With new builds every week to Retribution on the PTR, there’s a lot of new changes that have a big impact on Retribution’s place in the raid and on its playstyle. If you didn’t read my last post, it covers the major initial changes – this time I’m just going over the more recent additions to this new version of Retribution.
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.
One of the only major problems I had with the rework up to this point was how Retribution Aura was redesigned, both in terms of how it procs and how you might be incentivized to aura swap mid-combat to take advantage of it. Fortunately, those problems have now largely been addressed. Retribution Aura now requires a single hit of 30% rather than 50% to proc, which might not always happen on cooldown, but should occur with much higher frequency than it used to, and the buff itself now has an ICD that is tied to the players it’s applied to rather than for each Paladin. This essentially solves any Aura swapping that could have occurred with multiple Paladins in the raid, and although you technically could try to run only one Paladin and have them swap between Retribution Aura and Devotion Aura to bring the benefits of both, this is not a scenario that I’m personally super worried about happening compared to the previous alternative of having 3 Paladins rotate Retribution Aura. My expectation would be that the vast majority of raids will now just run 2 Paladins, and have one permanently use Retribution Aura and the other permanently use Devotion Aura.
Vanguard of Justice is a new 2 rank talent that increases the cost of Holy Power spenders by up to 2, so a total of 5, and also significantly increases their damage. So far, this has been a pretty divisive talent, because of how drastically Retribution’s gameplay changes when your Holy Power cap is the same as the amount your spenders cost. Rather than having a playstyle where you’re constantly banking some Holy Power even when you technically could spend in order to maximize the cooldowns of your generators, you end up basically playing like a Rogue: build to 5, spend, repeat. This is a pretty big departure in gameplay from what we’ve been used to for the last few expansions, and it ends up resulting in some awkward situations where you’re at 4 Holy Power, only have abilities that generate 2 off cooldown, and either have to overcap Holy Power to be able to spend or wait for one of your other generators to become available. With only 1 point in the talent, making spenders cost 4 rather than 3, the core gameplay is still largely similar, but when your spenders cost your entire Holy Power cap it feels like a very different spec. I’m not wholly against the talent existing, and I like the idea of modifying Holy Power spender costs especially when your Holy Power generation is so high, but if it becomes a permanently taken talent in almost every situation then there’s likely to be some angst about it.
These were originally added as a choice node in the Retibution tree, but have recently been swapped to the class tree as nodes that only exist for Ret. It does definitely feel strange to have a talent tree that’s supposed to be classwide have some completely different talents for each spec, but it’s a lot healthier for us to have our utility choices be competing with other utility choices in the class tree instead of feeling like you’re forced to lose damage in the Ret tree in order to take them. We do still have some defensive nodes in the Ret tree, like Light’s Celerity / Guided Prayer and Aegis of Protection, but there’s only so many you can put in a spec tree on central paths with a major cooldown or ability locked behind them. It’s also nice to have some amount of useful offhealing in the class tree, even if it’s just an ability that was moved there.
Crusading Strikes was recently nerfed to only provide Holy Power every second auto attack instead of every one, which is a pretty reasonable change – the amount of passive Holy Power generation it provided before was extreme, and even this version is still very strong. I am especially happy that the way you gain Holy Power from autos is still fairly predictable. It’s still quite a different form of Holy Power generation than we’re used to seeing for Ret, it’s a lot more frequent than other effects like Inner Grace that we’ve had recently, but I think it’s a much healthier way to let a talent choice emphasize auto attacks than Ashes to Ashes and it also has a nice benefit of lowering the number of unique Holy Power generators you’ll need to use when playing.
Templar Strikes was added recently as a replacement for Blessed Hammer. It makes Crusader Strike a sort of 3 part combo ability, where each time you use it it transforms into the next part of the ability. Each part generates 1 Holy Power and does a fairly similar amount of damage, it only goes on cooldown when you use the first part of the combo, and the combo is broken if you use more than 1 other ability between Crusader Strike casts. It effectively drops your downtime to 0, even eliminating the need for filler buttons like Consecration, since Crusader Strike‘s cooldown is so low that you’ll always have a button you can press to generate or spend Holy Power. It’s another very different playstyle than what we’ve been used to for Ret, since a lot of the gameplay over the years has revolved around managing Holy Power generation which is completely irrelevant with Templar Strikes, but I could see it working well with Vanguard of Justice since it requires such a high amount of Holy Power as well. I’m not a big fan of all 3 parts of the combo essentially just being a “Generate 1 Holy Power” button, and I think it might be a lot more interesting if one part of the combo generated more Holy Power or did a lot more damage so that you’d actually be incentivized to keep using it as a combo ability, instead of just treating it as a Holy Power generator with no cooldown. One thing to note that both Crusading Strikes and Templar Strikes have in common is that they both make Improved Crusader Strike essentially useless – with Crusading Strikes you don’t have an active Crusader Strike ability anymore, and with Templar Strikes you can basically spam Crusader Strikes to your heart’s content regardless of having a second charge of the ability.
