Mana Issues with Ret?

Hey guys! Just wanted to take a few mins to talk about something that seems to be bother a few peeps.

Josh @ Eye for an Eye posted about his mana issues and having to go for Glyph of Consecration to over come this.

Now Glyph of Consecration increases the length and cooldown time of Consecrate by 1 second. Meaning you spam it less often.

Rather than use Glyph of Con. I use Glyph of Seal of the Martyr/Blood. This increases the amount of mana you receive from Spiritual Attunement by 10% while the seal is active.

This little awesome glyph keeps you topped up in fights like Patchwerk where you don't(shouldn't) receive much healing. (don't get me started about random 14k Chain-Heal procs you shamans!!)

Reading the comments about the glyph on wowhead.com it seems no-one agrees and now has me 2nd guessing something that seems to help me keep my mana going.

The only time I ever have to consume a potion is if i'm solo'ing stuff now. In last nights raid for instance we cleared 3 wings of naxx-25 and I didn't take *ANY* potions - not even health pots.
I'm wondering if I should start carrying around DPS potions for the last 20% of boss fights when I pop wings or when Heroism is up.

I'll list what Glyphs I'm using later in case you're interested.

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Last night I was invited in the Naxx as someone dropped out at the last minute.

Once again all that dropped was stupid Protector T7.5 items, but I manged to get to 60 something Emblems of Valor so just purchased my shoulders that way instead.

I did however get 1 loot item:

Aged Winter Cloak
Back
154 Armor
+38 Agility
+57 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 43.
Equip: Increases attack power by 110.
Equip: Increases armor penetration rating by 28.

Which is lovely! I had the emblem cloak before so this was a nice crit upgrade for me.

I also got gems fitted to my t7.5 shoulder and legs, and enchanted my new gloves:

Crude Discolored Battlegrips
Hands Plate
1436 Armor
+75 Strength
+82 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 74.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 43.

This was the last piece i needed to get me over the hit cap again which is now sitting at 294 meaning I can possibly play with some new boots/belt/neck or something in the future.

I also went for the Massacre enchant for my Axe - controversial? +110 AP is pretty nice!

I'm sitting at 35.1% crit now unbuffed and way over 3k Attack Power.
(In raids fully buffed I'm hovering around 5k AP and 40-45% crit depending on Druids!)

Ghost Hit Rating Experiment

Hey guys! So we did a 3 wings in Naxx last night and I got some new legs to replace the Staggering Legplates. This meant I was loosing 80 hit rating.

So this meant I was 79 Hit rating off the cap. So it was time to test to see if I had the ghost hit rating.

Off I ran to Ironforge - removed all the gear I had with hit rating on, cleared Re-count and started swinging away.

20 mins later I came back and had a look at the stats:

As you can see I missed 4.6% of the time out of 500 hits. I took this to mean I would need only 5% Hit rating to reach my cap.

So I had limited time, but I threw on all my gear and started plugging away. I was only able to do 100 swings before I had to go to bed, but managed to get the following:

As you can see with 5.73% hit rating out of the 100 hits I had no misses. (I'll run a more comprehensive test(bear in mind I wasn't doing any special attacks - it was just auto swing on both tests)

So did I do something wrong? Does Hit rating affect Dodge as well?

Here's a screenie after the Noth the Plaguebringer fight....4115 DPS! nice!

Changes...

OK so thanks to all of you that commented on my last post. Great info there and I'm going to make some changes to my gear tonight. Such a shame you cant remove gems and re-use them later.

I was under the impression that haste was the way to go for Ret due to what I'd read about horde Pallies in TBC, but it appears I was slightly wrong about that. (thanks Tim!)

So I'm gonna swap out all the Haste gems for Strength gems or crit gems.

I'm just over my hit cap so I don't have a problem there are the moment. (no hit gems but 1 hit enchant on my boots)

I'm still unsure about a few things:

1 - Should I swap the 2/2 Improved Retribution Aura (increases damage done by my ret-aura by 50%) for 2/2 Vindication (reduces targets attributes by 20% for 15sec)

2 - What weapon enchant should I go for? (Josh says Berserking - and is what I'm going to try - Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes increase your attack power by 400, but at the cost of reduced armor. - 20 Infinite Dust, 15 Greater Cosmic Essence, and 10 Abyss Crystal's DAMN!)

3 - Where have the +Strength Enchants for Bracers and Gloves that I thought we'd see in Wrath? Or am I just stuck with AP enchants now?

4 - Should I pick a slower weapon over a faster one? If either what speed is good?

