The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in 5.4

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Earlier last week we got our first glimpse of the 5.4 PTR as Wowhead and MMO-Champion mined a massive amount of data from the latest update to the test realms. With new features like virtual realms, proving grounds, and flex raids, it's easy to be overwhelmed. As for myself, the first thing I did was hit Ctrl+F and searched for "Paladin" to see what, if any, changes we were due. Truth be told, I wasn't expecting a whole lot of changes for retribution -- we seem to be in a nice place, comfortably in the middle of the pack for DPS with heaps of utility to boot. Boy, was I mistaken.

Before we get into the discussion, do remember that none of these proposed changes are finalized. The "test realms" aren't named that by chance; the developers want to see how things like this play out on a large scale, larger than their internal testing can accommodate, and sift through player feedback from the community. So while we shouldn't get too worked up over one thing or another on the PTR, it's always beneficial to react to changes, at least in a civilized and logical manner.

The small potatoes

If the 5.4 patch notes were a meal, then the following would be the mashed potatoes -- hearty, delicious, but ultimately not the focus of the plate:

Turn Evil now has a 15-second cooldown. (Note: Glyph of Turn Evil will be redesigned and noted in a future PTR update.)Burden of Guilt has been replaced with a new talent called Evil is a Point of View, which allows the Paladin to use Turn Evil on players and beasts.Hand of Purity now reduces damage taken from harmful periodic effects by 80% (up from 70%) and reduces damage taken from harmful periodic effects that cannot be prevented by immunities by 40% (up from 0%).Unbreakable Spirit has been simplified. It now reduces the cooldown on Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Lay on Hands by 50%.
Not being a PvPer in any sense of the word, I almost forgot we had Turn Evil in the first place. With the change to Burden of Guilt we'll have an alternative CC to Repentance. Options are always good, and it's nice that they're breathing new life into an old spell, but did they have to name the talent "Evil is a Point of View"? While the quote apparently comes from an Anne Rice novel (and countless people before it, I'm sure), all I can think about is that it's one word away from quoting Palpatine from Revenge of the Sith and I'd rather try to forget that experience.

Hand of Purity's alteration is interesting but it seems a bit overly complex. How easy will it be for the player to determine what damage can be mitigated by immunities and what can't? Will Blizzard finally add a little icon into the Dungeon Journal indicating which abilities go through immunities? Something like that would have been nice to have from the beginning.

The simplification of Unbreakable Spirit is welcome, especially considering how impossible it proved to halve Divine Protection's cooldown given its base cooldown of 1 minute. If you claim you were able to spend fifty holy power over the course of thirty seconds without cheating with Holy Avenger, I think some physicists would like to talk to you about breaking a few laws.

The meat of it all

And now we come to the main attraction, the stars of the show, the tender and juicy chateaubriand of the paladin patch note platter: Inquisition and Guardian of Ancient Kings.

Inquisition now lasts 20 seconds per charge of Holy Power consumed, up from 10 seconds.Glyph of Inquisition has been redesigned. The glyph now increases the duration of Inquisition by 30 seconds (up to a maximum of 2 minutes) each time the Paladin lands a killing blow on targets that yield experience or honor.
I am certain that a great many of you are excited about the idea that Inquisition's maximum duration could be doubled. Such a move might even get more players to try out ret if our "maintenance buff" was scaring them off. And since we would theoretically only have to spend half as much holy power on Inquisition as we are now, we could cast more Templar's Verdicts and Divine Storms -- an additional one TV or DS every minute, to be exact. Doing a bit of napkin math, it would only be a very slight DPS increase, but free damage is free damage, right?

On one hand, I'm all for the change to the glyph -- the current Glyph of Inquisition sees about as much use as a taunt in LFR, so making it something players actually might use is obviously a plus. It also makes Inquisition easier to maintain for shorter PvE content and during PvP combat (if it's not dispelled immediately after application, that is).

On the other, I can't bring myself to appreciate the change to the base spell. Weaving Inquisition refreshes into your rotation adds variety and a tiny bit of skill to pull off well, which presents itself as a mechanism for someone who wants to excel at ret DPS to do so. Doubling Inquisition's effective duration reduces the contribution of such skill to your overall DPS.

