Cathela

Oh, baseline Repentance certainly wouldn't hurt anyone's chances at getting into a 5-man. But it's not something the other specs need, as healers and tanks aren't expected to provide CC the way dps are.

And Repentance is still quite a bit better than the CC any other healer has: Five usable categories of mob, no cast time, a duration equal to its cooldown, and it's a true incapacitation. All of the other healer CCs have weaknesses in one or more of those categories.

And tanks have no broadly effective CC's; if 51-Prot paladins could have Repentance they'd be hands-down better than any other tank for 5-mans.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

bellator

I've read on other forums people claiming they've changed judgements so that they dont refresh on melee hit. In case anyone has seen this, just to let you know judgements are currently bugged. Neither melee nor CS are refreshing them.

 

Selenia

I misread the above post. Can this be deleted?

 

Cathela

That actually wouldn't be a surprising change if it's intended. Considering how much easier it is to keep a judgement up now, losing the refresh-on-melee effect wouldn't hurt a lot.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

flyingtoastr

Losing the CS refresh would hurt a lot. It's pretty assuredly a bug.

Save Atlantis!

 

Cathela

Oh right, I was referring to the melee-refresh effect for your own judgements.

Although, given how easy it is for any spec to keep judgements up now, and how every spec has motivation to do so, they may be planning to give CS a new utility effect entirely.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Rustik

Or maybe just make it HIT harder. As has been mentioned, considering it's really nothing more than a gimped MS that requires 10 more talent points, it could use some love. Maybe boost the extra damage by a tiny bit or make the extra damage holy damage. Hell if they'd changed art of war to "Crusader strike also smites the target for holy damage equal to 10/20/30% of your spellpower" I would have been content.

 

bellator

Just out of interest has anyone put together any decent ret cycle?

On the Prot side, with shield and hammer being on 6sec CD, HS usable on a 9sec CD, and slackening Judgement and Consecration to 9 seconds, everything cells so nicely into an 18second cycle.

With Ret though having DS on 10 second CD, you have a 6,8,10 sec ability. Nothing seems to gel, and i cant seem to get any nice cycle down on paper i'm happy with

 

flyingtoastr

CS is not MS. MS is a PvP utility. CS is a PvE utility. There is nothing alike about them except that they are instant weapon attacks.

CS's utility is fine. It now allows a single ret pally to keep up a holy pally's judgements during the "downtime" when a holy pally doesn't want to be judging (between t=20 and t=30). It doesn't need any additional utility beyond that.

Save Atlantis!

 

Aramul

I've been fiddling with a spread sheet for ret cycles. I've uploaded it to GoogleDocs. Sheet 1 contains the cycles which are not strictly worse than another cycle.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...Rztt1nUg&hl=en

Without real average damage numbers, it's impossible to tell which will be the best.

 

bellator

The one thing that I would like CS to do is that when it refreshes a non-ret JoW/L, it applies the ret-palas AP/SP to the jow/l proc. Other than that i agree, i'm perfectly happy with CS.

I've got a dps model up and running, so can run different rotations through it with ease. However my issue is that all those rotations you posted look messy. Please note this isnt a go at you for making messy rotations, just that the abilities and their cooldowns force messy rotations. Prot has a nice cleam 18 sec rotation with 3 HotR, 3 SotR, 2 cons, 2 HS, 2 Judgements. It all fits perfectly. The ret abilities just dont mesh as well.

 

Aramul

Although the cycles look messy, they are all fairly easy to use. To use CS = DS > J for example, just hit Crusader Strike and Divine Storm as soon as they come up, while casting Judgement only when it won't interfere with the two above (just like we are using CS now).

 

flyingtoastr

Honestly Ret cycles have never been pretty. In all respects we'll be using the same system we are now (priority cooldowns) except with Divine Storm equal to or above CS.

Save Atlantis!

 

bellator

For maximum dps i would guess prioritising CS over DS may work out the best. Whilst the DS hit will be greater than the CS hit, since CS is 6 sec and Ds is 10 sec, delaying DS for 1 second will result in a smaller dps loss than delaying CS for 1 second (ofcourse if its a case of delaying DS for 2 sec or CS for 1 sec in the rotation, then things might be different). Will look at the posted rotations and stick them in the model see what it comes up with.

 

Khaelarys

Are we assuming our mana will let us include DS in a ret cycle?

