Although Retribution hasn't had a full rework like many other specs, it has had a significant number of changes to its talents and other core mechanics. This article will cover the most important of those changes and the impact that they'll have on Ret's playstyle and viability in The War Within.
Secondary Stat Improvements
Retribution has had issues with secondary stat synergies since early Dragonflight. Mastery had been nerfed significantly and Crit had reduced value due to some abilities like
always critically hitting, which led to Versatility being the default "best stat" simply due to the relatively poor value of the others. For The War Within, talents that guaranteed a critical hit have been changed to provide regular damage buffs instead, some extra talents that have extra bonuses when you crit have been added, and Mastery has had a makeover too -
has had its Holy damage buff increased significantly, and now also has a single target proc element. Mastery has historically been a stat that was a lot better for AoE than single target since a much larger percent of your damage on AoE tends to be Holy, so adding an extra bonus effect that will have more value in single target situations makes a lot of sense here.
Overall, these stat changes are definitely a step in the right direction to improving the value of non-Versatility secondary stats for Ret. However, one talent that still has issues with secondary stats is
, which still has a static 1 second GCD that isn't reduced by Haste. This makes it much stronger early on in an expansion where Haste values are low and it has a lower GCD than other abilities, but much worse in later tiers when its GCD becomes much longer.
Removal of
Probably the most important change for Retribution in a raiding environment is the removal of
. Bringing multiple raid buffs across different players of a single class isn't unique to Paladin, for example Rogue's
and
, but Paladin was the only class where the buffs were strong enough that it was perceived as optimal among the community at large to always run two, for
and
. It makes sense to remove one Aura when it's the only class that has two "mandatory" buffs in order to reduce the restrictions this puts on raid compositions, and this article won't argue to reinstate it. However, the relative strength of Paladin specs is unlike any other class, and this decision has dire ramifications for Retribution's value in raids beyond simply equalizing buffs among classes.
Although it wasn't officially stated at the time, it seems exceedingly likely that the main reason that Paladin had a second Aura added as a raid buff to begin with was due to the ubiquity of Holy Paladin in raid comps. Holy has essentially been a locked slot in any optimal raid comp since the dawn of time. With extremely few exceptions, and none in the last 5 years, high level raid progression comps always include it. There is no other single spec in the game that has had a raid spot as locked down as Holy does. For every other class, the optimal spec to use for a buff changes constantly from tier to tier, but when Paladin has a single raid buff, it's already a given that Holy will bring it. With a second raid buff added, it then became an interesting decision whether it was brought by a second Holy Paladin or a Ret or Prot instead. The second Aura was what gave Ret and Prot a chance to be included in raid comps without needing to be overtuned. Without it, and without any changes to reduce the gap between the value each Paladin spec brings to a raid, we're back to the exact same position as before where a group has no incentive to bring a Ret. Class buffs are intended to incentivize groups to bring a diverse set of classes instead of just the flavor of the month, but leaving Paladin in a situation where two of its specs won't ever be brought for that reason just reduces spec diversity instead - in a raid comp where you previously could use a Ret for
, you'll now just run an extra Mage or Warlock instead.
When it comes to other Paladin utility, Ret is also outclassed. Holy and Prot both have utility unique to their spec that has significant value in many raid encounters, for example
was pivotal on Fyrakk to reduce the cooldown of
to grip together adds during Phase 2, and
was essentially worth an entire battle res on Sarkareth when sacrificing a player to
in Phase 3. Ret is unable to use either of these, and it has no unique utility that can't be brought by one of the other Paladin specs. As it is, when it comes to bringing utility, there's great reasons to bring a Holy or Prot Paladin rather than a Ret and no reason for the reverse. The explanation for removing
stated that they "believe that the utility options additional Paladins are able to bring is sufficiently valuable", but it's difficult to see how this is true for Ret utility -
,
, and
are great utility abilities to have but none of them are valuable enough in a raid environment to justify a spot alone, the niches a second Paladin's
or
are useful for are just not impactful enough and too infrequent. Without getting lucky with tuning, Ret's position in any competitive raid comp is looking extremely dire.
AoE Talent Changes
One of the consistent problems for Ret has been the inability to take talents for AoE without losing a substantial amount of single target damage and vice versa. There's been a few different approaches and iterations over the course of the TWW beta to attempt to address this so far, with the initial positive changes including reducing the impact of the
/
node to improve the relative strength of AoE builds on single target, moving the 5% Holystrike damage bonus from
to
to reduce the reliance on
for single target damage in Mythic+, and the secondary stat changes that will likely make single target damage less reliant on trinket and other proc effects buffed by Versatility.
