Retribution DPS Theorycraft - Page 208

Foxconfessor · 08/28/08, 10:29 PM

Initially, I thought this spelled a problem for ret paladins, squeezed between warriors and enhancement shaman in terms of buff overlap, but the more I think on it the more I believe this could be a problem for all support classes. True, all classes will have viability, but the massive overlap in these buffs means you need relatively few support classes to get all the buffs you need. This means large sections of the raid could be stacked with the classes with the highest personal dps, rather than more support classes with redundant buffs.

The only way I can't see this happening under the proposed system is if rogues and maybe a few other 'pure' classes don't have the highest personal dps. To focus on the case of rogues specifically, it seems unlikely that they won't have the highest personal dps by some margin, since they bring no buffs themselves and raiding rogues probably expect to be compensated for their lack of utility.

Also, (and this is a far more personal observation) psychologically, I don't think players will like knowing their buff is flab and is basically the same as the next guy's, only with a different name. Ret paladins are maybe generally a little under-appreciated in live, but as far as my guild is concerned, I think my group and the raid really appreciate what I currently bring; its uniqueness, and its scaling. In the future, every time I see a elemental shaman, dps warrior, or enhancement shaman, (commonplace builds every raiding guild currently takes for granted) in the same raid, I will know my character's supposedly unique abilities are effectively meaningless. They may well be thinking the same thing. Maybe I'll get used to it, but the future seems a little bland.

GSH · 08/28/08, 11:20 PM

Originally Posted by Foxconfessor

Also, (and this is a far more personal observation) psychologically, I don't think players will like knowing their buff is flab and is basically the same as the next guy's, only with a different name. Ret paladins are maybe generally a little under-appreciated in live, but as far as my guild is concerned, I think my group and the raid really appreciate what I currently bring; its uniqueness, and its scaling. In the future, every time I see a elemental shaman, dps warrior, or enhancement shaman, (commonplace builds every raiding guild currently takes for granted) in the same raid, I will know my character's supposedly unique abilities are effectively meaningless. They may well be thinking the same thing. Maybe I'll get used to it, but the future seems a little bland.

The flip side of this is being a raid leader, and knowing that your raid is hurting because you haven't been able to recruit a decent Ret paladin. Or being forced to take a mediocre trial Ret paladin to encounters, and having a decent long-time raider sit out just so you get those "unique abilities".

If your abilities are not unique, then you know that your raid is taking you along because they like playing with you, because you do good damage, and because you make a significant contribution to the sucess of the raid through your skill and play, rather than through a specific buff you bring.

Rasputin · 08/28/08, 11:39 PM

I'm curious as to our mana longevity with only the new JotW and JoW. Will it support a full Judgement/CS/DS rotaiton? Will we be able to throw in exorcism on undead/demon bosses, or consecration at all? I guess we should wait on our second pass to see if we'll have any love for mana regen, but we'll only have our base mana, and our abilities cost significant chunks of that. If we're only regenning 2.5% of our base mana pool per 5s in addition to JoW regen, I can easily see us dropping mana VERY quickly. Could use some level 80 testing, but I'm only 76 and change on the beta.

Foxconfessor · 08/28/08, 11:40 PM

The flip side of this is being a raid leader, and knowing that your raid is hurting because you haven't been able to recruit a decent Ret paladin. Or being forced to take a mediocre trial Ret paladin to encounters, and having a decent long-time raider sit out just so you get those "unique abilities".

If your abilities are not unique, then you know that your raid is taking you along because they like playing with you, because you do good damage, and because you make a significant contribution to the sucess of the raid through your skill and play, rather than through a specific buff you bring.

So, right now in live, if in a raiding guild a ret paladin exhibited sloppiness and poor personal dps by the standards expected by that particular guild, and in addition no-one in the guild liked them, they would be allowed to continue regardless?

Redcape · 08/28/08, 11:41 PM

Given that you can now easily cover the needed buffs with half your raid still empty, I don't see an issue with just having everyone do near identical dps. Rogues still don't have to worry... the buffs are covered, might as well bring whoever you like and who plays well. It means that you don't get a raidspot based on your buffs, but rather based on how well you play and if people like you. Huzzah!

Prinsesa · 08/28/08, 11:48 PM

The Replenishment change is quite alarming, to say the least.

With Crusader Strike going off every 6 seconds, Judgement going off every 9 and Divine Storm going off every 10, we're looking at a mana consumption of roughly -574 MP5 at level 70.

A naked Blood Elf has 3977 mana*. That's a return of 99 MP5 from Replenishment, which reduces the mana consumption to -474 MP5.

