I am way above 2k as ret paladin but you are just spreading lies here really. If you knew anything about TBC pvp you would know that the class that is the biggest counter to ret is resto druid. Generally speaking the team facing the ret paladin needs to mess up quite massively in order to lose.
The only reason people think ret is godtier is because they are terrible at the game and do not know how to play against it. Ask actual high rated players instead and they will all tell you ret is quite bad frankly. But I suppose your experience at 1800 rating is more valid than mine.
A little bit biased huh? Dont worry, we all are.
Yes, rets arent godtier and people complaining about 100-0 oneshots are usually the ones feeding them reckoning stacks, however acting like rets are bad (especially now in s3 and even more so in s4) is just wrong, regardless of your rating.
Rshaman/ret is a super solid comp, not your average S-tier meta comp so you have more counters than for example warri/rdruid, but its still a very good comp. Im also a huge fan of ret/sham because you guys counter double rogue, and everyone farming those clowns is a good person.
I main ret paladin in nearly every expac and I love it, but thatâs subjective. Ill try to be objective.
Leveling
This is the hardest part. If you are on a busy server I recommend leveling as prot through dungeons. If you prefer questing then you can pick between ret and prot. Ret is the easiest way probably, but you can use prot as well and just collect a bunch of mobs and bore them to death. Ret gets fun at level 70.
At level 70
So at max level you will get seal of the martyr (or seal of blood for horde). This will allow you to use the famous seal twist method. If you get geared, and if you get good at seal twisting, you will do atleast mid tier damage and if all the stars allign you can actually do top 3 or top 5 dps on some bosses. Every raid needs 1 ret paladin for the improved seal of the crusader and ofc the blessing.
PvP
You can get high ratings in 2s but thatâs only if you find a great resto shaman. Some players also make rogue/ret work pretty well, but I would say thatâs a big niche. Itâs probably more viable in 3s (ret/war/resto) and 5s. You will have a lot of fun with seal twisting and WF though.
Ret is a fun class and itâs very much viable. Every raid needs atleast one. You lack mana regen and AoE damage, but that gets fixed in WotLK. So if you also plan to main a ret in WotLK like me, itâs a good choice to level one. If you have the option to boost a paladin to 58 then do it, since leveling a paladin can be painfully awkward at times.
this is incorrect, currently ret is in its most fun form, in wotlk it is more boring even tho the class is stronger. in tbc ret is literally the best melee class because it has a build in dopamine injector with the seal twists
ret in pvp sadly is kinda âWeakâ, its not bad per say but it keeps all the weaknesses that paladins have in pvp, idk if i recommend it even tho it can be real fun doing reckoning seal twists
Wait what? Thatâs funny. I would say a warrior is the easiest class to play. Keep up ms and hamstring, peel for the healer with intercept, intervene and hamstring, disarm melee in their burst window.
Thatâs it. You donât have to worry about mana and you canât do anything to support your team besides some peeling. You sit healers and you switch targets on cross cc.
As a Ret you do the same things a warrior does, except you donât have MS, you donât counter rogues (big part of any ladder), and you have to worry about mana and supporting your team with BoS, BoF, BoP, BoW, seal of Wisdom on pets/warriors, refresh BoS against high cc teams, and you actually need to create a kill setup by forcing trinkets with your HoJ/rep. Warriors create kill windows by just sticking to a target most of the times. Also, you need to seal twist and time it correctly while a warrior just runs a healer down with MS hamstring. Ret doesnât have a slow. Also, a ret has very few comp options. Warrior works with any healer, while a ret only works with Rsham.
I do agree that rogues donât require much skill to be decent, but to be really good is not that easy. Skill ceiling is high, same goes for Ret. Warrior has a low skill ceiling though.
to be fair i never had a worse experience than playing ret shaman in tbc to get a glad. maybe its better in current season or s4 but it was such a bad experience that both my ret and i wont ever play this again.
every rdruid x team(+ belt last season) literally has to afk and forget that lifebloom exists. only thing that kept us going was that even on high rating the ladder was filled with awful rp and rm teams who were carried by their godtier comp
i would rate ret definitely as suffering in tbc on top of that you are so limited in your partners choice. maybe its better on horde side but there is probably a handful of shamans to even play with on firemaw.
One of the reasons ret is better now than it was in s1/s2 is that the old offspec pieces for rets had (for whatever reason) very low resilience and crit, this is âfixedâ in s3/s4 . Especially SWP has a few insane pve items which make u hit even more like a truck, so thats another reason.
I agree with you that other comps have it âmuchâ easier, thats why I differentiated between your typical S-tier comp (like warr+rdruid, rogue+rdruid/dpriest etc) and rshaman+ret (which is a high A-tier comp imo).
Im just saying that there is a difference between a comp not being meta/S-tier and it being bad. Rshaman ret isnt one of the 3 best comps in TBC, but its far from being bad. There are more rets in the top 100 then all warlocks from all teams combined (who wouldve guessed that before tbc classic launch?).
So yea, saying the only reason why ret/rshaman is a thing is because people are stupid and dont know how to play against it (spoiler: its not that complicated, but things dont always work out as planned in tbc) is a double digit iq opinion.
edit: And youre also right about the racials, orc+belf is just 1000times better than allianceoptions
Open your spell book and read your spells, you have the perfect judgement to counter Restau Druid. If you think Restau Druid counter Ret Paladin, uninstall forever youâll never get past 1500 with your attitude. You have no clue.
ye that can be a reason. never played s4 but looking forward to it with the insane pve items available for sure.
I dont mean the rng part of tbc. But it was just observable last season especially in early weeks how even high teams fed reckoning like no tomorrow before some people like groblin started to stream the comp daily because they just didnt know about it. thats an advantage you just have in any expansion with an underdog class.
In every season/expansion you just have some comps that can be played braindead to very high rating because they are just so strong. now it was RM and RP mostly. the difference between two different 2,9k RM were sometimes bigger than for other comps a 2k vs a 2,8k team.
I am usually the top rated ret on the ladder so I think I have more of a clue than you do mate. A druid generally just needs to keep up 1 lifebloom and they will be unkillable. They also tend to play with classes that will not let you stick on the druid like rogue, warrior, lock. If the druid sat in your face and the warrior/rogue/lock was just standing there hitting you feeding you reck procs then yeah it would be a very easy matchup but thatâs not how it works in reality.
I am curious to see what rating you would get if you played ret (because obviously you do not since you think resto druid is the easiest class for ret because you have seal of justice lmao).
