Feedback on the retribution paladin rework

Classes Paladin
1

Hello!

This post is mainly made as a way to get mine and some prominent members (Augstakas, Huckleberrie…) of the retribution community’s thoughts about the retribution paladin rework out there to the devs, hopefully it gets read.

My name is Masky. I am a long-time retribution paladin main who has raided with the spec on and off at a decent level since Legion. Throughout the years I have done my utmost to minmax this spec to bring out the strengths of it. Historically this has been a careful execution of a burst window, either in the way of Crusade, or in more recent times talents like Final Reckoning and/or Execution Sentence. This has been a greatly enjoyable playstyle for me, and as I understand it many others, as it has been extremely rewarding to execute properly.

Like many others I was very excited for the retribution paladin rework as the spec had been suffering from some glaring faults for a very long time. I was excited to get a broader defensive toolkit and some much-needed QoL updates. But I was also very excited to see the direction blizzard would go with retribution paladin’s damage profile as it had been in an awkward state since the start of Dragonflight. Now that we’ve played with the rework for some time, I would like to give my opinion on what’s good about the rework, and what could be done better.

What’s good?

By far the biggest win for retribution after the rework is the defensive capability of the spec. The spec got a huge boost to its passive defensiveness and was given another great defensive cooldown to use. This makes the spec very enjoyable to play in difficult content as you can easily help your teammates out with Blessing of Sacrifice while staying healthy yourself, as well as just being a sturdy part of the team that doesn’t need too much help surviving. On top of this the spec was given some small QoL changes like a longer divine steed, and divine steed no longer being on the global cooldown. This makes retribution in general feel pretty good play, with a clearly defined weakness in snappy movement and forced displacement of your character.

What’s bad?

As I am a DPS player, my biggest concern with this rework is the new damage profile that retribution has been given. The spec does damage in 1-minute windows with the major cooldown Avenging Wrath (talented into Avenging Wrath: Might over Crusade to make it a 1-minute cooldown) and the talent Divine Toll (talented into divine resonance), combined with the 30 second cooldowns Execution Sentence and Wake of Ashes. This cooldown window is satisfying to play and quite fun. The problem I have with it is the lack of skill expression. The window is largely focused around performing your Execution Sentence window properly, with the end of Avenging Wrath being more of a filler part of your cooldowns. However, because the cooldown of Execution Sentence is 30 seconds it is tuned quite restrictive. Because of this, combined with the fact that you have have a smaller Execution Sentence window every 30 seconds that is very reliant on RNG for your holy power generation, the skill expression in the Execution Sentence windows is quite small. A well-performed Execution Sentence window and a poorly performed Execution Sentence window are on average very similar. Because retribution is a very simple spec at its core, this lack of meaning in the major cooldown windows makes retribution have a very low degree of skill expression. This can be backed up by statistics, for example with a box graph handily provided by Warcraftlogs.

Graph can be found HERE

As you can see, the box graph of retribution is very narrow. This means that the performance of the lower percentile and the upper percentile do not differ by much. This is a result of the 1-minute windows relying on a 30 second cooldown for their damage (as well as some other factors which I bring up later in the post).

With the rework, our abilities were homogenized into holy damage dealing abilities. They also increased the power of our generators. This resulted in the nerf to the scaling of our mastery as it now affected more abilities more heavily. This together with some new talents and the addition of our wings giving us critical chance stat instead of an increased chance for abilities to critically strike made direct damaging trinkets and effects much stronger for retribution than stat-increasing trinkets and effects. This has resulted in retribution preferring Versatility as a stat. Because of the nature of Versatility, it has very poor scaling with actual stat rating. This has made retribution scale quite poor, opting instead to use items from previous tier like the Eranog ring and the Onyx Annulet as they have strong direct-damage effects. All these direct-damaging effects gives retribution a very out of your control rng-heavy damage profile as you’re required to both proc the effect, as well as critically strike with it to perform well. This is quite unsatisfying to play as your performance varies drastically from pull to pull, entirely dependent on how lucky you got with rng-procs from items, some of which are from previous tiers.

