So. my guild had downed Kalecgos the other night (Server 2nd and ALliance first yay!) and we did some brutallus attempts on monday night.

Now. one thing that kinda bugged me is that we didnt min max for the fight and they opted to keep me holy instead of me as ret.

Now question is, is a ret paladin absolutely needed for Brutallus? whats everyone else think?

Is a Ret Paladin necessary? No. Incredibly helpful? Yes.

No, you are not expertise capped from only the 3 pieces. Going off the 6.5% (103 rating) requirement postulated by the rogue thread, you are still a fair amount short. The 3 pieces of the T6 give you a total of 60 expertise. The human racial is worth 19.5 more expertise rating, putting you at a total of 79.5 expertise, or 23.5 expertise rating short of cap. The expertise on Shard isn't worth as much for a human because of the racial, but again, the ability to guarantee that 100% of your attacks hit or crit is worth a lot more than a small theoretical DPS increase.

Ahh, I see. Thanks Toaster.

I was going by Belator's sheet noticing that the shard was lower DPS than some of the other trinkets with 3 expertise pieces. I agree, being over the cap is more important that spike procs, especially because DST and Tsunami have always evaded me. =/

its just annoying cuz they are still soemwhat against ret paladins even tho we have posted our best boss kills (2:36 on teron) with a ret paladin in the raid. I know they hold me in high regard as Holy. But for brutallus i know we have to min max as best as possible. Our Melee group was enhance sham/fury war/arms war/ 2 rogues.


im just hoping at some point we go back to our ret paladin set up. /shrug no matter how much math i propose to my officers and no matter how much better our kills are with ret paladin in the raid, they still dont believe it.

In my opinion the Bonkadin is very needed on this fight if only for the JoW/JotC

If you look at wwsscoreboard.com, the highest DPS brutalus kills almost all have Ret pallys in them.

Had the exact same problems back in the days where paladins wanted to tank and everyone was shouting that paladins cant tank and that they are heal bots, but look at where prots are today..

Ret popularity is advancing slowly but steady, heck even nihilum uses ret nowadays..

Just got me a Felspine, first trash pack in the instance on our first run there And then a second dropped from the second pack, we couldn't believe it. Wacked a mongoose on that pigsticker 'o win, looks ace.

Is the most recent version of Rawr Retribution 1.05? That's the latest I could find in this thread.

If so, for some reason it will not run for me. I see the startup splash screen but it goes away in about .5seconds and then nothing comes up. Anyone experiencing this? Is there a fix? Thanks in advance. I really want to get this going so I can see how my current Ret gear stacks up, and what I should be trying to get. My guild will down Illidan soon, and there has been talk of bringing in a Ret paladin. I'm currently holy and would love to go Ret, so I'm trying to prepare well in advance.

I've looked at maxdps.com but it just seems "off" to me. Anyone think that maxdps.com is actually worth it ?

Wait for around a week for the first public release of Rawr.Retribution.

Anyone tried the new [Shattered Sun Pendant of Might] yet?

For an Aldor player, it grants 200AP for 10 seconds, and for Scryer has a chance to deal an "Arcane Strike" upon melee hit for around 333-367 damage (average of 350).

I'm not sure if Rawr or Bellator's spreadsheet take these procs into account so its a little hard to value them.

From some rough testing with an Aldor Rogue friend of mine we came to the conclusion they both have a 45 second internal cooldown, and proc fairly readily. For him, he was granted the 200AP bonus on average every 50 seconds, so approximately equivalent to 40AP.

As for the Scryer proc, with my slower weapon, I was a little less lucky on the procs but it seems to average out at around 1PPM. The "Arcane Strike" can also crit, and I would imagine this is based upon Melee Crit rating, in which case, asuming a 30% crit chance, would add around 7.5 DPS to the value of this neck. This could also scale Misery and other such target debuffs as it is listed as Arcane Damage.

I would imagine, combined with the base stats on the neck, that it may actually edge out the [Pendant of the Perilous]. Anyone read anything else? Or tested this in a raid yet? WWS might help here. =D

Shattered Sun Pendant of Might will probably edge out Pendant of the Perilous/Choker of Serrated Blades. I just haven't seen enough data about the Arcane Strike proc yet.

Hi, I'm not very good with numbers so I'm doing my best to grasp the ret theorycrafting. I came into my current raid as a prot pally with a pretty good grasp of that and I gathered the ret pvp gear on the side as the stats were more beneficial to us than the other stuff pre-2.4. I had only considered ret for pvp on the side. Then tanking on trash and Akama adds became less needed, so I started coming to BT as ret. Now, outside of Hyjal they want me ret full time. We have just gotten to the point where I'd say BT is on farm and I have to stop pushing my prot gear forward and push for ret instead.

My main question is whether my gear farm needs to lean toward the non-set pieces from BT (with an eye toward armor pen and more crit), or T6, or an even balance that one of you guys has worked out to be the optimal?

About my current gear: currently clearly gemmed/enchanted more for pvp, which will change as the new gear comes in.

For a human is the Torch of the Damned such a significant upgrade that it's worth the crap I'll get from the dps warrior that I got the Cat's Edge when he wasn't there and now I'm not even going to use it? On the spreadsheet it's showing a 5 dps upgrade to the torch, but I guess you could say I don't understand the sheet enough to know if changing my gear as you advise will increase or decrease that number.

