The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.0.6 for retribution
by Alex Ziebart 
Feb 2nd 2011 at 5:00PM
Patch 4.0.6 is right around the corner. Isn't it about time we discuss what this means to the retribution paladin? You've all waited for this long enough, so let's skip the pleasantries and get right down to it.
We're going to go through the paladin patch notes relevant to retribution paladins one by one. Do note that we are not covering all of the paladin patch notes, such as the mana cost changes to heals or those that impact holy and protection talents. While some of those things may technically impact retribution, we would all much rather talk about issues very specifically related to hitting things with a righteous vengeance until they die.
Let's dig in.
Crusader Strike weapon damage percent has been increased to 135%, up from 115%. Straight buff. I like it.
Seal of Truth: All single-target attacks (including Judgement, Hammer of Wrath, Exorcism, and Templar's Verdict) can now trigger this seal. This change is not only a DPS boost, but also a quality of life change. Every retribution paladin knows the frustration of trying to get Censure stacked to five on a target in a heroic or raid environment. By the time you get it done, your target is dead or you need to change targets and start over again. How many bosses are stand-still tank and spanks nowadays? None. Even the most tank-and-spank boss around requires a lot of movement and target swaps, so Seal of Truth's debuff will drop off. It's still a DPS increase over Seal of Righteousness, but using it feels like you're endlessly climbing a mountain with your DPS. You never reach the top before you get shoved back down.
With this change, we'll be able to stack Seal of Truth much more quickly to avoid that sensation of endless struggling with our own mechanics. It will also add a small boost of DPS to every major damaging ability in the ret paladin's repertoire. This is a very nice change overall.
Act of Sacrifice will no longer cause Cleanse to remove movement impairing effects from vehicles the paladin is riding. You can't complain about bug fixes, really. I'm rather amused this ever worked.
Divine Storm weapon damage percent increased from 80% to 100%. This is nice, but it doesn't fix Divine Storm by any stretch of the imagination. Divine Storm gets a slight boost with this change and the change to Seal of Truth, but the real problem is that Divine Storm does not generate holy power. It had a random chance to generate holy power via Divine Purpose, but patch 4.0.6 will eliminate that.
When you make the decision to use Divine Storm, you ultimately decide to completely halt your DPS rotation. Retribution paladins rely very heavily on holy power. When you make the decision to use Divine Storm, it's not only a decision to forego Templar's Verdict but also Inquisition. Inquisition increases the damage of Holy Wrath and Consecration, so by choosing to AoE, you choose to reduce the effectiveness of your other AoE abilities. Alternatively, you use single-target abilities to build the holy power to use Inquisition, so you may start AoEing again. Both scenarios set the retribution paladin's AoE capabilities far behind most other classes.
You can't be the best at everything. In every encounter, there is going to be a class or spec that doesn't perform as well as the others, and that's okay. Needing to make tough decisions while doing DPS, like whether to single-target or to AoE, is also okay. Decisions can be fun. Decisions aren't fun when it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. That's the essence of Divine Storm right now. I very sincerely hope Divine Storm generates holy power in patch 4.1 or someone comes forward with a compelling argument for why it doesn't (or shouldn't).
I also think retribution could stand to have an AoE ability that utilizes holy power, but that may be asking a bit much.
Hand of Light (Mastery): A percentage of the damage done by Templar's Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm is done as additional Holy damage. This Mastery now grants a 2.1% increase to Holy damage per mastery, down from 2.5%. Our old mastery has changed completely in patch 4.0.6. Our old mastery was an enjoyable proc mechanic, but it ended up not being of much significance when it came to actual, competitive DPS. Because of that, mastery was an entirely undesirable stat to the point that retribution paladins actively avoided anything with mastery on it, even with the option of reforging available.
Those days are gone and this is the new hotness. The paladin community is still working out the numbers on this new mastery, but right now it's looking like after reaching the hit and expertise caps, mastery will be our best stat right above haste.
This added holy damage does scale with Inquisition, which is part of why mastery becomes so desirable. It plays into our existing abilities extremely well.
Divine Purpose: The chance for applicable abilities to generate Holy Power has been reduced to 7/15%, down from 20/40%, but instead of generating 1 Holy Power, the next applicable ability used consumes no Holy Power and acts as if the paladin has 3 Holy Power. Here's where the old Hand of Light ran off to. The old Divine Purpose is gone and replaced with this. With this change, expect your holy power generation to take a significant hit. Crusader Strike is the only ability in your arsenal that will generate holy power. Period.
