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First Impression of Retribution Paladin Rework in Dragonflight 10.0.7 - Guide Writer Feeback
PTR
Geposted
22.02.2023 um 12:24
von
Bolas
Retribution Paladins have received a complete rework to the spec with the Dragonflight 10.0.7 PTR, but were these changes enough to fix the glaring issues and rocky expansion launch for these Holy Avengers? Our Retribution Paladin Writer, Bolas, breaks down every aspect of this rework including Survivability, Mobility, Retribution Aura, Gameplay, and Talents. If you're wondering whether you should dust off your Retribution Paladin in 10.0.7, then look no further as we talk all things Ret.
It's been a few months since I last wrote an opinion piece about Ret, but fortunately this time I've got a lot more positive things to write about. There's been a significant rework to a lot of the Paladin tree, and the Retribution tree has had a complete redesign from the ground up. There's very likely going to be a lot more changes on the PTR before we see the finished version in 10.0.7, but I'll go over the major changes that we've been shown so far and give my initial impression on how I think they'll play out.
About the Author
Hi, I'm Bolas. I've played Ret since WotLK, I'm a mod in the Paladin class discord, and I help with some of the work on SimC for Ret. You can find me on
Twitter
or in the
Hammer of Wrath
discord if you have any questions or are interested in more information about Retribution.
Survivability
This is by far the area where Ret has had the most improvement, going from one of the squishiest specs to arguably one of the tankiest. Changes include:
Göttlicher Schutz
is now
baseline
, with a 1.30 CD (63s with
Unbeugsamer Geist
).
Schild der Vergeltung
is still a talent that you'll practically always take, and now has a half duration GCD. It still has a 1.30 CD (63s with
Unbeugsamer Geist
).
Aegis des Schutzes
is also in the Ret tree and you'll usually have no problem taking it. It significantly buffs both active defensives.
Geweihte Platten
in the Paladin tree, offering a staggeringly large amount of stamina and avoidance.
A plethora of new healing options:
Schnelligkeit des Lichts
makes
Lichtblitz
an instant cast, and buffs its healing. It puts it on a 6s cooldown, but there's no real situation you could ever spam
Lichtblitz
to begin with anyway, if nothing else because your mana pool just isn't big enough to let you cast it more than 3 or 4 times in a row.
Geleitetes Gebet
casts a free
Wort der Herrlichkeit
once every minute when you drop to low health. It also benefits from
Heilende Hände
.
Lichtgeschmiedeter Segen
gives free AoE healing for every
Göttlicher Sturm
.
Begnadigung des Kreuzfahrers
causes
Kreuzfahrerstoß
to also heal you every hit.
Schwindendes Licht
gives you an absorb shield based on the damage your generators do.
The new healing bonuses are all great, especially for a spec that has had a history off being able to take extra healing but very limited options recently, but the most important changes are the other ones. Getting to use both
Göttlicher Schutz
and
Schild der Vergeltung
, both on relatively short cooldowns and in addition to
Gottesschild
, is finally enough defensive cooldowns to be comparable to (or better than) most other classes.
Geweihte Platten
is also a great bonus, since Paladin was lacking the stamina/passive survivability talents that many other classes have in their class trees too. I've had many frustrating experiences that I'm sure are shared by most Ret players, where you just don't have the GCDs, or the health pool/passive reduction, or the number of defensive cooldowns necessary to survive mechanics that other classes have no problem with. Fortunately, I don't expect that to be a problem with all of these new additions; there's just so many tools and passive benefits that it should be almost trivial to keep yourself alive in most situations.
Mobility
It's a bit difficult to properly discuss mobility yet, since it's still being worked on. There's a new ability on the PTR (that was originally a
Heldenhafter Sprung
copy) called
which has a description that is just "Ret Movement ability". It's not clear whether this ability is actually supposed to be added to the spec to begin with, but since we've been told that they "aren’t done with maneuverability yet; we have a few ideas we’re currently exploring internally and will have more to share here in the future", it's pretty likely that something extra will appear in the near future.
Paladin didn't have really great mobility options prior, but in a PvE context, 2 charges of
Göttliches Ross
was enough to deal with most mechanics. The biggest issues were that it was on the GCD, and that Paladin had no way other than
Gottesschild
to deal with knockback or pushback effects. With the rework, we now have the option to take an almost permanent 10% movement speed increase with
Urteil der Gerechtigkeit
, a longer
Göttliches Ross
that is no longer on the GCD, and an extra bonus to
Segen der Freiheit
that also makes it increase movement speed with
Absolute Freiheit
. Pretty much every issue with Ret mobility has been addressed except for the knockback problem. It might seem like not a huge issue to have one type of movement mechanic that Ret isn't good at, but Mythic Raszageth should really highlight how dire it is - Ret literally could not live Phase 1 without external help from an Evoker or a Priest until recent nerfs. It's also the only melee DPS to have this problem - every other melee has some type of displacement or pushback prevention to stay on the platform except Ret. This isn't a recent or infrequent problem either, and it's been a problem on multiple other bosses this tier like Dathea and Sennarth. If
is some kind of ability that can be used in these situations, I'd consider Ret to have a well designed and complete mobility toolkit.
