You can’t walk away from the Vengeance Paladin’s major overhaul in the next World of Warcraft patch

Blizzard has the difficult task of balancing 38 specializations across 13 different classes in modern World of Warcraft. Many of these specs have seen major overhauls over the years, and with the launch of the Dragonflight expansion, the developers have overhauled the talents of each class and specialization to the point that nearly every one of them plays differently than in the past. With such a large company, it was no surprise to see that some specifications took longer in the oven than others. While major job reworks usually only happen at the launch of an expansion, Blizzard is now extending this into the next patch by giving Retribution Paladins a much-needed overhaul.

Recent Dragonflight content analysis shows that Retribution Paladins are not as popular as some of the other specializations in the game. Blizzard attributes this to many factors and is redesigning its talent tree from the ground up in Patch 10.0.7 to address these weaknesses.

For starters, Vengeance Paladins are at the extreme end of button bloat. Players don’t mind having a list of spells, but when that list becomes a book, finding keyboard shortcuts for each spell and learning the rotation can often become a daunting task. Blizzard aims to make the main rotation for Retribution Paladins more focused and with less bloat. They also want to round out the interactions of the talents in the tree to add more power to the rotation and less focus on extreme burst damage followed by unsatisfactory downtime.

Vengeance Paladins also have the highest mortality rates across all types of content. To bring them in line with other melee classes, the developers want to add more interactive ways to give Retribution Paladins access to passive defenses through abilities and cooldowns, and slightly increase the specialization’s mobility. Last but not least, there will be major overhauls to the core theme of the specialization, which is harnessing the light to buff damage to yourself and your teammates.

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There are a few other classes that players would like to see revamped in future patches, but the Dragonflight talent tree system has been largely well-received so far. Blizzard seems to be moving away from outdated practices, and it’s nice to see that they’re addressing class pain points by reworking broken specializations during expansion.