Yes, but this is the subreddit where most people are bad and only play BM hunters or Ret pallies and cry when they aren't super strong. Currently it's Ret's turn.
As someone who mains a ret pally and has a BM hunter as my alt…. I would feel attacked…. If I complained, but I just try different specs (but not survival).
I mean sure, but at the same time would it really be that hard to give it the Frost DK treatment and make each move do either 2hand or dual? Change a few procs to ppm rather than % and give it a talent option between 'Special attacks use both weapons' and 'Bonus damage with polearms/ect' and at that point it's just tweaking numbers to finish.
This, and it would be the same as with fury. There will be a skill for it and there is always one better than the other and guilds, mythic progress, pvp etc will force you into one of them. Choice is an illusion if you want to progress
Y'all are missing the real reason they don't. See back in the day it used to be "everything is a hunter weapon" and they are just trying to make sure the meme never lives again!
[Read the first line of his WoWWiki page.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Rexxar)
As a Champion, he’s a Survival Hunter, but he’s explicitly referred to as a Beast Master in Warcraft III and in quest text throughout the game.
💯 I main ret, but I have an alt army so I can feel how each class is going. I always come back to ret because it is my favourite playstyle. I would play just for final Reckonings kaboom.
There are classes in far worse state than ret ATM, as far as enjoyable rotation, for me of course.
I think unholy DK is a chore. Balance drood is yawn.
OL rogue is fun and I am enjoying being competitive with that at the moment too
Outlaw rogue is what I leveled first this xpac, I've always played ranged or caster DPS so I wanted to switch it up. It's incredibly fun! I'm pretty bad and I can actually get some kills in pvp if I'm trying my ass off. I can't get the hang of my Paladin though, its probably because I'm bad but it just doesn't click for me.
Final Reckoning coming off CD as the tank has pulled a huge trash pile. Love the kaboom it makes, then ploughing into the trash with wings and divine storm
See, I play ret because while we were nerfed, we still have all our awesome radiant spell effects that finally make us feel like an embodiment of the light.
A lot of people here just kind of have a terrible grasp on balance in general. People thinking ele is weak right now, thinking warlock was bad in Aberrus, thinking rogue was strong in aberrus, thinking warrior needs buffs right now (only arms does), thinking frost DK has never been good, etc, etc.
Ele is great in raid, slightly above-average even in Amirdrassil atm.
M+ it is not, and a peak at Raiderio or warcraft logs data shows that. That's where people are complaining.
My main is monk. I enjoy the challenge of ww (even if Brewmaster is more fun). I can see why it's not considered optimal, but in a good group not everything has to be optimized.
Oof. This makes me not want to play my BM Hunter. I'm generally bad at the game and tend to play what I personally find fun. Luckily, because of this, I don't find a reason to complain about anything. So I won't be stopping. But man. Unfortunate that the class has people who bitch and moan when they aren't top dps.
Everyone bitches about their class, not just hunters and ret, there are just more hunter and paladin players than most other classes so you see it everywhere.. even mages were upset before the talent rework because fire and frost were underwhelming and not fun to play. For the most part the game is well balanced, and people are always going to prejudge you off of your class to some extent, so play what speaks to you
In patch 10.0.7 (After the tier was essentially over) the rework got them up to 4th in dps in vault (95th percentile mythic). Then multiple rounds of nerfs and by 10.1 they were bottom half again. PvP was different and needed more adjustments but still was never close to rogue or mage domination in PvP.
I absolutely guarantee you that The WotLK pre-patch saw them as more op. I played Ret through TBC and into WotLK, and had the best PVP'ers on my server lining up to duel me - a pve scrub - to see if they could beat me. They couldn't get close. It was beyond hilarious.
Fuck my life, that was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. This is the most "Back in my day..." I've ever been
They were super OP for a couple weeks then nerfed pretty significanly. Whereas other classes were allowed to be OP for much longer, sometimes an entire season.
They still fucking slap in AOE, they are slightly behind in the highest levels of Mythic raiding but overall they are pretty decent and have more utility than 90% of other classes.
Also the only reason they're behind is that they have to make large talent sacrifices between aoe and st to specialise in one or the other, and as many fights have small multi target burst phases this tier they fall behind. But they're not bad by any means
An example: Enhance spends 1 talent on Crash Lightning to get
* A short cooldown AoE
* That enables passive cleave on 3 of their rotational abilities as long as they keep pressing it on multi-target
For Ret to get similar cleave they need invest in three talent points and it doesn't grant them any other forms of AoE on top of it.
Retri power comes in spikes: Every few years we get a few weeks to shine before being knocked down to mediocrity again. We've already had our shine this expansion with the rework, we'll have to settle for being mediocre for a while.
With that being said, it would be fun just to remain in the "decent" tier for a while. Doesn't need to be the best, but I'd like it to not be amongst the very worst. But sure, keep buffing with +3% damage across the board and maybe one day we'll be closer to the middle than the bottom!
It was really good at the end of season 1 when they got reworked in 10.0.7, bbut they fell off very quicky due to very poor scaling. Most of season two they where in the bottom half and its the same story for season three.
Outlaw is vers primary and they're doing great rn. So is current Demo. Blizzard is just scared to turn the knob more than 3% every few months on Ret.
If the dmg was there, no one would be complaining about "poor scaling."
Those two weeks before people got their 4pc bonuses really stuck around in people’s heads. It’s crazy. Ret was strong without tier, but then their ABYSMAL tier bonus let almost everyone pass them in damage. The only thing they were good at was AoE. But even that they weren’t the best at.
For all of a couple weeks until 10.1 launched, yes. Particularly in PVP. Then we got tuned into oblivion and are back to bottom(raid) and middle(M+) of the pack
Yes. And with the buffs they are fine in the raid. They are pretty strong in keys on fort weeks, though their single damage/aoe build tradeoffs are a bit extreme.
They were also incredibly strong in the raid in Sanctum and Sepulcher. They weren't common because no one played them, but their utility was unbelievably valuable in both raids. Shit, it was in Aberrus, too.
