would actually prefer a team of people balancing all classes, rather than a separate person or group that doesn’t know or care much about the other specs than thge one they were handed. If you have a a dev working outside and separate of the others ones, you get something like sub rogues right now. It’s like they are playing another game.
To be fair: I don’t know how it was in former times. We just know since a dev entered the HoW discord in Legion alpha (I think he told them about that although I may be misremembering the source) that there are no dedicated developers for any given class ANYMORE. Which implies there were dedicated developers before.
Essentially I agree with you, devs shouldn’t be just for one class…on the other hand I’d like devs for our class who actually play and ENJOY playing a paladin. This doesn’t seem to be the case for paladin from what they are delivering. Or do you disagree?
Being emotionally invested in any spec would be a bad idea because you’d be biased in balancing. Your job. You’d have nothing but emotional infighting if they all acted like political members fighting for their party, and it would be really unprofessional for someone dedicated to balancing the game to risk millions of dollars of a franchise so they can get their casual raid character higher on damage meters. I can believe that there is incompetence, and decisions made because maybe they are targeting some more casual players with certain classes. Decisions made for financial reasons to cater to the larger casual audience. But I don’t believe they would destroy their game which has made them around 10 billion dollars over the last 16 years because of petty emotional favors of a class.
I doubt any dev actually plays this game anymore. I don’t think people working on this game 80 hours a week go home, and think “I feel like spending a few more hours of my day looking at WoW!”
This seems about right, but also very sad. I don’t know how anyone could fix this, but it sounds like a very unsatisfying situation, for both the players and the devs.
By this logic none of the class design devs are allowed to play the game at all.
We all know that isn’t the case. There are devs playing other classes, there aren’t any playing this one. The blatant favoritism shown for Mages and Rogues, who are constantly not just viable but great, if not outright overpowered at times, in every aspect of the game at all times since the game launched is proof enough of this.
They’re allowed to play the game I’m sure, but if you let personal favorites play a role, you’re doing your job poorly. There might be balancing decisions made for financial reason. I think blizzard probably balances the game around 1800 rating players or so for pvp. Most specs probably have a relatively even representation around that rating. Most people are probably in the 1400-1800 range, and blizzard cares more about them more than that 1% of players over 2400 rating. Some specs just have much higher skill caps, and they’d have to completely gut rogues in order to get other specs to be the same at higher rating.
It’s difficult to balance all the specs. It’s even more difficult to balance all the specs along all skill levels. If they nerfed rogues and mages hard to get more representation of other specs at like 2400 rating, 95% of the community which is in the below 1800 rating would scream in horror as their class would look like trash compared to all others along the mid end. You’d have to remove abilities from rogues that have been part of them for over 10 years. Retribution on the other hand right now is probably viewed as really OP at the low end, but still relatively bad at the ultra high end. Especially once the ExecSent nerfs hit.
