With the arrival of 11.2 and related class updates, I want to share with you all some of my secret dreams that I would like to be realized… but I doubt it will arrive in a patch… it will probably arrive with a new expansion.
Anyway! I don’t lose heart and start with this reflection by good Bolas, curator of the guides on Ret Paladins and mod of the Hammer of Wrath discord server, which read like this:
Tuning
Although it makes up around 50% of casts on single-target, Final Verdict only directly contributes about 20% of Ret’s damage on average.This is the opposite situation to how resource spenders normally work - for most specs you need to spend a while to generate the resource, and then consuming it contributes high damage as a result. Ret used to have a major issue where the only spells that contributed any meaningful damage were spenders, and although we had a happy medium for a while, the opposite problem definitely exists now where spenders can be cast constantly and contribute barely more damage than generators per cast.
The strength of Hero Talents also play a role, where the increase they provide is extremely large and dominate native effects. This is a tricky problem to solve since there are many moving parts and there isn’t any straightforward or easy solution, but when you have a tier set that essentially allows you to cast 10 spenders in a row and the main reason that’s useful is to proc more Empyrean Hammer and extend Divine Hammer rather than the damage itself, something needs to be reassessed. Link
And it is precisely on the central part that I put in italics that I would like to reflect…
“…you need to spend a while to generate the resource…”
This is the core of my feeling of my desire for change. Currently, the Ret pala has lost a lot of its identity on the control and management of the Holy Power.
Since the time of Cataclysm we build Holy Power having full control over them and we have always spent them with great gratification, we have always been the players who controlled the rhythm and the generation of them and the consequent consumption…
Now it is no longer like that, the paradigm has been totally inverted for a long time! Now we have become a very fast machine that produces HP by itself and the player finds himself having to behave in response to all this… it is as if everything has been inverted, now only the automatic HP, and the continuous procs (AoW x5, auto EP x5) to induce us to have to react to what happens and not the opposite. (and in a way too “Brainless” if I may…)
We no longer have control over it! It is the HP that now control us! LOL
I would like a more classic gameplay to come back into fashion (or at least not inferior!) I would like a “Manual Paladin” to become competitive again and not overwhelmed by an “Auto Paladin” continuously facilitated in various choices of the developers…
Summary
A couple of examples:
A Bonus set could have been conceived in 11.1 instead of refunding HP for X seconds, it could have done it for X times so as to allow TS builds not to short-circuit…
Or a DH extension could have been conceived not “to infinity” but “finite” and reachable quite easily with any talent choice
Anyway, what do you think? Am I really the only one who likes a more tidy and classic gameplay more??
I’ve been playing only and exclusively Ret Paladin since TBC, and I’ve always thought that over the years this class and spec that I LOVE has evolved for the better, reaching its peak of complexity in Shadowland (gameplay that I loved!) and then changed course a bit in Dragonflight simplifying things a bit but WITHOUT BETRAYING the core “philosophy” of the ret pala… but paving the way for what it has become now in TWW…
A Gameplay that for the first time in all these years I personally don’t like at all 
and unfortunately I say this with great bitterness…