Infraction for Jubjub: Profile/Broken Shift Key

Kaubel · 07/17/07, 12:06 PM

Post: Retadin use in raids?
User: Jubjub
Infraction: Profile/Broken Shift Key
Points: 2

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Please fix both of these problems.

Original Post:

hello, i had registered with the EJ forums a while ago but i had never made any posts. tonight sapp got on and talked to me for a bit (actually taught me a few things too) and told me to head here and post. i was browsing the forums and think this is a good place for my first post.

i'm a raiding ret pally and i consider myself to be doing endgame content. we're far in bt (gotten illidan to 30% our first night after wasting 2 complete weeks on him due to some fucked up bug), and i consider myself to be pretty good geared for a ret pally. i play on Illidan and my pally's name is Grant.

getting past the introduction, here is the reasoning my guild had for asking me to raid as ret.
first of all i played a rogue pre-bc and i could put anyone to shame when it came to dpsing. also i have very solid attendance. so out of our paladins (who mostly had healer backgrounds) so i was a good choice for going ret.
second, we rarely take four paladins to any raid. usually its just 2 or 3. the reason is that for most end-game encounters, paladins fail at healing. especially since the healing nerf, our paladins cannot keep up with the rest of the healers. resto shaman and holy priests are pumping out triple the amount that the paladins heal. this gives holy paladins only one thing to do, and that's to heal the MT. other than the MT, there is no way paladins can keep up with chain heals, coh, and poh. we often have a druid and a priest watching MTs, and having more than a couple more paladins on him is simply overkill.

so raiding as ret has absolutely nothing to do with my dps, or the ret talents i bring. a ret paladin is an underpar dps by far. i do about half the dps of most people, and close to one third the dps of our rogues. however, the same thing goes for my holy brethren. they heal about half of what shaman/priests heal for. now having 3 holy paladins is a bigger hit to the raid due to lack of healing (we take very few healers to raids), than having that spread out. the way we do it, we have 2 holies and 1 ret, so the burden is shared.

btw, dont take this as me bashing paladins in general. the fact that people are sacrificing all this to squeeze in pallies in raids shows that we are worth more than the meters show.

now a few specifics. sanctified crusader will add different amounts depending on your raid makeup. the few times that i've taken the time to calculate it out of our raid dps, it comes out to around 1-1.5%. so on a 20k dps raid, thats a bonus of 2-300. imp sanctity aura is pretty much a worthless buff and adds up to nothing when raid dps is concerned. furthermore, having such terrible dps, i can be put in any group. it could be a tank group for devo, caster group for concentration, resist group, or whatever else. i pretty much get tossed around all the time so imp sanctity can be either off or out of range of anyone. there is absolutely no reason to take anyone out of a dps group to put a ret pally in. the most important things i bring to raid are blessings and judgements, and i do those in any group im in. so i sit at around 7-800dps, and the raid dps gets a benefit of say 200 from my judgement. any rogue will easily top that. not by a little, but by alot. but here's the kicker, no one is willing to swap me for another rogue. if they bring another pure dpser in, thats one blessing they're gonna lose. and if they swap a healer for a pally to get that extra blessings, now they're losing out on massive amounts of heals. also dont forget that i'm flexible. i dont care which group i'm in. i dont care what aura im using. i watch to heal people when i can. i ALWAYS have my finger on LoH when its up. i watch to bop people. i use bosac in any situation that demands it. and much more.

there you have it. retribution is a terrible spec no matter how you look at it and how much you try to add up numbers in order to make it look good. people who do all the number crunching are doing nothing but deceiving themselves. its a bad spec and its never worth it to bring ret pallies to raids, unless youre in the same boat as me. we rarely take more than 7 healers to raids and our top raiding healers are 3 holy priests, 2 resto shaman, and 1 druid. this leaves 1 slot for a holy pally, or 2 slots when one of the above is not online. in fact i could have just as easily been prot because when they were deciding how to get all the blessings in there was talk of having a prot pally, however we have very good prot warriors and a couple of very well geared feral druids, so that pretty much seemed like a waste.

there you have it. sorry if i rambled on or repeated things over and over. but thats the story of how i got to where i am, sitting in last spot in dps and stealing warrior gear