Fixing the Ret Tree

As you can probably guess, this is part II of the Potential PvE buffs post.

So, being the tree that most everyone agrees is in need of the most love, how would I go about making Ret on par with Holy and Prot?

http://talents.unleashedgaming.net/?p=vt&i=19391 I have decided to make a few modifications to the talent trees I posted in part I, inspired in part by the PTR changes, and in part by a closer look at some of the more functional hybrid talent trees, especially the druid Feral tree. Since I've made so many changes from the baseline talent tree, I'll be going tier by tier describing every talent (since I modified nearly all of them in some way). Before I get in to that though, I feel I should provide a quick explanation on why I changed the ret tree the way I did.

I started out with three main assumptions: 1) Paladins are never going to be a true DPS class, so any fixes to the ret tree can't involve massive boosts to DPS, 2) The main purpose of the Paladin is to be the guardian of his allies, and 3) Retribution paladins want to be primarily focused on melee combat.

Assumption 1 is pretty simple. Blizzard has stated ad nauseum that paladins are a Tank/Heal hybrid, so we won't be getting DPS that is on par with other classes. However, this doesn't mean that ret paladin DPS is in no need of improvement

Assumption 2 is a bit of a leap on my part, but judging by the class description and what has been stated as our two main roles, it seems reasonable. The Holy Paladin protects his allies by keeping them alive, and the Protection Paladin protects his allies by tanking. So how does the ret paladin protect his allies? Right now, the answer is "not very well". One could argue that by killing enemies before they can harm your allies, you would be doing an excellent job of protecting them, but that violates assumption 1.

Assumption 3 is also pretty obvious. A classic ret paladin complaint involves having to "stand around in the back". And, while on 90% of encounters the only thing making you stand in the back is yourself, one can still see that what ret paladins want is to be up in the fray, bashing skulls and maybe tossing out an occasional heal or cleanse, instead of primarily casting heals and cleansing while making some weak melee attacks with a 1-Hander.

In order to create a tree that was in line with these three guiding factors, I decided to make a tree that functioned similar to the druid feral tree: Both tanking and Melee DPS in the same tree, with an emphasis on flexibility between these two roles. Now, since paladins already have a tanking tree, I deliberately made ret more focused on melee DPS, with the ability to function as either an offtank or as a critical member of the MT group during a raid setting, and as a "5th man" in a 5 or 10 man setting.

Now, without further ado, the talents:

Tire 1:
Deflection: I moved this talent here primarily for prot paladins.
Benediction: This talent remains unchanged

Tier 2:
Might of the Blessed: This was just something I threw in to combat bad itemization and to enhance the hybrid nature of the ret paladin. It won't make a huge difference in damage output or healing output, but one of the problems that the retribution tree suffered from was having too many "must-have talents", so my goal was to compact them and add some nice choices for filler that didn't make ret pallies feel as if they need to invest a huge amount of points in the tree.
Conviction: Moved here from tier 3. I always felt that it was far too deep in the tree, given that other melee classes get their crit talents in tier 1.
Improved Seal of the Crusader: Unchanged. This is a nice option for a holy build and again, I didn't want to make every talent a must-have.

Tier 3:
Vindication: I decided to give this some more consistency. It could potentially be a very nice debuff to have in 5-mans, but the random nature of it made it not so useful, since it could fall off when you least wanted it to.
Seal of Command: After a lot of internal debating, I decided to change this to a nice consistent source of damage instead of the current slot-machine. This SoC would have a spellpower coefficient similar to SoR, but it would probably be around 75% as high. This also has the side effect of reducing the amazing but extremely rare retribution burst damage combos, which leaves room to up the overall sustained damage (At 40% it would be roughly a 29% increase in SoC DPS with a 3.8 speed weapon, and an even larger increase with a faster weapon). Essentially, with this change, your SoC crits will be doing about 14% more than your old SoC hits, however SoC will proc on every swing. In addition, I decided to up the base damage of the judgment while removing the bonus damage from a stunned target. The stun bonus to JoC was originally implemented to give ret paladins a method of controllable burst damage. Now that we have crusader strike, this is much less necessary. The net result of this change is that you lose roughly 100 damage from your maximum stunned judgment hits, but you gain roughly 150 to each unstunned judgment, so overall sustained damage gets another nice boost.
Improved Blessing of Might: Moved here from tier 1, cost reduced to 3 points for the same effect. This simply frees up 2 points for the raiding ret paladin to spend elsewhere.

