SoC has an internal cooldown of about 0.5-1s. Mostly to prevent Reckoning antics, I think.

On Live, SoC takes the PPM from the hasted speed, making haste less desirable. In Beta, SoC takes the PPM from the base speed, making haste more desirable.

But now they get SoB, which was apparently so good that even with "weird" interactions between WF and SoC horde paladins were still considered far superior.

So the new WF shouldn't change anything for Paladins, right? Atleast if SoC keeps behaving as it does now in the beta.

Well SoC does have an ICD, but that is way off topic from this.

Basically since SoC was a PPM you would always get the same number of procs regardless of weapon speed. Wheteher you were using a 1.0 speed dagger or a 3.8 speed Hammer you would always see (roughly) 7 Seal of Command procs every minute. So no matter how much haste you stack up you'll always see a flat 7 procs of SoC, which is why haste is a "meh" stat right now.

Windfury interacted with SoC strangely. It actually does seem to increase the proc rate (up to something like 8.6 PPM) by some wierd mechanic that we never bothered really caring about.

It seems to be a point of common confusion:

The SoC PPM never changes.

The chance to proc does change, as with a steady proc rate but more attacks per minute you have less of a chance to proc SoC with each attack.

I wasn't quite sure where to post this question, but since it's a WotLK item, I guess it can go here:

I noticed that Scarab of the Infinite Cycle's proc was improved very much, and saw that it now shares the (exact same) proc as this new item, The Egg of Mortal Essence

Can the effect stack, and more importantly, would the hidden cooldown activate on both if you wore them simultaneously?

Sorry if this is obvious but I can think of no other two trinkets that share an exact same passive buffing proc.

I have levelled my druid from 1 (well 10) to 60 resto specced. I also levelled 60-70 resto specced. It's quite possible, not really difficult, just a little bit sad that you had to spend most of your time in cat or bear form to be able to keep on going.

With the changes to healing bonus (healing giving some spell damage bonus) and spirit, I think that killing stuff in caster form is now possible without having to spend half your time drinking, and that's a relief.

On a different note it is basically confirmed that spec swapping is not going to make release so I guess we should start thinking about levelling specs that can at least tank or heal a bit.

That said, he did pretty much guarantee it is coming. This is mainly a huge boost for the endgame pvp/pve'rs so it isn't that important if its at release or not in my opinion.
They have also previously stated that the instances were tuned around the fact that people would be using leveling specs and sub-optimal gear. (Which is how most the tbc instances were anyway)

In conclusion: YES! It's coming. - No, it doesn't really matter much for leveling specs.

And to all you naysayers, well, yeah, Blizzard gets it. I agree it's not critical for release, especially because PVP is hardly on the agenda while leveling, or raiding for that matter. That said, the implementation issues are still worth revisiting. It's more interesting if the feature isn't on a cooldown and does require a visit to the trainer than if it sits on some arbitrary or over-long cooldown and allows for some field usage. You want to be able to go into the arena when your teammates are ready or tank an instance or whatever when it's ripe, not sit around saying "sorry, spec on cooldown". Sure, it can necessitate a trip somewhere, with the attendant hassle of getting there -- a la respeccing now, or the lexicon of power for glyphing or whatever -- but I hope the concerns about convenience are taken into account.

Anyway, while we're at it, how about throwing us a bone during the period between Wrath's release and the implementation of the feature by lowering the respec cap from 50g to 10g? Or whatever is appropriate.

But GSH said earlier that this got changed in Beta and SoC's PPM does indeed scale up with haste since the PPM is calculated from the unhasted base weapon speed (so you get more attacks per minute with the same PPM thus more SoC procs).

Who is correct?

As of 3.0 SoC procs are based on base weapon speed. As such, haste works just fine with it.

Once I figured out all the new mechanics and found myself a melee weapon (Coldstone Cutlass from an early quest in the Fjord, though with the recent change to HotR, my old [The Sun Eater] will likely work just as well), I began to level just fine in my prot paladin gear/talent spec. Infinite mana, almost never die, and there are a lot of nice places to round up dozens of mobs (the skorn camp is beautiful if you stay away from the Towers of Frostbolt Spam) while questing.

On Live:

The PPM never changes. You will always see ~7 procs per minute while using Seal of Command. What haste (weapon speed) changes is the chance to proc per swing.

