One thing I was wondering about with the idea of using our two Holy power TV is that it seems like this would also cause us to be much more GCD locked, as we would presumably be doing more TVs but less of our cooldown abilities; With so many of our abilities proc based, could the increased reliability of having a filler attack to use be whats lessening the gap between 3 HP TV and 2 HP TV (as your going to have less moments waiting for an ability to light up or come off cooldown)?

I was able to test the new things on PTR yesterday. The 2HP rotation seems to be very comfortable and easy. The 3HP rotation is wasting too much resources. Maybe just because PTR lag, but sometime i was already ditting the next CS, and just in this time was the last HP showing up on the screen, so my CS was for nothing. With 3HP max and 3HP used by TV and INQ it feels not so good to hit the TV by 3HP.

Something else: The proc from AoW is big, shiny on the screen, but the Mastery proc looks not so good if the whole raid attacks the same target

GC has stated that they want to fix the lag on HP generation through Divine Purpose. As for the Mastery proc animation... wait and see I guess. If not, there's always real Power Auras :P .

It's really easy to customize the looks of the auras. I posted some quick code on previous page. Very likely that when game is released someone will make a proper addon so you can customize them.
The way they are designed though makes me wonder if Blizzard plans to use them for boss encounters.

There is a new build, here is the Ret change:
Divine Purpose now has a 20% chance to generate holy power, down from 40%.

Looks like they are beginning to tune some things, Ret does seem too bursty from an outside perspective, so this may help.

Isn't that just bugfix for this this ?

Divine Purpose is still 40% on the 2nd rank.The 20% chance is to fix the tooltip and only represents the 1st rank of the talent.

With Eternal Glory now being in Prot tree and Guardian's Favor in Ret, after having spent 5/3/31,
would anyone still take Eternal Glory or would you just take the increased Exorcism damage in Holy?

For PVE, there is no ifs, ands or buts. Blazing light is a DPS increase, so its mandatory; There isn't any choice. If your asking for PVP, not sure; thats a bit fuzzier of an area.

Average human reaction time to an unexpected stimulus is 200-250ms. However, the reaction time to an anticipated stimulus is substantially faster, and if you also know roughly when that stimulus will occur it's that much faster again.

In the case of Retribution Paladins, we know exactly when the stimulus will occur - when we use a filler or finisher - and the situation we will be in after it is a binary choice based on whether Divine Purpose procced. The nature of the choice is determined by how much HoPo we had before the stimulus and what abilities are off CD. We always use a finisher at 3 points; at any other level we always use CS if it's off CD; if it is on CD, we use our best choice from whatever fillers are off CD and waiting for CS if its CD has less than 1 GCD to go. The difference between a good and bad Retridin will be how well they can learn these various scenarios, not how quickly they can react.

^ fixed ;-)

Seriously, though, I've always been confused when GC talks about wanting to make things more challenging for different classes so that good players can demonstrate their skill. No matter how complicated a rotation becomes, if its possible for people to figure out the right button to press, then its possible to write an addon to do the same. Our new rotation is certainly a lot more random with all our new procs, but its really not any harder than on live if you're playing with clcret. (I don't really have a problem with this---WoW has never really been a game that requires a ton of skill, just time to do a little research and practice and patience for farming this, that, and the other thing to upgrade gear).

I find this to be solid point in addition to that, in my experience, DPS is quite a bit more mortal than in Wrath. I've not done all 5man instances yet, but so far it feels a lot more like being a melee in early TBC (although not the one-hit-KO 360 degree cleaves). Most fights feel much more like the Drakkari Colossus/Elemental when done in appropriate gear, which is a complete breath of fresh air compared to pretty much all recent raid content.

Point in case being, I need to pay a lot more attention to staying alive now than I do in Wrath, so having CLCret (or similar) mind your procs and holy power stacks while you get a better feeling for the encounter truly is a lot less cheesy than it is on live.

Can anyone give an updated idea of how the ret rotation works? On the PTR, I find myself trying to use CS every other ability:

CS - filler - CS - filler - CS - TV - CS ...

But it doesn't always work out that CS is up every other global cooldown. There are often times where I can use CS followed by two fillers instead. For example, I might open with:

CS - Judge - CS - Exo - Cons - CS - TV ...