Tier 4:
Eye for an Eye: I expanded this talent to three points, and added a small mana burn effect to the dispeller of any of your spells. This will not be a magic bullet like UA, but it will make purge/dispell spam a less viable option in small-scale PvP.
Improved Judgment: Moved this down to tier 4 and combined the effects with the old Sanctified Judgment. More point compaction.
Crusade: Unchanged.

Tier 5:
Weapon Specialization: Changed this to include 1-Handed weapons. Mostly intended as a bit of a buff to the ret-spec tank.
Sanctity Aura: Unchanged.
Improved Sanctity Aura: Modified to increase healing based on your strength instead a flat percentage. This is to keep healadins away from it, as well as to make one of the best benefits of a ret paladin dependent on that paladin wearing ret gear, not healing gear, thus providing more incentive to have the ret paladin play as a damage-dealer.

Tier 6:
Vengeance: I really like what blizzard did with the stacking 15% Vengeance on PTRs. It really adds a lot more consistency to PvE damage, without adding too much to PvP burst damage. However, I believe that it really needs to increase healing as well as damage. This change will allow the ret paladin to drop some powerful spot heals, but only if he is meleeing. Combined with the Crusader Strike change, this allows the paladin to provide some serious (though occasional) help to healers in a pinch, without forcing him to break off his attacks for a long period of time.
Focused Will: The PPM on this would be 12, so it essentially gives you 10% of your strength as MP/5, but only while meleeing. This should help out with the mana issues that many ret paladins have.

Tier 7:
Sanctified Judgment: Modified to work with JoJ, JoL and JoW as well as JotC. Often times, it is more useful to your group or raid to have a judgment other than Crusader on the target. This allows you to use whatever Judgment the situation calls for, without giving up your 3% crit debuff.
Repentance: Unchanged
Divine Purpose; Changed to reduce chance to be crit by 3%. This allows a ret paladin in an offtank role to wear more DPS-oriented gear so that he is more useful when his target dies and he switches to DPSing, similar to how a feral druid can go to cat form and do some DPS when his target dies. It is also deep enough in the tree that a prot pally would lose more than he gains to pick it up, which should keep the warriors happy.

Tier 8:
Fanaticism: First off, let me start by saying that, from a sustained DPS perspective, the current Fanaticism is really, really bad. Just to give you an idea of how bad, the rogue talent "Improved Backstab" provides twice the benefit to a much higher damage ability that can be used roughly 33% more often, and it is a tier 2 talent that costs only 3 talent points. In most cases, Fanaticism works out to be a single-digit DPS increase, which is absolutely pitiful for an 8th tier talent. So instead, I decided to turn it into an awesome tanking and tank-support ability that also provides a nice survivability boost for an arena team. Basically, your party gains a large amount of armor and takes reduced damage from spells, but once again, only if you are wearing retribution-oriented gear. In 5-mans and raids, this provides a very nice mitigation buff for your tank (whether the tank happens to be yourself or another player), and in PvP this allows you to protect your group and kill people at the same time. And as a bonus, it also reduces threat generated by 15% when Righteous Fury is not active, boosting potential Paladin DPS much higher than the current fanaticism can.

Tier 9:
Crusader Strike: This was a nice addition to the retribution tree, finally giving paladins some real control over their damage. Unfortunately, it really feels lacking for a 41 point talent, and it tends to encourage a very selfish, warrior-like playstyle. So, I decided to add a buff that would allow you to cast a very fast heal after hitting crusader strike, which means that instead of having to chose between healing that priest that is taking heavy focus fire and dropping a CS on your target to finish him off, you can do both (1.5 seconds for the GCD on CS plus the 1 second cast time on Holy Light means that your heal will land at the same time as if you had decided to start it before hitting CS). It also means that when a tank takes a huge spike of damage, you stand a good chance of being able to land a very big heal in a very short amount of time, potentially avoiding a wipe. Finally, Crusader Strike would cause high threat while Righteous fury is active, giving it some use as a tanking ability.

So there you have it, that is how I would re-do the retribution tree. Again, it is critical to keep in mind that all numbers are very rough, my goal here is to provide general concepts for abilities.