Retribution has seen a surge of hype recently since the launch of Patch 11.1, mostly due to its sudden boost in damage that even surprised those of us who played it during PTR testing. Today we'll be looking at what's causing this sudden increase in damage and how different fixes or nerfs might affect Ret going forward.
The only major change for Ret was that
Divine Hammer was reworked for the launch of 11.1. It used to consume Holy Power itself, but now simply costs Holy Power to activate and then is extended by regularly spending Holy Power on other abilities normally. Its damage by itself is nothing especially impressive, but it has a number of synergies and bugs that boost Ret's performance significantly. Playing with
Divine Hammer so far has been incredibly fun - Ret has had a justified reputation for a long time as being a spec that was extremely easy to play well, so getting to use a new ability that instead rewards proper rotational execution without also harshly punishing suboptimal play is a welcome change of pace.
The Bugs
There are many bugs still affecting
Divine Hammer, both positive and negative:
Divine Hammer's initial duration is reduced based on your Haste- For example, with 100% Haste, the initial duration is reduced to 4s instead of 8s. This is especially awkward since it makes us strongly prefer to have raid buffs like Time Warp be cast a few seconds after the pull, or cancel buffs like Rush of Light, or make it extremely difficult to maintain if it's cast during Avenging Wrath.
Divine Hammer's extensions have a 1 second ICDDivine Hammer ticks can proc Radiant Glory- Casting the ability itself doesn't seem to be able to (and also doesn't apply Avenging Wrath stacks), but the regular ticks will cause significantly higher Avenging Wrath than was previously normal.
Impacts of Possible Fixes
The result of these bugs being present is that, from a damage perspective, Ret is now clearly overperforming. Although the initial three bugs are detrimental to the output of
Divine Hammer, the ability for its ticks to proc
Radiant Glory - something that was not present on the PTR to the best of my knowledge - more than compensates for them and drastically drives up Ret’s performance by allowing for absurdly long
Avenging Wrath durations under a string of lucky procs.
Longer
Avenging Wrath duration means it's easier to keep
Divine Hammer active with the extra 30% Haste, which means more
Divine Hammer ticks, which increase the number of
Radiant Glory procs - you quickly end up in a feedback loop where you can manage absurdly high uptimes on these buffs.
One of the constraints on the duration of
Divine Hammer is the ICD restriction on extensions mentioned above. If the ICD is removed along with the other bugs, another change will probably be necessary to prevent
Divine Hammer from having 100% uptime, such as lowering the duration of extensions or adding a cap to its duration. I think adding a duration cap to it as a fix would be a big mistake - it's very fun to try to play around it and optimize maximizing its duration, and it feels like the type of talent that Ret has been sorely missing for the last expansion, where there is at least one ability that has a higher skill ceiling and that players can aspire to improve at. A cap without an ICD would ruin any possibility of this, as the cap would be trivially easy to hit without an ICD. Either leaving the ICD or removing it and adjusting the length of extensions would both likely result in more enjoyable gameplay.
Another interaction worth mentioning is that between
Divine Hammer and
Hammerfall. Although there are people who seem to believe that this is a bug, it appears to be an intended effect that ticks proc
Empyrean Hammers, since taking
Divine Hammer modifies the tooltip of
Hammerfall to explicitly state that this should indeed happen. If this effect were to be removed, it would basically kill the talent completely -
Divine Hammer does not do significant damage itself, and it would be much less likely to be used without this interaction.
Empyrean Hammer damage has also already been nerfed due to this interaction with
Divine Hammer, as its damaged was reduced by 30% during the 11.1 PTR due to the extra procs causing
Empyrean Hammer to appear too high on overall damage breakdowns. Removing this interaction now after nerfing these abilities already would cause serious issues for all these talents and the spec as a whole, so I hope this is not being considered currently. I really
cannot overstate this enough - removing this interaction this close to the launch of the raid without time to see the impacts and provide appropriate compensation buffs would be incredibly unlikely to have any positive outcomes.
Final Note
For many Retribution players I've spoken to over the last week, the
Divine Hammer rework is one of the biggest things driving their anticipation going into the new season. Although the spec clearly needs to have these bugs fixed in order to bring its damage down to an appropriate level, the reception to this rework has been really positive from a gameplay perspective. Heavy-handed aura nerfs instead of bugfixes, or the removal of seemingly intended interactions would cause more issues than they would fix, when the source of the overperformance is really one specific bug with
Radiant Glory that wasn't present earlier.
Divine Hammer has been really enjoyable to play with, and so far I think the spec is much better off with it added, as it allows for a greater degree of skill expression without harshly punishing players for making mistakes that Ret has been lacking.