I'm kinda doing my gord in about this at the moment! Did you guess?

Question That I Have..

Just a quick one - 2nd post today - I was talking to a fellow Raiding Ret last night and he asked how my DPS was in raids and to be honest overall its been 2-2.5k. He was shocked about this and said he was putting out 3.2k dps.

I was a little shocked - looking at his gear he has more or less the same as me, and I'd go out on a limb and say I was better geared than him.

Check out his armory link (if its working....) and compare it to mine.

I cant see what I'm doing wrong. I've tried reading what I could get my head around here. (Great site for Ret btw)

Can anyone find a spell rotation for me? something that will get me to improve my dps by 1k? Does that even seem possible?

I still have upgrades to come as well - I'm almost exalted with Sons of Hodir - should have that by next week and I'm saving up mats to get the +115 AP weapon enchant unless you recommend I go for something different? (using +85 AP at the mo)

I'm WAY over my hit cap I think (142 is the cap still?) I'm running with 296 (9.03%) Around 4-5k AP in raids 35% odd crit in raids, with 200 odd Haste Rating. (cant remember off hand)

Retribution Builds for Level 70 and beyond.

Hey peeps! So I promised Iandrix that I'd put up what I thought were good builds for level 70 and I thought I'd try to make up something for level 80 as well.

Level 70 Ret Raiding Build
This is the build I'm using Live at the moment for Raiding. As you can see I've only put 2 points in Fanaticism. And so far I've not had a huge issue with threat so far. Hand of Salvation has saved my butt very well so far! But the threat generation warriors have at the moment is awesome.

Here are some more more builds i threw together..I had a real hard time going for anything nice for the 70 pvp build - I really cant decide if its really necessary...but some survivability would be nice...but then I have full pvp gear but rarely use it!!

Level 70 Ret PvP Build

Level 80 Ret Raiding Build

Level 80 Ret PvP Build

If anyone has any suggestions then by all means link different builds!

Edit: I fixed the 80 Ret PvE build!

Retribution Changes Ahoy!

This was posted today on the US forums:

We are about ready to do our next major pass on the Paladin trees.

Ret Pallies, it's your turn.

Please try and focus your feedback on talents. Which ones work and which ones don't? For talents you don't like, try and separate out whether the numbers are just off or if it's a mechanic you just don't need.

We're cool discussing holes in your class (e.g. mana issues or interrupts), but let's try and stay away from direct comparisons to other classes for purposes of this discussion. These threads tend to get long, so it would be helpful not to have a dozen pages debating whether Ret dps is currently too high or low compared to death knights.

So they're finally going to do something about the current state of affairs with the beta ret paladins.

I've been following the changes on Suicidal Zebra as he's the man in the know when it comes to the the beta as he has a beta-key (I'm so jealous!!) and I, like most retri's are very scared about mana regen.

Well this is blizzards chance to make a difference - they've already nerfed a really nice OP talent and I was really upset about that - as I imagine most ret's were.

This is my Level 76 Talent Tree that i've built.

As you can see I've got 4 points left and I refuse to waste them in "Art of War" as its clearly a PvP talent. So where do I spend the last 4 points? I'm thinking 2/2 in Pursuit of Justice and then 2 points in....heck i don't know..there's nothing left that jumps out at me and screams "ME!!!!!"

Maybe I'll just leave them off.

Anyway there are lots of posts up on the forums with good ideas - I'm just hoping that Blizzard takes them in and comes up with something interesting!

Illidari Council Down....Illidan Your Days Are Numbered...

Hey guys'n'gals! Hows everyone this fine Wednesday morning?

Well what a week we've had in Rage!!

Monday night we cleared Mother Sharaz and moved for the Illidari Council - 3 tries later we got them down! Guild first and we cleared them in under 10 minutes (5m 7 seconds left on the enrage timer!) One of our mages who used to be in a guild who had already down'd them said that the first time they got them down they were 30 seconds off the enrage time-out!

Awesome!

So after we downed them we popped up the ramp and Akama opened the doors and we popped upstairs and finally we were there! Illidan Stormrage...

Here's a nice snap of me standing next to the man himself...er...night elf...er....um..demon? Anyway we had 3 pops at him on the night we took down the council and couldn't get through phase 1 as the majority of the raid, including myself, were in awe of him and the fact we'd finally made it! Last night we had no less than 20 tries on him and got phase 1 down perfectly but phase 2 is a bit of a nightmare.