Ideally, I'd say let's split the difference: change the glyph but leave Inquisition itself alone. It seems to me that most people who truly abhor our holy damage buff are running shorter content like quests, dungeons, scenarios, battlegrounds, and arenas, where time outside of combat (or out of melee range) is more significant than a boss encounter in a raid environment, making Inquisition harder to maintain without a steady stream of holy power. The glyph would be a nice remedy for this problem.

I do recognize, however, that my opinion on this matter is a very unpopular one in the paladin community at large, so if push comes to shove I'll just grit my teeth and slowly turn into that guy that yells at joggers in the park about how everything was better back when you had to trudge barefoot uphill in the snow just to get enough holy power to cast Inquisition.

My other bone to pick is with the reduction of our longest cooldown, Guardian of Ancient Kings.

Guardian of the Ancient Kings (Retribution version) now has a reduced cooldown of 3 minutes, down from 5 minutes, and the maximum number of stacks has been reduced to 12.
The ability itself isn't getting any stronger by being available more often; as you can see, they reduced both the cooldown and number of stacks by 40%. Conceptually, having GANK available more often could make our play a bit more engaging, and getting to see the golden shuffler scoot around more would be nice.

As it stands right now, I will pop GANK and Avenging Wrath together at the start of the fight, then five minutes later I will see GANK come back off cooldown, wait another minute for AW to come up again, then tie them together once more. With a lower cooldown, I'm afraid that it would result in more DPS if we simply macro the abilities together, delaying AW until GANK would be back up, and pushing an AW cast or two off the table for the encounter in the process.

We could, of course, use them separately and only tie them together when their cooldowns align, but GANK isn't a very independent ability. Most of the time it is active we are slowly gaining stacks of Ancient Power, but we don't hold onto a full stack for very long. So what do we stand to gain by turning two buttons into one except a blander playstyle?

In the end, none of this is set in stone. I'm not too upset about GANK or Inq or the dumb name they picked for Burden of Guilt's replacement because it's not final. I have faith in the blues to listen to feedback, and use their experience to give us a quality product. But as a columnist here at WoW Insider, and as a paladin player in general, I feel it's my duty to complain in some regard. The Light and How to Swing It teaches you the ins and outs of retribution paladins, from Ret 101 and how to gem, enchant and reforge your retadin, to essential ret pally addons. Tags: featured, guide-to-paladins, guide-to-pallies, guide-to-pallys, paladin-5.4, paladin-guide, paladin-info, paladin-talents, pally-guide, pally-info, pally-talents, patch-5.4, retribution-paladin-the-light-and-how-to-swing-it, wow-paladin, wow-paladin-info, wow-paladins, wow-pally, wow-pally-info

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The Light and How to Swing It: Why retribution DPS is a-okay

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Towards the tail end of Ulduar and into the beginning of Trial of the Crusader, I was in a guild that had a rogue that would consistently top the DPS charts. I would run so many heroics and PuG raids to get gear, all the while practicing what could laughably be called our "rotation" in retrospect, and I would still fall short. Over time, however, I began to notice that even though I wasn't beating him, I was beating many others. Soon the time came when I was neck-and-neck with him, always biting his heels and waiting for him to allow me an opportunity to beat him, once and for all.

When I eventually did overtake him and saw my character's name on the top of Recount, the feeling was greater than any boss kill. You can't ever see a boss collapse and have the feeling that you did that all by yourself, that you were the sole reason for this victory, because it took a combination of other players, all supporting each other, to see that end result. The DPS race is totally different -- aside from healers keeping you alive (which, if you're properly aware of your surroundings and your threat, shouldn't be an issue) you shoulder the responsibility to push out as much damage as you can. Seeing yourself at the top is a much more personal victory because you can honestly say that you did that, that you pulled yourself up there and truly earned that spot. And from what I understand, this is not a unique experience.

I have talked to quite a few players who have expressed concern over some fairly recent SimulationCraft results that show retribution ranking near the bottom out of all available DPS specs. Even ignoring SimCraft, many more players have expressed concern over their damage output as they compare it to their fellow raiders, guildmates, and random DPSers in LFR. Despite this mounting evidence, I have asserted that retribution is in a nice place -- not great, not OP, but comfortable. Indeed, Ghostcrawler tends to feel the same way. So what's the story here? Why does it seem like everyone and their uncle think ret is doing poorly?

Why does retribution sim poorly?

