If you’ve looked around the World of Warcraft forums lately, you’ll notice that the discussion revolves around WoW Ret Paladins, which received a major overhaul in Dragonflight patch 10.0.7. Ultimately, PvP MMORPG players absolutely hate him, and given his Arena pick rate, it’s not hard to see why.
While one of the best features of WoW Dragonflight patch 10.0.7 was one of the smaller ones, the drastic changes to the Retribution Paladin skill tree have caused some resentment, especially on PvP realms.
Since the update went live on March 21, Retribution Paladin has seen a massive performance boost, hitting a pick rate of 28.7% in 2v2, 27.9% in 3v3, and 19.7% in ranked random solo. While WoW Arena Logs lists them as the max values since launch, Paladin’s Ret rate has remained largely in the teens (and low 20s in 3v3) since; a massive jump from well below 5% across the board.
Considering the rather staggering change in pick rate and performance, this resulted in a lot of backlash, largely condemning Blizzard’s choice to release the revamp so late in the PvP season.
“This is another call to nerf Retribution Paladins in the arena immediately, so that myself and thousands of other players who were really buffing and working towards mid-tier + season rewards can at least finish their attempts,” writes an angry player. “Having one spec for all the others takes away the fun and ability of other specs to reliably play and improve.”
“Never give a specification again complete return to work just before the end of the season,another writes. “Do it after the season ends or before it starts.”
A thread claims that “Rets has more games in the last 24 hours than 99.9% spec”, attaching a screenshot showing it. Note that I haven’t been able to verify this personally, but the fact remains that there has been a huge resurgence of Ret Ply in PvP.
I don’t play PvP, so this doesn’t affect me directly, but the overhaul has clearly affected the health of the game, and that’s not good for anyone. Blizzard will have to do something given the volume of complaints; Nerfs, removing rework, issuing different rewards are on the table, but whatever happens, it needs to be put in place quickly.
Luckily, there are other classes in the WoW Dragonflight tier list that still work, so I’d block any of them if you want to keep playing PvP. Some of the best WoW plugins are also worth loading; After all, it looks like we need all the help we can get.