retribution aura vs devotion aura

What is the best aura for tanking? I asked people in my server what the the best aura for taking and the majority of them said "it depends".

There was 3 people i asked, and one said use retribution when your pulling big mobs to hold threat and use devotion if your fighting a smaller mob or a boss.

I asked another person and he said use retribution for tanking and devotion for healing( I dont heal so that was pointless).

The last person said devotion is the best.

so which is the best or which is the best for certain situations?

In short, Devotion provides a bit of phisical damage reduction, Retribution provides a bit of extra threat, and Resistance a bit of magical reduction.


Pick the most useful one for your situation.

Yeah it depends on your situation.

When I'm alone I use Devotion by default, on the basis that as a tank I should reduce incoming damage. I switch to Resistance if I know some heavy magic damage is coming.

I consider Retribution to be really negligible compared to the damage we put out. I would only use it if I already have everything else covered.


In my raid I use Concentration. Holy paladins use Resistance (more practical for when they use Aura Mastery), and Devotion is provided a shaman.

I dislike Ret aura. I'm hard put to find a use for it, really.

When farming alone/doing dailies, I like to pull X number of whatever I need and kill as many at once as possible. The damage from ret aura is pretty meh compared to the reduction in incoming damage from devo.

I dislike it in dungeons and raids too, as the threat from it is applied to the person the mob is hitting, and sometimes that's not you. So if there's an errant mob (rare, but it happens) who runs off to beat on a healer, 1) the healer is taking more damage than if I had Devo up and 2) is generating more Threat for themselves which I need to overcome.

Granted, the amount of threat ret would produce and maybe the amount of damage devo would reduce in the above example is minimal, but the one is not good and the other is at least somewhat helpful.

Maybe if I were running low-level content on a speed run, then ret might be useful, I suppose. But otherwise, I never touch it.

Use devotion or magic resistance depending on whether you are fighting physical hitters or magic damage. If in doubt use devotion.

Retribution is badly in need of attention from Blizz since the damage it does is so tiny relative to the damage we now do, it hasn't scaled correctly. So I rarely use retribution unless AOE farming normal world mobs (but Blizzard seem to have decided this is bad too for no apparent reason).