Ret to the FACE

It seems that the RNG gods are displeased with the goats I have been sacrificing to them asking for holy plate, and have, instead, in their infinite wisdom, showered me with DPS and Tanking plate instead.  This is wholly depressing since healing is my thing that I do.  I heal stuff.  I heal stuff when I am ret as well.  Although, apparently I also Tank stuff when I am ret too.

This is not all bad.  Ret is stupid fun.  And when I say stupid I mean it.  My screen lights up like a christmas tree whenever I get into the thick of it and I am madly pressing the current glowing button and waiting for my combo points to hit 3 before I do something with them (or sometimes less if my "hit shit harder" timer says that buff is about to run out).

You see, I always loved playing rogues.  My first toon was a troll rogue and I played the hell out of that character, until I was convinced to reroll alliance with work mates.  So, you can imagine how damn excited I was to find out that my holy rogue is just as much fun to play!

Now, 4.0.6 will be a big change to ret.  I am looking forward to the change in mastery.  I might actually start stacking that at some point! I am going to have a look this week at numbers and things that I can produce (I have about ilvl 333 average gear, and seem to be able to produce about 8k average DPS on a boss if I dont have to cover tanking or healing), which, for someone excited by the shinies on her screen, are some quite respectable numbers... for ret.  Yeah, I put the caveat for ret on there because no matter what I do, I seem to be about 1-2k behind people with similar levels of gear to me.  Which is kind of depressing, really.

But my guild are lovely, and they take the broken holy pally along as ret to try to farm for heroic gear anyway. That said, I actually mostly hold my own these days.  There really isn't a lot to ret; keep your hitty harder buff up, judge and crusader strike/divine storm when they are off CD, use your holy power when it gets to 3 on either the hitty one or your buff (or use word of glory if things are looking a little dire) and whenever one of your abilities glows, use it!  Use all your CDs on bosses.  That's the guts of ret.  There are some ideas of rotation and start ups, and there is finesse in choosing which proc to use when many proc at once, but really, those are not too important to people who are not at top end raiding just yet.  For most of us, venturing into our first raid, or gearing up in heroics, the finer ins and outs of decisions as to which proc to use when is not a life or death situation.  Not standing in the poop will yield much greater results.  That extra 100DPS just doesn't matter to us at this stage.  I am not saying it won't soon, but it doesn't yet.

It's not quite the faceroll it used to be, but it is a lot shinier on the screen!