The joys of Ret and the beauty of multiple gear setsFollow

I've always been a chronic respeccer - it's fun and for the price of 4.5 dailies, you get to play a different level 70 paladin every day if you want. I levelled ret all my paladin life and was playing ret pretty well while doing quite a few Karazhan raids and heroic runs. But over the last two months I decided to give the other disciplines a good go-at, and in the mean time build up my other two gear sets. After those two months, I dusted off my good ol' ret set and put the pew pew talents back in play... and boy is it nice to be back in Ret!

Anyway, through my two months of talent waffling, here are my humble findings:

1) Paladins are true hybrids - owning three good sets of gear (holy, prot and ret) is the bare minimum for any paladin. My ret set is my best, but I have fairly decent prot (libram of repetence, uncrittable, 90% avoidance) and holy (+1300 healing) sets as well. I'll be working to get em all updated all the time.

2) Respeccing is awesome. Don't commit to just one discipline. Learn em all. You'll never know when each one is needed for a raid and don't be so proud as to say you won't respec.

3) Retribution is just plain fun. After weeks and weeks of yawning through long, drawn-out AOE kills (prot), or staring at healbot all instance long (holy), it is just plain good old-fashioned fun to see BIG FREAKIN NUMBERS when you beat down on something.

Anyway, I respect all the other disciplines and I will gladly switch to any of em at any time, but in my book, Ret still rules in the fun-to-play category!

Indeed, whats your AP, Crit, are you hit capped, are you expertese capped, and what dps can you do?

I did some number crunching earlier and theorised that I could do about 800 dps in my mish mash of a retri set, which has made me want to give it a proper go because thats better than some dedicated dps in my guild......

Ret is fun....and sometimes neccessary. im coming off of 2 months straight of Prot. outsde of MTing, Prot is a tough life. as Ret i can chew through QD dailies, keep my 5v5 above 1500, and still crank out #2-3 on Gruul and Mags.

however, Ret pallies face a huge wall. most of my raiding gear comes from pvp. this is the best Ret pally gear before T5 content(and even that isnt a significant upgrade). thus, i cant have a 'pvp set' and a 'pve set' like every class should(save a few accessories pieces). this creates a problem for a raider/pvper. do i gem/enchant for raiding or for arena? i estimate that i lose about 200AP as well as some other melee stats in exchange for pvp survivability(resil, stam, stun resist).



800dps is unlikely. www.maxdps.com

Of course you didn't. I just wanted to compare crit sizes.




Edited, Apr 29th 2008 11:11am by Poldaran

Well... white damage between 700 to 1000 per swing, all yellow damage is generally 1000+ per hit, frequently cresting 2500 per hit. Good times.

ROFL. Sorry, that got me thinking about that scene from "Superbad".

Anyway, that post by SillyGnomeMage shows a pally dishing out 800+ DPS. Looks legit too. I need to go check out his armory. Good stuff.

But in any case, I'm not starting another duke-em-out thread on ret pallies being viable or leet or whatever. I'm saying Ret pallies are wicked fun to play. I'll leave the viability debate to everyone else. I honestly don't care =D

Yup, cuz the OP is in full T6 with a full support group and on Brutallus. Oh wait...

Edited, Apr 29th 2008 3:52pm by lsfreak

I've got plenty of parses of our ret pally breaking 1000dps. Anyone who says ret can't dps needs to take their head out of their ***. Whether they can keep up with other DPS, though, is another question. Ours does what we bring him for, doesn't top the charts but doesn't do poorly either.

1000 dps, zomg!

Bodhi, not everyone is in a bum rush to experiance everything. Not all guilds are "ZOMG GOGOGOGOGOGO", some re more relaxed, mine lets us spec how we want, we just run Kara, we are gearing up our second group for Grulls, eventually ZA, etc, etc.


I don't care if we don't complete ZA by WotLK. We have fun.

Once again...
MaxDPS.com is trash. Get a spreadsheet.

I took your advice and pulled a spreadsheet off Elitist Jerks, it seems pretty thorough. In my current gear it spits out a figure of 840, this is fully raid buffed, but I checked off Battle shout, Trueshot Aura, Leader of the Pack and Windfury, i'd hope to get at least one or two of them in a raid situation.

Before you jump on me for having t5 and t6 bits, I crunched the numbers again with full S1 and Honour Gear, the figure came out at 814, which a bit low, partly because its not hit capped.

Finally I built the best gear set I could think of using Honour Gear and pre raid equipment, which came out at 835 (as you can see despite some t5 and even t6 bits, my blues really hurt me, one of them is lvl 62!)

With battle shout and leader of the pack (which I would expect both of in a 25 man raid) these figures come out at 966, 911 and 933.

So a well played retri pally can hold its own in a 25 man raid context right from the go, there is a lot of stigma attatched to the spec thanks to retn00bs.

These are only thoerycraft figures, obviously I wouldn't hit those numbers, but 966 would have placed me 9th on our recent najentus kill (which is about as close to a "stand there and hit it" boss as I have stats for), bear in mind I would have significantly better gear if I retri was my primary spec, so around about 1000 dps would be doable.

Edited, May 2nd 2008 9:04pm by Tinyknight