Toppazz

If you're getting caught in fear and sheep locks, you need to work on your LoS and it's not something BoS is going to help you through. You can't just stand and spend your time spam healing from an arbitrary place. Find a pillar, corner, or other LoS object and be aware of the positioning of enemy CC. You have to constantly work to make sure you are staying out of LoS while healing. Personally, I set my focus to the most dangerous source of enemy CC and drop a big Quartz focus casting bar towards the middle of my screen. If I'm being targeted by the focus and see a CC being cast, I can slightly move around my LoS object to avoid it. In absence of mods, showing enemy name plates with casting bars works.

This is probably the best thing said in the entire thread. When I play with low rated friends, the damage intake is incredibly higher than when I'm playing with my Gladiator teams. Healing and damage isn't what wins arena matches; controlling your opponents damage and healing is.

 

showdown

When I respecced to it, it mean the loss of around 1% of melee mitigation. That versus 3% hit to hammer of justice, hammer of wrath, exorcism, judgement of justice, etc. is no contest. I was kind of surprised that I didn't think of putting points there earlier, I guess I just felt I was completely neutered offensively. Just had to remember that I still have to cast offensive spells occasionally.

 

Rej

Yes, if you want to avoid being a liability, you have to be sure you can dodge behind a pillar at a moment's notice. Abusing LOS is important for avoiding both CC and manaburns. The problem is when your only DPSer is a Warrior, sometimes he overextends without meaning to. Having him be mindful of where your healers are and to play a bit defensively (don't get trapped out of LOS of your healers) can really help.

Fear is tricky, because it will run me out into the open at the worst possible times. From there it's hard to dodge for cover, especially when a teammate is dropping fast.

 

Krymore

I'm thinking about switching my Paladin's points into Precision as well, but I think the change to Precision came with patch 2.3 because I don't remember it ever helping Spell Hit as well.

 

• Episkey

Precision affects spell hit now; it's listed on the tooltip ^^

 

Keeper

Yes, the new Precision was introduced in the same patch as the Retribution changes. Before that, it was melee hit only.

I've personally picked it up as well when the patch hit, and I haven't looked back at all. Losing out on a bit of armour in comparison to getting less resists overall on many of your important abilities is really no contest.

Damage wins the fame, Healing wins the game.

 

Krymore

Yeah I respecced, and noticed that I got a lot less resists. Most of my partners don't see the difference, but it's really helped for clutch stuns. Still not sure about Toughness or Anticipation. I know the cookie cutter is Toughness, but Anticipation seems like it would be nice for those blocks, since I'd only gain about 100-200 armor.

 

tdevil

how much resilence/healing/hp do you guys run with?

In my pve gear i usually run +1910 healing with 21 resilence

I sometimes can't justify the drop in throughput for my resilence but other times, good teams straight come for me and lock/kill me pretty quickly if im in my pve gear.

 

Krymore

I've got 272 Resilience, 1580 Healing, 11.1k Mana, and about 10.7k Health.

 

Ariasis

(I remember the OP asking for Different specs, out-of-the-box-thinking... Well I wanted to reply to that...)

I am usually a Protection paladin, doing SSC/TK content. PvP quite frankly sucks when fully tank specced and geared. So I decided to try something new, something that involved Reckoning! I built a 0/25/36 spec, with all the usuall PvP talents. To my surprise I did quite good, winning against 2 people etc.

But my experience with this build was only short, since I had to tank the next day and spec out of it again... Also, I didn't try any Arena. Are there any other people that have experimented with Reckoning + 2 hander? People with more experience in PvP and tested it thouroughly...?

PS: I also tried this on PTR with a Blood elf, Reckoning + SoB which was... awesome! (Doing nearly 6k in one blow while ungemmed and unenchanted...)

 

Vitae

Precision is definitely better than Toughness now for the pure pvp build, no question. Sadly, I hate respeccing between pve holy and pvp holy, so I'm stuck with toughness here due to being the guild's AE trash tank.

Even beyond Hammer of Justice resists, I've found that since 2.3, it's almost always worth tossing in a righteousness and holy shock on the focus target during a spike. An extra 2k damage can very often mean the difference between a kill or a close escape. We're also bar none the best spikers of warlock pets. Typically the felhunter is on you as the paladin in the first place, which makes dragging it around a corner and dropping it without heals cake. Divine Illumination -> consecrate -> holy shock -> righteousness -> exorcism -> hammer of wrath will do about 70% of a pet's health with solid spelldamage (I have about 900 I think), which with a bit of help from your team will gib the pet 9 times out of 10. Hammer of Justicing it to prevent devour magic heals is sometimes necessary if you don't expect much help from your team, though obviously a debatable cooldown. Demo lock pets are even easier, since they tend to incidentally drop to 50-60% hp a lot, even against the better teams. In 2s/3s in particular, paladins killing warlock pets wins matches, and precision helps a lot in doing that, as any resists in the above combo make it far less effective.

The ability to drink freely makes the mana expenditure easily worth it, in most games. The initial kill isn't very costly due to divine illumination, and a good team is able to prevent the fel domination pet a surprising amount when they know it's coming.

 

AriasImmortal

I've run with 257 resilience, 1900 +healing, 11k mana, 9.6k health, 20% crit, 85 mp/5

I can switch to around 350 resi/10.5k health but I lose about 200 +healing and 50 mp/5, or if I want to go the full PvE route I probably have around 2k +healing with 100 mp/5 11k mana, and like 8.6k health with 21 resilience.

Having played all 3 setups, I think the best setup is the one in between full PvP and full PvE. There is a difference between 20 resilience and 200 resilience, but the difference between 200 and 350 is a lot less. I've found that I die just as fast in my 350 setup as my 250 setup, but quite a bit slower in 250 than 20.

