MoP : Ret Paladin PvP - Experience Immersion Journal
Why this Guide?: This is a "guide" to serve as a journal of the experience of an actual Ret PvP MoP player. A guide that I never found, and even when I did find some information, it was never detailed or close to being objective, nor justified as to when an opinion was given. So to those who are looking for such information, I hope this guide suits your needs.
This thread is going to include my perspective of the Ret Paladin PvP in the Molten WoW Mists of Pandarea Realms. It's mainly a means to give people looking from an insight of the actual gameplay. What to expect, what not to expect, whats the way the class and spec actually needs (aprox. wise) to be played as opposed to previous expansions.
About me: I have a big amount of experience with paladins (all specs, pve and pvp) in WotLK, and Ret PvP in Cata realms.
Note: Never played retail (this note is for those who will ask or point out, theres the answer to that. lets move on).
I will re-organize this thread (my posts) as I have longer and longer game experience in this expansion with this class and spec.
- Gameplay (Mechanics):
This section does not describe how the class mechanics work. You can find all of that in here.
This is about HOW I USE THOSE MECHANICS.
Mainly, the retribution paladin is not what it used to be ..AT ALL. But not in a bad way. Though you should get it through your head, that going all the way into the fight is not what you should do unless its a 1v1 against a melee or caster that you cannot control in a way that it allowes you to play from a distance.
In MoP, Ret paladins should go inside and outside of the front line. You do have insane amount of burst, but you dont have a STRAIGHT UP SURVABILITY. Our new survability plays out like a Feral druid. Thats the best example I can give you. Your DEFENSE, is about control, not straight out defensive cooldowns.
- Combat Tactics
I dont have enough info yet, but there is something very clear to me right off the top, and I'll break it down to you very fast:
YOU ARE 2 things: a DAMAGE dealer AND a HEALER. If you pass out on 1 of these aspects, you'll play 1 side of a 2 sided class, that in terms of HALF your entire performance.
This is not just a notion, this needs to be played as a MIND SET. You will damage, and you will BECOME a healer, jumping between those 2 roles a lot in a single fight.
So how you do this "being a healer" deal? This is why you pick up Selfless Healer as the talent in that tier. Your judgement will act in 3 ways: 1) Damage spell, 2) Gap closer (With Long Arm of the Law) or Gap increment (in order to get away from a tight spot) , 3) To build up for Selfless Healer stacks.
With 3 Selfless Healer stacks, your Flash Light becomes instant, and costs no mana. THIS makes you able to play defense and heal. This is like...one of your priority mind-sets to your defense and assistance mechanics.
There's more to it than that, for example using Execution Sentence on yourself or an ally instead of as a damaging spell. But I'll go into more details as I get more experience.
...work in progress.
- Talents
This is the talents I'm using right now: http://i57.tinypic.com/2u55aph.jpg
Progressive into the tiers--
- Long Arm of the Law
- Fist of Justice
- Selfless Healer
- Clemency
- Holy Avenger
- Execution Sentence
Description as to why:
- "Long arm of the law" allowes me to -choose- when to have the speed bonus.
The other options are : 1) Speed of light (....no) 2) Pursuit of Justice. This one IMO is not convenient AT ALL, since I want my holy power for output (heal or damage) and not as to a dependant power for my movement.
- "Fist of Justice" is a clear choice to me. Repentance is a horrible spell, has a cast time and breaks instantly on any damage done to target. The other choice allowes you to cast your Turn Evil on actually any player. Whats wrong with this? It has a cast time, fast , but has a cast time nontheless. Also, its for suppression of enemy assistance mainly, so this could be an option in arena, otherwise with Fist of Justice you have a 30 second Stun. GIEF PLX.
- "Selfless Healer". The Retribution paladin is very easy to kill unless you play defense when its required. With this talent you can do it very well. It gives a reduction on the cast time of your Flash Light, reduces its mana cost and also a boost on effectiveness when casted on a friendly target. You are, my friend, a support class. More now than ever. So you need to be capable of assist with heals, and this makes it happen, also makes you be able to actually have any mana left after casting 3 Flash Lights.. Imho, there is no other option to go in this tier. WoG is pretty much a filler heal than a sufficient heal, plus it reduces your damage output since it consumes Holy Power. You NEED Flash Lights. This talents gives you that.
- "Clemency": x2 times on every hand you got, is too good to pass. That should remind you to actually use them..
- "Holy Avenger". The reason for this talent comes down to 1 element : Control of my own buffs. And it has the same CD as Avenging Wrath. Use those in a macro, and you can do some heavy damage every 2 minutes for 18-20 seconds. I dont have a MoP DataBase to link you to the talents, and I will link info sources when I have the DB, but if you are trying this class, you should have access to that information ingame.
