UPDATE: Added some news about Divine Storm in Cataclysm. All I can say is that they better make DAMN sure that Ret doesn’t need Divine Storm to be effective in single-target DPS.

Q. What information/ideas can you share on PvP utility in the Retribution tree? Mandatory gap closer/interrupt question. Not having a cleanse will hurt. :\

A. Retribution paladins will be getting an

interrupt. : )

You’re taking away my dispel?

In our previous post, Tharvolde mentioned how Blizzard is taking away our dispel mechanics, and also we mentioned how Blizzard is going to give Paladins some stuff. What do we do now? Speculate how we will become overpowered in the beginning of the expansion until they nerf us two seasons later? I think so.
First, let’s look at what taking away our dispel does;

Lowers the skill cap even farther! Being on top of such a defensive mechanic while trying to play offensive took multitasking, something that adds a bit more challenge and fun into the game.

Having no dispel hurts our mobility, a lot! This puts a lot more pressure on Hand of Freedom, and makes us more prone to be locked down. Right now, our mobility can be questionable at times, now, we are looking more and more like enhancement shaman, something which everyone agrees with, isn’t a good thing.

Less synergy in arenas; with no dispel it’s just another reason not to bring us. Being a second dispel really helps in something like Ret/Rogue/Priest. One of the comps greatest strengths is that. In 5s, a Ret paladin can be quite viable based on this fact alone.

So what can we expect to see?
Well they say big changes again are coming our way. I’m hoping for a bit more of a combat healer. Already, divine storm adds some, while trivial, healing into our combat mechanics. In a lot of games, paladins do normally have heals tied into their offensive attacks. This would be interesting, and add a very distinct taste to us.

We might see our damage get a bit stronger; the less mobility we have, the more likely we are to get better damage.

We also might see some interesting defensive moves, granting movement freedom for the entire party, or even snaring the target on judgement.

So now we know what they are taking from us, let the speculation begin for what they are giving us. Let this be your chance to set in stone your predictions so that when Blizzard announces what they are giving us, you can say “I CALLED IT!”

-Slayton

Update by Tharvolde: OH NOES!  Leap of Faith (Priests) and Heroic Leap (Warriors) are both taken now!  Paladins will get neither!  SOMEBODY CALL THE AMBERLAMPS.  I can’t wait for the 16th :).

UPDATE 4/6/10: Added information about upcoming class changes and Cataclysm’s dispel mechanics.

AMG!! It’s been so long I don’t even know what to say? Cookies! What could this mean? What does “juice up the gameplay of both just a little bit” mean for Retribution?

Post your ideas here and let’s get the creative juices flowing.

Mmmmmm…. lemonade.

On an unrelated note, I’m at work and just laughed out loud hysterically at a recent spam comment we received. I’d like to share this with you all in hopes you’ll find it as humorous as I did. You can definitely expect a Part II of “The Absolute Best of RetPaladin.com Spam” in the near future! Megaphone! Slayton! Don’t delete any comments for the next few weeks!

Here’s the comment:

Te be honest, im just starting to question myself why they are still paladins ? at last patch, not even 1 thing was mentiont again for paladins, they nerfed us so much that actually wondering is there still a class we can kill on 1 on 1 ?? and in the other way, other classes can pop 3 to 4 CD’s for a fight at the time => we have to wait for 2 minutes to do that … whats up with this blizzard, im telling you, im pvp’ing as retri since TBC that paladin came out for horde, and it has been goiing from bad to worse with this class. I dair you to kill a equal geared ‘Spriest - Druid - Warlock - …’ it has become insane … they taking everything away from the paladins and we end up with a little smack of shit. Im sorry if im sounding frustrated, be am I wrong about this ?

BE AM I WRONG, FELLOW RETADINS? BE AM I WRONG ABOUT THIS?

Hi all!

Tharvolde here and, yes, I made up the name for the cleave.  It seems anymore that every particular comp has to have some “clever” name associated with it so why not Hungarian Bobcat?  You heard it here first.  Some other names I toyed with were:

- Magenta Scorpion Cleave

- Bob Saget Cleave

- Lithuanian Centipede Cleave

I digress…..

