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.