What would it take for ret pallies to raid?
Retribution pallies have a pretty bad reputation among a lot of raiding guilds. They're widely believed to have inferior DPS and low utility. And even as feral druids, prot pallies and shadow priests have become accepted in non-healing roles, ret pallies have been left out in the cold. Megas of Hakkar is frustrated with this situation, and asks the forums: What class changes would it take for a ret pally to get a raid spot in your guild? A healing factor like shadow priests have? Some form of group mana regen? The group buffs of ret pallies include a small healing-received (DPS in the next patch) aura and a judgement that can increase crit chance on a target by 3 percent.
Most of the respondees noted that they couldn't think of anything that would cause them to give a ret paladin a DPS raid slot. While there's no real hard numbers on ret paladin DPS, a lot of the raid leaders have had very bad experiences with pallies at the bottom of the DPS meters, and in the current bleeding-edge 25-mans, you can't really have inadequate DPS. There's a lot of talk about how to make ret viable in the paladin forums, but a lot of holy and prot pallies think ret is a lost cause, and it gets pretty heated in there.
I don't personally have enough experience with ret pallies in a raid environment to judge their DPS. My own pally went prot at 45 and never looked back. But I do think that people who rolled pallies to DPS in PVE may want to rejudge their choice. Paladins are possibly the best single-target healing class in the game, and make respectable tanks for most instances and superior tanks for multiple mobs. One class can't be the best at everything, and in difficult raids, raid leaders are going to min/max to get the best DPSers/healers/tanks there are. I'm content for paladins to be tanking/healing hybrids.
What do you think about ret pallies? Underutilized DPS resource, or waste of a raid spot?
