Hey everybody. This is the article that should be covering most of my feelings for the upcoming expansion. Strap in!

Before we start, I want to apologize to all of our awesome viewers here at Retpaladin.com! Thanks to my excruciatingly busy schedule, I couldn’t even think about releasing this article, let alone the video. I know there was a lot of people eagerly expecting this sooner, and for that, I can only keep saying that I’m sorry . I only wanted to make two small time videos and a small article so we all could have a big hearty discussion, but with rendering issues and a vacation sneaking out of nowhere, I had no time! Hopefully all of you don’t hate me for too long! Big <3's.

In Cataclysm, the Paladin class is being changed tremendously, as it does almost every expansion (especially for Retribution). I’ll be going over the new flavor abilities, that is, new / changed skills that everybody can relate to if they were to go live tomorrow. Then, I’ll be analyzing our new combat system and how Retribution feels in the current beta build. So let’s get started!

In Cataclysm, a Paladin only has four seals :

• Seal of Insight – Restores life on every attack and 4% of base mana. Seal of Wisdom and Seal of Light combined.
• Seal of Truth – Seal of Vengeance / Seal of Corruption have been renamed to Seal of Truth. Same functionality.
• Seal of Righteousness -  Didn’t change! Except for it’s icon at least!
• Seal of Justice – Imagine Seal of Righteousness, except 25% of the damage on hit. When you connect with an attack, it puts Judgement of Justice on the target for 5 seconds. Casting Judgement does not debuff your target

I like what’s been done to the seals. Instead of having vague, useless seals, there are now four major ones with specific purposes to them. One for regeneration, one for trash and quick fights, one for single target dps, and one for PvP. However, with the removal of Judgement of Justice, Retribution is now forced to be in melee range to “slow” players in PvP (not saying it’s bad or good at the moment!). I realize that our damage is going to be far lower when compared to using Seal of Righteousness in Cataclysm, but numbers are just numbers.

We get a couple of pretty interesting things that we’ve been hoping to get for quite a while! An interrupt, some form of distance closer, and as an added bonus, a longer ranged Judgement!

• Long Arm of the Law – Increases movement speed (stacks with Pursuit of Justice) by 45% when Judgement is cast on a target at or further than 15 yards
• Rebuke - 10 second cooldown, 4 second interrupt! Yay!
• Improved Judgement – Increases the range of Judgement by 10 yards (a total of 20!)

These three changes are long overdue and welcome in my heart. With an interrupt and our unique form of a distance closer, we aren’t a cruel joke of the melee bundle! There isn’t much to say when it comes to these changes, but just thinking about them gets me giddy for Retribution’s potential.

Unfortunately, as expected, there were a lot of changes made to old abilities and lackluster new abilities to look forward to. These could be far, far worse, but if it was up to me, I’d get rid of (most) of the abilities above in Cataclysm.

• Zealotry – 2 minute cooldown, Crusader Strike generates 3 HP instead of 1 HP for 20seconds. Our final ability in the Retribution tree is nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated wings or damage buff. Nothing fun to define our tree, I guess being a Paladin and doing melee damage was enough for their design!

• Inquisition – Savage Roar, but worse. For 3 HP, you get 30 seconds of increased Holy Damage. Boring, and tedious.
• Guardian of Ancient Kings - Our level 85 ability. It was covered in the video I released a while ago – minimal damage and doesn’t give Paladins anything unique. I’m not sure we need a pet for our level 85 ability!

• Divine Storm – Our once glorious and most treasured ability, constantly battered down through the ages has now been turned into an ability that costs Holy Power to use, and is never actually useful in any situation at the moment.

• Word of Glory – A new ability learned at low levels. For Holy Power, you can instantly heal yourself or allies. This is basically the Art of War proc that we know and love today – except instead of tossing a helping hand, you stop all of your DPS for 12 seconds and heal for mediocre amounts. If it healed for more, maybe I would respect having to choose between damage and healing. (It’s about 10k of your ~90-100k life at 80)

• Flash of Light – Completely decimated for Retribution. Costing roughly 20% of our mana pool and healing for 1/8th of our health, it’s purely a Holy Paladin tool now.

• Hand of Light Mastery – Covered in the video as well. All other DPS specs get something that scales logically, such as 20% increased Frost damage for Frost Death Knights, and an extra % or two per point of mastery. Instead, we get an RNG proc that is only made slightly less worse for every point of mastery we have. This wouldn’t be a problem if PvP gear didn’t have mastery on it and if our rotation wasn’t plagued by RNG, but alas, I leave that to the next section.

A slew of changes that my stomach disagrees with. I can no longer truly support with my heals and be able to at least throw some protection onto somebody as Retribution. Instead, I’ve turned into a hungry damage dealer with the ability to heal somebody no more than a Feral Druid. There are some gems out there that are so good though, that I would happily overlook the questionable changes if our combat system wasn’t so flawed. Which brings me to..

