4.01 retribution paladin impressions

Patch 4.01 has been up for a while and I'm sure most retribution paladin lovers have taken their character for a spin or two. Nonetheless, here are some impressions from a layman's perspective. For those not familiar, I only play in 5-man heroics and never do raids.

I specced my post-4.01 paladin as follows: 3/2/31. It's not the most efficient build by far, just something I came up with. I'm not even 100% sure about the glyphs but they seem ok to me.

So far I've only had the chance to try out the new rotation on a training dummy and I ran a single heroic which happened to be Pit of Saron. Let me get one thing out of the way. I've heard many people say that ret has been nerfed to the ground. Well, unfortunately I didn't have my dps meter during that heroic, but I've never seen bigger hits from my paladin before.

I'm wearing the same equipment I was wearing before the patch. Yes, the stats have changed some, but overall they're in similar amounts. I was critting regularly for over 10K and once I critted for over 20K. That never happened before 4.01. Never. The most I crit was around 6K-ish. So my perception is that my damage had got a huge boost.

However - and that's a big however - when I asked if anyone had a damage meter, someone told me I was 3rd. Barf. Before 4.01 I was frequently top dps or in the top 2. So I guess my post-4.01 dps did suck.

As I said, unfortunately I only got the chance to run a single heroic ever since. I'm having too much fun leveling my mage to make time for the paladin.

In regards to the new rotation and mechanics, I kind of dig them. Holy Power (HP) is an interesting concept but it does make the paladin feel somewhat like a rogue with 3 combo points. What pisses me the most is the fact that I constantly have to stare at the top left of the screen in order to catch all 3 stacks of HP. There's very little visual cue to signify that 3 stacks are up.

I like the new Templar's Verdict and also Word of Glory. I've heard people complaining that Word of Glory is severely underpowered but again, I feel the opposite. At 3 stacks of HP it heals me for over 6K, which I feel is a decent amount considering ret is not a healing spec. But what do I know?

The 31st point, Zealotry, seemed lackluster but now since it doesn't consume the stacks of HP anymore it is slightly better.

Unfortunately Divine Storm seems to have been rendered useless. I didn't notice any noteworthy numbers coming from this ability and I've been trying to use it whenever there were more than 2 mobs. I shouldn't have picked it up in retrospect.

I definitely need to run a few more heroics before I can make up my mind on the new retribution paladin but tentatively I would say that I like it. There are a few things that need to be fixed but I think Blizzard is moving in the right direction with paladins. But don't take my word for it. I'm just an amateur.

Very nice changes to retribution paladins in patch 4.01

Well, if you love retribution paladins and haven't yet seen this article from WoW Insider, now's your chance. I've been keeping up with Cataclysm changes, of course, but this is a very nice write-up of how the new paladin resource, Holy Power, is supposed to work.

I have to say I'm excited. There are some new spells in there which will make rotations more interesting and also give us more options depending on the fight. Patch 4.01 should hit in a couple of weeks or so and this will give everyone the opportunity to try out the new talents and mechanics before Cataclysm. Hopefully there's enough time to get used to them.

Speaking of Cataclysm, I think I'm gonna start yet another paladin on a Horde server just to level up with the new system. It's gonna be a Tauren paladin and I'm gonna spec him retribution/holy. I've long been curious as to how holy paladin healing works.

Retribution changes are looking good so far but I can't say the same about other classes that I play. Healing in particular has me worried. But that's a subject for another post.

I'm rocking a Quel'Delar and I'm loving it

A long time ago I was expressing my wish to acquire a Battered Hilt for a Quel'delar for my hunter. It proved to be a pipe dream because I stopped playing the hunter and instead found new love in my retribution paladin.

After running a ton of heroics and realizing that my dps sucked in comparison to raid-equipped players, I endeavored to improve my gear.

One day, a couple of weeks ago, I spotted a Battered Hilt in the auction house for only 6500 gold. I only hesitated 2 seconds before I bought it. On my server the hilt goes for at least 7000 gold. In fact I've only seen it once for about 7500 but most often these days it hovers around 8-9K. It follows that 6500 is a good price. After spending 20K for my tanking gear I figured 6500 was chump change.

And so I embarked upon a quest of epic proportions which culminated in Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. I won't describe the chain itself because you can follow it starting here. It's a fairly long quest and the initial chain is followed by about 2-3 more chains. There's a lot of running around involved but the hardest part is running the 3 Icecrown instances which are the hardest 5-mans in Wrath of the Lich King.

What I find a bit weird about this chain is that it requires you to run the instances in this order: Pit of Saron > Forge of Souls > Halls of Reflection. This means that if you've never completed Forge of Souls before, you'll have to run that one first, in order to unlock Pit of Saron.

You don't have to finish Pit of Saron (unless you've never finished it before) because you can complete the required part of the quest after the first boss. Just use his hammer to smelt the saronite. Oh but wait, you'll probably still need to kill Ick and Krick because likely you won't have enough saronite and there's more of it around these two guys. In the end you should stick around and finish the dungeon with the rest of the group because that's the nice thing to do. If you're dps, I guess you can get away with dropping group. I went as tank and would have felt like a dick to abandon the group.

