Originally Posted by Kinmaul

For the people that are actually reading this forum gearing has always been trivialized. The Ret community here is robust and min/maxing is taken very seriously. Therefore at any given point the community knows exactly what stats/gear are the best and what is sub-optimal. Is it really such a bad thing that our secondary stats are relatively balanced? Hypothetically if crit suddenly became the best stat then everyone would gear/gem/enchant for crit to optimize their dps. However in truth the real determining factor for EJ ret paladin forum members wouldn't be their knowledge of the class, but rather the rng loot that drops week after week while farming bosses. If you didn't get your hypothetical crit gear drops then your knowledge of the class does nothing for your actual dps when compared to someone who got lucky with the loot table.

Making every stat relatively equal may lead to bland gearing choices, but given that every change to the spec is put to the mathematical grindstone it's not like there has ever been much of a decision (unless you count being at the mercy of a the rng loot table a decision). With the addition of reforging the individual stats of a piece of gear also lose a lot of importance when compared to previous expansions. The homogenizing of our dps rotation, like it was in wrath, is a much bigger threat to the difference of an average ret paladin and a great one then gear selection at this point in the game.

Originally Posted by moonsond

IMO, the biggest problem about our damage output is the balance between our serious burst when all 3 cooldowns are used and the overal low level of damage after they fall off. Retribution paladin is actually able to pull some serious and competetive damage from cooldowns, especially from GoAK, on short high-damage phases, think of Magmaw's head or Ascendant Council 3rd phase; but just half a minute later our DPS can drop by 30-40%, especially if some movement or target change is involved.
The ptr' changes to SoT stacikng will address the issues with dynamic fights, I hope; however, i really don't see any positive changes to our burst/sustained DPS balance mechanics, and GoAK would be the best subject to such. There is no trouble with its design in general, but the difference between our damage with or without it is way too large.
Not to mention our aggro, which is somewhat high. Even though i don't put out as much DPS as other melee classes, aggro balance on burst phases can be very stressful even now, when tanks didn't (or can't yet) build enough agro on the target.

An obvious solution would be to nerf STR stacking from GoAK, but increase the duration (by some deep-placed Retribution talent) of the "pet".
Also, some passive reduction of our threat level would be fine, we don't have any since the 4.0.1 and the removal of Fanatism.