Retribution Paladin DPS Guide — Midnight Season 1

With the launch of Midnight Season 1 comes a new rotation of Mythic+ dungeons, three new raids, and powerful gear including a new tier set. For details about all the new content, see the links below.

Retribution received a number of tuning changes with the launch of Midnight Season 1. Overall, these represent a large increase to single-target damage, and a very small increase to AoE damage:

With the release of Midnight, Retribution received a complete rework of the structure of its spec talent tree, as well as many changes to talents, abilities, and Hero Talents. The major changes are broken down and explained in the sections below.

Retribution's new Apex Talent, Light Within, is focused on Art of War and Righteous Cause, providing larger damage increases and extra effects when they proc. The bonus can be mostly treated as passive, but it is now best to prioritize spending procs in order to minimize the chance the bonus effects are wasted.

Both Hero Talents have had some new talents added in Midnight, but they are both still very similar to how they worked previously.

Templar has had Divine Hammer added as a passive talent that triggers after Divine Toll is cast. It has also had the talents buffing Empyrean Hammer nerfed a little, and some extra talents added mimicking some of the effects of the War Within Season 3 tier set.

Herald of the Sun has had some new talents added with fairly basic passive effects. More importantly, it has had some redesigns to old effects so that Dawnlight has much lower overall uptime, and the addition of Walk Into Light, which significantly increases the power of Hammer of Wrath. These changes put a lot more emphasis on Avenging Wrath for Herald of the Sun.

Hammer of Wrath has been removed as a separate ability. Instead, Judgment is now upgraded into Hammer of Wrath during Avenging Wrath, and it inherits all of the buffs Judgment gains from various talents and effects. Boundless Judgment no longer increases the Holy Power that Judgment provides. Crusading Strikes has been changed to reduce attack speed, but now grants Holy Power with every hit instead and can work with Skyfury. Divine Resonance no longer automatically casts Judgment periodically, but instead causes future casts to be cast twice. Overall, these changes slightly reduce the amount of Holy Power you can generate, but give you a bit more control over exactly how Holy Power is generated.

Radiant Glory has been nerfed and no longer can proc extra Avenging Wrath duration. Crusade has been redesigned to be an additional stacking Haste effect to Avenging Wrath rather than replacing the flat damage and Critical Strike increases entirely. Execution Sentence has had the effects of Final Reckoning added to it, but is now a 60-second cooldown. Retribution now has a lot less focus on 30-second cooldown intervals, but has much more power for its 1-minute cooldown windows.