This change will remove some of the randomness surrounding retribution holy power, but at the same time, it will generally reduce the number of buttons that you push. Retribution's DPS rotation can feel very feast or famine -- sometimes you have more buttons to press than you care to see or else you are struggling for something to do between Crusader Strikes. Patch 4.0.6 isn't going to help that. It's going to make it worse. If your procs aren't playing nicely, you're going to be staring at a boss's butt for awhile and not much else. When your procs do play nice, your DPS is going to skyrocket ... briefly.
Repentance is no longer broken from damage done by Censure (Seal of Truth). Good change. It's going to make crowd-controlling in heroics quite a bit easier, as we don't have the leisure of having a glyph that makes our crowd control idiot-proof.
Yes, I'm fairly certain I just called myself an idiot just now, since nobody else can actually apply Censure.
The Rebuke talent has been replaced with a new passive talent, Sacred Shield. Paladins who had Rebuke before will automatically have Sacred Shield. Sacred When reduced below 30% health, paladins gain the Sacred Shield effect. The Sacred Shield absorbs X damage and increases healing received by 20%. Lasts 15 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds. Undispellable. Don't panic! Rebuke is being made a baseline spell. Blizzard's not taking away our interrupt. Every spec will have it, so this is what was granted to us in exchange.
Prior to Cataclysm, I likely would have said that this is purely a PvP talent and PvE players should go around it in their talent spec. In Cataclysm, I believe this is very much a PvE ability, especially if you're a raider. The sort of environmental damage that goes around these days is almost ludicrous. Healers work their tails off to keep everybody alive. Every little bit the DPS can do to help is appreciated. I foresee this even being slightly overpowered in select encounters in this expansion. Chimaeron, anybody?
Seals of Command will no longer trigger twice on each swing with Seal of Truth. This could likely be categorized as just a bug fix. Paladins seals work very strangely. Seal of Truth has two components, the DoT application and the up-front damage. Because of how Seals of Command functions, it triggered on both components of the spell. Yes, fixing this bug will be a DPS loss, but ideally it will be made up for elsewhere in these changes.
Zealotry is no longer dispellable. PvPers everywhere rejoice. PvE players say, "Cool, Garr can't strip my cooldown while I'm soloing Molten Core anymore."
Word of Glory will no longer reset the swing timer. This is good! Being selfless and losing your holy power to heal a raid buddy is punishing enough with the loss of holy power. Losing your melee swing and potential application of Seal of Truth is even more brutal.
If you're expecting patch 4.0.6 to drastically change your DPS numbers, it is unlikely to do that. You will see minimal gains, but if you feel like retribution paladins are severely underperforming, this patch isn't going to make you happy. With the exception of holy power generation, what this patch will do is smooth out some of the annoying little aspects of playing retribution, such as Seal of Truth's no longer feeling like a constant struggle.
The most important change in this patch is the change to mastery. Mastery will shift from being our worst stat to potentially the very best. If you like to min-max, be prepared to redo a lot of your enchanting, gemming, and reforging. Strength will remain king of the mountain, so those gems can stay right where they are, but the mastery/haste/crit hierarchy will shift entirely.
My personal hope is that patch 4.1 will tackle the feast/famine feeling of the paladin's DPS rotation, as well as holy power generation and our AoE capabilities. While I do feel retribution DPS is a little lower than it should be, the only situation where this truly stands out are encounters with AoE aspects. A retribution paladin simply cannot contribute in a meaningful way.
Back when I was playing a shadow priest at the very beginning of Wrath of the Lich King, I said that playing a shadow priest felt like a selfish decision. The class was arranged in such a way that it discouraged switching targets to help burn down adds, it discouraged attacking multiple targets when the encounter needed it, and it discouraged aiding with AoE. A major patch or so after I said that, many of those problems were fixed, and I applaud the developers for the great things they did with that class (even if shadow priests struggle now with their own lackluster mastery). Currently, I feel the problem shadow priests faced then is the same problem retribution struggles with now. We fight against our own mechanics, and those mechanics encourage a very selfish playstyle. The Seal of Truth change is a very good step toward fixing this, but there's still more work to do.
The Light and How to Swing It tries to help paladins cope with the dark times coming in Cataclysm. See the upcoming paladin changes the expansion will bring. Wrath is coming to a close and the final showdown with the Lich King is here. With Cataclysm soon heating things up, will you be ready?
Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Ostentaneous Feb 2nd 2011 5:05PM
Yay! Non holy paladin columns! Welcom back!!!
lookinginsetx1977 Feb 2nd 2011 5:09PM
Yea, finally a ret article, we need more. As well as what gear we should be getting before raiding, I seriously have no idea.
Bugs Feb 2nd 2011 6:22PM
You might wanna check out http://www.retributionpaladins.com/ on the gear matter
Pabohoney1 Feb 2nd 2011 8:39PM
Gearing really isn't that difficult anymore. Having a BiS list isn't necessary with reforging. If a piece of gear has more strength it's generally going to be an upgrade. Trinkets are really the only piece of gear that might not be so obvious, but Elitist Jerks has a pretty decent list of what trinkets are best currently.
Kolyarut Feb 2nd 2011 5:21PM
Great summary of the changes, thanks Alex.
Having a full set of 346 Ret offspec gear, I decided to give it a try the other day for the first time since ICC - to be honest, for me, Inquisition kind of kills the fun. I described it the other day as spending 30% of your time activating your various cooldowns, 30% of your time sitting frustrated because everything's on cooldown, and 30% of your time doing as much DPS as everybody else. Obviously that's an exaggeration, but still. I quite liked single target DPS in ICC, but having to keep Inquisition up as well is just an extra burden. Most other classes got one or more fun new spells, but Ret got one annoying obligation and one spell that's sort of nice but is basically unuseable on anything but bosses.
I'd be more willing to put up with that if a) at least I could do good / vaguely competetive DPS (or maybe the ability to re-cast the CC if it gets broken), and b) if Prot wasn't just a million times more fun and effective - as it works out at the moment, I typically do more DPS as prot anyway. If I wanted to micromanage an annoying number of cooldowns and resources, I'd... well, I don't want to micromanage an annoying number of cooldowns and resources.
Whyisretgimped Feb 2nd 2011 5:34PM
You are spot on 100% correct about Inquisition. We used to get an automatic boost to damage with ret talents and now we have to click them ourselves. Definitely adds dreariness to ret.
I agree again on prot vs. ret. Prot is just so much more fun to play because it doesn't feel like a futile hunt for table scraps of damage. Ret is twice the buttons for half the effect, all the while getting your face punched in and having to spend all your mana healing after a fight (in single player or PvP).
They should either dump inquisition and let us build our own stacks of beatingness again automatically, or make inquisition truly dramatic and add 30% to all damage from special attacks, make crusader strike do holy damage, or some other kind of interesting interaction between our abilities (it would be too awesome if it was straight up 30% to damage).
Powatodapeople Feb 2nd 2011 6:29PM
what do you do for the other 10%?
Kolyarut Feb 2nd 2011 6:35PM
Stand in the fire, mostly.
(you know, when I said that in guild chat, not one person, me included, noticed that the numbers didn't actually add up...)
devilsei Feb 3rd 2011 12:25AM
That's because of the DPS rule.
10% of the time, any DPS, of any class and spec, will be standing in the fire. Its nigh-universally understood, which is why no one questioned it.
Whyisretgimped Feb 2nd 2011 5:28PM
Well written article and does a nice job of setting up strategic thinking for when 4.06 hits (whenever that may be).
I agree with the author and would further like to add that these changes cause more problems than they fix. We've gemmed straight strength since BC. Why change that to mastery now? Does it really make paladins feel more like paladins and less like other classes or is it just Blizz arbitrarily trying to force players to play the game the way they want you to because they made a new stat that everyone thinks is utter suck. It feels like cry baby game design, like they're we're going to punish you because you won't play with their toys.
I kind of liked the way mastery worked for ret paladins. Like the author said, it absolutely added to the feast/famine/randomness of paladins, but it also made you feel like a paladin clobbering people with holy power as opposed to just being a warrior with a white glow. A much better fix would have been to come up with a far more consistent way to generate more holy power, not less holy power with more consistency. The fact that a warrior in greens does as much or more DPS than a paladin in blues at 85 is just not right. That is the biggest problem ret has right now and Blizzard hasn't addressed it all and 4.06 will simply make it worse.
