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Daily Thoughts: Ret Gets Buffed in Patch 4.0.6

January 6, 2011

The above chart was featured in a WoW insider Scattered Shots article, you can see the full article HERE.

Notice retribution at the very bottom of the raiding dps specs. Now, this doesn’t include the traditionally low raiding performance “pvp” specs such as subtlety rogues, but ret pallies are still easily 25% below the top performing dps spec and also lower than the next lowest by almost 1,000 dps. Naturally, I’d love to run around topping the meters, but balance at least is much preferred to the current state of affairs. Did we paladins despair though? Of course not! We knew at some point the useless mastery would be reforged into something we wanted, at least a little, and boost our dps. Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom (is always wisdom when they’re buffing your class right?), also buffed our bread and butter attack, Crusader Strike. Check out the paladin class changes.

Paladins

The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.

Crusader Strike weapon damage percent has been increased to 135%, up from 115%.

Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.

Talent specializations

Retribution

Divine Purpose: The chance for applicable abilities to generate Holy Power has been reduced to 7/15%, down from 20/40%, but instead of generating 1 Holy Power, the next applicable ability used consumes no Holy Power and acts as if the paladin has 3 Holy Power.

Hand of Light (Mastery): A percentage of the damage done by Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm is done as additional Holy damage.

Repentance is no longer broken from damage done by Censure (Seal of Truth).

Glyphs

Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.

The two biggest changes we have here are the 20% more base damage to crusader strike and our mastery changing. Mastery is now a passive holy damage buff to key attacks and our old Divine Purpose talent has become the same as what Mastery was. Depending on what this percentage ends up being, we could see a very significant boost to damage. This mastery also gives blizzard an easy knob from which to tune our DPS if it’s ever too low or too high. Holy paladins are also probably a little excited about the slight buff to divine plea which provides an extra 2% mana (3% talented) over a shorter time span.

I’m really excited to see ret damage come up to par with our other dps pals and for the first time was considering copying my toon over to a test realm to see the changes first hand before they went live, alas, the page isn’t currently loading. Maybe there’s a bunch of other enthused paladins clogging up the internet.

The rest of the 4.0.6 patch notes can be viewed HERE.

4.0.3a Cataclysm Daily Paladin

Daily Thoughts: The Cataclysm Paladin

December 20, 2010

I’ve spent a lot of posts recently talking about zones (and yes I’m still going to do that Twilight Highlands review at some point), factions, and other such things and not much time on the actual playing my class. The big changes specifically to Paladins in cataclysm (if you don’t count Holy Power from 4.0.3) are the new spells:

Inquisition is our new self buff. It increases all holy damage by 30%. Retribution gets a talent that extends the duration of this buff to 10 seconds per Holy Power used to trigger it. This is meant to be kept up as much as possible similar to Slice and Dice for combat rogues and is a pretty significant DPS loss if not used.. Holy Radiance is pretty much making us a moving healing stream totem, and does an AOE heal to nearby targets. I haven’t got much play testing with this spell, as I’m running ret main now, but I really haven’t heard anything too exciting about from those doing Holy main spec. Finally, Guardian of Ancient Kings is amazing. This buff has a long (5m) cooldown, but skyrockets a ret paladins DPS when used. From what I hear from the other specs, it seems it’s a better friend to ret than the other uses. Each spec gets a specific purpose, one for taking, extra heals for holy and more damage for ret. Follow me after the break for some more…

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Daily

Daily Thoughts: Ret Paladin Is Beast

October 27, 2010

I know I mentioned yesterday about getting more into warrior or DK dps but, I didn’t play my DK at all (other than doing the Headless Horseman Daily) and didn’t really learn anything new about the warrior. Actually, I did learn I should watch my threat on my warrior now that he has decent gear, because dying sucks.

What I did want to talk about today is Retribution Paladins and how awesomesauce they are right now. Yesterday was my first time taking ret into a raid since the big patch. With 2 slight upgrades (251 to 264 boots and back) and the changes from 4.0.1, my ret pally went from ~9k dps on Toravon 25m in VOA to 11.5k dps on the same fight. We actually wiped once on him because a tank and heal went offline, though it gave me a chance to see a neat little comparison of my own dps. The first attempt I was using Seal of Righteousness because I forgot to turn it off after trash. This is the seal designed to be slightly bursty and hit multiple targets with the seal of command talent. I was a little under 9k dps using that seal. At first, I didn’t notice the wrong seal since my damage was comparable to the raiding damage I was used to doing.

After the first wipe and during the replacement of the offline players and ragequitters, I used my proper Seal of Truth. Truth, much like the former Seal of Corruption, leaves a stacking dot on the target which also increases the damage of your judgement. Checking recount after the second attempt and kill, Censure (the name of the Dot damage) was responsible for about 15% of my damage. This should give you an idea of how important it will be to maintain 100% uptime of this DoT. On single target, low movement fights it shouldn’t be an issue. In fights like Marrowgar where he moves away from you or in rotface that could require you to take a slime to the off tank, you should be very aware and keep the debuff up if at all possible.

The other important changes are too our cooldowns. Avenging Wrath (as I mentioned in my Top 5 New Paladin Talents post) now allows hammer of wrath to be used outside of the normal enemy < 20% health rule. This means, outside of tank threat issues, you open up boss fights with wings and your rotation changes to HoW usage on CD. Our new cooldown timing is a point of contention so far for ret paladins. Zealotry can be used when you have 3 holy power and for its duration makes each Crusader Strike grant 3 holy power instead of 1. Rotation during Zealotry should be Crusader Strike > Templar’s Verdict > CS > TV and so on til the buff wears off. The issue comes with the normal standard of stacking cooldowns. Using AW and Zealotry at the same time would mean buffed CS and TV along with the HoW, but you’ll be doing less of everything during that time. If you follow the CS > TV rotation during Zealotry, you’ll miss precious extra HoW hits, though if you do HoW on cool down like you should, you wont get as many CS > TV combinations off during the time.

I haven’t seen enough data into this to say definitively which is the right way to go. Personally, I open with AW and have a rotation something like HoW > CS > Judge > HoW > CS > TV > HoW, depending on Holy Power generation. HoW on cooldown, only delaying it if I have a Mastery proc for TV or full HP for TV. Immediately after my AW buff ends, I use Zealotry and am able to maintain very high DPS for the duration of both of my big cooldowns. On Toravon I was only able to use Zealotry once this way while getting 2 Avenging Wrath off. During a slightly longer fight I’d probably be able to get two of each even with this method.