Monday, July 28, 2008

WotLK Beta - Retribution

I feel sorry for Retribution paladins. Every beta, Blizzard overpowers Retribution, and ends up scaling it back for live, thus disappointing all the paladins who are watching eagerly.

WotLK appears to be continuing that trend. Retribution is sick right now. I'm testing on Quel'Danas, and level 70 mobs die instantly. Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, dead mob. I'm not even in that amazing gear. I'm in T4 with a Gorehowl. I'd hate to see what the T6/Sunwell people are capable of.

So far, Ret is extremely good for soloing. Judgements of the Wise returns a fair bit of mana to the paladin. Basically, right now there is close to zero downtime with Retribution.

The biggest Retribution news out of beta are the massive 15K - 20K Judgement of Command crits Retribution is capable of. This is not an exaggeration. My best crit so far was 12.5K, and that was without trying. In better gear, pop Avenging Wrath and trinkets, and I can easily see coming close to 20K.

What's really weird about these crits is that they are somewhat controllable. The Art of War is procced off a Crusader Strike. So you wait for Art of War to proc, then stun and Judge Seal of Command. And since Fanaticism gives you +25% crit chance, that puts the chance for Command to crit at over 50%. Between the Art of War proc and Fanaticism, this burst is oddly reliable.

All in all, I think Retribution is headed for a nerf. And there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Paladin forums.

12 comments:

  1. Oh, almost certainly, which is really annoying.

    I'd love for Ret to not have the mandatory lol in front of it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's funny, cause I've been playing with the Death Knight and I was thinking that it was grossly overpowered compared to my live characters (notably my similar-leveled DPS warrior). Did they launch the beta with high numbers across the board, planning to nerf stuff down to size later? Or is everyone really going to be that much better at killing? I guess we'll know in a few months....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nerfing 20k judgements is reasonable. I wouldn't complain. I only hope that they don't nerf much else. Last time we got such a big buff the devs didn't look down the road to see that it would end up balancing out with the addition of resilience and extreme weakness against healers. Maybe now they will see that and not repeat their mistake.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If MMO-Champion is correct then there was a nerf but not that bad. Art of War doesn't cause Judgements to do double damage anymore but I actually like the new talent quite a lot.

    I have been Ret since early 1.0 and have been on the roller-coaster you mentioned. My feeling is different this time. I didn't roll a paladin and spec ret to be the king of damage. I would have rolled a pure DPS class if that were the case. I rolled a paladin because I like the idea of a hybrid.

    The problems with hybrids has been that they either have to spec into a role at the cost of gimping the others or be overpowered at everything (::cough:: druids ::cough::)

    I think that some of the changes Blizzard is making in Wrath are finally making hybrids viable. Things like the combining of Crit/Spell Crit, Spl Dmg/Healing and so forth enables hybrids to shine.

    For Ret in particular, in my current PVE gear I have 34% crit and 2300 AP. This is gonna translate into a 34% heal crit rate and about 700-800 SP (which from what i have read is going to be comparable to haveing about 1400 +heals in the live game.

    Couple that with my crits triggering an HoT and suddenly it is worth my mana to throw out a heal.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Art of War got removed and Righteous Vengeance was nerfed to the floor, but ret is still looking strong. As this is beta I'm sure things will continue to change and I see no reason for people to jump on the QQboat because something was toned down in one build.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yup, false hope, QQ and such.

    My only hope for the beta is that the devs find *balance*. If rets land on the shores of Northrend overpowered, I'll be just as unhappy as if they gimp off the boats.

    Why?

    Because if they land overpowered, you KNOW the nerf bat will be a-swingin' soon.

    It's amazing how difficult it is to balance paladins historically...

    ReplyDelete
  7. If they would give Ret's a proper chance I would love to go back to mine.

    But when wotlk goes live i bet it will be the same dead class!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Don't know if I'm just behind the curve or what, but I just looked at the latest changes to the talents for WotLK on Blizzard's site that were updated this afternoon at 12:30ish PST.

    It looks like Art of War was changed to not do double damage, and then changed back again to have the double damage chance again with this latest modification to talents.

    Like I said, I'm not sure if I'm just falling behind or what. Just thought you'd find it interesting.

    -Dy, Turalyon, Alliance.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Yeah I just checked the WotLK talent calculator and the 'old' Art of War is there. Not sure if they changed it back...

    ReplyDelete
  10. Coriel, Im eager to know, what actual dps were you outputting whilst AoW was in it's original form, and what are you outputting now in that same gear? Are you running Recount or anything? I'm just hoping we are gonna be more than the 66% damage output coefficient we currently are at compared to dps classes such as rogues, hunter, warlock, mage. Rather hoping we are 80%+ come Wrath.
    cheers

    ReplyDelete
  11. I don't have recount or anything running yet. I really should find a damage meter that works in WotLK.

    Regardless, the original Art of War didn't really add a great deal of sustained DPS. I estimated it at 1.5% of your total or so. Both versions were essentially PvP talents.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I think the art of war shouldn't be nerfed so bad because Mages can do relatively the same thing with pom/pyro which is bound to be much more powerful in wotlk and it's already a 6k shot minimum instantly. Imagine in WOTLK with geared out mages they'll be able to hit over 20k. There are videos of mages hitting over 10k currently even.

    Is it so bad that paladins would have something similar?

    ReplyDelete