And He's Back
Well guys I'm back from vacation. It was a wonderful trip full of memories my family will keep for a long time. I really needed the break from work, from WoW.
I'm not sure that pressing in with several thousands 'friends' in the Florida heat was the ideal way to relax, but my daughter had a really good time.
Allow me to take a moment and give a special shout out to the Ramada Gateway in Kissimmee, FL on Irlo Bronson Memorial aka Highway 192. We stayed at this lovely establishment the first night we got into town. After check in you are directed to the concierge desk to get your parking pass. This is simply a ploy to get you over to their concierge, which at this hotel seems to be nothing more than a high pressure sales man. He gave me a hard sell to attend a 'tour of their new resort' aka a Time Share the next morning.
It's a seven to eight hour drive from where I live to Kissimmee. I wasn't really up to dealing with him, so I put him off as long as I could. Once I finally got my parking pass from him, I told him I would talk with my wife who was waiting out in the car.
I got to car and started to close the door so I could explain to my wife what was going on. But here comes Captain Salesman running out of the hotel and up to my car insisting to know if I was really going to talk to my wife. I told him he was pushing way too hard and the more he pushed the less likely I was to agree to anything. When he started to talk again, I slammed the door and told me wife to floor it.
We stayed just the night. Luckily we already had other accommodations lined up for the rest of the week.
Yeah, I'll never stay at that hotel ever again. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'll never stay at another Ramada hotel ever again.
The rest of the trip was simply incredible.
I came back to learn that my guild had one shot the new Coliseum boss, Lord Jaxxius. They found him a bit easy.
I ran some heroics to get back into the swing of things. I was sure to run the Daily Heroic and Trial of the Champion.
As you might imagine, with me being a Paladin and all, I'm really enjoying Patch 3.2 as Protection. Ardent Defender is really cool, and I love having Vindication aka Demo Shout. Paladins are as competitive as they've ever been, perhaps even a little too competitive when it comes to threat.
But never fear, your developers are right there for you. Righteous Fury, the Paladin's defensive stance, is getting its threat nerfed by whopping 10%. That's right, 10% less threat from Holy spells in the next Minor patch. Please wait until a major patch to buff Paladins, but get those nerfs in as soon as you can. If not a hotfix, then certainly a minor patch. No need to wait 3 or 4 months.
While I don't like getting nerfed (who does), Tankadins needed to be brought into line with the other tank classes. If it was Druids, Warriors or DKs who were way ahead on threat, I'd be calling for them to be nerfed (or more likely for Paladins to be buffed.)
While I'm having a blast with Protection, I'm enjoying Retribution less so.
We did some PVP over the weekend and Ret really feels weak. I'm not sure what the Developers want to do with PVP Ret right now. All Ret could really do was pressure with high damage/high burst. That's pretty much gone now. I tried Seal of Command, Seal of Righteousness and Seal of Vengeance. None of them felt like they would really put out much damage. It just didn’t feel like I could threaten another player. An undergeared alt from my guild out damaged me most every battleground.
For once in my life I managed to keep my finger off the 'Push to Talk' key and didn't complain over vent.
Ret simply isn't much fun anymore. I actively started thinking about the Proly (Prot/Holy) build. But before I could even start really researching it, I learned it's going to be made extinct. Not just nerfed, but gutted. It's not working as intended.
What do the developers want Prot Paladins to do in PVP? Apparently we can't be healing, that got nerfed. We also aren't supposed to be damage, as you can see with the addition of diminishing returns to Shield of Righteousness to stop big Shield Slam crits.
My problem is that I need Ret as my offspec for fights where I'm not needed to tank. The beauty of Ret was that I could also PVP pretty well in that spec and still do pretty good damage when needed.
If I went with a Prot PVE/Prot PVP dual spec or a Prot PVE/Holy PVP build, I wouldn't be able to contribute much damage when I wasn't needed as a Tank. I don't know if I would enjoy PVP healing more than PVE healing. I would need to grind out a ton of gear just to see if I liked the Holy PVP playstyle, and I'd waste all the Ret gear I've gathered. The honor grind isn't too tough and I'm sure I could get some crafted gear to start out. Maybe I need to give another try.
I'm not sure that pressing in with several thousands 'friends' in the Florida heat was the ideal way to relax, but my daughter had a really good time.
Allow me to take a moment and give a special shout out to the Ramada Gateway in Kissimmee, FL on Irlo Bronson Memorial aka Highway 192. We stayed at this lovely establishment the first night we got into town. After check in you are directed to the concierge desk to get your parking pass. This is simply a ploy to get you over to their concierge, which at this hotel seems to be nothing more than a high pressure sales man. He gave me a hard sell to attend a 'tour of their new resort' aka a Time Share the next morning.
