Yeah, and then they kept the ranged racial @ 1% crit for Troll/Dwarf.

I like this alot, especially now that totems/Auras effect the whole raid. Given that Sancity aura would have been all kinds of overpowered when coupled with D-Storm and Protadin/Holydins/SoR? (they can sort of DPS in downtime now, given that we will HAVE to melee the boss to get mana back b/c of the non chain-chuggability of pots...but I digress...) Its providing possible offtanks (holy/Retadins/anyone else) with easy, free threat, that scales with a few classes WHILE giving everyone else 2% more damage and 3% haste.

With my current Ret builds (53-59 in ret) that leaves around 9 points (4 if you pick up AoW + imp.HoP/F) and 2 points if you go PoJ and/or Vindication.

They're definatly a plethora of what I think are "valid" Ret/Prot and Ret/Holy builds. Glad to be rid of the "cookie-cutter builds" for atleast a little while.

I'd be more excited to be out of the cookie-cutter build if the decision was which valid, useful talents to take, instead of which marginally situationally useful fluff talents to take. Compare ret to Prot. I'm ret most of the time but I spec prot for Felmyst and M'uru and the occasional BT and Hyjal. Each of those jobs has a discrete spec I can use and get useful talents I like(I'll grab imp SotC on M'uru or PoJ on Felmyst or a variety of prot talents etc) that actually improve me for the specific job at hand. That is my model of the best way to get out of a cookie cutter spec, rather than having 6-9 leftover talents that you can toss anywhere with minimal to no change in your effectiveness.

That's because the troll/dwarf bonuses are for ranged weapons, which cannot be dodged or parried anyway. Expertise would have been silly.

Ugh, that sucks. I guess I just assumed it was immunity to stuns since the baseline HoF is immunity to snares. That actually doesn't affect its PVE usefulness that much since you rarely (if ever) see multiple stuns/snares in short succession in PVE. But obviously its usefulness in PVE was limited to begin with, and that makes a huge difference in its usefulness in PVP. You could easily just be stunned again once you pop HoF to remove a stun, and even more importantly, you can't get any use out of the AoW stun removal if you "waste" HoF to get yourself out of snares. What a disappointing talent, they really need to rethink that one more time.

Eh, every class and spec will run into the "which marginally situationally useful fluff talents to take" problem, otherwise we would all be 61/61/61. Everyone has floater talent points they have to use/spend to get to decent deeper, and largely meaningful ones. I'm happy that I have, and this is important--options now. I dont have to be 5/8/48 for PvE DPS.

I'm glad that crit is a generalized modifier now, so when I spec 9-15 deep into holy, i'm not losing something--I can effectivly off-heal with the mana that i'm given. I can DPS for more mana, and more effective healing.

With the new Str-to-BV conversion, 20 deep into Prot means I can be a more effective Stoneclaw totem. Atleast the tables are getting more and more fair for OT warriors as they are for paladins. I'll mitigate more damage, but they'll avoid more. Considering things like SA-mana this is fine by me.

Not so. Ferals are definitely in the 'not enough points to take all the strongly beneficial PvE talents, with no fluff' boat, even for just maximizing one of our roles (bear or cat). I know Moonkin are too, I think Mages are are in that same boat too, and possibly rogues.

It's not unreasonable to want significant boosts from every talent point. (And on the other side of things, it's not unreasonable to want to be able to fill in all of the significant primary role talents)

I understand people want the most investment for their talent points, but given the power of the new tier 9, 10, and 11 talents, they'll naturally give you less points to work with. They're not that many T3 or 4 talents in other trees that facilitate a primary tree's functions, and I happen to think that druids get pretty nice off-Feral tree filler talents for their other points.

