We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Retribution Paladin in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Retribution Paladin!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Feral Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Paladin Tier Set
Why You Should Play Retribution Paladin in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Historically, Ret has been an extremely popular spec among the playerbase at large, but is generally overlooked when it comes to high end content. This was also true at the beginning of Dragonflight, where it was a playable spec but one with a ton of issues, until it had a comprehensive redesign in 10.0.7, which fixed many of the problems to do with defensiveness especially. Coming from the end of Season 1 where Ret is now a fairly strong DPS spec, we’ll take a look at why you might or might not want to play Ret in Season 2.
Why You Should Play Retribution Paladin in Dragonflight Season 2
Retribution Paladin Playstyle in Season 2
Compared to the earlier iteration of Ret in Dragonflight, the recent changes have made playing it a lot more fun. Previously, you’d end up spending a ton of GCDs on abilities that did a trivial amount of damage and felt bad to press, like Crusader Strike and Consecration. You’d also end up with your abilities in general feeling unimpressive outside of your Seraphim / Final Reckoning window, even Templar’s Verdict. On AoE this was a bigger problem, where although Consecration did a decent amount of damage, your regular generators like Judgment and Blade of Justice basically contributed nothing except to generate Holy Power.
Fortunately, the rework fixed pretty much all of these issues. CDR talents make it so that you cast more impactful generators like Judgment and Blade of Justice much more frequently, and Templar Strikes does a much better job at being a filler ability that also does a real amount of damage too. Your generators now all cleave on AoE as well thanks to Blade of Vengeance and Blessed Champion, which keeps your other abilities feeling impactful. Cooldown windows have definitely been simplified with the removal of Seraphim, so it’s now pretty hard to really mess them up, although there are still ways you can optimize them to try and squeeze the maximum damage out of them possible.
Retribution Paladin Talents in Season 2
Talent choices have mostly improved too with the rework. The previous tree was full of generic, X% damage buffs to abilities that weren’t particularly interesting to choose or to play with. Most of those effects are now gone, although a few do still persist, and most of the new talents are ones that you’ll feel have some kind of impact in gameplay. With the previous version, you’d run generally the same build for any situation with only one or two changes, whereas now a single target and an AoE build will look completely different. There are some positives and negatives to this, however – being able to optimize more for single target or for AoE is nice, but you’re much worse at the other one if you do so, and there’s a couple of specific talent choice nodes like Execution Sentence / Final Reckoning and Blade of Vengeance / Empyrean Legacy that make it difficult to build really effective hybrid talent builds. You’re much more likely to actually swap talents depending on the content or the encounter now though, so overall the talent changes are definitely a step in the right direction.
Retribution Paladin’s Damage Profile
Ret is now a spec that primarily does strong single target damage. You have frequent, strong damage cooldowns, and compared to other classes that lose a ton of single target damage by speccing into cleave talents, you tend to still have fairly good priority damage. Ret’s main weaknesses are low target cleave and prolonged AoE – short duration AoE is nicely covered by Final Reckoning and Wake of Ashes, but on sustained AoE you tend to fall to the middle of the pack. The problem Ret has with low target cleave is that Divine Storm doesn’t become much better than Templar’s Verdict until 3-4 targets, and then you also need to take a few different talents to make it better rather than ones that buff Templar’s Verdict. Most of the damage increase you get from one extra target comes from generator cleave from Blessed Champion rather than swapping Templar’s Verdict to Divine Storm. As long as its single target remains strong however, this isn’t really a huge downside – a sustained cleave damage profile is required a lot less frequently than a strong single target one, or a burst AoE one. Aberrus looks to be a primarily single target focused raid, with a ton of bosses like Magmorax or Rashok that are purely single target or close to it, so having strong single target damage going into the next patch is a good place to be in.
Retribution Paladin Utility
Paladin is a class with a ton of utility for a lot of situations. First and foremost are the Aura buffs, Devotion Aura and Retribution Aura, which are essentially mandatory raid buffs and still very useful for Mythic+. On top of that, you have a ton of extra utility spells, especially healing – Lay on Hands or Blessing of Sacrifice can both easily save a party member from death, and Blessing of Protection and Blessing of Freedom have uses every raid and most dungeons to help immune or remove some annoying mechanic.