Phase 1 - Tank and spank phase - Illidan is tanked by the Main Tank - the tank will have to move him occasionally due to a circle of fire that appears around the tank that will kill him pretty fast - he also has to make sure he blocks Illidan's Cleave thing that removes 2/3rds of his health (cant remember what its called exactly)

In the mean time the raid have to contend with shadow fiends popping up inside them - ticking 3000 damage per 3 seconds for 10 seconds or so - so that person has to run to some mages/hunters who have traps down so they can kill off the shadow fiends when they pop out of you. If these nasty buggers hit anyone they will get inflicted with the disease and will have to go to the mage/hunter area the same as the last person - so its imperative that you get to safety fast!

Once Illidan is down to 65% he jumps up into the air, throws his warglaves into the ground either side of the raid and we start...

Phase 2 - the warglaives spawn 2 fire elemental demons who have to be tanked by 2 tanks in full fire res gear - these guys leave a trail of fire and will pretty much one shot anyone having a go at them other than the tanks. From what i could gather - these 2 guys can NOT be any more than 30 yards away from each other or from other people in the raid or they will charge the raid person who moved out of range and then Enrage - thus wiping the raid.

While these 2 guys are being tanked, Illidan the lovely man/elf/demon thing he is is flying around chucking fire bombs on the raid - then he does his best cyclops impression and burns a straight line from one point to another leaving a fiery blue trail behind it which will pretty much one shot anyone other than a tank. He also does something called 'Shadow Barrage' (i think) in which he randomly targets a member of the raid with a purple nasty frikkin' lazor beam (said in best Dr.Evil voice) and nukes them down - so they need some huge focus healing on them to keep them up.

This was about as far as we got what with either the Fire-res tanks going down or too many raid members going out of range - or a combination of both - phase 2 = HARD! So 20 tries later it was 11:50 server time and time for raid over...

Illidan, your days are numbered my friend....enjoy your moonlit backdrop while you can...

Black Temple Last Night

Hey guys!

Just a small update with some more WWS Reports:

Supremus - This is a ranged fight so to be as High as I am here is nice! (Absolutely nothing to do with the 2 rogues, DPS warrior and the shaman being dead for most of the fight honest!!)

http://wowwebstats.com/rmayfssbr64is?s=2529-3171

Shade of Akama - I'm really proud here!! 1671 DPS!! and 7th on the list!

http://wowwebstats.com/rmayfssbr64is?s=6228-6274

We had some tries on Gorefiend, but as usual we had newbies to the fight in the group and we didn't get him down due to constructs in the raid picking off the healers.

But i was 7th, and 5th on 2 out of the 4 tries - so not bad..

My faith is restored for now! But I still think we need another instant attack - this is what we need!

Lots of Info to Assimilate...

Hey Dudes!

Well after my last post which generated a LOT of responses I've had a lot on my mind lately.

Firstly a big thanks to Josh @ Eye for an Eye for introducing me to RAWR. I've had a play with this app for a few days, and its pretty cool so far. Its a little confusing to start with, but once you get it setup correctly its a good thing to see what sort of loot you can use to increase your DPS. I need to sit down and look at what i have 100% in my bags and play with it properly.

I'm tempted to drop all my crit gems and swap them out for strength gems as well. Most of the socket bonus's are crit or stamina anyway so not a huge issue here.

I got a new ring last night:

Ring of Decietful Intent
+21 Agility
+42 Stamina
Equip: Improves Hit rating by 19.
Equip: Increases Attack Power by 58.

This is a nice replacement for my Kara ring, but not sure again if its a good upgrade.

Josh advised me to buy Angelista's Revenge but isnt the above ring better?

I've got 102 badges now so if anyone could suggest anything to buy with them then please do so!

Last Nights Raid Bosses:

Azgalor:
http://wowwebstats.com/4q2pznhixi6c3?m&s=2839-3353
(I was on the spawning demons)

Najentus:
http://wowwebstats.com/4q2pznhixi6c3?s=5766-6050&m

Supremus:
http://wowwebstats.com/4q2pznhixi6c3?m&s=8609-9055

Shade of Akama:
http://wowwebstats.com/4q2pznhixi6c3?m&s=11645-11696
(something screwy about that fight as melee were on the adds then the boss. Are the adds counted as trash mobs and Akama only has 1 million HP?)

2 Days - 2 Upgrades!

Hey Peeps!

This is one happy paladin right here!!

I got a 2nd Upgrade(ish) in 2 days last night!!!

Krakken-Heart Breastplate

1728 Armor

+61 Strength

+43 Agility

+42 Stamina

+6 All Stats (enchant i put on it!)