That just leaves Judgement of Wisdom. At 2000 AP, you're looking at a 292 MP5 gain from JoW, which still leaves the consumption at -182 MP5.

The point of inflection would be somewhere around 3250 AP. Raid-buffs would probably allow you to reach this, but then mana regen options from the raid would drive that down further as well. For soloing though, it's quite a high number to aim for.

*Since Replenishment restores maximum mana, then I assumed that we would have no INT on gear. This will be mitigated somewhat at level 70 since we have a little more than base, but I don't expect that to hold moving forward.

If anyone has figures on level 80 base mana (or ability costs, I can derive base mana from there), naked mana and a real ability rotation, let me know and I'll try to get some figures for 80.

flyingtoastr · 08/28/08, 11:49 PM

Originally Posted by Redcape

Given that you can now easily cover the needed buffs with half your raid still empty, I don't see an issue with just having everyone do near identical dps. Rogues still don't have to worry... the buffs are covered, might as well bring whoever you like and who plays well. It means that you don't get a raidspot based on your buffs, but rather based on how well you play and if people like you. Huzzah!

But it leads to a serious problem for badly scaling classes (Mages, Arms Warriors, Ret Pallys) who's main purpose is their buffs. If their buffs can be provided by a class that brings higher DPS potential there is exactly zero reason to use the badly scaling class.

They will have to homogenize DPS outputs between nearly every class now too. The devs seem to want to make balancing the classes nigh impossible in Wrath.

Pazgaz · 08/29/08, 2:51 AM

I didn't see this mentioned yet, from the list on MMO chamption, it seems like BoSanc is getting changed:

Damage Reduction Percentage Buff: Grace, Blessing of Sanctuary

No longer a flat reduction.

CaptBooyah · 08/29/08, 4:46 AM

Originally Posted by Pazgaz

I didn't see this mentioned yet, from the list on MMO chamption, it seems like BoSanc is getting changed:

Damage Reduction Percentage Buff: Grace, Blessing of Sanctuary

No longer a flat reduction.

As the post said later, not all the buffs will be of equal value, they just wont stack with one another. BoSanc might get changed but otherwise it'll just be that you either get hit for 3% less thanks to grace or n dmg less thanks to BoSanc depending on which value is higher/better.

Redcape · 08/29/08, 10:07 AM

Originally Posted by CaptBooyah

As the post said later, not all the buffs will be of equal value, they just wont stack with one another. BoSanc might get changed but otherwise it'll just be that you either get hit for 3% less thanks to grace or n dmg less thanks to BoSanc depending on which value is higher/better.

I can't imagine that they would actually implement it that way. For one thing, the flat damage reduction of sanctuary is an awful mechanic and needs to go % based anyway, and for 2 in order for sanctuary to be even vaguely competitive at a raid level it would need to be hilariously overpowered in 5 mans. They will make it a flat % damage reduction and solve both those problems in one fell swoop.

• Avitus · 08/29/08, 11:56 AM

Wow, this is quite the bomb shell.

I can see it very easily being the case that the optimum minimum of buffing classes is taken and the rest is pure DPS classes. Even while taking the buffing classes, if there's personal DPS discrepancy, then only the highest will be taken.

I really have to wonder how Blizzard is going to balance this, they've created a balancing nightmare, since with this change personal DPS will be more important than ever.

While I admire the goal to have raid composition more player skill centric than buff/debuff centric, in reality they literally have to guarantee that classes are doing pretty much identical damage or this is going to go bad, very very fast.

The other concern of course is JotW. I think it's somewhat annoying that the "rage-like mana regen" is going to be axed, since it was for once really fun to play. I dislike having gone the "static buff" route, rather than having it dynamic/scaling depending on damage done as it was. It sounds like a pretty big personal mana regen hit, specifically since it's supposed to go off "percent of max mana", which ret paladins won't have much of.

I think a new talent needs to be added to the tree for "personal" mana regen in addition to jotw (raid mana battery functionality). Something that's a true replacement of Sanctified Judgement. I can imagine adding a personal mana regen effect to Crusader Strike would be best.

Ugh, there's a lot of rumbling/shuffling going on now and it'll be hard to know for sure where we're at until the dust settles, fingers crossed they do a good job.

Thebigcheeze · 08/29/08, 12:08 PM

Originally Posted by Redcape

Due to CS functionality currently hit has a really powerful purpose aside from straight dps, but since that seems like it is going to go away in 3.0 I do not think that hit will actually end up being better than str. The spreadsheet that I created for level 80 certainly shows str being 50% better than hit for doing damage and substantially more than that for JotW mana returns. Granted those numbers are for level 80 raiding, but the 2 big differences there are that there is a big increase in AP and weapon damage numbers and a change in the coefficient on hit rating.

