I've been running into alot of discrepancies about what group i should be put into. We only run 2 shaman, no enhance shaman. and we have 2 fury warriors and 2 rogues that consistently raid. usually we end up doing those 4 melee with 1 shaman, and then the other shaman with casters and maybe a shadow priest.

what ends up happening with me is, they just kinda throw me in the whoever they can. 90% of the time i gotta ask the officers to fit me in to at least get a battle shout(from a prot warrior)

Granted i used to be holy before the patch, i was asked to go ret to give it a try. my gear is pretty decent but i dont think they are giving me a fair chance to show what this spec can do.

is there any way i can go about trying to get into the melee group without stepping over anyone? Its gotten to a point where, they find it hard to bring me into raids cuz they dont see my dps as being enough.

and yes, they are measuring my straight dps as justification of a raid invite (note i was always invited as holy)
any help would be nice :P

Same here as well. In my case a lot of healers stepped up and we have a great cadre of healers to choose from. I switched prepatch and the raid DPS went up. My original argument was that our pally MT could have a higher threat cap. Now I am in a melee grp with a fury, enhance, druid and a rogue and raid DPS is unreal. I can still go holy and do decent healing but I am truly a RetPally now.

I came in #5 in a Kael downing and #3 on Solarian and nobody says lolret anymore...

Ok, as said before, as a bare minimum you will need Windfury to do any form of competitive personal dps.

That's pretty much the only buff I think is non-negotiable, everything else is nice but not required.

Why?

As a slow 2h wielding class, windfury procs are a godsend, every proc means a huge extra hit and a huge damage contribution.

Rogues/Fury warriors (dual wielders) gain a lot less from windfury procs.

2h wielding MS warriors (for blood frenzy) used to be on the same boat as us, but go with tight slam rotations now-a-days to provide competitive DPS, which interferes with their gain from windfury.

As such, this puts us at the top of the "windfury needers" food chain, our average results are 8-15% damage gained from windfury procs, where as dual wielders gain 4-7% according to my experience.


Now who to take out of the melee shammy group: A rogue.

Why?

Since you don't have an enhancement shammy the argument of "but we need the unleashed rage (+10% AP)" for your rogues becomes irrelevant.

What's left is SoE, which is 77 str untalented, which gives your rogues only 85 AP, where as it gives you/fury warriors 186 AP (this is with kings and talents) and slightly less for MS warriors.


In addition, you boost your groups damage by 2% through imp Sanctity Aura.




So in a nutshell: High dependency on WF to provide good personal DPS and a lot more benefit from WF/SoE than any rogue as well as a group buff of 2% damage vs nada by the rogue.

The above was just to argue group placement, not raid relevance (raid buffs etc).

The classes you have priority over (IMO) in order:

1. Mutilate Rogues
Yeah, they're rare, but if you have one in raid chances are he'll be using dual DP, and thus be getting no benefit from Windfury. Kick him to the tank or hunter group.

2. Feral Druids
Again, no benefit from Windfury at all. The crit aura is nice, but the 2% damage and 3% crit from the ret pally make up for it. Tank or hunter group for the kitties.

3. Any "third rogue"
Its really just a waste of buffs to put a third rogue in a melee group over a ret pally. The DPS he loses is small compared to the amount you gain. Stick him in a corner somewhere.

Those are the classes I would drop first from a melee group in exchange for a ret pally. It is impossible to underemphasize the benefit that a ret pally gains from the group buffs he gets from a melee group. The are only a few fights (Kaz'Rogal) I can think of where I would really want to be in a caster group for a shadow priest.

Just like to put it out there that I have yet to group up with and get a Windfury Totem and I do 800-940 dps just fine. I don't expect to do Rogue dps and just due to the nature of Bursty 2H damage vs constant Dual Wield I don't really expect to compete with them on the Damage meters.

I do however keep really close behind them -_^

I'm sure I can post a few WWS once I get a hold of some recent ones. If it's wanted.

this is basically what i tell them, but they say that a rogue benefits more than me cuz my dps is "So bad" which it isnt, like the poster prior, i maintain about 800-900 without even having battle shout.but then they use that against me when making the melee group

Find someone with comparable gear on SWS, get a breakdown of how much extra dps they pull entirely due to WF, and then compare it to a similar gear-level rogue's extra dps due to WF. Make links. Show that you're right.

