Vis Maior

Heres a post from other forums that i thought really hit home.......


Retribution has zero viability when 3.0.3 hits. This is a very painful repeat of our pre-release and tBC history and probably the end of the Retribution. I don't think it will survive 4th year being the PvP underdog.

Retribution is on the longest run of underdog of any class in WoW history. Since day 1 of release all the way until now on live it is “lolret”. Denied spots in raiding, laughed out of PUGs, deal last in arena… list goes on. Did you know that Retribution S1 and S2 sets were the only sets without resil? Yes, it took 6 month of petitioning to just fix that. Season after season Retribution is absolute bottom of the barrel spec, nowhere to be found in any competitive arena play. There are only 20ish Retribution Gladiators total in all 3 seasons that got there as Retribution.

Retribution is about the only spec that relies on others to perform key PvP functions - interrupts, snares and healing debuffs. While other classes look for synergy, Retribution looks for "please make it work for me" partners when forming comp. Typical arena team would face decision - why have a retribution on the team? What do they bring? In S3 answer to that was - to stop effing druids with JoJ and stop melee train with BoP. Yes, about the only reason to have Ret on 3v3 was so your warrior can catch and kill druids easily. Considering how popular druid comps were, literally more than a half of all teams above 1800 in S2 & S3 had a druid healer, that wasn't such a bad decision. Now what happens if in S5 druids are no longer prevalent PvP healer choice?

Ask this question with WoTLK in mind - Why do I want to have a Retribution Paladin on my team? Right now answer is burst. You take this burst away and all you are left with is lolret broken class passed by in favor of other. In PvP raw sum of total damage you can do is largely irrelevant. Due to healers designed to be able to counter damage delivered by bosses and all non-fatal damage gets healed, as a result your DPS will be countered by HPS, without any effort I might add, since Retribution does not have MS healing debuff effect.

In PvP you look at damage dealing abilities from following point of view - pressure, burst and time on target. Pressure is an ability to deliver enough damage to get healer to use mana-intensive heals and abilities, if you can apply and keep pressure healer eventually runs out of mana and target dies. If you are not pressuring healer into full-time healing they end up regenerating mana and/or using offensive abilities. Pressure is closest metric to PvE DPS... but Pressure alone never kills anyone in PvP .
PvP Burst is any large damage that leads to a kill. Against competent healer burst needs to be fairly large chunk of damage in fairly short time. Any burst that does not kill or cause use of cooldowns to survive is failed burst, and gets counted toward pressure.

Retribution is clearly not a pressure class. Inability to stay on target due to vulnerability to kiting and CC, and lack of healing debuff makes Rets the worst pressure class in the game. For Retribution time-on-target is fairly low, but that gets offset by controlled nature of Burst. Now when you are talking about lowering Burst and compensating elsewhere you are still talking about DIRECT PvP NERF regardless of the fact that DPS (PvE metric) may stay the same. You will never find Retribution on a drain team, time-on-target and healing debuffs are just not there to make it work!

You have to realize that ability to quickly kill is the only thing that Retribution bring to the table. If Retribution gets into your face you should die in a short time frame. You can counter Retribution by kiting, minimizing time on target and preparing for the Burst., but if you fail at that you deserve to die.

But what do I know? Lets see what professional PvP player think about Retribution, that is when prize money on the table. Recently Montreal Arena Tournament even concluded, they were using 3.0 ruleset (that is before any Retribution nerfs were put in place!) $15,000 top prize. Few Retribution teams were brought into the play, but none made into finals or semi-finals. If Retribution, in complete pre-nerf state was a problem, you would thing PROs would take advantage of it to get prize money and fame?

Read details what happened here:
http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=46965

Top 3 teams were Rogue Mage Preist. All fights against Retribution teams Rets got CCed and kited.
When professional Arena PvP players determine by competition that there is no problem with Retribution, perhaps Blizzard should listen? After all, these people make living from Arena PvP.
Blizzard - design by QQ.

There was like two warlocks on that entire page.

But in light of this thread, I think paladins have become like rogues. Little kids want to play rogues cause they are sneaky. When they hit lvl70, and receive all these "crutch" abilities such as clos, blinds, will of the forsaken(they're all undead), pvp trinkets, vanish, etc, and they use them religiously every time the CD is up. The rogues who blow clos with 1-2 dots on them, while I'm still working on applying a 3rd and 4th.

So pre-patch there were good paladins who knew every kind of situation and how to respond to them without blowing all their CDs at once. (Slayton) But then you have your majority of the player base who blows everything, every pvp encounter. They try and use brute force and bitch about nurfs. The paladins who dispel my rank1 corruption till they run out of mana.

When the patch came out, it favored the paladin player base by no longer punishing the paladins who prematurely blow everything at once...they could burst down anyone within 2-8 seconds, yet they still use their bubble when I'm sitting there stunned for another 3 seconds. It's those players that are bitching, the ones who don't need to learn ability trade-offs between classes.

