But you can reduce the effect of the RNG on you.

Well, by rolling Blood Elf and using SoB you can, sure. But haste has nothing to do with it.

What, switch to SoR? I rarely get favorable reactions when I suggest that. = P

This was sorta brought up 20 pages or so back but do you guys think a Stormherald or Lionheart executioner is better for PVE Blood Elfs? Been trying to figure out which weapon to go for.

EDIT: Just realized I'm talking out of my ass and ignoring part of the above post.

Hah, Deedy is up next for our Vortexes so he's planning ahead accordingly I see. Now if only we'd have more healers show up so he could DPS on fights where he should be able to. Definately couldn't ask for a better paladin. Regardless I'm expecting an increase in our 2v2 feral/ret team rating equal to your dps increase once upgraded

For purely PvE?

Assuming you're only looking at damage output, the sword has more DPS stats (10 more Str, 2 more agi, roughly same weapon DPS, and the +Str proc). On the flip side, that fear resist can be a mixed bag. (Good if you believe in avoiding fears and assisting on heals/maintaining DPS; bad if you are not a fan of getting aggro sometimes)


The mace is better for general use (stamina, stun proc for stunnable targets) and is slightly nicer when using SoC (slower speed, stun proc + JoC).

Anetheron

Wow Web Stats

#7, 1186 DPS. This is a fight where I'm able to concentrate on pure DPS (not dispelling, taunting, spot healing, etc.)

However, both Natural (fury war) and I were pushing threat by a very fine line. I wasn't able to pop AW on bloodlust as I was sitting at 95%. I can gain a huge amount of DPS with AW/Bloodlust/Haste pot, but agro limits this a ton.

Also note that 79% of my damage fully benefits from haste. It is truly an amazing ret stat.

Anetheron is a flat out incredible fight for us Saabik, I just did it the other night for the first time and wished I'd been running WWS like you were. All I've got is a screenshot from one of our rogues recount that he reset before the fight. I'll try to parse it into WWS this week if I remember to but for now here is what I've got.



1-3 are rogues, 4 is myself, and then 5 is an MS warrior also in the windfury group with me. I was running a long a razor thin wire on threat throughout this entire fight but I managed to keep it throttled back just enough. This is a very melee-centric damage fight though so of course you can't really measure the other ranged classes like you normally would...but damned if it didn't feel good to come in at 4th place on a Mt. Hyjal fight.

Just a thought, but is crit actually that good a stat for ret paladins? Obviously you'd rather have it than not have it, but we don't get extra rage or extra damage on our crits and the Vengeance mechanic is pegged to time rather than number of swings like Flurry.

Obviously you need to stack Vengeance quickly, and ensure that it's maintained. But I'm wondering whether or not you could get away with gearing for AP and haste instead of crit, and use Darkmoon Card: Wrath to keep Vengeance going-- a task for which it is uniquely suited.

So one of the rogues in the top three had no WF? That seems pretty impressive to me

If you like seeing big numbers, you should look at your shade data.
here are mine from the past couple of weeks:
(1645dps) Grant - WWS
(1470dps) Grant - WWS

keep in mind that its only tracking shade. We pop bloodlust on channelers and that's when I use my trinkets and avenging wrath, so my dps for the entire encounter is ALOT higher than these numbers. No agro is a wonderful thing...

However, looking at favorable situations is what advertisers do. If you want real benchmarks, you need to look at fights that put alot of pressure on ret pallies, not ones that take advantage of all their strengths.


For a regular dps check, I find teron to be the excellent target. The duration is quite fair and the tanks usually dont hurt for threat. Also I get to go in dps groups rather than tank groups for the fight. Sadly numbers get skewed if dispellers die and I have to pick up for them, which means I have to keep a very close eye on my global cooldown in case I have to dispel someone, but that is not always a problem. It's also a perfect example why you should bring a ret pally to your raid instead of another rogue who can double his damage


And for stress testing I like to look at council. I'm always in the tank group for devo (so no sanctity). There is alot of raid damage, so I usually judge light (no crusader). I have to save my bubble for when I get hit with an evenom or holy wrath, so I cant be popping avenging wrath at will. I have to step off to bandage some times. I have to rebuff blessings 1-2 times per fight (the 5 min ones). I dont get to mana pot every time its up because I may have to take protection pots. I cant consecrate. I may have to heal myself so I dont die. And I may have to regen with seal of light or seal of wisdom so that I can stay in the fight. There is probably stuff that I'm forgetting too...

