Adventures in Retribution

Ok, so over the weekend, I wanted to do another speed run around Karazhan. Sadly Kirini (the Tankadin alt of one of our best healers) had already arranged to do a Kara run on Saturday night. Not wanting to diulte the pool of useful players further, I offerred to try one of the Retribution-based offtank specs I'd heard about over on MainTankadin. I'd never really tried Retribution before and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I ended up going with a serviceable 5/13/43 spec. Not amazing, but it got the job done. the first thing I noticed was that my Health had dropped from about 15.7k to around 14k in my Maintanking gear.

Just after I specced this way someone asked in the CD channel for a tank for Black Morass, and I figured this was as good a chance to test out my build.

We dealt with BM much like a regular tank would. A Warlock was assigned to handle the adds since my AoE aggro was weaker (no Holy Shield or Blessing of Sanctuary). That said, once I'd got three stacks of Vengence up (+15% damage), my threat generation was impressive, and my consecrate was enough to keep mobs glued to me.

Into Karazhan, and I spent a lot of time in DPS mode. I'm sorry to say that my DPS was less than impressive, even with 3k Attack Power and Windfury Totem, I was only putting out ~600 DPS, compared to the other DPSers putting out 800-1000 DPS.

Playing Offtank was manageable where required (Moroes, Skeletal Ushers, Romulo and Julianne, and Netherspite), in fact with Vengence stacked fully, I was often outagrroing the main tank. I was mainly tanking with my normal Spelldamage Mace and Seal of Righteousness, but I really should have tried using my Sun Eater and Seal of Command to see how they compared/

The downside to this is survivability. No Holy Shield effectively curtailed me from tanking any Boss mob and the loss of 1.8k health and Ardent Defender made me squishier for the Healers I'm sure. Still, OTing as Ret didn't suck.

I stayed Ret for my dailies on Sunday Morning, and I found the experience variable. More mana efficent and faster killing than Prot, but I found myself more limited in terms of the amount of mobs I could handle. Just wasn't as fun as AoE tanking.

Compared to a Fury Warrior, Retribution Paladins are almost a mirror image. Fury Warriors have better inherant Survivability but weaker threat generation. Retribution Paladins on the other hand have off-the-scale threat generation combined with poorer inherant survivability.

Still all in all, Retribution's decent enough. I'm not about to have any great epiphanies or give up the niche I've carved for myself in CD for the "joys" of Ret. Still for content I outgear, I might give it a bit more of a chance.