Retribution in Cataclysm
Holy fucking ballcocks, a post after 436 years of inactivity! :-OOOOOOO
I just realized that my existence means nothing without this blog… I need this; I need it to be a part of—
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Yeah fucking right. Actually Shye was just like “Update your blog with Paladin changes,” and I was like “Oh yeah I should do that.”
So, I’ll go ahead and go down the list of changes that Blizzard has confirmed, and then after that shoot out a few of my own thoughts independent of those changes. LET THE GAMES BEGIN!
Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure’s ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.
%*FJAN^&*WHFN*!RH&@%%! Looks like they finally acknowledged the fact that people were dripping wet over Eadric the Pure’s AOE blind spell in ToC. While this is all fine and dandy, and could be very powerful, the way it works right now with a cast time will be pretty silly for Ret. “Shit getting FF’ed by Spriest Rogue, ahghhhsh, so much damage, just gotta get this 2 second cast o— *KICK* “FUCKKKKPISSSSSSSSSS.” Keep in mind this is of course only the announcement of the ability and prone to change. As long as it doesn’t retain a silly 2-second cast time or has a large radius so as to be cast at a fair distance when you aren’t getting melee zerged, then it will be useful.
Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.
Healing Hands…
Healing…
Hands…
Suck my dick…
Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).
Okay, now this is genuinely cool. Not only does it seem useful and powerful, but it sounds cool as fuck too. This is seriously some straight Raidos shit going down. Invoking the wisdom of the Ancient Kings and destroying verital evil, there is no finer cause! I see this most likely being roughly equivalent to Death Knight’s Gargoyle spell (Except this is a righteous celestial in comparison to a diarrhea breathing fuckwing Assgoyle) in that it will be a pretty major dps cooldown in raids, and a good additional pressure move for Ret in pvp. This one gets a thumbs up from me.
Changes to Abilities and Mechanics
Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
This is a good change. Auto attacking and judging SoR/SoC until level 40 is pretty damn boring. This opens up doors to Ret getting a better signature strike. Who knows what they’ll do with it, but hey maybe CS will at least go back to doing like 125% weapon damage instead of less than a white swing with full talents (Who the balls ever thought that was a good idea anyway o.0).
Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
What they don’t say here is the defensive magic dispel aspect of cleanse is limited to only Holy Paladins. Blizzard will have to do some serious rebalancing and changes if they expect Ret/Prot to be good in arena without being able to dispel Fears, Polys, and other Faggotrous Debuffs.
Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.
Honestly I think a better solution that would go along with this would just be to change Paladin buff durations again and make them raid-wide. Greater Blessings would be hour long raid-wide buffs, and normal blessings would remain single target but last 30 minutes for the purpose of… eh, say your Prot Paladin needs to Sanc himself but Kings the rest of the raid, and doesn’t want to have to rebuff himself every 10 minutes.
Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.
This sort of caught my eye. As good as holy shock is right now in PvP, I could see this being ridiculous for Ret in combo with AoW procs. Perhaps it will be available for Ret but have awful scaling without Holy Talents. Going to have to wait for more details on this one.
New Talents and Talent Changes
We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
This whole Paragraph is a load of cock in regards to Ret. I have good survivability in PvP??! Maybe in Battlegrounds yeah, that’s accurate, but to say Ret has good surviveability in Arena is stupid. Once Divine Shield is gone you’re pretty much fucked. No shield block, no enraged regen, no disarming, fearing or really any form of defense. With forbearance we basically have one defensive measure in pvp and that’s it. Sacred shield won’t save you from much, and you’re your entire core of other defensive abilites (Freedom, Hand of Protection, Divine Protection) and most offensive abilities can be dispelled. I shield wall and it just gets dispelled, really? Avenging Wra – *Spellsteal* They should at least make it so if your wings or Divine Shield are removed by a dispel it also removes Forbearance and the “INVISIBLE 30 SECOND AVENGING SICKNESS.”
As far as Divine Shield goes, nerfing it is fine because its not like it stays on for more than 5 seconds again most teams, and generally you just end up clicking it off when you’re at full HP again so you don’t slip behind further in damage in an Arena match. Hell, I wouldn’t even mind losing it if I had some other more surefire manner to protect myself at least here and there.
We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving.
The first part of this sounds good. Ret’s rotation is pretty much just watching for Divine Storm procs and facerolling that shit. It’s a little more than just that but, pretty simple in comparison to say, Enhancement or even a Death Knight.
In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
Perhaps chances at an interrupt or some sort of additional defensive mechanic so we don’t just get trained once Divine Shield is down? Plzplzplzplzplzplzplz
We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
*Rubs self* I get so tired of rebuffing this in pvp. This is a great change.
I’ll also acknowledge some Prot changes just because, Prot PvP may still be viable and the way to go in Cataclysm as well, we’ll just have to see:
Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we’re looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
Meh this is alright, I don’t really feel there’s a major issue with Prot Paladin threat right now, it may be a little better in some cases, but the main issue right now would be their survivability compared to like, a warrior.
Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.
This is actually a good change, as long as the amount of damage and threat it generates is lowered just a bit to compensate for 100% uptime. The main benefit of this change will be for really fast hitting bosses and trash mobs that eat Holy shield in .035732 seconds.
So this is a pretty all right review with some promising ideas and early changes listed. I approve of it… but…
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY RECKONING BOMB!?!?!
No, not that crappy old shit from Vanilla, I want that huge fucking turret mega-holy-laser that you can fire in the Icecrown quest to defend the Argent Crusade’s base against the Scourge. 1 Minute cooldown: chuck a huge ball of holy energy that does ridiculous damage and silences for 3 seconds. I WANT THISSS AGHAGHRHGRHGHRG.
This is a rough idea of what Reckoning Bomb should do just IMO:
For an early look and rough outline of Cataclysm changes this does look good so far. I wasn’t sure what to expect for our new “Oomph” ability and Guardian of the Ancient Kings seems pretty wicked. Also for the record even though I ignored healing hands and called it stupid because of the name, it’s a good idea at least. Paladins need some form of AoE healing, and Beacon is way too effective in its current incarnation if you ask me. Though it certainly is a pretty required niche style of healing required for some of the current raid encounters (lol Saurfang).
I’m not too worried about the future of Ret PVE, I think we will be looking solid there. My real concern is how they choose to implement the new abilities and changes for PvP. I am quite frankly tired of Prot being far superior in Arena, and hope they deal with some of the silly issues Ret has been plagued with for so long (ex. absorbs preventing Judgements of the Wise from returning Mana). The lack of certain issues like this being listed here is a bit frustrating for me, however I’ll just hope they eventually choose to address it among the other changes. For now I can’t really determine too much from what they have said so far, only that they’re headed in roughly the right direction.
Anyway that’s about all for now folks. I’ll have Shadowmourne in just 3 more shards so I’ll probably screencap my mad diesel crits with it, or something. Maybe I’ll get really lucky and TAJ will drop too so I can pull aggro of tanks on every form of aoe pull in the game and get annihilated. :-DDDDD
Until next time, go crank Amon Amarth and annihilate scrubbery in BG’s.
Thankkkksss for listennningg chilllldreeen!
This is Reeman, and you’re reading the Art of Shred Ret blog!
~ Retribution Dude Guy
The Art of Shred 