Anyway, I’ve recently had quite a few people logging onto Mal’ganis to ask questions about the comp and our strategies of late.  While I’m certainly happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability on the spot, I thought it might be beneficial to simply make a post about it here.  Before I begin, however, I want to ensure the following is understood:  this is not a Prot vs Ret post.  ProtRet and Ret both bring valuable tools to the playing field and both are highly-viable in various comps.  I play ProtRet simply because it seems to work better for the 3s comp I play and I enjoy the play style.  I like having Hammer of Justice on a 30 second cooldown, have high survivability and having a 3 second silence.  With this understood, let’s begin!

This Arena season seems fairly balanced compared to most.  I can honestly say I think Blizzard has done a pretty decent job at balancing out specs and comps and that they are almost there.  I say almost because I feel Shadow Priests and Affliction Warlocks are slightly too string right now thanks to haste affecting damage over time.  The only change I would make to Arena at present is to slightly scale back the effectiveness of haste towards damage over time.  With balance comes variety as you no longer will be forced to see the same tired, old comps over and over and over again as they are the only viable options at high ratings.  And variety, seems to be the story of Arena season 8.

To give you a brief background, we are currently pushing into the top 10s of our battlegroup as ProtRet/Arms/Druid.  Last night, unfortunately, we dropped from 2640 to 2567 thanks to an unlucky string of comps that fair very well against us.  Partner that with us not really playing all that well and, well, you get a rating loss even though you achieved a great deal more wins than losses (I’m not 100% sure but I  think we went something like 15-8 last night but dropped almost 80 points).

So what do we do against the comps we face?  Before I begin, let’s discuss the structure of this post going forward.  I have purposely started with what we would consider be the easiest comps for us.  I have provided a difficulty ranking for each comp where 0 = easy and 10 = hard  As the list progresses, the comps become increasingly challenging until, at the very bottom, you will find the comps that are nearly impossible to beat.

Now, let’s get started.

TSG (Arms Warrior / Unholy Death Knight / Holy Paladin)

Difficulty: 1

TSG is probably the easiest of the comps we face as we are able to “outcleave” them.  TSG’s strategy against you will almost always be the same:  they will start on you or your Warrior to build up rage and runic power and then hard-switch to your Druid while blowing every CD available.  In particular, a good TSG will get MS up and then lead with a Bladestorm while the DK focuses on interrupts.  The moment you BoP the Druid, the DK will Strangulate him so be ready to Cleanse.

Generally speaking, you simply need to put out more pressure on them than they can put out on you.  Against this team, I typically pop wings early - before they switch to our Druid.  The split second they switch to our Druid, I Freedom him, Sacred Shield him and possibly pop either Divine Sacrifice or put Hand of Sacrifice up and I always start Cleansing like a madman while still maintaining pressure on both the DK and the Warrior.  Holy Paladins healing TSG often just spam Holy LIght as the comp is a zerg and kill type comp that thrives on quick kills and quick switches to achieve them.  Sit on the Warrior and Dk, help your Druid through the switch and you’ll be good to go.

Beast Cleave (Enhancement Shaman / Beast Mastery Hunter / Holy Paladin)

Difficulty: 2

This is another zerg and kill type comp that thrives on quick kills and quick switches.  Unlike TSG that needs to build up rage and runic power, however, this comp will typically just bum-rush your Druid (on some occasions I’ve seen them sit Warrior but this usually doesn’t end well for them).  Our strategy for them is simple:  let them get on the Druid while we get on the Paladin.  The key here is that I will pop Divine Sacrifice early to help with damage on our Druid and he LoS’s the Hunter like a pro.  I have not faced a Beast Cleave yet (and we’ve played some as high as 2700) that was able to get close to a kill on our Druid before we made the Paladin bubble.  When he bubbles, we try to shatter it and finish the job.  A good Holy Paladin doesn’t let this happen though as he is constantly pillar-humping.  As a result, we often just switch to the Shaman during bubble to peel for our Druid.  I usually hand him a Freedom at this point and refresh Sacred Shield if I hadn’t already due to purge.  Once bubble is down we switch back to the Paladin and land the kill.  I should note that a select few Beast Cleaves will stay on your Warrior when you try to switch back to the Paladin after bubble.  If we encounter this then we simply sit on the Shaman until our Druid is comfortable enough to get him in chain Cyclones - at which point we rush back to the Paladin and end the fight.