I believe that druids get more options in other trees than paladins do. For the points druids can spend in tier 1-3 Resto, you pick up power-shifting, and a boost to both your feral forms--Hell, feral druids on the whole get a ton of the best ACTUAL hybrid talents ( ones that cover both cat and bear) to only have to change gear to facilitate each function. Most of the talents that define the trees are 25+ points deep. Ret is an extremely bloated tree as is and its getting more and more bloated each day. Before the change to Righteous Vengeance, I could drop 4 points from Ret and still be an effective DPSer, but now I have to put 5 points in Fanat AND the points back. I wouldn't mind it being bloated either, if it meant that every point I put would have a positive mathematical advantage to my DPS. The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to agree with Rasputin.

But I digress from that line of downward-spiral thinking. As to Rasputin's comment--I can see what he means. We all want all 71 of our talent points to give us the most for our buck, but right now they're just are/arent too many Ret talents to pick up to "be good" at Melee dps. The sad part is they're are little to no talents in tier 1-4, except Str and Int ( to an extent) worth picking up that serve to facilitate our main purpose--DPS. They are all to the duality of our "hybridness". We just dont have enough outside ret talents to deal damage. Literally, everything else T4 and up in our trees except for the two stat boosters, are pure hybrid/utility spells. I see some synergy though (The current Art of War and Guardian's Favor come to mind) but beyond that--they're all "pvp" talents--skills with RNG componets that are purely for Pvp ( unless we see another Garr/Epoch Hunter fight where our other spells besides seals are dispelled, or for some stupid reason, the boss decides to stun us)

No one would shun a Resto druid/shaman if they went 60-71 deep because literally everything they need is in 1 tree. I would either like ret to be like that, or not. I also want repentance seperated from Fanatacism.

Slight thing that struck me the other day..

Eye for an Eye in PvE. I've noticed it proccing now and then when I'm out doing dailies after being PvP spec (even on spells).

Is that my resilience at work, or is there some kind of way it works in PvE? Can mob spells crit, just with the critdamage the same as a normal attack? How exactly does this work?

Delete this

You have a small (resilience%) chance for Eye for an Eye to proc, even on non-crit spells. That is, if you have 10% crit chance reduction, you should see 1 Eye for an Eye proc across 100 spell hits.

Blizzard's combat system cannot tell if a hit was a hit because it was really rolled as a hit, or because it was a hit that should have been a crit, were it not for resilience.

So instead of letting Resilience reduce the actual effectiveness of your talent (getting crit less means getting less E4E procs), they simply let normal hits have a chance to proc on-crit effects equal to the amount of crit chance reduction you have. Warriors with Blood Craze and Enrage also experience this phenomena.

Another special case are Elementals: They deal spell damage, but their attacks follow melee rules/hit-tables. A Fire Elemental has a 5% chance to crit you with its melee attack, but since the melee attack deals spell damage, the crit will proc Eye for an Eye.

Does any1 knows if Divine storm breaks cc (sheep, sap, sucle e.t.c)?

Cause if it does we are gonna have major problem......

Judgement of Light/Wisdom/Justice all deal (58% SP + 36% AP). Let's call this Base Judgement Damage (BJD)
Judgement of Blood/Martyr deals BJD, plus 45% weapon damage
Judgement of Command deals BJD, plus 30% weapon damage
Judgement of Righteousness deals 125% of BJD
Judgement of Vengeance/Corruption deals 110% of BJD at one stack, and 150% of BJD at 5 stacks

Is this a typo? Some part of me hopes not

Hallelujah for Prot Paladins

Argh I meant to post in the WoTLK pal thread, erf

You're right, it seems to work out. thanks for the clarification

Re. fanatism : it's not a typo, it's been in the updated talents trees for a couple of days

[edit] : it is a typo, I read "judgement" crit chance though it wasn't there in the patch notes. I though the previous poster was talking about the rates

So...Now. Seal of Vengeance's tick duration is 18 seconds when the last stack is applied or since the first stack? If it's the former, I guess we have a chance of seal twisting it with SoM/SoB...Otherwise it seems hard to me.

Yes it's a typo (or simply sloppy). It increases "Judgement" crit chance by 5/10/15/20/25% not flat out everything as can be misinterpreted by what they wrote.