Also I've been farming H MrT for the Shard with no luck yet but it is a clear upgrade over romulo's (which is a placeholder due to lack of options). Also I read the shard + the belt + one of the other 2 new T6 pieces for the expertise is almost required for Sunwell. But what is my best option to replace the bloodlust brooch? The beserker's call is obviously the direct upgrade choice, but are there other options I should consider that would provide a greater benefit? I don't raid SSC anymore so the Tsunami is out and I've never had the privilege of seeing a DST drop. I've looked at the Crusader card, and it seems like it's becoming less beneficial (am I wrong)? Also I'm going to start rotating in fel mana pots (as I saw you guys suggest) so the added spell dmg from Crusader becomes even less useful. (amirite?)

I will try to get a WWS after raid soon so we can see where the numbers I'm pulling are failing the gear level I'm at. I'm positive I haven't learned to maximize my rotation yet, and with Omen in the state it's in it will be even harder with the potential of pulling aggro.

Also as a random question, is there any Dr. Boom equivalent for a melee to guage their dps? If not, what end-game boss fight is the best judge for average dps?

Thanks guys in advance for any advice you can offer me.

My armory

Thanks for checking that Fiola, its good to know they still haven't changed it.

Now the question arises as to which rank gives you the best damage/mana ratio. Assuming that every rank gets 208 damage from JotC and you have all the normal percentage modifiers (Sanctity Aura, Improved Sanctity Aura, Crusade, Vengeance, Misery) it would look something like this.

Rank I

Damage: 380
Mana Cost: 120
Damage/Mana: 3.17

Rank II

Damage: 458
Mana Cost: 205
Damage/Mana: 2.23

Rank III

Damage: 558
Mana Cost: 290
Damage/Mana: 1.92

Rank IV

Damage: 681
Mana Cost: 390
Damage/Mana: 1.75

Rank V

Damage: 826
Mana Cost: 505
Damage/Mana: 1.64

Rank VI

Damage: 1005
Mana Cost: 660
Damage/Mana: 1.52

Clearly because the lower ranks get full damage from JotC they are much more efficient than the higher ranks. What I find interesting is that you get half of the damage/mana efficiency between Rank I and Rank VI, yet you only lose a little more than a tenth of one between Rank VI and Rank V. What this would mean is that if you're going to uprank Consecration and your mana supply can handle it you should be as close to Rank VI as possible.

I've been slacking on my heroic farming so I'm only about halfway to exalted, but when I get there I'll pick one up and check it out (yeah, I went Scryers way back when I was young and impressionable).

I seem to be full of questions today, and since I'm really pushing my guild to accept me as Ret, I want to make sure I'm armed to the teeth. I'm fully PvE focused, and have yet to step into a BG.

I'm not sure this has been asked before, but other than the rotation noted on page 1 and using the abilities as soon as they are off cooldown, do we need to pay attention to a specific rotation or timing sequence to maximize our DPS (I'm thinking of the necessity of a MS warrior having to perfect swing timing to get better DPS)? I have somewhere close to 2K unbuffed AP, and we are just now breaking into T6 (Armory is current with gear/spec). Yes I need some upgrades, but I've just switched from Holy as a "declared" spec, so my armour should get better quickly.

As a Blood elf, I didn't even take SoCommand as SoBlood works better and allows me to focus on Melee damage, but should I start focusing on Expertise and/or Haste (don't mean to start a holy war)? or get my unbuffed crit to 30% first?

As a side note, I was able to compare to a MS warrior in our guild who is well accepted in raids, so I'm hoping our healers will stop slacking and let me actually RAID as Ret.

Thanks in advance.

I just use max rank...never even really thought to downrank cause its a fairly long cooldown.

Also, on Brutallus, I usually drop a fel mana potion towards the beginning (after my first AW, because I usually drop 1-2 max rank consecrations), and then drop haste potions for the rest of the fight on cooldown.

In terms of rotation, I just use a "priority list" of sorts. I CS on cooldown, judge gets next global priority, then exorcism (where applicable), then R1 consecration. Keep in mind a lot of your utility is keeping judgements up... if they fall off you fail (or the boss fight sucks, IE Kalecgos).

Regarding the stats, I'd suggest you try our the Rawr beta or spreadsheets, because there are a lot of factors to take into account. Looking at my level of gear, I've reached a point where Expertise + Haste are better than pretty much anything else. However, a decent crit rate is very important to get Vengeance stacked quickly and keep it up... but I'd say 25% is all you NEED.

How is [Insane Strength Potion] comparing to [Haste Potion] for alliance retri paladins? As its 319 attack power with Kings, divine strengh and unleashed rage.

Nothing like instagibbing yourself on Prince when enfeeble hits. Twice in two weeks, I've managed to forget to switch.

I would argue that the damage done to you by SoB during RoS is so small that it shouldn't be any concern, especially since you should already have some sort of dedicated melee healer. (chain heal/CoH) JoL is usually enough to cover the damage SoB does, and really isn't a concern.

What other fights in BT can you not afford the tiny amount of damage done by SoB? The Prince fight in Kara is the only fight where using SoB really can have disastrous results.

While SoC is good to have if you occassionally pvp/farm/do Prince, you can do without it otherwise. I never use SoC in BT/Hyjal

This was discussed a few pages back. Haste pots add more damage.

I definitely use SoB for all of Reliquary... don't know what you're talking about. If you plan on doing lots of kara though, you REALLY can't use SoB For prince... that's about it though.