A little while ago when Paragon downed HLich King, I definitely knew I had to see what their Rets thought about everything that was going on. Luckily for me, Iiris agreed to answer a few questions, and frankly it’s quite refreshing to see such an upbeat and friendly player giving me some input on topics that players usually argue over for days, without coming off as a rager!

Hopefully you Tuesdaygoers like this week’s post, albeit a little late! (Link to his armory : click here!)

Q1: First off, I’m curious as to what your background is and what made you decide to play the Paladin class (and more specifically, Retribution) in the first place. Give us some insight on how it all fell into place before you were standing atop a dead Arthas as one of the few Rets to see him dead on hard mode!

Hello, I’m Iiris and I’m playing a retribution paladin in Paragon. I’ve been playing since the EU release and my previous characters before my paladin were a druid and a rogue. I played in small Finnish semi-casual guild called Replica at Darksorrow server. When The Burning Crusade came our guild needed paladins (being horde) and since we had too many rogues I decided to switch to paladin. I played in Replica till the guild collapsed at Kael’thas and ended up being disbanded. Shortly after that I was recruited with some people from Replica to another Finnish guild called Knockout at Twisting Nether which was pretty successful fully Finnish guild back then. As many of you might know Knockout is one of the “founding” guilds that became the Paragon with the guild Sauna, but nowadays Paragon is much more than just Knockout and Sauna. I raided in the TN Knockout till the end, I think we got to Sunwell twins before the guild disbanded. After that we migrated with our 5on5 pvp team to Stormscale and ended up being in Paragon knowing that the core of the old Knockout was playing there also and our present guild master Seita was planning to make a hardcore PVE guild in the Wrath of the Lich King. When Paragon was formed at the end of TBC we cleared everything in Sunwell in two weeks I think. I’ve been playing in Paragon ever since.

I first started as holy paladin in the start of TBC and I was one of our “main” healers till the Ulduar. We didn’t really have a retribution paladin till Ulduar but one was really needed back then because of the insane JoLight so we recruited couple but all of them quit after couple of month or were just pure fail so I had to step up and became the ret of the guild and I’ve been playing ret since that. I enjoyed healing as holy paladin but I wanted some change and I’m enjoying ret even more now =).

Q2: How do you feel about WotLK’s content so far, and WoW’s content as a whole? I know HLich King is something fierce, but the rest of heroic Icecrown has been a little less “heroic” and a bit more.. “pinata”.

I think WotLK’s content didn’t let me down and even though TOC felt like a filler instance I enjoyed the race to world first Anub and I think Ulduar and ICC are pretty awesome instances and personally I enjoyed Naxxramas also since my vanilla guild didn’t fully clear it. I think Blizzard has succeeded in creating this new hard-mode system. Their main concerns in raiding was that so few people got to see the end game content (its not too much fun spending so much time in creating content to 4% of the community eh?) so they ended up creating these new hard-modes so everyone can see the new bosses and the epicness of the fights without being in a hardcore raiding guild and there would still be something great things to achieve for the hardcore guilds. They also introduced the new timing system (Algalon), the limited tries (TOC hard + ICC hard) and the stacking buff (ICC). I don’t know if they tried to reduce the amount of time hardcore raiders use to raiding but at least in our case it didn’t help at all (at Algalon it did of course =) ). There are alt raids which help a lot in gaining information about the new encounters and the huge amount of time we use after every wipe to analyze what went wrong, what else we should try and so forth. I think there was a period at Anub where we raided like 7-9 hours straight and used like 7 tries, it was pretty hc brainstorming and theory crafting. The stacking buff will obviously help in the previous matter letting more people see the content.

The ICC being the expansion’s flagship instance was nicely done I think. There are these cakewalks like Marrowgar and Gunship but I think many people will find a challenge on other fights there like Professor Putricide and the Lich King of course. The HC Lich King really deserves to be the end boss of the expansion, without getting too deep in the tactics it requires almost perfect execution from the whole 25 player raid as a team and from every single player, it is really unforgiving fight, if you fail in some situations you are not coming back and its instant raid wipe. Actually I was pretty surprised we killed him with the 5% buff, many people even in our guild including me thought it’s almost impossible without the 10% buff but within the Lich King practice we noticed “what the hell? this might be beatable” and finally it went down and it was really awesome.