Double Healer and Warrior

Difficulty: 2

There are several different flavors to this comp.  Most commonly you will see what is called “Dispel Cleave” which has a Holy Paladin and a Discipline Priest.  Quite honestly, though, it doesn’t really matter as this comp is extremely easy for you.  Here’s the only catch - you need to figure out early what kind of gear the Warrior is in.  Some Warriors will run extremely low resilience with this comp because they feel that two healers makes up for the lost in survivability.  While this may be true against some comps, it is definitely not true for our comp :).  If you figure out that the Warrior is wearing extremely low resilience then you literally can sit on him all game long.  The Priest will try to land mana burns on your Druid but will quickly realize that he can’t afford to not be healing.  I specifically remember playing against this comp with the following Warrior:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Archimonde&cn=Hizo

Don’t get me wrong here - he’s a very good Warrior for sure.  The first time we played them, we ended up losing because we tried to bounce between the Shaman and the Holy Paladin all game.  Hizo eventually landed a kill on our Warrior as the damage he was putting out was insane and the Shaman, who was in extremely high resilience, was able to expend GCDs on purging our Warrior hard.  After the loss, I armory’d him and noticed that he was in 700-ish resilience.  The very next time we fought them (and every subsequent time we’ve ever fought them) we have ended the game in less than two minutes by simply sitting on the Warrior while swapping Cyclones between the Shaman and the Paladin.  Quickly they had fallen so far behind on heals that the Warrior popped Shield Wall and immediately following its end, we killed him.

Some double healer comps will run standard PvP gear however on their Warrior.  If they do this, your strategy is still just as simple as the above case:  sit on whichever healer is easiest to sit on.  If there is a Disc Priest, sit on him - all day, all night, through the next morning, into the weekend and twice on Sunday.  You can literally faceroll like champions on the Disc Priest and eventually you’ll land the kill.

Kitty Cleave (Feral Druid / Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin)

Difficulty: 4

We have only faced a few kitty cleaves this season but one of them was a triple-Relentless Gladiator one at around 2650 MMR.  Their strategy was simply to keep bouncing back and forth between me and the Warrior with occasional switches to our Druid.  Generally speaking, they played rather chaotically in that they were switch about once every 5 to 10 seconds.  The first time we faced them we lost a close match after a 4 to 5 minute battle.  The second time, however, we took the win by sitting on the Warrior and Feral long enough to force all significant cooldowns out of the Paladin.  I then waited for the instant Cyclone from the Druid and the moment I came out, we hard-switched to the Paladin.  We were able to interrupt one of his heals which means he was locked out of Holy and we ended it right there.

The moral of the story here is simple:  put out as much pressure as you can on the Druid and Warrior until you get a good opportunity to switch to the Paladin.  If you don’t land the kill, wash, rinse and repeat.

PHD (Unholy Death Knight / Marksmanship Hunter / Holy Paladin)

Difficulty: 5

This comp is fairly simple but extremely annoying.  I say it’s simple because the strategy is straightforward:  kill the Paladin.  I say it’s annoying because the Hunter and the Death Knight will be using every abilities in their proverbial toolbelts to stop you from getting to the Paladin.  You can expect the Death Knight to be spamming Chains of Ice on both you and the Warrior.  You expect a “clutch” Death Grip across the map the moment either you or the Warrior gets on the Paladin.  You can expect to receive a Scatter Shot the moment you’re about to land an Avenger’s Shield while your Warrior is Bladestorming.  So although the strategy is simple, the duration of the game promises to be long.  As the ProtRet in this comp, your primary objective is getting rid of serpent sting the split second it’s up.  Serpent Sting is the Flame Shock of MM Hunters.  Get rid of it every time it’s up.  I should also add that I would previously have rated this comp as a 3 or 4 but since the Unholy Blight buff that makes Death Knight diseases undispellable, I have increased the rating accordingly.

To land the victory against this comp, you need to play a game of possum.  You can’t bum-rush the Paladin off the bat because you’re just going to get peeled and your Druid will fall behind on healing as your efforts to get on the Paladin have allowed them to put out significant damage while you have done none.  Instead, you need to bait him into a position that lends itself to a good switch.  The Warrior and I typically get on the Hunter to mitigate damage for a while.  My left index finger typically goes numb from cleansing at around 2 minutes in.  Ideally what we want is for the Death Knight to use Death Grip on one of us while we’re on the Hunter.  At this point, we will hard switch to the Paladin and go for the kill.  We most often don’t get it and will have to get back on the Hunter until we can make another switch to the Paladin.  Some might ask why we wouldn’t just sit on the Death Knight who is already in our face.  The answer is that the MM Hunter is the bulk of the damage (at least the burst) from this comp and allowing him to unload without mitigation is a sure-fire way to lose quickly.