SimulationCraft is a great tool, and its developers should be very proud of the work they do. They make theorycrafting more accessible to a larger group of people by turning equations and calculations into a graphical interface that is fairly simple to operate. But every system has its limitations, and SimCraft is no different. When you plug in your character data and run a simulation, the program adheres to a set of predetermined conditions. In the case of their popular DPS comparisons, SimCraft uses the following:

Fight length: 360 – 540 seconds
Fight style: Patchwerk (tank-and-spank)
Iterations: 2500
Talents and glyphs (for retribution): 221223 with Templar's Verdict, Double Jeopardy, and Mass Exorcism

Basically what this all means is that the program runs through a calculated "optimal" rotation on a single-target, tank-and-spank encounter that's, on average, seven and a half minutes long. It does this 2,500 times and then averages the results to give us our final number.
So what's wrong with this?

First of all, how many Patchwerk-style fights are there this tier? The only encounter that I could say is even remotely like Patchwerk is Garajal, provided you either don't go down to the spirit realm at all or you spend the briefest of moments down there. You might be able to get away with doing nothing else on this encounter but DPS, but that doesn't change the fact that only one out of sixteen encounters reflects these conditions, which actually brings me to my next point.

A Patchwerk-style encounter is not a realistic situation in today's raids. So many fights these days have adds, movement, and debuffs that standing still to attack one target is no longer the norm.

Look at a fight like Will of the Emperor – as a DPS, you're either running around killing off adds, barely even touching the boss, or you're on one of the bosses dodging Devastating Combo and putting yourself out of melee range often but spiking your damage with Opportunistic Strike.

All Simcraft's T14H results show is that retribution does not perform as well as other specs under one stringent set of pretty unrealistic conditions. This ranking definitely has some uses (namely, finding outlier specs and identifying what separates them from the pack), but you need to treat it as a small piece of a larger puzzle instead of a scoreboard at the end of the game. Clearly, our strengths lie elsewhere.

Then where are our strengths?

Adaptation Aside from a few glaring omissions (* cough* untargeted, holy power-independent AoE), our damage loadout is very versatile: Suddenly have multiple mobs to fight? Thanks to Hammer of the Righteous, Divine Storm, a fast-stacking Censure and a fairly worthless Seal of Righteousness, switching to AoE damage is a snap.Need to close the gap? A robust tier of movement talents keep us very mobile, out of bad and in melee range.Stuck at ranged for the moment? Hard-hitting ranged abilities like Judgment, Exorcism, and Hammer of Wrath let us continue to do damage and gain holy power for those times when the boss is just out of reach.Burst potential For a long time now, one of retribution's greatest strengths (at least, DPS-wise) has also been the source of its greatest weakness – burst damage. Being able to hit Guardian of Ancient Kings, Avenging Wrath, Holy Avenger, and Execution Sentence together while Inquisition is running gives you an 18 second window of pure destruction. Of course there's a PvP tradeoff involved, the source of the saltiest nerfs in the quadrant, but don't be fooled -- being able to deliver massive damage in a small window can be very valuable.

Self-preservation Keeping yourself alive ensures that you can deal more damage in the long run, so our defensive toolbox works offensively when used sparingly and intelligently. The paladin's signature ability, Divine Shield, has snagged countless first kills and saved a multitude of lives.Off-healing with Word of Glory and/or Selfless Healer can keep you alive while healers are distracted or dead (especially on a fight like Chimaeron where a solitary self-heal can make the difference between life and death).Even better, shielding yourself with Divine Protection and Sacred Shield can prevent a lot of that damage in the first place.Overall, I'd say to not let a few numbers get you down. Any raid leader worth their salt wouldn't turn down a good ret paladin, what with all the utility we have to offer. Don't get me wrong, I'd like retribution to do better on single-target than what's reflected in the SimCraft results, but I think we're going to be just fine. I mean, at least we're not arms warriors!
The Light and How to Swing It teaches you the ins and outs of retribution paladins, from Ret 101 and how to gem, enchant and reforge your retadin, to essential ret pally addons.
Tags: featured, guide-to-paladins, guide-to-pallies, guide-to-pallys, paladin-guide, paladin-info, paladin-talents, pally-guide, pally-info, pally-talents, ret paladin DPS, ret-paladin, RetPaladinDps, retribution-dps, retribution-paladin-the-light-and-how-to-swing-it, simcraft, wow-paladin, wow-paladin-info, wow-paladins, wow-pally, wow-pally-info

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It, Mists of Pandaria

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