OctoWow - Forums

I never got a chance to play Paladin and I was curious how well the Ret Paladins play after the class changes? Would YOU have them in your group?

My perspective as someone who played Ret on Nordanaar:

"Default" Ret is... okay. It doesn't compete that well against other DPS classes and in my experience it was hard to find dungeon groups while leveling.

When I joined a raid guild it took a lot of effort just to provide mediocre middle-of-the-pack DPS. By effort I mean there's a lot of consumes we benefit from + I needed to grind out some specific pieces of gear like Soulforge (at least the 4 piece), Wrath of Cenarius, etc.

However once I got all my SP gear and a good weapon (UTB) I was consistently top 5 DPS and on certain fights I could hit top DPS.

The new Tempered Runeblade adds another grind but at least that gives a good weapon option beyond Shadowstrike before BWL.

So my conclusion is that Ret can be a very good raid DPS, but it takes some work & continual gold farming. I never really liked how the class performed in groups so I always swapped to Prot to tank dungeons at 60. Another nice thing about Ret is there's a lot of gear crossover with Prot so it can be a good class if you like playing multiple roles.

On Octowow I just leveled as Prot from the beginning so I could tank dungeons while leveling. I went down the Holy tree for Holy Shock after I got Holy Shield so I could AoE lashers from 53-60 and that felt better to me than leveling as Ret. I won't actually spec Ret until after I farm a decent amount of gear and start raiding.

That's not to say it's bad to level as Ret, especially if you like to solo quest and don't care that much about dungeons. Pursuit of Justice is a pretty nice benefit.

Ret is good but gear reliant, perhaps more so than other classes. At this stage in the game though, I don't think people are too concerned about having specific classes in their groups so I'd say go nuts.