Hey all, Megaphone here. Through mystical ways, our favorite crepehanger is going to snag the spotlight in today’s front page post with an old fashioned wall of text! (It’s beautiful to see so much text. /sniff)
So far, Ret has gained a new, better mastery, damage buffs, and Seal of Truth stacking Censure on most abilities instead of just auto attacks. Divine Purpose, loathed by many a ret, has been removed and replaced with the old mastery. Everyone, including me, the pessimist, should be elated, right? Ret is going to be great now!
Wrong. Ret is still as broken as it is on live. Instead of moving the class closer to a target of fun and balance, Blizzard missed again, but in another direction. No one really liked the new Divine Purpose when it was the old mastery, so why like it now? On the PvP side of things, there are a myriad of problems for Ret that remain unaddressed. But the core of the problem is that Holy Power is still poorly implemented.
With Crusader Strike as our only form of reliable holy power generation, every other time we reach 3 Holy Power, it will be spent in order to maintain Inquisition (13.5 sec to build up with 30 sec duration). That means more of your Templar’s Verdicts will be from Divine Purpose procs than from normal Holy Power generation, leaving us at the mercy of RNG for another expansion yet again. Combined with Art of War being based on auto attacks, we will continue to see long droughts of nothing to do but wait for a Crusader Strike cooldown, or we be bombarded by more abilities than we can fit in global cooldowns.
Just as it is now, 4.0.6 Ret is mostly about mashing a button in repsonse to an RNG proc. Sure, the damage may be higher and in the end you can put up the numbers. But if you don’t enjoy playing the class in order to generate those number, is it worth it? If you aren’t having fun, do the numbers matter?
In order to fix holy power and make ret a fun class to play, some things need to happen.
1. Generation Rate
Holy power needs to be generated at a faster rate. Outside of Divine Purpose procs, it takes a base 13.5 seconds to use one finisher. Even with a realistic amount of haste stacking, it still takes over 10 seonds to use one finisher. If finishers are supposed to be such a big a decision for the player to make, that decision needs to be more relevant. And if the finisher doesn’t occur frequently, not only is the finisher devalued relative to other damage, so is our resource generating ability. Using 3 HP once every 8 to 10 seconds has a good “feel” because it balances availability and power.
2. Management
The player needs to be able to fully manage his resources. If Holy Power is too random, then there’s little distinction between poor usage of Holy Power and getting unlucky with RNG procs, causing them to be wasted. Even in the 4.0.6 model, if you get Divine Purpose procs right before your normal finisher, it pushes back your next CS or other abilities depending on what else has proc’ed and what cooldowns are available. A little RNG could be good to break monotony, but the RNG should not force the player to react immediately. For example, a chance to generate Holy Power only on a finisher would be ok because even if you use a Holy Power generating ability next, you haven’t filled up your bar instantly.
3. Choices
There needs to be more of an active choice in which finisher to use. In PvP, there’s always the choice of damage or healing. However, PvE needs something more than, “Does the buff need refreshed?” Both rogues and feral druids have three choices for damage in PvE (straight damage, bleed, damage buff) and need to make decisions not just on remaining duration of one buff, but the remaining duration of the other, target health, and breaks in combat. Ret either needs a third choice or needs Inquisition to be more of an active ability that a player needs to think before using based on more than a timer.
The heavy artificial penalty for using Templar’s Verdict with less than three Holy Powe makes no sense either. Something I’m borrowing from another article is that games shouldn’t penalize players too much for playing the game. The cost to using a finisher with less than 3 Holy Powe is a global cooldown. Using your classes’ main resource should always feel beneficial. When and what you use it on should be the skill factor.
4. Complementary Resource
This one may sound controversial, but think critically about it before you disagree. Holy Power can’t be the only resource. Nor can cooldowns complement it. Just like rogues don’t have just combo points or death knights don’t have just runes, Ret cannot use just holy power. Mana needs to play more of a role. A role which Blizzard has continually tried to destroy rather than embrace. Instead of mana being almost infinite except when healing, it would need to be gradually used and replenished. Mana would then be an option to fill empty GCDs with a no or short cooldown light damage ability at the cost of running out of mana. This is similar to how death knights use runic power. That affects skill in PvE and PvP by having the player make a choice as to mana usage and GCD usage.
Unless Ret’s core mechanics are fixed, it’s headed toward an “expansion 4″ revamp yet again. The cycle needs to be broken. I understand there are other issues, mostly related to PvP, but until the core mechanics of the class are effective and enjoyable, there’s no point in trying to balance the other aspects. Addressing other aspects only leads to band-aid fixes.
Feel free to post comments or criticisms. If there’s good feedback (whether agree or disagree), I may write another.
- Exedore