Retribution Paladin Defensives
In recent expansions, Ret has been defensively pretty poor, with one of the highest death rates across most endgame content. This was also the case in early Dragonflight, until the recent rework substantially buffed our defensive capabilities to the point that we’re now one of the tankiest DPS specs in the game. You have access to two 1 minute cooldown defensives, Divine Protection and Shield of Vengeance, along with a full immunity in Divine Shield, and a ton of passive defensive abilities like Sanctified Plates and Guided Prayer. You also have a variety of healing options, both passive and active. Ret essentially now has no weak areas defensively – you should almost always have a cooldown available if you’re taking damage, and even outside of that your passive talents will help keep you alive anyway.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Retribution Paladin in Dragonflight Season 2
Retribution Paladin Mobility
Our mobility certainly isn’t the greatest, although it’s also improved since 10.0.7. Divine Steed is now off the GCD, lasts a few seconds longer, we now have access to Unbound Freedom outside of PvP, and Ret has a ton of extra talents that increase the range of your abilities to keep doing damage even while outside of melee range. It’s still definitely on the lower end of melee mobility, but in most situations you should still be able to comfortably deal with most mechanics without issues. The exception to this is knockback or pushback effects, which Paladin in general is still extremely weak to. While every other melee spec has a short cooldown ability that they can use to prevent or mitigate knockbacks and pushbacks, Ret only has Divine Shield that can deal with it at all once every 3.5 minutes. Aberrus is also a raid with knockback mechanics on almost every boss, and although most of them are unlikely to be as extreme as something like Raszageth winds to the point that Ret loses viability in the raid, they will certainly affect Ret the most out of any melee.
Retribution Paladin Tier 30 Set Bonus
Unfortunately, our tier set bonus in the new raid is both mechanically not that interesting and tuned pretty low. Hammer of Wrath does a decent amount of damage on single target, so buffing it is ok there, but Judgment contributes more through debuffs than direct damage, so a buff to Judgment doesn’t provide much of an increase. Hammer of Wrath applying the Judgment debuff is also not really a great bonus since almost all of your spenders are buffed anyway, especially with Divine Resonance during cooldowns. Buffing the Judgment debuff works ok for a set bonus since they’ve buffed it enough for it to be relevant, but it still isn’t actually that strong and doesn’t have any rotational impact. Hammer of Wrath now cleaving in AoE is interesting, since you previously didn’t end up even using it on multiple targets, but it’s tuned low enough that you’ll probably still prioritize it below most other generators. The only change you’ll notice on AoE is now pressing Hammer of Wrath more than “never”, but on single target you won’t see any difference in gameplay or talents chosen at all. This is pretty disappointing given that our first tier set in Dragonflight was an equally boring flat buff to almost all generators and spenders.
Retribution Paladin Stats
The WoW community tends to overreact a bit when it comes to whether a spec “scales” or not, and I am not really inclined to feed into that view since it rarely has an impact on how viable a spec ends up being for any given tier, but I think it’s something worth mentioning as one of the few potential negatives to Ret. Ret currently is a spec that does very strong damage with low gear/stats, but ends up not improving with the addition of more stats quite as much as some other specs. Most of the reason is to do with how some of the new mechanics we’ve gained from the new talents devalue some secondary stats that are usually quite strong for us. For example, Hammer of Wrath and Templar Slash always critically hit, so Crit can’t be quite as strong as it previously was due to not applying to all our abilities anymore. Similarly, our Mastery: Hand of Light was nerfed during the rework by about 40%, and Haste is less valuable than it used to be since Templar Strikes doesn’t have Haste applied to its GCD. The end result is that a spec that used to primarily want Haste and sometimes Mastery now ends up with Versatility as its best stat by default, and the relative improvements the other stats provide is lower than it used to be. This isn’t necessarily going to be a problem immediately or even at all this expansion as tuning happens very frequently, but it’s worth noting that while your 400 ilvl Ret might be blasting compared to everyone else at 400 ilvl, it might not gain as much from the next 20 or 30 item levels of gear as everyone else does.
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.
For more information on playing Retribution Paladin, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Retribution Paladin Guide
