Seal of Vengeance: A closer look
I was looking forward to using this seal at L64, but found it to be a "sidegrade" seal for my level of gear and opponents. I'm tired of the silly comparison posts in the official WoW forums, so here's an analysis of SoV to better understand how it fits into the (Alliance) paladin arsenal.


I. Mechanics
First off, known mechanics of the seal:
- Each melee attack has a chance to proc the DoT. (20 PPM according to Kalgan) The proc stacks up to 5 times and is refreshed by procs, but not melee attacks.

- The DoT lasts 12 seconds, dealing 120 damage over 12 seconds for each stack of the DoT. The DoT ticks every 3 seconds, and the first application of the DoT gets around 17% of your +dmg in bonus damage. (68% of +dmg over DoT duration; 1 stack DoT and 5 stack DoT get the same +dmg bonus)

- The Judgement deals 120 damage per application of the DoT, and gets 43% of +dmg. A 0 stack Judgement deals no damage.

- The DoT does not seem to get a bonus from Weapon Specialization (SoR and SoC do). However, it is boosted by +dmg/%damage (Vengeance/Sanctity Aura) buffs that are active when the first DoT is applied. Further applications of the DoT get the same %damage boost that the initial DoT received. ie: Vengeance is active when first DoT is applied. First stack gets 10% Vengeance damage bonus. Subsequent stacks will get 132 damage (120 * 110%) over 12 seconds, even if Vengeance has faded when they are applied.

- SoV ate ZHC charges per proc.


II. Preliminary Analysis
The apparent differences of SoV compared to SoR are:
- DoT provides reliable, continuous damage - even if you stop hitting the target, you will continue getting the seal's damage for the next 12 seconds. SoR provides reliable damage, but only as long as you are hitting that target. You only need to proc SoV on the target once every 12 seconds to maintain the stack of DoTs, so you could theoretically maintain a 5 stack DoT on 2~3 targets.

- SoV has much higher base damage than SoR but has lower scaling.
**The DoT portion of the seal is worth 60 50 DPS, and gains around 5.7% of +dmg in DPS. SoR's base DPS was 22.5/31.5 (1h/2h weapons) at L60 and gained 3~4 base DPS by 65, but gains 9/10.8% of +dmg as DPS.
**Likewise, JoV (5 stack) is 600 damage, over 3x JoR's base damage. (170~ at L60, around 200 at L65) Scaling is again lower: JoV gains 43% of +dmg vs. JoR's 73%.

Overall, SoV has about a 60 base DPS advantage over SoR. SoR has something around a 8% scaling bonus over SoV, so at 750 +dmg or so, SoR will be absolutely better than SoV for damage output on a single target. (Actual +dmg needed is lower due to SoV not gaining Weapon Specialization bonuses, and base damage of SoR scaling with level/new rank)

- SoV has issues with weapon speeds that are very fast/slow. Fast weapons have a lower chance to proc SoV, and a non-proc string will cause the DoT to fall off. Weapons with a 3.0 AS or slower have a 100% chance per hit to proc SoV, but get less hits and are vulnerable to a miss string. (weapons slower than 3.0 are also losing procs) Due to heals resetting the swing timer, this can make multi-tasking with this seal difficult.


Out of time, so my next post will try to model the ramping penalty of SoV and how that relates to weapon speed. (The time it takes to build up 5 stack SoV is essentially a static damage penalty)

EDIT: Made a mistake on the base damage of SoV.
EDIT: Added sections for easier reference and reading.
EDIT: Renamed thread for more general discussion.

Other considerations (from a tanking perspective):

- Once you reach steady state (5 stack of SoV), there is no synergy between SoV and Reckoning. You get no additional SoV damage due to a Reckoning proc. While SoR does 100% more damage for the duration of Reckoning.

- SoV can be resisted. While tanking a boss 4 levels above me in Sethekk Halls last night, I noticed that I had trouble maintaining even a 2-stack due to resists. While SoR is obviously unresistable regardless of level. In the endgame, this may not matter. But while leveling up, it is significant.

Alrighty, time for that math post I promised.

III. MATH!
A. Ramping Penalty
Assuming the SoV procs are spaced 3 seconds apart, it takes 12 seconds to "ramp up" to a 5 stack.

