With WotLK, Paladins received a fairly large overhaul, mechanics-wise. We have a few more buttons to push, and combined with relatively short cooldowns on our core abilities, we have a set rotation, and occupies every global cooldown (GCD).

We have 5 abilities that occupy our rotation. These spells are split into 2 categories, dependent on the length of their cooldowns, 6 seconds and 9 seconds **.

9 seconds:

• Holy Shield
• Judgement
• Consecration

6 seconds:

• Shield of Righteousness
• Hammer of the Righteous

Now, the math behind this all revolves around the GCD being 1.5 seconds. Fortunately enough, 6 and 9 are both evenly divisible by the GCD. I’ll make a quick list of the CD’s here, so you can see the flow.

1. 0.0s Holy Shield (9)
2. 1.5s Shield of Righteousness (6)
3. 3.0s Judgement (9)
4. 4.5s Hammer of of the Righteous (6)
5. 6.0s Consecrate (9)
6. 7.5s Shield of Righteousness (6)
7. 9.0s Holy Shield (9)
8. 10.5s Hammer of of the Righteous (6)
9. 12.0s Judgement (9)
10. 13.5s Shield of Righteousness (6)
11. 15.0s Consecrate (9)
12. 16.5s Hammer of of the Righteous (6)

Now I know this seems a little complicated, however, its really not. I’ve included a handy little video that will show you exactly how to do this. Please try to follow this order for these spells, as this is most effective for 1) getting Holy Shield up ASAP, and 2) best for immediate TPS generation.

Source for good stuffs!

** Ok, Holy Shield, and Consecrate aren’t really 9 sec CD’s, but you can treat them as such, Holy Shield has a 10 second duration, with a 8 second CD, so you’re not sacrificing any mitigation.

First and foremost I will say that retribution in it’s current state is fucking OP. While ret was in dire need of some nerfs, these nerfs were a little uncalled for. The stem of the problem is that ret has a few high burst instant attacks, and every other talent just increased their dps.

I know Blizzard’s “vision” for the paladin is very bursty, but their actual implementation fails.

TBC ret dps was sub-par. Fact. Post 3.0 the tables have turned. Sustained PvE dps is a little higher than most classes, but the issue is that in PvP they can dump all their normal dps abilities in a matter of seconds, all while keeping the opponent stunned. Now that would lead us to believe that whatever changes they made in 3.0 were the culprits.

However, they instead nerf class-wide abilities, our seal and judgements. They were hit hard in the most recent beta push, which will likely go live in a week or two. This hurts everybody, holy can’t solo as effectively, and it’s a protection DPS (and therefore TPS) hit.

In my opinion, the major culprit in this problem is Sheath of Light. It increases spell power by 30% of their attack power, and crit heals place a HoT on their target for 60% of the crit. The intent behind this is to make non-holy paladin (prot has something very similar), more capable healers in a pinch. However, it’s +straight spell power. This, along with all paladin spells having AP and SP coefficients, makes them extremely powerful. If Sheath was changed to only boost healing spell power, that would fix most of retribution’s scaling problems.