Hi everybody - my first post here on EJ's forum, hopefully I'll get it right - an first of all let me say just one thing: sry for my bad ass english, it's not my native language so I hope you can look over that.

For those of you who don't want to read the sobbering stuff continue at "The actual questions"

How this topic came to be:
I played as a holy-priest for the last 2 years (starting with the EU-release of WoW) and, with a short break in between, played that char to lvl 70. For some reasons that would have nothing to do with this topic I grew sick of healing and wanted to play a class which does its dmg in close combat. So I was left with the more obvious choices: Warrior / Rogue and the less obvious ones nameingly: Feral / Schaman / Paladin. For some reasons even I don't know I didnt want to play a warrior or a rogue and even the feral druid didn't life up to my expectations and so I stoped leveling that char in its mid ages. Therefore I was left with two choices: shaman or paladin. Not having played any of these two classes before I made the tuff decision and chose the paladin, well knowing thats its raidability when it comes down to pure DPS measurement is behind that of an equally skilled and geared shaman. I made the decision anyway.

So here I'm today:
After I had to defend myself for a couple of weeks when it comes down to DPS-Sheets, and me standing and the lower end of the bottom half in the DMG-meters it finally started improving. As i play in a guild that just downed hydross 2 times and "only" got Kara/Gruul/Mag on something called farm-status (whoever made that word up should be punished :-) ), even I managed to get some decent gear together (more info on the left via armory profile). My dmg got boosted alot and now I am at the point where I could do more dmg if there wouldn't be such a thing as agro. Having played some time now with my Retadin and having an awsome amount of fun during that time I started reading a lot of topics and board discusisons about retribution specs / dps sheets / itemization and so on ... asking myself the same questions over and over again and when asking for them there were only two possible typ of answers: the not helping type and the not knowing type. So I ended up here, thanks Larsiak for the ref-link

I'm over with ... :
... justifying myself for me being a ret or if a retadin is of any use in 25 man raids. - because I know that I am and I am not interessted in the ones that are not or think that they are not 'cause they couldn't life up to any expectations they falsely made up for themselfs for what reason ever.
... the topics that state something like: Specc healing and you earn the raid spott - because I will not specc more than 5 points (at this time) in holy and and besides the fact that I dont care about healing in general anymore I am simply tired of the specc-healing-noob-roflmao "discussion" - if there ever was a discussion in a topic with words like "roflmao".
... talking about PvP simply because I don't do PvP - that you can easily see when you watch at my arena ranking or my honorable kills, nothing more to say about it.
So - having said all that stuff I hope for a reasonable discussion - you guys here are my last hope

The actual questions:
1) has anybody played a retribution paladin with 1K spelldmg ? If so what’s it like compared to the more obvious way of a retribution paladin who normaly goes for crit/str/ap?
2) What grants more agro points: 1000 points holy dmg done by SoB or 1000 points holy dmg done by SoC
3) Same as 2) with the correspoding Judgements.
4) Besides the slower agro buildup and the possibility to start swinging earlier in the fights is there any reason not to switch to from SoB to SoC after a reasonable tank agro buildup?
5) Haste rating: Does it affect the SoC proccs? – or in other words: Does SoC have a fixed ppm value or is it an actuel chance for a procc so that it would procc more frequent when you increase your swings per minute?
6) Swing times: Am I misstaken or can it be that whenever performing CS the Auto attack timer resets and you gotta wait for the next full auto attack swing? I tryed to test it and sometimes I would say yes sometimes i would say no – anybody got similar „problems“
7) Is there a swing-timer-addon that takes haste rating into account ?

So there is no such thing as a hidden cooldown timer of which i read about in some other topics where even SoC-proccs got taken into account? Or in other words: It is possible to have SoC procc in 18 of 18 swings in one minute and after that not to see it procc at all for the next, lets say, 2 minutes? - Sry if that sound dump, but even the the previously used search function didn't clearify that up for me or I simply don't get it and miss something viable for that concern.

To the best of my knowledge, hidden cooldowns have only thus far been applied to trinkets and the windfury weapon imbue.

Certainly I've seen 3 SoComm procs from 3 hits, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't have an even longer chain.

No, there's no hidden cooldown. As for your last questions in the OP, CS shouldn't be resetting your swing timer, and Quartz is a really good addon that contains a swing timer (takes haste into account). As a Blood Elf paladin, you should be using Seal of Blood exclusively except for fights where it's risky.

