Cataclysm Final Grades: The State of Retribution

Inspired by a post at Tree Heals go Woosh. There are quite a few links there for different classes etc. This looks to be a topic where I can forge ahead without regard to wordcount, so obviously I’m in.

Do you feel that your class is better (in that it is more fun to play, more effective, etc.) now than it was at the end of Wrath?  Do you feel that your class is better now than it was at the beginning of Cataclysm?

I’ll be absolutely honest here: I was still levelling what would be my very first ever maxed character when Cata hit. I remember slaughtering spawning elementals in Netherstorm, and I remember eventually hitting 80 just before the new areas were released.

Here’s the thing, though… that character had been levelled the whole way as Ret, but the cata release broke it. Badly.

Deepholm sure is pretty

Rng was piled on rng, and the ret rotation consisted of long periods of doing nothing while waiting for Divine Purpose or mastery to proc. DP was adding one Holy Power at random, but could overcap on HP. Mastery effectively did what DP does now – randomly proc a free HP attack. Divine Storm was our only AoE, and it cost HP. Judgement was only worth using for the mana regen – its damage was a joke. Consecration was a good way to OOM yourself and get kicked for breaking CC at the same time. Inquisition was short-duration and, with only DS, Judgement and Exorcism doing holy damage, wasn’t worth the HP to use. Rebuke was talented-only.

So, in the period between the prerelease and hitting 85, I respecced Prot. If you want a prot writeup, though, there’s one here.

4.0.6 brought huge changes to paladins, with a rework of mastery and a change to the way DP worked. However, I was still too turned off by the ruining of my character to think of changing back. Besides, pallies were still hitting like preschoolers and t11 was notoriously melee-unfriendly. In the end I wouldn’t touch retribution until patch 4.2, when I levelled a whole new character.

Retribution as it stands at the moment is almost unrecognisable as the broken, pitiful wreck that the cata release reduced it to. My ret pally is undoubtedly my favourite character to play, and between keeping up Inq, dealing with procs, using rotational abilities and occasionally resorting to Cons – still ridiculously expensive – I never run out of things to do. Burst is very powerful in DS, and pally burst is absolutely unmatched. Hitting the OMG-button has never been so satisfying.

How much have you enjoyed or found uses for your class’ level 81, 83, and 85 abilities?  Given the chance, what would you have changed about them?

Holy all the things

I touched on how Inquisition was a bit of a failure in the beginning. Right now I’d say that Inq uptime is a big part of paladin interactivity, and I really like how it adds depth to our HP choices.

I’ll leave Holy Radiance to whoever decides to blog about how OP holy pallies are. It was neat to use on my Prot pally for fights like Chimaeron or even Cho’Gall, but with its present cast time it’s useless to anything but a healer.

The angry yellow man makes for a neat buildup to burst, or, more often, an ingredient as I forget to use it before for the buff. It started the expansion with a bad habit of going after the wrong targets or simply derping aimlessly, but changes to hunter pet stances seem to have brought it back in line.

Did you switch mains during Cataclysm?  If so, why did you make that choice?

I did. Initially I switched my paladin to prot, as explained above. For unrelated reasons I switched to a disc priest during t12, and that’s more or less officially my raiding main at the moment. The guild I moved to needed healers.

What were your class’/spec’s strengths throughout Cataclysm?  What were its weaknesses?

Retribution was honestly pretty weak throughout cata, and I’d say its strength was the community of paladins that stood by it. At the moment I’d say our strength is we’ve been worked over to the point where everything falls into place really well.

Weaknesses… well… the biggest was cascading Rng failures.

Did you enjoy the addition of the mastery stat?  What did you like about it, or, what would you change?

In its initial form, no. Actually, make that a hell no with cheese and chives. At the moment, though, it’s fairly inoffensive and contributes heavily to the importance of Inquisition, meaning it’s a big part of the complexity that makes Ret dps interesting right now.

How, if at all, did Cataclysm’s revamp of the talent trees affect your class?  Did you feel that these were changes for the better or for worse?

As a new player, I really wasn’t sure about a lot of my choices in the old talent trees. That said, grabbing low-hanging fruit in off-trees was kinda cool. Overall though I like that there aren’t any real dead ends in the current tree.

