The problem Ret has going into phase 3 is no Runes synergise or increase our raw damage or scaling.
Wrath is decent when you use a fast weapon like ACP because you Crit roughly x2-x4 more often with than compared to a slow weapon. You get so much more value out of Art of War and SoM for this reason if you’re attacking fast. Exorcism out damages my Melee damage and is my Top DPS ability in Gnomergan because of this.
When you look at the Wrath Rune its decent with fast weapons as you use more spells the faster your weapon is. Soon as you use a slower weapon you get less Crits way less often and Wrath becomes a lot weaker. Its not a bad Rune but its pretty Mid in levels of power compared to what the other Runes classes got. Shaman whos miles ahead kf us got a better version of our best Rune this phase.
Bracers are actually a meme because if you use a fast weapon my Exorcism on average never went above a 3s cooldown and it would Proc often enough I wouldn’t have the GCD time to cast anything else was holding Crusader Strike at times for over 10s at times on the rotation. So bracers have 0 value and are a DPS negative Rune as casting any abilities is a dps loss single target. The same issue goes for HoW Rune, its dps Negative in PvE.
They probably added the wrist Rune because they don’t want us to use a fast weapon and use a slower one. So since we’ll be attack less, we will Crit less and reach the 8s Cooldown so the bracers have more value.
The problem is if we are attacking slower SoM, Exorcism, Sheath of Light Rune and our new Rune Wrath lose value and damage compared to just using a fast weapon like ACP. This is because if we are using a fast weapon, spells suddenly now become our most used ability amd we use one almost on every GCD and this scales well with our entire Rune kit and especially Wrath as we will be casting on average x2 the Exorcisms compared to a slow weapon.
Now if we use a slow weapon we Crit less often, we get 1/2 the casts of Exorcism, so less spells to scale with our Rune kit and will do slightly more damage on Auto attacks and Crusader Strike. We now get some value out of the bracer because of we don’t Crit every 2 autos Exorcism will come off cooldown but it doesnt change the fact we will be casting 1/2 the spells compared to a fast weapon. This is a massive dps loss because Sheath, Wrath and fast Weapons all synergise well with fast weapkns. As of now, slow weapons only synergise well with Crusader Strike and Divine Storm which is a tiny DPS increment compared to SoL and Exorcist spam. This means equiping a strong slow weapon is a damage loss compared toany fast weapon like ACP.
ACP sims more dps than the Legendary Weapon Sulfuras for Rets to give you an example of how poorly our kit works with Slow Weapons.
So there we have it. We get completely screwed in the new raid because theres no fast weapons. A level 40 weapon Sims better than basically every weapon in ST. We will be lower on the DPS because we will be using a 40 weapon in ST and if you use a level 50 slow weapon your dps will be even lower. No wrist Rune synergises with us Ret and Wrath is only good on fast weapons like ACP that boosts the value of using a weapon like ACP more.
This is the reason why we are gonna be a bottom tier dps. I don’t think you understand once we get to the raid how badly Ret will fall off. The person designing Ret has completely messed us up this phase, exactly like last phase.