I think the rework was partially a failure

Classes Paladin
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First of all let’s start with the good:

1: Ret paladin gained utility, range, defensive options.

That’s about it for the good

Here’s the bad

1: Ret currently suffers from one of the biggest discrepancies between aoe and st spec.

I lose 20% + of my st damage by going m+ spec, that is frankly higher than most specs, the st cost for aoe is absolutely massive, unacceptable even.

2: The gameplay didn’t improve much if not at all.

A few good things added, i like the crusader strikes auto attacks, but empyrean power proc rate is too low for it.

I didn’t dislike seraphim, but also didn’t like the holy power cost, they could have just removed the cost and it would have been fine, there was also literally 0 reason to remove the passive proc.

Exorcism was awful, glad that’s gone, they could have just made exorcism replace boj, and make it do aoe, but that’s basically what boj does not.

Divine purpose nerfed.

The worst offender by far is the removal of woa reset though, that is just an awful decision. For a couple of reasons:

1: Woa reset meant less wasted boj procs
2: Woa reset gave you a way to immediately use a holy power spender after
3: Woa reset closes the discrepancy between aoe and st builds which is one of the problems i pointed out above
4: Woa reset provides a more fun combat than what boj alone could. It also gives you access to those wow moments where everything procs, you do a lot of damage, use loads of holy power spenders, and most of all, it’s reliable. It’s not an unreliable proc because it happens once every other boj reset, with a 50% chance, or once every third or so. So it’s extremely rare to feel starved of procs even with 35% chance. If you disagree you’re frankly wrong on this one.

Woa reset was one of the coolest things added for ret.

What was it replaced with? A 30 sec cd static woa, that does more damage if you use seething flames and truth’s wake. Such WOW. Sarcasm by the way, i think it’s boring as hell.

People rail on rng, but frankly speaking, a spec with no rng is a boring spec.

You need rng in a spec in order to make it fun, and not static, the trick is to not make the proc too unreliable, like imagine if a proc would do a billion damage, but only had a 1% proc chance, that’s basically bad rng. Or remember the old roll the bones? The one in legion? That was also bad rng.

I see this everywhere, even on other specs. For example, people even asking for the removal of stormstrike reset, and to bring back a more static rotation where you just press abilities in the same way over and over. Just completely clueless takes, and i hope that people who think like that will never become game designers, because you haven’t got a damn clue.

If not rng you need at least some form of cd reduction, like fury does. Not as much rng for fury, but still has a nice gameplay loop because of the cd reduction from anger management, which gives you a nice feedback from doing your rotation correctly, which also means much higher rage generation, while still having a decent level of rng provided through certain talents.

Anyway, there you go, ret rework is not as good as you think. Certainly not from a gameplay prospective.

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I agree that ST is very lacking and also have some holes in the rotation

But in AoE, ret definitely don’t need more rng.
The best thing about ret is currently that it is very consistent and has very high burst dmg every minute which matches the m+ pulling very well, much better than 2min cd gameplay.
The utility ret has is bonkers.

The only real issue is the craptastic and boring ST. It is also weird because execution sentence also don’t really increase the ST by a lot either

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Ironically, you have testers to blame for this. There was a couple of people on the US PTR-forums that argued everyday for weeks that Ret needed the ability to talent into more single target stuff. The result was a complete split of the spec and the removal of an entire playstyle (Fire DoT Paladin).

It was hilariously overpowered with the old 15% (20%?) proc chance and Vanguard of Justice. But i agree that 5% is too low, and so does math.

One of the goals of the rework was to reduce Ret’s burst potential and increase their sustained dps. This could not have been done while keeping Seraphim.

The passive proc was removed for the same reason. Getting rid of the proc allowed them to increase the proc chance of AoW and increase the average damage of BoJ.

Why did they want to change Ret in the first place? Because the “damage pattern” old Ret had was practially incompatible with M+. Ret was consistently a bottom 5 spec going all the way back to the introduction of M+. While being simultaneously being pretty decent for raids.

Ret being crap in M+ wasn’t really a problem back then, because raiding had good participation numbers and was still seen as the “main course” by most poeple. But raiding has since fallen to the way side in favor of M+. So the spec had to change.

Unjustifiably so as well. The devs probably worried that DP would be too strong with Vanguard of Justice. But it ended up not being worth using even with VoJ.

I wonder if someone has done the math on where the sweet spot is. At what point does DP+EP with VoJ break Ret?

This was the exact reason given why it was removed. Together with AoW Seraphim procs, Ret could RNG their way to mega dps. Pretty much all of the top SotFO Ret logs were people getting back-to-back-to-back-to-… WoA resets during wings.