Did your class experience any significant changes or additions to its lore during this expansion?  If so, how did you feel about those changes?

Sunwalkers! I haven’t played a fresh Sunwalker paladin, but having played a priest I’m going to say it was more of a lore nonsplosion.

Is your class easier or harder for a fresh 85 to learn now than it was at the end of Wrath?  Is this a good or a bad thing?

I’d say that the Wrath ret model was much, much simpler. Much. On the plus side, it’s actually not as bad as Arms, Assassination or Enhancement, so adding a little depth was called for.

What aspects of your class’ gameplay do you think the designers really got right in this expansion?  What aspects were clear misses?

I’ll be absolutely clear here: the designers who worked on Ret at the release could not find their backsides with both hands. A class that you could simulate by rolling d20s and adding whatever number you rolled to your damage is a recipe for frustration.

Overall, do you enjoy the playstyle of your class more now, at the end of Cataclysm, than you did prior to patch 4.0 at the end of Wrath?  Why or why not?

Absolutely. I’ve come full circle this expansion, and Ret as it stands now is not the simple, ticking engine of Wrath, but is instead almost a geological event, forces drawing together from disparate sources to build something deeper, greater, more impressive than that engine could ever have dreamed to power.

Respect my burst or suffer.

Dis coNN ecC t

A public service announcement: the knockback at Prophet Barim in Tol’vir is broken. It now knocks one up into the air a short way, but no longer throws one out of the Circle of Doom around him. Without this cue, it seems that the tank and any melee you have will quite happily stick around in the circle and OOM the healer before complaining “hey, what happened?”. If you are the healer and have the ability to reincarnate, this may give you some pause in deciding whether to rez your party or not.

A question: why is it that some parties at low level will chat and behave themselves while others will contain at least two DPS trying to outpull the tank and be dead silent? Also, I hate that it’s nearly impossible to get aggro as a bear if you didn’t have it at the start of the pull. This has led to a tendency to charge face-first through dungeons trying to keep ahead of the deeps, which sometimes fails anyway and is pretty certain to annoy my healer at some point.

A theory: I recall reading that in Vanilla there were far fewer herb and ore nodes to harvest. As such, Alchemy and Blacksmithing would have been balanced in time investment against Leatherworking and Tailoring, whereas the former two are presently much, much easier. The latter two professions rely on mob kills for mats, and mob kills have remained relatively constant as availability of gathering nodes and the ease of gathering have improved. While having a rather nice sense of internal consistency, this theory falls apart completely when you look at the sheer amount of leather that LW needs at Cata level. Which leaves only the impression that someone took an incredibly lazy approach to the design of LW levelling, and needs a motivational crowbar to the shins.

The mill of time

…grinds slow but fine, they say.

There have been three mounts that I’ve wanted since I saw them. The first was the war talbuk. The second was the Sunreaver Dragonhawk, which I have on my tank pally. The third, well…

o hai there

The third was that beauty. Excuse the image quality, MSPaint is my master at the moment.

The funny thing is that I made it through the months-long daily grind with my first pally to get the Sunreaver Dragonhawk from the Argent Tournament, but never touched the Shattari Skyguard rep before yesterday. All told, it probably took around 5 hours to get from Neutral to Exalted.

I suppose I just expected it to be harder… sort of like the Argent Timesink. The nether ray mounts themselves are unique in appearance, and while I suspect they share a lot of the animation framework of the dragonhawk mounts, they still give an eerie sort of alien impression as they hang in the air.

It is impossible for a mount to look bad against this sky.

For those who haven’t done it before, the progression of quests is quite simple: pick up the starter quest from the Skyguard Recruiter standing next to Shattrath’s flight master. He’ll send you on some busywork first, but will soon send you to the Skyguard base near Skettis. There you’ll meet the delightful captain Aldaris, presently not in posession of a full set of marbles, and his adjundant who sports the most magnificent set of goggles.

The assistant will send you looking for dust from the local Arakkoa – creepy bastards, I can’t stand them personally – and upon your return will administer a draught made with this substance to the captain, who as it turns out is in better possession of his faculties than one might suspect.

