Retribution PVP - putting the FU in Fun

Between my seemingly now standard 10-12 hour workdays I have been looking for ways to gear up some of my 80's a little to at least get them out of their blues and into something a little more epic.

The problem with running up to 12 hour workdays is that once you log in you need to know right there and then what you're going to do and whom you are going to do it with (no sexual inuendo intended).

Despite the relative easy of instances these days it turns out that getting a group as a blue geared paladin of any type can be a bit of a time-consuming challenge and so I turned to the age old gearing standby: PVP

And since I was and mostly still am fully dressed in the standard set of PVP blues I decided to go with Retribution as my primary pvp spec. Even as a blue geared ret paladin the burst is crazy enough to be able to take down most of anything.

Still as Retribution PVP there's still a few challenging classes. A good warlock is without a doubt capable of kiting the life out of me (quite literally), frost mages can pretty much snare me till I turn blue (also quite literally) and a good frost dk will definitely have the advantage over my blue geared ret pally even if it is only on the basis of lots of snares and interrupts.
Thankfully most warlocks these days are destruction in the BG's so there is only a minor worry that you'll be dotted up and CoEx'ed until you expire leaving the frost mages as biggest issue.

To try and address the whole issue of being easily kited I decided to put the FU in fun and looking towards gear that will keep me from being kited as much by frustrating the hell out of anyone who tries to lock me down in such miserable ways.

My answer to the problem was simply: Frost resistance (and liberal use of hand of freedom)

The 3 primary gear items for this goal are easily crafted (Icebane) starting you off with a chestpiece (115FR), some boots (86FR) and a belt (86FR) that together provide almost 300 Frost resistance (FR). Slap on your frost resistance aura at that point and you're sitting at a massive 400+ Frost resistance.

Incidentally 400 Frost resistance is about where you'd want to be to be resistance capped. Read a previous post of mine here on that topic.

The icebane set definitely has some disadvantages (losing crit/hit/resilience) but there is a decent amount of stamina on there and some sockets to make up for the biggest losses you may have taken.

You can also slot some gem slots with infinite spheres but at a moderate +5 resist all you can ask yourself if this is really worth it over some hit/crit/other gems.

Last but not least it's worth mentioning that there's a couple of rings such as the titanium frostguard or frozen eye that can be used to swap some gear around without losing any frost resistance over it.

Looking back at a day+ or so frost-resistance combat I can note a little less burst and some loss in resilience which is hardly noticeable. With frost resistance aura up however I can now pretty much mitigate a significant portion of frost dk damage and almost completely shrug off frost mages which previously were a huge issue.

Combining this with various engineering trinkets I am currently trying out and it seems like trading in some damage for oodles newfound mobility is paying off quite handsomely.

Perhaps once I have access to better PVP gear I will have to re-evaluate using the icebane set in favor of something else but in comparison to the pvp blues and even some of the earlier PVP gear sets icebane's tradeoff in damage vs resistance definitely puts icebane ahead of anything I have seen so far in terms of survivability.

If nothing else I can heartily recommend giving it a try simply because the overall material requirements to craft a frost resistance set is laughable by today's standards.

Now if you'll excuse me I have some frost mages to giggle at.