i see a lot of Alliance Pallies using DST these days, however Rawr says it shouldn't even be close to Darkmoon Card....whats the dealio?

What gear are you basing this on?

Given my current gear there's a 3 - 10 DPS increase (depending on Consecration rank) in going from DST to Darkmoon Card.

Given end of Sunwell gear, there's 0 - 7 DPS difference (Consec1 - Consec6), between the two trinkets.

That's hardly "not even coming close" as you put it


Anyway, the reason for this is you make back the negligible difference and actually gain a fair chunk of extra DPS by using Fel Mana Potions and upranking Consecration. This would not work using the Darkmoon Card, since Fel Mana Potions would eat into the spelldamage benefit that card gives you, rendering it much worse.

Basically the logic goes:

DST + Fel Mana Potion + upranking Consecration > Darkmoon Card + Super Mana Potion + lower rank/lower uptime of Consecration

Haste potions are yet another variable, which I'll post about in the new thread

Zurm will likely take up the development of Rawr.Retribution. He's a C# developer and has been wanting to help for a while. I've canceled my WoW sub due to various reasons and am moving to Age of Conan. I'll forward any pending requests I had to Zurm.
Thanks everyone for firstly making Retribution a respected spec and also your support for Rawr.

Sad day. =(

Sad to see you leave, thanks for the work you have done And do pop in if you decide to come back.

Have fun on AoC Anarkii (and see you there eventually)! Thanks for the work done anyway, it's a great tool you brought to us.

Hey everyone, I am a long time reader, first time poster.

I would first like to start by thanking everyone who has posted in this thread for helping to make retribution a viable raiding spec for more people. I have followed this thread for manys months now and am always picking up new bits of information.

With that being said, I would like to pose a question about aggro management to all of you.

It's no secret that I have a problem with threat. I come dangerously close to pulling off of our main tank and unfortunatly I have no active way of reducing aggro that doesn't result in a minor side effect of death. With salvation and talents I have 60% threat reduction, but this doesn't seem to help me very much and I'm afraid that as my gear gets better, my aggro problems will be getting worse. Someone in the raid gave me some shrouding potions but I fear that using those may prevent me from using a mana pot when I need it.

So I have a couple question for you all to help manage my aggro.

I usually wait til our tank has ~10-15k threat before I start attacking. Should I wait longer?

I use my special abilities every time they are off cooldown. Should I give them a few more seconds before I use them?

I blow all my cooldowns and trinkets at the same time to get the most benefit out of them. I.E. I have a macro that uses avenging wrath and pops my bloodlust brooch trinket at the same time. I also usually wait until heroism is up to get the most bang for my buck. Should I be spacing them out more?

Do you have any general tips for aggro management that I might not be aware of?

Any input you could give would be greatly appreciated. Here is an armory link for anyone interested The World of Warcraft Armory. Any criticism on gear choice would also be appreciated as long as it remains constructive.

You are doing nothing wrong from what you described... but your tank probably is. What kind of threat per second is your tank putting out? I know our tanks do 1.2k TPS easily, and I'm willing to be yours will be around the 600-800 TPS range.

Make sure your tank and you have the latest version of whatever threat meter you are using. Outdated versions of Omen or whatever had pally threat more than it should be.

Honestly I don't think a paladin is capable of pulling threat if a tank has 10k+ agro before you start attacking. We have a lot of burst DPS which could result in pulling agro if we don't wait for tanks to establish threat on a target. But our TPS will never reach that of a pure DPS class.

Just as an experiment, don't look at the threat meter and try to pull agro; I'm fairly sure that you wont. I say, go balls deep on DPS after 10k tank threat. If you pull agro with salvation and Fanaticism, then something is bugged. Pure DPS classes will out-threat the tank before you will.

Take this as a rule set in stone:

With the exception of the first 30 seconds of lucky bursts, a ret paladin should "never" pull aggro on a fight that doesn't have aggro dumps (Bloodboil), assuming of course Fanaticism 5/5 and BoS.

If you do, your tanks are messing up.