I'd like to touch base on your comment about refusing to heal - that's the exact reason Ret paladins get a bad reputation. Personally, I see it as being really stubborn and childish, regardless of whatever reasoning is behind it. A good feral druid can pop out, throw a healer an innervate, toss a few HoTs or Heals, then pop back and continue DPSing. While I understand mana is much more of a constraint for Paladins/Shaman, not healing just seems really self-centered. I'm not talking about healbotting, either. I'm talking about stopping your auto-attack and maybe throwing a heal to someone who looks like they're about to die, or throwing a BoP on a mage

For someone with a +holy/spell damage build, would SoR not be higher sustained dps than SoB? That's considering a build including Imp SoR, while running Sanc Aura and striking a target with Imp SoCrusader judged on it. Per the initial question, that's something that seems a little less dependant on str, crit, and ap, and relies almost entirely on +spell damage. I wonder how that SoR spec would stack up against SoB?

That begs the question, what type of bonuses does SoB get? It does holy damage based on weapon damage. Is SoB's holy damage increased by +spell damage? Is the weapon damage component basically "white damage", and therefore boosted by str and ap?

+spell damage is generally not used because such gear lacks in melee crit, which you'll want a lot of to keep Vengeance uptime as good as possible. That's also a downside to using Seal of Righteousness if you're heading the DPS route; Seal of Righteousness can't crit, Seal of Command and Blood can. Simply put: You want to minimize the chance to lose that +15% damage buff from Vengeance.

As for how Seal of Blood scales: Seal of Blood gets no benefit from any spell damage; and is basically as if dealing a normal attack that does 35% of your normal swing damage would, which also ignores armor.

Outside of Judgements all standard used Retribution abilities either scale best with attack power, or they scale equally from an equal value worth of spell damage and attack power. Auto-attack in particular shouldn't be discounted, since it's one of the larger sources of damage of any melee class, and auto-attacks only scale through physical stats.

That's not to say I'm not interested in someone trying it out, but I'd be surprised if it worked well.

Thats what I'm wondering too :-)

According to a Sticky on the official german pala board are the spelldmg-benifts as followed:
* 9.2% per 1.0 weapon speed, One-handed Seal of Righteousness
* 10.8% per 1.0 weapon speed, Two-handed Seal of Righteousness
* 73% Judgement of Righteousness
* 20% Seal of Command
* 43% Judgement of Command
* 76% Consecration
* 43% Holy Shock
* 43% Hammer of Wrath
* 43% Exorcism
* 19% Holy Wrath
* 20% Holy Shield (5% per Block)
* 9% Avenger's Shield
* 17% Seal of Vengeance (per tick)
* 43% Judgement of Vengeance
* 0% Seal of Blood
Source here - click me

Also, Crusader Strike scales up nicely with +spell damage (40% of holy damage), however what is its crit source? Does CS crit from +crit or +spell crit? I'm guessing the former, no?

Crusader Strike is indeed melee crit, and with a two-hander it'll get about equal damage gains from two different fictional items with one purely having attack power and the other purely having spell damage. I do believe it'd scale quite a bit better with spell damage with a one-hander, the spell damage scaling being independent of your weapon speed.

If one was trying to maintain a vengeance stack using SoR, something like the gladiator polearm might come in handy - the attack speed would allow a lot more opportunities to get crits in, and if you're packing +dam over ap anyway, the loss in damage Crusader Strike damage might, in part, be countered by the 40% +dam coffecient on it

edit:

nevermind.

SoC is melee crit, Crusader strike is melee crit, JoC is spell crit.

Roughly speaking 1 spell damage is about the same dps increase as 1 AP. However AP is generally cheaper in terms of item budget so you get more AP on items of a certain item level than you get +dmg. Furthermore you'll always find melee crit and ap on items together (woo non set plate) but you will only find +dmg and melee crit on ret paladin specific set gear.

Another thing to consider that you need 8.6% hit to not miss against lvl 73 mobs with crusader strike. There is no plate with +dmg & melee hit apart from 1 piece of T5 and 1-2 pieces of T6 you have to get your melee hit from trinkets, rings, back, neck and non set plate.

Basically most of your damage will come from auto attack, crusader strike and soc/sob, these are pretty mana efficient and all benefit from AP & melee crit. Consecration and JoC are mana inefficient and will probably only make up 20% or less of your damage.

Basically stacking AP, Crit and 8.6% hit will give you higher sustained dps with less mana used. If you stack +dmg you have to spam mana hogs like consecrate and jugements you also need spell hit as well as melee hit.

It's starts to get impossible the number of stats you need to be effective:
Melee hit, melee crit, spell hit, spell crit, +dmg, ap