If Holy Power is Only generated by CS for Retribution Paladins, then what will the rotation look like?
When you have just useed CS to get your 3rd application Holy-Power you will use Inquisition or Templar’s Verdict afterwards. And then?

Now CS is still on Cooldown and if your Judgement isn't ready eiter, what will keep you from building in a Divine Storm(with no Holy Power) now?

But i admit that its rather speculation, as we need to know if
- there will be another Holy Power Generator for ret
- the CS Cooldown remains the same
- how much damaeg DS will do with/without Holy power (it shouldnt be too low without, as otherwise the tier 10 2p setbonus would make sence anymore)

Obviously just speculation but I imagine Inquisition will last for 30 seconds or so and will work alot like slice and dice for combat rogues. You keep Inquisition up as much as possible while using TV in between refreshes. I would wager this will be the play style blizzard will be going for.

As for divine storm, since it resets your holy power I imagine you will never want to use it single target, if it is balanced correctly TV or Inq will always be better buttons to hit. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the current DS damage in beta remains as the unbuffed DS so that it is so awful that you will never use it unless you are willing to eat up your holy power, which should only be in an AoE situation. GC mentioned he likes the 2pt10 set bonus, that certainly doesn't mean it is something we will get as a talent (unless I missed a more recent blue post on the matter), and with this current change I could see a significant reduction in the DS cooldown, or even a removal of the CD without impacting our single target rotation at all, which would render the bonus completely useless. In fact I would much rather a low CD DS that does awful damage without any holy power than a random reset mechanics that ensures your AoE dps isn't reliable.

The plan is CS (4 second cooldown), Holy Shock (6 second cooldown) and Hammer of the Righteous (6 second cooldown) to be the only generators. Of course this can change.

CS is 4 seconds and it says it does 100% weapon damage on the tooltip, but then it may change.

Of course DS would eat up you holy power. That's why is was talking about using DS the moment just after using your holypower and CS(and other stuff) on cooldown. Thus there is no holypower for DS to waste. But as Aurrius said, there will be other stuff to use like Judgement and Exo, so there will be very few gaps for DS to close. Blizzard may even be fine with using DS in singlefights that rare.
Imagine the 2pt10 set bonus resetting both DS and CS, which would make much more sence with that mechanic. But enough of the speculation. ^^

There will be no open slots for DS to be used. Every other ability does more damage and I find it almost impossible that they won't be off CD. 4 sec CS does quite alot for us, as does a 6 sec Exorc, and an 8 sec Judge. If there ever is an open slot, I'd rather use Cons over Holy Power consuming, lol-55% damage DS. (Depends on the damage Cons does now, but I hear it can crit so sounds nice)

Using an ability between a TV and the next CS will push the cooldown of that CS to 4.5s. That's the difference between a 18.75% of weapon damage per second (WDPS) vs 18% of WDPS on TV and 25% of WDPS vs 24% of WDPS on CS (over the 12 seconds it takes to generate 3 holy power). Of course, pretty much anything is going to make up for that 1.75% of WDPS. Even a DS at 55% will do that (with an effective CD of 12.5s, DS would do 4.4% WDPS). In fact, using two abilities between a CS starts to have a bit of an effect. Being GCD locked would drop CS and VT damage from 43.75% WDPS to 38.89% WDPS. So those 3 abilities would need to do more than 4.86% WDPS in total to see a dps increase. That's not particularly hard so if we have the abilities to hit we're still going to be GCD locked.

If DS put CS on cooldown (so, we'd have 7s CD on the first CS and 4s on the other two), TV does 15% WDPS, DS does 3.66% WDPS and CS does 20% WDPS which would be much worse than not using DS. It does open up a gap which might mean that judgement and exorcism might play more nicely (I'd need to do a lot of playing around with the idea to figure that out).

However, we don't have all the information yet. As they didn't put a retribution only clause on Inquisition (and so it's likely baseline, making prot pallies happy), I'd say that we still have an unannounced ability. Divine Retribution was clearly set up in a way to test Inquisition so it's what I'm thinking will be the unannounced ability.

I'd like to see a strike which does holy damage because right now, I'm having a hard time seeing Inquisition being worth it. Being optimistic, we get:

• a seal proc a second (every GCD procs a seal and a swing timer of 3 seconds) giving 180% of weapon damage per 12 seconds from Seals of retribution and 70% from Seal of Corruption ticks (using current ratios of damage to calculate this).
• Exorcism (let's say Art of War is up at all times) on a six second CD will do around about 400% of weapon damage per 12 seconds (if it keeps the current ratio to melee damage but get's the 100% bonus and 6s CD).
• Let's add another 120% of weapon damage every 12s for Righteous Vengence (which is overkill given that CS is going to do about 60% of weapon damage from RV if 2 out of 3 crit, DS won't be used in single target and we get 1.5 judgements in that time)
• Judgement does about another 230% weapon damage per 12s

That's about 1000% of weapon damage every 12 seconds that's holy damage. Therefore, Inquisition has be more than a 22.5% buff to holy damage to even break even with using a TV on a single target rotation under extremely, extremely optimistic assumptions. It's probably much closer to 35-40% as I've ignored GCD clashing, not all abilities proc seals and Art of war and Righteous Vengeance are crit based. Those numbers are probably only slightly overestimated for the current tier but for cata, those crit rates are going to go through the floor. If we use a 33% crit rate, 2.5 seal procs per 3 seconds and a 9s effective cd on exorcism and still ignore CD and GCD clashing (these are somewhat gut feeling numbers, feel free to justify a better ones), it's about 800% of weapon damage every 12 which would see Inquisition needing to buff holy damage by about 28% to break even.

