I. Why Retribution? General idea behind the spec.

 

To be honest, retribution is not only more fun than Holy, but more challanging in my opinion. I’ve been on #1 Blutdurst EU with both spec’s and i have much better memories from playing ret. Roflstomping RMP’s as Ret/Disc/Surv and auto wins against every warrior team… ahh good days. This guide is very detailed and goes through every aspect of retribution play i could write about. Rest comes with experience and practice.

Race depends on your setup, available gear and playstyle, but you want to play either BE or Human. In gear section i’ll explain how gear choice can dictate the race you will play.

 

II. Character creation and preparation.

 

1. Viable builds

6/14/51

http://wow335.gamestool.net/paladint.php?050010000000000000000000000532013000000000000000000005232150203331322133201301

My personal choice. With Priest or Shaman in team, and Sacrfice or Divine Sacrfice on blinds you don’t really need 2/2 Unyielding Faith, and 3/3 Imp RF is really good. You also don’t need RV, since you’ll use SoCorr/Veng to prevent rogues from stealthing (Unless you wear T9 and TaJ for some reason ^^). I’d use it only in PvE abusive double healer setups, or if you really feel like the little bit demage more is the only thing you need.

 

0/19/52

wow335.gamestool.net/paladint.php?000000000000000000000000001532013022000000000000000005232151203331322133201301

Seal of not in Command spec with Imp HoJ and Divine guardian. Read the “Spells and cooldowns usage” paragraph to get an idea when to use which Seal.

2. Glyphs

Major:

 

• Glyph of Judgement
• Glyph of Righteousness (Unless you play with SoC, but it’s not standard)
• Glyph of your Choice: Salvation, Hammer of Justice, Exorcism, Turn Evil. If you are not sure what you need – get Salvation, but my personal preference is to get glyph of HoJ. It’s really underrated and i find it being clutch SO OFTEN when being kited or using it as CC on healer.

 

Minor:

• Glyph of the Wise
• Glyph of BoM
• Glyph of BoK

3. Gear

Gear depends alot on the setup you run and on your spec.

 

• You need 5% Hit rating (164), but up to 7% hit won’t hurt you. By any means don’t get more than 7% tho.
• General order of offensive stats you want to get on your gear: Str > Crit > Haste > Arp > Expertise

 

Here are some optimized setups of gear you can get on Arena-Tournament for each race:

 Standard SoR spec – Human – higher resilience option:

Wrathful Gladiator’s Scaled Set 5/5

Wrathful Gladiator’s Bracers, Belt and Boots

Necklace – Ahn’kahar Onyx Neckguard

Cloak – Winding Sheet

Ring 1 – Ring of Rotting Sinew

Ring 2 – Thrice Fanged Signet

Trinket 1 – Tiny Abomination in a Jar

Trinket 2 – Heroic Death’s Verdict

2Hander – Wrathful Gladiator’s Bonegrinder

1Hander – Wrathful Gladiator’s any 1 hander with 2,6 speed you like.

Shield – Wrathful Gladiator’s Shield Wall

Libram of Three Truths

 

Standard SoR spec – Human – lower resilience option:

 

Wrathful Gladiator’s Scaled Set 5/5

Wrists – Polar Bear Claw Bracers (or Taiga Bindings and 2x 10str/10hit gems in some yellow sockets)

Waist – Malevolent Girdle

Boots – Wrathful Gladiator’s Flip-Flops!

Necklace – Ahn’kahar Onyx Neckguard

Cloak – Winding Sheet

Ring 1 – Ring of Rotting Sinew

Ring 2 – Thrice Fanged Signet

Trinket 1 – Heroic Whispering Fanged Skull

Trinket 2 – Heroic Death’s Verdict

2Hander – Wrathful Gladiator’s Bonegrinder

1Hander – Wrathful Gladiator’s any 1 hander with 2,6 speed you like.