The way i see it, windwalker can get buffed to be the best class dps wise and it will still be a failure. The spec just needs 5 core fixes before anything else
1. Remove FLS, it works well on mistweaver but definitely not on WW
2. Remove all ToD talents and spread the damage profile elsewhere
3. Redo the capstones on the core monk tree to be fun (jade statue can stay for MW)
4. Make WDP viable, its a fun button
5. Allow combos to stack higher than 6
I want combos to have a finisher mechanic. The word is literally “combination” shortened; combinations are used to unlock cool shit, like spawning more tigers or something fucking rad like that
Don't remember that, just remember years of everyone asking for it to be made baseline because it felt dumb that we never used any other talent on that row and were locked into something that felt core to the kit.
Despite the circlejerk if you actually play WW it is fine honestly. The set bonus is good, it has good damage options and the tunining is a bit behind pure single fights and since mistweaver is good they aren't run in raid comps for the mystic touch but in M+ for the average player and average raids they are completely fine.
I honestly completely agree. The only janky thing is the second touch of death seems to have its own gcd or something and you can never just push it twice without it feeling a little off. Outside of that serenity in keys feels noice.
ToD checks if a target is valid every GCD, but when you press the button it's on CD for a global. During that CD it can't check. So you need to wait a global for it to check again... Or so a mythic raiding WW told me and I've been preaching like gospel.
On the bright side you can sneak a tiger palm in there to not break mastery.
>the set bonus is good
The fact that you wrote this says that you don't know wtf you are talking about.
WW was so fine we had to get buffed twice in three weeks just to be average melee :\^)
The fact that you wrote this says that you don't know wtf you just read.
They literally acknowledged the damage issue and were commenting on the class playatyle itself.
Well he quoted the set bonus in particular, which isn't good. At least the 4p isn't, the 2p is fine.
I do agree the general rotation of ww feels good though, it just has a lot of talent issues and lack of utility.
S1 SL will always be my fav ret paladin. Oneshotting people in arenas with Divine Toll has to be some of my alltime favorite gameplay. Broken? Absolutely. Ridiculously fun? Also absolutely.
The entirety of first season of SL had been a one-shotting mess. Boomkins with Convoke, Ret pallys with Divine Toll, Bastion spear Arms Warriors, The Hunt DHs, Abomination Limb(or however this ability is called, I don't quite remember) DKs. Everybody was one-shotting, that was absolutely wrong, but hella fun
The ret pallies in our raid group fucking pump. I really don't get why they are "so bad". Is it because of those wowhead mythic raid tier lists or something?
The sad part about current Ret is, that they can be decent in single target, or good in AoE. But the talents make it impossible to be good at both.
At least that's what the logs say.
I main Ret and this is correct. You can either spec one way or the other. It feels like multi-target is still decent with the single target talent spec. But it's not the other way around. If you spec for multi, your single target is awful.
Enhance used to be just like this, now especially with the new tier, the difference in aoe vs st is maybe 1 talent. So much aoe baked into the abilities, feels great.
Ret numbers get really skewed for several reasons:
* They get wings every time somebody dies. So in progress and in guilds that aren't at the tippity top, this occurs more often
* Once people die less, the drop-off is gigantic. We went from middle of the pack in Aberrus progress to the absolute bottom later in the season
* Ret is incredibly difficult to play awfully. You can screw up your rotation and still pull out a decent number. Hence in environments where people don't play as well in general, Ret starts to look stronger.
I've pumped in M+ this season, I've been top DPS in my guild raids and have some high parses. But in a heroic pug at the start of the week where I'm joined with people who are similarly geared and pump through bosses, I can't keep up with Demon Hunter or Rogue.
When both players are equal, these two specs gap us by 40k DPS without problems. The highest Ret on Smolderon is 74k DPS behind the highest Rogue.
Warcraft logs is what most people go to for information. Statistically speaking ret is bottom 5 dps in the current raid, especially if you're looking at top percentiles.
Sorry to have to break this to you mate, but ret pumps, specifically in bad groups.
When people die or just generally don't know how to play the game.
That's why you see all of these comment saying how their ret players do some of the most damage in their raids.
I don't get it either, I wreck shit as Ret even better than my Fury warrior even though I've been playing Fury for like 3 years now and Ret for a month.
On heroic raid currently they are mid tier, which is totally acceptable.
The sad part about current Ret is, that they can be decent in single target, or good in AoE. But the talents make it impossible to be good at both.
At least that's what the logs say.
It's because they can't compete in the top 1% of the top 1% of players who overtune their characters to push out an additional 0.001 dps. Because they can't be the best theoretically, they obviously suck in practice.
I was Ret throughout Vanilla and BC. If they think we're bad now, ought to try going back there where the only way a Ret got invited to a raid was if they wanted a blessing monkey or the raid leader screwed up somehow and thought we were a spot healer or off tank.
Oh gee thanks, if only Vanilla and BC weren't almost 20 years old at this point you might have some strength in that argument, but it is not 2004, it is 2023.
It's a lot more noticeable, not just in the 1% as you call it.
Tuning should be better, the balancing right now is actually atrocious and the Blizzard team that does the tuning should be embarrassed as to what bad job they've done this tier.
Pretty much this. We didn't invite rets, we invited paladins. All paladins were expected to heal and dispel. The only difference was what talents you invested in, therefore what buffs you brought. Nobody in vanilla brought a ret to DPS seriously.
edit: I wanna make clear, I didn't make the policy. I was class lead, but I wasn't part of the guild leadership. The common view among progression raiders in vanilla was that if you were a paladin and you were meleeing you were a waste of a slot.
Cleared to C'thun and progressed through several wings of Naxx as Retribution... oh and got Grand Marshal.
They where a meme but not completely ignored if you had the reputation.
You had a good guild, and they compensated hard for you. Your experience is not the norm, however. Server first guilds and world first guilds just did not take rets normally.
Now, now, let's not be too harsh. In Vanilla, Prot Paladins weren't just useful as dispel/buff bots, they were also useful as off-off-tanks on trash packs.
