Another thing that is sort of related to Ret right now is public awareness that Ret is actually fairly good dps. Im sure its going to be hard to find a good guild that will be aware of the benefits of ret paladins. How are you current paladins getting spots in raids?, and how many ret paladins are they bringing? I don't want to spend all this time gearing to find out that noone will take me.

I would imagine it's going to be big problems for many ret paladins to find good guilds to join up with. Long after 2.3 gets pushed live the stigma of lolret will still be there in many people. However after 2.3 gets pushed live with these changes, WWS reports will soon be put out showing what ret paladins can really do in a stacked meele group with threat reduction. Hopefully many raid leaders will realize the worth of a ret paladin. I'm a holy paladin right now and I plan to spec and raid ret as soon as 2.3 gets pushed live. I just cant see a reason for not bringing one, provided they're in a proper support group they should do very competitive dps. The biggest thing as a ret paladin looking to get into a solid raiding guild is that you're going to have to be a damn good player to prove your worth. I know that this is the same case with all classes, but we're working from the ground up here, if you're going to botch encounters or not come prepared I'm sure it's going to be rough. I say keep doing what you're doing, gearing yourself up, just remember you're going to have to go that extra mile to prove your worth.

For how many ret paladins people are bringing/going to bring. The answer is simple, one. There's no reason at all for more ret paladins, unless maybe you don't have any holy/prot paladins to provide additional blessings.

To touch on the discussion on the previous pages, on certain fights keeping up judgments is just not an easy thing to do as a holy paladin. For certain fights like bloodboil or achimonde keeping judgments up reliably is just not possible without sacrificing multiple GCD's or time running in and out of range.

Another thing is that when 2.3 goes live and shamans/druids/priests healers all get substantially buffed along with the down ranking nerf to holy paladins we really are going to be the least desirable healer to bring but of course you still need blessings, so bringing a ret to cover one of those blessings is allowing room for more tree druid/shaman/priest healers.

I tested CS on the 2.3 PTR and it is normalized to 3.3 for 2H and 2.4 for 1H weapons.

I am not trying to be cynical, but it is a lot more likely that guilds are going to allow long time players who have proven their loyalty to try out the fun new offspecs before recruiting new retribution paladins, so this change is more likely to impact a lot of holy paladins who are currently in guild but want to have a chance at a different role or a burnt out on healing.

Something I noticed about Bellator's spreadsheet - there's no Meta Gem requirement checks (IE, full socketing with 10str gems allows 12agi 3% crit to be active).

That is correct. Codeing meta gems checks is a pain.

The spreadsheet is not including JotC damage in CS. Can anyone confirm that it is counted as part of the spell damage? Reason i ask is when i first tested CS (a long while back) CS did not benefit from JotC. If anyone can confirm the change, i'll fix


Also, does anyone have any confirmation on my consecration mechanics i noticed. Them being:-
A) The extra damage from Jotc does not scale (ie is not reduced) like spdam on gear when it comes to downranking consecration (can be tested by noticing the increase in tick is the same for min and max rank consecration with 0 SpD and JotC on target)
B) The extra consecration damage caused from +dmg on gear gets modifiers applied to it but not the extra damage from jotc (can be tested by judging targets, casting consecration and then using AW....tick does not go up 30%)

The effect of slow weapons on CS damage isn't direct. The higher CS damage is because of the higher weapon damage, not because of the slow speed. A 100-200 weapon would always do more CS damage than a 80-180 weapon, no matter what their speed is. Of course 2 weapons with the same DPS will have a better weapon speed if they're slower, but the reason for the extra CS damage is the extra weapon damage and not the speed.

For SoC you get a direct benefit from having a slow weapon - the proc is based on weapon damage/ap, so if the proc was a fixed % (like WF), it wouldn't matter what speed you have. Since slower means higher proc % it means slower weapons automatically proc more.

In reality DPS speed and damage are related since given 2 of them you could calculate the 3rd. However when calculating DPS done with a weapon and how much DPS you'd gain from each attribute changing I find it easier to treat each stat for itself - check how much damage you lose by speeding up the weapon, how much damage you gain by increasing DPS and how much damage you gain by increasing the average weapon damage. Then when you change a weapon, sum up the DPS differences and see if it's really better or not. At least I think that would be the easiest way to calculate and compare weapons in a definite way.

As a general guidline, though, since SoC is PPM based obviously with equal level weapons the slower weapon wins.

I'm getting a chance because I was a very strong Ret player pre-BC, through all raids up to a few bosses into BWL, and because my guild has come to the point where I'm not the "token Prot Paladin" anymore. It used to be so bad, that half the night I was the only Paladin in a raid. That was pretty much unacceptable, but nowadays I have more freedom to experiment.

The caveat being that I have to spend all my time farming Heroics for and bid DKP to roll on DPS items until patch time, so that I'm not two raid zones of gear behind everyone else. I'm out to be competitive, not just viable. I plan to report on my findings once I've run a few raids.

My tests from a long while back show that CS does benefit from JotC... (Using low damage range weapon on various EPL mobs, if I remember right)



A. JotC affects R1 Consecrate and JoC R1, and I think it has no downranking penalty.


I'm not sure about B.

