I decided to make a place where I can write about my feelings and experiences playing WoW. Regardless of whether a lot of people find it interesting to read about, having to put my thoughts into writing often helps me distill particular thoughts about different aspects of the game, so I’ll probably make posts sporadically in a similar vein. This post is mostly going to be about my first experiences playing Ret in PvE post rework, and everything else that happened this week to do with 10.0.7.
First Raid
The TS playstyle is really fun to me. I love having definitive priorities on generators rather than them all sorta murkily being good, and they all feel good to press, especially compared to old CS or Consecration, especially the generators on AoE. VoJ took a little bit of getting used to, but it was much easier to get my head around it than I was worried about. ES windows are frequent enough that you don’t end up doing awful damage outside of CDs, and the doubledipping on Rasz is a nice bonus.
Damage
As far as damage goes, Ret’s profile is very different to what it used to be. Ret used to be pretty anemic on ST, but was able to basically run a full AoE build without losing and ST damage, did very strong passive cleave, and also had good burst AoE. Now, Ret has quite strong single target and passable AoE, although you drop a lot of ST to run the good AoE options - more on that below. Burst AoE is fine but not quite as strong as it used to be.
It’s not that easy to tell exactly how good Ret is compared to other specs at pure ST, since most of the logs earlier in the week got deleted, and most Ret players will still be adjusting to the recent changes, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ret being one of the best ST specs going into next tier. It’s not looking great for fights like Kurog though, low target cleave has suffered a lot with the nerf to Sanctify. I tried running a mostly ST build with 1 rank of Blessed Champion and Inquisitor’s Ire to buff EL proc cleave, and that seemed to do about as well as you’ll be able to with the new talents, but it feels very strange to end up running single target talents on a mostly 2 target fight. Doing strong ST damage is probably a more useful niche to have than being generally good with one set of talents, since there’s very rarely fights where being good at ST damage is something you don’t need, and tons of melee DPS basically fill the old niche.
Overall, despite low target AoE being not that great, I think damage tuning is generally fine, and I’m not too worried about Ret’s damage being too low at this point.
Survivability
Unsurprisingly, this felt SO MUCH better than it used to. I’ve played Warrior or Rogue on prog the last few tiers, so it’s always been a shock to the system when I start playing Ret on farm and immediately die to damage from some mechanics that were trivial on my other characters. Sanctified Plates and Divine Protection are fantastic for living regular damage events or having cooldowns more frequently for overlaps with shorter gaps between them. It was always a pet peeve of mine that Ret was one of the worst melee for mobility as well as defensively, so I’m pretty happy that we’re now very strong in one of those areas.
I’ve seen a lot of people talking about Fading Light over Seal of Order, especially for Mythic+. Fading Light is obviously insane for what it does, the absorb amount is extremely high to the point you could probably comfortably run high keys with 4 Ret DPS if the Tank didn’t need healing. I’m surprised it didn’t get some kind of nerf with the class tuning adjustments over the weekend. That said, I’m not completely convinced it’s necessary to run in most situations. It’s a 1-2k DPS loss on ST to run, and although it’s not as bad a % loss on AoE where you don’t have SoO reducing HoW CD, Ret has so many defensive options at this point that you should be able to trivially keep yourself alive in most situations. For actually high end content, pushing keys etc., it’s probably a much better choice. Basically any situation you’re frequently spending Holy Power on WoG, you could probably be running Fading Light instead.
Talents
Overall, I think the rework did a great job at keeping the talents that people actually enjoyed and cared about and culling all the random ones that sorta just stuck around cause they were Azerite Powers, then Legendaries/Conduits, then talents in 10.0 etc. like Relentless Inquisitor. Of course, I still have some things I am not thrilled about.
