Hi all,
I hope Blizzard will see this. It would be great to have an option to use a shield as a Retribution Paladin. The sword & shield class fantasy is a favorite of mine but every sword and shield wielding class is a Tank. Which is somewhat understandable but looking at the Diablo 3 Crusader a shield wielding damage dealer could absolutely be a thing.
Also open question to the floor: What spells would be great to have in a Shield based DPS build?
Anyway, I hope it will be at least taken into consideration. Thanks!
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I mean you can deal damage with tanks and heals with sword and shield, dont you?
Damage dealers should deal the most damage and therefore it makes sense that they dont carry a shield.
Every medieval fighter with a shield has less pure damage potential than one with 2 1h weapons or 1 2h weapon.
And the damage potential is the thing. You deal damage with tank/heal, but less. And when making a dps spec with sword and shield you are decreasing its damage output, when taking this realistic PoV.
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Vanilla they use to be hybrid like this and made Ret OP… 
yes, but DF ret feels like bad-bad-bad warrior, op 3 weeks (when ret got rework) nerf> bad-bad-bad warrior.
Still i cant imagine, how warrior got more heal/absorb then ret pala, its biggest cringe i ever seen…
Just seen a ret paladin with a sword and shield… Reason why I knew it was ret beause in AV i had 160% threat and I thought to me sen “strange that a proct paladin has such low tps” anyways it was a ret…
Lol. That isn’t how classic or mediaval warfare went. Ask the Romans.
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We can only hope for a diablo-esque paladin build in the next expansion since they will introduce “mini talent” tree stuff called “hero talents” and one of the 3 options is called templar which I’d imagine gives that kind of flavor we experienced in diablo.
As for the current game I saw a youtube video in the previous season of someone who made a build like you wich to play with - ofc its not super efficient but managable - and the whole point of the video was to have a different shield+1h build for ret that is fun.
Obviously you wont run keys with it but just to walk around and kill mobs and stuff and have that class fantasy it worked as far as I saw.
sadly Blizzard wont see your forum post …unfortunately devs dont read the forums and dont care about posts. Also sadly they promised that they will pay attention to feedback and act promptly but paladins were and been ignored for a very long time.
And when there are updates like the ret “rework” its usually something that goes against what the community actually wants.
Our mobility was still not addressed. The rework happened at the end of a patch cycle …ofc as usual ret was overtuned for a few weeks so everyone jumped on the hate train and over 3-4 weeks ret was nerfed back to the middle of the pack.
If you look at the current state Ret paladin in raid in 90-80 percentile charts is at the bottom on the dps rankings. 90 percentile mythic its only above augmentation evokers which is suppose to be the new “support” style spec so naturally shouldnt be good at dps…
There are no class tunings this week at all so that ~4 spec that is leading ahead of everyone else with ~20% dps are still ahead …and ret fell of the charts at the bottom.
Mythic+ is a little bit better but ret is medicore at best there too. The class design is awful. We have a couple of viable builds and if you build to have strong st damage you lose a huge chunck of your aoe dps, and if you build for strong aoe you lose your st damage. Most classes dont have to choose between these two.
Also ret paladins have a terrible passive spell which gives them wings for 9 second whenever someone in their raid dies within 40 yard… this leads heavily skewed dps numbers at the beginning of new seasons because everyone is still learning the fights and many people tend to die…
After 2-3 weeks most players will be familiar enough with the fights to avoid death… this means ret paladin gradually lose more and more dps because less ppl are dying around them. This is an awful class/ability design which leads to fake statistic because at the start ret paladins might be in the middle of the dps pack due to the “free” damage buffs from people dying around them but a few weeks later they lose all that “extra” damage and quickly fall behind.
On top of that even if devs would read the forums it wouldnt change anything for paladins because some classes like warriors and druids have a dedicated dev for their classes but paladins do not have that…
This explains why they started to work on ret rework in the middle of the expansion instead of during beta where they worked on most of the other classes - but they didnt care at all to work on a few classes at all during beta or during the development phase before beta.
And if you hope for good things for paladins I dont want to ruin your hopes but paladins were pretty much ignored and left behind since Legion. Unless you love the class fantasy enough to be able to deal with being the unwanted and neglected “child” of the devs I dont recommend playing paladin… unless you want to tank …prot paladin is fairly boring but simply and strong. At least we have that. But since they baked in most of the stuff that you should otherwise manage yourself into one ability and passives if you are looking for an interesting playstyle you will be disappointed with prot paladin.
If I wouldnt play with other classes I would have quit the game a long time ago.
Btw I cleared the HC raid multiple times, unlocked all m+ portals (done all dungeons on 20+) and currently have 480 itemlvl on my paladin just to give you and idea where my experience is coming from. And I started this season a few of weeks ago a little late to the party.
I like the class fantasy so that is the only reason I’m still playing with my paladin and its hard to leave behind anything after like 15+ years.
Sword + relic/offhand would be amazing
you dont understand. when u hit a puppet with a 2h or a 1h. we can agree that u cut it in half with the 2h but you dont do that with a 1h.
I think you may have watched way too many Hollywood movies.
A well crafted 1handed axe/sword can effectively cut unarmored opponents. As matter of fact, they are way more easy to manipulate and be precise with, compared to 2handers which were not as common as fantasy showcase them (pikes/spear are different and were the actual main weapons in warfare).
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Sure it can but the impact is lower. You also cant bench press the same kg with 1 arm… impact is mass times speed
Just to be clear, even if they would be just as sharp, the two-handed would still be better in terms of swords. Aside from further reach and more moves you can pull off, instead of flicking with just your wrist with one hand, you now had two hands to add even more to it.
If the one-handed was better, there would be no reason for knights to discard shields. But they did - since when full plate became a thing, shields became pretty pointless in most cases.
(Overall though, swords are side-arms, unless you’re a Zweihander-figure going first in line to push away spears. You’ll go for a poleaxe or something - which is very much two-handed and still outperforms one-handed things.)
But on topic: Nah, I don’t think Retribution would fit with Sword & Board for pure damage.
Dont try and logic splain with facts of reality on how things should work in this game.
2h dual weilding, leaping warriors in full plate, in a world of magic, that cant block a fireball with a sheild.
Would it actually add anything to the class in a game when most of the dmg ignores armor? no
Would it be cool to have? sure
And thats basically the main reason i think we might get it sooner or later. Its something cool… but kinda pointless.
I’d kill for a 1h sword + offhand (not necessarily a shield) DPS paladin.
Classic use to have hybrids… You would have Ret using a sword and shield mixed with Holy talents… Or was it Proct and Holy combined… I know they called it a Shockadin and it was nearly impossible to kill… 
You do know that in IRL person with gigantic 2 hander will lose 99 times out of 100 to a person with small agile sword and shield.
Real life is not some final fantasy where you can swing around 100kg sword all day. There is a reason why Gladius was the sword that conquered the world and not some seremonial compensator sword.
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It was Holy/Ret during Tbc. With wotlk the shockadin build died.
During wotlk we had protection paladins which did good dmg with pvp ret gear.
I have always wanted, if nothing else, to be able to transmog a 2 hander into a sword and shield would be cool. But for world stuff, it could also be nice, we do have Shield of the Righteous, which has seemed strange to me considering most of our abilities need a 2 hander weapon to cast, so just changing them to a melee weapon requirement
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ret is way way better than arms and way better than fury in m+ how in anyway is it like a
bad warrior?
I wouldn’t mind a slow and mortal strike on demand.