Progress

It's been a couple weeks since my last post and Blizzard has implemented quite a few changes to the Retribution Paladin with the latest patch.  With all the changes I decided to change up my spec a bit.  I went with a more PvP spec and added the support talents.  This has done a couple of things for me:
1. I can throw heals to my partner and they hit harder, have chance to not use Holy Power and give me a buff if I use WoG.  (Due to Divinity, Eternal Glory and Selfless Healer)
2. I can heal my self and the heals hit harder and have chance to not use Holy Power.
3. My HoJ has a shorter cool-down.  (Due to Improved Hammer of Justice)

Also I have gotten a couple upgrades to my PvP kit:
1. Pants
2. Shoulders
Upgrades in PvP always mean more damage (if your a damage dealer) and more survivability.

With our new Mastery the added damage was significant.  Against a training dummy in my PvP gear I saw a 30% increase.  This was with the same gear, the same rotation and reforging into mastery and out of crit/haste.

The Sacred Shield addition was a definite gain to our survivability.  How can you complain about a ~25K shield every 30 seconds while below 30% health?

Now lets talk about the Crusader Strike nerf.  I know what your thinking they buffed the damage output of it.  This is true.  But, the main reason CS is one of our top priority abilities is not for its damage.  It is now our only source of Holy Power.  Before the patch CS awarded holy power on cast.  Now it awards on hit.  The difference is that since the majority of PvP players ignore expertise when we face someone who has a ton of dodge we a don't land many of our CS's.  If we don't land a lot of our CS's we get less Holy Power.  No Holy Power no WoG and no TV's.  One of the blue posters on the official forums tried to say that this was a bug fix.  This is not the case.  Ghostcrawler stated specifically that CS generating HoPo on cast was by design.  For raiding retribution paladins this should not cause much issue since they are usually expertise soft capped.  The main problem is the delays we will be seeing from the slowing of holy power generation.  For other classes that have attacks that do not land the resource that was used is refunded (at least partially refunded).  Since the resource that retribution and protection paladins use is cool downs then my recomendation would be to reset the cooldown on the CS.  My personal opinion is that this was a serious nerf.

All in all I feel the patch was a net gain for retribution paladins.  Definitely could have been better without the CS nerf but we can't have everything.

Quick Update

Not much to talk about.  So far I am still getting used to the new rotation.  I do ok in PvE.  In PvP it is still ok when the enemies are not dispelling.  As soon as they realize that they can dispell most of my offensive power I am done for.  One thing I am noticing is that the alliance in my battlegroup don't PvP much.  So, I get to sit in queue for 30 to 45 minutes waiting for random bg's.

A friend of mine asked me about the ret PvE rotation such as it is.  Being that most fights in PvE haven't been lasting for more 30 seconds I have dropped off Zealotry due to lack of usefulness.  Then I evaluated the differences between my PvP and PvE specs and realized they were close enough to not warrant using both my specs for ret.  As for the rotation, CS,  filler (judge, exo if art of war, HoW if under 20%, HW), repeat until 3 HoPo or HoL procs then TV.  This is pre cata since we don't have inq yet.

Patch day

Ok now that I am done ranting about how they have broken the retribution spec I will try to chronical my experiance as I try to make something usefull out of it

Yesterday was partch day.  After a couple hours of updating I finally got on the servers.  I logged into Saraphina and checked out my spec choice.  I also looked at my glyphs and wrote down all the ones I thought I nigh use.  Then I went to elitist jerks and arena junkies to look into possible spec choices.  I found that I didn't really like the specs I found as is so I copied a basic pvp spec and made a couple changes.

I will link my current spec in each of these posts for future referance.

I decided against getting zealotry since I don't think I will have enough up time to make effective use of it.  I will probably change my spec frequently so, it wont be the same for long until I zero in on an "effective" spec.

I logged over to my scribe, made the glyphs I wrote down plus a couple and mailed them off.  Also threw some on the AH at stupid high prices to account for that source of income going away soon.

Logged back into saraphina and glyphed and talented.  Also had to go to the trainer for new spells.  Put some deal on my bars and qued for a random bg.  I saw that wintergrasp was in progress so, I figured I would start there.  Had a little fun running around killing allies but not really all that telling since no one knows their class yet.  We won so I went back to dalaran to wait for my bg.  It never popped.  So, I guess I will have to see tonight.