How To Improve As Retribution Paladin — The War Within (11.1.5)

No matter which build you are using, knowing when and how to use your abilities to properly utilize your resources is key to improving your damage.

Holy Power is converted to damage through your spenders, Final Verdict and Divine Storm. These both do significantly more damage than your average abilities, so optimizing Holy Power generation in order to maximize the number of spenders you can cast is crucial. This means tracking your Holy Power, including any effects that grant it periodically, like Crusading Strikes and Divine Resonance, as well as knowing how to prioritize your generators. Wasting Holy Power unnecessarily is effectively wasting high-value spenders.

Although your spenders are usually the best single GCDs to use, you will often want to delay using them in order to generate an extra Holy Power first. The upside here is that it puts your generators on cooldown earlier, which increases your future Holy Power generation, while you still are able to spend the Holy Power you had prior to the next GCD anyway. This results in less rotational downtime and more spender casts over the course of a fight.

In general, cooldown usage is straightforward - you should use your cooldowns on cooldown unless your target is just about to die or become immune to damage. Retribution's cooldowns are short enough that it is almost never worth holding them. The exception to this is Wake of Ashes if there will be additional targets spawning shortly, since its damage is massively increased with extra targets.

It is very difficult to properly 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 will be the strongest tool for helping you decide on 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 guide on how to sim your own character using the website.