Cata Ret Healers Back?

[BrothelMeister]

No need to post a spec, as they are all so similar, but do you think that ret healing will be back in Cata?

Primarily from a PvP standpoint, the mobility, and offensive power of a Ret pally, wearing Holy gear. Obviousely the damage will be lower, and probably the healing would go down to some extent, but I would think if one or all of the ret paladins were wearing holy gear, when they get into melee range, the healing output would be insane (Zealotry + CS + WoG spam anyone?). You would also have access to the CC abilities, and could rely more on instant heals than stopping to cast.

Not sure what the loss is in healing potential, or how high the damage is, but if someone could check, I would be interested

[Noids]

Don't have access to my toons at the moment to test, but I don't think holy gear over ret gear would actually give bigger heals, just more mana to spend.

The atk pwr to spell pwr conversion means our heals will still be effective in ret gear. Considering our instant heal uses holy power inetad of mana, the mana pool isn't so important anyway.

What I have seen as being very effective though is playing rets in a shockadin type style. Having 2 min cooldown on avenging wrath which then allows hammer and exos to be cast continuously means that every 2 minutes I can kill that pesky kiting mage in 1-2 GCDs. I played around with the holy shockadin build a bit and as you mentioned, the utility of ret with CCs, damage, healing and mana recovery is very nice for PvP.

[remanz]

Rather than calling it doesn't work. I would say it is not likely to work.

Ret in melee DPS gear can't heal for long. OOM too quick. Burst healing output is decent though. But can't sustain it. Its more like save you once kinda thing. and the healing output is not close to Holy.

Ret in Holy gear can't DPS. The melee dps is too low.

Shockdin is way better (both DPS + healing) right now though I don't see Blizzard will tolerate holy paladin's current status.

[Mosg2]

They've been buffing Pally healing on beta. /shrug

I tried out 4x Holy Pally dmg spam and it's just... Meh.

[Noids]

I agree on the shockadin dmg. Pounding a dummy I can get close to 2.5k dps which isn't really enough for PvP in 251 gear and it lacks the burst of the rets.

I was also disappointed that my holy pally in 2.5k SP gear was hitting for less with exo than my rets were. For shockadins to be a really viable spec I think they would need to allow holy pallys to achieve 100% bonus to dmg from spell crits similar to all other offensive casters. They obviously can't increase the base or co-efficient damage or this would buff rets too much, but for a spec that is primarily casting, it would be nice to receive full benefit from crits.

This would obviously be a major buff though and considering the healing capabilities would probably be too OP.

[BrothelMeister]

Holy geared Rets would not be doing melee for the damage, they would be casting.

[remanz]

Rets in Holy gear just casting, no melee ? Why not just go holy then. Rets can't heal better than Holy, Can't cast (ex, judge) better than Holy. Its like lose lose.

Only gain repen, and some run speed.

[Zappy]

I'm not sure if much has really changed on paladins lately, but all I can say is holy crap. I finally got around and gave my tank a pvp spec - went frost, and it while tuning a DPS cast sequence, and I was able to get my DK to sustain 8k on the test dummys. Now the crazy part about this is that on my last go, I unmuted my clone and let them all wack the test dummys, and I'm able to sustain 8k dps on my paladins for ~4 min as well. Does the 10% haste buff give that much more to the ret paladins? If so, I think I need to look at getting another 9-10% haste so they can have 30% total and see what kind of damage they do. I need to rerun my test with my DK in blood, as the last time I ran it, my paladins were seeing around 5k dps.

I've been running heroics more than anything lately, to farm a little more tank gear (around 5700gs on my tank now) and in the meantime I've built up nearly 3k justice points and another 1k honor on my paladins, so I may try them in the shockadin spec with full holy gear for lack of nothing better to do at the moment. Heroics were extremely easy as shockadins without any mana issues, but I'd really like to see what they are capable of with matching gear.