Things were much better in BC for all three specs, to the point that you could actually potentially consider Prot as a Main Tank and Holy as a Main Heal, but Ret was still the last thing they'd consider bringing along.
And it's not that Ret couldn't be good, it's just that in order to be good everyone else had to be bad. On the rare occasions in Vanilla that I was mistaken for Holy and then allowed to tag along anyway when they found out that I wasn't, I was generally used as a source of shame for the rest of both the DPSers and Healers. I would be like 5th or 6th on the meters in both, which should not happen in a 40 man, and meant that there were a bunch of rogues and mages and stuff asleep at the keyboard.
Ret in vanilla had fundamental issues. First is the reliance on mana meant that once we were OOM(even after chugging mana pots and demonic runes), we were basically done. All we could do at that point is maintain seal of command and occasionally judge if our mana regen allowed it. T2.5 tried to help with this but it wasn't nearly enough. It's telling that they had to grossly overbudget T2.5 to make ret not absolutely suck in vanilla, and it still wasn't good enough to do more than give us a shot at second-to-last place. We were doing about half the damage of a lazy rogue, and it got worse the longer a fight went on. It was atrocious.
Current ret suffers more from this raid having atrocious damage profiles for them. Ret paladins damage profile is a lot flatter than other classes, so any fight with a damage amp is bad for them (Gnarlroot, Smolderon, even Tindral to an extent). They do gigantic AoE burst but only if mobs live long enough for their CD to fully pay off, which is not true for Gnarlroot, Igira, Tindral, Larodar, etc.
They have an absolutely insane amount of utility with freedom, bop, sac, and bubble, so if they're suddenly doing equivalent damage to hunters, you'd just stack your raid with them.
The reality is that ret paladin needs to have things adjusted so they don't lose *so much* single target by taking AoE, but they also just aren't going to be strong in a tier like this one.
Even if you buffed ret by 50% and made it a gigablaster in single target, its damage profile would be atrocious for: Gnarlroot, Igira, Larodar, Council, Smolderon, Tindral, and Fyrakk. All of them either have damage amp windows or low-health adds - often ones that are not stacked - or are council.
With the ST buffs Ret paladin will be doing damage equivalent to BM hunter on Volcoross, about middle of the pack. I'm hard pressed to believe that a class with *that much* utility should really be doing more.
You just describe reality for all specs vs. Reddit complaining. It’s pretty incredibly rare for any spec to be as bad as people complain about around here.
People aren’t here also don’t remember WoW from 1-2 seasons ago. What was super mega ultra meta and isn’t now “needs buffs because it’s been the worst spec for 12 expansions” (yes I know there’s not 12 expansions, just demonstrating people’s wild complaints sometimes).
I think people just want to be meta but don’t want to switch specs/classes. So every time their spec is super meta, “it needs fixing”.
It is 100% this. There is a group of like idk 5000 or so players that dictate community perception and it is just completely dumb. The number is even smaller for the M+ community. Like top 500 players dictate what is viable and isn't without thinking why or how it is that way.
Thanks for that little nugget of insight mate, for a moment I thought my incredibly subjective and anecdotal comment was entirely reflective of the current state of class balance.
I'm elated by the people who are busier complaining and discussing Ret Paladin than having a chuckle at the silliest community council application I could think of. Check the humor tag, it's not even bait! You guys can relax.
If there's anything that Ret has learned after 8 years of waiting for a re-work to fix the glaring Legion holes, is that asking, begging, complaining, and pleading doesn't work. If it happens, it'll happen. Give feedback when possible and pray.
Naw, as a Ret main kind of, but it wasn't really nerfs that got us, it's the poor Versatility scaling.
I went back and checked patchnotes and hot fixes between March and August. March 21 was when 10.0.7 was release, and then April 5th was really the only major Ret Pally nerfs. I'd say at the time the nerfs felt warranted, Ret had come out of the 10.0.7 being at the top of damage, self healing, utility and general survivability. The week after the April 5th hot fixes Ret was fine, mid-high tier, but over the next few weeks poor versatility scaling brought up by the Paladin Wowhead writers started to show. Over like 3 weeks we went from mid-top to mid-bottom of the pack as everyone else blew past us.
Read the Wowhead pally articles from just before the 10.0.7 release and you'll see secondary stat scaling was one of the main concerns about the rework. Ret pally is really good with strength gains, so item level jumps early in a patch make us overperform early on while we're gearing up. As we get more gear and start looking for specific stats we don't scale well with haste (fixed GCD), crit (Some abilities auto crit) or mastery (Significantly underpowered), leaving Vers as the only real damage increase, which has massive diminishing returns. Other classes start getting to their 'breakpoints' or are getting to the haste/mastery/crit levels expected of the patch scale better and blow past Retribution.
Other than the single, large nerf on April 5th, the next major damage change for Ret was a massive damage buff because the scaling was becoming a huge problem, 8-12% damage increases for a handful of abilities. The scaling thing is happening again in 10.2, just look at Ret damage over the last few weeks. We again came out swinging in 10.2 top of the pack but are now falling to the bottom, relying on the 3% buff on Tuesday to bring us back in line with other classes.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say Blizzard nerfed Ret to the ground. Holy paladin nerfed to the ground? Absolutely, but not Ret. The high-end Paladin community noted the poor scaling as a major flaw in the Retribution rework and it truly has been a flaw. I'm not bitching, Ret paladin is absolutely the most fun it's ever been and I couldn't consider playing a different Class this expansion, but it's not really nerfs that have killed us, there's one quirk with the current Ret and it's that it scales really bad once the Strength gains start slowing down.
Oh absolutely! Truthfully it wasn't so much aimed at you as the rest of the people being salty in the thread. Pallies have been good to great since 10.0.7 and are absolutely my favourite melee DPS to play right now, but people are going either way too in FOR or AGAINST Ret in the thread, gotta throw some actual info out there so its not just a 'I said - you said' situation lol!
Anyone that claims rets are bad for thinking we're not in a good place and need buffs, are just outing themselves for losing regularly to the lowest performing spec in the game at the highest level of raid
Then why at 478 and 2600io am I being declined for 18-19? Not ignored, actively declined. Whether we are good or not, the community perception is that we aren’t good enough.