Sure, if our mastery is +holy damage, this is going to change. At some point Inquisition would be worth using the holy power to keep it up, however, I'd say that blizzard don't want us to have a crossing point. They want us managing our Holy power generation from the start (what's the point otherwise?). Also, if you add in consecration, Inquisition becomes more attractive, however, that also destroys the idea of keeping AoE out of single target rotations.

On that note, what's keeping us from adding consecration to our single target DPS rotations. Given it's a 15 second duration spell now, it's not exactly super expensive on mana or GCD. Inquisition just makes it win. I'd say that consecration is a greater worry than adding in DS.

There just isn't enough info to go on at the moment.

However, I imagine Cons will still be used as a GCD filler on ST fights given it's length and solid damage. I really like this change, not because it gives us a rotation, but because it gives us a scalable rotation. Meaning, it isn't difficult to follow a static rotation a spec may have; so that isn't necessarily where the "skill factor" comes in; the skill factor will come in on knowing a fight and when to sac your HP for a minimal gain and when to save it for a larger gain.

I'm still hoping and actively suggesting on the Beta forums for Hammer of Wrath to be added to Righteous Vengeance in lieu of Divine Storm. Since Ret has been painful on beta currently I've been playing around with glyphs and the reduced CD HoW during AW is pretty fun. I think if HoW was added to RV it would help it's longevity and keep it from being sidelined like it is now.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. My brain mustn't be working at the moment.

Given that Prot and holy are capable of generating more HP than us (sure, CS is not a particularly good way of generating it for holy which would have them generating less hp than us) I'm also sure that there's going to be more methods of getting HP. Prot will be able to generate 5 HP per 13.5 seconds and if we don't push the CS cd back to 4.5s we can do 3 per 12s (or more likely 3 per 13.5s). Maybe prot needs the extra HP to keep holy shield up.

This change does make CS feel a lot like a sinister strike or shred (which effectively has a 4s CD from energy before the haste changes). The difference is that rogues and druids have to wait on their energy before they can do anything else while we can still do stuff. If I recall correctly, there was a post which GC said that we were getting 3 new abilities. Inquisition, TV and Divine Retribution? There's got to be a good chance that TV is our specialisation ability, otherwise, we're going to be going for quite some time without a damaging "finisher". If druids are anything to go by, Inquisition will be trained at around level 70-80. That said, rogues get SnD at level 10.

On a slightly different note, Hand of Glory seems to be replicating the Art of War heal functionality (dps loss for healing). I wonder if AoW got cut (at least the heal part). Also, given that the mana free heal is the only thing that is good for holy in the list and unless they get more HP from talents, it would have to be a godly sort of heal to make it worthwhile. Maybe it become godly from talents. That or they are looking to add a lot more HP stuff to paladins (and just announced the no brainer/definite ones).

I also expect that the Holy Light part of Art of War will be cut since it replicates Word of Glory. It is also probably safe to infer that there will be more uses for Holy Power than those announced in the DevChat: they only mentioned 5, of which 2 are Retribution-only. Cat Druids have 4 finishers (Rip, Ferocious Bite, Savage Roar and Maim), while Rogues have 7 (Evis, Recuperate, Slice and Dice, Kidney Shot, Envenom, Expose Armor and Rupture). You need at least 3-4 finishers to give you choice and make the system interesting. And while the Rogue specs can share the finishers, we mostly cant (except for Prot and Ret sharing Inquisition and maybe something else), so I expect that we will end up with 7-8 finishers rather than the 5 already announced.

Holy in particular looks like it needs something, otherwise they are just casting Holy Shock and getting a free heal every 18 sec. I expect that one of their AoE heals and/or maybe Divine Light will scale from Holy Power, forcing them to choose single-target vs. multi-target, or efficiency vs. throughput.

I also think there must be another un-announced finisher available to Protection (and maybe ret too), because as it is, they only need to keep Inquisition up once every 20-something secs, and Holy Shield up once every 30-60 secs. At best, this implies 0.25 HP/sec (3/20 from Inquisition, and 3/30 from HS), which you could satisfy exactly with a 4-sec CS. With a no-CD CS, that leaves them with a lot of excess Holy Power. They must have some way to burn it, which means that there must be either another new ability or an existing ability that will scale from HP. It is also likely to be a something that generates threat and deals holy damage, because otherwise all of Prot's HP dumps are passive percentage increases to threat or mitigation. They need something active.

Ret is in a better place, with one buff to maintain, and then a choice between AE and single target finishers.

In short, I am fairly sure that we are only seeing a subset of our finishers, with 2-3 more still to come.

Divine Retribution has probably been removed, or rather renamed and taken out of the Ret tree, since it duplicated the effects of Inquisition. An interesting area of speculation is whether TV is our new Ret specialization ability or the 31-pt talent. Either way, both are supposed to be single-target attacks, so we are still missing something. Also, I expect that we will have at least one talent granting HP. Blizzard hinted at this (they said it was generated by CS, HS and some talents), and it follows by comparison to Rogues and Druids. Rogues have Seal Fate, Ruthlessness, Premeditation and HAT, Druids have Primal Fury. All of these randomly disrupt their rotations. Given the number of talents in Ret that seem ready for deletion or rework (SR, Conviction, Fanaticism, Heart of the Crusader), I would be very, very surprised if we did not get a proc that gave us HP on a random basis.

A few of you seemed to miss the change to Holy Shock, so don't talk about it as part of our future Ret rotation

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Holy Shock Holy only again?

At this point I would guess HW is going to be completely different than the current ability. Right now HW and Blinding Shield are pretty much the same spell (outside of the the Demon/Undead restriction) so it would make sense that one would be altered to fill a new niche.