Besides what I’ve presented here, retribution suffers from some uninteresting talent choices. Particularly the capstones Divine Arbiter and Searing Light, but also talents like Vanguard of Justice. Divine Arbiter and Searing Light are very boring talents, they provide no meaningful gameplay changes instead serving as just default damage increases depending on the content you’re doing. This leaves our capstones feeling entirely like a choice between Execution Sentence and Final Reckoning which is a very boring choice as Execution Sentence is practically useless in AOE scenarios. Vanguard of Justice is a cool talent, provided you have the resource generation to support it. Currently there is a strong retribution paladin build used when you do not have access to windfury totem that uses Crusading Strikes and Vanguard of Justice together, this leaves the player often sitting AFK for several seconds at a time waiting for resources to be able to play the game. This is obviously not an enjoyable playstyle. These troubles are mostly design problems with the spec tree itself, and as I am not a class designer I cannot provide any meaningful solution, only the things I find frustrating. This together with some nasty bugs (Execution Sentence damage not scaling with Versatility) has made the rework, while still stronger than before the rework, quite a disaster in terms of fun and agency over performance.

To fix some of these issues I suggest two simple solutions:

  • Buff the amount of damage contributed to Execution Sentence, make it into a 1-minute cooldown to match Final Reckoning and fix its bug with Versatility. Buffing Execution Sentence would make skill expression more pronounced as a well performed Execution Sentence would contribute much more to your damage on average than a poorly performed Execution Sentence would.
  • Revert the nerf to our mastery and tune us accordingly. Having our mastery as a strong stat that scales extremely well with stat rating would help us immensely to keep up as we get later into the expansion with better gear. This would also help us perform better in AOE which retribution is currently falling behind in.

Along with the above changes, I would love to see some changes to the problematic talents I mentioned to make them more fun and engaging.

Thank you for reading, if you have any thoughts about what I’ve written here I would love to hear them.

6 Likes
2

Only 2 abilities didnt do Holy dmg pre rework, Crusader strike and Blade of Justice. Only BoJ became Holy dmg and CS needs a talent and ill get to that later. Making these 2 attacks scale with mastery shouldnt have warranted the mastery nerf.

This i very much agree with but i think the bigger offenders are the talents prior those, Blades of light, Burning Crusade and Penitence.

BoL does only one thing for PvE… makes Crusader strike do holy dmg. For pvp its either bugged or its intended to be an inbuilt nerf so our “holy dmg” no longer bypasses BoP.

BC is just a 5% dmg buff on our AoE… Radiant dmg just sounds fancier.

And Penitence is just… there.

The capstones + the talents prior makes it look like they just added new wallpaper on a molding wall imo.

Btw

Avenging wrath is now a 1 min CD base… Might only adds 20% crit, nothing else.

3

Thank you!

I edited the post to better reflect my thoughts regarding the mastery nerf aswell as the line about Avenging Wrath: Might.

Regarding your thoughts on talents such as Blades of Light and Burning Crusade, I wholeheartedly agree. I could spend another 1000 words talking about how retribution is pigeonholed into picking specific talents for specific scenarios that essentially do nothing at all to change your gameplay. However to keep the post as concise as possible i decided to only bring up what i believe are the major offenders when it comes to actual design:

  • The capstone talents as i believe they should be held to a higher standard when it comes to gameplay changes.
  • Vanguard of Justice as it is essentially a must-pick talent because of a lack of other interesting options that presents a playstyle that slows down the spec, where you frequently spend many seconds completely afk because you have nothing to press.
4

I am frankly not a big fan of the ret rework.

It’s better in terms of defensives, but the gameplay is not that much better than before.

They removed some of the bloat like exorcism, although exo would have been nice if it replaced boj, took over it’s function with added benefit, but that’s basically what boj does now.

But they also removed a lot of cool stuff.

Seraphim was only a problem because it used holy power, remove that and it would have been fine. And no, seraphim is not a maintenance buff. It’s not like inquisition or slice and dice. And even if they were to remove the ability, why remove the seraphim proc on art of war? That was completely passive, but it was pretty nice as it added quite a bit of secondary stats, and haste is really cool.

Wake of ashes reset removal was bad. It was awesome from a rotational prospective. But muh variance… Shut up please.