The captain then proceeds to send the player on a fairly standard assassination mission, with the flavour element that the player can only see the targets while under the effect of the draught. This is followed by a disguise-and-gather mission slyly given by the captain’s prisoner, and then a quest to summon four miniboss elites by means of scrolls carried by other mobs who are only visible under the influence.

Once this is accomplished, it will turn out that the noble captain has been in the know and tacitly supporting the prisoner’s plans, and will require that the player summon and destroy an elite boss mob on the island at the center of Skettis.

Once this is done, the player may turn in dust for further draughts, and may turn in a set of tokens gathered from the four minibosses for an item which allows the summoning of the final mob once more. You do get a token off each miniboss the first time that you kill them – these tokens are green items which vendor for just over a gold piece each, hope you kept them. The minibosses can be resummoned using scrolls as per the first time.

The minibosses give 110 rep each to exalted, any arakkoa mob in skettis gives 11, a draught turn in gives 165, a token turn in gives 385, and the final boss gives 550. The small birds flying around give 5 rep, but only until revered. There are a couple of dailies in the area, but honestly, they shouldn’t really feature heavily in your calculations. You’ll also get a ludicrous amount of Netherweave, some neat blues for transmog, and a few BoEs for other people’s transmog.

So, if you haven’t, go grab all the mounts. Do it. Now.

Because this is worth it.

The rule of Six

Arioch seems to have tagged me in a blogging game. I don’t have anyone to tag, but as this will be my 101st published post, it’s pretty obvious that I’ll kick in for anything that I can shove on the front page. Also I’d feel a little bad if I didn’t at least respond.

The rules are apparently to go to your sixth image folder and post the sixth image in the folder. Arioch has, unsurprisingly, cheated, and seems to expect WoW screenshots from her tagees. Little does she know that I don’t actually keep screenshots, but I do have a file system characterised by my fiancee as “convoluted” and “ridiculous”.

Derp face dairy edition

This is from the comic Scandinavia and the World. I mostly saved it because of the 6th image (panel?) there. SatW is pretty… special. I visit the comic because it’s not blocked at work, but the artist’s gallery is also worthy of perusal, particularly if you’re into dodgy demons and cuddly trolls.

Go forth, look, be amazed, be amused, be bemused and butter BUTTER buTTEr BUtteR BuTtEr

So you want to tank with your face

As most folks hitting dungeon queues will tell you, plate is the byword for tanking. Let’s face it – when you’re looking at absorbing blows from sharp, pointy, often oversized weapons, you’re not immediately going to look over at your teddy-bear collection and think, “hey, Mr. Ruffles there looks pretty tough! I’ll roll a bear!”

In time, though, you may look at the lockstepped armies of puckered-up, punch-drunk pansies, and decide that plate is for pussies. So you roll a feral druid.

You poor bastard.

Let’s run through the first 30 levels or so.

1-7: You’re a caster. Not a very good caster. Live with it.

No discussion of druids is complete without Sesebi.

8-14: You’re a cat! Mash Mangle until things drop their things so you can buy more things. Have fun being a cut-price rogue, but be aware that this will in no way, means or form prepare you for your eventual task. Take a couple of points in feral swiftness when you start doing talent tree stuff. It makes Fedexing much more bearable, and it comes with a baked-in bear bonus.

Get used to re-reading your tooltips, since most of your talents do two completely different things.

15-17: Bear form at last! You now realise that many of your abilities have “bear form” and “cat form” variants. Welcome to paying for everything twice. Maybe this is meant to make up for getting two talent points for the price of one. Hope you have an alt to send over a couple of gold. For a lowbie, this shit gets expensive.

