Patch 4.0.6 rocks!Follow

This is from the perspective of my Retribution Paladin. I know other specs/classes were nerfed, and some people are disgruntled about the patch, but I have definitely been enjoying the new patch on my Ret Paladin for these reasons:

1) Slightly less random rotation.
With the old mastery gone, and our talent reworked, I no longer have to worry about crazy random spikes in my Holy Power generation. This was more annoying than helpful, and I felt like I was forced to waste Holy Power that I had already worked to build up in some situations.

2) New Mastery!!!
This is by far my favorite change. Right now I am doing about an additional 30% damage with my most used abilities because of this mastery (while being hit/expertise capped and gemming for strength and enchanting for strength/mastery). Combine this with Wings, Inquisition, and 5 stacks of censure, and you can see some very big numbers coming out of Crusader Strike and Templar's Verdict. For example, in a Deadmines run, while standing in the blood bubble, I did a 90k templar's verdict crit on a mob.. without wings (average iLvl 345).

3) Seal proccing on instant strike abilities
This I felt was a long time coming. I was sick of having to wait on my regular melee swings to get to 5 stacks before my seal started kicking in. Now I can get my stacks up faster if they drop off for whatever reason, and don't lose as much dps in more mobile fights.

4) Sacred Shield
This has already saved my life a couple times. This is mostly a PvP talent, but I have been enjoying it in PvE as well. Sometimes you don't notice that whirlwinding mob in the group that you are AoEing down (or someone broke their CC and now you're just dealing with it) until it's too late, and this has given me that extra second of reaction time to either move out or whatever so that I could survive, heal myself up to reduce load on healer, and go back in.

I know this isn't news to a lot of people, but I just felt that I had to post my satisfaction with this patch from a PvE ret standpoint. I've always rooted for Retribution and I was really not satisfied with how it was playign in Cata. With this change, I really dont have any more complaints from my standpoint.

Edit: Also, 2000th post!

Edited, Feb 10th 2011 10:55am by CapJack

I feel like I am seeing the same, if not lower dps after the patch. I haven't raided much, but I have done 2 Argaloth runs, one before and one after the patch. I managed 13.6k before patch and only 11k after. My DPS on trash packs has been higher, faster ramp up times, better AoE, harder hitting attacks.

I just feel like my HoPo generation isn't enough, and I regularly find myself just sitting waiting for my Crusader Strike cooldown to finish.

I haven't logged in since the patch, taking a bit of a WoW break. But this makes me want to try it out. Glad at least some are seeing nice results.

Yeah, play around with it and I think overall you will see a significant boost in your DPS, I know I have... if you couldn't tell from my top post lol