The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution after patch 5.4

Originally I was not very happy about this change. I felt that maintaining a relatively shorter duration buff was part of what distinguished a "good" ret paladin from a "bad" one, as if squeezing out a tiny amount of extra DPS would make a dramatic difference in performance, and that making it easier to maintain would make the spec utterly boring and unchallenging.

Boy, was I wrong. It took some getting used to at first, for as Inquisition's duration doubled the WeakAura bar that I used to track it remained the same, resulting in far too many early refreshes than I care to admit. But after the honeymoon I had settled into our new relationship pretty well. It may only be an additional 30 seconds, but it did wonders for setting my mind at ease when I went to refresh it.

I still wonder if this is where the devs will stop with it, or if they'll eventually make it passive or allow other abilities to extend its duration (essentially making it passive anyway). I would like to think that Blizzard has learned a great deal from how much tanks are enjoying active mitigation and realize that, on the whole, "active" is fun whereas "passive" is not.

On the flip side, I was slightly looking forward to this change. A more available Guardian of Ancient Kings meant a more active approach to our cooldown rotation. For the most part, this was dead on. Hitting buttons more often at least makes you feel like you're doing more, although combining that logic with the truckloads of haste we're running with these days doesn't produce the same fulfilling effect for our rotation (but that's a different discussion entirely).

Now that the dust has settled though I'm fairly indifferent about the change. While it's nice to be hitting more cooldowns, my original concern that the ability wouldn't be able to support its own weight remains valid. I haven't done it quite yet, but macroing Avenging Wrath together with Guardian of Ancient Kings seems to be path of least resistance for the near future, if you plan on speccing into Sanctified Wrath that is.

This is all a bit sad as it seems like Blizzard wants to make Guardian of Ancient Kings a very iconic ability for paladins, but in the grand scheme of things (at least for ret) it can't live up to the majesty of its spell effects.

Rather than spend a small portion of an article discussing the merits of the proposed four-piece for this latest tier, I decided to dedicate an entire column to extolling the virtues of a Divine Storm-centric bonus. Despite that very public defense, I still had some lingering doubts that the bonus would perform well on single-target encounters.

From my experiences thus far it appears to do alright for a small number of targets. Divine Purpose combined with the procs from the four-piece create a very satisfying RNG jackpot effect, the screen lighting up with golden notifications and your character blinded by the light of a thousand hammers orbiting around her.

Where the bonus truly shines is in multi-target environments, as I had expected when I first read the tooltip. What I did not expect, however, was how exhausting it can be cackling maniacally to myself as proc lead to proc and my enemies crumpled before the might of my divine tempest.

I actually didn't prepare for Siege as much as I should have. After spending several weeks working on heroic Lei Shen without success it was a bit deflating to have to pack our things and move on to a new instance. As such it was difficult to be objective, especially on most of the normal mode encounters that were tuned for people with far fewer ilevels than our raid had. Now that we're in a good rhythm and can repeat our successes with much, erm, success, I've been able to take myself out of the encounters a bit and judge them at a distance.

Overall, Siege of Orgrimmar is a very melee-friendly instance. I can count on one of Bart Simpson's hands how many fights are actually tough on melee, all of which are only classified as such due to the abundance of deadly ground effects on each encounter.