Equip: Improves hit rating by 30.

I'm well chuffed!!

Oh hang! That means Rage downed Vashj for the 2nd time! And this time I was there!

Woohoo!!

/collects quest item.

Just Kael to go now...oooh we're so close i can almost smell it.

Here's a pic of my standing in Ironforge wearing my Warrior Tier 5 look-a-like gear:

The Meanest-most-badass pala this side of Azeroth.

/flex

Looking good eh.

Well I'm happy! I know technically its not really an upgrade from my Armorsmithing breastplate, but its almost the same, and the /use option on the old breastplate was kinda worthless at a stagering 30 minutes cool-down. I mean 150 Strength for 20 seconds is just 330 Attack Power or there abouts - just like my trinkets.....

So now i have to decide...Swordsmith or Macesmith...

The top-end Sword is really nice for PvE, but the mace is awesome in PvP...

I think I'll go for the mace...and slap executioner on it so that it does really well in PvE as well.

Maybe I'll make 2 Maces... One with Executioner on it for PVE, and one with Mongoose or Savegery on it for PvP....Can you have 2 of these items? Or are they unique...

The chest wasnt/isnt Unique. So I should be ok.

Or i'll just use Trollbane for PVE....gah.....I cant decide!

After the raid last night I logged my Warlock, Starslayer, and went back to Nagrand to finish off the quests I had there.

One of the ones I had was to do the Forge Camp quests to kill some elites.

The quest says I should do it with 3 people, but i remembered something I read on Yet Another Warlock Nerf about the Elite Felguards that protect the area. So I sent in my Felguard, cast Curse of Shadows on the Elite and Enslaved him!

Wow this guy has a LOT of hit points. He owned this quest with ease! Every now-and-again i'd have to leave him alone and run away so i could either let him die so he didnt kill me, or reset to his original position. Then I'd re-enslave him and off I'd go!

One part of the quest was to go and get some plans from the Master Engineer. I did the same thing and enslaved a nearby felguard and went in. He went down after a minute or so and i noticed something:

4.5k XP! From 1 mob! LOOOOOOL!!!!

I've got like 3 bars to level my lock to 67...i'm just gonna go and grind that Master Planner! I hope he's on a quick respawn timer!!

Warlock's Own!!

Also can anyone tell me why Blogspots editor freaks out how i have written the text in here when i insert a picture.....Its really annoying.

Lady Vashj...

Morning peeps! I'm SOO looking forward to the weekend. Its been a long week.

Last night entered SSC and took down Morogrim Tidewalker nice and quick, then we had 6 or 7 tries on Vashj.

I got the Healing plate shoulders he drops that look like the paladin T5! Nice for my off spec gear I'll probably never use! Why do people take off spec gear? Bah who knows!

I'm going to be trying to get as many of the t5 look-a-likes as possible - just for fun of course!!

I've got the Hunter t5 look-a-like and the warrior look-a-like, and now the paladin look-a-like! (even though i actually do have the real thing, but ret obviously)

So onto the tries on Vashj.

We seem to have phase 1 down, nice and easy, and the elementals and passing the core around is now easy too, but damn those striders....

They keep picking off people. I'm just lucky that i dont have anything to do with those buggers...

The raid leader announced at the end of the raid that we need more DPS before we can take on those striders, so we'll be leaving her alone for another week.

Tonight we go to Tempest Keep: The Eye to clear the 3 bosses before Kael. I wonder if we'll try Kael himself.. I've seen the fight briefly on a video, and it looks difficult.

I'd love to get there and try it though!! One day!

Is Kael harder than Vashj? Opinions would be nice!

Oh i have quick question to any mages that might read this...

Why can you not train portal: Darnassus till you're level 50, when all the other cities in Azeroth let you train them at level 40?

Small Update.

As there were no raids scheduled for last night the girlfriend and i watched Shrek the Third which was pretty good actually! Quite funny in places!

Anyway after i popped on to my banker to check my auctions etc. I've just started playing with auctioneer and its brilliant!! I've made like 300g in a couple of day just from buying stuff people have listed cheaper than the going rate for them!

Anyway i do a quick "/who rage" to see whats going on as my banker is in a dead guild.

They're in Kara! the buggers!!! I wanted more badges!! Grr!!

So i logged onto Firelight and before I've even said "Hi" on the guild channel I've got the 2 raid leaders /w me asking me to come!!! Hehehe!

They had just cleared maiden and were making there way to Opera.

