By alex
Hey guys.
Not much to report of late from in-game Retribution related stuff that hasn’t already been covered elsewhere.
I moved my Death Knight who’s now 70 to Silvermoon-EU – He’s now called…oh…err…I forgot what I called him!! I’ll check tonight and update this!
The Reason? Well my mum’s new Boyfriend has 2 level 80 characters on here, and my sister wanted us to play together! Sounds wierd I know, so I created a paladin and started leveling him up before realising he was seriously lacking gear and money! So off my DK went – with his 750g on him from questing.
Rage have changed their rules regarding raiding and dkp and attendance. A lot of people have not been raiding much, due to RL issues I imagine. This includes myself. But they have also opened up Naxxramas to alts – so I hope to get my Druid in there for some Boomkin love!
I ran some more tests on the PTR – checking out the new changes to SotM and I’m impressed.
At a test dummy I managed a sustained 3.3k DPS with just self buffs (BoM, 180AP Flask, +40Str Food) and was still able to not run out of mana too fast – with raid mana-regen we should be ok I think.
Also has anyone noticed they’ve added a nice Yellow Lightning effect to Divine Storm? It only happens sometimes, but I think it looks really nice. Subtle.
I’ll grab a screenie later and post it.
I’ve just completed my Protection set – made up of mostly 25-man naxx items – which is really nice! I finished enchanting it and gemming the gear up and in Ret spec i’m running at 27k health with Kings. Very Nice! Now when 3.1 comes out I can try some tanking! I’m a bit out of practise so will need to do some normal runs before I jump into heroics!
Practise Makes Perfect!
By alex
Hey guys.
Just wanted to pop a quick post on here to tell you all about an experiment I ran last night on the PTR.
So armed with the new changes, but no dps meter, I ran myself to the glyph vendor in dalaran and picked up the new Exorcism Glyph and the Seal of the Martyr/Blood Glyph.
I only applied the Exorcism Glyph.
Off I ran to Stormwind and to the test dummies, buffed up and started plugging away at the helpless wooden object.
For 5-10 minutes I stood there – spamming everything that wasnt on Cool Down, including concecrate and didnt really run out of mana. If I got to 50% of mana left I popped Divine Plea and I was back up to 90-100% mana again.
Its good to remember that the new Judgements of the Wise returns 25% of base mana now. Which unless you have a lot of Int gear is pretty much 25% of our entire mana bar. Judgements are now almost back to how they were when 3.0 first came out (33% returned back then IIRC)
So I think with the added re-gen from buffs like improoved Blessing of Wisdom and other sources we shouldn’t have any problems with mana regen.
Which is good news!
The only thing we have to work out now is our rotation. It seems that we can still spam consecrate but is it worth it now we have Exorcism?
I’m guessing our priority should remain roughly the same, but I was getting almost 5k Crits with exorcism in there.
Judgement > Crusader Strike > Exorcism > Divine Storm > Consecrate.
Does that look OK? Or is the Judgement going to off Cool down before DS or Cons? Its not really a big deal – just remember to punch Judgement over anything else!
PS – In naxx on Monday night i managed to get a 484k Judgement of the Martyr Crit on the adds after Razz died! LOL! I literally Crit myself to death!! Next time I’m gonna go in guns blazing full on! (read my Avenging wrath was on cool down!)
By alex
OK so Blizzard have started to talk about our up-coming changes…
Divine Storm now causes 110% of weapon damage to up to 4 enemies within 8 yards.
Is this a nerf or a buff? The tool tip in game doesn’t give a percentage figure for the damage.
Righteous Vengeance now also affects Crusader Strike.
This is a nice buff. Straight up.
Crusader Strike is now An instant strike that causes 110% weapon damage. In addition, if you strike a player while they are casting, their magical damage and healing will be reduced by 50% for 6 sec.
