This is in line with my experience as well. I tried using several of the methods that "don't reset swing-timer" while using a 2h weapon (3.6 AS), but found that there was always a 3+ second delay between finishing a heal and my next swing.

I'm sure it's been discussed elsewhere in this thread, so you may want to read the previous posts, but basically:
1) More blessings- there's diminishing returns after 2 sets of blessings (some argue 3). You can do with having all 2 (or 3) paladins be Holy to give the other hybrids (priests, druid, shaman) more flexibility.
2) Full judgements aren't (always) maintained- see the problems that ret paladins have with Crusader Strike in its current implementation. Once the judgements drop you're faced with having your paladins, some of whom are likely healers, run into melee (wasting time and getting near AOEs) and recasting the seal/judgement (using more time, though it can be done while moving, and mana).

While the most important blessings can probably be summarized into 2 per class, 3 is better for most classes, and some can use as many as 4, especially hybrid classes. For instance, unless all your druids are healers, you're gonna want Kings/Might/Wisdom for Druids. If you're running with DPS warriors in addition to your tank, you'd see legitimate use out of Kings/Might/Salvation/Light (click off Salvation on the tank!).

Bringing a retribution paladin in addition to a stable of 3 Holy paladins might have diminished returns, but if you have only 2 Holy paladins in the raid so far (definite possibility Horde-side!), the Retribution paladin brings non-trivial blessings to most classes.

The only way around this is to use an instant attack like Stormstrike (I often do this after throwing a few heals), but for Paladins the only choice for that is Crusader Strike... and.. yeah. Not really any worries about this issue if you have CS. It's been my experience that it's usually just easier to re-judge the mob every 20 seconds rather than worry about swing timers and positioning (dodging cleaves, etc).

After reading much of this informative thread, and dealing with a similiar issue with the raids I lead - I propose a question. The goal of the question is to simply get a flat metric to measure Ret viability in a raid. Assume we are already aware of the great benefits they bring in keeping JoW and JoL up. In other words:

How much personal DPS would a Ret Paladin have to do, in order to justify his raid spot?


For your amusement, I present some data of my own. One of the pallies in my raids has pretty decent ret gear and I actually let him into the Windfury group on the last (bugged) Gruul kill.

http://jefte.net/decertostats/wws-20...039/index.html

No ground slams other than the first one made the fight a very basic tank and spank. Therefore, my dps and his were increased considerably (imagine that, I kept up with our SP). Is 500 dps a decent enough amount? Where do we set the bar? 700? 800? I refer you back to the question in bold lettering.

I don't think the question can be simplified this much. Obviously the choice is Retribution Paladin vs. Traditional DPS class, so the question you're asking is equivalent to, "How much do a retribution paladin's buffs increase the raid-wide DPS?" If the DPS increase from buffs is B and an alternative DPS class provides D DPS, then the paladin needs to provide (D-B) extra DPS.

Now here's the problem with simplification... The value of B depends heavily on the number of paladins already in the raid. Yes, the aura and 3% crit is nice, but the real benefit is another round of blessings for everyone in the raid. If the ret paladin would be #4, the value of B is quite low. But if the ret paladin would be #1 (ie. no other paladins in raid), then the extra DPS/survivability/etc from 25x blessings alone would already increase damage by slightly more than one typical DPS class.

I think the real question we're trying to answer is:

If a retribution paladin would be the Nth paladin in the raid, how much personal DPS would he have to do to justify his raid spot instead of another DPS class?

And the question is most interesting for N = 2 or 3.

What do you mean? That using an instant strike will add an extra swing after casting a heal?



And for non-CS judgement refresh, I often use that method too. Re-seal SoW after judging so you know how much time is left on it. If you can get in a few swings for SoW procs, that's great, but either way, you rejudge when SoW or JoW fades.

I'm going to have to mull that over a bit.



Are you proposing that their worth is dependent on the number of paladins in the raid?

