#1 - Jan. 20, 2016, 8:05 a.m.
-POSITIVES-
-- Exorcism replaced with Blade of Justice. This is an excellent change as Exorcism was a very weak and underwhelming ability in our Live toolkit, and has been for the past two expansions now. Its terrible scaling meant that nobody used the ability for what it was intended for--a hard-hitting but ill-frequent rotational ability that would periodically reset its cooldown as a means of adding an element of randomness to the rotation and for an attentive player to maximize their damage. Blade of Justice hits harder and scales with our Mastery, which means it'll scale a lot better in comparison, and its spell animation is awesome as well.
-- Melee animations, visuals and audio in general are a huge improvement. The visceral feedback is definitely available for not just Retribution, but most other melee as well, and each ability feels great to press due to the immediate feedback you receive from the character's animations and the visual and audial effects. Templar's Verdict has never felt so good to press.
-- Shield of Vengeance is a more interesting take on a short defensive cooldown for Retribution, providing not only a solid absorption shield but strikes back with non-negligible damage as well. This really fits the theme of the Retribution Paladin in regards to retaliation and vengeance, but this comes with a drawback, as I'll soon explain.
-- Crusader's Flurry is a great talent choice for reducing empty global cooldowns within our rotation, though this is mainly due to the other two primary rotational abilities having long-ish cooldowns. Regardless, it really increases the fun factor of the rotation and honestly feels mandatory in terms of raw throughput as well. In reality, Crusader Strike having a few charges should've been baseline for Retribution's rotation, as the spec feels a whole lot slower and sluggish without this talent carrying things along.
-NEGATIVES-
-- Our mobility is completely, inexcusably bad. I could make an entire post about Retribution's mobility woes alone -- in fact, I did http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20420203250 -- so I'm just going to let the bulk of that discussion continue there. This includes my critique of the talents Turalyon's Might and Seal of Light.
-- Retribution doesn't need three talent tiers dedicated to our core rotational spells. I can see two tiers dedicated to adjusting our baseline rotation, in both active and passive ways (more on that later), but having minor adjustments to Crusader Strike, Blade of Justice and Judgment just isn't interesting, especially when such talents are simple flat 25% damage increases.
-- Why remove Word of Glory but keep Flash of Light? In terms of how melee are played and how you wish to see specializations designed, it would've made a lot more sense to keep Word of Glory for Retribution over Flash of Light. Word of Glory is an interesting ability in that it shares the same resource as our offensive damaging options, which means the player must actively choose between using their primary resource (Holy Power) to deal damage or heal themselves or an ally. Flash of Light doesn't fit Retribution in the same way as its main drawback is the opportunity cost of interrupting your rotation to hard-cast an ability as opposed to consuming an important resource to use it, and the nature of hard-casted spells means that Retribution will have a difficult time using this ability in instances which requires the player to stand still or be susceptible to interrupts, which are both a major threat to those in a melee-based role.
-- The only changes made to T45, our crowd control tier, is a redesign of Fist of Justice. The redesign isn't bad in itself--it actually lowers the cooldown far more than what the Live 30 second cooldown reduction offers--the problem is that nothing else has changed, and Repentance and Blinding Light remain very ineffective talent choices. Repentance works well for Holy, but simply doesn't function well for Retribution for the same reason Flash of Light doesn't, and Blinding Light's cooldown is far too long for the situational and easily-nullified effect it offers.
-- Shield of Vengeance dealing damage when it bursts means we'll want to use it rotationally on cooldown as opposed to when we actually need to mitigate important incoming damage, which I feel is bad design. I can hear the "I died because I didn't have Shield of Vengeance available, I used it for more damage output 10 seconds ago" excuses already.