0 seconds - 1st application
3 seconds - 1 stack tick, 2nd application
6 seconds - 2 stack tick, 3rd application
9 seconds - 3 stack tick, 4th application
12 seconds - 4 stack tick, 5th application, judge

For 4 ticks, we'd get 68% (17% * 4) of our +dmg, and 10 "blocks" of base damage. (30 base damage per tick per application; 300 damage done)
JoV would do 600 damage, and add another 43% of +dmg.


So over 12 seconds, we have done:
[Seal damage] + [Judgement damage]:

[top] 300 + 68%+dmg + 600 + 43%+dmg

900 + 111%+dmg damage
or
75 + 9.25%+dmg DPS


Comparisons
At 5 stack, we'd do
50 + 5.67%+dmg SoV DPS (600 damage over 12 seconds) and 60 + 4.3%+dmg (600 + 43%+dmg per judgement, assume every 10 seconds) JoV DPS
110 + 9.97% +dmg DPS (1320 + 120%+dmg over 12 seconds)

While ramping up, we lose 300 SoV DoT damage and a small bit of JoV damage (if we wait to judge after the 5th DoT application; We lose at least 120 damage if we decide to judge before that point, so it's probably better to wait for the 5th application).


If we instead used SoR, (assuming 1h SoR, rounding up 1H base SoR DPS to the nearest decade) we'd do :
[SoR DPS] + [JoR DPS]

[top] 30 + 9%+dmg + 22 + 7.3% +dmg

52 + 16.3%+dmg
or
624 + 195.6%+dmg over 12 seconds

So during the ramping time, we do 276 more base damage with SoV, while SoR receives 84% of +dmg more over these 12 seconds; at steady state, SoV does 58 more base DPS while SoR gets 6% more +dmg as DPS.

Examples
Say we have 500 +dmg (I'm around this level with my current L67 gear). During the ramping time, SoR does 144 more damage (420 total) than SoV. At steady state, SoR does 30 DPS, so SoV still has a 28 DPS lead. It takes 144 / 28 = 5 seconds for SoV to make up for that difference, and after that SoV does more damage.

For SoR to have a 15 second lead over SoV, we need (.84+dmg - 276) / (58 - .06+dmg) = 15
Solving this equation gives us +dmg = 660. At higher levels of +dmg, the damage penalty of ramping up to a 5 stack makes SoV less attractive for single target use.


B. Special Cases
However, SoV still has something going for it at that level of +dmg - multiple targets and seal cycles.

1.) Multiple Targets
For two targets, if one swung at each mob with SoR once, that would be the same damage output as if attacking a single target with SoR. For SoV, one can maintain a DoT on each mob and essentially double seal damage. With 2 DoTs, SoV has 15.64%+dmg in DPS, which reduces SoR's scaling advantage to less than one percent. There would be no achievable level of +dmg that would allow SoR to scale better in that scenario.


2.) Seal Cycles
For seal cycles, consider the ramp up of SoV - after 12 seconds, on average, we have done 900 + 111%+dmg damage from 10 "blocks" of base SoV DoT ticks and a single JoV. After the Judgement, there are another 4 ticks of 5 stack SoV in backloaded damage, worth 600 + 68%+dmg damage.

In all, we'd have dealt 1500 + 179%+dmg for 12 seconds of melee using SoV.
Compare that to SoR's 624 + 195.6%+dmg over 12 seconds.

It would take more +dmg than a mage could ever possess for SoR to do more overall damage in this comparison.

Now, this is kind of unfair, since we're comparing 12 seconds of SoR + JoR with 24 seconds of SoV + 1 JoV. However, 12 of those 24 seconds do not require SoV to be active - allowing us to use another damage seal, such as SoR!


Using SoV by itself, we'd deal
1320 + 120%+dmg over 12 seconds
or
2640 + 240%+dmg over 24 seconds

Using SoR by itself, we'd deal
624 + 195.6%+dmg over 12 seconds
or
1248 + 391.2%+dmg over 24 seconds

Alternating between SoR and SoV, we'd deal
1500 + 179%+dmg for 12 seconds + 624 + 195.6%+dmg over 12 seconds
2124 + 374.6%+dmg over 24 seconds
(These values include the ramping penalty. However, DPS numbers are an approximation, and do not consider the effects of talents like 1h Weapon Specialization, imp. Judgement, Sanctity Aura, Vengeance, etc)

This 3rd method would do more damage than SoV by itself once +dmg exceeds 400~, and will do more damage than using SoR alone until we reach 4k +dmg.


