Retribution Paladin Guide for The War Within

Welcome to our The War Within Beta guide for Retribution Paladin. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about Retribution Paladin in the forthcoming The War Within expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the War Within Beta. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Retribution Paladin, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Retribution Paladin has received a few changes to its base abilities and core talents that you will want to be aware of. Our Mastery, now called Mastery: Highlord's Judgment, has been buffed to now include a chance for Judgment to deal extra holy damage to your primary target. This is a nice buff to Mastery considering that it has been one of our weaker stats since the major rework to Retribution in early Dragonflight, and it helps improve Mastery more on single target without buffing it too much for AoE. In a similar vein, many talents that caused abilities to always critically hit like Vengeful Wrath and Templar Strikes have been reworked to instead buff damage normally, which should also improve the value of Critical Strike rating too.

Other major changes are new talents like Radiant Glory, which removes Avenging Wrath as an active ability and instead applies it when you cast Wake of Ashes, and the reworks of Vanguard of Justice and Judge, Jury and Executioner into nodes that now buff 2-4 target cleave damage.

Retribution Paladin gets to choose between the Templar and Herald of the Sun Hero Talent Trees. In sections below, we will talk more deeply about the implications of these Hero Talent Trees for the spec, and some thoughts on what looks strong and weak ahead of launch.

The Templar Hero talents bring two new core effects, Hammer of Light and Empyrean Hammer. Hammer of Light becomes castable after using Wake of Ashes and replaces it on your action bar until you use it, which will do a ton of damage and proc other effects in the Templar tree. Empyrean Hammers aren't a new ability you activate directly, but will be automatically cast from a variety of passive effects in the tree.

As far as how gameplay is affected by the Templar talents, you will want to save up some Holy Power and use Hammer of Light whenever it is available, but otherwise the effects are largely passive. Some talents like Shake the Heavens will have effects that you can get more out of by tracking and playing around them, but the difference will not be very large whether you do or not.

Templar's talents are largely single-target focused. Although Hammer of Light and Empyrean Hammer do have some cleave elements as well, the amount that they cleave is a lot less than the damage your primary target takes. Despite this bias, it is fairly strong in all situations on Beta at the moment.

The Herald of the Sun Hero talents are based around a new DoT effect, Dawnlight. These are automatically applied to nearby targets when you use Wake of Ashes or Avenging Wrath, and other talents also make the create some extra effects. Other than that, there are a few talents that buff Divine Storm and Hammer of Wrath damage as well.

Herald of the Sun has an almost entirely passive playstyle, with the only thing to manage being trying to make sure that Dawnlights are applied to different targets. Everything else is a passive effect that you will benefit from during your normal rotation.

Herald has a more AoE-focused tree, with multiple talents buffing Divine Storm damage and Dawnlights themselves doing full damage to secondary targets they get applied to. It has received a recent nerf on Beta that reduces its strength significantly, but it is still a decent tree to use at the moment.

• Paladin Retribution 11.0 Class Set 2pc — Blade of Justice damage increased by 15% and Wake of Ashes damage increased by 10%.
• Paladin Retribution 11.0 Class Set 4pc — Wake of Ashes increases your damage done by 10% for 8 seconds.

These bonuses are largely passive, although with the 4pc bonus you will want to delay casting Wake of Ashes slightly during Execution Sentence in order to have the buff still active when it lands.

The 2pc bonus is not strong at all, as Blade of Justice and Wake of Ashes do decent damage, but not enough for a 10% or 15% buff to be really strong. This part should be worth somewhere in the range of 2-3% overall damage.

The 4pc bonus is also not very strong. It can be used to buff your burst windows during Execution Sentence, which improves it somewhat, but it is still only a 10% buff for 8 seconds which limits its strength significantly. It should increase overall damage by somewhere around 3-4%.

The total expected value of the Tier Set is around 5-7%. Compared to previous tier sets, this is extremely weak.

Strengths

• Two viable, fun, and very thematic Hero Talent trees.
• Stat scaling issues have been largely adressed with the buff to Mastery and rework of Critical Strike effects.
• Keeps most elements of the Dragonflight playstyle, which was extremely popular.

Weaknesses

• It is still prohibitively difficult to take both AoE and single-target talents, and this issue has arguably become worse with the rework of Vanguard of Justice and Judge, Jury and Executioner.
• Some quality of life effects like range extension on regular melees and extra damage reduction from Divine Protection have been removed.