My god I hope I don't have to weave SotC in for every CS and switch back to Blood for white hits and judgements. Not that it would be overly manageable, but just knowing it was there would make me want to.

SotC has always been a mystery to me. It's just such a completely useless gimmick Seal that likes to contradict itself a lot:

"Here, have a Seal that gives you more AP while active!"

"Cool, so it makes me hit harder?"

"Nah, another feature of it is that it makes you hit for less damage."

"So wait, why did you make it give more AP again?"

"..."

I think it's pretty funny that it still exists in our spellbook despite this nonsense, with 7 ranks of it no less.

That's only one of its oddities, the other of course being that the Seal segment of it serves no purpose: From a damage perspective, you could say it's a Seal that does "nothing". You hit faster, but you hit for less, so you gain nothing really. (Nothing that would register as a tangible dps increase in any case. Going to re-examine this claim later.)


Now regarding the "buffs" in the patch notes, I'm equally uncertain as to why they're there and whether they might be vague and mean something else than what is written there (JotC buffs).

Looking at the patch notes:

* 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.

I think the first line is a bugfix/buff to it reducing CS damage by 20% previously, though no one can understand why exactly they thought that was a needed fix as the Seal is worthless and no one in their right mind uses it. "No one cares".

The second line however, I highly suspect they mean JotC not SotC and that's just a typo/being vague. Reason for this is that while CS used to be weapon damage + 40% of spelldamage, JotC did give it a slight boost, where as now it doesn't since the new CS doesn't make use of those 219 spelldamage anymore.

So I'm assuming it means "CS will do a bit more damage on mobs with JotC now, basically the same amount 219 spelldamage gave to the old CS", which would be nice, but not earth shattering.


Well, looking at some WWS logs, my damage breakdown is roughly 50% white, 20% CS, 20% (SoC + JoC), 10% (Consecration + Exorcism + left over fractions).

A 40% damage increase to CS would therefore roughly be an 8% damage increase overall, which is incredible.

Now whether it's weave-able, I have the same gut feeling: No.

In addition to GCD hell every 6 seconds you want to use CS, you'd get a horrible number of collisions between times where you want SoC to be up due to an incoming swing and times where CS is ready where you want SotC to be up, which will force you to lose either a significant amount of SoC procs or significantly delay your CS. Both of these are disaster scenarios and should definitely outweigh the buff to CS from weaving.

That aside, it would be mana consumption suicide to say the least, you'd be Seal changing every couple of seconds, without even making use of Judgement most of the time (and losing the 80% mana you'd get back from Sanctified Seals).




Now here's the real question: Despite what I've said earlier about SotC being a Seal that does "nothing" damage wise, could this make SotC viable as a DPS seal on it's own with more changes?

Assuming SotC does "nothing" to your DPS, with this 40% CS buff you'd be doing roughly 12% less damage than with SoC/JoC (20% - 8%).

Open questions:

-Does SotC really do nothing to our dps? How minute is the increase?

-How does a lot of haste gear play into this?


Anyway, I don't think it's going to turn out to be anything worthwhile, but it's worth investigating in light of those patch notes.

I'm sure somewhere, someone at Blizzard knows there's a horrible faction Seal imbalance and that SotC is a pretty useles Seal atm. Maybe, someone is attempting to put two and two together.

The net effect of SotC as it stands is simply the bonus 494 AP. The haste bonus and damage decrease are set up to cancel each other out, then AP is added on afterwards.

Since SotC is a straight % increase to haste, it stacks multiplicately with haste rating. No matter your haste rating, you will swing 40% more times with SotC up than without.

Don't quote me on this, but I believe SOTC is a 474 AP, or a 33.85 DPS increase from plain autoattacks with no Seal.

That is, we attack 40% faster, but our weapon damage is also proportionally decreased. That alone would be a null DPS difference, except SOTC also increases our AP by 474.

If SOC+JOC is 20% of our damage, and CS getting 40% more damage from SOTC is 8%, then SOTC's contribution to would have to make up for the remaining 12%.

Dividing 33.85 DPS by 12%, I got 282.08 DPS, although I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Maybe someone with more math skills could uncover how much damage SOTC needs to deal to put it in the same ballpark as SOC (never mind SOB).

494AP and 40% more WF procs, which again should hit for less than normal, though have those 494 AP on them.

Probably not enough to make those 12% I guess, this is just food for thought at the moment (and/or trying to make sense of that which makes no sense), if there's intention to do further tweaking to this currently useless Seal.


Assuming 12% of 2k DPS, SotC would need to give a DPS boost of 240 DPS over pure auto-attack (through increased WF procs and the increased AP), which doesn't sound likely in its current state.


This is of course, very coarse napkin math and it's obvious this very much depends on whichever DPS you want to go off.

so this is my first post on the EJ forums, long time lurker so to say :P

anyways, I've been ret since around 2.3 and my guild has gone from just starting t5 to stepping into t6 content. currently my stats are:
The World of Warcraft Armory

2070 unbuffed ap
97 hit (armory says 89 but I put in a 8 hit gem and it just hasn't updated)
31% crit

I generally run about 900-1k dps per fight and rank among top 5 dps. I feel that I'm doing decent dps for my gear level but I am curious what things I can do to better my damage output, getting different gems etc. I'm currently running H BF every darn day for that libram but it refuses to drop.
My DPS cycle goes like this:

Fight start.
Judge SotC
SoB
CS
CS
Judge SoB
SoB
CS

etc

I use AW and trinket whenever threat permits.

if there is anything else I can do to squeeze out more dps please let me know

In their Known Bugs/Issues list, they had a line saying
'CS does less damage when SotC is active' (Not the exact wording)

So I should think they did mean SotC and not JotC. Here's my interpretation of this whole mess :

- SotC gives you an attack speed increase. To 'counter it'(for whatever reason) your damage done is decreased proportionally.
- SotC gives you bonus attack power so that overall having the seal active is a DPS increase.
- We didn't have instants when the SotC mechanics was implemented so they did this as 'Just reduce all physical damage done by X% to counter the speed increase'. Later CS was added, and so CS did less damage when SotC was active.
- Someone figured this out, and since Attack Speed increase didn't affect CS, they thought the Damage Decrease shouldn't affect CS as well, so labeled this as a bug. This bugfix is the 2nd line in those patch notes you quoted
'* Crusader Strike (Retribution) will now properly receive a damage increase from Seal of The Crusader.'
- While they were changing SotC for this, since nobody ever uses this seal, they wanted to buff it and made it give CS 40% higher damage.

Some more over-estimated math for sotc:

474 ap + unleashed rage -> 521 ap -> 37 dps

40% crit -> 52 dps
2h weapon, crusade, imp sa, vengeance -> 66 dps
50% extra white because of haste, heroisms and wf-> 99 dps

Unless I missed a lot of stuff that's a generous 100 dps before armor reduction.

Edit: Figured it out. Theras' post explained exactly what I was missing. Also, thanks Anarkii for explaining it a bit better.

So, now that I have that figured out, there's a couple things I want to ask you raiding Alliance Retribution Paladins since you're forced to use Seal of Command exclusively,

Avitus mentioned that the possibility of weaving the two seals would pretty much be a mana dump, and my first reaction is to completely agree since having to recast Command/Blood can get pretty pricey if you had to do it an additional time between each Judgement cooldown.

My questions are these:

1) Do you actually downrank Seal of Command in a high end raid anymore?

2) Does the 40% Crusader Strike bonus on the PTR apply to Rank 1 Seal of the Crusader? I need to copy to the PTR before I can check myself.

3) If the answer to #2 is "Yes", how low would you have to downrank Seal of Command to get the same mana consumption rate by weaving Seal of Command and Rank 1 Seal of the Crusader as you would just using Rank 6 Seal of Command?

I'll make the following best case scenario assumptions:

1. Seal of the Crusader's 40% attack speed increase is perfectly canceled out by its weapon damage decrease. So it divides your both weapon speed and normal weapon damage by 1.4.
   
   
2. Seal of the Crusader's attack power boost is added after the above two stats are calculated, giving you a 494 / 14 * (modified weapon speed) damage increase per attack.
   
   
3. Seal of the Crusader's weapon damage decrease does not affect Crusader Strike damage.
   
   
4. Seal of the Crusader's attack power boost does affect Crusader Strike damage.
   
   
5. Seal of the Crusader will increase Crusader Strike's damage by an additional 40%.

Even assuming all that, it still gets wrecked by Seal of Command at all levels of gear (100 to 150 DPS deficit; ~75 of which is the loss of Judgement). Unless there's some crazy voodoo math going on here on the PTR, our original gut reaction was correct: this change is pretty worthless.

I went ahead and bolded the correct part of your statement there.

You're falling into the common pitfall of calculating haste backwards. For example, if you had 100% haste it means that your weapon speed is cut in half (i.e. at 0.8s swing time you get 100% more swings than at 1.6s swing time). The way you're attempting to calculate it, 100% haste means that your weapon speed becomes 0.00 and the server explodes. Fortunately for the servers, it doesn't work that way.

The tooltip is wrong. It's 40% haste, not 40% faster attack speed. They are different.
Hasted Speed = Weapon Speed/(1+Haste/100)

So for your 1.6 mace, Hasted Speed = 1.6/(1+40/100)=1.14

You get 40% more attacks in for the same time period. Haste, faster attack speed ... They could call it attack frequency incrementation for all I care.


EDIT:
As for the remainder of this SotC discussion, remember this is supposed to be a bug fix. You guys need to calm down. Wait to see how it works on the PTR before getting into some deep analysis, if you really think Blizzard is going to buff it in that way.

Don't think anyone is expecting any sort of buffs really, but every now and then you see patch notes indicating something so ridiculously useless had some major work done on (wasted on) it, that it makes you question your reasoning/understanding of what's going on (and/or sanity).

Yea, carry on I guess.

Well, I'm up late and can't sleep at all, so let's go ahead and hash this out. For reference I'm using a Rawr character template that I've attached at the bottom of the post. Take a look if you're interested.

From a quick gander at the GCD's that would be invoked by Seal twisting for each Crusader Strike, we're going to have to build a new cycle that revolves around maximizing Crusader Strike damage and Seal of Command uptime. We'll assume that we start with Seal of the Crusader active.

0.0 - Crusader Strike
1.5 - Seal of Command
4.5 - Judgement of Command & Seal of the Crusader
6.0 - Crusader Strike
7.5 - Seal of Command
10.5 - Seal of the Crusader
12.0 - Crusader Strike
13.5 - Seal of Command
16.5 - Judgement of Command & Seal of the Crusader
18.0 - Crusader Strike
19.5 - Seal of Command
22.5 - Seal of the Crusader
24.0 - Crusader Strike

So after the first few seconds are over, you fall into a 12 second cycle of: Crusader Strike -> Seal of Command -> Seal of the Crusader -> Crusader Strike -> Seal of Command -> Judgement of Command & Seal of the Crusader -> Loop. Points in Improved Judgement would be a clear waste in this kind of cycle, since you're Judging every 12 seconds; Libram of Divine Judgement's effective AP drops to 66.67 as a result. Judgement DPS drops to 59.07.

While under the effects of Seal of Command you get the following DPS breakdown:

Seal - 323.36
White - 701.53
Windfury - 153.13
Crusader Strike - N/A (we only CS when SotC is active)

While under the effects of Seal of the Crusader you get the following DPS breakdown:

Seal - 0.00
White - 765.45
Windfury - 165.94
Crusader Strike - 613.25

It would be ludicrous to also attempt this kind of cycle synchronized with your swing timers, so I am going to assume a 50% Seal of Command uptime and a 50% Seal of the Crusader uptime. Stats will look like this:

Seal - (323.36 + 0) / 2 = 161.68
White - (701.53 + 765.45) / 2 = 733.49
Windfury - (153.13 + 165.94) / 2 = 159.54
Crusader Strike - 613.25
Judgement - 59.07

Total - 1727.03 DPS

That's a pretty marked increase over the 1666.10 DPS that you get from Seal of Command alone. Now, however, we need to take a look at the mana cost:

Crusader Strike -> Seal of Command -> Seal of the Crusader -> Crusader Strike -> Seal of Command -> Judgement of Command & Seal of the Crusader
236 -> 280 -> 210 -> 236 -> 280 -> -77 (thx Sanctified Judgement!) & 210

So we're looking at a total mana cost of 1375, or 144.58 mana per second. By comparison, a standard 18 second Command and Judgement rotation costs 61.89 mana per second. If you twist in Rank 4 Consecration, the basic cycle increases to 105.22 mana per second and increases to 1764.57 DPS. Whoops.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this?

If you have unlimited mana - and I mean truly unlimited - you could gain DPS by twisting Seal of the Crusader to be active when you Crusader Strike. However, it comes at a significantly higher mana cost and level of precision, and significantly lower gain than simply punching Rank 4 Consecration when you are free of the GCD.

I'd say that qualifies as pretty worthless in just about every raid situation I can think of right now. That and I'm pretty sure it's just a bug fix. But that was a fun mental exercise.

Right now, it helps quite a bit in training weapon skill (When was the last time you have used polearm? Blackhand''s Doomsaw from UBRS?). Still, I don't think designers had it in mind...

EDIT: As a sidenote, I wonder if Blizzard does something about SotC (paladin) in WotLK. I remember old theorycrafting discussions at the start of TBC, when SoB was considered by many completly useless and in general, worse then SoC (some people even considered it tanking seal for warrior geared people) - and only gear progression and new stats resulted in SoB gaining upper hand. I wonder what could be a niche for SotC (if buffed)... armor penetration builds? Some debuff proccing damage (so haste effect would help here)? Food for thought.

Ohh my...remembred it as something that could be improved upon (pre TBC main was a rogue) but even that was memory was vague.

thanks alot for the quick response!

Why? Rank 1 SotC would have virtually no attack power on it.

I am fairly sure that 521 ap is not 37dps in reality.

Different Matter - is there any solid material on the personal/raid dps gain/loss regarding melee group compositions? Reason for this is that I am having a bit of a discussion with my Raid on that topic. Currently our melee group most of the time is 2xRogue, Warrior, Feral-Druid, Enhancement Shaman. Poor little Ret-Pally (me) usually gets pushed off into the Tank Group, where ocassionally there is a second Def-Warrior keeping up Battleshout and ocassionally a BM Hunter.

I usually manage to keep my personal dps on par with the feral druid, using sharpening stones and all other crap So maybe any of you can give me some advice, is this really optimal? Would for example switching Ret-Pally/Druid be better? If I am not misstaken, Druids have much less to gain from Windfury/Shamanistic Rage than Ret.

Some things to consider:
- Feral brings 5% Crit to the melee group, while Ret only brings 2% more damage. Unfortunately our Raid Leader is one of the Rogues who needs his 5% Crit
- My gear is so/so - I have a Cataclysms Edge but still some S1-Pieces too, but it is on the same level the rest of the raid has, probably better than the Ferals Cat gear.

So, things I really would like to know, who is the optimal person to push out in a 6-Melee Situation? Ret, Feral or even Rogue? Does any of you have solid experience there, or even hard numbers? I think I remember having seen some discussion like that, but I am unable to find it

This is surely just a fix to correct the fact that CS deals much less damage when you have SoTC up, because SoTC reduces your weapon damage. 40% more damage would make CS the same or very slightly more damage than using CS without the seal up. Any extremely small benefit gained by weaving it would surely not be worth the mana cost and the tediousness of doing so.

I wouldn't read anything more into these patch notes than that.

Speaking purely anecdotally, it would be my assumption that having the Ret Paladin in the melee group would be better.

This might not be the case, but regardless, having a Ret Paladin in a tank group without Windfury seems like an absurd waste of a raid slot. The raid would benefit more from having pretty much any other DPS class instead.

Teron is nothing but RNG tho, I did 2229 dps on teron a few weeks ago (Wow Web Stats)