4.2 Nerfs

As of today, September 20th, a series of nerfs have hit to most Firelands bosses, on normal and heroic. There were smaller, more specific nerfs to some boss abilitites, in addition to blanket 20% Dmg and Health and 15% Dmg and Health on normal and heroic, respectively. My guild is 2/7 HM and I for one, am not tickled with these nerfs. Granted some of my exasperation is with the troubles that my own guild has had that have prevented us from performing on a level that we have grown accustomed to, but my primary anger is directed towards Blizzard in this case. Hardmodes should be left alone.

Rogue Legendary

In an interview with the lead producer of WoW, J. Allen Brack, it was announced that the next legendary may be a dagger for rogues. The exact quotes are as follows:

There's one more piece which is an announcement that we're releasing a rogue legendary weapon. Specific for rogues, so it will be a dagger. There will be some sort of quest, traditionally we've done these quests that players need to participate in order to create the legendary weapon in this case we'll be focusing on rogues that will try to make that happen......We haven't decided on the name and how it's going to work, we just know that we really want a legendary weapon to come out of this tier and we really want it to be a rogue dagger. That's really all we know at this point.

Cooldowns

Ahh the cooldown. Such an exiting part of a fight. Waiting for the right time to cast the 1+ spell(s) that will give you that real moment of meter glory, then going through the motions and carefully eying your bars until you can go right back and use them again.

As Ret pallies, any hope of relevance or even presence in a hardcore raiding environment is hindered on our cooldowns, and how well we use them. In fact, this is my biggest beef with our rotation. The fact that, in order to finish a fight with comparable numbers to classes with a little more to them, we have to hope that our high burst of cooldowns will balance our sustained dps, which, suffice to say, has been dwelling in mediocrity for longer than I care to remember. While we can't expect a major change to this crippling set of mechanics any time soon, we should master our cooldowns and how to use them while we can.

Censure and Apologies

Took a bit of a break there. With the start of school I've been really busy (go figure, right?) so haven't been able to keep working on making this blog SEMI??!? legit but, I've found myself with a free Saturday night and hot news so away we go!

First off....OH MY GOD RET GOT A BUFF! BLIZZARD DOES KNOW THIS SPEC EXISTS!....phew. Had to get that off my chest. That was the immediate, and quite loud, reaction I had when stumbled into MMO Champ last night and saw the post. To be exact:

After monitoring thousands of Firelands kills, we've concluded that Retribution’s damage was not where we wanted it to be, so we're going to increase Censure damage by roughly 40%. We'll also be keeping an eye on paladin damage as we move towards patch 4.3. We expect that this hotfix should be applied sometime later today.

We're also considering shifting some of the damage from Hammer of Wrath into other attacks. While that may not necessarily cure some of the current concerns about proc reliance, it should help smooth out damage a bit.

Bless you. Sufficient to say I agree that Ret's DPS was worrisome. Well...is worrisome, but I am not one to not be grateful! I think that the Censure buff was a quick, tide-us-over fix for the issue that our dps is seriously gimped in terms of sustainability. Our friends at elitist jerks have been calling this anything from an overall 3% dps increase to 5% to oh what an incredible buff this is! My assessment from spending some time on dummies this afternoon is that its somewhere in the middle. I'll have to take a closer look over the weekend and then again at the logs on Tuesday. I am happy with the buff though, not so much for the minimal change it will bring, but that it shows that Blizzard does recognize Ret's serious fall from grace and that all of us who remember the dear, dear ICC days would like for a sort of step back as opposed to further step forewards.

The small quip about HOW was a fascinating insight into the direction Blizz is considering taking Ret in. The main issue with Ret currently is that, other than a mediocre and mana leeching AOE, our single-target DPS is low. This is mainly because, while our burst damage is very strong (around 2nd or 3rd behind Arcane and occasionally Rogues) we have very low sustainability. Lobster, a very active poster on the pally forums from the Cry Havoc guild on Bonechewer, posted a series on screenshots in one of his post. One showing his DPS around 40/50 seconds into a fight (high/1st) and then 2 minute later (lowish/last), which, in my opinion, was a perfect example of the prime fault of Ret's DPS. Hopefully by spreading our procs damage around among some of our general rotation, we can get a little more sustainability and a little less reliance on procs. They will, however, need to take care not to steal so much of HOW's damage that it becomes obsolete itself.

In conclusion, I am indeed HAPPYHAPPYHAPPY with the buff and the promise for more in the future. Ret, it seems, is a spec on the rise. Rejoice! And expect more posts in the future. I swear I'm getting better at this :P.