Betadpsv2.xls - FileFront.com

I tried dropping the weapon damage to SW gear levels, setting the coefficients to level 70 standards and lowering the stats and buffs to full SW geared level 70 standards.

DPS per 100 points

Str - 220
Hit - 214

MP5 from JotW

Str - 210
Hit - 127

So for maximizing personal dps the difference is very minimal, but str does give a big chunk of mana return. The other insane thing str does is it provides mana return from JoW.

100 Str * 2 (AP) * 1.15 (Divine str) * 1.1 (Kings) * 1.1 (UR) * 1.3 (Sheathe) * .09 (JoW return on SP/AP) = 32.56

So 100 Str grants 32.56 mana per proc. Since there is a 4 second cooldown on JoW now, it is rational to model this as 32.56 mp5 for every person actively attacking the target. Since you have something like

2.5 mage/warlock/hunter
.8 Moonkin/Elemental/Enhancement/Prot
1 Shadow/Ret

all hitting the target, you are getting 12.7 people netting 32.56 mp5 from your JoW which is 413.5 mp5. So in total from both JoW and JotW 100 str is returning 624 mp5. To sum:

100 Str

220 DPS
624 Mp5

100 Hit

214 DPS
127 MP5

Now all this extra mana from JoW only applies against a single target the raid is dpsing, but since added hit is only meaningful against a boss regardless I don't think that matters much. Str ends up bringing 6 more dps per 100 points and 497 more MP5.

The effects on JoW are so massive that I think ret paladin gearing may well come down to simply selecting the item that has the highest str score on it and hardly even caring about the rest. The mana return is so outrageously large that unless your raid really has no need for your mana restoration str is probably going to end up being at least 3 times as powerful as any other stat (barring AP, of course, since that has a fixed relationship).

Even if my sheet needs to change a little to accomodate the buff reorganization that is coming up I can't see anything coming even remotely close to str in value. I do expect a big change in ret paladin coefficients prior to live. With the numbers I just entered a ret pally with amazing SW gear in a fully buffed raid we should be seeing 4800+ dps with SoR without even counting Consecration, Exorcism or Hammer of Wrath!

You forgot the bonus from inscriptions.

Glyph of Blessing of Kings - Your Blessing of Kings also increases attack power on affected targets by 3%.

Not much, but every multiplier helps.

• Avitus · 08/29/08, 12:14 PM

The Glyph is included in the spreadsheet. Anyway it's a moot point since JotW was changed.

As a side note, please don't quote mammoth posts.

Redcape · 08/29/08, 1:26 PM

Originally Posted by Avitus

Wow, this is quite the bomb shell.

I can see it very easily being the case that the optimum minimum of buffing classes is taken and the rest is pure DPS classes. Even while taking the buffing classes, if there's personal DPS discrepancy, then only the highest will be taken.

I really have to wonder how Blizzard is going to balance this, they've created a balancing nightmare, since with this change personal DPS will be more important than ever.

Indeed true, but I think this is a great way to go. They have actually stated here that rogues are slated to get more utility and that they intend to level the playing field completely as far as dps goes. Clearly making everyone do the same dps is a tall order, but when they can throw out the utility arguments and simply tune every class to do just the same dps it becomes much easier. It is rather challenging to figure out how much less ret paladins should do currently because of added utility, but once you remove that constraint it is a much simpler job.

Blizzard has been getting better and better at balancing classes, and with the removal of outside considerations they are now free to focus purely on personal dps with full raid buffs. This should make their job straightforward enough that I expect to see all pure pve dps builds performing similarly in Wrath. I do expect that they will at least get the dps numbers close enough that you should take a very skilled class x over any mediocre player no matter what, which is really all we can ask I think. Making it perfect just isn't going to happen, though obviously striving to be as close as possible is necessary.

This might even have the nice benefit of flattening the curve for soloing strength so that pure dps classes aren't so vastly superior at killing dudes and getting stuff, which would be a nice change for sure.

flyingtoastr · 08/29/08, 6:24 PM

It sounds wonderful on paper, but given both Blizzard's track record (resto druids?) and the sheer immensity of having to balance 30 specs for 10 classes to all put out nearly identical output that scales identically and doesn't have an inverse impact on PvP or small-group content and you see the problem.

