Patch Day Yay

Not much going on with me.  Real life has me busy so, I haven't gotten much time in game.  What I have been doing is some Wintergrasp, BG's and the occasional heroic.  One of the things I have found is that while Ret Pally burst is significant there are definitely classes out there with more.  I was running around with a warlock friend and saw some impressive burst coming from his destruction spec.  80 elites dying before I could get to them to hit them once.  Some PvP battles where I target someone and as I close the gap I see one-half to three-quarters of their life go away.  I am not saying that warlocks should have less DPS then paladins but, that was fairly impressive.  My gear is Naxx-10 purples and his is mostly blues a couple greens and a purple or two.

 

My thoughts on the retribution changes are not good.  I personally think that it is a significant nerf.  Yeah if you do the numbers it looks like a minor bump to over all DPS but that is only if you look at the math without actually paying attention to how we do our DPS.  If all I did was CS until the mob was dead then yes my DPS would go up.  If I actually hit every mob 6 or more times with a white damage swing my DPS would go up.  But guess what.  That's not how I fight.  In PvE I use rotations based on the situation (none of which involve using just CS and white damage for 20+ seconds.)  In PvP I pretty much use the top three damage dealers since mobility makes it fairly hard to maintain a long rotation.  Actually calling it a rotation is misleading.  Retribution paladins use a FCFS with different attacks having different priorities.  JoW, CS, DS, Cons, Exor and HoW are the main attacks.  All of these have cooldowns that prevent spamming the one that does the most damage.  So I pick whichever attack is off cooldown that is the higher priority.

 

Ok where I see the biggest problem is in PvP.  Right now I can unload on someone and if they are a scrub they die in the initial unload.  If they are decently geared they can fight me.  Chances are if they are any good and have decent gear they will stop me sometime in the initial unload and root/cc me or engage me in melee.  Then because my sustained DPS isn't nearly what I unloaded with and I have no gap closer I need that heavy hitting CS to do anything near the damage I need to in order to compete. Now they lower the damage of CS and drop the cooldown.  How does that help me at all in PvP?  It doesn't.  It hurts.

 

Now for PvE well, CS has a lower CD with a lower damage %.  The net change would be positive.  But, wait we have to figure out how to fit that into our rotation/FCFS priority.  Cooldown clashes are going to be a big problem.

 

In PvE I will miss the SoB and its judgments a lot.  I will have to play around with SoCrap and SoComplete crap to see which sucks less for my DPS.  I foresee everyone toping me on the DPS meter now.  I will also more than likely have to respec in order to get something worthwhile out of SoCrap.  (side note:  5 stacks really!?!)

 

In PvP I will miss CS having good damage.  I will also miss a judgement that does good damage.  Now I get to run around and chase classes with countless gap openers (snares or teleports) or stand toe to with others in plate with my now almost completely melee arsenal being mitigated by his armor.  This will be fun.

 

Oh yeah, I also really like the fact that since blizzard can't manage to balance 2v2 they make it pointless to play.  I really think the developers need to come back from the unnamed new blizzard game and work on the one that we are still paying for.

 

Well, they did make a new BG with little lore and no faction.  I guess making up a new faction is too hard for them.  Great I get to go get owned in a new place like I did when I was in quest greens fighting in AV for the first time.

 

While I understand that at times a class needs to be nerfed due to being too powerful.  I really don't see that rets were that overpowered.  Not enough so to totally kill our burst and give us little to no additional sustained DPS.  I have read MANY posts on the results from PTR and the sustained DPS on a target dummy went up marginally while burst went down tremendously.  I thought rets carried large slow two-handers for a reason.

 

I guess blizzard wants us to reroll.  Screw them, the only class they made that I like is the retribution paladin.  It is the only class that can be self sufficient other than the druid.  I don't like cows (except to eat) or playing alliance (except to beat on).  I guess I will just suffer through the craptastic DPS and wait for someone at blizzard to actually play a ret.