Paradoxically, you may feel somewhat alarmed by how empty your bear-bar is. Your abilities come down to:

• Mangle. This hits like a whiffle bat but leaves a pretty nice bleed going and increases bleed damage.
• Maul. Hits pretty hard, especially since it’s boosted by effects that amp bleeds. Unfortunately, it’s expensive as hell.
• Growl. You’ll recognise this if you’ve ever played a hunter. It’s a taunt. It’s also your only pulling tool until the mid-twenties.
• Demoralizing roar. Honestly, I’m not sure whether it’s meant to demoralize the player or the target at this point. “Wait,” you might think as you read the spell description,* “this is my only AoE ability. Isn’t this tooltip missing the damage?” It is not. What this ability does is debuff nearby enemies. Don’t look down on it too hard, though – it’s the cheapest ability that you have, and in early levels you’ll likely find yourself mashing it just to get some threat, any threat up on groups. In later levels you’ll keep it up simply because you have no cooldowns and it’s the only way you have to keep enemies from turning you into a stylish rug.

This bear is confused by the flowers, because it is a simple creature.

Level 15 is also notable for being the first level where you can pop into the dungeon finder. By all means, do so if you want to learn about tab-targetting and careful pulling. Or if you want to gape jealously at the classes who got their AoE before you did, and then chase mobs across three different rooms while the aforementioned classes run steadfastly away from you with the mobs glued to them.

Ragefire chasm is the lowest-level dungeon, and is fairly linear at first with single-mob pulls, and gets trickier with multi-mob pulls later. I recommend it for bear cubs. The Deadmines are your other option. Good luck with the groups of four or more Defias in there.

You’ll likely get dumped into Wailing Caverns long before you have any AoE. Experienced tanks will often say that any tank that taunts on trash is a bad tank. Swallow that pride and don’t spill a drop, because either you Growl or you have a healer covered in snakes. I can tell you from personal experience that healers react to snakes in much the same fashion as Indiana Jones, except with more invective directed toward nearby, supposedly friendly, fauna.

18: With Swipe, you’ll finally have an actual AoE damage ability. Somehow it costs about half what Maul does. The sense there is no making. Unfortunately, you’ll likely get this in the middle of WC and then spend the rest of the run cursing about how you don’t have it.

19: It’s easy to overlook as a PvP talent, but check out Infected Wounds. This applies a move-speed and attack-speed debuff to anything affected by your major bleeds, making cleanup of running mobs easier and managing incoming damage somewhat. Keep this lesson in mind, because it seems the crossover between what seem to be PvP utility or DPS abilities and the bear’s mitigation model seem to run pretty deep.

20: Somehow I missed reading what exactly Omen of Clarity does when I bought it, thinking it was some pansyish castery-like skill. So I’ll spell it out here.

This is what you can expect from a druid skill tooltip.

It makes bear playable.

I’m not even kidding here. Up until this point, a bear is starved for rage in a way that makes me think that playing up to this point is some sort of test of patience, or maybe an accidentally leaked punishment for captured gold-farmers. What the ability actually does is give a chance of your attacks, spells and autoattacks making your next rage-cost ability free. My advice is if you see those green vines, hit Maul before anything else. Regardless, this marks your exit from the purgatory of early bear levelling, emerging cleansed and tempered.

22: Enrage makes its debut at this point, solidifying your newfound confidence in the ability to, you know, actually have any rage at all ever, but especially when you need it. Somehow Skull Bash sneaked its way out of the purgatory and up here, though. An interrupt on a 1 minute CD, with a rage cost of 15 and no apparent way to reduce that. Spiffing, chaps. Think of it as picking out the last of the obsidian shards gouged into your tender paws. Let the healing begin.

24: I think Faerie Fire is a pretty good ability. Eh applies sunder armour and doesn’t afraid of anything. A free ability with a cooldown short enough to use in rotation, a range long enough for pulling or for grabbing incoming mobs, damage, a debuff, bonus threat and which can be talented and glyphed to be even better? This is your payoff. Your reward. Easily the best ability you’ll get for a fair while.

Getting Faerie Fire made me so happy. You do not even.

29: It’s not strictly an ability, but this is the first level where you can talent into feral charge. It’s also the level where you can start taking Thick Hide, but you may be so starved for buttons to press that it doesn’t even feature as a choice. Bear in mind*** that your new shiny charge has a rage cost, though. So much for being just like warriors.

By this point, the bear actually feels like a pretty good tank. Congratulations! It only took over 1/3 of your character’s lifespan to become functional on a basic level. That said, you still don’t have any cooldowns. The future is brighter than the past, though, so keep running forward!