My recommendation is (on most team setups) wear a mix. Try to get 200 resilience while maintaining your other stats.
If you play 2s with a warlock, though, wear full PvE gear and your PvP trinket.

 

Obligatory

So I was wondering if any other ret paladins could give me some advice. I just started 2v2ing with my roommate, an ice mage, as ret. His gear is pretty much terrible (I think he has like 2 pieces of season 1 + a mix of dungeon blues, giving him a whopping 7700 HP unbuffed). My gear is decent, though I could certainly use a new weapon.

Basically, we've been doing reasonably well, but we are running into a brick wall against any double DPS with a warlock. The DPS output is far too much to heal through, and I usually end up kited/feared into uselessness while my partner dies. On blade's edge we've had some success by trying to separate the two so that I can get the non-warlock alone and work him over without getting feared off, but I know that a good team would never fall for that.

Any advice aside from getting better gear? (or are there any PvP ret paladins that read this thread )

 

Ariasis

Well... it's a bit like kicking in an open door but your buddy simple has to increase his health by alot more. Against a double dps team you guys should have an edge because both of you can do burst damage while having good survivability (DS and Iceblock) Just try to nuke one down fast and try to break any cc fast by dispelling and using BoSac, trinket or Bubble.

Frostmage + Ret paladin seems like a nice combo to me though

 

• Amera

I played some double frost mage + ret 3v3s a bit ago for fun, and while it isn't exactly the same as the 2v2 version, it has some similarities. I found that my biggest problem personally was deciding when you need to heal. Like my mage would take damage, and my instinct was to heal him - but really that's time you aren't DPSing, which takes pressure off them and allows them to do more damage, etc. Really I think your heals are so pathetic as Ret that it isn't even worth healing if the target has any healing debuff on them. Probably the only time you should ever heal is to get yourself back to full after a DS, or your teammate after an IB. Otherwise you need to be putting out the pain as much as possible.

 

doogless

A couple guildmates of mine actually played Ret Paladin/Frost Mage for a while last season. I don't think they did particularly well, but they seemed to enjoy it. The Paladin released a video that has some of their matches in it - Ret Pally Pwnage - Filefront.com. Don't expect anything groundbreaking from the video, but at least it should give you a general idea of what you'll see.

 

Ariasis

I decided to go and try some 2v2 and see how far I can get. The most common setup is to get a MS warrior as partner... But there's none available for me in the guild or in my friendslist.

What is the second best choice?

(my spec is 41/20/0 btw)

 

Obligatory

Best choice imo is a SL/SL warlock. You're going to need some solid PvE gear though, having a lot of MP/5 is critical for that combo to work at the high end.

Also, thanks for the help to everyone that responded to me. I'm going to try a more aggressive rushdown style this week (hopefully aided by a new weapon, unless our guild's curse holds) and see how that works out. With any luck, we can get out of scrubby double DPS land, and get in to scrubby DPS-healer land, since we have little to no trouble with those types of teams.

 

Fadaar

It's completely hit or miss it seems when it comes to what gear you wear. Sometimes you won't get touched except for CC the entire match, other times you'll be focused. It's really a crap shoot. But anyway my stats with full pvp gear: 10.6k hp, 10.2k mana, 1666 healing, 25.75% holy crit, 41 mp5, and 371 resilience. Can add another 21 resilience if I swap my Hyjal mace (Hammer of Atonement) for the season 2 healing mace, but I much prefer the extra crit over the small resilience boost. I also don't have the badge cloak, much like the mace I never saw the use in downgrading my healing stats for a small bit of resilience.

 

yalag

Hello all, I have only recently started to arena with my paly. I'm needing some serious help in the UI aspect. Currently i have no pvp mods at all. What are some of the essential ones that I must have? I am guessing (from reading 23 pages of this thread) some mods to help on targeting cleanse, some timer mods (for DS etc), and probably some spell alert related mods.

Thank you.

 

• Leene

There are plenty of options for what you're asking for, but here are some alternatives at least.
For spell alert, something like Nature EnemyCastBar will really help out.
Visual display of remaining cool-downs on buttons: OmniCC.
Visual display of remaining cool-downs with separate bars for each: Cooldown Timer Bars
A spell alert mod that will print "X begins to cast X" in large letters on your screen: WitchHunt.
And finally Decursive can provide you with an easier way to manage cleanse.

 

Malakhi

It seems that most of the threads that discuss class and pvp have at least some information on gearing/ gemming etc. So far there has been little discussion in regards to specific gear that should be the goal of ppl new to PVP, or even non honor/arena gear that should be the goal of the higher ranked pvpers.
My main interest is in gear for Retribution. Is blacksmithing the way to go for a Ret Paladin?. Or is it not worth the investment and better to grind out the seaon 1 weapons and armor?

 

flyingtoastr

Unless you have easy access to 5 Nether Vortexs to go straight to the third tier weapons, Blacksmithing isn't too useful. The Season 1 Weapons have equal damage to the second tier Blacksmithing weapons, so you don't lose too much by using a different profession. As for armorsmithing, the tier 3 chestpiece is nice in stats but the on use ability is wasted in arena. Season 1 is generally the way to go for most cases.

I do have one small question though. Does anyone know of an addon (or plug-in for Grid) that lets you know exactly when a party member has certain debuffs? I'm concerned because I keep hitting UA accidentally, which has lost our team a few games. It would be nice to have a big "don't dispel this guy" sign so I don't have to go through each debuff manually each time I go to cleanse someone, costing time and heals.

 

Malakhi

You need to add UA to the alerts seperatly then you can display it as you wish , by icon or corner indicator whatever.

My guild currently doing T6 content and when we occasionally do T5 stuff the votexes are usally sold for guild funds, so I do have access to vortexes does this make the mace a suitable goal?