Shield – Wrathful Gladiator’s Shield Wall

Libram of Three Truths

 

Standard SoR spec – BE – higher resilience option (my personal choice in most setups):

 

Wrathful Gladiator’s Scaled Set 5/5

Wrathful Gladiator’s Bracers, Belt and Boots

Necklace – Ahn’kahar Onyx Neckguard

Cloak – Winding Sheet

Ring 1 – Ring of Rotting Sinew

Ring 2 – Thrice Fanged Signet

Trinket 1 - Tiny Abomination in a Jar

Trinket 2 – Medallion of the Horde [153 resilience]

2Hander – Shadow’s Edge

1Hander – Wrathful Gladiator’s any 1 hander with 2,6 speed you like.

Shield – Wrathful Gladiator’s Shield Wall

Libram of Three Truths

 

Standard SoR spec – BE – lower resilience option:

 

Wrathful Gladiator’s Scaled Set 5/5

Wrists – Polar Bear Claw Bracers (or Taiga Bindings and 2x 10str/10hit gems in some yellow sockets)

Waist – Malevolent Girdle

Boots – Wrathful Gladiator’s Flip-Flops!

Necklace – Ahn’kahar Onyx Neckguard

Cloak - Winding Sheet

Ring 1 – Ring of Rotting Sinew

Ring 2 – Thrice Fanged Signet

Trinket 1 – Heroic Death’s Choice

Trinket 2 – Medallion of the Horde [153 resilience]

2Hander – Shadow’s Edge

1Hander – Wrathful Gladiator’s any 1 hander with 2,6 speed you like.

Shield – Wrathful Gladiator’s Shield Wall

Libram of Three Truths

 

Seal of Command spec:

This is when people get lost. Seal of command does 200% demage on crits, unlike other spells, that crit for 150%. It also scales bad with AP, but scales great with weapon demage and crit. This is why you need to regem your gear to all Crit and wear Whispering Fanged Skull over other trinkets. You will suffer small AP and SP loss but your burst will be still the same if not higher and your heals will crit more, which is what you need as ret (you will also have more AoW procs).

 

Trinket dilema:

So basicly – to TaJ or not to TaJ. Tiny Abomination in a Jar is a trinket that can be only viable for retribution paladins, due to very fast stacking motes of anger that can be earned even 4 at a time, and proc hitting not only with 50% weapon demage but also the seal. Here are my words of wisdom on this topic.

 

TaJ gives better consistent demage if you are using it correctly and with the right gear, but DV/DC and WFS give nore burst. Counterintuitive isn’t it? You should pick TaJ only if you know how to use it, when you have the right gear with it (not getting useless hit rating) and when you can get the hardest hitting weapon available. Otherwise you should stick to heroic DC/DV and WFS, especialy as human, because they tend to proc at the same time quite alot.

 

Weapon choice:

On Arena-Tournament there is not much available. you can Pick from S8 T1, S8 T1 dressed as Shadowmourne, Shadow’s Edge, or Baryntroll. If you play human, it is better to get S8 T1 weapon to compensate for the lack of resil PvP trinket and to get expertise racial bonus (unless you play PvE hero setup and don’t care about resil, only about highest demage output possible then go for Shadow’s Edge) If you play BE, based on your desired resilience value get S8 T1 or Shadow’s Edge. I recommend Shadow’s Edge tho, because you can always swap to your PvP 1 hander and shield that will give you 189 resil if you need to go defensive.

4. Enchants

 

Head - 50 AP 20 Resil

Shoulders – 40 AP 15 Resil

Cloak – 22 Agi

Chest – 20 Resil (i would use this over 10 stats even if you run in crazy PvE gear)

Braces – 50 AP

2Hander – Berserker

1Hander – You can get one with Lifeward and one with 60 AP

Shield – 12 Resil

Gloves - Crusher

Pants – 75 AP 22 Crit

Boots – 32 AP

 

5. Gems

There are 2 ways to do it. Getting socked bonuses or not. I like to match the socket colors, simply because i need all those stats in pvp. Crit is really important and usefull stat for burst and Art of War procs and stamina helps alot when teams swap to you, which happens alot, because ret is very viable target to zerg down without bubble.

 

Meta – 21 Agi 3% Crit Demage

Red - 20 Str

Yellow – 10 Str/10 Crit (10 Str/10 Hit)

Blue - 10 Str/15 Stam

6. Macros

 

Startattack macros.

