Retribution Paladins Are Dead! (At Least That’s What They Say)

Poor retribution tree. For the longest time it was only known as the Paladin leveling tree and had no place it raids at all. If you were a Retribution paladin in the pre-TBC days you were laughed at and ridiculed. Even with the improvements made to the tree in TBC, the tree still hasn’t truly cemented itself as raid viable. This is why a lot of hope was placed for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion where the reworked tree with the new talents had great promise in truly being raid viable. Then came the nerf to the talent Judgements of the Wise, angering the whole Ret pally community.

Old version, 3/3

Your judgement spells restore mana to up to 3 group or raid members totaling 60% of the damage caused.

New version. 3/3

Your judgement spells have a 100% chance to grant up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.5% of their maximum mana per second.

The reason why Retribution paladins are mad is that they saw the talent as the saving grace for their mana problems. The old version made it such that their mana was just like another rage bar, since it was generated that fast. Of course, even I admit this is a bit over the top. But the nerf brought the talent from great to really really bad. The fact of the matter is, Retribution paladins will be sharing their gear with Death Knights and Warriors, two classes who don’t use mana at all and thus the absence of the Intellect stat. Even with the increase from 3 players to 10 players, the fact is the talent as it is now is going to suck now that it’s based on mana, which Ret paladins will have little of, instead of damage caused. Even Enhancement shamans and hunters tend to have some Intellect and even mp5 at times as part of their gear. Ret pallies will have none of that. As it is now, paladins will produce decent damage and will have great raid utility with talents like Sheath of Light and Divine Storm but will only be effective for a short period of time, going OOM right away. This is why “ret pallies are dead” is the going saying now.

Blizzard poster Ghostcrawler gives some hope though with his recent post in response to this matter.

We haven’t done much work on mana generation or sustainability in part because we were working on the massive buff changes and the mana battery mechanics in general. While managing your mana is something we want you to have to consider (else why have mana at all?), ideally we don’t want to balance a class around “well this guy can do a lot but runs out of mana really fast.” That’s not a fun mechanic. source

Maybe when the work on mana generation and sustainability is implemented we’ll be able to see Ret pallies “alive” once again – viable but not as OP as they were reported to be and not really bad either.