I've seen a lot of reference in various threads to the importance of kiting as a ret in WOTLK. My main is a hunter, so the kiting playstyle appeals to me, and I thought I'd ask for comments on the best way to kite as a ret in WOTLK. The following are just my (probably uninformed) impressions as someone who doesn't play my ret all that much. But hopefully they can get the discussion started.
It seems to me that the basic logic of kiting as ret only applies against classes that rely more than we do on pure melee abilities. Our crusader strike requires melee range, but divine storm has an 8 yard range and judgement has a 10 yard range.
I suppose that means that rogues, warriors and ferals are the only ones that it makes sense to kite, as a routine matter. DKs (especially unholy) and enhance shamans have a good bit of ranged abilities, so I don't think it makes much sense to kite them. And of course rets have the same ablities we do, so it makes no sense I can see to try to kite another ret, even assuming you could using Judgement of Justice.
I'll consider warriors, rogues and ferals in turn.
WARRIORS:
When to kite: Definitely when you have freedom up. Piercing howl (which the vast majority of arms warriors take) has a 10 yard range, and we can't dispel it, so I assume we couldn't kite warriors outside of freedom. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try to keep kiting outside of freedom and then see if the warrior uses piercing howl. Or maybe kite during freedom then HoJ and go melee (without being too predictable so as to invite spell reflects) after it passes. In his video I link below, Swifty talks about using a weird spec to beat rets that doesn't include piercing howl. If the warrior does that, then I suppose you could kite outside of freedom as long as you don't have hamstring on you.
Seal to Use: I would normally have thought to just use regular seal of righteousness, but I notice in this duel in a Swifty video the ret seems to be using seal of vengeance/corruption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoEQrIfRLeE&t=90s
Using seal of vengeance/corruption has a certain logic if you're kiting, since the dot keeps ticking even when you're out of range. However, I've seen reference to vengeace/corruption getting nerfed and requiring melee range to activate:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ion-discussion
Maybe that changes the logic of using vengeance/corruption against warriors, I tend to think so. So I plan to stick with righteousness against warriors, barring a good reason for doing otherwise. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Judgement to use: I assume Judgement of Light is best against warriors, since they don't have a sprint or baseline speed increase I'm aware of. Does JoJ negate the speed increase you get from boot enchants/meta gems? If so, then that could at least provide an argument for using it against warriors. Still, JoL seems best to me.
ROGUES:
When to kite: When you have freedom up, and when you have dispelled or otherwise don't have crippling poison on you.
Seal to use: Definitely vengeance/corruption, since it has the benefit of making re-stealths harder in addition to ticking outside of melee range.
Judgement to use: Justice, to negate sprint.
FERALS:
When to kite: When you have freedom up, and when you have dispelled or otherwise don't have infected wounds on you.
Seal to use: Vengeance/corruption- see above.
Judgement to use: Justice, to negate dash and feral baseline speed increase.
Anyway, there's probably a lot wrong in the above guesses, but that's why I'm asking. :)
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Member
Kiting as Ret
Edited: October 4, 2016
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Member
You shouldn't need to kite against any classes in 1v1. You should instead be going all out offensively and keeping auto-attack swings up on them.
The only exception to this would be if you're severly undergeared and your opponent is overgeared
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Forum Veteran
>Running just enough distance away for a window to hardcast 1 FoL/make them panic into running towards you to interupt a fake -> continue hardcasting a few FoL
>Kiting melee to sneak in some Judgement damage (and possibly a free AoW proc on crit) so your opponent falls behind
>Kiting to avoid **** like Retaliation, Seal damage into AMS giving them runic power, denying other paladins white damage while waiting for your own spambuttons to come off cd when you can continue rolling face again
Kiting is relevant.
Anddddd yes you should do more of it when you're undergeared/opponent is overgeared - /partially agree with post above.
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Banned
The enemy doesnt neccesarly need to be better geared.
It makes for example sense to kite a warrior when his trinkets proc. No reason to stay next to the warr when his dbw + sts procced.
Also against 100% arp geared prot warriors it makes sense to kite them and kill them with judgement because when u fight them in melee u just feed them with revenge procs.
Prot warrs are very easy to kite because they have hardly any slow effects.
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Member
I can't imagine a ret kiting my warr, just wont happen. Rogues, ferals and warrs have way too many gap closers and slows. I imagine you could kite a complete newbie who uses keyboard to turn, but then again kiting would be useless in this case. Also when you try kiting a warr that has procs up you need to pretty much jump 24/7 while rotating towards him to parr or dodge, and i quarantee in the end you will still take few more hits.
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Banned
There is a deathzone where u cant charge nor hit in melee.
Smart players will kite in the deathzone.
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Member
Piercing howl and im living on your back again ...
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Banned
Yes but it doesnt work during Hand of freedom. Also prot warr dont have piercing howl which makes it quite easy to kite them.
For other classes like Enh shami the key to beat a warr in 1v1 is this deathzone kiting and it also works as ret paly to some degree.
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Member
I dont play paladin much but using hof to deadzone rather than escaping intercept sounds ******ed. You need to actually get the distance somehow and only way that is happening is hof.... i do agree on mage,dk, feral, enha and rogue being able to actually benefit from deadzone, but pala... no never . Even a 1,5k warr will catch you . As ret you should go toe to toe with warrs since you counter them anyways, plus kiting means no aow procs so yeah, another gimp.
Edited: November 2, 2016 Reason: cant type
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Banned
Ret has 15% faster movement speed which makes it also possible to run out of the bladestorm range to avoid a few swings.
I was fighting against several ret palys with my prot warr. When the ret paly doesnt kite its quite easy to win the fight because of all the revenge procs and the high burst of full pve geared prot. However when the ret starts to kite and uses only judgement its hard, if not impossible, to win the duel.
So against prot warrs its definitely worth to kite. Arms warr under shieldwall, Shield Block and Retaliation should also be kited until the effect wears off.
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Forum Veteran
But the whole point is to avoid damage while still being able to land Judgements on them, and from those crits (which happens often) you still get your AoW
While I feel you're right about saving freedom for removing stuns rather than to kite, I'm sure there are moments where your runspeed/howl or hamstring falling off lets you deadzone kite
I think it's just each to his/her own playstyles here, and playing excessively safe is viable anyway so why not! You can heal, and any damage done is done - your opponent has fallen behind.
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