Ret DPSFollow

Is Ret DPS as bad as I've been reading?

From what I've been reading, Ret Paladins put out close, but not quite the DPS as most other classes, but they have to sacrifice a lot of their own HP to do so, because of Seal of Martyr/Blood.

This makes me ask a question, though:

What incentives do any group have, to actually want a Ret Paladin, when any other class can do the same thing, without the increased burden upon the healers to keep the stupid Ret Paladin alive who keeps hurting him/herself just to do "meh" DPS that anyone else could do?

How good are Ret Paladins' DPS? Is it worth considering this for a dual-spec, or are we just doomed to nothing but Tank or Heal in dungeons/raids?

The ret paladin in my guild is the top melee dps and is only behind one mage and one shaman in overall dps. The self damage is pretty negligible in a raid situation. When you have Circle of Healing, Glyph of Holy Light, Chain Healing and a Druids AoE heals firing off, the 2k damage he does to himself is pretty negligible.
Not to mention the fact that you need a ret paladin if you are wanting to get all 4 Blessings, and the Replenishment effect is always nice, because it isnt a guarantee from other classes but a Paladin has it up 100% of the time from the first pull.

i'm curious where you even get this question anymore. back in BC it would have been understandable. ret was, in general, middle to low end dps. some of us managed to still be useful via our utility, but at bst one ret pally per raid was needed for improved BoM, 3% increased raid damage and 3% increased crit on the judged target and to keep up the judgements of any holy pallies.

we bring all of that still (except keeping up judgements) plus many new raid utility abiities that a couple others already mentioned. in addition to our top notch raid utility, our dps is only barely behind the "top" dps classes if even at all. does our top dps seal hurt us? yes. are we therefore a drain on the healers? hardly. any WWS report will show you that the healing we do through Divine Storm (which now hits harder for more heals) and Judgement of Light far outweighs the recoil damage. in the heavy AoE damage fights in Ulduar this is especially useful. Raid buffed my JoL is healing for between 700-1k heals depending on trinket and other members procs. That's that mu less healing the healers have to do and can potentially make the difference between dying and lasting till the healers top the tank off and can get to you.


so, whoever is telling you that ret isn't worth bringing to a raid isn't someone to pay attention to. they clearly don't understand Ret mechanics and how amazingly useful we are in Ulduar. My question is, "how can you NOT want a ret pally in your raid?"

Rets only trail behind Mages and Locks in my guild on boss encounters. New Seal of Blood is barely a hindrance at all.

With as much raid damage as exists in Ulduar, guilds would be crazy not to take a ret paladin. I'm not sure why this is news to so many people, but by saying that the rets JoL is the largest, we're talking 2-3 TIMES what a holy gets. In high end Naxx gear and a touch of Ulduar gear, my JoL will heal people for 800-1100 PER TICK (depending on what AP/STR procs I have at any given moment). Every attack by everyone in the raid heals that much for free, basically. Last night on Mimiron, i was the #2 healer in the raid while still making 9th DPS, with my gear below that on average of much of the rest of the group (thats second in actual heals, not counting the overheals which were twice the actual due to the spam nature of JoL). Rets JoL is like getting a free raid healer.

And that JoL is on top of the aofrementioned buffs which all together add something like 7-8% damage to the raid.

I agree Goggy, Paladins have to be special to be the top DPS, but they can still put out pretty hefty dps, and the buffs that they bring to the raid more than makes up for it.
Blessings, Damage and Haste from Auras, Resist auras are useful for bosses, Replenishment and the humour value of tier 7 shoulders.

with regard to a new player, using the top 100 speed runs to illustrate the effectiveness of Ret in raid is horribly misleading. in a min-max raid situation, having only 1 Ret pally wearing BiS gear is ideal. but for the other 95% of us, Ret rules! bring 25 of em.

first of all, to those who say you go OOM fast without JoW, I disagree. a few things on that:

the mana return from JoW has an 8 second internal cooldown. based on weapon speeds and global cooldowns you won't actually see it exactly at 8 seconds.
the mana returned is 2% of base mana which is less than 4000 which means you get 80 mana returned at best.
80 mana every 8 seconds (absolute best case scenario) is hardly game breaking.

your judgements have had the mana return increased to 25% of your base mana. this is actually a substantial amount. if you seriously are having mana issues use Glyph of Seal of Blood. that's what its there for. I have not had a fight in recent memory where I didn't have enough mana regen to continue through the entire fight and I have never needed the SoB glyph. I use every damage dealing ability I can as soon as they come off cooldown. i'm not conserving mana or even worrying abut it much other than to pop DP on cooldown. only time I even don't use consecrate is fights where it would be wasted (grobbulus, hodir, etc) due to constant kiting the boss. if mana is hard for you to manage warriors, rogues, feral (cat)druids and DK's may be better for you... just saying... oh, and that's despite the fact that I never judge wisdom. my JoL is too beneficial in the highly aoe damage intensive fights in ulduar and even many fights in Naxx where dps take damage. l2managemana or reroll but don't cry about your own inability to use the tools blizz gives us please.