You want to macro /startatack to all your judgements, CS, DS, HoJ (usefull when you do hard switch to new target).

#showtooltip
/cast Crusader Strike
/startattack

Mouseover HoJ and Repentance.

You can also use Arena1/2/3 macros, or focus for it, but i find this way much more handy, since they’re both on GCD and you save alot of binds.

#showtooltip
/startattack
/cast [target=mouseover,exists] Hammer of Justice(Rank 4); Hammer of Justice(Rank 4)
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, harm][harm] Repentance

Party macros for defensive spells.

You want to bind your Cleanse, FoL, SS and possibly HoF and HoP to all party members in your team. This will improve your reaction time alot and will save you from losing huge ammount of white swings and seal procs that you would have wasted otherwise while switching target to you party member.

#showtooltip
/cast [target=party1] Flash of Light(Rank 9)

Target to focus and focus to target macro which i use on every class i play.

It basicly puts your target as your focus and your focus (if you have) as your target.

/cleartarget [target=target, dead]
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead]
/target focus
/cleartarget [target=focus, noexists]
/targetlasttarget
/focus target
/targetlasttarget

2h wep to 1h+shield and the other way around in 1 button

/castsequence YOUR1H,YOUR2H
/equip YOURSHIELD

 

7. Bindings

First of all – don’t copy someones binds straight up. It’s stupid. You should design your binds yourself based on your ability to smash some buttons easier than others. I will give you an example of my binds but keep in mind that i play with my left hand on the mouse and right hand on keyboard. This is just to give you general idea of how to bind things to make it easier for your hands and memory.

• Try binding every spell and item you will ever use in arena/bg/duel
• There is always a way to bind it! You’re never gonna run out of binds. you’ll just have to learn using more buttons.
• Be creative and smart about binding your spells. What does it mean? Check my sacrfice binds – There is no need to backpaddle as ret paladin (it’s not S5 anymore) so i bound Sacrfice to “S” and Divine Guardian to

“Ctrl+S”. And Sacrfice starts with the “S” so it’s really easy to remember.

 

http://i.imgur.com/tvmEp.jpg

8. UI and addons

Addons are mostly personal preference. You can play without them, but they can greatly improve your awareness and performance in PvP. If you decide to use addons, here is what you should get:

 

- Gladius

Not much to explain here. Even Arena-Tournament included this addon in the download pack. Must have.

 

- Afflicted

You need some sort of addon that will show you Diminishing Returns and major Enemy cooldowns. This addons does it great.

 

- OmniCC

Displays numbers on your action bars, showing you, how much time is left on cooldown.

 

- Spell Alerter

If you don’t pay close attention to enemy casting bars you should get this addon to warn you about important spells being casted. It show’s the caster, spell and target. Allows you to Sacrfice sheeps like a boss.

 

- Power auras

This addon can be customized to show you whenever you have your Art of war proc up, or when some of your important buffs expire/are being dispelled.

 

 

Those are the important/helping addons that you should get. Now onto some sweet UI customization to make our screen clean and simple like this: http://i.imgur.com/3EHxH.jpg

 

If you want to improve your awareness but don’t like the standard UI, you need to really work on your addons to make them help you instead of covering entire screen with bars and numbers that prevent you from noticing subtle animations and player movements in your field of view. Those addons will help you with this task:

 

- PitBull 3

Seriously, don’t use PitBull 4. It’s crap. Much harder to customize, doesn’t have all the options of PitBull 3 and in general, working with it can be really frustrating if you want to achieve specific look of your unit frames.

 

- Dominos

Bartender is for hipsters, real man use Dominos. Easier and faster to customize

 

-Button Facade

To tweak the looks of your action bars and buff’s

 

- SexyMinimap

Simple and aestheticly pleasing minimap addon

 

- Prat3.0

Customize your chat window. Contains all sort of great functions like copying links from chat.

 

- MikScrollingCombatText

Let’s you customize where , how and if you want to see your combat text/cooldowns and all kinds of floating text there could be in the game.

 

- Quartz

All castbars are now under your command.

