Hey there fellow Retributors! As Cataclysm is ever so closer to it’s goal of encasing the skies in it’s demonic mojo, I’ve been pondering about releasing another video to the masses before our beloved old content is shattered forever. And now it falls into your hands!

No but, really. I want to release a video before and after Cataclysm’s release, but I can’t bring myself to settle on a single topic / alleyway of entertainment. This is quite literally a news post asking the community to

PM me
post on our forums
or leave a comment

on what you’d like to see crafted out of my deep, dark confinements. As I prepare the content to be released just prior to Cataclysm (level 85 specs & glyphs, gems, enchantments), give me something else to do!

- Megaphone

Hey there everybody! I hope all of you who managed to go to Blizzcon had a good time! I’ve never had so much fun standing in lines in my entire life!

There have been a lot of blue posts and discussion flying around since / during Blizzcon by both the developers and communities, so I’m going to compile the major points here and give everybody my two cents!

Q: “If you decided to cut out abilities for prot or ret paladins due to rotations being too complex, what would they be?”
A: We’ve been looking, we probably could take out Avenging Wrath and bake that into Zealotry. Same thing with Inquisition, we could move that somewhere else.

Verdict : Bad. There are a few problems with both the question, and the answer given. Currently, our rotation isn’t “complex” whatsoever. We only have a few buttons for single target DPS, even less than what we had before 4.0. There is no complexity to playing a Ret now, but rather fast acting fingers and a head that can manage the complete and utter nonsense of not proccing Divine Purpose for 5 attacks in a row.

As for the response, merging AW and Zealotry would be a terrible idea. I dislike Zealotry in it’s current form (and purpose thanks to Divine Purpose), but then we’d only be using it for the sake of popping our wings. It’d be a glorified wings buff, nothing else! At least they’re trying to make it a reasonable 31pt talent, they might be close to making it bearable soon!

This question should have went like this : “If you decided to cut out Divine Purpose for Ret Paladins due to rotations being too finicky and RNG orientated, what changes would you make to the other abilities?”

Q: “Zealotry clashes with Ret’s mastery and the Divine Purpose talents. It’s sort of reducing how many Crusader Strikes we can generate (wat?). Do you feel it’s clashing, or that you’ll reevaluate it as a talent?”
A: We’re looking at it. Some people claim it’s not a dps increase at all, but we’re confused by that. We might change it so Divine Purpose procs 3 Holy Power while Zealotry is up.

Verdict : Meh. Why not just have Zealotry give you HP and be off the GCD? Why is Divine Purpose still in the game?

The question was badly formulated, but the response was a tad bit more perplexing. Zealotry isn’t much of a DPS increase in it’s current form, even with all of the changes that have went down. In the big scheme of things, it’ll give you an extra TV or two (or even three!), and be done. Their suggested change might improve things, since we won’t have to wait 4 seconds to gain 3 HP, but I’d still be opposed to it since it means that Divine Purpose becomes useless again after 20 seconds.

Verdict : A purpose? To Divine Storm? It’s not useless anymore? HOW COULD THIS BE? BE HOW THIS COUUUUULD?

More seriously, I’m welcome to the change. As long as they find a balanced way to have us AoE without us being low on the meters, and it feels good, I’m happy!

Zealotry has been the main topic of most talk for the past week. There were some minor number changes to many abilities on the beta, but those are just minor tweaks to make us not as useless. With Zealotry being tackled down, and Divine Storm looking to have some promising changes, I go on another week without wanting to find Ghostcrawler during his long walks on the beach!

If there was anything big that I missed, please tell me so I can add it to the discussion!

- Megaphone

Calling all Retributors out there! Many people from our own community are heading down to Blizzcon this year, including myself! We’ve started a few discussion threads on our forums already, but I’m just here to tell everybody to head to one so all of our thoughts and concerns can be in one big post.

Everybody click on the big shiny picture to head over to our Blizzcon 2010 Discussion Post!

Or a direct link if you prefer : http://www.retpaladin.com/warcraft/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5081

Highlights

• WoW Dungeons & Raids: Day 1
• WoW Quests & Lore: Day 1
• WoW Class Q & A: Day 2
• WoW Open Q & A: Day 2

Some questions for any budding Retadins looking to ask the Developers about Rets (If they even allow Paladin questions this year!) Please do mention if you’re from Retpaladin.com, a handsome reward involving anywhere up from $.03 is involved!

And please don’t ask about mortal strike. One of our only “questions” was a disaster .

Mechanics Questions

• Something about being dependent on RNG.
• Ramp-up times (Seal of Truth & no “instant Holy Power” buttons like other classes often get).
• Clunky mechanics (hello Zealotry).
• Long Arm of the Law’s dead zone.
• Dispel vulnerability.
• GoAK seems underwhelming for a 5 min cooldown.
• Why does Ret always seem to lag an expansion or so behind other classes? Eg basic melee tools.
• It seems that Ret & Prot are very dependent on HP, but Holy isn’t really. Working as intended?

