I lost roughly 2500dps.
I didn't realize TV would get nerfed, I'm just wondering how much it got nerfed.

These coeffecient changes were announced some pages ago by redcape and exemplar and represent our L85 balancing:
- TV was nerfed from 290 to 235 weapon damage
- CS was nerfed from 130 to 115 weapon damage
- HoW base damage was nerfed
- Exo was buffed quite a bit at the expense of our seal of truth and judgement damage

So yes, ret paladins (and i.e. fury warriors) are back at the very first state when patch 4.0.1 went live. Which means in a underpowered state compared to most of the other classes but maybe in the right place considering L85 scaling and balancing.

I tried a new rotation as mentioned by redcape in his spreadsheet (Exo > HoW > 3 TV > CS > ...) and it felt very clunky especially when Exo was procing two or three times in a row. But at least I was able to recover a litte bit of my huge dps drop.
What I noticed as well was a accumulation of procs, i.e. 2 or 3x Exo, 3x TV which was far away from gameplay as fluently as before.

AoE dps is in a pretty bad shape, too, but in a way covered by our 2pc t10 bug. A huge part of this problem is the behavior of seal of command and its extremely small range and the random nature of Hand of Light when using DS. Sometimes when I was lucky my rotation was similiar to DS > TV > repeat which felt completely awkward and not like a thing to do in an AoE situation. Not to mention that 80% is not enough to even use DS when fighting <4 mobs.

The zealotry change is nice though. I found that the best way to handle it is with a macro like:
Because zealotry can only be used with 3 HoPo this is a fast and efficient way to unload your HoPo in a 3 TV.

TL;DR; Patch 4.0.3a - there is a dps loss for L85 balancing reasons but what's more of a problem is the revelation of severe design flaws which will hinder gameplay and scaling at later levels.

Another thing to note about Zealotry on live is that using zealotry will still consume a HoL proc, so if you're in a situation where you have 3 HP + HoL proc, you obviously want to TV --> zealotry --> TV instead of just zealotry --> TV. I don't know if this is intended or a bug, but either way it's quite annoying. Multiple times in my raid last night I ended up wasting my HoL proc because it came at the last second right as I used zealotry.

I realize Cata is only 2 weeks away and blizzard probably doesn't care about lv 80 raiding anymore, but this patch also makes killing H-LK 25 even harder. Between paladin add tanks now being hittable, nerfed cleaves of multiple classes (DS change + seal changes make ret AOE on valks in particularly laughable), and a bug where pets/mirror images seem to be able to trigger shadow traps now, guilds like mine which were previously on the verge of a kill are now probably going to end up coming up short. Yes, I know, we're bad and should have had it by now, but my point is that it would have been nice if they saved the changes aimed at balancing level 85 for the patch that actually makes it possible to level to 85.

Since DS shares a cooldown with CS and doesn't proc HP is it even worth using? If so at what point is it acutally worth it 4 mobs, 5 mobs, more?

The difference, which I assume kalstrand is referring to, is that CS is a 100% chance to proc HP whereas DS is only 40%. Therefore in using DS over CS, you are relying on RNG for holy power generation and missing out on potentially several TVs, making the number of required targets for DS to pull ahead even higher.

Personally I've found using DS to be a dps loss in pretty much every situation. I'm not a good enough theorycrafter to know how bad the difference is in theory, though. It's a little bit ironic though if you think about it. Blizzard's goal was to get us to use our signature ability, DS, more often, and in making their changes they're actually making us use it LESS often. I find it amusing, anyway.

I haven't had a chance to play around with the 4.0.3a build yet. I know they fixed rebuke, but have they changed the bug with Censure and Haste? I/E if you maintain Censure it will tick at the haste it was applied with?

It seems to be fixed, I have 20 haste more than our other Retri with BS/JC and got 1 more Tick at yesterdays Saurfang but I applied the Dot also with Hyperspeed Acc (80 ticks vs 79 with a fight lenght of 2:32) My Uptime was 99.3%, he had 98.5%. Our Third Ret (just know he has less haste on gear than me) had an uptime of 97.7% and had 2 Ticks less than me without using any Pot and 740 more haste before applying the dot should lead to more than 2 ticks in comparison to our third ret who applied that dot 2s later than me.

If I understand correctly each target hit by DS has that 40% chance to proc a HP. In large trash i have found when using DS I rarely DON'T get a HP proc, however as it has been said before the damage is still quite low. My AoE trash damage is now at the bottom and still don't know if I'm doing something wrong.

As for your H LK kill. The job for some of us got harder because of the nerfs, but some other classes got buffed (mages in my guild are destroying valks with proper use of combustion and impact) We got our kill 2 weeks ago with a second last week so it is definetly possible to kill him for guilds that are "about to" and I would say the encounter has around the same difficulty as before 4.0.3a so just keep at it and good luck.


About our single target rotation, I also found out that Exo > HoW > TV > CS >etc... is a higher DPS rotation (compared saurfang logs from 4.0.3 old rotation to 4.0.3a using old rotation to 4.0.3a using new. logs not public ATM). I think they want us to give the top priority to the AoW Proc followed by the HoL proc, HoW requires attention during wings and <20% health.

All ret spreadsheets previously posted in this thread and in Redcape's Ret DPS Spreadsheet thread shows a different rotation. Just based off of what i do on dummy targets, my melee attack is 4th or 5th on the total damage done with Exo being 5th or 6th depending on how many procs I get during the session. With the preivous patch adding additional % damage to Exo, and glyphing into Exo is nice. But, you really dont want to be losing out on the melee damage because you are busy casting Exo.

We should never be casting Exo at melee, only using it during AoW procs.

Now, about the rotation, you gotta remember that in ICC basically all the mobs are undead, thus, Exo will have a 100% crit chance, definetly going above HoW.
But on a regular game play (specially on cata, where undeads and daemons shouldn't be so common), HoW will crit far more than Exo, having a higher priority. The new 50% buff might change it and there's probably a breakpoint based on your crit chance where Exo might surpass HoW, but time and spreadsheets will show that to us.

Is this true? I was definitely under the impression that it's a 40% chance per cast, not per target. If it was per target, then I'd be a lot more OK with it. Has anyone proved it one way or the other?

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't see Nation's post before I replied. However, I don't think that not receiving more than 1 HP from a DS proc really proves anything. Blizzard could just as easily have implemented it as a 40% chance per target, but cap it at 1 HP per cast.