Why should we care? It's the defensive abilities like bubble-sac that justify our slot, not big yellow numbers. If all that mattered in raids was DPS, we may as well just stand at the door buffing and let the raid take a Rogue.

After playing around last night, this is what I've discovered.

Art of War currently procs from:
- Judgements (probably going to be fixed so it doesn't)
- Auto-Attack
- Crusader Strike
- Divine Storm
I had it up for nearly 100% of the time. What mattered to me was if it was up when the Exorcism cooldown was ready, and it was. Welcome back to instacast Exo.

Seal of Command/Vengeance currently procs from:
- Auto-Attack
- Crusader Strike
- Divine Storm
It seems Command's internal 1 sec CD has been removed, so it works for AEing now. Lesser-skilled rets who use Vengeance are going to be a CC nightmare since it procs on every swing. With Vengeance, AE fights are going to be easier than ever before imo.

Judgement of Command/Vengeance:
- Auto-crit on stun has been removed from JoCommand.
- JoCommand is very low, made me cry .
- JoVengeance is bursty still.

This is what peak my interest the most:
The Flash of Light critical gives you a HoT called "Sacred Shield". Now that's 3 buffs we have called "Sacred Shield": the actual casted buff, the bubble, and now the HoT. Casting in on myself (after jumping off the mountain outside IF), I can get it to proc along with Sheathe of Light. Double-stacking HoT's is awesome, but I wonder if it's intended for Rets to have double-stacking HoT's. If they remove the HoT component from Sheathe of Light, I hope they replace it with something else rather than leaving it with just the 30% spell power conversion.

moved to 3.2 thread. pls delete.

Well I think most of us would like a new combat system that had much more scaling with skill, but if you are expecting that THIS expansion you need to forget about it. It is not going to happen until the next Xpac, and to be honest I don't think it will happen then either just more of the same with small tweaks and number changes.

When you think of skill classes most of them involve keeping track of DOTS (Aff, Mutilate, Feral) or using two resource systems that have strong synergy (Energy and Combo Points or Runes and Runic Power etc), and some of those share both "skill" based systems. We have never had either of those. I mean after the redesign in 3.0 before WotLK why didn't you just switch classes then? We worked exactly the same as now, but then we were destroying meters and everything else in our way, because our numbers were waaaay too high.

Also, I still don't understand where this battle cleric mentality is coming from. I want to be straight DPSing not making a 1,000 macros for cleanse and tbh your FoLs are not as critical as you think they are. There may be times, yes, when those come into play (me thinks brain phase of Yogg), but most of the time you are better suited keeping your mind on killing the boss and letting the actual healers heal. Yes I can throw out the occasional Salv (though these days they are rarely needed other than Vezax and Hodir) or Sac some large AOE damage to buy some time or save the healers some mana, but I SURE as hell do not want to be designed around having large open gaps in my DPS so I can cleanse some moron who stood in fire too long.

I am not saying we are perfect, but there is a lot of QQ going around about how we were just nerfed, and that is simply not true. I am very much happy with a 500ish DPS increase when not even raid buffed. Odds are when I am raid buffed that number will go up by quite a bit more. We still need a few more tweaks. Crusader Strike needs to have its mana cost lowered by just a bit. And I think we will eventually see a nerf to SoV, because I HIGHLY doubt that it will be PVE only. More than likely because of its superior damage it will be the PVP seal of choice as well which will lead to future "redesigns" down the road. Another reason I don't like having a PVP and PVE seal system.

I don't see why we shouldn't see a change in an abillity to make the class skill based slightly more I also don't think it is out of blizzards power to do it considering how sweeping the current 3.2 changes actually are.

Mana is a tricky resource for melee but not one that other classes don't have so I don't see the argument as a negative as it 'can' be done.

I've got one reply telling me losing DPS by using divine sacrifice is ok and this one telling me you don't want to use your hand abillities because you aren't a battle cleric. It isn't a battle cleric mentality it's about easing the abillity to have access to these spells which can be fairly potent and useful. We are one of 2 melee classes that can't interrupt the other class has combat res and innervate why shouldn't we be more able to use our helping abillities? Theres nothing wrong with being able to provide some help around the raid else we'd all be rogues.

at 3.0 release I don't think anyone thought things would stay like that for long and I think lots of people tried to get across the message that ret was a very easy spec to play. Now im not talking about going TBC belf seal twist complicated, but surely a small increase in class knowledge needed for better dps should be present. The difference between a bad ret paladin, a good ret paladin and an excellent ret paladin is probably gems>Proffessions>RNG.

I understand what you're saying here, but I think you & several others misunderstand what people like me really want.

First off, I don't think there is any disagreement about ret's skill cap needing to be raised. How much is probably up for some debate, but we want to be able to tell the facerollers from the rest of us. It was posted above me that the difference between a good & bad ret is mostly in gems & stats (I'm paraphrasing here), but currently, I don't know if that is completely true. On many fights I manage to sneak in my utility just enough to make a difference, without sacrificing much (if any) dps. As crappy as our AoW heals are, one placed on the right person at the right time can stop a lot of problems before they happen.

