Cooling down

 WOW is getting a big patch today.  Blizzard is updating the game in preparation for the new expansion, and retribution paladins are getting a variety of changes.  One of the trends in the changes is to ramp up the cooldown based nature of the spec.  For a couple expansions now ret paladins have been in a frustrating place because everything about their play is based around a single cooldown - Avenging Wrath.

AW is a cool looking, iconic ability.  You grow glowy wings and get a huge damage bonus.  Angel dwarf smash!  Unfortunately for four years now the way you build your character is to stack everything that makes AW better.  You take all the abilities that make it last longer, and all the abilities that make you more powerful during it, and it adds up to doing four times as much damage during AW as outside of it.  This means that ret paladin play is largely about being a golden god for 30 seconds, and then being dumpster tier until AW is back up again.

I don't like that playstyle much.  For one, it makes selecting talents and traits boring.  You can't switch things around at all without becoming terrible.  Everything multiplies together, so the more AW stuff you stack, the more critical the next AW pick becomes.  I can't tinker with individual choices the way I want to - not without being terrible, that is.  It also doesn't leave much decision making in combat.  I hit AW as soon as it is up, and that is all there is to it.

I was hoping that with a new expansion coming and much of the AW boosting stuff rotating out that I would get to change this situation.  Unfortunately the new talents Blizzard has just rolled out are going to put me back in exactly the same spot I have been in for years now - take everything that boosts AW.

One new talent called Seraphim gives a 33% damage bonus for 15 seconds.  Of course you want to take this, and use it during AW because they multiply together.  Even though Seraphim has a 45s cooldown and AW has a 2 min cooldown, you will just use Seraphim every 1 minute so they sync up.  Another talent called Execution Sentence gives 20% bonus damage for 8 seconds and has a 1 minute cooldown, so obviously you take it and use it every 1 minute so it syncs up with both Seraphim *and* AW.

Having talents be cooldowns isn't a problem inherently.  The trouble is the kind of cooldown they are using.  Talents that read like "Do 4 damage to a target" and "Do 2 damage to all nearby targets" and "Deal 8 damage to a target over 10 seconds" are all fine.  You can use them on cooldown if you want, or save them for the right spot.  If you take one, you might take the others, or not.  Depends what you want to do.

However, talents that all act as multipliers to one another are an issue.  You end up doing monstrous damage for a tiny window and otherwise being bad.  Even if it is overall balanced in terms of damage output it sucks as a playstyle because you are locked in.  Everything has to be used in a specific optimal order as soon as it is available.  You can't effectively tinker with the build because it all multiplies together.

You get locked in to a specific play pattern, and that is boring.

It would be fine if other talent choices were reasonable, but right now nothing even looks close.  Having one loadout that was built for massive burst damage is okay; the problem is when other builds simply cannot compete.  The class and spec will be balanced around the best talent setup, which means you either play the cooldown stacking setup or you are going to be numerically inferior.

I like playing my paladin.  I don't want to play another class.  Unfortunately it looks like Blizzard has goofed on the numbers and ret paladins are again going to be locked into builds where they are ridiculous during AW, and pathetic otherwise, and that is not a great place to be.