Paladin DPS is mostly higher in 5man due to being able to spam in between resting periods and the burst DMG nature of paladins. Sanc. Crusader is only really worth it on bosses in this case.

That may be the case.

I still think you can make a strong argument for adding something to ret paladins. It should be a party buff not a raid buff, because I see them as being a weak spec at both levels of PVE (party and raid).

Add a Vindication-esque aura or proc that reduces armor by X% and all of a sudden you've got an extremely useful addition to a melee DPS group, or even a MT group (more damage = more rage, more threat).

Do what makes sense for you. Nihilum, DnT, etc crunched the numbers for their guild and decided a ret paladin is not useful for faster progression. We do have one Paladin who is ret, doesn't play much and is a bit undergeared. I've run 5 mans and Karazhan with him, his damage is great and he switches to healing when needed. Of course we haven't killed Gruul and I doubt we will pre 2.1.0, we don't try to optimize raids and specs and buff up.

So either your guild is trying to "beat the game" as fast as possible, in which case most priests=shadow, paladins=holy, gruul=many ranged, or you play for fun in which case spec how you want and enjoy the game.

I'm suprised we haven't really seen 10 man Karazhan runs of certain classes, whether its 10 pally or 10 druids. Probably the only two classes that could really single class the instance?

A few simple changes like Vindication to a damage debuff (chance on critical strike to reduce mob damage by 1/2/3% or the like) and/or fanaticism to something like chance to increase party melee, ranged, and spellcasting haste speed by x% would go a long way towards that.

I've also thought for the party support role, a talent that gave a chance on melee to proc an instant cast would actually allow a Ret paladin to be in melee and feasibly cast a few heals.

They should hire you sky, to do Paladin talent stuff.

Sanctity aura is tank group oriented, maybe the buffs should be tank group oriented as well. Maybe something like increased chance to parry. Shamans never got instacast heals, I think it would either be pretty imba - especially considering Light's Grace - or proc rate too low therefore not a factor. I think the answer is in armor/parry/resist buff group proc buffs.

How do you plan to handle interrupts in such a raid

For the Druids there's always Feral Charge. It'd actually be amusing to set up a rotation for that.

Paladins will just have to do it the hard way... And hope they don't get R&J.

Well, ideally you would not be able to get that talent and light's grace at the same time. You could also give it a proc chance off melee crits or something to encourage the use of melee gear, which is then going to weaken the heal to bring it in line. I would obviously take some testing and tweaking, but ideally it would allow the ret paladin to want to be wearing ret gear and want to be in melee in order to heal. One of the biggest problems now is that you can basically give all the Ret group buffs without actually meleeing, and your raid is better off for it.

I think you'll see 10 shamans before 10 paladins.

Isn't there a CS usable item off the Baroness in Stratholme ?

Belf Pallies could also use their racial too possibly?

That's kinda silly. I haven't seen a dps meter without one shadow priest for Gruul/Hydross. In fact I see several with 2 (including our own). Its damn hard to replace 15% more shadow damage and 5% more spell damage. Isn't the goal here to bring every hybird to that same level?

A 10 paladin Moroes kill would be absolutely easy mode, Attuman would be fairly easy too. You'd most likely get stuck on Opera though, unless you get lucky and end up with RRH.

What I meant was if you can rely on the effect it would be better than Light's Grace. If you can't rely on it, it doesn't matter.

I'm talking the possibility of tuning with Vindication in mind so on some boss it could 1 shot the tank without it. Knowing Blizzard they would do this when they want to make some really hard hitting boss. While Shadow Priests are nice we could live in theory without them basically anything DPS based should be able to be made up for but something balanced around a 15% chance in a stat like strength could have much more radical effects.

I rather see Paladins get something like Unbridaled rage for their party or an armor debuff. Something that increases DPS not changes in a potentially massive way how hard a mob could hit (then it would be like the original Thunderfury in ways)

That's probably accurate, mob damage reducing abilities seem to be difficult to balance rather than just "increases damage" types. To keep the debuff flavor it could either be something that decreases mob armor, increases miss chance, slows attack speed, etc. None of which would be make-or-break, but might be very worthwhile at certain times.

As of right now I don't think Vindication does anything to mobs at all. It'd be nice for somebody with too much time to do testing but I certainly won't bother. If Vindication does make a difference and would be a requirement for Patchwerktwo - this is the worst possible situation. They very well could be forcing people into specs they don't want or even roles they don't want by requiring whatever (Vindication or something else). We should be looking for solutions to make people want tot take a ret paladin on a raid, not making people take ret paladin because they have to.

I think the main problem with retribution presently is that holy paladins are very desirable healers. If a raid already has 3 holy paladins then adding a 4th pally as retribution really brings very few useful blessings to the table. And most raids do tend to have 3+ holy paladins because it just works out very well.

A raid carrying only 2 holy paladins (and 0 protection paladins) would probably benefit quite a bit from the addition of retribution paladin simply because they get the 3rd blessing which is still very useful for many classes. Perhaps the benefit isn't as big as adding a holy paladin but it would still be worthwhile over adding, say, a rogue or a mage.

If raids preferred holy priests over holy paladins as healers then there might be easier spots for retribution paladins. Currently holy paladins are preferred over most other healing classes (for bulk healing at least) so there is very little demand for any other paladin spec.

Yeah whatever it is needs to be autoattacked based and not like judgements where a paladin goes oh time to refresh that judgement let me go seal and judge for a few seconds.

The problem with making a modification to Vindication is that its so low in the ret tree. You can still be 41 holy and pick it up without too much trouble. If a fix comes that makes ret a desireable spec it has to come in a talent past repentence so that a heavy holy pally cannot pick it up with their 20 or so left over points.

IMHO if ret gets a talent it should be something that makes others more defensive since I think that fits with the class better than something that increases offense.

Something like 15% of your holy damage heals your targets target. 10% of your armor applys to targets affected by your aura. Something defensive I think fits more with the class, if it has to be an offensive debuff, something that makes the target miss more, or hit for less seems more "paladinish" than an armor reduction or something that makes dps hit the target harder.

My 2 cents anyway.

I think personally the frustrating thing about paladins right now is the two "off spec" trees are so very very close to being perfect that its really frustrating to stand there at the cusp of greatness but not quite be there. However if Blizz is too heavy handed with the tweaks the prot and ret tree can quickly become overpowered. Not an envyable position.

But it still won't accomplish anything unless you're actually meleeing. It's a proc on hit, so in order to get any benefit from it you have to leave autoattack on. So if you're going to have a paladin sitting there whacking at the boss the whole fight, why not have him spec so that he actually does some damage?

Vindication's placement is perfect. It allows prot paladins to get their own version of demo shout-like debuff and ret paladins to provide a strong debuff.