I will say that Word of Glory is an amazing heal for rets right now. Without changing anything in any of my dps castsequences for my rets which includes Templar's Verdict and Divine Storm in the rotation, anytime any one of my toons takes burst damage, I have a keybind that used to be my flash heals for each toon. Rather now, it casts Word of Glory on the focused toon, and it'll top them off almost every time. I was a bit worried that my castsequence would get stuck on one of the other holy power dumps (templars verdict, etc), but I haven't seen any issues with it at all. I added a modifier key (shift) for my keybinds that I can use for flash heals, but there's been so few times that I've actually needed to flash heal. I got heroic POS the other day, and by using Word of Glory for heals, I didn't even come close to wiping, whereas my first attempt a few weeks back was horrible.

After doing some pvp, i'm finding it a lot easier to stay alive by using the Word of Glory for heals. Not to mention, popping wings is now a death sentence for at least 2 of the opposing players. I took down a 118k HP bear in WG with 3 stacks of tenacity on him in 2 gcds.

One big key I've found here is to put exorcism in your normal dps sequence, and leave hammer of wrath as the free cast.

So instead of
/castsequence ...............(long dps macro with no exorcism)
/cast Exorcism
/cast Hammer of Wrath
/stopcasting

I have
/castsequence ..........(long dps macro with exorcism in the middle)
/cast Hammer of Wrath

If you run the first scenario, the stopcasting seems lose too much dps to be worth it - especially after having a frost DK as you lose most of the haste benefits. The other problem is if exorcism is not an instant cast, then the fall through for hammer of wrath won't fire. By using this scenerio, when you pop wings, you're knocking the crap out of whatever you have focused.

There's been very few times in pvp where my exorcisms weren't a free instant cast, and in those scenarios, unless you stop to cast them normally, you'll lose a little dps, but with 3 others, this hasn't been much of an issue.

The real downside I've seen with this team so far is when they take AOE damage it's very difficult and mana intensive to try and keep them all up. I've found it's better to just bubble all of them and pop wings and heal back up after a few of the opponents are dead.

[remanz]

Hmmm, 8k dps on dummy. Is it heroic dummy ? or just lvl 80 dummy. With just pvp gear, that's really good. I have windfury in my group, and I cannot get that, which is the same 10% melee haste. I only get it if I pop bloodlust. But that's a whopping 30% damage increase. And in 4mins, 8k sustainable dps is really nice.


I gave up on full rets. I will swap 1 enhance shaman in for the goodies. And let's see what can a shaman do to my team.

[Zappy]

Hmmm, 8k dps on dummy. Is it heroic dummy ? or just lvl 80 dummy. With just pvp gear, that's really good. I have windfury in my group, and I cannot get that, which is the same 10% melee haste. I only get it if I pop bloodlust. But that's a whopping 30% damage increase. And in 4mins, 8k sustainable dps is really nice.


I gave up on full rets. I will swap 1 enhance shaman in for the goodies. And let's see what can a shaman do to my team.

Good question and good point. I reran 4 different tests tonight. On the 80 dummy (non-heroic), I'm not hit capped - just under 4% since I traded my ashen verdict ring in for the wisdom one. In tank spec, I was seeing between 5500 and 5800 on all my paladins (tank @ 1.5k lol). in frost, DPS jumped up from 6.1-6.3k.

Retesting on the L70 dummy so that I wouldn't have any misses is where I was seeing a sustained 8k. What's more interesting is that in blood, I see 6.5-7k dps on my palys, however frost jumps them all up to 7.6-8k, so it appears to me in both cases, that haste is a clear winner for this team.

Oh yah. I forgot another big one that I learned from playing my shockadins. Try switching from seal of righteousness to seal of truth. To give you a straight comparison, on the L70 dummy:

Seal of Righteousness and my DK spec'd frost: 5.6-5.7k
Seal of Truth and DK spec'd frost: 7.6-8k