Q3: What are your opinions when it comes to Blizzard? It’s no secret that Retribution has felt like the abandoned orphan child for a while now. We might be in a decent place, but do you think Blizzard has been doing it’s job?

Since I started playing retribution as late as Ulduar and playing horde in vanilla I don’t really have much to say about the “beginning” part of ret, all I can think of vanilla ret is 2 button smashing and hope for SoC procs =). As of now I don’t think we are an abandoned child or anything, retribution has been really useful and needed in raids at least since Ulduar. In Ulduar you needed one ret for the JoL which I mentioned earlier and even though ret was badish damage at the start of Ulduar Judgement of Light was just one too big perk for aoe healing that you couldn’t miss it.

After the removal of Seal of Blood and doing some other adjustments to retributions mechanics we are now pushing really competitive dps while bringing lots of utility to raiding. I know what you mean, there hasn’t been much changes to ret after the SoB removal but maybe we don’t need any? I think we are pretty balanced at the moment, if you know what you are doing, you can be one of the top damage dealers or be one of the key point of raid survival, I like it where we are now.

Q4: Recently, Blizzard stated that Rogues do too much passive damage with their white and poison damage (Source). Though, if caught without a seal active, a Paladin’s dps would drop down to hilariously low amounts. What do you think about Retribution’s combat system? And more importantly, what do you desperately want to see improved?

The FCFS system which people also tend to call “facerolling” is indeed little different from other classes’ rotation like systems. The way I understand the word “facerolling” is something easy or just some button smashing the way you feel like but even though people think it’s easy there still are rets who do bad damage and rets who do really great damage topping the meters so even though it’s called “facerolling” it seems like it isn’t that easy for everyone =). I personally don’t hate the system and I like the new set bonus which resets the Divine Storm cool down and the lowering of Crusader Strike cd in the past, at least they are trying to cut off the time doing nothing (waiting cds to finish) which they have succeeded in doing.

The only thing I would like to get changed is the huge dps of loss of switching targets as ret (I heard ferals are hating it also =) ). The mechanic of SoV really hurts us, need to stack that seal up over and over again in fights with lots of switching. I used to say to our raid leader that “do I have to swap? it hurts my dps!” but what is more important? The work being done or one guy’s personal dps. Of course there are fights where you can throw one auto attack here and there to keep the stack rolling (Putricide for example) and it really is important if you want to do competitive dps but I would rather see old-school Seal of Blood like seal (maybe without the backfire =) ) that wouldn’t hurt our dps so much when switching targets.

Q5: How about Retribution as a whole? It sure has evolved a lot from the early vanilla days – what keeps you trucking on your Ret pally instead of playing another “dps only” class?

I’m playing retribution mainly because our guild needs one and I enjoy it. I’ve always liked playing kind of “support” class even in games outside of WoW so that might be one reason too =). I like to be one of the key characters of the raid and be able to help my guild to the fullest.

Q6: I find it awesome that you’ve also achieved Gladiator multiple times in the past, what’s your take on PvP currently, especially when it comes to Paladins?

I haven’t played pvp seriously in long time, last time it was serious was season 4 when we played 5on5 on Cyclone battle group and I think we finished 3^rd that season in the ladder. I am also a Vengeful Gladiator which I’m really proud of, getting so rare title and of course being able to be the first in the ladder at the end of the season. I got my title with my 5on5 team at Rampage BG consisting of ( Sailor (eleshaman), Nalena (priest), Feebeli (mage), Zumi (warrior) and me as a holypala, little pre shout outs there =) ). Being kind of inactive at the pvp sector lately I don’t really have much to say about paladins in pvp now, the little bits I’ve been playing in WotLK show at least that both ret and holy palas and even prot specs are very viable.

Q7: In closing, is there anything else that you want to add or shout out to the thousands of Rets out there, as well as the WoW community? Go wild!

Shout out to Mych.

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Apparently “go wild” means four words! Cheers again to Iiris for answering a few questions, too bad I got a hold of such a friendly player, I was looking forward to the large 9 paragraph comment wars!

- Megaphone