How To Improve As Retribution Paladin — Dragonflight 10.1
On this page, you will find out how you can improve at playing Retribution Paladin in World of Warcraft — Dragonflight 10.1. We list the common mistakes that you should try to avoid and the small details that can greatly improve your performance.
Wasting Global Cooldowns
Staying idle in combat and not using all your available Global Cooldowns to actively generate or spend Holy Power is the biggest mistake you can make. Always be casting.
Not Staying Behind Your Target
Staying in front of your target allows the target to block (reduces the damage by 30%) your attacks, or worse, parry (nullifies all damage) them. Always stay behind your target if possible.
Overcapping Holy Power
You should always be conscious about you current Holy Power amount and make sure to use Holy Power spenders before continuing using your Holy Power generators so that you do not exceed the 5 Holy Power cap. You have to learn how much Holy Power your Holy Power generators build, so that you can plan ahead to use them as efficiently as possible while keeping their priority in mind.
Not Using Shield of Vengeance
While Shield of Vengeance is considered a defensive cooldown, you
should use it as often as possible in a fight when you can absorb damage
for the additional damage gain. If there are important mechanics where you
need
Shield of Vengeance as a defensive, you should absolutely delay
it for that.
Not Using Cooldowns
Not using your throughput cooldowns as often as possible leads to a massive damage loss. Always use them on cooldown in given priority and only ever delay them for encounter mechanics that require you to use all cooldowns to counter them.
Not Knowing How to Sim Yourself
It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Retribution Paladin without using Raidbots to sim your own character, as there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.
On top of this, simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.
Analyzing Your Mistakes as a Retribution Paladin
When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.
Changelog
- 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
- 21 Mar. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Paladin Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Urthearso, theorycrafter for Retribution Paladins. If you have any questions about the spec you can reach him on the official Paladin Discord, on Twitter, and during his streams on Twitch.
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