Ironically the variance with the proc is worse with 35% than with 50%, because 50% is 1 in 2, you have a very high chance of proccing wake, 35% it’s still high, but not high enough to proc it super reliably, but high enough to potentially get back to back resets. In other words with 50% you usually get at least 1 reset, before the fight is over, in a short fight, with 35% there are many instances where you might not even get 1, but others when you get 2 or 3.

Instead we have talents that build on top of wake of ashes, and make it a burst burst button, but don’t actually improve the gameplay. The fact that some people think this is a good trade baffles me. Seething flames and truth’s wake are IRRELEVANT. Compared to woa reset. There is not gameplay feedback from those abilities, just damage.

They nerfed divine purpose, empyrean power is also nerfed if you have crusader strike auto attacks. Which is the coolest thing they added from the reset. I mean, the csaa not the lower proc chance on purpose/empyrean power, i can understand a nerf to empyrean, but 5% is too low. Also i think it’s still bugged. So wake up already blizzard fix it already.

Overall, i am not a big fan.

It’s not worse than before in terms of gameplay, but not better either.

I’m gonna be honest, i think the reason why people liked ret rework, was purely because of the damage it dealt initially, but now that phase is over, and ret pally damage in st is actually somewhat sub par.

It seems that so far the most successful rework will be mage. And devastation evoker.

Everything else is either garbage, like the demo rework, or just so so, like ret pally.

5

I have little opinion on VoJ, it doesnt bother me much as HoPo generation is at a decent place atm and i think (keyword) it synergises better with blessing of dawns second stack in a rotation.

Problem with Sera was that its a second wings CD… but better in terms of dmg. The Versa and mastery stat increase was a 20%+ dmg increase + crit and haste.

But its CD was lowered from 45 sec to 30 and made to get in line with other CDs. Overall i dont think we use it less often now then when it was a proc and lets not forget its extended talents. I didnt mind the old version but i kinda like this one better. Im growing tired of luck based rotation.

On this i agree, ppl got swayed with over the top dmg and survivability that gradually got nerfed back to what it was pre rework, well survivability still a weeee bit stronger then it was.

We dissagree however on what should be added. You want procs, i want gapclosers, get rid of the wheelchair feeling. Abilities that actually change gameplay, not “oooh now i can press this button again” while smashing a stationary target.

6

I hate it when a spec grows overly static.

Imagine how mind numbingly boring ret would be without any procs. Or any cd reduction.

Or any spec really.

Woa might deal about the same damage, but in terms of the actual rotation it’s not that great, compared to the reset.

And 50% chance is not luck based rotation, you would get a lot of procs pretty reliably.

Rng is only a problem when it’s impactful, but it’s not reliable. That’s when it feels awful.

For example old roll the bones.

But woa reset is not like that, art of war procced quite a lot, and 50% chance is basically 1 in 2, that’s not bad odds, and lot felt pretty great to use, you would get some insane procs at times, but it was very rare to have the opposite where things would just not proc at all.

But no, seraphim was not stronger than wings. At least not crusade, but even then, having short burst of damage is not a bad thing.

Even if they were to remove seraphim as the ability, there really was no reason to remove it as a passive art of war proc.

I mean, look at enhance shaman for example, you have lots of procs, but it’s really fun to play, and you don’t really feel like you’re at the mercy of rng, because there are lots of ways to guarantee procs, and the chance is high enough so you usually get quite a few anyway.

But i don’t think they should necessarily remove what they made, and replace, there is always the option of choice nodes. For example, seething flames could have a choice node with woa reset. Stuff like that.

I also think it’s an oversimplification to say “Abilities that actually change gameplay, not “oooh now i can press this button again” while smashing a stationary target.”

These procs to change the gameplay significantly.

7

And isent WoA currently one if not the hardest hitting abilities we have?

Its a proc of a proc witch both got lowered in DF with all of its corresponding abilities when compared to SL.

Was it 15% mastery + 8% Versa meaning 23% increase in all Holy dmg and 8% for AA, CS and BoJ and then 8% crit and haste on a 45 sec CD? Yhea no thats better then 2 min wings with 20% dmg and 20% crit and not far from crusade… Now combine the 2 and problems starts to build.

