How To Improve As Retribution Paladin — Dragonflight 10.1

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.