Using shoddy round numbers as an example:
If a Paladin is the only Pally, their personal dps would have to be ~300.
If a Paladin is the second Pally, their personal dps would have to be ~400.
If a Paladin is the third Pally, their personal dps would have to be ~500.
If a Paladin is the fourth Pally, their personal dps would have to be ~600.

WWS calculates the glancing blow percentage from the total of Hit/Crit/Glance. It doesn't count the 10% misses (counting out, 58 glances/101 hit/glance/crit is the listed 57%). True glance rate would be more like 52% (still high).

Funny, he did complain of a high miss rate - and its subsequent effects on CS and Judgements falling off.

My non-scientific observation* has been that using your instant attack as soon as the heal lands will get you swinging right away, much in the way that warriors have to abuse Slam.

*not proven in any way shape or form

The shaman would go to waste. The biggest problem I see with ret pallies is their need to be in a stacked group in order to have competitive dps. =(

Hasn't Teleyn already told us that all a ret pally needs to be reasonably effective is windfury? So just throw the pally into the melee group (or the misfits group if that group has a resto shammie) and they're good? (I think people are assuming that the ret pallies need a shadow priest when this is not actually the case.)

Retribution Paladins do not "need" to have a Shadow Priest in their group to sustain their mana (especially BE Paladins), unless they were healing or spamming consecrate/exorcism on a target. They function as a melee class, and their optimal "stacked" group is the same as optimal melee group stacking:

Enhance Shaman
Feral Druid
Fury Warrior
Melee DPS
Melee DPS

The two DPS slots are usually reserved for rogues. I excluded Hunters because the DPS they gain from a Shadow Priest being grouped with them is greater than what their aura provides the melee group.

Assuming 3 Paladins in the raid there's a definite formula that answers this question, but the variables within the formula are subject to gear, spec and the nature of the fight:

Raid Justification:

Paladin DPS Contribution = DPS Generated by Sanctified Crusader + Group DPS Increase from Sanctity Aura (exluding the Paladin) + Paladin's Personal DPS + (Optional increase in DPS from Talented BoM if other paladins don't have it)

There's also the matter of keeping judgements refreshed. This also hinges on your raid's composition, healing style and the nature of the fight. Some fights, such as Magtheridon allow plenty of room for recasted judgements. Other fights require more out of healers and a global cooldown or attempt to refresh through melee could get someone killed. 100% presence of JoW means a significant increase in DPS for certain classes, such as hunters. Healing generated from JoL is questionable, I haven't seen a fight that could have its healing burden significantly alleviated due to the presence of JoL.

If contribution is measured off personal dps + overall raid DPS increase alone, Retribution Paladins already should have a permaslot in raids, regardless of what group they were stuck in. They would end up replacing the DPS class that they surpass in terms of overall raid contribution. All that remains to be dispelled is the stigma that they suck at raids.

Group Justification:

I think this is more of an issue, as Retribution Paladins get their hands on better gear and figure out their optimal gear setups. There is usually only one melee DPS group in most raids, though if you stick WF with your MT you could potentially have two. Regardless these spots are coveted by other melee DPS and some people are rather...defensive...about keeping their slots.

A Retribution Paladin has two possible positions: the first is in the main tank group or in the melee DPS group. If both groups have melee support buffs (especially from shaman and feral druid, which isn't so hard to set up) then I doubt people would really have an issue with being put in either group. The point of contention appears when there is only one melee DPS group with supporting DPS buffs.

In this case it's

Melee Group DPS w/ Paladin + Tank group DPS

vs

Melee Group DPS + Tank Group DPS w/ Paladin (in addition to other things such as mitigation from devo aura or increased threat cap from sanc aura)

I have a suspicion that in its current state, the raid stands to better have the Paladin in the tank group rather than the DPS group. Something needs to change there in terms of support talents in the Retribution Tree more attractive for DPS groups if this is to change.

From chatting with Teleyn I think the general order is WF > LotP > BS > VT for group buffs.

