Why Lawl Ret?Follow

The meh-ness of Retribution Paladins is not as apparent in 5-mans and lower bracket Arenas. It used to be apparent there too, but a couple of patches have made them be able to keep up a little bit more.

It becomes much more apparent when you start raiding. A Ret Paladin does not bring much utility to a raid. 2% more damage to the people in their group and judgement refreshes, while nice, is not necessary. Dil puts it the best when talking about this saying that a raid leader will never say "Wow, that was a tough encounter, we tried our best but we couldn't do that. If ONLY we had a Ret paladin, we might have tipped the scales in our favor and win." (I'm paraphrasing but that's the gyst of it.)


And as far as high-bracket arena goes, they have been getting a little better in 2v2 and 3v3 as a nice counter to resto-druids, but that's kind of it. They have a drainable power supply, which is really hard to get back. They have very limited CC options, with cooldowns, that anyone with the PvP trinket can nullify at least one of them. And they have the kitability factor. A warrior can intercept, a rogue can sprint, a shaman can shock and drop totems, the Paladin's only method of getting to an enemy is to run as fast as his legs can carry him with no means of slowing down the enemy except for the measures I brought up earlier. A lot of damage is lost in their pursuit.

Not to say that there aren't high-rating Retribution Paladins. It just takes more skill than most of us possess or are willing to admit. As Bodh put it "The difference between a good ret and a meh ret in Arenas is 0.5 seconds." The good ret will cleanse, put out BoFs, BoPs, heals, etc.. 0.5 seconds faster than the other ret and it makes a huge difference. (Again, paraphrasing but that was pretty close to what he said)

As for BGs.... no one cares about those.

as many know i'm terribly biased towards ret. started kara last night and was first in overall damage done by quite a bit. individual fights showed a little bit of what many have been saying about ret, and i can see that my current strategy will really only work here in kara and heroics. on trash fights i'm way ahead of everyone. on the bosses i found i ran out of mana despite being in the group with a shaman and a shadow priest. i had probaby 20-30 seconds on each boss where i had to rely purely on SoC procs and before my mana pot was ready again. i can imagine on bosses beyond Kara this mana and mana regen deficiency will be worse. i'll be working on this asap.

so can ret do well? for sure. last week i went to kara with a guild that was had kara on farm... i ended up 3rd on the charts. not top maybe, but easily competitive with people with superior gear. helped my healing and tanking sets (nothing dropped for a plate dps) a little since noone else really needed anything. so viable? absolutely.

desireable for raids? well as i was putting my guilds raid group together this week the important parts were tanks, healers at least on priest (for shackle and fort) and one hunter (for trap). needed a mage for int (pally tank and healer) and after that, the remaining 3 spots (including mine) were generically for DPS. in the list of necessary persons ret didn't even make MY list.

i think capjack and dilbert make a good point. ret can compete in dps, but has no real utility that the pally tank and healer. we can still find a spot, but are competeing with all the other long established dps classes for maybe 3 remaining raid spots. not an easy competition since many are still biased against ret and there are more sucky ret players than any other spec/class except maybe hunter...

i have a friend (former guildee who still likes to help us) in the guild i went with last week which gave me the opportunity to prove myself to them (got invited by their raid leader to go with them agan but i wanted to try a guild run again). if you aren't in an open--minded guild or have friends to vouch for you, being ret could be very rough. it can take time to prove you aren't the 90% of rets that are behind their tanks in dps....

yeah, regulars and 5mans i only bring a few mana pots and then only for emergency bad pulls or the like. never use them except bosses in heroics and kara. i can go for several trash pulls in heroics and kara before i even need to drink. bosses in heroics i'll use a pot but that will be enough to last and i won't end the fight oom. kara bosses i tend to use 2 and the cooldown is just a little to long... i started having our pally tank judge wisdom (he was still using jotc cause he didn't realize i was judging that) and it was helping quite a bit. gonna work on better mana regen though. i hate watching other dps'ers catch up to me on the bosses just cause i ran out of mana...

i hate you with a passion ruenbahamut..... lol. yeah, belfs have it made on both dps and mana regen with seal of blood... its the one thing about ret i feel is unfair.... lol. oh well. i'll continue managing with the tools given to my by blizzard... and hating all belf rets... ;)



just kidding of course.


i am jealous though...

thats why im a female =P

thats why i never type /silly or /flirt . . actually, i dont recall ever finding out what those look like. i also dont /dance either.

but you have to give them credit (male Belfs i mean), their laugh is pretty damn diabolical.

even though some gear doesnt look all that great on their thinner frames. i love their proud posture, or is it vain. either way. i like it.

Edited, Mar 7th 2008 2:55pm by RuenBahamut

[quote=CapJack of the Seven Seas]love sob for retlawling around. wish i had sov for tanking/quote]

Our prot pally will not use SoV. Initial aggro is slow, missed procs mess up your ability to hold aggro, and there is not a large enough difference between it and JoR to justify the shortcomings.

Seems like they are slowly building up ret since patch 2.3 as well as those following. IN 2.4

I think they are preparing for the DK with there a new tank class and DPS, now groups have three alternatives for DPS and Tanking in Ret, Fury and blood(or whatever the dps tree is for DKs and prot, prot, and whatever the equivalent will be for DKs

So I think they will become more and more viable, particularly as the new XP approaches, and also the 51 point talents and 10 additional talent slots available. Which is down the road of course, but I think they are progressively moving in that direction. Just lie Shadow for priests had not been a great alternative.

Oh, and, uh... Lawl Ret and all that. Sorry guys, your glory stories are cute and all, but until I see a Ret Pally do better than slightly more damage than the tank... I'm going to have to continue to scorn them.

We lawl ret because we have always lawled ret. In the same way that no matter how awesome Blood Elves become some people simply will not play them, no matter how awesome they make ret, some people simply cannot rid themselves of the thought that it's not the job a paladin is supposed to do.

They also still kinda suck, it's not all just prejudice. I mean, a bunch of my friends set up a guild, and one is a die-hard retadin. They're currently in dire need of a few high-level healers (they literally don't have enough to run Kara regularly) and despite the fact that they have oodles of rogues and mages, my friend refuses to respec holy. He's actually willing to stop everyone else from getting to run Kara because he thinks holy is boring.

That's kind of why I think ret is irresponsible. It's not horrible any more, it's fun to PvP with and you can jack-*** about with a 2hander, but when it gets to the point where you're simply performing your job badly and refuse to do it better, everyone else gets screwed over. You can afford to be irresponsible if, in the aforementioned example, you have druids falling out your ******** and the raid just can't take any more healers or tanks. But that doesn't hold up forever.

Besides, I think prot is fun. I wouldn't respec ret now even if they suddenly became Jesus in a tin can.

Ooo... fiesty.

I say Ret's are just above the tank in DPS because I consistently see them place just above the tank in DPS. That would be dead last as far as DPS goes, junior. It's not idle conjecture, and it's certainly not jealousy (lawl); it's real in-game observation through experience. Are they bad Ret Pallies? Absolutely, I have no doubt of it. Now, there are bad Warlocks, bad Rogues, bad everything else out there as well, but at least I still see the good ones every once in a while. Since TBC released I still have yet to see a single Ret Pally do any kind of noteworthy DPS in PvE or PvP.

If I do ever see a Ret Pally blow past the rest of my raid like the second coming of DPS Jesus, as you seem to be quite at home believing yourself to be, then I will tip my hat to him. But I'm still waiting for it to happen.