It's a seven to eight hour drive from where I live to Kissimmee. I wasn't really up to dealing with him, so I put him off as long as I could. Once I finally got my parking pass from him, I told him I would talk with my wife who was waiting out in the car.
I got to car and started to close the door so I could explain to my wife what was going on. But here comes Captain Salesman running out of the hotel and up to my car insisting to know if I was really going to talk to my wife. I told him he was pushing way too hard and the more he pushed the less likely I was to agree to anything. When he started to talk again, I slammed the door and told me wife to floor it.
We stayed just the night. Luckily we already had other accommodations lined up for the rest of the week.
Yeah, I'll never stay at that hotel ever again. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'll never stay at another Ramada hotel ever again.
The rest of the trip was simply incredible.
I came back to learn that my guild had one shot the new Coliseum boss, Lord Jaxxius. They found him a bit easy.
I ran some heroics to get back into the swing of things. I was sure to run the Daily Heroic and Trial of the Champion.
As you might imagine, with me being a Paladin and all, I'm really enjoying Patch 3.2 as Protection. Ardent Defender is really cool, and I love having Vindication aka Demo Shout. Paladins are as competitive as they've ever been, perhaps even a little too competitive when it comes to threat.
But never fear, your developers are right there for you. Righteous Fury, the Paladin's defensive stance, is getting its threat nerfed by whopping 10%. That's right, 10% less threat from Holy spells in the next Minor patch. Please wait until a major patch to buff Paladins, but get those nerfs in as soon as you can. If not a hotfix, then certainly a minor patch. No need to wait 3 or 4 months.
While I don't like getting nerfed (who does), Tankadins needed to be brought into line with the other tank classes. If it was Druids, Warriors or DKs who were way ahead on threat, I'd be calling for them to be nerfed (or more likely for Paladins to be buffed.)
While I'm having a blast with Protection, I'm enjoying Retribution less so.
We did some PVP over the weekend and Ret really feels weak. I'm not sure what the Developers want to do with PVP Ret right now. All Ret could really do was pressure with high damage/high burst. That's pretty much gone now. I tried Seal of Command, Seal of Righteousness and Seal of Vengeance. None of them felt like they would really put out much damage. It just didn’t feel like I could threaten another player. An undergeared alt from my guild out damaged me most every battleground.
For once in my life I managed to keep my finger off the 'Push to Talk' key and didn't complain over vent.
Ret simply isn't much fun anymore. I actively started thinking about the Proly (Prot/Holy) build. But before I could even start really researching it, I learned it's going to be made extinct. Not just nerfed, but gutted. It's not working as intended.
What do the developers want Prot Paladins to do in PVP? Apparently we can't be healing, that got nerfed. We also aren't supposed to be damage, as you can see with the addition of diminishing returns to Shield of Righteousness to stop big Shield Slam crits.
My problem is that I need Ret as my offspec for fights where I'm not needed to tank. The beauty of Ret was that I could also PVP pretty well in that spec and still do pretty good damage when needed.
If I went with a Prot PVE/Prot PVP dual spec or a Prot PVE/Holy PVP build, I wouldn't be able to contribute much damage when I wasn't needed as a Tank. I don't know if I would enjoy PVP healing more than PVE healing. I would need to grind out a ton of gear just to see if I liked the Holy PVP playstyle, and I'd waste all the Ret gear I've gathered. The honor grind isn't too tough and I'm sure I could get some crafted gear to start out. Maybe I need to give another try.
Comments
The Ret PvP is fantastically un-spectacular. I don't enjoy it at all.
I just don't understand what the dev's want us to do in PvP. We have ZERO burst potential now, to the point where having no gap closer has become as big of a liability as it ever has been. We need to be in range 100% of the time to even have a chance to kill a target. Healers? Forget about it.
I think the dev's want to pressure us more into the choice of using the wings or bubble. But the gains from the wings just don't cut it. Even more than ever, I feel as if I cannot use those wings because I will never be able to kill the person I am battling it out with. I need the defensive bubble to even have a chance at downing them.
If you check my armory you'll see my pve ret and pvp ret specs are totally different. I'm sealing with command for pvp and im still getting the big numbers, on account of gear and stat balancing. But overall I would say that now more then ever to be successful as ret in either arena or bgs it all comes down to using your cd's smartly to outlast/play your oppenent and knowing when they have used theirs to apply that extra damage that wings and/or a trinket can add.