Thanks to Teleros for letting me steal all of his material without permission!

- Megaphone

Hail

Tharvolde here. Megaphone’s analysis of 4.0 was indeed a good one. There were quite a few points I agreed with. There were some, however, where I feel he and I may have a difference of opinion. In the spirit of rational inquiry, I thought I’d offer my own take on 4.0. I welcome agreement, indifference and contrast alike.

All in all, I’m very pleased with 4.0 albeit not in its entirety. With any major patch there are sure to be necessary tweaks and adjustment to be made. The present state of Retribution shouldn’t be considered an exception to this rule. First and foremost, allow me to say that I actually enjoy our current rotation thoroughly. While I feel that Divine Purpose provides a bit too much “randomness” to it, as I’ve mentioned previously, I am not one that enjoys predictable, monotonous gameplay. It seems to me that the rotation the masses are requesting from Blizzard is one of predictability and precision where the only difference between hitting Retribution’s DPS ceiling and falling mildly short would be measured by the speed at which you can mash your next hotkey – a hotkey whose future activation is known well in advance. That sort of rotation is simply not for me. I enjoy the need to react and adapt. I am thoroughly enjoying my sessions on a training dummy wherein I am ready to use Crusader Strike but Hand of Light procs and I instead unleash a 22K Templar’s Verdict before returning to business as usual. I like watching my Holy Power bar closely as I judge with two Holy Power knowing that my next Crusader Strike may be replaced with something more interesting. These small opportunities to react and adapt are exactly what I’ve been looking for in a rotation. These small opportunities are what I miss from the days of Seal twisting wherein you would need to watch closely for an opportunity to do so such that you don’t adversely affect your DPS as a whole in your attempt. The opportunity to adequately distinguish myself from the competition in terms of DPS will ultimately lead me back into a PvE setting – something I had given up on come Ulduar given the boring nature of Retribution in a raid environment where every ability is predefined and I’m simply going through the motions. I do believe that Divine Purpose should be adjusted in some way. A 20/40% chance on all those abilities to generate a single Holy Power seems to provide a bit too much randomness for my tastes but I believe increasing the percentage chance but limiting it to one or two abilities would achieve the purpose of the ability while still providing a sense of control to the player. In particular, I would expand Divine Purpose such that it provides a secondary effect and change the original portion of the talent to, say, a 35/70% chance on Judgement to generate one charge of Holy Power.

From a PvP perspective, I am excited for the future of Retribution. Already I have had some fairly epic duels that, previous to 4.0, would have ended one way or another within 5 to 10 seconds at most (or within 5 to 10 seconds following ones conscious decision to end it). Most recently I had a 3 to 5 minute duel with a Boomkin that ended in my favor. Shortly thereafter, an Elemental Shaman and myself fought for roughly the same time frame before eventually he bested me. Granted these are duels with fellow hybrids but we shouldn’t expect to have lengthy duels with other pure DPS classes such as Warriors or Warlocks. Now I do understand that one can’t equate dueling with Arena or Battlegrounds but, at the very least, these experiences do shed some light on our capability alone with a single opponent. Testing Retribution PvP in a group setting at present results in, at best, slinging mud at the wall. It’s hard to tell exactly where we stand in group settings when healers are going from zero to full in an instant and the simultaneous barrage of spell casters results in a small crater where one once stood. Regardless, I think we’re almost there with “there” being defined as a point at which Retribution is unique yet competitive in both Arena and Battlegrounds. The following are my proposals (some stolen from my previous post) I believe would complete the transition:

• 1) Update Divine Purpose as follows: Gives your Judgement a 35/70% chance to generate a charge of Holy Power. In addition, the effectiveness of your Word of Glory is increased by 10/20%
• 2) Add two seconds to the Long Arm of the Law buff
• 3) Follow through in adding the self-cleanse portion to Acts of Sacrifice
• 4) Increase the healing portion of Divine Storm significantly and increase its single-target damage moderately
• 5) Give Retribution a couple new Prime and/or Major glyph options.

On a side note, I would recommend that the community tries out the following talent build:

Tharvolde’s Survivability and Damage Build

Here is the macro generated at WoWtal that you can paste in-game to use the above build:

/run t,p,a={3,23,32,42,52,62,71,83,92,111,121,131,143,152,161,172,192,201,1,12,23,2,}SetPreviewPrimaryTalentTree(t[1],GetActiveTalentGroup())for i=1,#t do a=t[i]if a<9 then p=a else AddPreviewTalentPoints(p,floor(a/10),a%10)end end

The above build features 3/3 Protector of the Innocent from Holy which results in every targeted heal also healing you for an additional 4374. This is quite signficant when you are low and you use 3 Holy Power to deliver a 10K non-crit Word of Glory to yourself.