Monday, February 2, 2009

Don't Read WoW Insider's Ret Guide

As much as I appreciate what Zach Yonzon is trying to do, it's riddled with mistakes.

First off, yes, hit and expertise are good stats, but the hit cap and expertise cap are completely unnecessary. Stocking up on strength at the expense of either of these stats is fine. Never gem for hit. Bold red, Inscribed orange, and Sovereign purple, nothing else (aside from your meta) is acceptable.

Second, when speaking about expertise rating, keep your terms uniform! The following:

You'll need 214 Hit Rating to be Expertise capped, so every little bit helps.
... is confusing! I know Zach meant "214 expertise rating," but anyone reading this that isn't, well, me or someone like me, might not know that he just mixed his terms. Hit rating is not expertise rating.

Third, I just got done explaining why Glyph of Seal of Blood is terrible, especially when you have the option of Glyph of Spiritual Attunement. Neither of them should be considered, but if you do, Glyph of Seal of Blood should not be chosen. Ever.

Fourth, you don't open with Judgement because of Heart of the Crusader. You open with Judgement because it's your biggest, juiciest, highest damage and highest DPS attack. And you keep it as your top priority because of that AND it returns mana.

Lastly, it is irresponsible to macro Avenging Wrath to Judgement. Avenging Wrath should be used early in the fight and as often as possible, but if it comes off cooldown just before Sapphiron takes to the air, or just before Malygos starts his Vortex, or just before Sartharion sends a position-unfriendly Flame Wall at you, or before Heigan teleports away to make you dance, you just wasted your cooldown.

There are some good things said in the article, but these glaring errors make me nervous that people will actually read and take some of these wrong pieces of information to heart.

EDIT: And another thing! When talking about specs, Zach says:

As far as the two discretionary points are concerned, it's a toss-up between Pursuit of Justice and Divine Purpose. Pursuit of Justice is extremely useful for mobility fights while Divine Purpose is useful to break stuns on bosses with stun abilities.

Let me make this crystal clear. Vindication should not be considered mandatory in a PvE raiding build. It does not affect bosses and is iffy on the trash. If you want to make a PvE build skeleton, it's 0/10/57 +4, with your 4 points having a choice of going into Improved Blessing of Might (which is not necessary if you coordinate your talent builds with other paladins in your raid), Divine Purpose, and Improved Retribution Aura. Pursuit of Justice should be the mandatory one - getting to your target quicker means you can start attacking quicker, and if you start earlier you get more swings in. More swings = more damage. Vindication is even less important to a raiding paladin than Divine Purpose, which has limited application in raids to begin with.

2 comments:

BigFire said...

After their utter lack of knowledge on protection paladin last year, I sort of given up on them ever knowing Paladin.

Argent said...

Actually, you might want to use an Enchanted Tear (+6 all stats) instead of the non-strength gems mentioned above -- it's a 3-color gem, so you can put one in your Spiked Titansteel helm, get the blue socket bonus, and always have your meta active.

The only drawback is that the Siren's Tear seems to go for around 200g on my server. (limited supply from one vendor for 100 clams, or luck in fishing to get one.)