Now I'm going to make it official. I'm sure many of you have heard me mention this before but Vulk will be going Ret to level to 80, and then staying Ret for Raids. That Right, I wont be around to heal for you and play fun games like "How Low Can You Go?" (tanks are going to miss that one). I will be there to pew pew for you all in raids.

Lately I have made browsing WoW Insider and MMO Champion making it my twice daily routine. I have been drooling over the paladin changes since they first announced them. Of course there is a nerf coming for damage but its still beta and as of now nobody's damage has been equalized. Bottom line though is that they have really done a 180 and take a deep look to fix the Ret tree. They have changed almost everything about retribution paladins and have tuned it to a 100% viable class spec now!

To begin I will go over some of the changes they have implemented to improve the spec. I say some of them because I am bound to miss a few because,as I said, there is so damn many changes lol.

Starting with fundamental changes:
Seals: They have completely reworked the seal and judgment system. Seals now last 2 min and are no longer consumed by judging. That means that paladins no longer have to judge and reseal every 8 seconds saving immense amounts of mana. In addition seals proc from Crusader Strike and, our new ability, Divine Storm adding a decent amount of damage.

Judgments: They have removed the Judgment spell we all know today and have replaced it with three different spells that all ad a debuff. Judgment of Light (restore health), Judgment of Wisdom (restore mana), and Judgment of Justice (prevent fleeing and limiting movement speed). For ret this means that we no longer have to seal, judge then toss up our damage seal allowing us to focus on dps.

Auras: Although this is a change for most/all class auras this brings retribution paladins a lot more utility. Especial with what our primary aura will be(more mentioned later). Auras will be raid wide instead of just for your party.

Damage: One of the biggest, if not the biggest ret change. All paladin spells now scale with attack power AND spell power (Ret will have both) as opposed to just spell damage now (which Ret currently lacks). This is phenomenal for our abilities like Judgment, Concencrate, Hammer of Wrath, Exorcism (Undead/Demon) and Holy Wrath (Undead/Demon). They now do much, much more damage.

Avenging Wrath: This spell no longer causes forbearance and now causes 20% additional damage AND healing! Its now viable for holy too to increase healing and its made even better for Ret with talents.

Now the Retribution Talent Tree from the top down:

Improved Blessing of Might: Increases the attack power bonus of your Blessing of Might by 50%.
- Raised from 20% its a delicious boost to an already amazing buff.

Heart of the Crusader: In addition to the normal effect, your Judgement spells will also increase the critical strike chance of all attacks made against that target by an additional 3%.
- They removed Seal of the Cursader which the 3% crit used to be attached to and moved the crit to every single judgment we do. Brilliant.

Conviction: Increases your chance to get a critical strike with all spells and attacks by 5%.
- Now adds spell crit on top of the mele crit it already gives. This adds a small boost to our judgment and other spells we use as well as providing an awesome incentive for holy paladins to pick it up.

Sanctified Retribution: Damage caused by targets affected by Retribution Aura is increased by 2%.
- They removed Sanctity aura and this skill ties in the 2% damage from Improved Sanctity into Retribution Aura. Wait wait wait, Retribution paladins using Retribution Aura!?! WHAT A CONCEPT!

Sheath of Light: Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 30% of your attack power and your critical healing spells heal the target for 60% of the healed amount over 12 seconds.
- WOOOT! Its about damn time. Shammies got an AP -> Spellpower earlier and finally Ret got what we also deserved. On top of that crit heals add a HoT, awesome! With mele and spell crit being tied into the same thing we may very well see a relatively high crit chance for ret heals, and that is tasty.

Judgments of the Wise: Your Judgement spells restore mana to up to 3 group or raid members totaling 60% of the damage caused.
- This is like Sanctified Judgment, the live version of this talent, only on steroids. Add to it the fact that we now have spell damage and judgments do much more damage it returns quite a bit of mana to yourself aswell as a couple friends. What I have read is it has a "smart" mana restore system and will always restore mana to the paladin and chooses the other two targets by whoever has the lowest % of mana to maximize its utility. B E A Utiful!

Repentance: Puts the enemy target in a state of meditation, incapacitating them for up to 1 min. Any damage caused will awaken the target. Usable against Demons, Dragonkin, Giants, Humanoids and Undead.
- RET PALLY CC! This is not an atrocious 31 point talent anymore. Up to 1 min CC on a 1 min CD and it now works on FOUR MORE mob types other than just humanoids. /dance the we have cc dance

Sanctified Wrath: Increases the critical strike chance of Hammer of Wrath by 50%, reduces the cool down of Avenging Wrath by 60 secs and while affected by Avenging Wrath 50% of all damage caused bypasses damage reduction effects.
- As I said earlier, Avenging Wrath can be improved by talents and I wasn't lieing. This reduces its CD to 2 mins and half the damage bypasses damage reduction. Any DPS would give their left testicle (or boob) for a trinket that did this, its fantabulous. This talent also makes Hammer of Wrath viable. Combine the roughly 30% crit you will already have and it increases its crit to an amazing 80% chance! And lets not forget this scales with AP and SP too! It is indeed Hammer of GG.

Swift Retribution: Your Retribution Aura also increases casting, ranged and melee attack speeds by 3%.
- Another amazing addition to Ret Aura. With this Retribution Aura stacks up to be an astonishingly useful aura. Fully Improved it will deal 168 damage to attackers adding a little more threat for tanks. It will provide 3% faster attacks and heals as well as increase the entire raid's damage by 2%(not counting the haste benifit). Thats one hell of an aura!

Righteous Vengeance: Increases critical damage bonus of your Judgement and Divine Storm spells by 25%.
- More crit damage from Judgments and DS, defiantly will take that!

Divine Storm: An instant weapon attack that causes Holy damage to up to 4 enemies within 8 yards. The Divine Storm heals up to 3 party or raid members totaling 20% of the damage caused.
- Pally WHIHIRHRHRLLL WHIHIHINNDD PEW PEW! Paladins finally get an amazing AoE ability as well as another instant attack to weave into our DPS rotation! YESYESYES! It has an additional bonus to heal party/raid members similar to Judgments of the Wise making it even better!

Divine Strength (Protectoion): Increases your total Strength by 15%.
- Yes, it is in the protection tree but it is defiantly a retribution talent, 15% more strength is 5% more than it currently gives us making strength all that much more valuable.

Granted WotLK is still in beta and all this is subject to change but it appears that Blizzard has finally taken a long, in depth look at the Retribution tree and figured out how to fix it along with our itemization issues.

There is also a plethora of pvp changes to ret that are just amazing but I will skip covering those because this has gone on longer than I expected lol.

As for professions, I will most likely drop both Enchanting and Alchemy to pick up either BS/Inscript, Eng/Inscript or JC/Inscript. I honestly haven't decided yet. I am still waiting for more on professions to be released before I make my final decision. I have been leveling my feral druid, Cizin, to be my primary alt in wrath with my supporting professions (mining/herb)

Well now you all know my plans for ret and how awesome they have made it so hit me up if you need something blown up when Wrath arrives. :)