Aura der Vergeltung
This is really the only part of the redesign that I am not thrilled about so far. I like the idea of one of the Paladin auras giving the group some kind of damage benefit, but both the way it procs and the way players will be incentivized to play with it seem like they'll be awful player experiences.
50% of their Health in a Single Hit
It's difficult to assess how often this actually happens in boss fights naturally until you start looking at logs. The same mechanism, a player in the raid taking 50% of their health in a single hit, is how the current
Aura der Vergeltung
procs a
buff. It's difficult to distinguish that from regular
Asche zu Asche
buffs for Ret, but looking at a Prot or Holy log where they're using
Aura der Vergeltung
, it almost never procs from regular gameplay - maybe once or twice an encounter, although some encounters will have no procs. Players just don't take that much damage from one ability unless they're making a mechanical mistake or are intentionally taking damage. Since
Aura der Vergeltung
is a significant damage increase for the raid, 5% for 10s, you'll likely see tanks frequently refraining from using their mitigation abilities in order to take more than half their health from a melee hit, or DPS standing in a mechanic that they probably shouldn't be for the same reason. None of this sounds like fun or healthy gameplay, and could be easily avoided by tying the proc to something that happens more regularly in a raid environment.
This Cannot Occur More than Once Every 30 Sec
It's not clear yet whether this ICD is group wide or specific to the Paladin. Either way, it will incentivize Paladins to constantly swap Auras during the fight.
If the ICD is group wide, in groups with one Paladin, you'll have that Paladin start in
Aura der Vergeltung
, proc the damage buff, and then swap to
Aura der Hingabe
. Once the ICD is up, they'll swap back to
Aura der Vergeltung
, and repeat. They'll end up swapping Auras twice every 30s to maintain both the damage buff and the damage reduction.
If the ICD is Paladin specific, you could run 3 Paladins, and have them rotate their Auras to permanently maintain the 5% damage buff. This would at least require the Paladins to swap Auras in the first 10-20s of the fight, and probably more often if subsequent procs don't happen exactly on CD.
Again, this sounds like miserable gameplay - Aura swapping in combat occasionally is fine, but Aura weaving as part of regular gameplay is not something most players will enjoy. This is the one aspect of the rework that I really hope gets the most changes before it goes live.
Retribution Gameplay
The elephant in the room when it comes to the major differences in gameplay is
Kreuzfahrerschläge
. It entirely removes
Kreuzfahrerstoß
from your regular rotation, and instead provides consistent Holy Power gain. Compared to other melee specs that gain resource from auto attacks, it reminds me less of Subtlety or Havoc and more of Arms, where the resource gains are easy to track, not that sporadic, but very significant when they do happen. They're definitely something you could and almost certainly will want to track and play around. It's a much higher rate of Holy Power generation than Ret usually has, but so far I've really enjoyed the consistent nature of it and ability to plan around future Holy Power gains when playing. If the rate of Holy Power generation is nerfed at some point to bring it in line with other talents, I hope that it's not done in a way where it ends up being random per melee whether you get Holy Power or not.
The rest of the rotation also flows pretty well and feels fun to play. There's a ton of talents that give extra charges or reduce specific generator cooldowns, especially on choice nodes, which I really like - it gives you a ton of flexibility about what generators you want to really lean into buffing. I'm also a big fan of giving almost every generator a cleave option. One of the biggest issues Ret had prior to Dragonflight was that your only damage on AoE was either
Göttlicher Sturm
or cooldowns like
Letzte Abrechnung
, which also meant that your priority damage would really suffer when you started to AoE. Talents that let your generators cleave is a nice compromise here, especially when there's a lot of options to pick between depending on what generators you've already buffed with other talent choices. The
Zornige Vergeltung: Macht
vs
Kreuzzug
choice node is also a real choice now that
Zornige Vergeltung
is a 1 minute cooldown baseline, giving you the option to play a Legion-style 2 minute extended burst profile or lean into
Letzte Abrechnung
and have stronger 1 minute cooldowns. I think the duration of
Zornige Vergeltung
and
Kreuzzug
might be a little too long now with
Paragon der Zeloten
though - you can get
Kreuzzug
s that last almost a minute and will also have close to 50% uptime on
Zornige Vergeltung
too.
