How does he do it?

This is something of a response to my last post, or at least, it's something of a continuation of the conversation that "what kind of DPS do you do" brings up. As my last post stated, I've pretty much turned to my standard answer as being "I do 18k DPS", and it's left at that. Sometimes people laugh, sometimes they just ignore me, either way, I don't particularly mind, I'm usually too busy trying to run down Alliance players in Wintergrasp.

Though, there are those exceptions. There are those people that just want to know more. Which, given a bit of time on my part, I'm fine with sharing. What do I know? So, after the "what's your DPS" question and my template response, there's usually something akin to "how do you do it?" Well, I won't lie, sometimes I don't even know. If you don't know the basics of how to play retribution, I'd suggest you pop over to retpaladin.com or one of those other high class compendiums of retribution knowledge. Hell, you might even find something on the Warcraft class forums. You'd be surprised just how much people are willing to help each other if it makes them seem smarter.

Once you've got the basics of playing retribution covered, i.e. being hit-capped and knowing the basic rotation, the best thing you can do is just to practice. The First Come First Serve (FCFS) rotation that is key to retribution paladin DPS is one of the, in my opinion, most forgiving rotations there is. Now, I haven't really played a number of different classes, so it may just be my own personal biases speaking, but you know, if you screw up on the FCFS rotation, just wait for a GCD and you're usually back on board.

I seriously use 1-5 on my keyboard, and that's about it unless I'm hitting divine plea or something weird for a specific fight. I've got my buttons ranked in order of importance, 1 being the most important, and 5 being the least, and then I just faceroll on the keyboard making sure to mash the buttons when their timers light up. As long as there are no buttons lit up to the left of the current button that I'm mashing, things usually work out pretty well.

So, practice...practice...practice. It's the best thing you can do, it's all about muscle memory, or at least, that's how you get the rotation down. I've been playing the rotation long enough now where I don't even have to look and see which buttons are lit up and are ready to fly, it's just sort of second nature to me. I have found, by way of retpaladin.com, a neat little add-on that is sure to help those of you out there struggling with the paladin rotation, or at least those of you trying to figure out when to press what.

The add-on is called CLCRet and it's by Abija. It's essentially a graphic organizer for what actions you should be doing and when. While I could try to explain it here, retpaladin.com has a nice YouTube video of how it all works here:



Now, this add-on might not be the end all be all to learning the retribution rotation, but it's a definite help. It might not be the optimum in terms of DPS, and it might miss a few things here and there, but it's better than nothing. Think of it like training wheels for your retribution bicycle: you might not go the fastest, and things might be a bit wobbly, but once you figure it all out, you too can win the Tour de France.