Civilian

First things first, let's look at the composition of the melee dps group, to which i guess we both agreed.

Melee DPS group: Fury Warrior + Enhancement Shaman + Feral Druid + Rogue + ... 

the 5th spot, is what we argued about, so i will make comparisons between a Retribution Paladin and:

• Hunter (survival)
  
• MS Warrior
• Rogue 

Altho, having a second rogue for this spot is the safest choice, by FAR. Not even arguable, not situational, he will do his DPS disregarding every other variable...

Let's start with the rogues!

They have significantly higher DPS (highest dps class) and they don't have a threat problem (aggro dump). No matter how long the fight is, they are not limited by mana, and their DPS is constant from the start of the fight till its end.

The same can be said for Hunters, in addition they have uninterruptable damage regardless of the boss cleaving or aoeing which melee have to watch for, they have a great aggro dump, altho their effectiveness without the need of another misdirection drops a lot and their dps is lower than rogues. But they do provide ~300 AP buff if geared like Leica for example who has 1100 agility and 52% crit raid buffed, which keeps their AP buff constant. The Aspect of the Viper buff helps them a lot in long fights and that's an issue solved for this class, which we will encounter fighting Illidan for example, approximately 20-30 minutes... which is our aim as a raiding community, we are not an Illidan farming guild, and we have to optimize our raid composition in order to achieve that goal.

MS Warrior (33-28-0), higher DPS than the Paladin, altho he mainly auto-swings like a pally, the pally's SoC is compensated by the warrior's instant attacks. He has Flurry, he gives 4% Physical Damage buff to the whole raid which outweighs crit or ap buffs for scalability reasons. Even Death and Taxes and a few other guilds use MS Warriors for this buff, example: Schmity from D&T. Again, he is not limited by mana, altho he might be limited by aggro (just like the paladin). So, long duration fights won't affect this class/spec. Again, having a second warrior in that group allows for a second Shout buff (Commanding / Battle) and he can help keep sunders/demo shout/thunder clap up on the boss.

Now for Retribution Paladins:

A Retribution Pally gives an extra blessing to the raid (which is not needed coz we already have 2 pally healers and 1 or 2 pally tanks).

He gives 3% crit to the whole raid from his judgement and 2% dmg to his party, in addition he can refresh all the judgements that are on the target.

3% crit scales significantly bad compared to 4% raw physical dmg (MS Warrior) or a constant ap buff (Survival Hunter), since any physical dps class is near 30-40% crit, and crit is capped in relation to your hit, for example: Attack Table
Please do check the Attack Table and see how insignificant crit is when our raid is easily achieving the 30-40% crit which is the point where only Haste/Armor Penetration/Attack Power/Hit/Expertise (Recently) have a HUGE impact on our DPS.

Then comes the mana limit... If a Ret Pally is put in the Melee DPS group, even if he is chain chugging mana pots his dps is very very limited in time to the point of auto-swinging with SoC Rank 1. Being oom makes him less reliable to even keep the judgements up, it also means that his DPS suffers a lot after the first few minutes of the fight, not to mention that his DPS is already average considering theorycrafting which is very situational. 

Threat Dump??? anyone??? By the way the 30% less threat buff for Paladins only makes them on par with rogues who have the base threat of 70% and warriors who have 80% base in battle and berzerker stance, without any talents. Not to mention Hunters who have the shortest cooldown on aggro dump ability.

 

So to sum it up, here's my conclusion:

The Retribution Paladin is unreliable to keep his buff/dps up during medium to long fights. This being said, it will be better for the raid to get any of the above mentioned classes in the melee dps group instead of a ret pally, since their sustained dps output will be much higher and their Buffs will be more reliable and much more effective.

So basically, and logically speaking, the choice of the 5th dpser would be a rogue or a MS warrior, if there was no need for another Misdirection. Let alone bringing in another really high dps class like a warlock or a mage or even the mana battery shadow priests.

If i was the GM of Nihilium, or any top guild, farming Illidan, a ret pally in those raids is only reserved for a HIGHLY dedicated/appreciated/valued/regarded member of the guild (do not get me more, my point here is, if Argrax for example had an extremely well geared retribution paladin and we are farming available content, he can be taken into such raids, for fun), more like a privilege and luxury, since such guilds can allow this sort of luxuries in their raids.

 

WALL OF TEXT CRITS YOU FOR OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You have been Insoed.

Questions welcomed.

Peace.