New Talents
There's a lot of new talents with this rework - practically the entire Retribution tree is completely different, with very few talents from the last iteration sticking around. I'm not going to talk about every talent in detail, but I have some thoughts about specific talents that I think are worth noting.
Retribution Talents
All of the passive stat nodes in the Retribution tree like
Lehren des Lichts
or
Adjudikation
now have an additional effect to them too, which is a nice bonus to make them a little less boring.
Heilige Klinge
sorta feels like it just exists to soak up a talent point. I'd consider this a fundamental part of
Klinge der Gerechtigkeit
as a spell, since every version of it we've ever had ended up generating 2 Holy Power, so it feels weird to need to pick it as one of your first talent points.
In the top third of the talent tree, there's only 9 talent nodes and 8 points to spend on them - that said, there are also 6 choice node talents among them, so you still do get to make a lot of choices here, just between two different options on a choice node rather than between two or three different talent paths. There's also two utility nodes here, which means you'll usually just pick one of them to take and then take every other talent in the section. I like the effects these talents provide, but I think most players will be reluctant to take more than one of them since it'll probably come at the cost of a decent amount of damage to do so.
Rechtschaffene Sache
vs
Kunst des Krieges
is a really cool way to let players decide the mechanic they want to have for
Klinge der Gerechtigkeit
resets.
Rechtschaffene Sache
should probably also reset on
Göttlicher Sturm
casts though, or otherwise in any situation involving AoE you'd essentially be forced into always taking
Kunst des Krieges
, assuming they're tuned to be comparable on single target.
Urteil der Gerechtigkeit
is a pretty tame version of
Der lange Arm des Gesetzes
, but I like that it's managed to sneak its way back into the talent tree in some form, since there's a lot of players that really love that effect.
Ausmerzung
has had a redesign so that it now procs off every
Klinge der Gerechtigkeit
cast rather than just crits. I liked having some talents that would alter your secondary stat preferences, but its position in the tree makes it seem like it's supposed to be a talent that you'll just take in most regular builds rather than a talent that you'd build around for
Klinge der Gerechtigkeit
specifically, which makes sense. Currently if you use
Klinge der Gerechtigkeit
on a target that already has an
Ausmerzung
debuff, the original one just gets completely overwritten - I'd like to see a mechanic similar to
Seelennarbe
instead where the remaining damage on an existing
Ausmerzung
dot gets added to any subsequent application instead, especially since
Rechtschaffene Sache
and
Kunst des Krieges
can cause you to cast a lot of
Klinge der Gerechtigkeit
s in a small period.
Himmlisches Erbe
is still a talent I like a lot, but it still has the awkward incentive if you're using
Kreuzzug
and
Letzte Abrechnung
that you'll probably want to use
Göttlicher Sturm
to build
Kreuzzug
stacks on single target, to then use the
Himmlisches Erbe
proc after your
Letzte Abrechnung
at 10 stacks. Hopefully without
this might not be a damage gain to do anymore, but it's not very fun to have to hardcast your AoE spender on single target just to save the proc.
It makes sense to nerf
Heiligen
and
Geweihte Klinge
when they were previously strong enough to even see use on single target, but I'm not sure it makes sense for them to still be in the talent tree generally when
Weihe
itself has already had its cooldown increased to 20s and all of the talents that make your generators cleave are likely to be stronger than these anyway. I'm definitely not a big
Weihe
fan, but these versions of these talents seem like they could just be something else a bit more interesting for Ret.
I like bringing back
Zorn des Inquisitors
, an old Legendary from Legion that never really saw any use, but the % per stack and cap mean that at maximum stacks
Göttlicher Sturm
will only do 50% more damage, which isn't even enough to beat a
Letztes Urteil
or
Rache des Rechtsprechers
on single target.
Zorn des Hochlords
has an interesting concept, but currently you'll end up constantly overcapping buffs with
Göttliche Resonanz
. I'd like to see either an increase in the stack cap, or some other mechanism that means you don't end up losing value from it when every spender you use will be buffed by
Richturteil
anyway.
Putting
Todesurteil
and
Letzte Abrechnung
on a choice node together makes sense from the perspective of not wanting too many damage buffing modifiers to exist, but I'm not sure it'd be a really oppressive combination without
, and there's a lot of players that really loved that playstyle from Shadowlands who would love to be able to use both at once.
Schwung des Frontkämpfers
currently provides all its damage bonus in just the first talent point, and the second point only gives you one extra charge of
Hammer des Zorns
. It should probably be tuned so that the second point provides a bit more benefit. I like that it emphasizes
Hammer des Zorns
's role during execute a bit more, since it always felt odd to have an execute ability as Ret that didn't significantly increase your overall execute damage.
