My take on the state of the ret paladin:

Overall, kudos to Blizzard for being willing to take on such a massive overhaul. They took a class that was popular but had some issues (specifically, dominance at easy content levels, weak performance at harder content, especially arena) and put a huge amount of effort into a near total redesign.

That said, the redesign feels like it is still beta mode. The state of retribution right now is terribly weak, with some core structural flaws.

1. Too much RNG. This is at the core of a number of conflicting mechanics, but is also a problem with gameplay. Some rng is fun. Having our main resource, holy power, so RNG dependent is a huge problem, because it turns our holy power bar into a little slot machine. Will it pay off? Won't it? You wind up tunnel visioning on your resource when you should be paying attention to the beautiful new game world, and avoiding the fire. We don't have a rotation, we don't have combination, we have whack-a-mole as our combat system.

2. Conflicting talents and abilities. Our mastery conflicts with three of our talents: divine purpose, art of war, and zealotry. Divine Storm and Seals of Command are both for weak trash AoE...and share the same cooldown. Huh? About 40% of our dps suggests that what we need is the fastest weapon we can get, while the rest demands the biggest, slowest weapon possible. Inquisition is not usable in most scenarios, and is a pain in the butt even when you have enough time on target for it to pay off.

3. Our mastery is terrible. If a point of strength (our best stat by far) is worth 1.0, a point of hast is worth roughly .5, crit .45, and mastery .125 (numbers from Elitist Jerks). Mastery is a stat that will only be taken by the ignorant or obstinate, which Blizzard has specifically said it wants to avoid.

4. PvP is dire. We lost much of our defence, while most other classes gained defences. We got a weak gap closer that can actually snare us instead, and we remain horribly susceptible to kiting. Barring serious luck with the RNG, we have almost no burst except when wings are up. Basically, we are terrible without our cooldowns, and all of our cooldowns are dispellable.

More than ever before, retribution needs time on target because barring RNG our burst has been completely nerfed. In pvp, time on target is at a premium, and we lack most of the tricks that other melee classes have to get time on target (snares, true gap closers). So it's not looking good for us.

The state of retribution is, in my opinion, similar to how it was in early Burning Crusade. We have potential, but are at the mercy of some clunky mechanics. However, Blizzard is far more reactive with class balancing issues than it used to be, so I'm hopeful that the kinks will be ironed out soon.

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