Conclusions
So assuming SoR does not make any major gains at L70, and barring buffs/nerfs to either seal, it looks like SoV will definitely have a place in a paladin's arsenal even at L70, as it has better damage potential than SoR at realistic levels of gear.

This is an interesting conclusion, as I actually thought SoV would be obsoleted by high end gear. But the math shows that SoV is not that far behind SoR in its ability to scale with +dmg, and comes out ahead due to its higher base damage.

EDIT: Added sections for easier reference and reading.

This depresses me. I'm hoping to do a fair bit of tanking on my Blood Elf paladin, and this means lacking SoV could hurt my aggro-generating abilities in some cases. I've read a bit about SoB, seems to be rather lacking at the moment; unless you are using near zero +dmg gear it's outstripped even by SoCom in the area it seems to be aimed at, ie Retribution-spec burst damage.

I know SoV vs SoR isn't a major issue, but it's the small things that make the difference.

<End obligatory Alliance = EZMode rant here>

I was planning on posting a bit of information on how Seal of Blood works myself once I'd actually tested it a bit, but it'll still be a while before I actually have it. If my current rate of leveling is anything to go by it'll be at least another week before I'm level 64.

I was planning on testing the following:
- Threat scaling versus Righteousness
- How the damage return actually works
- If the damage done by the Seal is 35% of your character screen damage, or 35% of the actual damage you do (The latter would be bad as it'd be affected by armor)
- The spell damage coefficient for the Judgement.

Anything else people would be interested in knowing?

I'm still more or less filled with murderous rage that they split pally abilities like this, honestly.

That said, Seal of Blood has a stealth benifit- since to my knowledge you don't get mana from heals at full health, always being slightly below full health (while not significiantly) has fairly severe benifits for a tankadin. It's more or less continual extra mana froma a renew/rejuv, which doesn't suck. While not directly relivant to a SoV post, for the direct comparisions (that obviously are going to spring up) I thought it was worth mentioning.

As I said, filled with murderous rage- I stil don't get why this happened.

You get mana from overheals.

HoTs don't tick if you're at full health, though, unless it was recently changed.

Thank you for providing an empirical breakdown of SOV.

I am now a bit curious as to if the proc of SoR has been known to refresh on each application of SOR (a per hit holy ‘proc’ guaranteed per weapon strike) the dot of SOV.

I currently lack the time to test this, however if so, then this would apply not only a ‘holy dot’ (adding agro to the mob immediately after an agro dump such as fear or wing buffet) but also maximizing mana efficiency for paladin off tanking and total holy damage output (our method of effective tank-a-din).

Another question would be if the Dot effect refreshes judgements applied, or if we still have to continue hitting the target to refresh the judgement.

edit: Zedrich appears to be asking in part c. the same question I have, yet I'm more looking towards the exact efficency rate of mana consumption and if a full SOV stack is worth applying to all targets along with a judgement of wisdom / light debuff in most raids or 5 mans. (Simply for the judgement paladin to act as an off tank or add an additional burst of holy dps to the target)

You should look closer at the "Seal cycle" section. My math assumes you start a SoV stack from scratch and judge on the 5 stack each cycle. You then activate SoR, judge after 8 seconds, and start rebuilding a SoV stack. (Or you could seal-judge SoV, but that's much less mana efficient, and is a trickier cyle to maintain) You're just alternating between using SoV/SoR after each Judgement. (Though you try to judge after building a 5 stack for the best mileage out of SoV)

On paper, this does more damage than SoR alone, and more than SoV alone if you have 400+ spell damage.


If you are able to maintain the 5 stack between SoR/JoRs, it'd be even better. If you could pull that off reliably, you'd essentially be getting 100% of SoV AND 50% SoR damage at the same time, with alternating JoV/JoRs; my theorycraft model gets a bit less due to the ramping penalty for each cycle, but still gets full +dmg scaling from SoV and half +dmg scaling from SoR.

Can anyone smarter than I am figure out the relative probabilities of losing a stack of SoV with a 1.5 speed weapon and a 3.0 speed weapon? I ask because my current tanking weapon is [Scimitar of the Nexus-Stalkers] (you can quit laughing now, I'm still levelling), and I'd hate to think I'm losing SoV stacks because of it's speed meaning SoV procs are unreliable.