It’s been a few months since I last wrote an opinion piece about Ret, but fortunately this time I’ve got a lot more positive things to write about. There’s been a significant rework to a lot of the Paladin tree, and the Retribution tree has had a complete redesign from the ground up. There’s very likely going to be a lot more changes on the PTR before we see the finished version in 10.0.7, but I’ll go over the major changes that we’ve been shown so far and give my initial impression on how I think they’ll play out.
About the Author
Hi, I’m Bolas. I’ve played Ret since WotLK, I’m a mod in the Paladin class discord, and I help with some of the work on SimC for Ret. You can find me on Twitter or in the Hammer of Wrath discord if you have any questions or are interested in more information about Retribution.
Survivability
This is by far the area where Ret has had the most improvement, going from one of the squishiest specs to arguably one of the tankiest. Changes include:
The new healing bonuses are all great, especially for a spec that has had a history off being able to take extra healing but very limited options recently, but the most important changes are the other ones. Getting to use both Divine Protection and Shield of Vengeance, both on relatively short cooldowns and in addition to Divine Shield, is finally enough defensive cooldowns to be comparable to (or better than) most other classes. Sanctified Plates is also a great bonus, since Paladin was lacking the stamina/passive survivability talents that many other classes have in their class trees too. I’ve had many frustrating experiences that I’m sure are shared by most Ret players, where you just don’t have the GCDs, or the health pool/passive reduction, or the number of defensive cooldowns necessary to survive mechanics that other classes have no problem with. Fortunately, I don’t expect that to be a problem with all of these new additions; there’s just so many tools and passive benefits that it should be almost trivial to keep yourself alive in most situations.
Mobility
It’s a bit difficult to properly discuss mobility yet, since it’s still being worked on. There’s a new ability on the PTR (that was originally a Heroic Leap copy) called Wings of Liberty which has a description that is just “Ret Movement ability”. It’s not clear whether this ability is actually supposed to be added to the spec to begin with, but since we’ve been told that they “aren’t done with maneuverability yet; we have a few ideas we’re currently exploring internally and will have more to share here in the future”, it’s pretty likely that something extra will appear in the near future.
Paladin didn’t have really great mobility options prior, but in a PvE context, 2 charges of Divine Steed was enough to deal with most mechanics. The biggest issues were that it was on the GCD, and that Paladin had no way other than Divine Shield to deal with knockback or pushback effects. With the rework, we now have the option to take an almost permanent 10% movement speed increase with Judgment of Justice, a longer Divine Steed that is no longer on the GCD, and an extra bonus to Blessing of Freedom that also makes it increase movement speed with Unbound Freedom. Pretty much every issue with Ret mobility has been addressed except for the knockback problem. It might seem like not a huge issue to have one type of movement mechanic that Ret isn’t good at, but Mythic Raszageth should really highlight how dire it is – Ret literally could not live Phase 1 without external help from an Evoker or a Priest until recent nerfs. It’s also the only melee DPS to have this problem – every other melee has some type of displacement or pushback prevention to stay on the platform except Ret. This isn’t a recent or infrequent problem either, and it’s been a problem on multiple other bosses this tier like Dathea and Sennarth. If Wings of Liberty is some kind of ability that can be used in these situations, I’d consider Ret to have a well designed and complete mobility toolkit.
This is really the only part of the redesign that I am not thrilled about so far. I like the idea of one of the Paladin auras giving the group some kind of damage benefit, but both the way it procs and the way players will be incentivized to play with it seem like they’ll be awful player experiences.