But every class has those players. They make up a huge percent of the WoW population. Warlocks have theirs too, the ones who blow deathcoil first thing off the bat to get the fear advantage...then for the next two minutes they feel as if they need a buff cause they die non-stop.

That's inexperienced-arena-warlock point of view.

All I see are buffs and bug fixes;

Eye for an Eye: No longer breaks crowd control effects. <--- Amazing fix. E4E is now 100% pvp viable.

Repentance PvP duration reduced to 6 sec. <-- 9 Seconds was too long, Blind is long, but Blind also shares a DR with Cyclone, Repentance does not, and Druid/Ret + X is a common 3v3 setup.

Righteous Vengeance: No longer increases critical strike damage on Judgments and Divine Storm, instead applies a DoT effect similar to Deep Wounds. <--- Buff, No one put points in Righteous Vengeance in a PvP build, this talent was crap. Now you can sink 1 point into it and get a nice DoT effect on people. Also take note Ghostcrawler mentioned this will not break CC.

Art of War: No longer increases critical strike damage on Judgments, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm, instead increases all damage done by those abilities by a smaller amount. <--- Only real nerf here, and it's so slight, and it is even a slightly better choice for how to dish damage vs resilience stacked targets.

I would have made the same nerfs. However, I will say that yes, retribution still has this problem with closing a gap quickly and effectively, although they are mobile they are not offensively mobile, and it does hurt.

As for the MS or interrupt, arena is balanced around group pvp. If you have ever played a warrior, I'm sure you understand this. Point being, we don't need it, or at least when I pvped at 80 on beta I didn't and I don't need it right now, but if the problem arises where group pvp has us needing it as well, I'm sure they will look into some kind of fix.

Overall, the statement of us not being viable in 3.0.3 is over the top imo; Don't worry so much We aren't the only class getting nerfed. *Cough* Frost Mages

As for the other statements I just don't agree completely. A number of 3v3 comps with retadins have turned really good. Rogue/S.Priest/Retadin, Rogue/Druid/Retadin, Mage/Rogue/Ret. Obviously you see the place of a retadin, support and heavy pressure burst. I believe we will do just fine in that area as they have said our burst is going to stay near what it is now, just will be put in line so we aren't dominating 24/7, and I'm ok with that, and hopefully after you read this you will be to. Dominating the game isn't fun. A challenge is. If we continue dominating the game, we will just stop playing. I log on less then I used to because it just isn't fun running in and mauling everyone for more then a few bgs. It gets old rather fast.

-Slayton

Yes i agree for the most part and always try to be sensible with gc remarks and "surgical" fixed to our class. Noone likes to dominate in pvp without a challenge...well at least not us lol i prefer to earn my wins in arena...but you gotta admit that first day 3.0 came out it was sweet poetic justic of being the underdog for so long lol...as far as frost mages...and arcane mages with there arcane barrage they need to be toned down a bit...thx for your input though..

PS.... i thought u were suppose to come out with a new vid? never saw updated post about it on pally site

Superdave wrote:Yes i agree for the most part and always try to be sensible with gc remarks and "surgical" fixed to our class. Noone likes to dominate in pvp without a challenge...well at least not us lol i prefer to earn my wins in arena...but you gotta admit that first day 3.0 came out it was sweet poetic justic of being the underdog for so long lol...as far as frost mages...and arcane mages with there arcane barrage they need to be toned down a bit...thx for your input though..

PS.... i thought u were suppose to come out with a new vid? never saw updated post about it on pally site

Due to work and such, I never got to finish my video, as of yet. Too much stuff going on IRL for me to focus on something like that, in addition to ret just blowing people up, I would probably get shunned for making such a video.

Just trying new specs in ret and wondering what some thoughts on SoM over SoC were. I have noticed since the last patch that pallies still seem to see SoC as still out performing SoM especially when glyphed (I have seen this on pallies forums as well as EJ). I have been trying SoM and not even spec'd into SoC and it seems to kill stuff just as fast I was wondering what kind of numbers pallies have seen and thoughts on spec options. Just a side note I like SoC and have always liked the pvp burst aspect of it but am just looking to see if SoM is a viable option for pallies to use.
Currently I am http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/cla ... 2134201331
glyphed with: Judgement and HoJ (looking to change that one but none in AH), and minors: undead/LoH/wise. I have been looking at glyph of SA but don't see that need as I'm primarily out of the raid scene.
As for my numbers in my current rotation: JoW, DS, CS, Conc and repeat also popping trinkets and AW when up depending on situation. Doing this I notice that RV is up almost all the time and ticks for about 220-250ish? or close to it and judge crits avg. 3.7k to 4.1 highest so far being 4.7 I think. The other abilities hit somewhere in the same neighborhood but I haven't found a mod to follow dps as much. I have followed the debate for SoB/SoM vs. SoC and am just looking for input from pallies I know of. Also my current libram is null so nevermind it I am currently looking at replacing that with the new crit ones later on.