A choice node between
Letztes Urteil
and
Rache des Rechtsprechers
is a cool idea, but I'd like it more if it was just a "do you want more range on your spender or a heal on your spender" choice rather than also picking between different base damage on each or a
Hammer des Zorns
reset effect too.
There's a few talents that seem like they'll probably be fairly undertuned, like
Göttlicher Hammer
or
Göttliche Hilfstruppe
or
Lodernde Flammen
, but since this is the first iteration of these abilities I'm not too worried about tuning still needing to be done.
Some talents don't really work at all together yet. If you take
Kreuzfahrerschläge
,
Siegel des Kreuzfahrers
doesn't proc off your
Kreuzfahrerstoß
auto attacks. If you take
Gesegneter Hammer
,
Verbesserter Kreuzfahrerstoß
doesn't give it an extra charge,
Schnelle Gerechtigkeit
doesn't reduce its cooldown, and
Klingen des Lichts
doesn't make it deal Holystrike damage.
I'm really interested to see what happens with the talents that alter spell damage schools like
Klingen des Lichts
and buff specific schools like
Sengendes Licht
. These clearly aren't done yet, but it's design space that has seen minimal exploration other than one or two talents like
Finstere Mischung
, and I think there could be a lot of really interesting ways to specialize into Physical or Holy or Fire damage that could be really great if they're fully explored.
Paladin Talents
There's definitely some significant pathing improvements - for example, you now no longer have to take 2 ranks of
Faust der Gerechtigkeit
to get throughput increases. There's no major issues with throughput nodes being locked behind utility nodes anymore, although there are still a significant number of throughput nodes you'll want to take.
Unlike the Ret tree, most of the passive stat nodes are still just boring multi point passive nodes like
Heilige Aegis
and
Siegel der Macht
. The one node that has an additional effect,
Siegel des Eifers
, still has the same passive bonus as another node already in the Ret tree,
Lehren des Lichts
. I'd like to see more interesting effects added if we're going to want to spend 4-6 points on this style of damage node.
Strafe
is a nice bonus for interrupting, and is a lot more reasonable than the free
Urteil des Templers
that it cast originally.
I'd really like to see real options for pressing your buttons to meaningfully offheal in the Paladin tree. Currently, most of the options are either passive benefits like
Lichtgeschmiedeter Segen
or
Goldener Pfad
or
Richturteil des Lichts
that won't help much if your group is taking heavy damage, or effects like
Nachbild
or that would probably be throughput increases for Holy, but aren't very helpful for a Ret trying to offheal in a pinch. Compared to options in other hybrid class trees like
Führung der Ahnen
or
Vampirumarmung
or
Wache der Natur
, there's nothing even close to comparably strong for Paladin.
Gleißendes Strahlen
is a lot worse now that
Weihe
is on a longer cooldown, we don't get free procs as often, and we're less inclined to press it anyway.
A lot of the talents are effectively useless outside of the spec they seem to be primarily designed for - for example,
Lichtgeschmiedeter Segen
procs off
Göttlicher Sturm
when neither of the other Paladin specs actually have access to that ability, and
Glaubensrüstung
is an armor buff when that's a completely irrelevant effect for either Holy or Retribution.
You can still very comfortably take every capstone and lose almost nothing for doing so. Since the entire bottom third of the Paladin tree is essentially throughput, this means that every capstone is now basically a baseline passive damage bonus rather than something you'd ever pick or choose between.
Beschleunigte Anrufung
is realistically never going to be used - taking it would desync
Göttlicher Glockenschlag
from your other 60s/2min cooldowns, and losing
Göttliche Resonanz
is way too high of a price anyway.
Similar to the choice between
Letztes Urteil
and
Rache des Rechtsprechers
,
Siegel der Ordnung
and
Schwindendes Licht
are very similar abilities, except one gives you a stronger throughput bonus while the other simply provides an absorb shield. It'd be a lot more interesting if the choice was more like between a flat damage reduction or an absorb or something similar instead of one being strictly better for throughput.
Is it a Good Rework?
My answer so far is a resounding
yes
. The specifics of
Aura der Vergeltung
aside, almost every other aspect of the spec has seen massive improvements, both in terms of how they'll affect the spec's viability and also just how fun it is to play. Almost every issue that the spec suffered from has been addressed or will be addressed soon, and you actually have real choices to make in the Ret tree instead of playing the exact same build minus one or two talents in every situation. I'm extremely happy with what we've been shown so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing more development and tuning over the next few weeks.
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