50% of their Health in a Single Hit
It’s difficult to assess how often this actually happens in boss fights naturally until you start looking at logs. The same mechanism, a player in the raid taking 50% of their health in a single hit, is how the current Retribution Aura procs a Seraphim buff. It’s difficult to distinguish that from regular Ashes to Ashes buffs for Ret, but looking at a Prot or Holy log where they’re using Retribution Aura, it almost never procs from regular gameplay – maybe once or twice an encounter, although some encounters will have no procs. Players just don’t take that much damage from one ability unless they’re making a mechanical mistake or are intentionally taking damage. Since Retribution Aura is a significant damage increase for the raid, 5% for 10s, you’ll likely see tanks frequently refraining from using their mitigation abilities in order to take more than half their health from a melee hit, or DPS standing in a mechanic that they probably shouldn’t be for the same reason. None of this sounds like fun or healthy gameplay, and could be easily avoided by tying the proc to something that happens more regularly in a raid environment.
This Cannot Occur More than Once Every 30 Sec
It’s not clear yet whether this ICD is group wide or specific to the Paladin. Either way, it will incentivize Paladins to constantly swap Auras during the fight.
- If the ICD is group wide, in groups with one Paladin, you’ll have that Paladin start in Retribution Aura, proc the damage buff, and then swap to Devotion Aura. Once the ICD is up, they’ll swap back to Retribution Aura, and repeat. They’ll end up swapping Auras twice every 30s to maintain both the damage buff and the damage reduction.
- If the ICD is Paladin specific, you could run 3 Paladins, and have them rotate their Auras to permanently maintain the 5% damage buff. This would at least require the Paladins to swap Auras in the first 10-20s of the fight, and probably more often if subsequent procs don’t happen exactly on CD.
Again, this sounds like miserable gameplay – Aura swapping in combat occasionally is fine, but Aura weaving as part of regular gameplay is not something most players will enjoy. This is the one aspect of the rework that I really hope gets the most changes before it goes live.
Retribution Gameplay
The elephant in the room when it comes to the major differences in gameplay is Crusading Strikes. It entirely removes Crusader Strike from your regular rotation, and instead provides consistent Holy Power gain. Compared to other melee specs that gain resource from auto attacks, it reminds me less of Subtlety or Havoc and more of Arms, where the resource gains are easy to track, not that sporadic, but very significant when they do happen. They’re definitely something you could and almost certainly will want to track and play around. It’s a much higher rate of Holy Power generation than Ret usually has, but so far I’ve really enjoyed the consistent nature of it and ability to plan around future Holy Power gains when playing. If the rate of Holy Power generation is nerfed at some point to bring it in line with other talents, I hope that it’s not done in a way where it ends up being random per melee whether you get Holy Power or not.
The rest of the rotation also flows pretty well and feels fun to play. There’s a ton of talents that give extra charges or reduce specific generator cooldowns, especially on choice nodes, which I really like – it gives you a ton of flexibility about what generators you want to really lean into buffing. I’m also a big fan of giving almost every generator a cleave option. One of the biggest issues Ret had prior to Dragonflight was that your only damage on AoE was either Divine Storm or cooldowns like Final Reckoning, which also meant that your priority damage would really suffer when you started to AoE. Talents that let your generators cleave is a nice compromise here, especially when there’s a lot of options to pick between depending on what generators you’ve already buffed with other talent choices. The Avenging Wrath: Might vs Crusade choice node is also a real choice now that Avenging Wrath is a 1 minute cooldown baseline, giving you the option to play a Legion-style 2 minute extended burst profile or lean into Final Reckoning and have stronger 1 minute cooldowns. I think the duration of Avenging Wrath and Crusade might be a little too long now with Zealot’s Paragon though – you can get Crusades that last almost a minute and will also have close to 50% uptime on Avenging Wrath too.
New Talents
There’s a lot of new talents with this rework – practically the entire Retribution tree is completely different, with very few talents from the last iteration sticking around. I’m not going to talk about every talent in detail, but I have some thoughts about specific talents that I think are worth noting.
Retribution Talents
- All of the passive stat nodes in the Retribution tree like Teachings of the Light or Adjudication now have an additional effect to them too, which is a nice bonus to make them a little less boring.