I was amused by the amount of typos/sloppiness in the latest patch notes :P

Just make sure you run with a real tank, like a Prot paladin. = )

(Actually, all tanks should have good reasons to move out of CC, considering the AE tank abilities they have)

It should work as on live. Each time SoV procs, the DoT is refreshed to its full duration. (And does not lose any ticks)

Depending on your stats and where you are hiting the boss, you can still miss or get dodged/parried. But if you have 100% chance to hit, then yes... it should be posible to keep 5 stacks for 16sec, hit him one with SoV and go back to sob/sor/soc.

A ret pally should always be hit/expertise capped in WoTK (now that expertise is ez to get), meaning that a rotation between SoV and SoB (for example) should be posible. And it can lead to a huge dps buff.

Tho... i really dout they lwill eave things are they are now. With ret gear, 5 stacks of SoV currently do twice the dmg SoB does, and that makes no sense at all. Specially if you consider you can use both on a rotation.

Again, if your mana allow it, you will want to use another seal when the vengence tick don't need to be refreshed, but you'll be judging vengence since a 5 stacks vengence beats everything* (not adding calculations again, they're already all over the place in this thread and the WoTLK one)

If you manage to have one swing during the 2 GCD you will have vengence up (putting the seal on, and judging it) which seems very likely after all given that most weapons I've seen are 3,2 - 3,5 speed and we'll probably have loads of haste, then you'll refresh the stacks by twisting the seals to judge every 8 seconds.

Then the possibility of doing so would be conditionned by mana consumption and regeneration, due to higher seal cost

*execpt a crit JoC on a stunned target, but we're mainly talking PVE boss fighting here I assume

Because of this, could we possibly need Benediction?It may be useful now that seals mana cost got a lot higher.

I haven't done the calculations yet, and we still need to make sure how JotW works, but according to flyingtoastr's calculated manacost, benediction might not even be enough to allow seal twisting in long fights

so maybe we'll stick to vengence since it stays ahead in terms of seal + judgement dps accounted together

Assuming I was right with my base mana pool calc in the Wrath thread Seals are going to cost 615 each cast. With Benediction they would cost 523 mana.

Without Benediction changing seals every 15 seconds will cost a good 410 Mp5.

With Benediction changing seals every 15 seconds will cost 349 Mp5.

So if you are Seal Twisting SoV with something else Benediction is worth 61 Mp5 off the seals. Judgement cost reduction from Benediction (220 > 187) is worth 21 Mp5. So in total 5/5 Benediction is worth about 82 Mp5 if you are twisting seals every 15 seconds.

The problem really does become "do we have enough regen to support this in the first place?". Until we know how JotW will work I can't answer, but my gut is telling me it will be situational at best.

Since Judgements are on the GBC now, I'm trying to figure out a decent rotation for them with CS and DS. Here's my problem, I'm getting a lot of traffic jamming. Normally, you'd want to use the hardest hitters first, but there's a little snafu in there. If I delay my crusader strike half a second to use judgement first, what I end up with is

0.0-Judge
1.5-Crusader strike
7.5-Crusader strike is up, but I'm going to wait...
8.0 Judge
9.5 Crusader strike.

If you follow this iteration, you get that every single time, effectively making your crusader strike an 8 second cooldown. The same thing will happen with DS/Judgements. To solve this, I decided to favor the short cooldowns first, to help separate everything, but I still run into a huge traffic jam at about 43 seconds. I'm only doing this with a single column of numbers in notepad, so perhaps I'm going about it wrong.

I have a feeling I'll just need to minimize the damage done at the jam, perhaps by getting the averge damage of each ability and how much of an impact a delay has on the dps of said ability. A 1 second delay on DS is a 10% hit to that abilities dps, and more to Judgement, and even more to CS. I was hoping to avoid the number crunch (just this time).

I'm even debating using a 9 second judgement instead, to see if it helps seperate things a bit more. Heck with a 10 second judgement Your ds and judgement would always be 1.5 seconds away from each other, and CS would be the only little bastard bugging up the mix.