That brings up a different question - what are the coefficients for the various abilities that we can downrank? I've tested Consecrate and JoC, but I've never looked at

HoW
Exorcism
Holy Wrath


With the reduced mana costs in 2.3, certain ranks might be mana efficient enough to incorporate into a DPS cycle vs. demon/undead/wounded targets.

You can get DeMon, the recently released next-generation version of pDebuffFilter. It lets you manually add debuffs to track.

Mine watches for the presence of all four "debuff" judgements and Scorpid Sting, in addition to all the normal stuff.

Where did you find the addon? I can't seem to locate it anywhere. Something like this would actually merit a close inspection if it works well.

If not you can always do what I so and just use NECB to monitor your judgement. Once you CS they'll all be on the same timer anyway.

EDIT: Nevermind, found it on the Ace site.

EDIT 2: WowAce Downloads Download it from there.

Do you have a link to this addon? I can't seem to find it on any of the addon sites.

Thanks!

Rough numbers for SoB are:-

1 Str = 2.2 AP = 1.1 Agility = 1.1 Crit = 1.0 Haste = 8 Armour Pen = 3 +Dmg

Hit rating not included in this, but is greater than all if not hit capped.

And yes, the mail bracers are outperforming the plate ones.

In terms of weapons, for SoC torch of the damned is definately the best. The model suggests the sword is marginally better for SoB, however i'm an alliance paladin, so not 100% sure on all the SoB calculations, but i think they are fairly accurate

In general the model is pretty accurate. I know of a couple of minor errors which need correcting, but shouldnt change the outcome of anything. Feel free to ask about any particular items you were looking at,

Okay, so as you can see from the title, I'm a weaponsmith. Only 275 at the moment, but that's beside the point. What I'm trying to ask is this. Is it better for a retribution paladin, who is planning to be used mainly for PvE, to choose Swordsmith, Hammersmith, or Axesmith. The biggest reason I need to know, is for the 2-handed weapon that I could use from each mastery. Obviously, I can only choose one, and I would like to know which one would benefit me the best. Here are the stats of each of these 2-handed weapons:

Bloodmoon 2-handed Axe
375-564 damage Speed 3.70
(126.9 damage per second)
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 56.
Equip: Increases attack power by 112.

Lionheart Executioner 2-handed Sword
365-549 damage Speed 3.60
(126.9 damage per second)
+52 Strength
+44 Agility
Equip: Increases your chance to resist Fear effects by 8%.
Chance on hit: Increases Strength by 100 for 10 seconds.

Stormherald 2-handed Mace
386-579 damage Speed 3.80
(127.0 damage per second)
+42 Strength
+42 Agility
+61 Stamina
Chance on hit: Stuns target for 4 seconds.

I managed to get my spot in the raiding scene because one of my friends holds a lot of influence with our guild and he managed to convince all the officers of the guild that a retribution paladin would be very helpful to the entire raid, as well as capable dps. That's how my spot has been secured. But I agree with you. Ret pallies are now making their own way in the World, but it'll be a while yet before they are generally accepted as capable dps, able to match those classes that are actually designed for dps, no matter what spec (i.e. rogue, hunter, mage, etc.)

Season 3 weapons also require a reasonable time investment as well as a personal rating of 1850. In all honesty I would still go for either the Skillherald of the LHE. The Axe is (IMO) a purely hunter weapon, so the choice between the other two is up to you. The sword is marginally better for PvE in raw stats, and its proc is very good, but the extra stamina on SH comes in useful as well.

Its also 5 vortexes and 8 nethers. Not hard to do at all if you're into tier 5 content.

He's lvl 66 according to armory atm

Thanks. That helps out a lot in making my decision.

I'm having a hard time deciding if I want to invest points in Season 3 pieces when the patch hits, or just get Season 2 now. I qualify for most pieces except shoulders (2,000 personal rating -_-), and looking at the difference, I can't tell if - assuming all other gear is T5 level, which would benefit me more.

I tallied up the differences...going from S2 to S3:

Armor: +492
Strength: -29
Stamina: +7
Intellect: +6
Spell Damage: +1
Armor Penetration: 252
Hit Rating: +36
Crit Rating: -4
Resilience: +160

Also the bonus of SotC +20 versus 5% to Crusader Strike. It sounds really hot, but at the same time I can't really use the spreadsheet to weight the loss of crit and STR too well. :\

The S2 and S3 gloves have almost the exact same same stats (Season 3 having +1 STAM, +3 INT, -3 Spell Damage, +26 Resil compared to Season 2), but the new bonus effect alone makes up for it. Testing it on the PTR's I could see a noticeable increase in my DPS (not huge, but not small either). So even if you decide just to grab the Season 2 stuff, I would at least get the Vengeful gloves.

Prepared, the latest version of the spreadsheet has the S2 and S3 items listed, so you should be able to compare them. As flyingroastr said, the gloves are grear. Pluggin in tier 6 gear with tier 4 gloves, then running the upgrade analysis, the tier 3 gloves run out big winners. The spreadsheet doesnt have the tier 2 bonus, but there is no way it will make up for the tier 3 bonus