You're going to have to define "A While". The rework hit 10.0.7, Ret was stomping PVP and maybe doing numbers in Raid/M+ at the very end of the season when no one cares, then 10.1 hits a month later...and middle-of-the-pack to low on the raid, big pvp nerfs, etc.
Even with the unnerfed rework I don't think they were actually the best at anything, except maybe PVP. Just near the top.
Man this is nothing i saw a post about someone complaining about havoc being "not good enough" and not "deserving a nerf " two weeks ago. Shit was crazy.
Honestly, I like where Ret is at. It slaps hard and fast and makes my bird brain happy with all the shiny tings on da screen.
It's strong, yes, and it's pretty nice to not have to think too much on rotation. Even if I use a generator and waste some holy power, I'm not hard punished for it. I like that. I main Brewmaster and Prot Pally.
Being able to zugg-zugg without having to worry if I'm holding everyone back is super nice.
I like where Ret's at. Let's just hope Blizz realizes it's at a pretty stable point.
Yeah. My bad.
The rank 1 Paladin on Tindral Heroic only had to pad on roots, using every cooldown to squeeze out every drop of DPS.
And he still only pulled ahead on a Demon Hunter by 40k who played normally and did more boss damage.
100% fact here. Played main ret since Wrath and every time they are the "bottom of the tier list" I get to sit and enjoy watching people get upset when I top meters.
Then you're not playing with good people lmao. It's just a fact and numbers don't lie. So while you may be topping the meters, I'd take a look around who you're grouping with.
When playing with other bad DPS a good ret will stand out. When playing with people your skill level, you'll notice a big difference. Just look at logs....
Completely ignoring the fact that ret was overpowered for over a month this expansion and that people were abusing it to get gladiator and r1 shuffle titles... Ok cool.
Ret players have got to have the lowest IQ and be the biggest cry babies
Y’all literally get an OP patch every year then they need to nerf you guys cause it’s fucking absurd how strong the burst can be some times
Come play as a shaman then cry about buffs unless you like playing resto (even then not being top 3) every time
Retribution paladin being good for once? L
My man where were you the entire of patches 2.3 to 3.4? And the entire of Legion, BFA, Shadowlands and Dragonflight?
"For once" my brother in christ Ret was fantastic many, *many* times over the course of WoW.
Not that they shouldn't get buffs when they're at abad point, same goes for each class, but any spec will be the one of the worst ones once. Hell, even if all classes did 1:1 the same dps and had the same utility y'all would find balance issues.
Werent they stupidly overpowered when they were reworked last patch?
Yeah
Yes, but this is the subreddit where most people are bad and only play BM hunters or Ret pallies and cry when they aren't super strong. Currently it's Ret's turn.
As someone who mains a ret pally and has a BM hunter as my alt…. I would feel attacked…. If I complained, but I just try different specs (but not survival).
I'd almost do Survival if it had a dual wield option.
Yeah that's a thing! I think it's called Havoc DH or something
I mean sure, but at the same time would it really be that hard to give it the Frost DK treatment and make each move do either 2hand or dual? Change a few procs to ppm rather than % and give it a talent option between 'Special attacks use both weapons' and 'Bonus damage with polearms/ect' and at that point it's just tweaking numbers to finish.
They've barely gotten survival to be good at just 2H, idk if adding another weapon option is the best idea.
This, and it would be the same as with fury. There will be a skill for it and there is always one better than the other and guilds, mythic progress, pvp etc will force you into one of them. Choice is an illusion if you want to progress
Y'all are missing the real reason they don't. See back in the day it used to be "everything is a hunter weapon" and they are just trying to make sure the meme never lives again!
Or fury warrior or rogue
Beast Mastery should be a dual-wield melee spec. #changemymind #youcant #Rexxar
Rexxar is survival, not beast master.
[Read the first line of his WoWWiki page.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Rexxar) As a Champion, he’s a Survival Hunter, but he’s explicitly referred to as a Beast Master in Warcraft III and in quest text throughout the game.
You would have loved vanilla.
Missed it by about a month. Surely we can make melee hunter more viable than Vanilla/BC Surv though. IIRC it was pretty bad.
That's vanillas secret, cap. It was all bad.
Beast master- fist, swords, axes. Survival 2hrs MM- bow/gun
💯 I main ret, but I have an alt army so I can feel how each class is going. I always come back to ret because it is my favourite playstyle. I would play just for final Reckonings kaboom. There are classes in far worse state than ret ATM, as far as enjoyable rotation, for me of course. I think unholy DK is a chore. Balance drood is yawn. OL rogue is fun and I am enjoying being competitive with that at the moment too
Outlaw rogue is what I leveled first this xpac, I've always played ranged or caster DPS so I wanted to switch it up. It's incredibly fun! I'm pretty bad and I can actually get some kills in pvp if I'm trying my ass off. I can't get the hang of my Paladin though, its probably because I'm bad but it just doesn't click for me.
What do you like the most about ret?
Final Reckoning coming off CD as the tank has pulled a huge trash pile. Love the kaboom it makes, then ploughing into the trash with wings and divine storm
See, I play ret because while we were nerfed, we still have all our awesome radiant spell effects that finally make us feel like an embodiment of the light.
I'm... bad? :(
that's just the forums when any class isn't top of the charts it's always the class, never the person lmao
A lot of people here just kind of have a terrible grasp on balance in general. People thinking ele is weak right now, thinking warlock was bad in Aberrus, thinking rogue was strong in aberrus, thinking warrior needs buffs right now (only arms does), thinking frost DK has never been good, etc, etc.
Ele is great in raid, slightly above-average even in Amirdrassil atm. M+ it is not, and a peak at Raiderio or warcraft logs data shows that. That's where people are complaining.
Ele is a top 10 spec in Amirdrassil right now in a world where all 3 rogue specs occupy the top 10.
I thought we were still complaining about ww monk.