Making the glorified UBRS easier to tune and get good groups for is a laudable goal. The way they are going about it though is opening such a massive can of worms they might as well just announce that they're going to be pigeonholing "hybrids" again.

Kigale · 08/29/08, 7:04 PM

A problem I see is "pvp" specs. If you look at mages as an example. Why would anybody play arcane or fire if frost dps is close enough to be considered identical? Will Blizzard take only a few "pve" specs and balance the dps output of those specs with full raid buffs? Will Combat and Subtlety output similar dps? It seems like Blizzard will have to choose specs to base their balance on. Then, once all the balancing is complete someone will discover some weird hybrid spec similar to 0/21/40 for warlocks and out perform the balance. There are so many potential problems that if overcome I'll be the first to commend Blizzard.

Thordurin · 08/29/08, 7:04 PM

Beta just went down for patching the new build. Let's test the numbers tonight.

Oh, and hooray for a three-day weekend!

Mica · 08/30/08, 1:15 AM

Ok im back

Some time ago i posted on how can i possibly boost my DPS.

I took alot of input from the guys here and after getting a few upgrades my DPS has jumped quite a bit.

But i still have one problem I cannot break 1500 DPS on Brut!!

Im excorcising every time its up, i use concecrate with Avenging wrath/Blood Lust/Lust for Battle (plus i can fit a Lust Trinket in at the start of the fight).

Im not sure what more i can possibly do to get close to 2k DPS.

The only thing im not doing (and probably should be doing) is using haste pots.

Armory Link - The World of Warcraft Armory

WWS Link (note at one point i click off drums instead of Bubble!) - Wow Web Stats

Any input into what more i can do would be greatly appreciated

*edit* should have added, the group is normally 1 MS warrior, 2 Rogues and 1 Enh shammy with a Drums rotation

watersrog · 08/30/08, 3:51 AM

Mica: at a quick look, one of the problems seem to be Crusader Strike. In a 5min40sec fight you only have 37 Crusader Strikes which means one in over 9 seconds. That is way way low. Crusader Strike has a 6 seconds cooldown and should be your priority even you delay Judgements or Exorcism a bit (keep in mind the Global Cooldown).

Borna · 08/30/08, 6:33 AM

New beta build is up, retribution changes are as follows:

Retribution
Skills

* Blessing of Might ranks 5+ have all been buffed and now grant more attack power.

Talents

* Judgements of the Wise (Tier 6) changed to: Your Judgement spells have a 33/66/100% chance to grant up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.5% of their maximum mana per second.
* Improved Blessing of Might (Tier 1) now increases the attack power bonus from Blessing of Might by 5/10/15/20/25%. (Previously 10/20/30/40/50%)

In addition, the class glyphs have changed as well. Interested in your opinion, especially about the JotW change.

bellator · 08/30/08, 7:35 AM

Am I missing something here or are we mana starved again?

CS = 8% Every 6 sec
Judgement = 5% every 9 sec
Divine Storm = 20% every 20 seconds

This equates to 3.672% mana per second.

JotW = 0.5% mana per second
JoW = 2% every 6 seconds (on average)

Deficit leave us spending 2.84% mana per second

Prinsesa · 08/30/08, 7:38 AM

Is JoW still under the internal cooldown, though?

If not, would it be worth intentionally timing something to coincide with the JoW cooldown to maximize the mana gains?

bellator · 08/30/08, 7:49 AM

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

Is JoW still under the internal cooldown, though?

If not, would it be worth intentionally timing something to coincide with the JoW cooldown to maximize the mana gains?

Could do, but but decrease dps and still leave us with a 2.6% mana per second deficit

Trakor · 08/30/08, 8:24 AM

Originally Posted by bellator

Am I missing something here or are we mana starved again?

CS = 8% Every 6 sec
Judgement = 5% every 9 sec
Divine Storm = 20% every 20 seconds

This equates to 3.672% mana per second.

JotW = 0.5% mana per second
JoW = 2% every 6 seconds (on average)

Deficit leave us spending 2.84% mana per second

It gets worse once you factor in seals, Avenging Wrath, exorcism, Hammer of Wrath and possibly (at times) consecration and holy warth.

There's no way the current JotW will be enough.

Buliwyf · 08/30/08, 10:25 AM

Reply to Mica

You get the same Melee group as I. I usually get around 1800 however I still have the crappy badge axe.

Haste posts make a difference. Even more of a difference with Avenging Wrath. Even more again when lusted. Also try using elixirs of demonslaying, they provide a better attack power buff than anything else. Use scrolls of strength. I'm not sure if you use all these or not but they can make a significant difference. SWP is all about consumables.