 

flyingtoastr

For all we know the ultra-scaling judgements might actually beat them both (not too likely, but you never know). We'll need some concrete numbers on AP/Crit/etc. levels at 80 before we can make a solid call here.

We will easily have enough regen to keep up a CS>DS>J cycle.

DS is all of 900 mana. You're guaranteed 2.5 JoW procs every DS cooldown, so if your JoW tics for anything above 360 you'll be gaining mana. Combined with Blessing of Wisdom's 110 Mp5, Judgements of the Wise and SA regen via Blood recoil our regen is still looking quite solid. CS and Judgement are very cheap spells and if worst comes to worst you can pop Divine Plea a minute earlier.

Save Atlantis!

 

GSH

Actually, it seems like JoB will out do CS when your AP is greater than 1.7 * Base Weapon damage for a Ret paladin with Sheath of Light. Pretty much all other statistics will affect each ability equally and thus can be ignored. Given that AP is almost always at least twice your weapon damage, I think it's safe to say that JoB will be the highest DPS ability we have under the current system.

JoB > CS > DS

The only other thing I can think of that would change this is if CS/DS can proc a Seal, but Judgement cannot. Will go check that now.

Edit: Hmm, Judgement doesn't proc Seals, will have to redo my calculations.

Edit: My new calculations indicate the breakpoint (JoB > CS + SoB) is somewhere around AP > 4 * Base Weapon Damage. Maybe higher, maybe lower depending on crit rate, weapon speed, and if any of the abilities are normalized. This is interesting, because it's close enough to the normal AP:Base Weapon damage ratio that the answer may depend on your current stats, rather than being able to make a blanket statement.

 

Khaelarys

Not sure how much I'd count on this. I can feel the difference now whenever light is on the kill target. I'm sure DS isn't going to help matters.

 

flyingtoastr

CS and DS do proc all seals according to the patch notes, so it is something worth considering.

Given the massive scaling on JoB combined with the nerf to JoL it is entirely possible the recoil damage might be a large percentage of our health. Still too early to say until we start seeing how level 80 gear is itemized though.

Save Atlantis!

 

Cathela

Updated and fiddled with the OP again. The format should (hopefully) not change anymore.

Talents are now fully listed by tree and by tier; this should make it easier to add notes and analysis results in an organized, easy-to-read way.

I've also added a section called "Things We've Noticed" which glosses some of the main topics of discussion in this thread. The idea behind this is to (a) let casual readers savor some of the fruits of the analysis and thought done in this thread, and (b) just in case a developer happens to stop by, summarize things that might be of interest to them. (Have they realized that with current scaling SoR > SoB for Ret at Kara gear levels and above? Well, we have.)

I'm sure I've missed some things we've discussed here, so please feel free to suggest anything else you think belongs there.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Ellerain

I respectfully disagree. CS utility is meh. In 5-men I am the only judging man. In 10-man, it's 50/50 that I have another paladin, and even if I do, this other one miht as well be prot, keeping his own judgement. So its only PvE effect shows up in 25-men, and only for Holy palaldin's judgements that they are supposed to keep up anyway now.

Furthermore, we have only two effects to keep up now, one of which I can keep up myself (and will, since I AM premier JoW debuffer). JoL is good, but hardly mandatory 100% uptime, and if you have 2 other paladins on the scene, they can, between themself, keep it up.
Refreshing judgeents utility of CS becomes, frankly speaking, negligible, in PvE; I would like to see it changed to either real 100% utility - or more damage. Heck, make it both, IMO, 41-pointer deserves it...

Edit: oh, and it is 100% useless while soloing/small group.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my job here is done!

 

Shuror

It's ridiculously unreliable without any +hit gear, though. I can see ferals using it once in the pull, and balance druids keeping it up all the time, but resto druids won't have the luxury of it with such a bad hit chance.

Does anybody know if Hex has heartbreak resists, too? Would be nice, with elemental and enhancement shamans being able to rely decently on it as they've got hit rating.

Repentance might get such a check too. Could anybody test that? Ret paladins will quite surely have enough hit rating, but probably not Holy paladins. Enlightened Judgements is unavailable as Repentance spec. Repentance might not turn out to be as useful for Holy as one might wish.

 

Argavaine

Its an issue with repentance becaues of 1 min cd but ER is a spammable ability. I have no problems in Arena to use it with my druid sometimes you have to recast it and mobs in 5s are also lvl 80.