Often I find that I can wait for the next CS instead of using a second filler. I know that people here have speculated that waiting for CS is better than filling in time. Is waiting always better? Does it depend on what your options for the filler are?

It depends on the damage that fillers do relative to CS/TV loss over the course of a fight. It also depends very heavily on the amount of haste you have reducing the cooldown of CS and the spell GCD.

Until final numbers are balanced it's impossible to make a call for certain what will work out best.

Almost none of the theorycrafting on rotations can be taken too seriously at the moment for obvious reasons; however, I was playing with the 2 HP idea the past couple of days and I noticed a huge difference if I aimed for 2 HP, but also spent my TV even on 1 HP whenever there was an open global.

I tried to only to use INQ with 2 HP and my goal was to try to get at least 2 2HP TVs off in between INQ refreshes. Now sometimes I would get lucky and get off a TV or INQ with Hand of Light and I would adjust accordingly, or I might get lucky with HP generation and get off a 3HP TV, but I noticed that when I was unlucky as long as I was spending globals on TV even at 1 HP that my DPS was increasing. Simply because TV and INQ themselves also have a chance to generate HP. It often seemed to be an increase rather than a decrease to spend that HP whenever you have a chance. It makes for a more fluid rotation, but also once Hand of Light comes into play it feels even more dynamic. You may get lucky and get an unexpected 3 HP INQ and have to adjust to filling in 3 or more TVs into the rotation to make the best use of your procs.

I can say without a doubt that doing this was about 1500 dps (yes i know dummy dps) higher than going for a 3HP TV/3 HP INQ rotation.

Just an idea. Not sure if anyone else wants to play around with it.

I was playing on the PTR today, and I must say, I'm having a hard time fitting in two fillers inbetween two CS. I'm sitting at 24.25% haste from gear, my CS cooldown is 3.62s. I can't see the numbers yet, but delaying CS and TV this much... I can't imagine it being beneficial for dps. I'll see if I can get Recount and CLCRet going, see if that makes a difference.

Overall though, I must say this feels a lot nicer than the button mashing nonsense we are doing on live.

Edit: Did some more testing... Holy Wrath is still AoE? I thought they were trying to take away the free AoE. I also found myself wasting a LOT of Divine Purpose procs due to interface lag. Is there anything we can do about that or is it up to Blizzard?

Additionally, your present 24% haste will rapidly drop. You need nearly 4 times as much haste rating for a % of haste increase at L85 compared to L80. If you did not change any gear (unlikely) by 85 you'd have a bit over 6% haste.

The delay seems to have been drastically lowered (less than .5 seconds for the DP proc to appear) by the beta build released on Saturday. Not sure if that fix carried over to PTR as well. It's possible I'm just seeing things, but I remembered being shocked at how fast I was getting DP procs when I sat on the target dummy for a few minutes Sunday morning.

Two observations from the PTR.

The first, Arbiter of Light, does not appear to be interacting with Templar's Verdict. I ran several 10 min tests (yes on the target dummy) and averaged at 24% crit which is what my paper doll stats would suggest rather then the 12% higher that arbiter of light should suggest. While Judgment crit was more in line with the talent. somewhere in the 30's on most attempts.

Also reforging haste to mastery and getting the paper doll mastery percent to 17, did not seem to have any affect on the proc rate. That was more napkin math, without a better way to track it, while the arbiter observation was based more on recount.

Edit: Having gone back and kept better track, using power auras to track the procs better (because proculas wasn't tracking them for whatever reason) I got 18 procs out of 194 swings on the mastery, with the mastery showing at 17% on the doll, and in the test proc at about 9 %

More templar's verdict testing showed a little bit of an improvement, but still not near the 12% it should give. Obviously these results aren't the final word. But I think it warrants further investigation. Maybe with someone more savvy with the tracking add-ons then I am.

Righteous Defense (Righteous Defense | Tankadin news, views, and guides) is saying the seal of truth glyph is gone on beta. I'm guessing expertise just shot up in value since we don't get 10 free any more.

It is definitely still there. Tabbed out typing this after applying and reapplying the glyph/seal to double check it still working.

Seal of Truth is a Prime, rather than a Major in the current beta build (12984).