Ooh shiny.

So I been pallying a lot.

Obviously.

Wile I make it a point to hop on over to B.Hoof to roll Corvy every night for a little while, most of my time is spent filling out Nel’s new Ret gear, and I expect I’ll be doing that till I hit the T9 plateau where there really isn’t anything that more Triumph badges will buy me.. Most of my armor’s covered, I just need new rings, trinks, a neck would be nice, etc. etc.

I have to say I find a perverse pleasure in gearing up new toons, especially DPS ones, because going from a blue or low-level purple to something much higher up makes an immediate and visible difference. Having an upgrade add like 30+ swing damage and 2% crit is glorious, and It motivates me to get right out there and plant my axe in someone’s face just to see that extra 30 damage in action.

The higher up you get some of the upgrades are more like slightgrades, and we have to content ourselves with like +7 to swing and .25% crit. And that’s after you’ve spend the 500G to get it chanted, gemmed, waxed and buffed to a suitably oily sheen. As I’ve said a few times before before I started raiding I’ve never been quite so interested in decimals.

Anyway.

I think I’ve been Retpallying long enough to make some statements about it.

• It’s actually pretty fun.

• It’s definitely pretty easy.

• Holy hell can it rake up the trash.

One of the things I like about Combat Rogue is it explodes trash really well when you press the right buttons. You’ll know when I do it, too, because this is what you hear:

*Bamf*Verrrrrp*Fuum*Fuum*Fuum*Fuum*Fuum*Swaaf*Serff* *Chunk  *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk *Chunk

Numbers fly everywhere, things dissolve into component parts and I cackle till my eyes roll back in my head.

It’s fun!

And it’s why Pallying is fun, too, except that while my rogue has to wait ~2m between making the noises above, my Pally can do it.. Well, basically whenever he wants. He can pop his wings and throw in a trink to make things worse, but really he’s ready to decimate flocks of trash whenever he likes.

And single target is pretty well covered too, though sadly not as fun as multitarget. However the rotation (as I’ve seen it so far) is more or less exactly the same. If I had to chose I’d declare Ret pally the King of the Facreoll classes. (insofar as I’ve seen) Intelligent use of your abilities will boost your DPS, but really so long as you’re actually pressing your buttons and are in generally the same vicinity of the mob(s) you ought to do okay more or less.

What I’m finding most interesting about the class so far is the Art of War Proc. Which on a melee crit makes your next Exo or FoL an Instancast.

Now the cooldown on Exo is 15 seconds, which means you very often have Art proccing before Exo is ready again.. So what do you do with that?

Well, if I get the chance I’ll throw a FoL heal on  someone in my party.. It’s not like a ~3k heal is really going to save the party or anything, but I figure it can’t hurt. (Yes it eats a GCD and resets my swing, but mleh.)

The other thing I find myself doing a lot as Pally DPS is cleansing midfight and other somesuch. Again, yep this drops my DPS but if the healer doesn’t have to be cleansing everyone s/he can save his GCDs and mana for where it really needs to go. Espcially since certain healing classes have holes in what they can fix. Priests with poisons and such. If I’m in a party with a Priest I consider getting the poisons off to be My job, and by now it’s mostly reflex.

I do this quite often as a tank as well. If I get debuffed I cleanse that shit, and if the situation is noncritical I’ll get a few of my party mates as well.

The only time I think this works to my disadvantage is in certain fights (read Grobbulus and Rotface, etc.) where you don’t want to dispel certain debuffs right away. Usually I remember however. >.>

Very recently I’ve setup Vuhdo to cleanse on mousewheel-up which makes things a lot faster. I can just rollover my party without needing to unhook from my target. Huzzah! I set FoL to left-click so I can dump my extra Art procs quickly if somone is down on health a bit. Right click is Assist and Mousewheel-down is Hand of Salvation, since I know you’re just SO interested. 😉

Anyway.. What I see as the downsides of the class is, I really really miss the aggro-reduction and aggro management abilities of Rogue, especially where Pally has a lot of off-the-bat burst AOE damage it can deal out, so you have to be a bit careful with the tank sometimes. Yes Pally has some very good defensive abilities, but I’d prefer to just not get hit in the face to begin with rather than rely on my abilities to survive being hit. Pallies can Salv themselves, but the threat reduction is pretty tame and not particularly fast, so if I hit it I’ll usually also just sort of step back for a moment.

In a lot of ways I’m glad I played Rogue as my first melee DPS class, since it taught me to be very cagey around aoe damage and boss effects (the direct result of getting WTF1shot by the Commander in Nexus and his GOD-DAMN Whirlwind Over and over and over and over and over again.) And so my first instinct is to duck out of damage rather than just ride through it.

Anyway.

tl;dr: I’ve been playing a lot of Ret Pally, and I like it pretty damn well so far.

Still working on my gear, but I’m hoping to be at a point sooner rather than later where I’d be viable to be part-time DPS when I’m not needed for tankerin’. At the moment I’m pulling ~3k in Heroics, so… Getting there, slowly but surely. 🙂

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In other news: I’ve been talking abut WoW a lot, recently, and part of the reason is I’ve been working on some side stuff that keeps me from working on my other projects.. I’m hoping to have that all wrapped up by the end of this week or the next, and then hopefully you’ll see some updates regarding the other stuff I’m doing. Wewt.