Pretend you have a 3.8 speed weapon. That means that every minute you have 15.789 weapon swings, 7 of which will proc SoC. So your SoC has a 44.3% chance to proc on a swing. Now if you get enough haste to drop your swing timer to 3 seconds you will have 20 swings per minute, 7 of which will proc SoC. That means you only have a 35% chance to proc SoC on any given swing. This is why we say "SoC doesn't scale with haste" right now.

On Beta:

The PPM seems to be based on our base weapon speed regardless of haste.

Basically with your 3.8 speed weapon you have that 44.3% chance to proc SoC. With no haste that means you'll see 7 procs per minute out of your 15.789 swings. However if you take that haste to drop it to 3 seconds you will still see a 44.3% proc rate. With 20 swings per minute that means you'll be seeing 8.86 procs per minute. So for Wrath haste will scale SoC damage.

I think it is an incredibly clunky solution. For one, SoC still retains it's short internal cooldown (originally put in for the old-reckoning bomb to reduce the burst somewhat) forcing you to stagger your instant strikes with autoswings to avoid "eating" SoC procs. It's also incredibly unintuitive for casual players. And my biggest beef is that it still locks you into using the slowest weapon possible, given that you want your proc rate on yellows to be as high as possible. I think a much more elegant solution would have just made it a flat 40% proc rate rather than a PPM.

Of course the fact remains that SoB is still better by a longshot (non-glyphed) or 1-2% (glyphed), so SoC is still mainly a PvP seal.

And to answer your question, we're both correct. I was talking about live, as we were discussing Windfury's (the old one) contribution to SoC mechanics and why Windfury does work out to be nearly a third of an Alliance Paladin's DPS (the actual main reason is because our white swings hit for so much damage that extra ones are an incredible damage boost; why haste is such a good stat for DPS increase) while GSH was talking about beta Windfury.

Having SoC be on a PPM system is uncool because it makes the damage heavily favor particular weapon speeds, in almost exactly the same fashion that instant weapon strikes did. The frequency of SOC procs is constant, but the damage done is unnormalized and therefore increases with slower, chunkier weapons. Same number of procs at higher damage means more damage. Windfury, at a 20% proc rate, didn't have this problem. Getting a weapon with the same DPS but twice the speed would net twice as many procs with the half the damage, for same overall DPS increase (+/- other attack-based procs).

Unnormalized instant attacks got you, say, 10 mortal strikes per minute, a constant frequency, at greater damage for slower weapons. This caused greater-than-intended damage from mortal strike and totally borked the scaling as the [Arcanite Reaper]'s 3.8 speed made it better than epic weapons with 10 more white DPS. It's exactly the same deal (from a raid DPS perspective) with SoC: constant frequency at unnormalized damage makes bad scaling.

Has anyone else been doing a real analysis of the rep grind? I'm just starting to.

I think they did something extremely clever with the "as soon as your boat lands" faction. At least, compared to HH/Thrallmar.

You've got the faction that's in BT/HF. You start working on it immediately. You make real progress quickly, and there are dailies for it available all the way back to 70th (68th?) level. If you're crazy, you can get exalted at 70.

But. It's part of an "umbrella" faction set like "Steamwheedle Cartel" is.

And the quartermaster isn't tied to any of the individual factions in the set. It's tied to the umbrella. This is like having a rep vendor that isn't Gadgetzan or Ratchet or Everlook, but directly tied to Steamwheedle Cartel.

The result is, you get to make immediate real visible progress on the faction, and you can get exalted with them, but the real endgame-appropriate rewards aren't opened up by that. It's like having a superfaction with more sections than just "neutral/friendly/honored/revered/exalted". There's more discrete steps.

But even if you only get exalted with one of them, you're already getting exalted-level repair and vendor discounts in at least some areas.

I'm still digesting this. I really think I like it. I'm finding it less frustrating by far than Honor Hold rep was. "Wait. I'm questing here, and I am now Honored, and I see a recipe at Revered, but I can't get more rep until 70? Really? And all my quests are taking me out of the zone now? Really? This... aw. Okay, I'll come back at 70. Boo." That isn't happening here.

The dungeon reps differ. My druid in beta is now 74th level, and I'm just beginning to really see the dungeon factions. In the abstract I like using the "championing" system for those. And I think I like this separation between the "leveling" faction grinds and the "endgame" (ie. dungeon-based) faction grinds.

Anyone else have any observations about the whole area of reputations?