 

PS: Everyone should have a look at the Attack Table, if you're not already familiar with this. 

just to throw this out there, Horde raiding pallies use Seal of Blood, not Seal of Crusader for dps(atleast steph and the other retadin pallies i've talked to do), its a consistant damage additive and has the ability to crit unlike seal of rightousness. but also damages the paladin for 10% of the holy damage inflicted to the target, with a judgement of light on the boss from another paladin tho, it helps balance it out. all in all tho, i think the gear of the possible 5ths as you said, has a lot to do with the choice of which class.

 1. the +3% crit Improved Seal of the Crusader judgement is both for melee and casters.  Anyone who has an ability with a capacity to crit gets +3% to that.

2. I use Seal of Blood, not command for dps in a raid setting.  The only place where command gets a pref is Prince in Kara due to the 1hp debuff.  Blood's knocback damage is minor and doesn't do more that it should.  Rarely do I see a tick for more than 200 damage.  Even so, a heal to repair the damage gets mana back with spiritual attunement.

3.  I rarely go OOM on a bossfight.  Only where I'm using concecrate does chain-potting not get me enough mana back, only where there's a major burn phase that i'll drop one for the extra damage.

Retribution feels like a PvP spec.  I absolutely despise fighting a ret paladin in PvP.  I find myself killing 2h warriors with a better chance to live.  2 gauranteed stuns for more tha 3 seconds on each stun = a stunlocked rogue.  For PvE i don't see a ret pally pulling close to the DPS a dps warrior/Rogue can provide.  It seems that they would make an acceptable 5th if there wasn't Windfury or Survival Hunter avail.  I don't know for sure.  Im only acting on the perception i get from grouping/raiding since 2.3.   I think Blizzard has some fine tuning to do still on the changes.

EJ Forums said SoC (Command), so SoC it is. Anyway, i will get back with a bigger/better post including accurate numbers from Pallys. Gotta raid right now, see ya.

I wasn't really trying to say that we should have a Ret pally in the raid. I was more trying to argue your point that "Ret paladin will never be viable in a raid." I mean, for example, in patch 2.3 they gave all paladins 3% more crit than they had before (for free), and also reduced the cooldown on Crusader Strike from 10 seconds to 6 seconds. You say that paladin's only damage is auto attack and SoC, but really a ret paladin does auto attack, each of those procs a seal of blood damage in addition to the white damage, then he also uses crusader strike every 6 seconds, and judges blood every 8 seconds. It's like, you might say right now, we should never have a moonkin druid in the raid; the buffs they add (5% crit for their party), and their dps simply doesn't add up to adding another mage/lock, what have you. But then, in patch 2.4 say they give all moonkin druids 200 more spell damage for free and reduce the spell cast time of wrath or something...or whatever a moonkin druid does to DPS. Then maybe you ought to consider it as a valid PvE spec. I mean, you see Laera in patch 2.2 coming in dead last on DPS almost always, then in 2.3 he's more in the middle. I guess my point is, Blizzard clearly thought Ret paladins were too weak, and so they buffed them. They clearly want Ret to be a viable spec for PvE and PvP as shown by their buffs to both fronts. If Ret paladin isn't PvE viable, then the paladin will be the only class in the game that can't do damage in their damage spec, and that is not what Blizzard wants. I think the whole argument started cause I said in /guild that I just specced ret and you were OMG terrible spec, go back to holy nub. I mean if you went feral on Inso it wouldn't bother me. I'm just doing what is fun. If you only had one level 70 like me, and it was a paladin, you'd probably want to experiment with Ret as well, since doing damage in this game is a lot of fun.

BTW, I have no idea why there aren't any paragraphs in my above post...I had them there. I'm using my new iMac!! YAAAAY. I guess Safari didn't like my carraige returns or something :)

Inso:

EJ Forums said SoC (Command), so SoC it is. Anyway, i will get back with a bigger/better post including accurate numbers from Pallys. Gotta raid right now, see ya.

 

With all due respect and no offense intended, we're not EJ, they may be held in very high regard, but if we're wanting to take this discussion serously, all possibilites need to be considered, not just what the "Pros" think. Whatever post you got SoC from was probably quick to judge paladins unworthy of raid dps and didn't consider other dps seals' possiblities. if there was some spreadsheet or numbers drawn up for the use of SoC's dps possibilites, it should be ran with Rightousness and Blood and compared before any statements of incompatable dps is thrown out there.

I'm not the one doing the research, but am just trying to throw things i catch out there.

Silentbones:

Inso:

EJ Forums said SoC (Command), so SoC it is. Anyway, i will get back with a bigger/better post including accurate numbers from Pallys. Gotta raid right now, see ya.