RLS (Assassination or Subtlety Rogue / Affliction or Destruction Warlock / Restoration Shaman)

Difficulty: 6

Quite honestly, the deciding factor on the difficulty for this comp is how much damage they are able to put out.  Really good RLS will just sit on your Warrior all day long while CCing you and the Druid back and forth.  The amount of damage a good RLS can put out on your Warrior is ridiculous and when you partner that with the Shaman purging you have a recipe for disaster.  What we typically do against RLS is to start hard on the Shaman to force some cooldowns (we can usually at least get NS on our initial push).  If we are unable to land a kill by zerging up front (we most often do not) then we switch hard to the Warlock.  The key to surviving this comp is that you need to be splitting your time between cleansing everything (even UA) off the Warrior while hitting bot h the Rogue and the Warlock.  HotR should nail both of them and Consecration should be down at all times.  Basically, you want to force the Shaman to have to heal instead of allowing him to purge.  I typically use my Hammer of Justice on the Rogue or Warlock because I’ll have five stacks of corruption rolling on each which means a lesser chance that the fel puppy can dispel it.  If you Hammer of the Shaman it’s almost guaranteed to come off immediately.

As with any Warlock team, once we are on him we keep a close eye on his pet’s health.  Once the pet gets reasonably low from Soul LInk, we hard-switch to the pet and kill it.  We repeat this process for the second pet and, if successful, the game is pretty much over as the Shaman will no longer be able to heal through our damage on the Lock.

Old School Spell Cleave (Elemental Shaman / Destruction Warlock / Holy Paladin)

Difficulty:  6

I wish I had a better strategy for you against this comp but, quite frankly, what follows seems to be the only path to victory.  You can get on anyone you’d like for this comp although I’d recommend the Warlock given how hard Warriors hit them.  The single most important thing that I absolutely cannot stress enough about playing against this team is that you absolutely, 100%, never can ever (not a @#^@ing chance) stray too far from an LoS point (a pillar, Dalaran boxes, etc).  What this team wants more than anything is for one of their opponents to stray too far from such a place and then to lock them in place and light them up like the Christmas Tree in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (great, classic film).  You no doubt feel like the biggest tool of all time playing against this team properly but I assure you it’s the only way to beat them consistently.

The moral of the story is this:  always stay by a LoS point, cleanse Immolate and Flameshock immediately, keep Fire Resistance Aura up at all times, pop in and out of LoS to do damage to whatever target is nearby and eventually you will land a kill on the target of your choice.

Our games against this comp typically last around 10-15 minutes because of how we play against them but we have a pretty good win percentage as a result.  Quite honestly, the trickiest thing about this, for you as a ProtRet, is managing your mana pool by ducking in and out of LoS to hit something in order to keep Divine Plea rolling.

PMR (Discipline Priest / Assassination or Subtlety Rogue / Arcane or Frost Mage)

Difficulty:  7

The bane of your existence as ProtRet/Arms/Druid will be teams with high burst potential and extremely good CC.  Enter PMR (RMP, MRP, RPM, w/e).  If the Mage is Arcane, the fight is a bit easier for you as he only has one Ice Block and you and the Warrior won’t constantly be Frost Nova’d in place (nerf snares pl0x).  We almost always start out on the Mage and quite often force an early Ice Block.  If the Mage is Frost, he’s more willing to just block early as a precaution against any RNG kills from us.  If he’s Arcane, he may still block early but we generally stay on him until he does.  If the Mage is Frost, the first thing I do as soon as he pops a Water Elemental is to kill it.  Frost Mages already bring enough snare potential to the table - we don’t need the elemental’s nova as well just heightening the Mage’s chances at ridiculous burst.  Whether the Mage is Arcane or Frost, the important thing to note here is that you need to be cleansing your Warrior extremely hard at all times.  I don’t care if Wound Poison is just going to go right back up after you cleanse it.  Cleanse it again.  Every tick of a heal your Druid gets off without Wound Poison up there turns chance in your favor against PMR.