By the way, the whole chain can be completed on normal and I recommend it because it's easier.

In Forge of Souls you have to get to the end and kill the final boss and then use the forge behind him.

In Halls of Reflection you just need to get inside the instance whereupon the quest item (the unfinished weapon) jumps from your inventory and attacks. You'll have to defeat the blade and then loot it. The ghost of Uther the Lightbringer will be present and you can trick the blade to attack him instead, and he will kill it for you. The only problem is that likely you won't be doing enough damage to get credit for the quest. I attempted this about 5 times on my own before I gave up and found a group. A group is the easiest way to complete this quest because the blade hits very hard when it does a whirlwind attack.

Now that the hard part is over you'll have to run around some more, including a trip inside a phased version of the Sunwell.

After all this I found myself with Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. At ilvl 251 it's simply the most powerful weapon I could have obtained outside of raids. I enchanted it with Berserking, of course.

Shortly thereafter I also upgraded my craptastic trinkets to a Darkmoon Card: Death and a Darkmoon Card: Greatness. The new weapon + enchant + 2 new trinkets gave me over 1000 dps extra.

Along with a few other upgrades, I'm now frequently top dps in most random instances. According to the dps meter I do in excess of 4K dps. I really love seeing those big numbers roll. A couple of nights ago, however, I was shamed by a particular random run in Culling of Stratholme. I ended up as the 5th member in a guild run. The other 4 were guildies and it was obvious they were uber-geared by the way they devastated that instance. Up until then I had no idea Culling of Stratholme could be run in less than 10 minutes. Not one of these guys did less than twice my dps. I could barely hit 2 spells in my rotation and the mobs would be dead.

All this effort and gold spent for a cool weapon and two levels later, at 82, it will all be for naught. One of the quests in Cataclysm awards a blue weapon that's leagues better than even today's legendary Shadowmourne. BTW, the DK tank in the Stratholme run I mentioned previously was rocking a Shadowmourne. This new Cataclysm weapon is ilvl 305 and it's called the Axe of Earthly Sundering. The stats on it are amazing and I can't help but ask myself what stats will epic weapons have.

Here's a shot of my paladin sporting his new weapon.

A little RAWR-xperiment

So I just discovered RAWR, which is to say I just discovered hot water. In case you don't know what RAWR is, it's an amazing program that you can install on your computer and which allows you to import your character from the WoW armory, including their gear and talents and then calculates a million fascinating statistics for you.

You can download RAWR here.

I read about RAWR on some random site and I decided to give it a try because I wanted to see what exactly is my retribution paladin's DPS and how I can optimize it. Actually RAWR also has this really cool feature where you can specify a rotation and find out how efficient that rotation is. You can change spells in a rotation and it updates the DPS in real time.

Sure enough, I soon discovered that my rotation was bad and quickly reordered my priorities such that now (hopefully) it is optimal. Now of course, I realize that in the case of retribution paladins we can't really talk about a "rotation" per se but rather a system of priorities.

My old "rotation" was something like this:

Crusader Strike > Divine Storm > Judge > etc
My new one is this:

Judge > Crusader Strike > Divine Storm > etc

Of course, at any point insert Hammer of Wrath > Exorcism if the first becomes available and if Art of War procs for the second.

Here's a screenshot of the rotation portion of RAWR, along with some DPS stats.


As you can see, my DPS at the time this screenshot was 3380 but with the new rotation. My old rotation, although not terrible, would have given only 3234 DPS.

I also discovered that Seal of Command is much better than Seal of Vengeance (or Corruption) when fighting 2 or more mobs, which is always the case in heroics. Since I was using SoC anyway, I'm relieved that I'm doing at least something right.

I won't go into further detail regarding RAWR but I urge anyone interested in optimizing their character, whatever class and spec it may be, to give it a try. It is a very complex program but I managed to figure out the things that were of interest to me fairly quickly.

As I write this my DPS has gone up to 3657 (according to RAWR) due to some upgrades. My biggest problem is still expertise as I only have 7 (or 35 rating). For this reason I'm enchanting and gemming for expertise on my future gear.

Quoting from wowwiki, "DPS will need a total of 6.5%, or 26 expertise, or 213 expertise rating, to avoid Dodges on yellow attacks against a raid boss." So I still have a ways to go but since I'm not fighting raid bosses I can stay a bit lower and I should be fine.

I've been running heroics like crazy with my retribution spec so I could get emblems to gear my protection spec. Now I've completed my last piece of the puzzle and in theory I should be ready to run heroics on my protection paladin. I'm holding back though. Tanking is not as easy as DPS-ing and I need more experience under my belt.

My strategy these days is to run the daily heroic as retribution and then run a normal (non-heroic) random as protection. So far the worst dungeon I've tanked (on normal) has been Pit of Saron (twice). I actually tanked the second Pit today and I did much better than the first time.

On the other hand retribution is so much fun that I've decided to get my dude some DPS gear from Triumph Emblems as well. I'm referring to the Turalyon set. I've already got the gloves and I'm working on the other pieces. I've also set my eyes on a nice libram.