I agree with the author wholeheartedly about a lack of AoE abilities that utilize holy power. When divine storm utilized holy power, it was beyond useless as it was our only strong AoE choice and would always lose out to Verdict. To add a serious type nuke attack, which used holy power, would give us some flexibility. We'd really have interesting choices to make if we had to chose between divine storm, verdict, and some kind of more powerful three holy power AoE nuke.
Great analysis of the current state of ret. Spot on breakdown of the coming changes. A very useful article indeed.
Paladious Feb 2nd 2011 8:05PM
I think the easiest thing to do would just be taking Divine Storm off the same cooldown as Crusader Strike like it used to be.
Fletcher Feb 2nd 2011 5:29PM
I went "eeeee!" when I saw this. An article as to what stat weights we should be chasing would be most welcome, hint hint! :P Right now I have no idea what to stack other than strength ...
Also, the main problem I'm feeling at 83 is that my paladin feels *squishy*, more so even than my *mage*! Am I doing something wrong, or is ret genuinely having issues with survivability?
And Inquisition seems kinda useless for soloing ... keeps dropping off between mobs. Should I be bothering to spend my holy power on it? Or should I wait until ret gets some kind of paladin Deadly Momentum?
Whyisretgimped Feb 2nd 2011 5:37PM
Elitist Jerks has a great analysis of this. It's also very simple:
Stack strength... when you're done... stack more strength...
Blizzard's solution to this asinine simplification of paladins:
Stack mastery... when you're done... stack more mastery...
I would love it if they just brought back pre-4.01 ret. It wasn't the best ret we ever had (that was just after LK launched and we were dropping huge burst with judgements), but it is so much better than this convoluted mess they have brought us with cata.
Kuala Feb 2nd 2011 6:09PM
I have the same squishy problem and I was sure there was something wrong with how I'm playing. I'm main spec holy and whenever I switch to my offset to do dailies I get a can of whoop-arse! Would really appreciate any suggestions :)
Heilig Feb 2nd 2011 6:51PM
Actually, according to EJ, the situation is even worse. After hit and expertise caps, all 3 secondary stats have the same stat weight. Even worse, with the mastery change, CS, TV, Exo, And HoW all have the same rotation priority.
So in an effort to make Ret more difficult, they gave us unnecessarily complex mechanics that lead to overly low DPS. When they realized that, they give us a change that turns our rotation into "hit whatever's off CD" and a gearing scheme that is now "use the highest ilvl piece available."
They wanted the skill cap and the skill floor to be very far apart after Wrath. As of 4.0.6, the two will be closer than they have ever been.
Pyromelter Feb 2nd 2011 7:54PM
Heilig... wouldn't you still want to wait for 3 HP to hit TV? I can't imagine it being a dps gain to hit it at 1 HP, at the very least.
Sturmovic Feb 2nd 2011 5:31PM
On a side note, I think we need more chargers-flying charger gryphons would be great. In fact, injecting more class mounts into the game would go a long way to keep player interest I think.
MikeLive Feb 2nd 2011 5:36PM
I was awaiting 4.0.6 to play Ret again for the Mastery change - currently it just seems like the entire goal is to hit TV as much as possible - but it was just moved into Divine Purpose, which had it's own effect removed, so I predict that I'll not find the spec any more enjoyable than I do now - I enjoyed the non-guaranteed HP generation from other abilities, but not the free-3-HP procs. Coupled with Zealotry, I found that if things were going well, all I was doing was pressing TV over and over and over and over and over again.
Pyromelter Feb 2nd 2011 5:58PM
15% chance is not that high. I have a feeling you'll be hitting crusader strike, taking a nap, and hitting crusader strike again, over and over. For 20 seconds every 2 minutes you'll be a TV-spamming superhero, then you'll be clark kent for the other 100 seconds.
WTB a buff to judgement. Would help in pve and pvp quite a bit, imo.
terph Feb 3rd 2011 3:03AM
Really, I'm not even going for TV a lot of the time. Just not giving me the bang for my buck that I want. It's my "i guess I have nothing else that I can do right now, so I'll use that rotation." I'm feeding off my Exo and AW/HoW procs as much as possible while keeping Inquisition up. Seems to have a much better DPS turn-out. When AW isn't an option and Exo isn't proccing, then I go into a TV build-up. I'm then praying for good procs. Oh so very much.
I'd like to see more consistent damage and less praying, but I'm concerned. Seems like our good attacks will still be only when RNG smiles upon you, but there's less opportunity for those procs to occur. Just gotta wait and see, I suppose.