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.

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