But keep it as a proc? Then we are back to

Arent they currently suffering with what we did post rework with a bit of over the top dmg? But unlike us they have mobility, pushback, slows and PURGE!!!

Why do other classes get freedom like skills but we dont get gapclosers? Being able to cast freedom on others is pointless if they can remove snares themselfs

8

The things you’re talking about are mostly utility.

I am talking about the core gameplay.

You may have some problems with rng, but let’s be real, every single spec in the game has forms of rng, and specs like outlaw, enhance, etc are currently some of the best specs for gameplay, not retribution.

There are different types of rng, some are bad, some are very good, i think the woa reset was awesome gameplay. Good damage, especially in aoe, and 3 holy power, so you could immediately use a finisher.

Try to remove all procs from the spec and all cdr, make it a completely static rotation, see what happens. I guarantee you, it won’t be good gameplay.

Enhance is definitely not suffering from anything in terms of gameplay. It can be improved just like any other spec, but it’s definitely fun to play.

Generally the best specs are those that have a mix or rng, some form of bad rng protection, and cooldown reduction.

For example enhance has, stormstrike procs, hot hand, msw procs which are rng, but then you have things like doomwinds, feral spirit msw generation, elemental assault to guarantee a msw proc when you cast stormstrike etc… And then you have cooldown reduction for wolves.

The sum of all these tings make a very engaging, fun rotation, that doesn’t feel like it’s too luck dependent.

Ret has a few things to spice up the rotation, but they removed one of the most important things, which was woa reset.

9

Yes and no… Mobility is gameplay as it has its uses in pve awell. Pushback, Purge etc is utility.

What you are talking about is not what i see as gameplay but rotation. I dont think of them as the same. Yes procs change things up for a rotation and are needed for all classes and yes they can be made better for ret but even if they did make an intresting proc that wasent OP or unreliable it would change little for my enjoyment of Ret as all i would eventually get from it is dmg and nothing more.

There is no finesse when playing ret, we are a train on a track that can be slowed or derailed. We rely on others to keep the targets in our path long enough. We are one of the most predicable specs with both mobility and dmg CDs…

On second thought, this is something i would love on Wings. CD reduction or duration extention, or both. We have had those in talents (but kinda weak) or in armor set/ borrowed power before i think. Makes the spec less predictable and could also be applied to freedom and steed. But i want my gapcloser!

10

Well i mean, your rotation is gameplay.

i don’t know why you feel the need to separate the 2, it’s just differentiation for the sake of differentiation.

The main point is:

The pillars of good spec design seem to be 3 in general.

1:Procs
2: cdr/cd extension
3: bad rng protection.

Put very simply.

When you do these things correctly, you can achieve something that feels fun to play, has skill expression, and doesn’t feel too reliant on luck. But at the same time, the rotation is not overly static, and you get those awesome moment when all the stars align and you do insane damage, but the contrary, where there are moments that you feel like you don’t do anything are much more rare thanks to skills that protect you against bad luck. In short bad rng protection. Another form of bad rng protection is simply having a high enough proc rate.

11

One of the stated goals with the Ret rework was to reduce Ret’s reliance on cooldown/modifier stacking to make sure the spec was funt to play outside of those.

I mean Ret was barely even functional outside of Wings. I recall someone posting logs in the US PTR 10.0.7 Ret rework thread which showed that Ret was barely beating tanks on single target damage outside of cooldowns in 10.0.

In raids this kind of damage profile didn’t negatively affect the spec, but in M+ it was total garbage.

You know what’s funny? WoA resets was really bad for old Ret. But for nu-Ret it would work really well.

I think it was Zaim of the US forum who posted some spreadsheet which showed that the delta between 2 equally geared and skilled Ret’s could be as much as ~20%. All depending on how many WoA resets they got inside the cooldown window. Even if they got the same amount of resets overall.

That’s apparently the reason why so many top Ret’s prefered Radiant Decree over WoA resets. Because they didn’t have do deal with the RNG.

12

Just as you did with utility, overall it still bellongs in the the sphere of gameplay.

For you good design is on rotation and rotation only? For me its the overall kit. All your 3 points are one and the same.