Not that I necessarily think it'll help, your raid leaders sound like the same kind of people who were saying "lol why would a priest go shadow" for several months after BC came out. However, there's a marginal chance that real-world data will work where "logic" and "math" doesn't (seriously who uses those). ...Or they'll just claim that the rogue in your data sucks. I had to deal with the same flak but it went away the moment I got WF and started breathing down the rogues' necks.

yea its interesting. They have told me personally that they would never let a paladin go ret in the guild. But shortly after we got into SSC, our GM left and we had our paladin class lead take over. And he was the one who approached me to give it a shot when 2.3 came out. cuz i actively worked on all 3 of my sets(holy>prot>ret)

being as ret was my tertiary set, it wasnt that high of quality at the time, but its improved alot. when we were progressing through RoS this week, i was right with the rogues and fury wars when we only had 1 shaman in the raid (given to casters) and then, and i didnt even have battle shout, but when our other shaman logged in, the 2 rogues and 2 warriors got the shaman without question.

i just have no way around it . i dont know how to get it through their heads that i can benefit GREATLY from having a shaman in the group.

Here's some WWS reports of my first night as (hopefully) a full time Ret Paladin:

Gurtogg Bloodboil (no Windfury, no Battle Shout) - Wow Web Stats
Teron Gorefiend (only Windfury) - Wow Web Stats
High Warlord Naj'entus (ideal melee DPS group) - Wow Web Stats

Take a look at my relative position throughout the night. First place with a nearly ideal melee DPS group (Windfury / SoE, Improved Battle Shout, LotP), middle of the pack (but competitive) with just the Shaman present, and near the bottom of the pile with a group with no group buffs at all. That should give you a pretty decent idea of what exactly group placement does for a Retribution Paladin.

Edit: Even using some very simple math it's easy to see who benefits the most from melee totems. Let's look at mine and (the Rogue from my WWS report) Kouheii's Armory profiles:

The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory

My average, unbuffed, pre-armor weapon swing is 1080.5 damage. Kouheii's average, unbuffed, pre-armor main hand swing is 595 damage. Regular, unimproved Windfury procs would be for 1201.29 damage for me, and 680.82 damage for him. I gain 63.23 DPS, he gains 50.43 DPS. Paladin wins.

Strength of Earth will give me 239 attack power after Kings and Divine Strength. Strength of Earth Totem will give him 109 attack power after Kings. Paladin wins.

Unleashed Rage will give me 197.8 attack power. Unleashed Rage will give him 173.4 attack power. Paladin wins.

The scale tips more in our favor if we are fully raid buffed, as well. I'm of course not trying to say that Retribution Paladins are better than Rogues, but that we gain more out of Shaman buffs than they do. And if you have to choose between Rogue 3 in the melee DPS group and your only Retribution Paladin, the choice should be pretty easy.

I think the words "Try it and prove me wrong" might go a long way... altho that is putting you in the hot seat assuming you can rise to the task of convincing them otherwise.

There was some math done about rogues vs paladins with the benefit of WF some pages ago you could look at and expand upon as well.

You simply can't please everyone, when you have 5 mages.. not all of them can be in the shadowpriests group... when you have 2 warlocks, one group is going to miss out on imp buffs... when you have 2 paladins, someones missing out on an extra blessing... etc etc

Composition to the most efficient value is name of the game and someone is bound to be sour over being left out of awesome dps group synergy.

i dont mind getting put in the hot seat at all. I mean, i was purely holy until we got into hyjal. 2 nights of messing up terribly on trash, and they finally gave me a shot at AoE tanking the trash.

we got to archimonde in a matter of days. and alot of it hinged on me being a knowledgeable paladin(and having a decent prot set :P)

How big dps boost 1str actually give. I tested with MaxDps spreadsheet and I didnt see "Ret paladin scaling is one of the best in game ". Its better than feral druid but worser than any dual wielders. Or am I missing something relevant?

There is also the non-trivial point that being in a shaman group will get you heroism - and a 30% damage increase is obviously better for a rogue. I guess min/maxing absolutely would be shifting the ret paladin out for heroism, then back in after.

That said, this is about as good a fight for melees as you can:

Loading...

Arihant had battleshout, leader of the pack.
Rogues had windfury, heroism, battleshout.

We had a survival hunter and a bloodfrenzy warrior both in the raid.

Here are also some really dumb Gorefiend wipes, but on those parses Arihant had an enh shaman:

Wow Web Stats

I also want to adress something that a lot of people brought up in this thread recently. Arihant recently has respec'd a lot back and forth since one of our holy paladins recently moved back to help his old guild, and we have been fairly pressed for healers, even though we have been trying to recruit some more shamans for sometime.

If your guild is excellent for DPS and you are one of the top healers, understand why asking to spec ret might be a tough sell. Hopefully guild bank is intelligent enough to fund your respecs, but a lot of time one extra healer is a lot more valuable than one extra DPS, expecially if you have extra DPS that end up sitting out a lot on raids.