Yes, VT is nice, but there are other classes that need it more. Unless you're throwing a lot of spot heals around (or, god forbid, consecrating), mana isn't a huge issue.

I can't really see putting a Ret Paladin in a stacked melee group. The ideal melee group IMO is a Fury Warrior, Enhance Shaman, Feral Druid and 2 Rogues. First of all, in this set-up the Enhance Shaman is probably going to be using Grace of Air rather than Windfury. Grace of Air helps all 5 members of that party, whereas Windfury only helps 3 (and is not significantly better than Grace of Air for 2 of those 3, assuming they're dagger Rogues). Where do you put a Ret Paladin here? The Warrior's battle shout will be huge for the group, the Shaman's group buffs are similarly important. The Rogues are benefitting the most from those buffs and are cranking out the highest DPS by a large margin. The Feral Druid would probably be the first to go for the Retadin.

SoC is bugged and generates more threat than it should currently, it's fixed next patch. A geared tank should be able to output ~700 sustained tps, meaning a paladin would have to do what like 1100dps to pull agro. In a raid situation with multiple warriors where the tank doesn't have to demo shout or thunderclap some tanks claim to sustain 1000 threat per second.

So really it depends how good your tank is and how often the boss does a huge de-agro move

Could I ask what UI mod / software generates that content?

I'm such a numbers nut I would so dearly love to have our raids parsed in a similar way. (Although I probably lack the tech knowledge to implement it myself)

It's WoW Web Stats.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting (although not necessarily with those numbers). Since the choice is either Ret Paladin or DPS class that's not a paladin, you must take into account the extra raid utility from the Nth round of blessings, and that utility has steeply diminishing returns from first to fourth.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not suggesting that if you only have 1 paladin in the raid, it's best if he's a ret paladin. I'm just saying it would probably be better to take a reasonably geared ret paladin in that slot than another DPS class. The Paladin still might contribute more as a healer. The situation where a ret paladin would add the most is a guild that has too many healers and not enough paladins or DPS. That way you could get the paladin blessings without going too healer heavy. For min/maxing however, it's still probably better to have the paladin go holy and have a priest respec shadow.

Post a video of yourself in raid please Teleyn, i'd like to see how you play.

tnx.

I'm not sure if i'd phrase it that way. In fact i'd prefer to put forth the question as, "if the Retribution Paladin is the Nth melee DPS in the raid...".

I like to think of myself as reasonably open minded about Ret Paladins. However my guild, and my raids, usually has a fairly akward number of rogues/warriors in a raid. We usually have two or three rogues, two or three DPS warriors (mostly MS for now), and only two shaman, one elemental and one resto.

What we usually end up with is a group of two rogues and two warriors plus a resto shaman dropping an un-enhanced windfury. There's usually a leftover rogue or warrior sitting in a group that isn't condusive to their dps (along with the obligatory lone Hunter.. /sigh). I would love to add the Paladin to the "melee dps group", but who do I drop? In this case, to my eye, the Paladin is in competition for a group slot with one of the warriors.

The number of Paladins in the raid matters, but composition, particularly melee DPS composition, matters as well. Sometimes the compositon of the raid doesn't lend itself to adding another melee DPS class, because no matter how you parse it you can't put them in a group that is beneficial to their damage output. So you're inviting somebody who's going to underperform right off the bat because composition dictates they can't be in a group that is beneficial to them (or that somebody suffers for their sake).

When all is said and done adding a Ret Paladin to the mix may still be more beneficial than say, an extra warrior. Improved Sanctity Aura, by it's wording, implies that it could work for casters as well. So if you can't find a place for them in a melee dps group, you could put them with a caster group and have them healbot with Improved Sanctity on. Not an optimal use of their utility, but at least they're more beneficial than that leftover warrior stuck in a group full of warlocks.

Ideally I don't want more melee dps'ers in the raid than I can reasonably construct synergistic groups for. (I wish we had a third shaman, but that's an different issue.)