Were you assuming that trinket stacks never fell off? RNG alone can cause that, but so can boss mechanics. H Beth (assuming you're going up top) and Alysrazor are both fights where you're going to have a decent chunk of time not able to DPS anything. That increases the chance trinkets fall off, and I would think the value of CS glyph.

I just re-ran the numbers in simcraft as well for my gear, and I came up with exorcism glyph being only 78 DPS ahead of CS Glyph on a patchwerk fight. That's significant but hardly "way better". In fact, it's only 0.24% better. It looks better on paper, but in practical application I'm not sure the results we're looking at are accurate. Is there a way to force simcraft to account for trinket stacks falling off?

I use a TV priority so losing HoW for TV isn't a problem. If you're curious to how I layer my cooldowns, there's a VERY descriptive post with pictures a page or two back. I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote. I use the trinket at the very end of the pull CDs - when they all have 15 seconds left, with however many stacks I have - But without being forged for crit, you frequently get RNG'd not to have 5 stacks of Titanic Power. Since we declare crit and haste as approximately equal, But crit allows us to use our trinket more consistantly, we won't be seeing a wild shift to haste without further changes.

This was my point.

.24% better for your overall dps, but that still means Exorcism's Glyph would be something around 25%+ better than CS's.

5% crit on an ability you use every ~4.25 seconds is simply not a significant increase to your overall crit rate. That's 1 crit in 85 seconds. Looking at a recent WoL report of mine, I can expect about 35-40 crits in that same time period without the glyph on a typical fight, and 30 on Alysrazor (I was offline for Beth'tilac). Is a 3% difference in my overall rate of critting going to matter? Almost definitely not.

From the numbers I was coming up with in Excel (but not a Sim, so ymmv), AoK capped at a max of 4 stacks with Exorcism's Glyph was still more damage than Glyph of CS with AoK at 5 stacks, albeit not by much, and that is a very heavily skewed scenario in GoCS's favor, though I may have only factored for the first set of CDs since AoK is almost always full later in the fight, but can't remember for sure anymore. If you can make a change like that in Simcraft (change the stack value to ~90% of it's normal amount to account for not always being fully stacked), I'd imagine it'd confirm my less reliable number crunching.

I am trying to wrap my head around what you just said here, but I am not quite understanding what your talking about. We can all agree that using AW gives you a 20% dmg increase, whether you use it at the start of a fight or 30 seconds in. Obviously that 20% dmg scales with however much dmg your currently doing at the time, so using it when your doing the most damage would probably seem the most ideal time right? This would all be completely true if it was the only factor, but unfortunately it is not.

When you say "your also pushing back zealotry," what exactly are you talking about? Do you mean pushing it back by all of 10 seconds, or do you mean by a considerable amount of time. As I said before, Zealotry is only being delayed until you have 5 stacks of the AoK trinket, at which time you use them together. The original point of this discussion was more of an issue of people complaining about not being able to stack their trinket to 5 quickly enough. If you use AW first, this alleviates a few issues for you, but there is always a tradeoff. This tradeoff would be about 10 seconds of 20% dmg while Zealotry is up. The gain would be that you actually get to use HoW and Exorcism with AW up, instead of ignoring them for CS-TV spam. You also ensure that you get to 5 stacks of the trinket super quickly. Ultimately this just comes down to whether or not you believe that 20% damage for 20 seconds while your doing the most dps is better than a full minute of increased damage. I wish I had the math skills to figure this out, but unfortunately I do not. If anyone cares to spreadsheet this discussion I would love to have a final answer on the topic.

As this was discussed back on page 47 & 48, people will find different methods of cd usage and make their own judgements. Unless I can see clear math that proves the way that I am doing it is wrong, I will continue to do it the way I have been. I would assume that you would feel the same way, but if you do have math supporting your statements I would love to see it.

What your saying is the complete opposite of what I actually do. I do not delay AW at all, and I only delay Zealotry until I have 5 stacks of the trinket, which if your using AW first, you only end up delaying Zealotry 6-12 seconds, depending on whether or not your HoW's crit, which would give you the stacks of the trinket quicker. Sometimes I only need that first HoW after popping AW to get the 5th stack, at which point I'd then pop Zealotry+Trinket. Either way, AW is not being delayed at all, as it is actually being used in the first 10 seconds of the fight, depending on how quickly I can get Inquisition up.

Your comment about Zealotry not being buffed by other abilties and losing 20% damage on TV spam isnt really correct. As I said before, you can actually end up popping Zeal+Trinket with more than half of your AW duration still up and more importantly, while your 15 second duration mastery proc is still up. All that this ensures is that you don't stand around waiting for 5 stacks of a trinket while lust is up, or even in a normal scenario. HoW almost always crits, and gets ur stacks up very quickly, which ultimately allows you to use Zeal+Trinket while your guardian is still up.

Based on the timings you listed above, which I am assuming is how you do it, your indicating that you use Zealotry at 0 seconds, but I figure what you mean is that you use Zealotry as soon as you have 3 HP. If your actually doing that, that would mean that your backloading your Zealotry and using your cds to coincide with the back half of it instead of the front half. That is fine and their is no real difference, however you are assuming that at the 20sec mark that you will have 5 stacks of AoK. Maybe you will, maybe you wont, however in the event that you do not, every second that goes by after that 20 second mark is 1 second of wasted Zealotry with the mastery proc from the trinket. You are also gambling with every single cooldown that you have. By using such exact timings for everything, you basically are going all or nothing. If you do not have 5 stacks at exactly the 20 second mark, you are not gaining the most that you can from Guardian, Golemblood, AW, & Zealotry. Also, if you prepot, it will fall off before you AW, which also should be factored in. Now think about Bloodlust/Heroism.....If you don't get 5 stacks by the 20 second mark, and thus have to delay using the trinket, you only give yourself a 5 second window to make sure that all of your cooldowns are effected by Bloodlust. That just seems like a lot to gamble with. Obviously the other way to look at it is that if you do get 5 stacks by the 20 second mark, your golden. But even then, the whole debate over whether or not its a good idea to forego the use of Exo and HoW during this period of time when every one of your cooldowns are up is still up for discussion, especially during lust when Exo procs are fairly frequent. Just seems like a lot of damage to throw away.

I feel that your timings above will yield the most damage over that 20 second period, without question. But I also think that damage isnt about how much burst you can do at the start of the fight and the fact that stretching your cooldowns out a bit could quite possibly yield more damage due to the fact that you enable yourself to actually use all of your highest DPET. Like I said though, I am not great at math and would love to stand corrected if someone could run some numbers on this topic.

For reference, this is usually what my rotation looks like to start a fight:

0 - Prepot
5 - Guardian > Heroism > AW > HoW
10 - HoW + Exo's
15 - HoW + Exo's
15 - Zealotry + Trinket (After 3 HoW's, having 5 stacks of AoK is very reliable)
25 - Pot Fades, AW Fades
30 - Trinket Fades
35 - Guardian Fades
45 - Heroism Fades
50 - Zealotry Fades

The main difference here is that you extend damage cd's for almost a full minute instead of 35 seconds, and also grant the use of buffed Exo and HoW usage, 2 of our highest DPET abilities, while only taking away the 20% dmg boost to Zealotry for roughly 10 seconds.

So if i'm understanding correctly, youre giving up having zealotry benefit fully from heroism, avenging wrath initial trinkets, pre-pot, in order to stretch out the amount of time that youre doing increased damage, because you perceive the lost HoW's as more significant than the damage gained from lining up and combining the damage boosting effects.

I too, would like to see numbers on the subject. My gut instinct is still that its better to open with zealotry and use AW 15 seconds into it, but thats because a crit HoW and a normal TV+HoL for me is about the same amount of damage so I prioritize TV>HoW>Exo. Then again, we have problems with "sustaining" high damage and perhaps cooldown splitting would address that.

again, all of this talk might be irrelevant if they nerf how/buff other spells

Ya i mean, there is a 5 second window of time where zealotry would still be active and heroism wouldn't, but what difference does that really make. In that 5 second window, you can still get 2 TV's off w/o lust, and even with lust, your only getting 2 TV's as well. I guess if the timing lined up perfectly, you could gain an extra TV in some cases, but it wouldnt be something consistent, regardless of what way you look at it.