This section will be a wall of text, but I’ll try to keep it short. Hopefully my soothing voice in the video makes this a bit more bearable.

I agree, Paladins need some structure in their lives. From Auto Attacking to Seal Twisting, to Whack-A-Mole, it’s nice to see that there is something coherent about the new combat system. It is a step in the right direction, that is for sure. Unfortunately, it is so poorly implemented right now, that even if some of the changes that communities have been suggesting go through, our DPS would still continue to be lackluster. I know numbers are numbers everybody, but let’s just take a look at how the system feels.

In my previous video, I went over the basics of our rotation. Crusader Strike generates one combo point, while a slew of other abilities have a 40% chance to generate one combo point. This is quite literally the most detrimental flaw to this entire system. If the changes are to stay as they are now, I have a deep fear for any Paladin who wants to roll Retribution. Even while attacking a single target dummy, every second of my life was spent living in complete and utter fear of the RNG combo point procs. The concept is so nonsensical that it’s almost amusing to see Blizzard attempt to ignore it. If a Rogue’s Mutilate had a 43.894% to only give 1 combo point, the very fabric of our universe would tear and shatter into pieces. I feel very sorry for any Rets trying to PvP in the beta right now!

The ramp up time at the moment is horrible. With Savage Roar Inquisition having to be kept up at all times for a mediocre yet painfully necessary buff, Seal of Truth still taking it’s 12+ seconds to be reasonable, Divine Storm causing so little damage my pet twig could cause more harm, Consecration being a 30 second cooldown and doing less damage than a level 65 Mage AoEing, Holy Wrath being one of our major abilities to generate combo points also being on a 30 second cooldown and clumsily hitting all targets around you, and the bone cracking fear of using Crusader Strike after using Judgement when you are at 2 Holy Power, it is a miracle that some Paladins are even able to keep up with a tank’s DPS. (Haha, silly Shadow Priests!)

The previous paragraph was supposed to be over the top, but I hope everybody can see the frustrations that come up when you’re just trying to quest about in Twilight Highlands or run a heroic with your friends. There are many changes that tons of respected players have been suggesting that would help tremendously, but Blizzard continues to turn a blind eye and scold forum trolls while keeping absolutely no communication between the players and the designers. They’ve been a bit better at that as of late, but old burning hatreds never die right!

Overall, Cataclysm isn’t looking too good for Retribution. I know numbers are numbers, and Blizzard can always make us hit up to par, but then we’d still be stuck with a silly RNG system that will only work with extraordinarily high amounts of haste and guessing. Though, I’m not just here to be a doomsayer, there are a lot of high points that I’m sticking to.

Almost every Paladin I’ve talked to that is participating in the Beta isn’t happy with how things are currently. I am truly thankful to Blizzard for finally addressing some of our concerns and giving us a taste that they at least care a little bit. If half of the things they’ve done get implemented tomorrow, I’d certainly feel like I was on top of the world and be more respected without having to shove a Shadowmourne with full 277 gear up somebody! (If you can call that respect of course!).

If Blizzard takes away the RNG and gives us something that we can depend on, 70% of the issues will be gone. If Inquisition was redesigned or removed, another 15% would disappear. Make Word of Glory be a respectably large heal for us to sacrifice a potential 12 seconds of ramp up, and there would be a distinct difference between another melee damage dealer and a Paladin. Our mastery and 31 point talent kind of make me feel iffy, but I wouldn’t mind them if they were polished out a little bit more. And please, give us Divine Storm back. We miss it dearly .

Yeah, things aren’t going too well for now. I still have hope, and as long as players continue to keep suggesting brilliant changes and Blizzard lends an ear out, Cataclysm has a good chance for being Ret’s first solid expansion off the bat without being instantly nerfed or lackluster!

Tharvolde and many others have contributed tons of suggestions in previous posts. I’d like to keep hearing more!

Post Article Mood : Things are getting a little better! I’d like to see less number changes and more long term implementations, and I’d be flat out impressed!

During the making of this article, a couple of decent steps were taken for Ret. Our two-handed weapon specialization now increases our damage by 20% (up from 10%). It isn’t the greatest of changes since we’re eons behind other DPSers, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Also, Ghostcrawler has acknowledged that Retribution and it’s inability to cleanse magic debuffs is to “kitable” in PvP, and they are working on something to help us not be a complete trainwreck! Link : click me!

A week after 4.0 has been live for all of us, four new changes have come out to help us significantly when Cataclysm rolls out. Some Paladins say that their DPS has skyrocketed, others say that we’ve been gimped. In the end, these are definitely welcome changes since our DPS is not up to par in the beta content, but our system could still be improved. Like I said, numbers are just numbers, but maybe if our numbers our sexy enough I can deal with a silly system as long as we know they’re on the road to improving it.

