Upon reaching the hit cap though the draenei bonus should be nullified pretty much, whilst expertise will always be helpful because there are no such items bonuses. Am I correct?

If nothing else, SoC is outstanding for soloing (for nice mana returns with Stun + JoC) and PvP.



On imp Ret Aura, I think the scaling is 7% SP, so about 63 damage added with 3000 AP. Adding another 1.5 to the damage sounds better than 11 mp5 from half of the Tier 1 talent.



Here is my Ret PvP build:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Paladin -> Talent Calculator

I didn't know what to do with the 3% haste vs more crit damage bonus, but in the end I thought buffing the group was better.

There are infact items with expertise rateing such as [Shard of Contempt] They are fairly rare but will become more prevelant in wrath, so through gear you will be able to cap out both hit and expertise. And yes, once they are capped, then the racial bonuses are nullified, however in gear selection you would do you best to make yourself capped after the racial bonus and get other stats instead.

Heck, in WotLK there will be enchants to add expertise.

As for live, most of the items with expertise are tanking items right now. Shard is one of very few dps items (THough I actually use it on my tank to be undodgeable with my threat set :P)

Mmm, I never read anything from Blizzard saying that expertise items will become more prevalent, but anyway...We'll see that.

Expertise is a brand new stat, practically. They've been steadily adding new items with expertise on them since the patch that implemented it.

Items - World of Warcraft

Or better yet

Items - World of Warcraft

Expertise replaced "Increases weapon skill by x." Which existed even before TBC.

Why would they NOT add more items with expertise? It wouldn't make any sense to make a new stat rating then not actually use it anywhere.

Well then they might as well change the Expertise racial bonus back to crit...That would be better in the long term.

There will be expertise gems: Profession - Jewelcrafting

Expertise is just another stat in Wotlk, a 2nd "hit cap" to work towards.

Assuming, of course, that every Ret paladin hits the +hit and expertise caps, and that the ideal gearing makes it more efficient to have a +crit racial than a +expertise one.


If it was changed back to 1% crit, at what gear levels would it beat out -1.25% dodge AND parry? At the very least, PvP and resilience guarantee that a significant population of humans would prefer to keep it as it is.

Given that Judgements of the Wise doesn't return any extra mana for "overkill" damage (it only restores based on how much actual HP was removed from the mob) it isn't quite important to get "teh big 21k lazerz". As always consistent sustained damage will reign supreme in all avenues of PvE.

As for PvP... I don't really like the arena system anyway.

Long time reader first time poster on these forums, New to Retribution Was Holy for quite some time then i saw the light. Been looking around but haven't been able to find any information reguarding a PvP hit cap. I know you need the 9% + Talent for End game raiding, but is the number lower for PvP or the same.

Thanks for any feedback.

The human weapon specialization racials were never a bonus to crit, it was a bonus to weapon skill and was changed to expertise when the stat was first introduced. The only reason they would change it to crit would be to make the racial ability weaker, which they may do at any time, but there wouldn't be any beneficial reason to switch it over to critical strike.

Now if they wanted to change it so that your critical strike chance is increased with spells and melee attacks when you have a sword or mace equipped... well that would change things.

I'm pretty sure what he was getting at was the fact that Ret is perfectly expertise capped with 3 piece SW Tier 6 and the Shard. The only way to work out some of that excess gear expertise is to replace one of the 3 T6 (Nothing compares to the right now even if the expertise is wasted) or the Shard, which has "too much" expertise to remove it (bringing you below the cap)

All in all, that's really just a unique problem to high end Ret because I think we're the only ones that hit that cap perfectly with 4 pieces of gear. Once there are more ways to work with expertise, the racials will start to shine possibly

Actually, it was bonus to crit on the PTR where our racial was changed, for about 1 week before finally being changed to expertise.

BTW... I consider Imp. Ret. Aura a must in any PvE ret spec for WoLK. Mainly because we have 6 ¨extra¨points to spent somewhere, and that extra dmg is not going to waste when you have tanks around, specially if you raid with a prot pally, who will love you for it.

Quick question since I am mid raid at the moment. There was talk about Vindication affecting the adds at Muru. Was that ever confirmed? Does it?

Was looking over the paladin dps spreadsheet. Is it true that JoR is based off melee crit and has a crit modifier of 2.0 (instead of 1.5 like normal spells, pretalents of course)? Is this new for Wotlk? I was pretty sure JoR was based of spell crit and used a 1.5 spell modifier in TBC.

It still needs to be tested. Even in Wrath a few talents like Holy Power apply only to one type of crit. Right now JoR's crit chance is modified by this talent but with the change to 200% damage it might be modified only by physical crit buffs in Wrath, it needs to be checked whether it is scaling with melee crit or spell crit.

A year or two ago while leveling my paladin as ret I created a ret paladin simulator. Nothing too special about it but I decided to update it for wotlk. I haven't added several things yet but overall it's functional. No crusade talents, no SoV (testing currently) but I thought I'd post it here for you guys to look at.

I'm hosting it on one of my computers right now but feel free to play around with it and let me know what you think.

PALADIN DPS CALCULATOR / SIMULATOR

hopefully that works.

I haven't done Muru, but Vindication affects the mob if it shows up on the debuff list, in my experience. (You will notice a slight spike in the mob's HP % when the debuff applies) Does Vindication show up on the adds?


As far as effectiveness, it seems Vindication doesn't reduce the damage output that much. I suspect that mobs have similar base stats to a naked PC; 15% of your base Str/Agi is 30~50 AP and -0.5% crit, a pretty small mitigation bonus compared to other raid debuffs. (And from what I understand, elite mobs take those base stats and add a +X% modifier to determine final damage/hp/mp/etc) The -Stam debuff might be worth about 8~10% max HP (since base HP does not come from Sta); this is only useful if the mob had 90+% HP when you debuff it.

I haven't seen any conclusive proof yet and the search reveals no reference to the Blackened Naaru Sliver recently, so I thought I'd ask. Has anyone received the Sliver and tested it to determine whether SoB(or SoC for that matter) builds AP stacks on the proc? I'm curious as to whether it's good enough to fight for, but not curious enough to go crazy against my rogues with only a feral druid model of the AP proc to go on.

So, does anybody know for certain yet the details of the Sliver for Horde Ret Paladins, specifically whether seals can proc AP stacks during Battle Trance?

For the vindication question the answer is yes. Vindication does indeed affect the adds that run in during phase 1 M'uru. By how much that affect is I am uncertain. I personally make sure that I try and get it to proc on as many of the npcs as I can before their hp starts to lower since I feel its effectiveness is rather useless if it finally procs too late.

On the same note as vindication, the new ptr vindication has been buffed to 20% matching the new death knight talent Heart Strike. It will be interesting to see how that will play out in the future or it could just be that both talents were intended mainly for pvp.

New version of Rawr is out. Please try it out and PM me any bugs or issues you experience, or suggestions you have.

Link: Rawr - Release: Rawr b15