Crusader Strike has been nerfed by 11% to make way for this extra PvP ability. Not sure I’m completely happy about that – Unless we think it’ll work in PvE? (Just checked the talent tree’s on the Blizzard page – it says it should be 110%….so why does my in game one say 121%? Am I being thick?) ……Wait a minute…is that a mortal strike effect? /facepalm
Judgements of the Wise now immediately grant you 25% of your base mana. (Up from 15%)
There’s our mana return increased. Will this be enough? As soon as the EU PTR is up I’ll take a look.
Right so the first phase of the Ret-tree fixing has started – all in all it seems positive – some extra pvp abilities and more mana back and a seemingly nice buff as well.
Edit: They’ve added a Glyph change as well!
Glyph of Seal of Blood — When your Seal of Blood, Seal of the Martyr, Judgement of Blood, or Judgement of the Martyr deals damage to you, you gain 11% of the damage done as mana.
More Mana! Very nice – So Martyr is no longer less appealing. 11% seems a bit much given the increase on Judgements of the Wise.
Edit 2: The Crusader Strike Debuff isnt coming to the game in 3.1 – Ghostcrawler
Thanks to Tim @ Suicidal Zebra for letting us know.
By alex
Morning people! So Ghostcrawler decided to answer some questions last night…Check it out!
“I know Ret pallies have made many posts outlining their potential or realized problems. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to answer those. We can only answer a very few a day.
“But here is what I can tell you:
“There is a bug in Righteous Vengeance that caused its damage to be too low (even accounting for the reduction in ranks). That bug has now been fixed. Note that even though the dot is Holy damage (which is normally not-resistable) mobs that are higher level than you can still resist some of the damage. This was not the actual bug, though some players made that assumption since they noticed RV had dropped (again even accounting for the rank reduction).
“Spiritual Attunement could provide as much or more mana as Judgements of the Wise on fights with a lot of raid damage. To account for this, we are likely to buff the instant mana from Judgements of the Wise.
“The glyph of Seal of Blood is reasonably nonsensical now, so we will probably change it to something similar but actually useful (e.g. you get mana back as if you still had SA for purposes of Blood).
“When all that is said and done, Ret’s PvE damage is still probably a little low. Buffing Divine Storm or allowing RV to benefit from Crusader Strike are two possible places to add more damage.
“Note that I made no promises. 
These are all just things we are discussing. The eventual solutions could end up different. ”
So interesting stuff eh…
Righteous Vengeance is bugged and is gonna get buffed and fixed at the same time – will this bring us inline with pure dps classes in 3.1? Time will tell.
It’ll be interesting to see – maybe I’ll resurrect my PTR session and go have a looksee when its all said and done.
It does sound interesting though – but I bet we still have mana issues while solo’ing. Seal of Wisdom FTW I suppose…
At least Blizzard have given us a glimmer of hope – a chance that we wont be broken again.
Solidarity Brothers and Sisters…the Light will Deliver us from Evil….
By alex
Hey guys!
Spent the weekend focused on getting Gwindle to level 80. Somehow even though I wanted to level my mage up first, I was always going to level her up before any of the others.
So I have to decide what to go for next – aside from getting into heroics and naxx-10 with Gwindle – Who do I level next?
The Mage, The Warlock, or burn through the TBC content again with my 65 Death Knight.
Its a fairly steady income for my raiding from selling all the greens/greys and AH’ing all non soulbound items.
In Achievement news – Firelight is up to 81 out of 100 Mounts for the Mountain of Mounts Achievement – which is pretty mental when I think about it!!
Rage continues to work hard on Sartharion with 3 Drakes up. With 2 we clear it first time. But with the 3rd we’re having problems when the 3rd drake lands – key members of the raid are getting killed fast and its kinda frustrating.
I’m not sure where things are going wrong here but considering how simple Sarth +2D is why is +3D such a big step up? I’m guessing its cos of the debuffs, but we can usually take Tenebron down really fast so he’s either dead or almost dead when the 2nd Drake joins the fray.
We’ll be going there again tonight to give it a try if we have the raid members present.
This week I’ve also been playing a bit of Warhammer. Created a Warrior Priest (of course!) called Firelight and I’m currently level 5. Will be doing a bit of a report on it later maybe. First impressions are OK, its very much a WoW Clone, with a few things different here and there.