If only because you don’t have the rage to Charge.

* reading druid tooltips is probably best done after getting some sort of technical writing degree**, or maybe experience in WWII-era cryptology.

** do these exist?

*** after avoiding this expression for most of the post, it somehow sneaked out there into the open. aargh.

Green Zs

Zzz...

Been taking a bit of a break on the raiding front. It was getting a bit ridiculous anyway – the FL legendary run thursday, prog run friday, alt run sunday, prog run follow-up tuesday, LFR for a couple of toons in between…

This probably sounds like a bit of a joke schedule for guys who are really into raiding, but for the last week I’ve been back to my true love – my army of alts. Mostly my now-78, almost 79 shammy.

She’s been levelled as Resto since day 1, with a short break in the transition between 55-60 to play as Enhance. Last night I dusted off the agi set she’s been compulsively hauling around in her bags, cast my array of neon lights, and set to work pounding people to paste in Zul’drak and Icecrown.

Windfury, flametongue, stormstrike and lava lash tend to produce quite the spectacle. It’s fun just to watch. *flails madly* *crackles of thunder and the burning and the lightning and the oh an open gcd WOLVES OH YES HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR SOFT FLESHY BITS NOW*

By the time I hit 78, though, those open GCDs were coming a bit closer together. Despite their current rep for very steady damage, the rotation seems a bit frontloaded and runs headlong into a tar-pit if you don’t get enough Maelstrom procs. Still, I don’t have Reverberation yet, and being able to cast Shocks more often would likely tighten it up a bit. ‘Sides, it’s cool to whip out the wolves every couple of minutes.

Fiancee asked last night what it plays like. Honestly? Nothing. I really can’t think of anything that would be a sensible comparison with this. As a healer, well, the toolkit is great and I honestly love having a ranged interrupt, but still feels a lot like “green bars go up hurr durr”. As a melee? A shaman is explosive.

And gone

On sunday I deleted my rogue. lvl 85, geared to ilvl 378… but a rogue is a main, not an alt. As I transferred his riches in preparation for the delete, I couldn’t help but have a thought of him taking to the shadows to provide for his people.

Rades, you bastard. I can’t do that quest anymore.

The freshly-opened slot is now occupied by a troll druid. Female, because apparently I like being mortified by my character selection screen. Honestly, what’s with the chicken drumstick legs? And I made the mistake of picking one of the faces other than the generic “pretty”* one that everyone uses, because apparently somewhere deep inside me there’s a 15 year old who thinks he’ll be cool and special if he does things differently, like a counterculture maverick. It occurs to me that I haven’t taken the crowbar to his crisp, fragile shins recently enough.

There’s something very wrong when a decomposing abomination draped in shattered armour is more attractive and better-animated than the primal voodoo chica wearing tight leather. At least she looks striking as a big, scruffy white-and-blue tiger. This may be the first time I’d ever consider paying for a race change – to troll, male. And that only because of all the leather I’ve invested in getting LW up to 150ish.

Seriously. ALL THE LEATHER. It’s ridiculous when recipes cost 8-12 pieces, plus other assorted mats, from skill lvl 50. I’m sort of hoping it’s like JC, which gets better as you get out of Vanilla skill levels, but I’m told it gets worse. There’s something very wrong with this prof, and if it wasn’t the only one I’m missing for a full set then I wouldn’t even consider it an option.

No whining this time about RNG holiday mounts and achievements. I’ve done the questline on the new troll because it was a handy source of quick xp… but none of my characters will do the dungeon this year. This “lolumad, try next year” approach to getting nice things is frustrating design, and I refuse to get involved in it. The token-bought mounts are hideous, only there to pad numbers on the stable, but at least they actually exist. That’s a big step in the right direction.

Huh. So much for “no whining”. I blame the 15 year old. Brb, toolshed…

 

* actually more like “derp”, but we’re talking comparatively here

The Small Stuff

No jaw, but this is our team post-kill.

Herewith a bit of detail on last night’s kill.

1 tank, 2 healers, 7 dps.