In addition to cleansing a lot, you need to realize that they are going to be CCing the living @#%^ out of you..  Most often, this is not really avoidable unless you just stay out of line of sight the entire game - which isn’t a viable option.  The moment you come in LoS, they are going to want to CC you.  Generally this will begin with a Polymorph or two or three.  Good PMRs will complete the CC chain on you with 3x Polymorph, Blind, Fear (or Fear and then Blind) and then under 10 seconds later put you back in three Polymorphs.  The trick here is to be aware of how your Warrior is doing at all times and to communicate to your team how you’re doing.  The moment you are CCd, call it out and let them know the duration.  Keep it concise and informative.  I typically just sayed “Sheeped - 9 seconds” or “Feared - 5 seconds”.  The reason you need to be aware of how your Warrior is doing is because you will need to coordinate CC DR and your sacrifices with your Warrior’s ability to deliver some burst.  Once you are on DR for all significant CC AND the Warrior is in a position where he can put out some damage (i.e. he’s not too low on health and he is in range to switch to the Mage) get on the Mage with him.  About five seconds into this, pop Divine Sacrifice and then follow that up with Hand of Sacrifice on the Warrior.  If you do this right you’ll have a grand total of approximately 29 seconds worth of damage potential on the Mage.  You may still get sheeped or blinded but you’ll come right out thanks to sacrifice.

The name of the game against any PMR is to survive their burst long enough to deliver your own burst once you are on DR for significant CC.  Some ProtRet/Arms/Druid find success in just training the Priest.  We, however, have found this to be a bad strategy as the Mage just lights our Warrior up.  If we ever get on the Priest, it is after he has blown Pain Suppression on the Mage first.

Bad PMR will be just as easy as TSG for you but good PMR can be borderline impossible to beat unless you play absolutely perfectly in every way.  As a result, I’ve ranked this comp a 7 based on my experience against decent PMRs.

Modern Spell Cleave (various except for Shatterplay)

Difficulty:  8

The original “Spell Cleave” (thus what I’ve labeled as “Old-School Spell Cleave”) was undoubtedly Paladin / Ele / Destro.  This comp started popping up in strong numbers during season 6 and, from it, have spawned all varieties of spell cleaves.  There is an important distinction to be made for us, however, between the old-school standard spell cleave I just mentioned and some of these new flavors.  One particular spell cleave we’ve fought around 2600 was Affliction / Boomkin / Holy Paladin.  Given the recent buffs to both Affliction and Boomkin, this comp is now extremely scary.  Expect 8000 - 10000 Starfires on occasion while ticking like crazy from Affliction’s DoTs.  We play comps like this the same though, regardless of makeup:

- Line of Sight like crazy

- Pop in and out for putting out some damage

- Line up CC from your Druid with burst from you and the Warrior to land kills or at least force defensive CDs.

This general setup of two casters + a healer can be extremely frustrating for ProtRet/Arms/Druid but you can win if you play it extremely smart and line of sight effectively.  I do recall one game taking roughly 20,000 damage instantly because I was cleansing myself of DoTs, failed to check on the Boomkin and ate a 10,500 Starfire crit at the same time I dispelled UA on myself (I typically just dispel UA - especially since its dispel nerf recently such that resilience now affects it).  I was already a bit low from DoTs and a few Wraths and I promptly fell over dead.  Bad on me for sure but let it be a lesson to you as to how to play against these comps.  Line of sight like champions, cleanse like crazy and only pop out to do damage sporadically.

Shatterplay (Shadow Priest / Frost Mage / Restoration Shaman)

Difficulty:  10

Strategy:  Leave arena and join a new game hopefully against a team you can beat.

Seriously though - the amount to which this comp counters ProtRet/Arms/Druid is borderline absurd.  Your only hope is to literally pop everything on the Shaman right off the bat and hope for some RNG.  If the fight lasts any longer than 30 seconds, barring any ridiculous luck in your favor or some extremely game-changing @#%@-up on the part of your opponents, then you will lose.  I think we have beaten this comp perhaps once or twice in 300+ games.  The games go like this:

- Pop Bloodlust/Heroism

- CC me the point of uselessness with Polymorph, Deep Freeze, Fear and Psychic Horror

- Fully DoT Warrior and commence Shatter combos while silencing/imp CSing the Druid

- Is the Warrior dead?  If not, CC him instead and switch to Druid for the guaranteed kill.

I hope you all have found this useful.  If there are any other comps you’d like to hear about, please let me know.  As always, you can feel free to PM me here at RetPaladin.com or simply log on to Mal’ganis and drop me a line!

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