 

III. Entering the Arena. WTF to do?<

 

1. Viable setups

 

So there you are in your great gear and with perfect binds to conquer the Arena ladder, but before you que up for first match, you need a team.

 

2v2:

Setups capable of top ratings:

• Ret/Resto Shaman
• Ret/Discipline Priest

 

What else you can try:

 

• Ret/Shadow Priest
• Ret/Feral Druid
• Ret/Rogue
• Ret/Hunter
• Ret/Resto Druid

 

3v3:

Setups capable of top ratings:

• Ret/Resto Shaman/Hunter (MM or Surv, MM is always better tho)
• Ret/Discipline Priest/Hunter (my fav due to double dispel)

 

Setups that will have harder time getting top ranks:

• Ret/Rogue/Discipline Priest
• Ret/DK/Healer
• Ret/Arms/Healer
• Ret/Healer/Healer (PvE hero setup preferably with priest and shaman)

2. Spells and cooldowns usage

a. Seal

With SoR spec, you should use SoR most of the time, with few exceptions:

vs Warrior/Healer and Rogue/Healer teams, when they train you, swap to Seal of Corruption and 1h+Shield. This will allow you to still put nearly the same preassure on them while being defensive. It will also prevent rogue from restealthing and may force few dispels on him instead of you, which is really really helpful.

With SoC spec you want to use SoC whenever there is more than 1 target to hit, or when you are trying to conserve the mana, but when you burst someone down you still want to switch to SoR.

 

b. Supporting your teammates

 

• Always prioritize helping your teammates over doing demage. With your macros and ui you should be able to dispell sheep/fear/strangulate, HoF the KS and Deep Freeze or HoP the Blind within 1 GCD if you are in LoS. Your team mates should also call for the dispels on skype as well as you should tell them that you’re, for example, HoP’ing the blind so they don’t blow their trinket for no reason.
• Keep the sacred shield on enemy team target if you have the mana for it. Don’t forget about it, it’s important!
• Use FoL on demaged members of your team whenever you have spare GCD and AoW proc.
• Be smart about your cooldowns. If you are not sure whether you need to bubble or not – ask your healer on skype. Don’t blow your freedom to chase full hp mage if you have just 2 debuffs to dispel, you may need it later for breaking deep freeze on your dying healer.

 

c. Awareness

Try to challange your multitasking by watching your buffs/debuffs, watching your teammates party frames, watching enemy cooldowns and watching the battle field. You can’t of course do this at the same time, so try focusing for a second or two on one of those things, then redirect your attention to the next one. Being aware of all those things coupled with good skype communication will alone be enaugh to boost your rating several ranks up.

 

4. Duels, BG’s, general tips and advices.

 

• Watch for absorbing shields when you judge. You don’t get your mana back when you judge on the shield.
• Righteous Fury doesn’t cost any mana and BoK with clyph cost only 105. Always rebuff them if you’re getting spam dispelled if you have the GCD for it
• Use Judgement of Justice to prevent druids, shamans, rogues from running away.
• Aura’s are important! Always pay attention to your active aura. Even tho people are using spell penetration resisting fear/coil or deep freeze can swing the momentum of the battle in your favour.
• Use Turn Evil to fear the Gargoyle or DK with Lichborne buff active. If you have the glyph use it always on lock pet once the DR resets.
• If you play BE, when going 1v1 against another ret use arcane torrent split second after HoJ. He wont be able to freedom out of it and often will freak out and blow trinket or take alot of free demage.
• You can cast freedom on you or your partners while stunned/sapped/frost trapped and you can cast Hand of Protection while cycloned.
• Use holy wrath to keep lock/dk pet behind the pilar when bursting it.
• Use Purify to dispel wound poison from the target with UA/VT debuf.
• Use Shield of Righteousness when fighting with swoard and board, it does more demage than crusader strike.
• While playing against rogue teams, if you know you are about to be sapped or blinded – use sacrfice or divine sacrfice, same when you see mage casting sheep on you. Your dispels/heals/shield and preassure that you can apply is well worth the CD.

 

That’s about it guys. There is propably alot i didn’t mention, but it should give you great boost on your path with retribution spec. I think the size of this guide clearly displays that ret is not exactly a 3 buttons spec ;)