1: Rotation - On this i feel we are at a decent place in DF, we have been far worse in several itterrations of Ret in several expansions

2: Mobility - We have been far better in the past here, mainly with help of cleanse/emancipate, non dispellable freedom and shorter CD speedbuff but slower

3: Utility - Overall unchanged since Vanilla, got interupt in the 3rd expansion

4: Counterability - On this ill need to explain i guess

Most classes have small counters to what other classes can do. In vanilla Mages learned never to blink on warriors charge or rogues cheapshot and save it for intercept/kidney shot.

Today Mages and Shamans of all specs have a pushback but warriors and rogues have counters even for those and can be used even if they are pushed over a cliff at LM at flag in EotS. Hell even mages can counter the pushback with Alter time.

And then comes the Paladin, the class with a core DESIGN to be countered! Be it from bubble to mobility to even our very rotation!

Remind me how a battle between a Ret and Shaman went back in the day

Seal - PURGE - seal - PURGE etc

Paladin was designed to be countered at its very core from day one and that design philosophy persists to this day. Because what counters does a paladin have VS pushback over a cliff other then never standing near a cliff? And even then it still creates a distance that we lack the means to close!

Other then BoPing a monks Karma, what counters can a Paladin do to other classes? Freedom in the past could be used while stunned and it dispelled the stun. That lasted 1 expansion i think untill Blizz remembered that Paladins dont counter, they are to be countered!

Thats why it took 3 expansions for an interupt, thats why we still dont have a gapcloser in the 10th expansion. We dont even have a good or spammable slow even tho suerly the least mobile class should have atleast that right? RIGHT!?!?

13

On a personal note.
I Disagree with Executioners Sentence.

I dont like this talent at all. Besides the point that it has a HUGE amount of RNG in it (if all your attacks crit or non of it) it is also a huge pain if you have todo stuff the moment you cast it. (It would actually fit into the paladin right now if this talent had a min/max damage it can deal)
Yes you can talk about “Skill” but i will be honest here: I went for Paladin this Season because i didnt WANT to deal with complicated stuff where i have the track 2 debuffs, 2 bleeds, 2 buffs and “insert class resource here”. I wanted something easy and fun to play while also needing a nice skill level to play it really good (In case of Paladin actually USING your support kit and not only braindead DPS). If i only wanted brainless DPS i would play my Furor Warrior.
If you want to “Frontload” more damage into executioners Sentence then you create a “onetrickpony” that only deals damage every 30 seconds in a single hit (up to a point where you would use it even in a AoE spec)
I would actually prefer it if Executioners Sentence would be a Dot instead of a “big flat hit” just for the sake of PvP balance. (not that i play much pvp)
Hell i wouldnt even play this Talent if i had a competitive chose for a different one in singletarget situations.

But i have to agree in terms of Scaling…

Paladin DPS scaling is poor and the difference between “top Stats” and “worse stats” it surprisingly low.
Just a look at simulationcraft org and you know how “bad” the DPS situation for Retri paladin is. It doesnt translate into “Real world” performance of the class (since it is midrange and has no casttimes, this makes “movement encounters” not a complete DPS loss) but the “better” the players get (for example Mages) the further paladins will be left behind in dps.

14

Euhm are you serious? Again are you serious? Just lol. You dont lack AoE infact they need to nerf your AoE even more. Its just spamming divine storm. Really.

15

Why was it bad for old ret though? I don’t get it.

I thought the woa reset was awesome.

For many reasons.

1: It’s just plain cool
2: does good damage, especially in aoe
3: 50% is not a bad proc rate, you don’t feel starved of procs
4: Loads of holy power generation, which feel nice
5: Less useless art of war procs when blade of justice is almost off cd anyway.

And i’m gonna be honest, the damage was not really shifted outside of cds much.

You still do way more damage inside of cds than outside, about the same as before.

Still i do not think ret pally damage is just awful outside of cds. It’s not like arcane mage, or fire mage. Your damage is still relatively decent.

So they didn’t really solve this, and seraphim wasn’t really “burst” in the true sense of the word, you had that stuff up almost 50% of the time with art of war proc and seraphim itself.

I did not like the holy power cost, but that was about it.

16

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.