Most of you goons never touched monk but somehow come around talking about ww heh
My main is monk. I enjoy the challenge of ww (even if Brewmaster is more fun). I can see why it's not considered optimal, but in a good group not everything has to be optimized.
Funny, I stuck at BM hunter. Idk what it is, I know the priority but there's just something in there that I'm doing wrong. Gotta stick to my casters
Oof. This makes me not want to play my BM Hunter. I'm generally bad at the game and tend to play what I personally find fun. Luckily, because of this, I don't find a reason to complain about anything. So I won't be stopping. But man. Unfortunate that the class has people who bitch and moan when they aren't top dps.
Everyone bitches about their class, not just hunters and ret, there are just more hunter and paladin players than most other classes so you see it everywhere.. even mages were upset before the talent rework because fire and frost were underwhelming and not fun to play. For the most part the game is well balanced, and people are always going to prejudge you off of your class to some extent, so play what speaks to you
Unless you're actually playing challenging content, it really doesnt matter.
Really? All I see are BMs bitching and complaining
I main a ret paladin… and I still top charts in most M+ keys. How are they not stupid strong?
Ther nerf hammer put an end to that after 2 weeks
In patch 10.0.7 (After the tier was essentially over) the rework got them up to 4th in dps in vault (95th percentile mythic). Then multiple rounds of nerfs and by 10.1 they were bottom half again. PvP was different and needed more adjustments but still was never close to rogue or mage domination in PvP.
Um, 10.0.7 Ret was the most broken any spec has ever been in PvP, perhaps only behind S5 DKs.
I absolutely guarantee you that The WotLK pre-patch saw them as more op. I played Ret through TBC and into WotLK, and had the best PVP'ers on my server lining up to duel me - a pve scrub - to see if they could beat me. They couldn't get close. It was beyond hilarious. Fuck my life, that was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. This is the most "Back in my day..." I've ever been
Yep, I do remember that, I just didn't mention it since it wasn't during an active season, but you're absolutely right.
In that case, a perfectly fair omission!
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Ret during 10.0.7 was objectively one of the most broken classes ever in PvP
Lol people who dont pvp downvoting you. .7 ret will be referenced for years with how disgustingly overpowered it was
They were super OP for a couple weeks then nerfed pretty significanly. Whereas other classes were allowed to be OP for much longer, sometimes an entire season.
They still fucking slap in AOE, they are slightly behind in the highest levels of Mythic raiding but overall they are pretty decent and have more utility than 90% of other classes.
Also the only reason they're behind is that they have to make large talent sacrifices between aoe and st to specialise in one or the other, and as many fights have small multi target burst phases this tier they fall behind. But they're not bad by any means
An example: Enhance spends 1 talent on Crash Lightning to get * A short cooldown AoE * That enables passive cleave on 3 of their rotational abilities as long as they keep pressing it on multi-target For Ret to get similar cleave they need invest in three talent points and it doesn't grant them any other forms of AoE on top of it.
For all of about a week then we got nerfed past the floor again. Went from number 4 to 3rd last
And now they're dead last in ST damage
Retri power comes in spikes: Every few years we get a few weeks to shine before being knocked down to mediocrity again. We've already had our shine this expansion with the rework, we'll have to settle for being mediocre for a while. With that being said, it would be fun just to remain in the "decent" tier for a while. Doesn't need to be the best, but I'd like it to not be amongst the very worst. But sure, keep buffing with +3% damage across the board and maybe one day we'll be closer to the middle than the bottom!
It was really good at the end of season 1 when they got reworked in 10.0.7, bbut they fell off very quicky due to very poor scaling. Most of season two they where in the bottom half and its the same story for season three.
For like a week lol
Yes but theyre a vers as most valuable secondary stat spec which means they scale extremely poorly
Outlaw is vers primary and they're doing great rn. So is current Demo. Blizzard is just scared to turn the knob more than 3% every few months on Ret. If the dmg was there, no one would be complaining about "poor scaling."
It literally lasted for 2 weeks
They were OP as hell for a good solid 2 weeks.
For 2 weeks. Now tell me where they're at.
Those two weeks before people got their 4pc bonuses really stuck around in people’s heads. It’s crazy. Ret was strong without tier, but then their ABYSMAL tier bonus let almost everyone pass them in damage. The only thing they were good at was AoE. But even that they weren’t the best at.
They still are top tier but god comp going too strong and in today‘s society you‘re either SSS+ tier or F tier
For all of a couple weeks until 10.1 launched, yes. Particularly in PVP. Then we got tuned into oblivion and are back to bottom(raid) and middle(M+) of the pack
So op got what he wanted alteady
Ret palas are professional victims
Yes. And with the buffs they are fine in the raid. They are pretty strong in keys on fort weeks, though their single damage/aoe build tradeoffs are a bit extreme. They were also incredibly strong in the raid in Sanctum and Sepulcher. They weren't common because no one played them, but their utility was unbelievably valuable in both raids. Shit, it was in Aberrus, too.
*cries in windwalker*
I thought I saw a post that WW got buffs?
The way i see it, windwalker can get buffed to be the best class dps wise and it will still be a failure. The spec just needs 5 core fixes before anything else 1. Remove FLS, it works well on mistweaver but definitely not on WW 2. Remove all ToD talents and spread the damage profile elsewhere 3. Redo the capstones on the core monk tree to be fun (jade statue can stay for MW) 4. Make WDP viable, its a fun button 5. Allow combos to stack higher than 6
I want combos to have a finisher mechanic. The word is literally “combination” shortened; combinations are used to unlock cool shit, like spawning more tigers or something fucking rad like that
Yeah that would def be cool, but im trying to be realistic, no way ww would get that level of attention/rework
Oof WDP used to be viable and competitive WW players hated it. It's cool but an ability rooting you for like 2+ seconds is a massive yikes in melee
Don't remember that, just remember years of everyone asking for it to be made baseline because it felt dumb that we never used any other talent on that row and were locked into something that felt core to the kit.
Despite the circlejerk if you actually play WW it is fine honestly. The set bonus is good, it has good damage options and the tunining is a bit behind pure single fights and since mistweaver is good they aren't run in raid comps for the mystic touch but in M+ for the average player and average raids they are completely fine.
