My struggles come with running around or drawing aggro and having to back off.

My ret is the 1st and most loved character I have, and to be honest, I dont think things are as bad as people think. Ultimately its the way this class has to played now rather than nerfing and broken bits.
I’ve hit 85 and have just upgraded gear to about 333 running only a few heroics so far, but this is what I’ve noticed so far…..

1. We used to be quite hard core pre cata with aoe. Now, we absolutely suck, I agree, but no-one really cared about trash dps anyways so I dont let DS bother me as a result.

2. Having mentioned the above, we are still quite potent at boss fights, particularly when little movement is required. I find myself gunning top dps spots with mages only and no other class. in heroics with my cirrent 333 gear, I’m peaking at about 12k-13k dps while most in my pugs are doing between 8 and 10k.

I am by no means a super arrogant imba player, I’m just noticing that our dps does count when it is needed most. I gladly take mastery over haste any day. Sure, we do get those odd moments when we do have to wait within the rotation, but there are equally, if not more occasions where proc bombardments occur. And when that happens, watch you dps skyrocket.
Naturally, one should leave all cd’s refreshed for the boss fight. start the fight, build up your 3 HP and let everything else rip, leaving your guardian for last, only after your zealotry is up.

Thats the way I play, and I find it works every time. Usually I’m doing the same dps a tank would on trash, but again, it doesnt bother me much.

Simple fixes to our class would be adding more damage to DS and fixing a somewhat buggy guardian ( perhaps even drop his CD a touch ). other than that, I think these change is quite wicked.

as far as using one first over the other? it’s generally easier to get avenging wrath up while ramping up charges of holy power to use zealotry. by the time avenging wrath is over you should definitely have enough Holy Power to use zealotry immediately following.

Second, regarding Zealotry and Avenging Wrath – I’ve seen mention elsewhere of the need to use them separately – but why? Up until now I’ve had a macro which casts both bound to a key, and just hit the key a couple times to run both – is there anything to be gained by running them separately in sequence? And if so – which first? Or is that situational?

On the subject of class usefulness, my feeling is that one of the biggest things we’ve got going for us atm is the ability to self heal with WoG (unfortunate acronym!) and still do useful damage, taking some of the load off the healers. I can see Blizz reducing the holy power drain for this.

You should still be using holy wrath and consecrate to fill some of the gaps in your DPS rotation. DS is totally worthless though.

The DS issue is that DS is worthless. there is almost no time that DS is worth using in practically any heroic or raid. It is only useful when there are something like 5 or more mobs. how often does that come up?

back in BC and vanilla when we had those “issues” we were much more on par(or downright broken) with other DPS and still had a guaranteed raid spot because of(at least) auras and blessings. At this point in the game, no matter what our level of utility, we are being dropped, or forced to heal/tank, for people that give the same buffs we do who do more DPS overall on a boss.

Waiting a couple of seconds isn’t a bad thing. That said, ramp up time for HP does need to be looked at somehow.

The second thing I take issue with is putting DS back in our single-target rotation. First of all, it isn’t going to happen, as Blizzard has said explicitly that AoE attacks are not supposed to be part of single-target rotations. I wouldn’t mind a buff to make DS worth casting, or to have it generate HP, but not if it doesn’t share a cooldown with CS.