You need enough crit so you don't have to worry about losing vengeance.
At low AP, AP is worth more than crit. At high AP, crit is worth more than AP.
Haste is roughly .8 crit. If you use haste meta, or dragonspine, or any ppm in general, then its worth more.
Haste vs AP works similar to crit vs AP.

So what you need is based on what you wear.

I'm currently a little under 50% T5, the rest <= T4. Here's an WWS from our Karathress kill yesterday:

WWS


On haste: does anyone know for sure whether haste adjusts the proc rate of SoC?

I'll be allowing the use of a Ret paladin tonight for our Gruul's. We're all about experimental builds.

From my testing (I sit at about 13.6% passive haste) I have the same proc rate. This is anecdotal with about 250 swings, but I sat at 43% proc rate according to my local wws. Soloing is just so much better with no judgement and r1 SoCo. I'll try to get some files up for hard evidence, though.


Edit: Acutally let me look at some of my WWS where I use r1 SoCo exclusively.

So so far the only Ret Paladins with a nontrivial amount of haste gear that I've seen are all horde, and thus have access to SoB. We know already that for pure damage improvement haste is better than crit (10.5/22.1 = 47.5%, and we know haste benefits more than that portion of a Ret pally's dps), but how does it affect Vengeance uptime given SoC? Do the extra attacks per unit time compensate for the lowered chance per attack to trigger Vengeance? Here's a chart, showing what happens as you trade crit rating for haste rating given a constant amount of item budget to use (assuming 8 second Judgement and +15% crit on Judgements, and my own raid buffed crit and weapon speed):



Let me know if any of the math looks fishy, but as you can see, haste doesn't compensate for loss in crit for Vengeance uptime. The more haste you stack, the more likely you will fail to refresh your Vengeance stack. What's also interesting is that the effect accelerates, so each additional point of haste you trade for crit will make you lose more Vengeance uptime than the last.

So, there is a point past which you would want to stop stacking haste for crit, namely when the gain to raw dps is equal to the loss due to lower Vengeance uptime. However, that point is most likely outside the realm of possibility given current haste gear. Looking at the chart, at 210 haste rating we go from 0.58% failure rate to 1.58% failure rate, and there is no doubt that 210 haste rating is worth more than 0.15% in dps (although we're also assuming failure rate = downtime, which isn't exactly the case, and there will be a loss in raw dps from the lowered crit).

Also, the analysis above doesn't include windfury. Does anyone know if windfury can proc from SoC/JoC/CS?

Furthermore, the effect of haste varies with your current crit. If your crit is currently low, trading crit for haste will make you hit the breakeven point faster, causing each additional point of haste for crit after that to make your dps worse.

Something else to consider is that most of your crits occur at the same time as an autoattack (white, SoC, WF). This means in most cases Vengeance is going to be refreshed in sync with an autoattack swing. So for example, with no haste you may average 3.947 swings in a random 15-second period, but for most of the 15-second periods you actually care about, you're only going to get three swings.

So even if trading crit for haste is not broadly a good idea, it would probably help quite a bit to use just enough haste to lower your swing time from 3.8 to below 3.75, which moves you from three swings in most Vengeance periods to four.

EDIT: Also, hi.

Haste doesn't change the number of SoC procs per swing. That number will always be around 40%. You can have 0 haste or 500 haste and it will be 40%. Just like SoB will be 100% no matter what your haste rating.

What changes is the number of procs per second/minute.
With a 3.8 weapon and no haste, you should see a 44% proc rate on SoC. With 20% haste, you attack 20% faster, and therefore get 20% more SoC procs per minute.

PPM is calculated off of your weapon speed, not the speed on your character sheet. This is why haste rating affects all PPMs.

That was my point, no? Its the same proc percentage no matter the haste value.

Oh, that's not the conclusion. It's generally worth it to trade in your crit for haste for most realistic levels of raid crit. It would've been really cool if the equivalent haste effect traded maintains the same amount of Vengeance uptime as well, but even though it doesn't it's still worth it. Although, the % gain from it is underwhelming if you're just trading an equivalent amount of crit for an equivalent amount of haste with no other stats gained. For instance I estimate going from 0 to 160 haste rating and from 40% raid crit to 32% raid crit is only about a 5% net gain in dps.