Other early changes included the rework of Vanguard of Justice and
into talents that focused on cleave damage by incentivizing
to be used against multiple targets. While interesting conceptually, these mostly just served to make the situation worse by increasing the number of talent points that needed to be taken for AoE that did nothing on single target. Fortunately, since then there's been excellent further changes to remove Vanguard of Justice and reduce
to a single point talent, which drastically lowers the number of talent points that an AoE build would use that a single target build wouldn't. A new talent,
, was also introduced that helps fill a gap as a talent that is predominantly good on AoE while still providing a little value on single target, a niche that hadn't really existed prior. One thing worth noting is that
is now a choice node with
, which is a bit of a shame since
was a really nice talent to swap to for AoE, but is likely now just completely outclassed.
At the moment, the changes made should result in a talent tree that is much more accommodating for hybrid builds, with most single target builds able to easily swap a couple of points into AoE talents. In Dragonflight, individual AoE talents had a very small impact, to the point where on many raid fights that included adds you could do AoE damage to, you didn't bother using them as you didn't actually do any more overall damage by running AoE talents to cleave them compared to just running a full single target build and tunneling the boss. The situation in TWW is unlikely to be quite as bad, as the single target talent points you'd drop are less important now than they used to be, but some buffs to marginal AoE talents like
or
would definitely help to make them be worth using. Besides that, Ret still has a larger number of talents that are exclusively useful in only single target or only AoE that could be somewhat hybridized, like
or
or the entire far left and far right sides of the bottom of the tree. There's a lot of potential design space here for something more interesting than just "Holystrike for single target and Radiant for AoE", especially with the Hero trees seeming to lean in similar directions.
Removal of Quality of Life Bonuses
A lot of the nice quality of life bonuses that were added during Dragonflight have been removed in The War Within.
has been removed along with all the other range increasing talents, even though all of our other abilities still have a 20+ yard range.
has been effectively removed since it's been moved to be a choice node with
, and
has been nerfed. While Ret was certainly a very strong spec defensively, making those nerfs a bit more reasonable, the range reduction nerf makes little sense. All of our other abilities already had a much longer range and still do, and the reasoning provided for the talent being added to begin with was to compensate for the lack of mobility options Ret has relative to other melee DPS. Our mobility certainly hasn't improved beyond some basic passive bonuses in the Hero trees, so removing the compensatory range talent without any other alternative form of compensation feels pretty bad. A common theme among many of the changes we've seen in TWW for Ret is the removal or nerfing of abilities that were strong, but not really genuinely overpowered to the point where action that drastic was necessary, and instead seem to have been done in service of overarching class design goals.
was certainly powerful, and removing it might align with the wider melee range goals for class design, but for Ret it just makes the spec less fun to play for little discernable gain.
Unintuitive Interactions
A number of new talents and effects have unintuitive or anti-synergistic interactions that I would love to see addressed before launch.
is a new talent that removes
as an active ability and instead ties it to
, but it has unintuitive interactions with a number of other effects. Taking
along with
does not affect the duration of the procs at all, making it a genuinely wasted full point, which is certainly going to be a trap many unaware players will fall into. There's also some awkward timing concerns with
, since its duration is 12s with
, but both
and the new tier set bonus last 8 seconds. You could delay casting
until 4 seconds into
, but this would feel absolutely terrible to play with, especially considering you want to cast
early to proc the Hero tree effects, and that
procs from spenders extend the duration of any existing
buff, but the proc from casting
does not.
Final Notes
Overall, the changes we've seen so far seem to be split into two types:
- Changes focused on Ret's issues specifically, such as the secondary stat or AoE changes, that may not always be a perfect approach but overall tend to improve Ret's gameplay and viability across a range of content
- Changes made due to decisions about overall class design, like the removal of or , that directly make Ret less enjoyable to play or limit its viability without any kind of compensation
While sometimes these changes need to be made in order for fair class representation or mechanical balance, making them without considering the implications they have on Ret's viability is extremely shortsighted. These are core mechanics that Ret has relied on for the past year in order to contribute meaningfully to a raid beyond just "do damage and don't die". The other positive changes mentioned should definitely make it a more enjoyable spec to play, and Ret has enjoyed some recent periods in Dragonflight of strong performance in raids, but as it is it'll need a lot more of the same favorable tuning or you should expect a noticeable drop in popularity.