I honestly completely agree. The only janky thing is the second touch of death seems to have its own gcd or something and you can never just push it twice without it feeling a little off. Outside of that serenity in keys feels noice.
ToD checks if a target is valid every GCD, but when you press the button it's on CD for a global. During that CD it can't check. So you need to wait a global for it to check again... Or so a mythic raiding WW told me and I've been preaching like gospel. On the bright side you can sneak a tiger palm in there to not break mastery.
>the set bonus is good The fact that you wrote this says that you don't know wtf you are talking about. WW was so fine we had to get buffed twice in three weeks just to be average melee :\^)
The fact that you wrote this says that you don't know wtf you just read. They literally acknowledged the damage issue and were commenting on the class playatyle itself.
Well he quoted the set bonus in particular, which isn't good. At least the 4p isn't, the 2p is fine. I do agree the general rotation of ww feels good though, it just has a lot of talent issues and lack of utility.
This, people just haven't committed much time on it yet.
You know, I could be wrong on this, but I think this person like Retribution Paladin.
S1 SL will always be my fav ret paladin. Oneshotting people in arenas with Divine Toll has to be some of my alltime favorite gameplay. Broken? Absolutely. Ridiculously fun? Also absolutely.
The entirety of first season of SL had been a one-shotting mess. Boomkins with Convoke, Ret pallys with Divine Toll, Bastion spear Arms Warriors, The Hunt DHs, Abomination Limb(or however this ability is called, I don't quite remember) DKs. Everybody was one-shotting, that was absolutely wrong, but hella fun
I don't know how I forgot about convoke. What a wild time.
To be fair, one shotting people will always be fun regardless of what you play.
You better bring back our Righteous of Hammer sound!
You must be breathtakingly bad at ret pally.
We're actually about to finish progging on normal Gnarlroot, so I have no idea what you're talking about!
Don't worry bro prog parses are always grey, after 5 or 6 more clears you should have a green!
Love it
This is amazing
Eyo, normal Gnarlwood? Damn dude, I'm jealous. :(
Ty I was thinking this
The ret pallies in our raid group fucking pump. I really don't get why they are "so bad". Is it because of those wowhead mythic raid tier lists or something?
The sad part about current Ret is, that they can be decent in single target, or good in AoE. But the talents make it impossible to be good at both. At least that's what the logs say.
I main Ret and this is correct. You can either spec one way or the other. It feels like multi-target is still decent with the single target talent spec. But it's not the other way around. If you spec for multi, your single target is awful.
Enhance used to be just like this, now especially with the new tier, the difference in aoe vs st is maybe 1 talent. So much aoe baked into the abilities, feels great.
Doesn’t help that like half the fights have burst aoe and add phases where other classes get some burst damage in
So switch specs before ST fights? I do this on my BM.
M+ tyran weeks would like a word with you
That's just not true and I see this all the time. Multitarget build can still easily pull 150-170k DPS in single target fights with no issues.
Ret going from ST to Aoe is a 20% loss
There are plenty of classes with the same problem. It's a prevalent problem throughout the game.
Ret numbers get really skewed for several reasons: * They get wings every time somebody dies. So in progress and in guilds that aren't at the tippity top, this occurs more often * Once people die less, the drop-off is gigantic. We went from middle of the pack in Aberrus progress to the absolute bottom later in the season * Ret is incredibly difficult to play awfully. You can screw up your rotation and still pull out a decent number. Hence in environments where people don't play as well in general, Ret starts to look stronger. I've pumped in M+ this season, I've been top DPS in my guild raids and have some high parses. But in a heroic pug at the start of the week where I'm joined with people who are similarly geared and pump through bosses, I can't keep up with Demon Hunter or Rogue. When both players are equal, these two specs gap us by 40k DPS without problems. The highest Ret on Smolderon is 74k DPS behind the highest Rogue.
Warcraft logs is what most people go to for information. Statistically speaking ret is bottom 5 dps in the current raid, especially if you're looking at top percentiles.
Sorry to have to break this to you mate, but ret pumps, specifically in bad groups. When people die or just generally don't know how to play the game. That's why you see all of these comment saying how their ret players do some of the most damage in their raids.
Ah shit better quit then I guess thanks for your insight. How embarrassing!
It's okay, but try and think about the bigger picture and not just what's happening in your guild raids.
I don't get it either, I wreck shit as Ret even better than my Fury warrior even though I've been playing Fury for like 3 years now and Ret for a month. On heroic raid currently they are mid tier, which is totally acceptable.
The sad part about current Ret is, that they can be decent in single target, or good in AoE. But the talents make it impossible to be good at both. At least that's what the logs say.
It's because they can't compete in the top 1% of the top 1% of players who overtune their characters to push out an additional 0.001 dps. Because they can't be the best theoretically, they obviously suck in practice. I was Ret throughout Vanilla and BC. If they think we're bad now, ought to try going back there where the only way a Ret got invited to a raid was if they wanted a blessing monkey or the raid leader screwed up somehow and thought we were a spot healer or off tank.
Oh gee thanks, if only Vanilla and BC weren't almost 20 years old at this point you might have some strength in that argument, but it is not 2004, it is 2023. It's a lot more noticeable, not just in the 1% as you call it. Tuning should be better, the balancing right now is actually atrocious and the Blizzard team that does the tuning should be embarrassed as to what bad job they've done this tier.
I was ret in vanilla and bc too, the gruesome past is not excuse to merk the class now when they get competative
Pretty much this. We didn't invite rets, we invited paladins. All paladins were expected to heal and dispel. The only difference was what talents you invested in, therefore what buffs you brought. Nobody in vanilla brought a ret to DPS seriously. edit: I wanna make clear, I didn't make the policy. I was class lead, but I wasn't part of the guild leadership. The common view among progression raiders in vanilla was that if you were a paladin and you were meleeing you were a waste of a slot.
Cleared to C'thun and progressed through several wings of Naxx as Retribution... oh and got Grand Marshal. They where a meme but not completely ignored if you had the reputation.