this really is the issue at hand. unless you're a lore nerd (i'm a math nerd, some like lore, to each their own lol) you don't really care how you do damage as long as its competitive and people want to bring you to raids and maybe it should be interactive enough to be fun. my seals and judgements hitting me back doesn't directly affect my dps or the fun factor as long as it isn't so noticeable as to cause me to be left behind while my guild raids. I will admit in advance as a Guild Leader who's mains are a Ret Pally and a Holy/Prot Pally i'm a little biased and perhaps out of the loop on what raid leaders are looking for. my guild is not the top guild - we've only cleared as far as Hodir so far. however, I have never had a complaint from healers about how hard I am to keep up. i've actually heard healers complain often about how OP it is that I can compete with them in effective healing done without casting a single heal. additionally, even though i'm neither the most geared (8th best geared dps in my guild atm) nor the most skilled, I regularly top damage meters. not every fight, but beating me in dps is worthy of gloating on vent in my guild. the ones that sometimes manage this depending on the fight are 2 of our locks, our Spriest and a rogue. some of our hunters are also right there with me. our mages seem to be feeling the effects of nerfs although I haven't looked into what those are. do I think I'm proof that ret is the best dps spec in the game? hardly. I do think that ret pallies in general in normal raiding guilds are performing well. is there a reason to bring Ret Pallies other than aura's and blessings you ask? yes, and that is our dps. so, the real crux of the issue being raid viability, if you need help doing better dps, or managing mana better, or whatever the case may be, lets address those issues. I am not the best Ret here. i'm merely the most Verbose. ask for some help in those areas and i'm sure someone can help. heck, if you haven't got the help you need here i'd even be willing to help people over vent. I enjoy my class and want to see it succeed that much :)



ret aura is a thing of the past. if there's no prot pally, I use Devo aura usually. if there is a prot pally, I let him use that and I use ret aura, concentration aura, or the resistance auras depending on the type of fight. ret aura itself is almost worthless now that the 3% damage and haste buffs are active no matter what aura we have on. but, yes, the haste and damage buffs are very much worth bringing a ret. so is replenishment and JoL and DS heals, and blessings, and dps.

side note, decided to look your toon up. I noticed you're in a small guild with mostly less geared people. i'm assuming that you are pugging since none of them have any of your raid achievements. you seem to have cleared 25 naxx several times since you have many ilvl 213 items and 93 EoV. you clearly have been in both 10 and 25 man ulduar. i'm just wondering, are you really having a hard time getting in raids? it seems you're doing very well for yourself despite being in a more casual guild. you logged in your fishing pole, but your gear looks to be nearly on par with mine, so i'd guess you're doing at minimum 3.5k dps on average, right? is that not enough to be desireable? I was going to try to give you some gear tips, but you seem to be doing pretty well in that area. just keep in mind the people that you hear about doing 4-5k dps are fully BiS geared (or were till ulduar came out). at 3.5k dps (which is an rough average for your gear level - if you're higher great, if you're much lower we can work on that) you should be very competitive with 95% of the people you run into unless your server is a super hardcore raiding server. those other 5% are the people that out-gear you or are more skilled.

anyway, if the real issue behind the recoil is raid viability, like I think it is, I hope i've answered it a little. if I didn't answer that let me know. if the real issue to you is recoil regardless of raid viability, then I can redo my math for the current nerfed recoil and increased damage (and therefore heals) of Divine Storm.

hope this helped, and if not, let me know what I didn't answer clearly enough (or at all).

......... to be honest, if they're not in BiS gear, then you wouldn't really expect them to be top dps would you? if ret pallies without BiS gear were worth bringing to those top 100 speed runs, don't you think that says even more about the value of ret pallies?

but yes, for min/max'ing a raid 1 ret pally is ideal. more is only good once you have all the buffs from all classes and you are just looking for dps and at that point the dps they do is all the merit they bring. but i would say even at that point, their dps is competitive and most ret pallies will be brought purely on the merit of their dps depending on the gear and skill compared to the other choices.

recoil is kinda moot nowadays. if you kill yourself from recoil then you were already dead anyways(pvp not withstanding). if recoil were such an awful effect then it makes me wonder why the only toon that i can solo Threat From Above is my Ret pally.

Yea, Vs Vezax due to the nature of the fight (his aura preventing all mana restoration) blizzard allowed JotW and that Enh Shammy thing, name slips my mind, and i think Aspect of the viper to work so that those classes could competitively dps with the rest of them. But in order to prevent ret pallies from spamming ppl with heals from Art of War, when under the effect of Vezax's aura the Mana Return from JotW still works, but you get a debuff on you that reduces your healing done for X seconds by a LARGE amount so that you cant help heal. I beleive Enh shammies get the same debuff, but we didnt have one present so i cant be certain.

I love discussing ret!

Although I think I'm being taken slightly the wrong way. I don't think ret is prohibitive in selecting players for raids, but you guys surely must use blood/martyr for maximising DPS in fights, and in the past I have been asked by RL's to switch to command. This has happened on two occasions, which is why I was agreeing with the OP.

With the recommended talent build from EJ now not including command, this is not an option for me now. I know it's not set in stone and I could take it if I wanted too.

Unless we're doing something completely different in raids or it is the effect of JoL, I do find that the recoil from blood/martyr hits me hard, especially on crits. I've tried it on the boss dummy and had DBM 'Low Health' in a very short space of time, bearing in mind the dummy isn't AOE'ing IMHO it is a problem. But this is old territory and Blizzard clearly see this as a mechanic that they want.

I am interested in off-setting the recoil by judging light instead of wisdom though. To be honest that's my lack of knowledge as I just always judged wisdom for the mana return to enable 100% rotation an no OOM's, but I agree 2% return on base is no great shakes and JotW should cater for mana anyway.

Oh god yes. Sorry to bring up WWS again, but check out some 'Highest Hit' stats for the palas.