Beta: Prot to Ret and back again.

So when I finally logged into Beta on Saturday, I naturally went straight for Ulushnar. As a Protadin, my first thoughts were to spec Prot, using a spec based off Lore's musings on the WotLK-era core spec.

I dithered around a bit at first. For some strange reason, they'd given Ulu a different "haircut" (actually a large Klingon-like head protusion with a grey mullet) as opposed to his normal alabaster baldness. I went to the hairdresser in Stormwind and found to my horror that the Bald Draenei model was missing!

Ultimately, out of protest, I picked the "hairstyle" that was obviously supposed to include the baldness, and wandered round as a Draenei with half it's head missing:



I started doing quests as Prot, but I found the old cycles weren't working. Even with the new Hammer of the Righteous and my Spiteblade, mobs were dying too slowly. Of course the sane response would be to round em up and AoE, but since it was a busy Saturday afternoon and I was competing with a whole bunch of DPS specs (including Hunters with their new Devilsaur pets and Warriors dual-weilding 2-handers), I was generally limited to what Exorcism and Avenger's Sheild could gather for me.

I'll say one thing for using a high-DPS one-hander over a caster 1-hander though: it really helps you keep soloing if you're low on Mana. That said, with the new Judgement of Wisdom, and the fact that Seals last two minutes, I found mana to be ok, as long as I didn't Consecrate. The Seal change was the hardest to adjust to, since refreshing a seal after hitting Judgement is hard-wired into my playstyle at this point.

Anyway, after a few quests, the Northrend World Server crashed, I went to start my Death Knight (more on him in another post), and then did some mining on Ulu on Live.

After a break for food, I went back to Ulu, ported him back to Stormwind and visited three places: The hairdresser, the Paladin Trainer and the bank. I got sick of being half-headed, so I gave in and got the Klingon Mullet, although this time I changed his hair color to a reddish-brown which I thought was more asthetically pleasing:



After doing that, I went to the bank, and traded in my Prot gear for my Ret gear. It's a mixture of Heroic, Kara, ZA, T5 and early T6 items. It's not amazing, but it gets the job done. Anyway, I specced Ret (using a Spec suggested by Worldie on the Maintankadin forums)) and ended up with 2.3k Attack Power (with improved BoM) and 23.49% melee crit.

I. Owned.

Using Seal of Command and my unenchanted Hammer of the Naaru meant I was downing most mobs in about three hits. I was taking on 3-4 mobs at a time and killing them all in the same time it took Prot Ulu to kill one, and with less downtime for mana recovery afterwards. As it stands, Retribution's kinda broken, and it's damage is going to be toned down before release. Hopefully they'll keep abilities like Divine Storm and Judgements of the Wise functioning similarly, since they offer nice utility. Similarly, I hope they don't break Ret's damage-dealing capacity whilst they're toning it down. It'd be nice to have them doing competitive damage in raids.

After a couple of hours with Ret, I kinda felt a little guilty. I'm positioning myself to be my group's main tank, and there's no point in me falling in love with toys I can't have. So I specced back to Prot and went to see how I could best make it work.

The golden rules seem to be:

*Use Judgement of Wisdom exclusively.
*Use Seal of Wisdom when you're low on Mana. It'll proc on all three mobs when you use Hammer of the Righteous, and the Hammer + Holy Shield + White Damage should keep your DPS high enough.
*Use Consecrate sparingly. Generally I used it when I made an aoe pull to gather up the mobs.
*No matter what you do, downtime is inevitable. Take it like a man and keep on hoping for level 71 and Divine Plea.