Heh, so SoC finally has something better than SoB.

Thanks for the help everyone, new version of the JoW list should be up tomorrow.

I'm leveling my pally right now and I want to be an end game SoR pally. I would wear all cloth with spell hit/crit and larg e amounts of spell dmg raid buffed in the 1300-1500 range. All sockets would be socketed with +8 melle hit. Could i compete end game dps and is this even viable?

No, but you can do something similar and not be awful. Spell hit and spell crit are worthless to you, ignore them. If you want to use SoR, the best gear is spellpower mixed with physical hit, crit and str. It sounds bizarre, but I had basically the same thing in mind, and until 2.3.2 came out it was actually quite competitive dpswise with a full AP/Crit SoC build. I used s2 arena/honor gear and t4/t5 gear and a mix of physical and spellpower rings/trinkets/cloak/neck. You want to be hit capped and have maximum spellpower for that style but spell hit and spell crit are very weak. Your build would be 10/8/43. It is just worse than a AP/crit build now though because of the change to Crusader Strike. You won't be totally useless or anything, but you won't be particularly good.

Just make sure you use t4/t5/t6 gear and s2 stuff and you will be ok. If you actually use cloth gear mostly you will be terrible, aside from a few pieces like the Collar of Cho'gall since it has only spellpower and doesn't waste points on spellcrit/spellhit.

Edit: Oh, and eye of magtheridon is INSANE for that build. Just saying.

Thank you folks for all the valuable information. This post is not ment to be offensive or anything like that, i just honestly believe i could have an idea to improve the thread structure.

In my opinion, this thread is getting confusing. 51 pages (and growing) iss just too much to remember, and to read if you are looking just for a specific information. My suggestion is to split this post furthermore up into Therorycraft(Itemsation), Therorycraft(Spells&Abilities) and a part to discuss freely whatever comes in your mind and does not fit into the above mentioned categories.

Now if anyone feels this post is non-contrbuting to the topic. Yes you are right. However what´s the use in super-informative posts if hardly anyone can find them in time.
If this post is violating any forum rules or you consider it disturbing, feel free to delete it immediatly.

Kind regards,
andz

I did my first Karazhan run as Retribution last night. The first thing that struck me was simply how mana starved I was. I had to use Blessing of Wisdom the entire night. On every boss fight I had to switch to JOWisdom and SOWisdom about halfway through, even though I was only using Crusader Strike and JOBlood/SOBlood (I dropped Consecrate from my rotation).

Aside from chain chugging mana potions, which I'd hate to do in a farm Kara run, is there something I'm missing?

Hey again.

I have a question about the DPS Spreadsheet; relating to "Expertise".

Does the spreadsheet assume you are stood in front, or behind your target?

If it assumes you are in front, then expertise would negate both Parry and Dodge; hence being twice as effective as it would be in reality (taking into account you stand behind targets most of the time).

This leads me to the [Shoulderpads of the Stranger] Vs. [Pauldrons of the Wardancer] debate. :S

Thanks.

Ret pallies are simply suboptimal in kara. You require the raid buffs for mana, another pally to JoW for you, and windfury totem to do good DPS, and this is not something you usually get in a 10-man.

If my math isn't wrong (its early in the morning, sorry), using a straight CS/JoB cycle will cost you ~315 Mp5. Between JoW (~100 Mp5) and BoW (41 Mp5) it looks like you will be spending ~174 mana every 5 seconds. That gives you (with about 5.1k mana with paw and AI) about 150 seconds of DPS time. In all honesty you might need to be potting in kara. Its easiest just to spend those AV tokens on some [Major Combat Mana Potion]s (as an aside, the new flavor texts on those things is awesome!).

One of the hardest things for me to get used to when I spec ret is that the style of potting is so much different than healing. When I'm holy its just the general "at -3000 mana pot and burn one every 2 minutes after". With ret it really depends on your cycle.

That's such an oversimplification it hurts. Of course you won't do 25-man damage in kara, but you can still do respectable personal DPS without an enhancement shaman.

The reason ret pallys aren't great in kara is the same reason DPS Warriors and Rogues aren't. The instance in general is melee unfriendly (excluding Aran) and more importantly all melee DPS classes scale with gear to an incredible degree. Once you start getting some nice heroic/T5/Za DPS loots you'll see your personal DPS skyrocket compared to the casters that rule kara.

If you have enough hit, expertise is a great way to increase your DPS. Im sitting at about 14 expertise which reduces dodges and parries by about 4%. I think the spreadsheet assumes you attack from the back.

I would still stand in back and here is why. A boss cannot parry from behind, only dodge. If a boss parries one of your attacks, it increases the speed if his next attack which is usually on the tank. So if you are getting parried, it means your tank is getting hit more often which eats up their shield blocks.

Even if you somehow reach the total expertise cap for a frontal attack (I read somewhere its something like 10% for most T6 bosses) you still wouldn't want to. Most bosses can block from the front (in addition to parry and dodge), and WepEx does nothing for that.

Socketing everything to str would be fine comparing 2 items in a void, but the spreadsheet compares 2 different items using the rest of your gear as a base. This means anyone without 9% total hit using any combination of 15 of their 16 items will have at least 1 item comparison that overvalues +hit since you're no longer capped and hit is the biggest dps increase stat when you're not capped. When you have sockets you can stick +hit gems in that is probably not the best comparison.

I've reworked my copy of v30 to socket to 9% hit and then socket str if that's something you would be interested in incorporating in future versions bellator. It helps keep the spreadsheet from grossly overvaluing items with +hit on them for people who have to socket some +hit to cap (or could be better off socketing hit to cap). I think this is a lot better way to work the comparison for anyone who isn't already several percent beyond the hit cap because it brings down the value of straight +hit vs. sockets to something reasonable. It could on occasion screw you out of a tiny bit of dps where it would be better to gem str and live with 8.x% hit instead of gemming to 9.x but I consider that an acceptable tradeoff. Gemming for +hit is the right answer over staying uncapped the vast majority of the time.

The spreadsheet is currently unable to tell you the very best combination of items. It can find a combination of items for which there is no single item that results in a dps upgrade however, which makes for a fairly solid ending gearset. The one I found had all str gems socketed, even with the option to socket +hit, so I'm inclined to believe people at high (T6 farm) levels of gear have very little need for this enhancement, but it may find some combinations you wouldn't otherwise see I suppose.

One more tip for people, if you don't want to see a socket bonus on an item broken up, you can add the item again yourself and use the stats you would have socketed instead and simply not include any sockets (except meta if applicable).

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If anyone is interested in using what I wrote:

Changes the function of "Socket Strength" to fill with Strength Gems like normal and then backfill hit gems into yellow, blue, and red sockets in that order as needed to reach 9% hit (or run out of sockets).

Please note I'm using 8 Str and 8 Hit gems. You can obviously just change the 8's to 10's to go back to using 10's if they are available to you.

1.) Name your +hit total cell (H17) to "Hit" (no quotes)
2.) In the macro editor go to module2 and replace from Public Sub Socket_Str() to the first End Sub with the following