Saturday, October 23, 2010

World of Warcraft – Retribution Paladin 4.0.1 CHANGES



So I have been busy in my Warcraft stuff trying to make a little gold here and there slowly relearning my classes and sorting them out in terms of gems, glyphs or reforging as necessary. I certainly don’t have the nightmare as some of my friends I only have three level 80s, the first a Priest, the next a Death Knight and finally a Paladin. Guess what this post is about.

Paladins are one of the most popular classes in World of Warcraft heck on my realm I checked the populations once by class and paladins made up something like 20% of the level 80s here. Paladins have a reputation as the faceroll class of WoW and get a lot of stick because of the interesting changes that they have been through since BC.

If you visit MMO Champion or stake out the official WoW forums then you will know time and again Blizzard often in the form of Ghostcrawler will say that paladins need a revamp blah, blah, blah. It seems now that this revamp, reimagining or whatever you wish to call it has come to pass. BEHOLD the Holy Power system – cue dry ice, mood lighting and some faux angry rock song. Hmm even with the bells and whistles it seems to lack something.

The main problem with the 4.0.1 changes is the shock to the system, the other two classes i play are pretty much the same as they always were yeah they were alterations to spells that might affect rotations at 85 but for now I can contribute well to a group with only a little research and messing about (minus the fun of reglyphing and reforging which takes time), with a paladin it is like a whole new class that just stole the paladin’s skills.

I felt so lost standing at the training dummies in Silvermoon vainly trying to build up Holy Power charges to use Templar’s Verdict and just trying to get a hang of this new system. I have been reading some blogs on the Paladin changes like THIS ONE and I tend to agree in that now ret feels like a cheap rogue knockoff direct from Hong Kong. Reading into things it seems that things don’t get started until we hit level 81 and get a new spell that should help in adopting a rotation but of course that is not a lot of help at the moment.

This is a weird time for learning how to DPS as to be honest I don’t have the time or inclination to try and get into the often fail PUGs that go to ICC 10 or 25. I suppose I should but alts don’t level themselves.
So at the moment I am incredibly unimpressed by the ret changes but I am not quite ready to give up yet queue ANOTHER reading of the ret paladin thread at Elitist Jerks and tomorrow I will try to get into some sort of raid to test my dps after going back to the training dummies.

After that fun, I get to go try and relearn how to heal badly.

No comments: