Yea, expertise is amazing. I only have shard and the T6 wrists, and I've noticed a HUGE dps boost, as well as a lot fewer CS dodges (meaning its easier to keep up on bosses where I run around a lot).

Hey guys,

I'm trying to improve rotation..

Latest VR kill

(I know how to improve my toon gear wise (expertise, pvp gloves, etc) and I didn't feel like flasking or food/scroll buffing for just VR, and I forgot to switch back to SOC rank 6) - BUT that's all configured correctly in the spreadsheet, so it's my rotation that is really killing me I guess

According to the spreadsheet my DPS should have been 1224, but I was at 971
Wow Web Stats

Now it says I was DPSing 337 seconds, so I could have done 56 crusader strikes vs the 33 it says I did.. but if I paste the log into excel and only look at crusader strikes, they are 90% of the time done done within 7 seconds of each other (6 + some fraction of a second), and I only lost 32 seconds total on the entire fight

by the same 337 seconds it says it means I should have 93 auto-attacks, but I only had 78 - and that should be dead on since VR didn't move out of my range on that fight (why the discrepancy??)

my judgement is low because since I forgot to swap out rank 6, and my mod locks action bars during combat I tried to priortize consecration over it

It's just 253 DPS difference from spreadsheet and wws (especially when I'm specifying rank 1 SOC, my buffs, debuffs, etc - and on a fight I could just make a macro for 100% of the time) it seems like I'm way off and doing something wrong

how else can I analyze my fight to improve what I'm doing within the confines of my buffs/debuffs (even if I don't use judgement at all, and drop down to rank 1 cons spreadsheet shows me at 1079 DPS vs my 971)

thx!

I'm not trying to be rude when I say this, but a lot of people who come here have no idea how to read WWS reports.

The "hits" on your ability category are not your total amount of attacks. They are simply the sum of your normal hits and your glancing blows. The "hits" do not count critical strikes. To figure out how many times you actually hit the boss you have to manually add the crits and the hits.

NOT Total hits!!!

+ = Total Hits!!!

Add your hits and crits and misses and you have your actual number of swings.

You actually had 124 autoattacks and 51 CS's, which is well within acceptable margins.

As for why your DPS is low: Void Reaver has close to 11000 armor before debuffs. The spreadsheet is set to something like 8600 armor. The rest of it was most likely just bad luck with RNG.

I have been unable to find enchantment suggestions on this thread since I've begun to follow it dozens of pages ago; if I overlooked the solution to this, please forgive me....

I'm a raiding Retribution Paladin, Elzam on Akama-US if you need to look me up, but currently I am in a prime position; I am the only Retribution Paladin in the guild, I am the Melee DPS Officer, and I've crammed enough theorycraft down raid leader throats that I'm never without Windfury at least (lately it's been MS War / Ret / Enhance / Rogue / Rogue).

Anyways, with that group composition in mind, my DPS is skyrocketing lately as I'm making some minor adjustments to my gear and trying out new combinations (I'm personally liking the SSO Neck over Pendant of Perilous at the moment, for example, although I haven't pumped out the hard numbers to check). This is good, although it's not new as I've always been able to squeak out in at least the top six in nearly every boss kill.

However, I'm running into major threat problems. In not only sensitive fights like Gurtogg Bloodboil with its multiple tanks, but also in fights such as basically any in Hyjal (I almost pulled once on Archimonde even; I was in the zone when it came to avoiding Doomfires and keeping DPS up :P). I'm always salv'ed and even in a low number of Paladin group I'm always at least putting single Salv on myself. Everyone else has Greater Salv typically. I am not suggesting that there is a difference between the two blessings other than their durations, but I am finding that my Enhancement friend is continously pushing more DPS out than I am (usually around 40-60k more on average) but never nipping at the MT's heels.

So, TLDR and all that, is there any hard math that would suggest that Subtlety would be a major impact? I'm sure that even if it allows 2-3k more damage that's more damage than I was doing beforehand, but is that the limit of its influence over threat? I'm feeling pinned by the threat monster and classes with threat dumps are obviously beginning to have an easier time passing me.

Is subtlety the only true option at this point, or am I going to have to consider yelling at the MT for more threat?

I'll quickly sum it up for you Elzam, but for future reference you should use the search function on these boards, we covered this at least 2 times in this thread.

In general, mongoose > savagery = executioner > anything else. Executioner can be best in very specific situations, and requires a good deal of personal armor penetration.

For non weapons, go by the general rule of str > crit > other stuff. If you have threat issues as a ret paladin, barring the occasional rediculous early burst (lots of WF's and crits), then the issue isn't you... it's your tank. I am never close to capped on threat on anything except for Gurtogg Bloodboil, the only people who SOMETIMES are would be the warlocks and rogues. Unless I'm missing something, you might want to forward your tank to their appropriate classes' tanking thread.

I believe he was talking about Subtlety enchant to cloak, Zurm, not weapon enchants.

Between Salv and Fanatisism you have a 51% reduced threat.

With the Sub cloak enchant you're looking at a whopping 51.98% threat reduction.

No, its not worth it. Your tanks are either having major problems or you seriously outgear everyone (and how on earth are your destro locks not pulling like crazy?).

They are. Our tanks have never been holding our DPS back before as our MT has always been applauded as having excellent TPS, but I'm beginning to think that perhaps she's holding back a bit lately or becoming too comfortable. I know that at least 2 of our Destro Locks usually have time to climb up to her threat, Shatter, and then be back up there keeping me company.

I'll stick with my +12 Agi then and try to find ways to help the tank's TPS. Granted, it came to me after the post that lately we've only had one Enhance and they've been in the melee group with the tank not getting any; this is after a period during Kael-Vashj where we would sometimes have three excellent Enhancement Shamans in the raid at a time.

Our tanks rarely get a shaman, they shouldn't need it to hold aggro. Once again, get your tanks to step it up

Why do you think that math proves Subtlety is useless?

Salvation lets you deal 43% more damage per threat. (1/0.7)
Fantacism lets you deal 43% more damage per threat. (1/0.7)
Subtlety lets you deal 2~% more damage per threat. (1/0.98)


They all stack multiplicatively (1 / (0.7 * 0.7 * 0.98) = 208% more damage per threat), so there's no diminishing returns or anything here. *IF* you're threat capped, then Subtlety is 2% more damage. That's a lot more than the DPS bonus of 12 agi (0.5~% crit. which is not quite +0.5% DPS).

The tanks might have sucky threat generation, but we don't have much control over that - if someone needs more threat reduction to do more damage safely, then Subtlety is the logical choice.

I'm glad to have spurred such thought, but...

I fixed it, sorry. I mapped out the damage dealt by my Fury Warrior as well as the threat Omen was displaying for him which was correct in its reduction for Imp Zerker Stance and other modifiers, and then did so for Elzam. It was displaying Elzam's threat as 100% of his damage without Salv up, and with Salv up was only displaying a 30% threat reduction instead of the 50-51% that it should be.

It turns out that a couple weeks ago Omen had an issue with not registering reduced threat from Fanatacism and I am a very lazy person when it comes to updating my mods; I figured as long as Omen was displaying threat it was working; turns out it wasn't. Updated it, charted the numbers, and it's displaying the proper threat reduction now.

Sometimes it's the simplest solutions... no subtlety for me. ^_^

You're relying on an absolutely massive IF here. With 51% of your threat being washed away you should almost never be in that "if" situation if you have halfway decent tanks. If somehow you're threat capped on a non-threat sensitive fight then I'm willing to bet 99 out of 100 times its a problem with the tank.

Lets say you have your normal awesome tank with windfury, Mr. Tank 1, putting out 1500 TPS. In order to match his TPS I'll have to be pulling almost 3000 DPS with just salv and talents. I'll never get there, so it isn't an issue and Sub is completely worthless.

Lets say you have a bad tank, Mr. Tank 2 and he is only pushing 850 TPS. Even without Sub, I'll still have to be breaking 1700 DPS to match him. Yes, I might be able to get to 1700 DPS and sub wouldn't be worthless because it would allow me to push a little harder, but that isn't the problem. If I'm able to get up to 1700 DPS and the MT is only putting out 850 TPS there is a problem with the tank, not me. 1700 DPS is high end BT gear, and tanks should be putting out at least 1200-1300 in that kind of gear. If your tanks suck at generating threat you get them to fix their rotations, just like a crappy DPS player has to fix his.

In short, if you have a tank who knows how to press buttons in order you should never need sub, which makes it worthless.

I'm starting to be at my wits end here; is there any way to get someone to even acknowledge the existence of the Seal of Blood imbalance? It's so massive, and the fact that no one official seems to even notice the existence of the problem really really bothers me.

It doesn't help that I get to watch opposite faction paladins reroll ret on a whim and use a terrible cycle to beat my perfect-cycle damage, in inferior gear.

That doesn't really say anything useful. Best in slot can mean so many things for tanking.

Specifically, how much spelldamage does he have on his gear (how much "warrior tanking gear" is he using)? 4 set T6 bonus? What's his Mainhand? What trinkets/libram? Is he using wizard oil?

4-pc T6.

[Hammer of Judgement] [Ancient Aqir Artifact] [Darkmoon Card: Vengeance]

504 spell damage, doesn't use oil to tank.

The World of Warcraft Armory

What the devil is he putting on his weapon, then? Wizard Oil costs roughly 2 gold per hour, you'd be insane to be skipping it in a Shamanless group (and then only if Windfury is being dropped).

*pokes in to join the forums*

Recently (dinged about a month ago) rerolled to paladin and retri after looking over the patchnotes and gearchanges that occured with 2.3 and 2.4 and have been spending my time gearing up in what atleast i think is some sort of decent level. It has been ages since i played a melee DPS class before and found myself, after looking over WWS logs, wondering a bit about glancing hits, is there any way to bring the amount down or is it just bad luck? (for instance, our latest Anetheron kill: WWS). Spent the entire fight threatcapped (damn that sleep effect on tanks...) or i ought to have been able to push out a bit more DPS then i did in that attempt.

From the Debuff Knock-off thread, it was concluded that switching Rogues from Rupture to Eviscerate is a smaller DPS loss than switching from Deadly Poison to Instant Poison.

Then, if you still need to drop more debuffs, Rogues should switch from Deadly Poison to [Righteous Weapon Coating]. Switching to Instant Poison causes your Rogues to consume Stormstrike charges, which is a significant hit to raid DPS since those charges should be consumed by Elemental Shaman instead.

Other recommendations from the thread include avoiding having more than one Affliction Warlock, Destro Locks going Shadow (since Fire would require Immolates to power their Incinerates) and Enhancement Shaman use Earthshock instead of Flameshock (although it would have to be timed until after Stormstrike charges have been used to avoid raid DPS loss).

Your Locks may also use Curse of Shadow rank 2 and/or Curse of the Elements rank 3, which offer the same 10% damage increase while still using pre-BC debuff priority.

New from Patch Notes 2.4.2

* Seal of the Crusader: This ability now increases the damage dealt by Crusader Strike by 40%.
* Crusader Strike (Retribution) will now properly receive a damage increase from Seal of The Crusader.

Oh god... Are they really trying to actually make SotC worth using for something... Use this dev time to fix Seal of Command instead damn it, forget about Crusader.

Anyway, it is confirmed here. My toon should be transfered over tomorrow so I'll check it out then.

Two things to find out:
1) Is the 40% damage bonus in addition to the extra AP or does it replace it?
2) Does the additional 40% damage make seal weaving viable? (my gut says no)

SotC fixes, what horrible waste of time...

I'll re-iterate what has been said: No wizard oil?? Why the hell not (with no shammy)? It's 42 free spelldamage.

Still, spelldamage on his gear looks decent enough, should be able to keep aggro there without Sanctity. Brutallus hits very fast = Holy Shield threat galore. Anyway, lets not digress, since this is the ret thread after all.

Suffice it to say, there's definitely smarter (and less raid dps damaging) ways to buff protadin TPS than taking the ret paladin and losing a minimum 500 DPS in a fight where group stacking is the key. A BM hunter (3%) and/or a resto shammy would make much more sense and should be enough.


I've had fights with up to 38% glancing I kid you not. This is exactly where I draw the line between interesting/fun mechanic and an annoying one.

Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do against it (not anymore). You can get hit capped, you can get expertise capped, but glancing is always going to remain (normal should be 20-25% but can vary wildly).

Bad luck with glancing blows can easily lower your DPS by a couple hundred (up to ~300) if it's just one of those days. If I get unusually low results in a fight, glancing percentage and whether there were any parries is where I usually look first.

Welcome to RNG.

Not quite sure yet.

What it looks like is that it won't reduce the damage done by CS by 20% anymore (I would hope) and just give it a 40% increase right on top of it.

Though you now lose out on Judgement damage (unless you "twist" seals with CS rotation which will cause some GCD issues), SotC is mitigated by armor, and makes Sanctified Judgement, Benediction, Imp Judgement, Fanaticism (half of it) all but completely useless.

I am hoping it is actually supposed to be Judgement of the Crusader where it gives the 40% CS damage bonus...though that would be a gigantic DPS boost in PvE, and decent in PvP even.