Actually I think one of the most interesting things about the way the new reps work is that there is no incentive to delay questing so you can rep up in lower level dungeons. In BC it was most efficient to do HH instances before doing your questing since the rep from those lower instances was capped at honored and you could get rep from the quests at any level. In WotLK you don't even really need to concern yourself with most reps till you get to near 80, at which point you can get enough rep from quest chains to unlock the dailies and tabards that will get you rep in the level 80 instances. I'm a little concerned about the grind for the non-tabard reps but there are still the dailies.

Slam is not normalized either. I did a search on all ilvl 150+ weapons with speed over 3.6, other than the heirloom arc reaper there's a lonely blue sword there that will get outdated quick regardless. 2h weapons are getting faster in general. Heirloom reaper is worse than that blue sword.

Speed is still somewhat of a factor to consider for SoC, it's just that (a) SoC is not the primary pve dps seal, SoB is and it doesn't have speed preference and (b) there's not much variance between 3.4 and 3.6 speed and the vast majority of 2h will fall in between those.

I think that part that you mention is just badly bugged right now.
Or, well, not sure actually.

The local faction is "Valiance Expedition", the "Umbrella Faction" is "Alliance Vanguard" which includes Explorer's League, The Frostborn and The Silver Covenant.

When you do quests in the starter zone, you get 250 Valiance Expedition rep and as spillover 62 Alliance Vanguard rep, 1/4 of the original rep.
I quested through Borean/Dragonblight/Zul'drak, then Scholazar at around 78, and then went back to finish the lowbie zones Howling/Grizzly.
I did Storm Peaks and Icecrown later.

I'm not sure when I hit exalted with Valiance, but I suspect it was midway through Howling Fjord.
After that, quests only gave me the spillover 62 Alliance Vanguard rep, since the 250 Valiance rep was maxed out already.
Doing quests in Icecrown, I got 38 Alliance rep for example, from 150 Valiance originally.

Why am I saying this? Because that means Alliance Vanguard rep is gained very very slowly.
You only gain Alliance rep from the 25% spillover. So, to get exalted you need the amount of rep that gets 4 factions to exalted.
I have some rep with the Frostborn and the Explorer's League from quests in ... Storm Peaks mostly I think. None with the Silver Covenant I think.
For the Umbrella Faction, I'm something past honoured. Maybe 4k/12k honoured, can't check right now.
There are no Tabards for any of the four factions.

I have maybe a good dozen of quests left in the whole of Northrend.
So, the only way left to get rep with them is ... some Icecrown dailies for 38 spillover rep?
Would take about ~700 of them. That can't be it. I'm aware that Silver Covenant has nothing attached to it yet.


I really, really think the items on the Valiance Keep quartermaster are supposed to be tied to the Valiance Expedition faction and not to the Alliance Vanguard.

I mean, the way you described it would work very well if Explorer's, Frostborn and Covenant reputation could be maxed out by completing every quest and then some dailies perhaps, to get Alliance Vanguard to exalted.

But in the current implementation, you just get past honoured via questing, mostly from Valiance spillover.

That means 13k rep from questing, and would need 29k more from dailies, that's 116.000 rep before the spillover.
Considering that the "Kill 1 Million Tuskarr" achievement has been changed, I doubt that this one is intended.

SoB does have a speed preference (it is also non-normalized) but it isn't as stringent as SoC's, given that SoC's affects both the scaling and the proc chance while SoB only affects scaling.

Speed is a big factor for all seals. Paladins have 2 normalized strikes where slow speed is helpful, as well as multiple unnormalized seal procs on our instants, and an unnormalized damage component of Judgement for SoC and SoB. Weapon speed is HUGE for paladins with every seal except Vengeance, where it really does become a marginal (though nonzero) concern.

All level 80 dungeons and heroics give alliance vanguard rep if you are not wearing a tabard - its the default dungeon rep.
Edit: just tracked down the rep vendor. Ehh.. nope, not appropriate awards for the 80 dungeon rep at all. By the time you have alliance vanguard high enough that you can buy anything she sells, you wont need any of it, except the pvp head enchant and the engineering pattern. And having the pvp arcanum tied to a rep that takes extensive PvEing to get is.. problematic. Likely she is tied to the wrong rep, yes. Bug reported it.

The majority of leveling quests give valiance expedition rep, I was exalted after completing all the quests in borean tundra, howling fjord, and in the middle of questing in dragonblight, around level 76. That's with doing no dailies and getting no rep from instances.