We got Wizard of Oz again, i don't need/want anything from that even anyway...then onto curator, i got t4 gloves as no-one wanted so I've got 2 parts of t4 tanking set now!!

That's 3 Ret Pieces of t4(helm/hands and legs), and 2 Prot pieces of T4 (gloves and head) now!!

hehe!!

We then one shot Aran, then pop back to Illhoof. Its 12am Servertime - raid over.

10 Badges for 1 hour's work! not bad really!!

I was hoping we'd stay on for a bit longer just to get chess event, and Prince, but I'll have to wait till later this week before i get in there again. (reset was last night - EU are 1 day after the US)

Season 3 of the Arena starts today!!

I wanna get home and buy my s3 gloves!! Grr!! Be a nice upgrade for me i think!

I'm gonna try and do some arena with another ret-paladin that wants to join our guild desperately, we tried a couple of matches last week before i had to raid and it worked really well. 4 stuns are quite a good way of nuking 1 person down while the healer/caster is stun locked!!

Guess i cant chuck my old season 1 gloves away as well then...

I've started collecting my epics that I've replaced so far in the bank!! Pretty sad really!! LOL!

Zul'Aman - First Impressions...

Good Morning peeps! I trust you all had a good weekend!

Friday night saw my first trip into Zul'Aman. The first boss had already been cleared the night before, so we went first to the Eagle Boss.

The Gauntlet.

I'm not to sure where i read it, but i was pretty sure that someone said it was possible to crowd control the dude at the start of the gauntlet so he didn't run up the hill and start the event at all...

Now we tried sapping him, but he kept breaking early, and running up, and he wasn't stunnable either...very annoying! But we bought some time at least and were able to down the first 2 mobs then the eagles came...The first time we tried it we got right to the top when the last guy comes, and we lost one too many healers and the tank went down - annoying!

The 2nd time i made an effort to try and CC the eagles so they weren't killing off the casters too soon. This meant Consecrating a lot, chugging a lot of mana potions too!! But it seemed to do the trick - Obviously i had to have a lot of healing with 4/5 birds pecking away at me!!

Anyway we got up there and started the wipe-a-thon! Oh hang on! That was group 2!!! We took him down on our 3rd attempt!

Loot was very disappointing! Only 1 epic, and 1 badge! bah!! An epic caster ring dropped.

So then we started what was easily the most frustrating bit of gaming I've ever had to deal with!! Ever!!

We started clearing to Firehawk boss (is he that? i forget his name!!) Anyway the dude that spawns the 2 guys that crack open some eggs then the sunhawks come.

Anyway what a nightmare! He doesn't seem to take a lot to take down, but the birds cause all sorts of problems.

We went with the option of killing one of the bird dudes, then letting the other open a few eggs.

I was to consecrate in order to get the birds attention, but for some reason they just flew straight past me and i had to run after them. With no aoe attack available to me i just couldn't get them back. Then i died, and we reset the encounter.

2nd attempt i put on some more spell damage gear and it worked better, i used righteous fury as well to get more aggro. This worked but i wasn't kept up long enough as the casters let too many birds out. Then i died and we reset the encounter.

This seemed to go on for 4 or 5 more attempts and people were getting very frustrated.

I think the main thing is someone need to kill the dude cracking open the eggs quicker, but when the shaman and i were doing that we were getting shouted at by the raid leaders, even though i was still doing my job.

Eventually we called it a night and left the area. Very annoying fight that one.

Saturday i spent about 2 hours trying to stealth into Arcatraz normal to get a guildie his key fragment for kara! LOLATHON!!! we would manage to get through past the first boss (i was on gwindle, my druid obviously!) and we kept getting killed by the arcane robot thing that guarded the voidy room - we tried to kill him 4 or 5 times, with varying lack of success. eventually i /w a rogue who was in the area and we manage to get past the robot and get the fragment before one of the voidy's killed the 3 of us!! Would have been quicker to get a proper group into arca!! LOL!!

Then i respec'd Gwindle to resto as we lacked a healer for Black Morass, but it turned out we had to do Durnehold as well as the rogue had never been.

Gwindle proved her worth and healed through it all! I was very proud!!

I also bought Guitar Hero 3 for my PS3 later in the afternoon! This is awesome!! Although I'm very frustrated that Sony have not put the song pack onto the store, as i was desperate to get the Foo Fighters pack!!! Maybe it'll be on there later today!

Last night The guild took their first crack at A'lar in The Eye. they had 4 goes at him then moved onto loot reaver and got him down first time i think.

I wasn't there sadly.