- Holy Blade sorta feels like it just exists to soak up a talent point. I’d consider this a fundamental part of Blade of Justice as a spell, since every version of it we’ve ever had ended up generating 2 Holy Power, so it feels weird to need to pick it as one of your first talent points.
- In the top third of the talent tree, there’s only 9 talent nodes and 8 points to spend on them – that said, there are also 6 choice node talents among them, so you still do get to make a lot of choices here, just between two different options on a choice node rather than between two or three different talent paths. There’s also two utility nodes here, which means you’ll usually just pick one of them to take and then take every other talent in the section. I like the effects these talents provide, but I think most players will be reluctant to take more than one of them since it’ll probably come at the cost of a decent amount of damage to do so.
- Righteous Cause vs Art of War is a really cool way to let players decide the mechanic they want to have for Blade of Justice resets. Righteous Cause should probably also reset on Divine Storm casts though, or otherwise in any situation involving AoE you’d essentially be forced into always taking Art of War, assuming they’re tuned to be comparable on single target.
- Judgment of Justice is a pretty tame version of Long Arm of the Law, but I like that it’s managed to sneak its way back into the talent tree in some form, since there’s a lot of players that really love that effect.
- Expurgation has had a redesign so that it now procs off every Blade of Justice cast rather than just crits. I liked having some talents that would alter your secondary stat preferences, but its position in the tree makes it seem like it’s supposed to be a talent that you’ll just take in most regular builds rather than a talent that you’d build around for Blade of Justice specifically, which makes sense. Currently if you use Blade of Justice on a target that already has an Expurgation debuff, the original one just gets completely overwritten – I’d like to see a mechanic similar to Soulrend instead where the remaining damage on an existing Expurgation dot gets added to any subsequent application instead, especially since Righteous Cause and Art of War can cause you to cast a lot of Blade of Justices in a small period.
- Empyrean Legacy is still a talent I like a lot, but it still has the awkward incentive if you’re using Crusade and Final Reckoning that you’ll probably want to use Divine Storm to build Crusade stacks on single target, to then use the Empyrean Legacy proc after your Final Reckoning at 10 stacks. Hopefully without Seraphim this might not be a damage gain to do anymore, but it’s not very fun to have to hardcast your AoE spender on single target just to save the proc.
- It makes sense to nerf Sanctify and Consecrated Blade when they were previously strong enough to even see use on single target, but I’m not sure it makes sense for them to still be in the talent tree generally when Consecration itself has already had its cooldown increased to 20s and all of the talents that make your generators cleave are likely to be stronger than these anyway. I’m definitely not a big Consecration fan, but these versions of these talents seem like they could just be something else a bit more interesting for Ret.
- I like bringing back Inquisitor’s Ire, an old Legendary from Legion that never really saw any use, but the % per stack and cap mean that at maximum stacks Divine Storm will only do 50% more damage, which isn’t even enough to beat a Final Verdict or Justicar’s Vengeance on single target.
- Highlord’s Judgment has an interesting concept, but currently you’ll end up constantly overcapping buffs with Divine Resonance. I’d like to see either an increase in the stack cap, or some other mechanism that means you don’t end up losing value from it when every spender you use will be buffed by Judgment anyway.
- Putting Execution Sentence and Final Reckoning on a choice node together makes sense from the perspective of not wanting too many damage buffing modifiers to exist, but I’m not sure it’d be a really oppressive combination without Seraphim, and there’s a lot of players that really loved that playstyle from Shadowlands who would love to be able to use both at once.
- Vanguard’s Momentum currently provides all its damage bonus in just the first talent point, and the second point only gives you one extra charge of Hammer of Wrath. It should probably be tuned so that the second point provides a bit more benefit. I like that it emphasizes Hammer of Wrath‘s role during execute a bit more, since it always felt odd to have an execute ability as Ret that didn’t significantly increase your overall execute damage.
- A choice node between Final Verdict and Justicar’s Vengeance is a cool idea, but I’d like it more if it was just a “do you want more range on your spender or a heal on your spender” choice rather than also picking between different base damage on each or a Hammer of Wrath reset effect too.
