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Why ret's tier 16 bonus isn't as bad as everyone thinks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! As we enter what are surely the twilight builds of the patch 5.4 PTR we are approaching the "speak now or forever complain about it afterward" part of the marriage between test and live servers. Feedback, I would argue, is more important at this stage, the mechanics stage where general ideas are taken from someone's brain and sculpted with pixels and code, than during the tuning stage, which is more or less a giant equation in need of balancing. So I donned my lead-lined undergarments and pillow armor and plunged headfirst into the PTR Discussion forums, looking for posts featuring ret discussion. What I found was disappointing, to say the least. Instead of discussing the nice buffs to Inquisition, Guardian of Ancient Kings, or Unbreakable Spirit, most every forum entry I stumbled across was decrying our tier 16 four-piece bonus. For the unaware, Wowhead shows the current iteration of our tier 16 bonuses as follows: Tier 16 two-piece bonus: When Art of War activates, all damage is increased by 5% for 6 sec. Tier 16 four-piece bonus: Holy Power consumers have a 25% chance to make your next Divine Storm free and deal 50% more damage. The four-piece bonus was reworked once, boosting the free Divine Storm's damage by 50%, but has otherwise remained untouched since. After some initial skepticism I began to really look forward to the bonus, something reminiscent of our tier 10 two-piece ("Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to reset the cooldown on your Divine Storm ability") from a time when the ret paladin reigned supreme. As such I had a hard time understanding how these players could scream for change from their soapbox daises. I read through soul-crushing thread after soul-crushing thread, expecting to find some sort of logic I could latch onto in an attempt to see where they were coming from. The remainder of this article contains the main points I was able to glean from their diatribes, followed closely by why exactly I think these individuals are off their gourds.