But ironically. WoA resets would works wonder for the spec right now due to how static it is. No Seraphim and a lower base cooldown of WoA means the varience wouldn’t be that extreme.

WoA being as strong as it is, while being completely static is one of the (many) reasons why Ret scales so poorly. WoA doesn’t scale with haste at all.

Getting WoA resets back would be a huge help for the long term health of the spec. Maybe replace Truth’s Wake with the reset talent if current WoA turns out to be too powerful with resets.

I haven’t played Enh since BFA, but isn’t current Enh super loaded with rng?

2 Likes
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To recap i will re explain the point, and expand on it a bit.

What makes a good spec good? Or rather what makes a spec fun to play. I will use enhancement as an example for this. Because frankly speaking enhance is just very fun to play.

1: You need a mix of deterministic and probabilistic factors. Not everything should be up to rng, but not everything should be set in stone either. Why?

Very simple, having an overly deterministic spec leads to your standard 123 type of rotation where you just press things in the same order over and over. But having everything up to chance can lead to moments where you feel like you have no control over your rotation, stuff just won’t proc and you’re stuck.

What is an example of a deterministic ability? Doomwinds, elemental assault.

What is an example of a probabilistic ability or passive? Stormbringer, if you noticed these things feed off each other, so you rarely get moments where you feel like you are completely starved, but at the same time you get moments where everything works very well quite frequently.

2: Interactions between abilities.

Cooldown reduction, cooldown extension, abilities proccing other abilities etc.

These are basically the 2 core aspects that make a spec fun to play.

If you look at it objectively, ret paladin is lackluster in both.

At the very least they need to bring back woa reset. It’s important for the gameplay of the spec, the removal of it, damaged ret greatly.

Frankly speaking, ret aoe is quite low at the moment all things considered, not everything is about your main cd.

@zathina, as for enhancement being loaded with rng, it kinda is, but isn’t at the same time.

Frankly speaking, enhance is the perfect example of good rng in a spec. Because you have rng, but also ways to counteract bad rng with deterministic abilities that just proc stuff when you need.

Enhancement shaman is the spec that frankly should put to rest the argument that rng is bad in a spec. It isn’t, if done well it greatly enhances the gameplay of a spec. You just need to tune it relatively high so you don’t feel starved of proc, and give the spec a way to guarantee procs when rng just won’t work with you.

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kinda doesnt because it is subjective.
thanks to the talent selection we are running we are either overflowing or starving for msw.
the phys build with rng ascendance and wf procs etc. is even worse

the dmg variance is quite hefty with roll he wolves.

if you like rng, play enhance thrn, we do you want ret to be rng as well.

You can also spec empyrian divine and divine proc for buttons glows that are the rng element if you want to on top of the art of war proc that you already have, so i dont see the problem

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That’s the only thing that’s weird, the storm build is not well tuned. You should not press stromstrike when you have 10 msw stacks. But that’s a problem with tuning. Not with rng. So again, wrong.

Also no, i already explained the problems with ret.

Ret is currently boring, the rework was not successful in making the gameplay more fun.

Say what you want, but what i pointed out about what makes a class actually fun to play is objectively true. The most liked specs in the game have always been like how i described.

Without any dynamic aspects, the gameplay is boring.

Ret doesn’t have any dynamic cd reduction or extension, few procs, it does have a few, but aside art of war they are all very low proc rate, it doesn’t have anything to make it stand out. Nothing that makes you say, wow, that was really cool. And woa reset was exactly that. Also it’s not more rng anyway, because the proc is not separate, it’s just art of war, but instead of blade, it’s wake. And with a 50% proc chance, it’s quite reliable.

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this is only your opinion though, so don’t generalize.
I find ret extremely fun to play currently.

No it is not.
So it is subjective not objective. What you think is fun, I don’t think is fun.

of course phys build has rng. Ascendance proc is already huge rng. Chaining stormstrikes from flurry is also rng. WF itself is rng.
MSW generation without having elemental assault just feels rng garbage.

elemental build is even worse anyways.
Enh is the incarnation of rng shiat in the game and people were complaining for years about it.
Now while it is still rng, they tuned and added so many buttons and procs that there is too much to do.
Enhance is not fun, but it is obviously tuned on the very high side for aoe and is fully reliant on fat rng in ST or you do absolutely negative dmg, especially if you don’t run beacon in an M+ build.

so agree to disagree

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It’s not completely subjective, most people like pizza, most people do not like eating their own vomit, taste is subjective.

That doesn’t mean that everything is 100% subjective, much in the same way, what i pointed out before, is true, and what makes gameplay enjoyable is usually a combination of some or all of the aspects i talked about.

And just because YOU personally like ret at the moment, doesn’t change that.

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