That said, I certainly don't want to be relegated to a melee healer. I think what we (and any dps class really) want is to be useful in a visible way. Bubble/DivSac is highly visible, highly effective & doesn't cost us that much dps over the course of a whole fight. A few of us voiced concern over possibly losing this ability & the discussion turned to our utility, but that hardly equates to us wanting to be battle clerics. We don't get to do as much dps as a rogue, so we want to be sure our contributions to the raid are visible enough to have raid leaders continue to bring rets to raids.

So why is it that rets are expected to provide utility at the expense of dps, but not enh shammies or feral druids?

That is not true at all. What does an enhancement shaman need to do to heal? Use their Maelstrom Weapon stack that would otherwise be dps. A feral needs to totally abandon cat form to provide utility.

But, in their current form, they could pop out, Battle Rez, Innervate a healer and pop back into cat and still outdps us. That's what he was getting at.

I think blizzard would be the first ot put forth that cat dps is too high and is not what other hybrids should be balanced against. A better question would be if Boomkin battle rezzing and invenerating does more dps than us or a DK raising a raid member as a ghoul does more than us.

Well, weird enough, I haven't really seen any blue posts with big nerf plans for ferals. I've seen GC say something around the likes of "ferals are very high, but not on every fight [which I disagree with] and they require a lot of skill to be that high [as if that makes it ok. Give us their combat system then]".

Unless I missed some big (they need to be tuned down around 15-20% I'd say) nerf recently of course.

Thanks for pointing that out, I underestimated the nerfs in the patch notes so far then. (the whole "same AP scaling" made me sort of assume the difference wouldn't be hughe in BiS ulduar gear)

It's not a huge nerf. I'm not sure why fmorrison is getting a 10% nerf (and my source could just as likely be wrong), but the ferals in my guild said they only see a 2-3% dps difference since the vast majority of their damage comes from AP scaling. However, I'm fairly confident that we'll all end up around the same in terms of hybrid DPS.

That being said, first this is a retribution paladin thread. Crying about what other classes have will get us no where. Second, you guys are discussing a 3.2 topic in a 3.1 thread, and it's only leading to confusion!

A lot of their abilities had the amount of damage done by the base ability reduced by 6-10%, but the attack power scaling wasn't changed, so who knows...could be 2-3% considering they didn't nerf the AP scaling on those abilities.

It seems like divine sacrifice was hotfixed so that 150% is the cap of absorbed damage instead of damage taken. This would make the ability hardly worth taking. Anyone have definitive evidence of this? If this is true, looks like we have a bunch of talent points with basically nothing to do with them.

Even if that was true (not as past Thursday), I still would take the talent due to the SS buffing. Absorbing 37k raid damage at the cost of 50% less damage is still good to me.

As rightfully requested, some posts about yogg from the 3.2 discussion:

Anyone with similar experiences?

Does Divine Storm healing produce any (I do not hit the spawning guardians with it but I might use it before they are in its range)? Does Sacred Shield proccing produce any threat? Retribution aura?


Yes, the healing from DS and the buff/absorb from SS produces threat. Ret Aura produces threat for whomever procs it by getting hit. Try not using Cons/DS when a new Guardian is coming, it lowers your dps but then dying is worse.

Yes, ret paladins have a serious aggro issue on Yogg P3, and it took me a while of testing (and many deaths) to sort it out. Here are some general rules I follow, which I hope will help:

-Consecration should be used sparingly, it's a minimal dps gain and too mana expensive to be worth the risk of pulling aggro while an add runs over.
-Don't attack right away. If your guild has GOOD rogues, and enough of them, a tricks rotation should keep aggro under control. But you can still do 20k rounds on a target within a GCD, so you NEVER want to attack off the bat. My rule is to not attack until the mob is at 90%. Usually other melee switch off the mobs before they get very low, so to minimize aggro pulling I'm usually the one to finish them off (and get lots of HoW because of it!).
-Don't mindlessly hit DS. Be aware of your surroundings. If you hit a passing mob that a tank hasn't actually hit a few times, you WILL pull aggro and die. Be aware that both consec AND DS have a range exceeding their graphic.
-There is no such thing as a death where you did "nothing". JoL gives no threat, but consecrate and DS do.
-A guardian will not hit you over a healer if the tanks don't get threat. If you get threat, YOU MESSED UP.
-Make excessive use of Omen. If you get lucky on crits, don't risk it. Stop attacking, wait until your threat subsides.

Helping dispel during P3 can be a boon to the healers to. Usually, I'll go beat on Yogg too when wings are up so at least I'm making use of my cooldowns, but what you do really depends on where you tank the adds. Keep an eye on which tank is holding the mob you're currently killing because you should know how each of your tanks is on producing initial threat.

I've tried to take all this into account and even so the adds like to target me as they spawn. I stood with the ranged group away from the tanks, the guardian spawns and targets me instantly (I can see it via ora2 target's target) before the tank taunts it and starts building threat. Since our tanks use the tactics of letting the guardians run in front of them towards the ranged before taunting (to make sure they are always facing them), this can be a problem when a guardian spawns directly behind melee, runs past, whacks me, then runs further before the tank taunts it.

All I can think of is that I might hit DS or Judgement on a previous guardian when the next one already spawned somewhere and the minuscule healing/mana regen threat pulls them towards me.

Could be Replenishment ticking? I believe that that is attributed to you, and I'm not aware of it having zero threat.