 

With all due respect and no offense intended, we're not EJ, they may be held in very high regard, but if we're wanting to take this discussion serously, all possibilites need to be considered, not just what the "Pros" think. Whatever post you got SoC from was probably quick to judge paladins unworthy of raid dps and didn't consider other dps seals' possiblities. if there was some spreadsheet or numbers drawn up for the use of SoC's dps possibilites, it should be ran with Rightousness and Blood and compared before any statements of incompatable dps is thrown out there.

I'm not the one doing the research, but am just trying to throw things i catch out there.

 

EJ is the last place to find a bunch of people that don't think outside the box and condemn things without thinking them through.  And EJ is not one guild its a message board that most every serious player that cares about the game and mechanics goes to learn.

Probably the best theorycrafting about retribution paladins anywhere on the web can be found here. 

 The best place I've found for Ret-paly specifics is cromfel.battlefield.fi .  Basically their forums if full of info about dps rotations and such.  

Thus far, I've seen nothing that would make me not want a Ret. Paladin in a raid; the questions in my mind are how melee friendly is the fight and how many Paladins are already present in the raid.

As for being 'crit-capped', with the changes to glancing blows, is that even still possible? 

Fap:

BTW, I have no idea why there aren't any paragraphs in my above post...I had them there. I'm using my new iMac!! YAAAAY. I guess Safari didn't like my carraige returns or something :)

 

I'll answer this one first: I use Firefox on my Mac, but I noticed that Safari on my iPhone doesn't use the rich text editor on the Civ forums; instead it dumps me straight into a raw html editor.  (Which is fine, by the way.)  So to put in carriage returns use <p> or <br>.

Argrax:

Thus far, I've seen nothing that would make me not want a Ret. Paladin in a raid; the questions in my mind are how melee friendly is the fight and how many Paladins are already present in the raid.

As for being 'crit-capped', with the changes to glancing blows, is that even still possible? 

 

I'm with Argrax on this one.  Certainly the range in damage between our "pure dps" members is greater than the theoretical difference between a combat rogue and a ret pally, so the question is less what a ret pallly is capable of in general and more what the available raiders (for any guild) are capable of.  In a guild with extra paladins but not enough other dps classes, I could see bringing a ret pallly.

I'll also admit that I'm too quick to dismiss the idea because we (and I assume other guilds) have a history of recruiting and gearing pally healers only to have them decide they'd rather  be ret after all.  (Same with shaman.)  So I apologize if I'm irrationally resistant to the idea.

As for that "ZOMG I DID 1700 DPS ON RAGE WINTERCHILL" post in the WoW forums, if you look at the rest of that WWS report you see that the ret pally picked the one fight from an entire Hyjal clear where he rocked the meters, and that he was out dps'd by most of his raid for the other bosses and trash. 

Lastly, Inso, in your example the MS warrior and the Survival hunter, while I love them both dearly, don't actually have to be in the melee group for melee to get the benefit of Blood Frenzy and Expose Weakness.

There is the Ap buff from Battleshout that would be gained from an MS warrior in the group tho

Gurruk:

Silentbones:

Inso:

EJ Forums said SoC (Command), so SoC it is. Anyway, i will get back with a bigger/better post including accurate numbers from Pallys. Gotta raid right now, see ya.

 

With all due respect and no offense intended, we're not EJ, they may be held in very high regard, but if we're wanting to take this discussion serously, all possibilites need to be considered, not just what the "Pros" think. Whatever post you got SoC from was probably quick to judge paladins unworthy of raid dps and didn't consider other dps seals' possiblities. if there was some spreadsheet or numbers drawn up for the use of SoC's dps possibilites, it should be ran with Rightousness and Blood and compared before any statements of incompatable dps is thrown out there.

I'm not the one doing the research, but am just trying to throw things i catch out there.

 

EJ is the last place to find a bunch of people that don't think outside the box and condemn things without thinking them through.  And EJ is not one guild its a message board that most every serious player that cares about the game and mechanics goes to learn.

Probably the best theorycrafting about retribution paladins anywhere on the web can be found here. 

 

with the information givin it was looking as if possibilities outside SoC were being dismissed, but after looking at the site I affermed the basics of my assumption, SoC is the only charted Seal rotation, there is no comparitive chart for blood, righeousness or vendicator. also after looking at the weapon comparisons, it shows the DPS for both SoC and Blood, showing blood is more effective DPS, which frustrates me as to why there isn't a dps chart for Blood.