Empyrean Legacy & Blades of Vengeance
Other than ES/FR, this is probably the most egregious choice node for ST vs AoE damage profiles. EL is a large gain on ST, but is insignificant on AoE. BoV is a massive gain on AoE (spreading those Expurg DoTs is huge), but a DPS loss on single target. Having some nodes that are strong on ST and some that are strong on AoE obviously isn’t a bad thing, but the difference between them for each situation can’t really be understated. When you pick one you effectively are picking to be significantly worse in the other situation. Having a ton of choice nodes in the Ret tree hasn’t had that many downsides, but not being able to take both of these talents for a hybrid build is a massive kick in the teeth.
Judge, Jury and Executioner
This might have the highest delta of any talent between how cool the name is vs how cool the ability itself is. I feel like this might have been seeded in to try to synergize with the spoiled tier bonus for next tier, but man this thing sucks and is also really boring at the same time. Maybe it gets a cool extra ability by 10.1.
Crusading Strikes
All of the builds I’ve been simming various fight types with all end up running Templar Strikes. This isn’t to say that Crusading Strikes is necessarily bad, it usually ends up performing within a couple of % of Templar Strikes, but it also doesn’t seem to provide a profile or anything where there could be a situation Crusading Strikes would be better outside of it just getting buffed. Obviously if you don’t have WFT it gets relatively a bit better, and there could be some more APL improvements we can make to get it close to even, but at this point I would be surprised to ever see it beat Templar Strikes by any significant margin.
Consecrated Blade
I love being able to unbind Consecration. Easily one of my favorite parts of the rework.
Primordial Gems
Probably the most miserable part of my week so far. I don’t understand why these existed in a borderline untestable state for the entirety of the PTR, and then had multiple massive buffs and nerfs days after they came out. I had to update info for them 4 or 5 times. People were permanently confused about how good the ring actually was, and which gem combo to use in what situation. It’s also very misleading to have the damage tooltip update with the gem item level, but then to actually tie the spell effect itself to the ring item level - I expect a ton of people to have unupgraded Twilight Prophetic Stones, losing a ton of damage for no reason. They’re also going to need to get massively nerfed to ever get replaced on prog next tier, let alone on farm or even on prog the tier after.
Build & SimC Updates
There were less changes necessary to the builds I originally had posted on Tuesday than I thought there would be. The Mythic+ build changed the most, but that was mostly just due to Seething Flames AoE scaling functioning differently on live to the PTR and a bug with Searing Light AoE. The APL will probably need a bit more work to get some aspects of Templar Strikes and Crusading Strikes to work better, but it was surprisingly not that hard to get a functional APL ready for launch, which was very fortunate for me.
Versatility
I was pretty surprised to see Vers rise in value so much. Ret is usually a spec that likes Haste quite a lot, but it doesn’t seem to be worth that much. Obviously Mastery got nerfed pretty heavily, so it’s not a huge surprise that it isn’t worth a ton even though TS and BoJ also do Holy damage now. My best guess for why Haste isn’t looking as great is that a ton of your damage is in your 30s CDs, ES and Wake, which don’t get their cooldowns reduced at all. Obviously ES does benefit from Haste to an extent since you can fit more damage into its window, but that might be enough to reduce its value. It looks like Haste is still pretty good with Crusading Strikes, so it might have some other relation to generator cooldowns that impacts it that isn’t immediately obvious to me as well. Similarly with Crit, Templar Slash and Hammer of Wrath always crit, ES never crits, and you get a ton of extra Crit with a very high Wings uptime, so it’s also less valuable as a result. Vers might have just ended up being good by process of elimination due to various spec mechanics not functioning well with the other stats.
Last Note
I know some people have parts of the older version that they miss, especially Seraphim or just not enjoying VoJ, but I really love this version of Ret so far. It’s definitely more fun than any version of Shadowlands Ret to me, and probably also better than it was in most BfA tiers. I’m usually pretty doomer-y about Ret in high end content, I would argue justifiably so, but this version just looks great to me and I’m looking forward to playing it a lot more.
Hey, thanks for the post. I appreciate the insight.
I enjoy the new Ret for the most part but some of the talent choices are definitely uncomfortable, mostly what you've already mentioned. VoJ is really staggering my muscle memory, and I wish Crusading Strikes was stronger.
Hope to see more!