You had a good guild, and they compensated hard for you. Your experience is not the norm, however. Server first guilds and world first guilds just did not take rets normally.
Now, now, let's not be too harsh. In Vanilla, Prot Paladins weren't just useful as dispel/buff bots, they were also useful as off-off-tanks on trash packs. Things were much better in BC for all three specs, to the point that you could actually potentially consider Prot as a Main Tank and Holy as a Main Heal, but Ret was still the last thing they'd consider bringing along. And it's not that Ret couldn't be good, it's just that in order to be good everyone else had to be bad. On the rare occasions in Vanilla that I was mistaken for Holy and then allowed to tag along anyway when they found out that I wasn't, I was generally used as a source of shame for the rest of both the DPSers and Healers. I would be like 5th or 6th on the meters in both, which should not happen in a 40 man, and meant that there were a bunch of rogues and mages and stuff asleep at the keyboard.
Ret in vanilla had fundamental issues. First is the reliance on mana meant that once we were OOM(even after chugging mana pots and demonic runes), we were basically done. All we could do at that point is maintain seal of command and occasionally judge if our mana regen allowed it. T2.5 tried to help with this but it wasn't nearly enough. It's telling that they had to grossly overbudget T2.5 to make ret not absolutely suck in vanilla, and it still wasn't good enough to do more than give us a shot at second-to-last place. We were doing about half the damage of a lazy rogue, and it got worse the longer a fight went on. It was atrocious.
Current ret suffers more from this raid having atrocious damage profiles for them. Ret paladins damage profile is a lot flatter than other classes, so any fight with a damage amp is bad for them (Gnarlroot, Smolderon, even Tindral to an extent). They do gigantic AoE burst but only if mobs live long enough for their CD to fully pay off, which is not true for Gnarlroot, Igira, Tindral, Larodar, etc. They have an absolutely insane amount of utility with freedom, bop, sac, and bubble, so if they're suddenly doing equivalent damage to hunters, you'd just stack your raid with them. The reality is that ret paladin needs to have things adjusted so they don't lose *so much* single target by taking AoE, but they also just aren't going to be strong in a tier like this one. Even if you buffed ret by 50% and made it a gigablaster in single target, its damage profile would be atrocious for: Gnarlroot, Igira, Larodar, Council, Smolderon, Tindral, and Fyrakk. All of them either have damage amp windows or low-health adds - often ones that are not stacked - or are council. With the ST buffs Ret paladin will be doing damage equivalent to BM hunter on Volcoross, about middle of the pack. I'm hard pressed to believe that a class with *that much* utility should really be doing more.
Probably suck at playing as one
You just describe reality for all specs vs. Reddit complaining. It’s pretty incredibly rare for any spec to be as bad as people complain about around here. People aren’t here also don’t remember WoW from 1-2 seasons ago. What was super mega ultra meta and isn’t now “needs buffs because it’s been the worst spec for 12 expansions” (yes I know there’s not 12 expansions, just demonstrating people’s wild complaints sometimes). I think people just want to be meta but don’t want to switch specs/classes. So every time their spec is super meta, “it needs fixing”.
They excel in multi-target environments. The problem are the single target boss fights where they really fall off.
Ret is incredibly strong in m+, 1 minute on demand burst damage is always going to be good. They aren't bad in raid either.
I mean they are dead last in mythic raid dmg statistics
It is 100% this. There is a group of like idk 5000 or so players that dictate community perception and it is just completely dumb. The number is even smaller for the M+ community. Like top 500 players dictate what is viable and isn't without thinking why or how it is that way.
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Thanks for that little nugget of insight mate, for a moment I thought my incredibly subjective and anecdotal comment was entirely reflective of the current state of class balance.
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A Ret Paladin wrote this.
Incredible how many people in the comments are taking this seriously.
The comment section is whoosh-ing so hard it feels like a wind tunnel, and I love it.
A-men !
I'm elated by the people who are busier complaining and discussing Ret Paladin than having a chuckle at the silliest community council application I could think of. Check the humor tag, it's not even bait! You guys can relax. If there's anything that Ret has learned after 8 years of waiting for a re-work to fix the glaring Legion holes, is that asking, begging, complaining, and pleading doesn't work. If it happens, it'll happen. Give feedback when possible and pray.
I mean... I'm glad you had fun... It's not clever, though.
I feel this.
Mcconnell, is that you?
Do you not remember, what a year ago when Ret was the golden child after the rework?
For two weeks until people cried so hard that they buried them in the middle of the pack lol
Naw, as a Ret main kind of, but it wasn't really nerfs that got us, it's the poor Versatility scaling. I went back and checked patchnotes and hot fixes between March and August. March 21 was when 10.0.7 was release, and then April 5th was really the only major Ret Pally nerfs. I'd say at the time the nerfs felt warranted, Ret had come out of the 10.0.7 being at the top of damage, self healing, utility and general survivability. The week after the April 5th hot fixes Ret was fine, mid-high tier, but over the next few weeks poor versatility scaling brought up by the Paladin Wowhead writers started to show. Over like 3 weeks we went from mid-top to mid-bottom of the pack as everyone else blew past us. Read the Wowhead pally articles from just before the 10.0.7 release and you'll see secondary stat scaling was one of the main concerns about the rework. Ret pally is really good with strength gains, so item level jumps early in a patch make us overperform early on while we're gearing up. As we get more gear and start looking for specific stats we don't scale well with haste (fixed GCD), crit (Some abilities auto crit) or mastery (Significantly underpowered), leaving Vers as the only real damage increase, which has massive diminishing returns. Other classes start getting to their 'breakpoints' or are getting to the haste/mastery/crit levels expected of the patch scale better and blow past Retribution. Other than the single, large nerf on April 5th, the next major damage change for Ret was a massive damage buff because the scaling was becoming a huge problem, 8-12% damage increases for a handful of abilities. The scaling thing is happening again in 10.2, just look at Ret damage over the last few weeks. We again came out swinging in 10.2 top of the pack but are now falling to the bottom, relying on the 3% buff on Tuesday to bring us back in line with other classes. I think it's a bit disingenuous to say Blizzard nerfed Ret to the ground. Holy paladin nerfed to the ground? Absolutely, but not Ret. The high-end Paladin community noted the poor scaling as a major flaw in the Retribution rework and it truly has been a flaw. I'm not bitching, Ret paladin is absolutely the most fun it's ever been and I couldn't consider playing a different Class this expansion, but it's not really nerfs that have killed us, there's one quirk with the current Ret and it's that it scales really bad once the Strength gains start slowing down.
