Why do I keep getting little zits along the layer lines?

I chased the exact same dotted pattern on a helmet print a while back and it turned out to be z hop, not retraction itself. Every time the nozzle lifts for a retract it drools a tiny bit, and when it drops back down onto a curved outer wall that little bit of ooze gets squished into the surface as a bump. Because a helmet curve triggers tons of short retracts in a row, you get that dashed line look. The slicer preview stays clean because the toolpaths are fine, the problem is what happens during the lift, which the preview just doesn't show you.

First thing I'd try is turning z hop off completley and running a test. On my machine the dots basicly vanished the moment I did that. Stock z hop values tend to be on the generous side, and a lot of people leave it on out of habit when it isn't needed for PLA on a rigid bed.

If that doesn't fully fix it, turn on the travel and wipe visualization in your slicer preview and zoom into one of the dotted areas. Sometimes the dots line up perfectly with a specific move type and once you see which one it is, the fix gets obvious. Also check if your seam setting is set to random. Random seam plus a curved surface can scatter little nubs that look nothing like a normal seam, expecially if wipe is doing a short swipe before each travel. Two other things worth a quick test. Drop the nozzle temp a bit, since a slightly too hot nozzle oozes more during those hops, and darker or matte colors can behave differently than you'd expect. And if your slicer has the variable width wall mode on, switch to classic walls and compare, since uneven wall widths can produce odd little bumps on curves. For me it was the z hop alone, but the temp drop made the surface noticeably cleaner too.

Same dashed-blob thing hit me on a knight helmet a couple months back and z hop was only half of it. Turned out my nozzle had a partial clog, so every so often the flow would surge a bit and leave a raised dot. Swapped nozzles mid-print-run and the rest of the layers came out clean. Only took me 3 months of on and off troubleshooting to figure that out, so don't overthink it. A cold pull is a 10 minute test and rules that whole branch out. If the dots are perfectly periodic it's more likely settings, if they're scattered randomly I'd look at the nozzle first.

I'd pump the brakes on turning z hop fully off though. I did that exact thing chasing a diffrent blob issue and traded dots for drag lines, because my bed isn't perfectly flat and the nozzle caught the tops of some layers on longer travels. If the ooze theory is right, and honestly it sounds right, just lowering the hop height should give you the same win without risking the nozzle kissing the print. Cheap to test either way, but I wouldn't nuke the setting outright.

Question for the original poster: do your dots show up in the exact same spot on every layer, or do they wander around the side? Mine wandered, and it turned out the white plastic tube feeding into the printer head had worked itself slightly loose, so the pushy bit was catching now and then. Pushed it back in snug and clipped it and the bumps mostly stopped. Also, one of the replies mentioned a partial blockage inside the nozzle. If you go that route, how do you even tell if that's your problem before swapping parts? I've never opened mine up and honestly don't know what I'd be looking for.