Composition:

• Protection paladin
• Discipline priest
• Restoration shaman
• Fire mage
• Another fire mage
• Balance druid
• Subtlety rogue
• Warlock. I have no idea what spec
• Shadow priest
• Marksmanship hunter

Legendaries: none, though the rogue does have the first-step daggers and both mages have second-step staves.

Platform order: Ysera, Alexstraza, Nozdormu, Kalecgos.

Loot: No’kaled and some agi dagger that no-one other than the rogue cares about.

Notes:

• PW:B is great for dealing with the elementium bolt that goes through at the end.
• Having a balance druid who can tranq just after is very useful.
• Having a shadowpriest who can hymn through the second set of burning tentacles is also good.
• Both of these are useful because you’ll want your primary healer hitting all of their CDs and burning Divine Hymn when the damage starts getting out of hand on the last platform. Even that is likely to be marginal, if your priest happens to be, say, Disc.
• Time your Hymn carefully. When the damage starts getting out of hand, it snowballs.
• A shadowpriest is useful in general. With the damage and haste buffs, Vampiric Embrace is worth over 6k hps over the course of the fight.
• If you have a resto shaman, save Spirit Link for the Terrors. Get everyone you can stacked in the yellow swirl and pop it when the tank starts making desperate sounds on Mumble.
• A pally tank can remove his Tetanus stacks with a Divine Shield. Timed correctly, this can be done while a Terror is still alive but low enough that it’s unlikely to kill anyone before it goes down.
• In the event that the pally does DS early, it helps if your rogue has a) a good deal of threat, and b) Evasion off cooldown.
• I need to explain “cancelaura” to our paladin.
• It is possible to avoid all damage from Impale by using Hand of Protection. This also needs to be timed properly; too soon and you’ll lose someone else in melee range of the Corruption.
• If you learn to do this fight without Replenishment, you’ll be swimming in mana when you do have it.
• An Arms warrior is brilliant for dealing with the Blood adds; you will miss him if you’re used to having one.
• Handing out potions does help.
• This is a ludicrously long fight.

We got the kill on our fourth pull.

First pull was close – 2% – but we’d lost a rogue to the Impale early, so we couldn’t Rebirth the lock when he didn’t move from the Bolt on the last platform. I don’t really blame him – he isn’t a usual part of our raid group, and has only seen the fight in Raid Finder.

Second pull was again close but the tank had died very quickly on the Terrors and we lost 2 other DPS before they went down. No Rebirth because we’d lost the tank earlier while trying to heal a group of people who didn’t quite get the idea of “spread” on a corruption.

Third pull we lost due to miscommunication. Got to Kalecgos’ platform, called for Hymn on the second set of burning tentacles, and got… Hymn of Hope. Whoops. Healers tried to save it but couldn’t manage by the time we realised.

Fourth pull everything went well enough. I won’t say perfectly – in the end there were four people standing, all on low health, when the boss went down. One or two more ticks of the AoE and it would have been a wipe. I’ll take it, though.

Should be a bit easier with the nerf, but I’m glad we got it before. Those 2- and 3% wipes were painful. I hope that the group maintains its focus, though – nothing spells a wipe more clearly than a raid group that goes in expecting the fight to be easy because it’s been slightly nerfed. We gave it pretty much everything, and still only barely got the kill. It’ll be easier, but still not a cakewalk for us.

Great Success

I'll get the killshot tomorrow

Made it. Around 1 hour into raid time, day before the nerf EU. 1 tank, 2 healers, 7 dps.

Dearest LFRoaches

Did you know that healers have the shortest LFR queue? Of course you do; some of you have been taking advantage of the fact to queue as healer and then play as DPS. Now, try to bring to mind why exactly our queue is so short.

I, as a healer, need nothing from LFR. The only thing it’s good for is relatively easy valour. However, when we wipe on Madness and you blame the “lazy healers” – whose HPS are putting half of the DPS to shame, on a fight where the healing buff is removed first and the damage buff is insane – then I don’t want to queue as a healer any more.

By all means, keep blaming the healers. Keep pulling 18k DPS on Madness. Watch your queue time grow. I’ll be over here in the LFD queue, as far from your stinking, useless carcasses as possible, where personal responsibility means something and you’ll likely get kicked for your lackluster performance long before you’ve cost me a repair bill.