- "Execution Sentence". Everything is kinda bugged right now, but the description of the spell sais it all for me, and man, show me where to sign. This is a freaking Execution Sentence. Either you use it to heal or to damage, it DOES that.
Again all of this will go into revision on and on again as the Core gets updated with fixes and content (arena, spell fixes, talent and glyph fixes, etc).
...work in progress..
- Glyphs
I know we all hate the word "mandatory" but, hey, if you wana go leeeroy on this be my guest.
- 2 Mandatory Glyphs just by looking at the description: Templar's Veredict, and Burden of Guilt.
- As for the third glyph, i would swap between Divine Protection, Word of Glory and Flash of Light. The others dont really capture my attention. So why one or the other? The first one I would use in ANY situation unless I'm agasint a team mainly composed of magic damage dealers, which then I would go with Word of Glory or Flash of Light. Other than that, Divine Protection all the way.
..About Burden of Guilt: This works great even as a defense, slowing your enemy providing distance for you to recover, with the same spell that builds your Selfless Healer stacks for your Flash Light, and also gives holy power. If there is ONE MANDATORY GLYPH, Burden of Guilt is the one.
...work in progress
- Stats + Reforging
reserved .....but mainly check it here
This section is going to be MY aproach to it, as it relates to my idea of how the class actually works.
Crit v.s. Mastery
Ok so to MY POV of this. Basically first check the link I posted to Lynea's guide. But I have my opinion here on 1 of the (actually 2, compared to each other) stats mentioned there. Maybe I passed on the information in that guide but I'll just go to it:
The only difference to the Stat relevance i found in that guide, is that IMO Crit > Mastery by like...A LONG FREAKING WAY. Why? -> Resilience no longer reduces chance to be critted by a player. So, Crit increases your damage all - the - freaking - way , plus it also increases your healing all - the - freaking - way. So all the freaking way, I go crit instead of mastery.
As to haste ... I've yet to check it out since its all so bugged, and gear is not accessible as of now. But considering the theory, I would aggree that you should have at least 1 CD that generates Holy Power up and ready to use all the time. Or said differently: the gap between Holy Power generators CD wise should be as short as possible.
So according to THAT GUIDE I KEEP SENDING YOU TO WITH THE LINKS, Haste should be 20%. Though i havent checked this for myself, so I might update this when I get around to experience it.
Update (corrected v2): Ok ...HASTE...From MY PoV, after you get your Crusader Strike to be around 4 seconds CD, you are FINE. You dont need more haste, and if you do, I seriously dont know wtf you are doing with your character. Now that visual bugs have been somewhat corrected, haste , for this purpose, is in the lines of 20% as mentioned in Lynea's guide. If you believe that you need more haste so you can cast Flash of Light faster then I will tell you 2 things: 1) You are not using Selfless healer properly. 2) If you actually dont use Selfless healer and actually use the cast time of your Flash Light entirely, this means that you will be out of mana in 3 casts, even if its 0.000003 seconds. So to hell with haste. Get your Crusader Strike down to 4.0 - 4.2 aprox and you will do fine.
Rest of the stats:
Strength, PvP Power, Stamina and PvP Resilience. There's nothing to think about this since this is the stuff you should get just by purchasing your Retribution PvP gear.
Seals:
Seal of Truth for damage, Seal of Justice when you reckon your enemy will try to escape rushing away or if you just need to keep your enemy at a constant movement speed for whatever the reason, which you will find yourself wanting very often. Have these keybinded or macro'ed.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Alright, the guide as it is will read as a somewhat changing perspective about the performance of the spec, because it was very much indeed an experience immersion journal. I didnt know a thing about this spec in this expansion before actually playing it at Warmane here in the MoP realms. So for me it was really going all in all blind into a spec-class.
As for the final thoughts about how much I enjoy this class and is it a strong pvp class? The answers are : 1) The class is FUN, 2) The class is VERY WEAK.
"Why is the ret spec weak for this guy?", I cant think of a single reason. I'm inclined to say that as of blizzard work on creating a new way for this "hybrid"/support/damage spec, MoP is the weakest step in the workflow for Retribution. Sure many new things are good -ideas- that I personally look forward to seeing how they are developed in WoD expansion, but in MoP these ideas are vague, not accurate, and overall the Retribution spec feels like someone just created something and never actually tested it.
Personally I gave up on trying retribution in MoP, so this is the end of the development of this "guide", or whatever it turned out to be.
Cheers and thanks for reading.
Special thanks to:
- Lynea's extensive guide to the Ret paladin MoP spec. Insane amount of work was put in there. You should not pass it out. Here's the guide
