The Forbidden Build

Cooking up a storm

In late July some speculation around a build focused exclusively on Divine Storm began brewing due to some large nerfs to Final Verdict and buffs to DS. The most well-grounded voice advocating for them was Dao, a Chinese theorycrafter who writes a lot of guides too, who created some spreadsheets justifying why he thought it could be a legitimate build. To say that I was skeptical would be an understatement - this build relied heavily on Herald of the Sun as a Hero tree to be viable, which was significantly behind Templar at the time, and the hype around it seemed to mostly be overreactions to the tuning changes to spenders rather than any genuine use case. The novelty wore off soon and most of us didn’t think about it much further.

After Herald had its massive bugfixes and became a much better Hero tree, we started looking at builds that focused on DS again, and realized that there actually were now situations where this build could outperform regular single target or cleave builds. The build does do less single target damage than regular builds, but not by much - only about 4-6% or so less depending on the exact configuration, and you gain a huge amount of free cleave from it. It’s worth noting that it does do worse on genuine AoE situations than traditional Mythic+ style builds, since you can’t afford to take Blade of Vengeance, but for specific situations like Broodtwister Ovi’nax or Silken Court where priority damage is important but free cleave is also extremely valuable this build does much better than traditional Mythic+ builds for that profile. The most interesting quirk here was that due to dropping all points in talents that buffed FV, Divine Storm actually becomes a stronger spender on single target for this build.

Casting Divine Storm on any target count is certainly an unusual state for Ret to be in. The biggest cause is that FV and DS have base damage that is way too close, where DS also gets way more value from talents like Tempest of the Lightbringer than anything that buffs FV and has extra value from a whole column in Herald that buffs DS and HoW but doesn’t touch FV. Secondly, despite a lot of work being done to improve the state of Ret’s talents with regard to the amount of single target damage you lose to take AoE talents, there are still a ton of really valuable single target talents like Blades of Light, Jurisdiction, and Rush of Light that don’t help you nearly as much (or not at all) on AoE, and being able to ignore all of those points in favor of generally stronger talents is a huge advantage. Finally, Ret’s spenders just don’t really do that much damage relative to our stronger generators anymore. HoW hits with a Blessing of An’she proc or Templar Slashes hit harder than an FV would anyway, so spending your GCDs on generators that hit harder than your spenders would is a better use of them. I don’t think that a return to spenders completely dominating our damage profile would be a good solution, since it’s great to have generators that feel meaningful to press, but the pendulum seems to have swung a bit too far in the opposite direction at the moment.

Here’s an example of what a build looks like:

Blessed Champion and Empyrean Power do less priority damage than putting those points into Zealot’s Fervor would, but the cleave they provide is generally still worth putting the points into them for this type of encounter. Templar Strikes is surprisingly strong here as it lets you skip Blades of Light as its native damage type is Radiant, which works better with Burning Crusade and Searing Light anyway.

The priority is reasonably straightforward (read: difficult by Retribution standards). You keep Expurgation active as much as possible, use Blessing of An’she procs where able, keep Templar Strike on cooldown and spend Templar Slash before it expires, then just spend Holy Power and use Judgment to fill GCDs. On AoE, you want to prioritize keeping Expurgation active as it spreads through Holy Flames, but otherwise Templar Strike/Slash and Judgment are stronger abilities.

I would not recommend playing this build on single target or for bosses like Rasha’nan where there are tons of adds that are active for very short periods - the strength of this build is in the consistent free cleave which requires targets to be active for a while to really bear fruit. I would expect this build to be the strongest option on Silken Court, and while it doesn’t do as well for Parasite damage on Ovi’nax as builds with BoV will, it does do much better boss and Spider damage. Some people have had some success with it in Mythic+, but I prefer the regular builds there too personally. If you do want to try it, the build is also a ton of fun - this is the first time a Templar Strikes build has really had its time in the sun since early Aberrus, so if you’re not an auto attack enjoyer then this is your time to shine.