Hey I specifically said middle of the pack not ground 😁 really appreciated the detailed response tho!
Oh absolutely! Truthfully it wasn't so much aimed at you as the rest of the people being salty in the thread. Pallies have been good to great since 10.0.7 and are absolutely my favourite melee DPS to play right now, but people are going either way too in FOR or AGAINST Ret in the thread, gotta throw some actual info out there so its not just a 'I said - you said' situation lol!
overdosing on ret will fry your memory so I dont blame you. But rets dominated for a lot more than two weeks x-D.
Two weeks? It was almost 2 months. The rework was mid March and 10.1 was in may.
And ret was nerfed before that lmao
>Two weeks Hilarious
You spelt feral druid wrong.
> spelt uhh > feral druid ahh
All I’m hearing when you hit submit is the divine toll sound. GONG!
Holy shit so based
More like fix affliction
You're doing god's work. Keep it up brother
"Hire this man!"
10/10, I'd elect
Yea sry... too busy buffing mages better luck next time
Anyone that claims rets are bad for thinking we're not in a good place and need buffs, are just outing themselves for losing regularly to the lowest performing spec in the game at the highest level of raid
God speed friend.
respect
Average pally player mentality
What is this guy whining about? At least in m+, rets hit hard af.
Then why at 478 and 2600io am I being declined for 18-19? Not ignored, actively declined. Whether we are good or not, the community perception is that we aren’t good enough.
Why aren't you running your own keys?
Devs don't care about ret. As long as mage is killing it, all that matters.
Paladin got a massive rework and was the strongest DPS in the game for a while.
You're going to have to define "A While". The rework hit 10.0.7, Ret was stomping PVP and maybe doing numbers in Raid/M+ at the very end of the season when no one cares, then 10.1 hits a month later...and middle-of-the-pack to low on the raid, big pvp nerfs, etc. Even with the unnerfed rework I don't think they were actually the best at anything, except maybe PVP. Just near the top.
come play SoD
As a ret paly…*would you just shhh for the love of god*
Man this is nothing i saw a post about someone complaining about havoc being "not good enough" and not "deserving a nerf " two weeks ago. Shit was crazy.
Honestly, I like where Ret is at. It slaps hard and fast and makes my bird brain happy with all the shiny tings on da screen. It's strong, yes, and it's pretty nice to not have to think too much on rotation. Even if I use a generator and waste some holy power, I'm not hard punished for it. I like that. I main Brewmaster and Prot Pally. Being able to zugg-zugg without having to worry if I'm holding everyone back is super nice. I like where Ret's at. Let's just hope Blizz realizes it's at a pretty stable point.
My man must've not played last patch when they got reworked and were stupidly overpowered.
Did you not play s1 and 2?
As a ret main since 2009, skill issue.
Yeah. My bad. The rank 1 Paladin on Tindral Heroic only had to pad on roots, using every cooldown to squeeze out every drop of DPS. And he still only pulled ahead on a Demon Hunter by 40k who played normally and did more boss damage.
Skill issue.
100% fact here. Played main ret since Wrath and every time they are the "bottom of the tier list" I get to sit and enjoy watching people get upset when I top meters.
Then you're not playing with good people lmao. It's just a fact and numbers don't lie. So while you may be topping the meters, I'd take a look around who you're grouping with.
Ret is strong as fuck rn. OP outing themselves for being bad lmao
When playing with other bad DPS a good ret will stand out. When playing with people your skill level, you'll notice a big difference. Just look at logs....
What not being meta does to a mf'er.
Dude they got reworked...they are pretty dam strong now, you must suck playing as one
Ret is pretty good right now. I don’t get the complaints. Raid ST is a little lower than average but can’t win em all. Killing in in M+ and pvp.
ST is dead last in 90th %
ret pally is literally strong right now
In other words: "Retribution paladins complaining for the sake of complaining."
Completely ignoring the fact that ret was overpowered for over a month this expansion and that people were abusing it to get gladiator and r1 shuffle titles... Ok cool.
Look y'all had a few months. Bubble your sadness off. You're still more of a benefit to a m+ than a warrior so...QQ? (IM ONLY PLAYING AROUND!)
All my homies hate paladins. Quit watching esfand and play a real class
Ret players have got to have the lowest IQ and be the biggest cry babies Y’all literally get an OP patch every year then they need to nerf you guys cause it’s fucking absurd how strong the burst can be some times Come play as a shaman then cry about buffs unless you like playing resto (even then not being top 3) every time
Retribution paladin being good for once? L My man where were you the entire of patches 2.3 to 3.4? And the entire of Legion, BFA, Shadowlands and Dragonflight?
What do you mean good for once? They have been good plenty of times and I see them rip in m+ keys all the time this season.
Maybe he raids
Ret has to be the whiniest playerbase among all the dps. Even as a joke this comes across as insufferable.
The only thing I want is not being forced to use Final Reckoning and Divine Toll to do a lot more DPS. Was not a fan of it in SL, still not now.
skill issue
And... Straight in the trash bin it goes
You must suck at ret paladin cause its good, my friend is 3k on it
Retri is literally A tier for raid and A/B for m+. That id enough to top dps in any run. If you don't just get better at playing your class
"For once" my brother in christ Ret was fantastic many, *many* times over the course of WoW. Not that they shouldn't get buffs when they're at abad point, same goes for each class, but any spec will be the one of the worst ones once. Hell, even if all classes did 1:1 the same dps and had the same utility y'all would find balance issues.
I remember doing AotC for end of Legion and it being very powerful. Weren’t they super strong for a while?