I was baseing it off the gear setup im aiming for at the moment, which does not include Sunwell boss gear sadly (though i hope it will soon =) so its a "best of the best" outside of sunwell. Rawr rates Darkmoon card at 39.01 and DST at 22.65, below even Zerks call...which is why i said it that way.

I would guess Rawr doesnt really factor in your thoughts on Fel mana vs Super man for higher ranked concecration up time so that does make sense, but if the spell damage from the trinket is valuable, wouldnt a fel mana potion be eating at that point into the damage of your concecrate? Or would a typically complete lack of any spell damage on our gear mean it does nothing, im no castar so i dunno.

So i went through and selected the best of everything in Rawr, Apolyn, Leather Sunwell stuff, all that, so according to it there are no longer any upgrades available anywhere.

darkmoon card 59.97
DST 48.55

So it seems Rawr is either wrong, or it believes Darkmoon card scales the same as DST. And at this lvl of gear scaling is no longer an issue.

(updated numbers to include Debuffs/buffs that werent enabled before)
Rawr also makes no change in item value from Concecrate Rank 4 to Rank 6, which seems odd. Though it does if you downrank all the way to Rank 1, but i can easilly keep Rank 4 going through out most fights, not to mention the spell damage will help out Exorcism and judgement damage.

Thank you to everyone who replied so quickly!

I do infact have a (relatively) old version of Omen. I never thought that it could be reporting my threat wrong and I will update it to the newest version before our next raid. I always figured something was wierd since 5/5 fanaticism and BoSalv would mean that I'd have to put out roughly 2500 dps in order to pull off of our tanks (assuming the threat reductions are additive).

I will also take your advice and go balls out once the tank has a 10k threat head start and see what happens.

Ranks 4-6 of Consecration all have the same spell damage coefficient (roughly 95% over 8 tics) so you wouldn't see any damage change.

The 120 Spell Damage will increase your max rank Exorcism and Judgement damage by about 50 and the damage of your rank 4-6 Consecration by about 14 per tic. Compare this to Fel Mana Pots allowing you to use continual higher ranks of Consecration through the entire fight and chances are you'll see a higher DPS (Avitus had a post running the exact numbers a few pages ago).

Difference ~17 dps.

Difference ~11 dps.


??


Edit: Also what "best of best" items did you select? My plate only selection gives me ~2122.36 DPS using SoC, Exorcism and Conc6 at 7700 armor level 73 mob, 10 min fight and I'm not even selecting all possible buffs/debuffs, just what normally applies to me. With DST it gives 2115.41 DPS. Result: <7 dps difference.

Threat reduction abilities are multiplicative. Meaning if you have 5/5 Fantatcism (or Spirit Weapons for me), you do .7x threat. With Blessing of Salvation you would also do .7x threat. .7*.7=.49, or a 51% threat reduction since you're now doing 49% of your original threat. If you really have issues with threat, you could always ask your Enh shaman to twist TA on certain fights that would potentially shoot you up retardedly fast. If you had all 3, you would be at 39% of your original threat, or a 61% reduction.

They changed this a while back to stop people from getting 100% threat reduction.

Ok so I'm almost fully setup to pick up Rawr.Retribution's development... if anyone has any updates/changes they would like to see in B14, now's the time. Here's what I'm planning to work on now:

*Add an option for multiple bloodlusts
*Add an option for multiple drums of battle
*Modify either the AP bonus or hunter's agility for Expose Weakness

I know there's been a lot of discussion regarding SoC mechanics, any updates needed there?

Has Anarkii forwarded the list to you with buffs/debuffs etc I had PMed him?

not yet, can't hurt to send it to me either way.

I noticed the Ashtongue Talisman of Zeal doesn't show any dps value in RAWR. Is this something that just hasn't been updated yet? I wanted to compare it to the other trinkets I have since I am getting this someday.

I could model it if you REALLY want, but it's pretty terrible. There are much better options out there, like [Hourglass of the Unraveller] or [Bloodlust Brooch].

Really… hmmm I must be missing something. I thought this trinket added around 35dps putting it up there with the rest of the trinkets like Darkmoon Crusade card, etc.