In the end this is a team game, raid leaders should try to accomodate everyone's desires to play whatever spec they want, but the main priority is always killing the boss.

Is 30% attack speed really going to benefit rogues more? Given that such a high percentage of their damage is yellow, I think the auto attack reliant ret paladin would have far more to gain. This may be slightly different on alliance, as I'm not 100% sure if SoC benefits from Blood Lust or not, given how it works with haste.

Rogues have a *slightly* higher % of white damage than paladins. And yes, SoC doesn't benefit from it. With SoB though, I'd venture as far as to say, a paladin may get more out of Bloodlust than any other dps class. Haste scaling with SoB is incredible.

Rogues also tipically wear a lot more haste gear, and haste feeds them through combat potency procs. Paladins on the other hand can pop AW during heroism - would be interesting to see who benefits more, but I strongly suspect its the rogues.

I think the comparison of the first 2 WWS's really says it all. with windfury, you did 10,000 more damage in a 3 minute fight than you did without windfury in a 7 minute fight.

Wow......just wow.

I'm in a 3/6 SSC and 1/4 TK guild with both Maggy and Gruul on farm, just to give you an idea of progress and avaliable gear. I had my first raid as Retribution last night on our "Gruul and Maggy" weekly raid, after much time gearing up and convincing the officers it might work.

I was in the perfect melee group, Fury Warrior, Feral Druid, Enh. Shaman and a Rogue. Mana was a slight issue throughtout the fights, nothing a Mana Potion couldn't solve however. Aggro, well, this was an issue. Despite having Salvation and the 30% threat Reduction from talents I was still capped behind the off-tank on Gruul, and on Maggy I pushed to 123% of the tanks aggro before I decided it was time to back off and look sexy for 30 seconds.

Damage though, wow. I topped the damage meters on both boss encounters, and topped the DPS as well. I hit 1007dps on Gruul despite being held back by the off-tanks aggro. I had Haste Potions in my bags ready to pop, and I couldn't, I even had to skip an Avenging Wrath because of threat as well...not to mention the occassional backing off, counting to 10, before re-engaging. Was even top on Magtheridon, despite being on box clicking duty.

I'm not sure if Armory is functioning yet, but I am in mainly PVP/crafted gear, with just one piece on T4; certainly outgeared by some of the higher geared players present last night.

It was absolutely incredible. Safe to say the Rogues, Mages and Warlocks in my guild are NOT happy at the moment.

Thanks again for this thread and especially for the spreadsheets!

<3 Retribution!

They are completely different fights.

Teron is a DPS burn fight with no aggro thresholds whatsoever. Gurtogg everyone except hunters is immensely threat capped, since there are multiple knockbacks and there is some horrendous damage going around. Gurtogg is pretty much a healing fight, DPS is trivial there as long as your healing is good

Of course windfury is a big boost, but the two fights are hardly comparable in any way.

For reference, my guild is further back than Imperatoris, but check out those parses:
Wow Web Stats - Teron, 8 healers, 21000 DPS
Loading... - Gurtogg, 8 healers, 14000 DPS

We had ~6000 more raid DPS on Teron, but look at the amount of healing required in both fights.

Mongoose was what I used to use, but I just got a Cataclysm's Edge tonight and I decided to put Executioner on it. Executioner sounds better and better as it's researched more fully in the thread dedicated to it, and I'm fairly sure that an Executioner enchant's ~5% damage increase for the duration of a proc will do more than the 4 and a bit crit gained from a Mongoose proc, even when Executioner only works on ~75% of our damage. Not to mention, Armor penetration stacks with Armor penetration really well.

That's not really a valid conclusion. I specifically said to look at the relative performance, since absolute performance is pretty meaningless across different types of fights. DPS'ing on Gurtogg is pretty downright scary because of threat and positioning issues, while Naj'entus and Teron Gorefiend are nothing but an exercise in perfecting your cycle. Then you have to take into account elements of movement like on Gurtogg, and the shield Naj'entus throws up and the spines he impales you with that cut into DPS time.

The only thing that's constant across the three fights is that everybody has those issues, so you'd expect relative positions to stay similar if nothing else changes.

Hmm, I disagree. Some fights favour some players a lot more than others - rogues have vanish, mages invisibility, so classes with an aggro wipe do much better on fights like Gurtogg compared to Teron. Shadowpriests end up massively threat capped early on both Teron and Najentus because of VE healing aggro.

I expect that the ratio of rogue/ret paladin damage varies wildly between Teron and Gurtogg.