- Megaphone

Hail

Tharvolde here with another gem you may have noticed recently over at MMO Champion:

This is huge, in my opinion in that the current Zealotry implementation was very lackluster. I think a large part of this was indeed the requirement of three Holy Power for its use partnered with the consumption of all Holy Power. This change should go a long way towards making Zealotry a more viable 31 point talent. I would argue it still needs a slight improvement beyond this – perhaps an increase in damage for TV or Crusader strike while active would be prudent. Let us know your thoughts!

It seems that, sometimes, Blizzard delivers a rapid response to problems within their game. See the following:

This should help quell the rampant QQ (albeit not entirely) on the WoW Paladin forums for the time being.

Swing ‘em hard,

Tharvolde

PS: The power player on the left was staring me down when I went to preview this post. The song was “Wrong Hole” by Scott Baio. Wow……

Hail

Tharvolde here.  It’s been a while since my last post.  This is partially due to purchasing a home, moving, and other RL adventures yet partially due to the fact that I was reserving judgement until the patch went live and I’d had some opportunity to do some extensive testing.  A plethora of Battlegrounds, countless duels and seeming endless grinding session with my friendly neighborhood training dummy later and I now am comfortable sharing my thoughts with respect to Retribution 4.0.  With that stated, let’s begin as we have a lot of ground to cover.

After just a few battlegrounds (all of which turned out to be WSG thankfully as it provides a more controlled setting for active testing) and an hour or so with a training dummy, my initial reaction to the changes became a bittersweet symphony.  It seems to me that, for once in Retribution’s tenuous existence, the tools are now all there.  We have an interrupt with no strings attached.  We have a gap closer that is unique and useful.  We have a bit more control over our burst compliments of the Holy Power system and cooldowns.  Yet as excited as I am about my ability to make these statements, I am equally disheartened by the distance we yet have to travel.  Divine Purpose, although interesting in theory, merely serves as a means to clutter up our rotation and provide an unwarranted penalty for not reacting beyond the bounds of human capability.  Divine Storm is teetering on the brink of uselessness with its only viable application being usage while standing amidst an army of enemies – something that will never happen in PvP and seldom happens (at least not the extent that Divine Storm needs in order to be effective) in PvE.  Zealotry is uninteresting and although it provides a decent DPS increase, the very nature of PvP in World of Warcraft ensures that it is something seldom to be used with much effectiveness.  Disheartening was the fact that, across a multitude of training dummy sessions, the greatest difference in DPS while using each of our four seals was roughly 800 which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t strike me as significant given the secondary effects of Insight and Justice.  Even more troubling was that, without taking Inquiry of Faith, my DPS with both Seal of Truth and Seal of Righteousness was nearly identical.  In PvP, it’s presently hard to differentiate between your own failures and the nature of the game.  Everything is quite a bit unbalanced at the moment.  I specifically recall receiving a 24,000 Arcane Blast in my last Warsong Gulch.  Keep this in mind as you do your own testing as Blizzard has already gone on the record saying that they are aware things are “a bit crazy” on live and that the game is not intended to be balanced around level 80 any longer.

All this said, I’ve compiled a list of concerns/suggestions/observations that I feel can put Retribution on the right track.  Please do weigh in on this in the comments below.

• Long Arm of the Law needs to have a bit longer duration.  Four seconds is not cutting it unless you judge from 15 to 16 yards and already have Freedom on yourself.  I believe six seconds would be appropriate.
• Divine Purpose needs to be removed and a new talent added in its stead.  Perhaps instead of a 40% chance for each of those abilities to generate one Holy Power, it should be that Crusader Strike alone has a percentage chance to add an addition point of Holy Power.  This would at least result in a bit less randomness such that one would know when they are using Crusader Strike and can be on the lookout for this proc.  Another thought might be to give Crusader Strikes that hit targets with the Judgement debuff (Insight) a chance to generate an additional point of Holy Power.  This would tie in nicely with my suggestion below about Seal of Justice.
• Divine Storm might as well be removed as currently there is very little reason to take this talent.  An AoE ability for Retadins would be nice but currently Divine Storm is too weak given that it consumes three Holy Power upon use to warrant it’s replacement of Templar’s Verdict.
• The upcoming addition to Acts of Sacrifice to allow Retribution’s cleanse to remove a snare on themselves is much needed and should go a long way.
• Seal of Justice needs to be removed and Judgement of Justice should be brought back.  This would give Paladins two Judgements:  Insight and Justice.  Insight would provide healing/mana/chance for Crusader Strike to generate an additional point of Holy Power while Justice would limit the target to normal run speed.
• Retribution needs a couple minor glyphs.  The current listing is entirely pointless for Retribution as mana is no longer any kind of an issue.

Please let me know your thoughts

Swign ‘em hard,

Tharvolde