I was excited to see how these talents would end up working with the rest of the kit, but the resulting design has been a bit disappointing. Other than the buff to the specific damage type, all you get is a damage proc instead of some other interesting effect that feels more worthy of a capstone talent. Burning Crusade has also been changed to only affect your AoE abilities like Divine Storm and Blades of Light now affects single target spenders too, which ends up pigeonholing Fire as the “AoE” damage type and physical as the “single target” type you want to buff. I found it a lot more interesting when they’d buff different spells, like when fire was more centered around Blade of Justice, which although is a single target spell itself, you can turn into an AoE effect with Blade of Vengeance and spread a DoT that would be buffed further with Expurgation and Penitence. I would much rather this type of buff that you could decide to enhance for either single target or AoE depending on other talents you took than just a straightforward choice of “physical is single target, fire is AoE”. The proc effects are also fairly uninspired – a stacking buff that just does some damage when it procs isn’t an exciting culmination of the talent tree that you feel rewarded for speccing into in the same way that Final Reckoning or Execution Sentence is.
Another impact of the damage type altering talents is that basically all of Ret’s damage is now holy – the only major physical component left is your melee attacks. This was pretty close to the case for a while anyway, with the only major exceptions being Blade of Justice and Crusader Strike, but with Blades of Light and Holy Crusader, Mastery: Hand of Light is effectively just a flat damage increase for all abilities, which is makes a pretty boring effect even more boring. It’s also had a pretty substantial nerf on the PTR as a result of this. I would be surprised if there was a Mastery rework planned as well when we’ve already seen the majority of the big changes that are going to happen, especially since there’s a ton of other specs that also suffer from the “Mastery is just another version of Versatility” problem, but if Ret gets another look at some point in the future this would be near the top of my list for improvements to how the spec functions.
Other Thoughts
There’s a couple of other smaller changes I want to quickly highlight:
- Highlord’s Judgment – This now increases the duration of the Judgment debuff in addition to its other effects. This doesn’t really make any sense, since the issue you’d run into with Highlord’s Judgment was that you’d end up not being able to cast 3 spenders before you’d end up overwriting the debuff with another Judgment cast anyway, there was never any problem with the duration of the debuff at all even at 15s. I assume this was some kind of attempted fix that was lost in translation, but I’d still like to see some type of fix made to let you not have to constantly overwrite debuffs if you use it.
- Vengeful Wrath – Now replacing Zealot’s Paragon, it makes sense to remove the extreme Avenging Wrath extension when the base duration was buffed so much. Hammer of Wrath always critting is interesting especially as a way of making it a bit better during execute, and I like that Adjudication was changed to allow them to synergize together properly, although I don’t know if a free Blessed Hammer is a bonus to get that excited about.
- Consecrated Blade / Divine Hammer – I like that these talents are in a much more central place in the tree, easily accessible for every build. I really don’t enjoy using Consecration, so having either an option to maintain it passively or a Holy Power generator to replace it are both great options to me.
- Expurgation – This hasn’t changed, but I just want to reiterate an issue I mentioned last time. Currently, if you use Blade of Justice on a target that already has a Expurgation debuff, it’ll completely overwrite the existing DoT. If your last Blade of Justice crit, this can lose you significant damage to have to overwrite it, and there might be situations where you feel forced to hold Blade of Justice casts to not get a worse Expurgation DoT. This could easily be fixed in a number of ways, such as making the DoT effect take the remaining damage left on the previous debuff and adding it to the next application, and it’d vastly improve how good Blade of Justice feels to use.
- There hasn’t been any more mentions of mobility changes, but I hope there’s still some work being done here, really just some type of ability to let Ret deal with knockback and pushback effects other than just using Divine Shield, since every other part of our mobility toolkit is fine at this point.
Final Note
I’m being fairly nitpicky here because these are the talents and abilities that stand out to me as needing more work, but overall the changes are a massive improvement, and only getting better each week. The gameplay feels focused and fluid, you end up using your impactful Holy Power generators a lot more, and they feel better to press too, especially in AoE situations. Cooldown windows are much more adaptable depending on the situation, and survivability and mobility are leaps and bounds ahead of where they used to be. It’s mostly an effort to try to get “great” to “really great” at this point. I’m very excited to see the changes that come before 10.0.7 launches, and to be able to play with these new abilities on live soon too!