- There’s a few talents that seem like they’ll probably be fairly undertuned, like Divine Hammer or Divine Auxiliary or Seething Flames, but since this is the first iteration of these abilities I’m not too worried about tuning still needing to be done.
- Some talents don’t really work at all together yet. If you take Crusading Strikes, Seal of the Crusader doesn’t proc off your Crusader Strike auto attacks. If you take Blessed Hammer, Improved Crusader Strike doesn’t give it an extra charge, Swift Justice doesn’t reduce its cooldown, and Blades of Light doesn’t make it deal Holystrike damage.
- I’m really interested to see what happens with the talents that alter spell damage schools like Blades of Light and buff specific schools like Searing Light. These clearly aren’t done yet, but it’s design space that has seen minimal exploration other than one or two talents like Dark Brew, and I think there could be a lot of really interesting ways to specialize into Physical or Holy or Fire damage that could be really great if they’re fully explored.
Paladin Talents
- There’s definitely some significant pathing improvements – for example, you now no longer have to take 2 ranks of Fist of Justice to get throughput increases. There’s no major issues with throughput nodes being locked behind utility nodes anymore, although there are still a significant number of throughput nodes you’ll want to take.
- Unlike the Ret tree, most of the passive stat nodes are still just boring multi point passive nodes like Holy Aegis and Seal of Might. The one node that has an additional effect, Seal of Alacrity, still has the same passive bonus as another node already in the Ret tree, Teachings of the Light. I’d like to see more interesting effects added if we’re going to want to spend 4-6 points on this style of damage node.
- Punishment is a nice bonus for interrupting, and is a lot more reasonable than the free Templar’s Verdict that it cast originally.
- I’d really like to see real options for pressing your buttons to meaningfully offheal in the Paladin tree. Currently, most of the options are either passive benefits like Lightforged Blessing or Golden Path or Judgment of Light that won’t help much if your group is taking heavy damage, or effects like Afterimage or that would probably be throughput increases for Holy, but aren’t very helpful for a Ret trying to offheal in a pinch. Compared to options in other hybrid class trees like Ancestral Guidance or Vampiric Embrace or Nature’s Vigil, there’s nothing even close to comparably strong for Paladin.
- Incandescence is a lot worse now that Consecration is on a longer cooldown, we don’t get free procs as often, and we’re less inclined to press it anyway.
- A lot of the talents are effectively useless outside of the spec they seem to be primarily designed for – for example, Lightforged Blessing procs off Divine Storm when neither of the other Paladin specs actually have access to that ability, and Faith’s Armor is an armor buff when that’s a completely irrelevant effect for either Holy or Retribution.
- You can still very comfortably take every capstone and lose almost nothing for doing so. Since the entire bottom third of the Paladin tree is essentially throughput, this means that every capstone is now basically a baseline passive damage bonus rather than something you’d ever pick or choose between.
- Quickened Invocation is realistically never going to be used – taking it would desync Divine Toll from your other 60s/2min cooldowns, and losing Divine Resonance is way too high of a price anyway.
- Similar to the choice between Final Verdict and Justicar’s Vengeance, Seal of Order and Fading Light are very similar abilities, except one gives you a stronger throughput bonus while the other simply provides an absorb shield. It’d be a lot more interesting if the choice was more like between a flat damage reduction or an absorb or something similar instead of one being strictly better for throughput.
Is it a Good Rework?
My answer so far is a resounding yes. The specifics of Retribution Aura aside, almost every other aspect of the spec has seen massive improvements, both in terms of how they’ll affect the spec’s viability and also just how fun it is to play. Almost every issue that the spec suffered from has been addressed or will be addressed soon, and you actually have real choices to make in the Ret tree instead of playing the exact same build minus one or two talents in every situation. I’m extremely happy with what we’ve been shown so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing more development and tuning over the next few weeks.