One more observation about DPS. I've noticed that it varies from dungeon to dungeon. In some instances my DPS is top-notch, around its theoretical maximum. In others it is dismal. One example of crappy DPS is The Culling of Stratholme. And it's not just me. Looking at the DPS meter, it seems that everyone is performing poorly there. I don't understand why. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this.

Now I'm off to run some more heroics.

Retribution paladin rocks in 3.3.5

I've talked briefly about retribution paladins in previous posts and the gist of it was that I greatly enjoyed my ret pally in Burning Crusade, after abandoning him in classic WoW with an indeterminate spec. I'll be damned if I remember what my first spec looked like. All I know is that back then I didn't quite grasp the concepts of tank-healer-dps and as a paladin I would assume all 3 roles in 5-man dungeons.

In Burning Crusade they changed retribution a lot and the spec finally became viable for PvE. That's when I specced right into retribution and leveled my paladin to 70. From what I remember, those were fun times. I really enjoyed playing him and leveling was very quick.

The Wrath of the Lich King came and paladins had a brief period when they outshone every other class by being overpowered. During those times I leveled to about 77 as paladin and then got the notion to try as protection from there on. This also coincided with some retribution nerfs during which the change which pissed me the most occured: they added a cast timer to Exorcism. I was pissed because I always used Exorcism as a ranged opener. At that point I imagined that most likely I won't be playing my paladin as retribution again.

More recently I decided to get my prot paladin the best gear money can buy so he could start tanking heroics. The problem was that there were pieces of equipment that simply couldn't be bought or crafted so I had to run heroics in order to get emblems so I could finish equipping him so he could run more heroics. I tried some regular (non-heroic) dungeons and even though with the new gear my paladin's stats were pretty good, I didn't feel confident enough to run heroics. So I got this idea of running heroics as retribution instead.

Having decided to give retribution another try, I ended up being pleasantly surprised at how ret plays. My gear was really crappy, most of it being from leveling quests. However, since the dungeon finder allowed me to run heroics, I didn't hesitate to jump right in.

For the past week or so I've been running heroics as a retribution paladin and I'm loving it. My gear has jumped from crappy to passable and my damage from an abysmal 900 dps to a more respectable 2-2.3K. All the new gear came from drops and a few dungeon quests that I completed. I enchanted some of it (my paladin is an enchanter) but haven't gemmed it because I don't have any sockets on this shiny new gear. One piece of gear that I bought with Champion's Seals was Claymore of the Prophet which is really cheap for a ilvl 200 weapon. I didn't bother buying something like Titansteel Destroyer because I figured my stint as ret would be brief.

Little did I imagine that I would enjoy it so much. Ret pallys are beasts! Last night for example I ran a heroic (one of the Utgardes, forget which) and I was top DPS at 2.3K average. I realize that I'm still doing crappy damage relative to raid geared players but still, at least now I'm pulling my weight.

What I like most about ret is The Art of War. This little baby procs off each and every melee crit (including judgements, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm) and since with my crappy gear I have about 26% unbuffed crit, you can imagine it procs a lot, meaning instant Exorcisms or a quick heal. In fact I use Flash Heal on myself quite often during fights because I take plenty of damage as melee dps. I also use it occasionally on some wounded team member if needed or if my Exorcism is on cooldown. Yeah, I miss a GCD but there's more to a paladin than just performing his primary function.

Ret is also amazing because there are no mana problems are long as you judge whenever the cooldown is up.

Stats

Here are some quick stats. I won't detail my gear because it is perpetually changing, almost on a daily basis. I also won't talk about enchants or gems because my pieces of gear are not keepers just yet.

Health: 15,200
Attack Power: 3041 with Blessing of Might.
Hit: 224 = 6.83% (used to be more before some gear changes but >6% should be enough for heroics)
Crit: 27.5%
Expertise rating: 3 = 0.75%. Ouch!

As you can see, my biggest problem is expertise and it is actually palpable because I've had numerous mobs dodge or parry my attacks. Now of course, I try to attack from behind so parries shouldn't be a problem but still, my expertise is terrible and needs fixing. I just don't have any gear with expertise on it and the meager amount that I have comes from my racial (humans + swords).

Talents

As I write this we are in patch 3.3.5, probably the last patch before Cataclysm. Here's what my spec looks like:

6/10/55

If you don't like it, I don't care. What I love about retribution is that you can easily pick all the talents you need from the ret tree, a few essential ones from the prot tree and still have spare points to put wherever you please.

Retribution in Cataclysm

From what I've seen so far, ret pallys will change a lot in Cataclysm but in a good way. There's a new thing called Holy Power that procs whenever we deal damage and then we can unleash it (currently stacks 3 times) for various effects. It sounds all good and I can't wait to try the new and improved ret paladin.

Conclusion

What more can I say? In patch 3.3.5, as we currently stand, retribution paladins are kick-ass. There are so many things to like about the spec: massive damage, simple priority-based rotation, a cool proc that allows you to either heal yourself or deal additional damage and in general plenty of survivability, especially when leveling.

Don't take my word for it though since I'm not such a big expert. Take one out yourself for a test drive but don't be surprised if you'll start cheating on your other characters.