What I perceive is that the buffed HoW's, the buffed Exo's and the longer period of increased damage time is enough to warrant using the AW before Zealotry.

Every top ranking ret in the world????? That is a pretty bold statement, and even if for some odd reason you personally know and talk to all of these people, namedropping really doesn't prove anything. Sure I can claim that a bunch of other Rets do it like I do too, but there is no point, and it'd be a lie seeing that I don't go around asking every ret from a top guild how they use their cooldowns. WoL rankings also prove nothing. Our class is way to RNG dependent and the top rankings really don't tell the full story about how the cd usage is working at the beginning of the fight.. There are just too many other variants that can occur over the rest of the fight that impact a top parse.

As much as you might think that your personal experience is enough to warrant convincing me that I am doing it wrong, I would much rather stand corrected by way of math. As I said back on page 46-47, months ago, I initially brought this up to see if other people had tried it and what their conclusions were. Those that responded agreed with my findings.

Let me ask you......have you tried the other cd usage method for a full week of raiding? Maybe this is what your referring to as your "personal experience." If not, then what are you comparing to??? If you haven't tried and compared both methods, then your basically just saying "my way is right because I say so," or because a few other top paladins told me so. The people involved with the conversation have all said that math is the only way to prove/disprove the topic. Saying that its wrong just because you feel that its wrong isn't really helping the discussion.

Has anyone crunched the numbers on seals for aoe with the change to censure? With it gaining such a large amount, it could potentially surpass SoT at 4 or even 5 targets.

I modified exemplar's spreadsheet with the new coefficients (0.014 for spell power, 0.02702 for AP), and it seems now the OP is correct, it is only better to use SoR at 4 targets or more, whereas before the it was at 3 targets. This is just with the default gear, but the difference is quite significant (800 dps) so I doubt it'll depend on gear.

Not everything involving adds is automatically an AOE Burn.

There are two general scenarios (with many sub-scenarios):
Scenario One: Boss + Adds
Boss is present, adds spawn and move near boss. All targets can be hit. In this scenario you must decide whether to (potentially) reduce Boss damage in order to increase total damage. # of adds is important for this decision. Even more important is whether the adds matter - on some fights they should be ignored as insignificant or merely distractions.

Excellent Example of #1 - Alysrazor:
She has crashed and burned. 2 adds are spawned and close to the boss. You can swap to SoR and cleave for more damage, but it's entirely pointless on this fight. The adds are entirely unimportant and do not need to be killed. Retaining SoT for single target damage wins.

Scenario Two: Boss goes away, only adds
With only adds present, maximizing overall damage is important. Again quantity of adds is important. If you have only 2 adds with several million health, even in a raid you should be able to stack Censure on at least one. Would DS (not proccing HP) and SoR truly be worthwhile? On the other extreme if you have dozens of adds all with 100k that will explode in a global or two, is it worth the time/mana to swap seal?

Excellent Example of #2 - Rags:
Phase changes involve 8 adds. SoR is obviously perfect, 8 adds! But wait, the adds are not stacked, there will be little to no cleave. DS is entirely useless. You're only hitting one target at a time, so SoT is good, right? On the other hand, Rags is gone, so no need to keep Censure on him. And wait, the adds are low on health and should die before you could get a full stack of Censure ticking. After due consideration you should find that SoR wins because it does faster single target damage in a burst environment - not because there are "enough" adds, because it cleaves, or any other such reason.

Each fight should be assessed for its own merits. The OP is simply covering if there are multiple targets, all are equally important to kill, and will take more than 1-2 GCD to do so. Knowing a rough breakpoint can be very useful when considering a specific fight in advance.