Makes sense, since it doesn't require a target. my bad coach.

I tend to use this in my math, but I might be a bit biased :P

Crusader strike = 6.143 seconds
Judgment = 8.600 Seconds
Divine Storm = 10.75 Seconds

43 second rotation. First Come, First Serve, Favor CS>J>DS when cool downs match exactly.

I'm working on a write up of the various possible permutations (or is it combinations? I get those two mixed up all the time), but it's slow going as I don't have much time.

Some of them can probably be dismissed without even looking at them, but I like to be thorough.

It's entirely possible there's an easier way figure out a rotation, and I'm taking the long road, so I'll leave you all with the list of cycles I was going to include:

Strict: Higher priority NEVER loses time to lower priority
FCFS: Priority only comes into play when the cool downs match exactly, never pause an ability to use another.

CS>J>DS
CS>DS>J
J>CS>DS
J>DS>CS
DS>J>CS
DS>CS>J

This results in 12 different rotations. I don't see why we can't get the numbers now. All a rotation determines is the effective cool down average of the ability. We can change the numbers as Talents are adjusted.

I've seen some rotations including an "equals" but I'm not entirely certain how that one is crafted. It's certainly possible there's a rotation that doesn't use a priority system, but rather would include a list of 120 seconds worth of time and when to use every ability.

That's how I compiled a warlock dot rotation. Unfortunately, I don't think these can be jigsawed into place without ever getting in the way of each other like the warlock dots.

I'm also curious as to how Flyingotastr came up with a 6/9/11 cycle.
I spend a few hours in Excel modeling the different possible cycles, including 9sec Judgement, and Rustik's came out on top.

However, I don't think this includes Consecration, because at the time the Downranking change had just been made.

I'm also curious as to why you would think DS would put out more DPS than Crusader Strike. Assuming the abilities are used every 6sec and 10sec respectively, DS would have to do 1.667% damage to have the same DPS. Unless we're talking multiple targets, in which case the answer is obvious.

I played on the PvP non-premade realm (much less laggy) and it's much more useable. I also don't know what I was thinking but I had it in my head that it's name was Divine Strike, not Divine Storm... thus the confusion in my above post. You're also right, it's cheaper than consecrate and has the same range, probably a better unstealthing ability... although it also means if it doesn't land you wasted one of your more powerful instant abilities.

DS does holy damage. Holy damage ignores armor. Ignoring armor weapon damage > 110% weapon damage. Logically.

The DPS difference from pushing back DS will therefore be larger than the DPS difference from pushing back CS. Logically.

Not more DPS, more damage per application. If both abilities are up, which is more worthwhile to cast? Unless your target is under approximately 9% physical mitigation, the answer is Divine Storm. Less DPS, more DPC(damage per cast). Given that, wouldn't casting DS over CS make sense? Even if it takes longer to cool down, choosing between the two should always result in DS except in cases of very low armor targets.

Another thing part of the rotation to consider after Boss is 35% how would HoW fit into the rotation placement

58% crit chance from talents alone, instant, and holy damage to boot.

Which only adds a another variable to the priorities. If you wanted to optimize your rotation for Consecrate, Exorcism, Hammer of Wrath, CS, DS, and Judgement, you would be using 6 different abilities. The number of Prioritizations is 6!.

1*2*3*4*5*6 = that's 720 possible combinations, unless I've done some horribad calculation somewhere. I think we're better off focusing on just he main three, and where we can fit in the other three as a bonus.

You don't "consistently delay CS 1.5 seconds".

6/9/11 doesn't mean you use CS every 6 seconds, Judgement every 9 and DS every 11 on the dot. It's the average cooldown for each ability. It means that when there is a collision between abilities one of them gets higher priority. You will have a collision between CS and DS every 30 seconds. Between the two DS does higher damge. You push back CS that time.

It's still a priority system, just as it always has been. It's just a nicer way of saying it.

And you don't have the mana to throw HoW and Consecration. You choose one and run with it.

DPC shouldn't matter in a rotation, because it's about cooldown management.
For argument's sake, let's say CS does 1760dmg after mitigation (2000dmg*110% Weapon Damage*80% Damage due to Armor) and DS does a flat 2000dmg.
CS would be 293dps if used on cooldown, and DS is 200dps on cooldown. Pushing back CS 1.5sec every 30sec causes CS to drop to 279DPS, while delaying DS 1.5sec every 30sec lowers it to 190dps.
You lose 14dps instead of 10dps.

I'd be interested to know what your rotation is, because I can't model a 6/9/11 cycle when the priorities are ambiguous (last page you said CS>DS=J, but DS>CS here, where's J? What ability starts the rotation?).

That's exactly the point I was trying to make, apologies I wasn't clear enough. Just as Dark Necross just pointed out, CS loses a larger chunk if you push it back instead of pushing back DS. Every 30 seconds is still "consistent."

1.5 from 6 is a much bigger delay than 1.5 from 10.

I initially came up with the FCFS:CS>J>DS for three reasons:

FCFS: because holding a strict priority will cause you to delay another ability as much as 2.5 seconds just to favor a "harder hitting" one. 2.5 seconds off a crusader strike because judgement hits harder won't really work out well.

CS>J>DS to favor the shorter cooldown first, because a delay to a longer cooldown is not as detrimental to the average.

Due to the skills being 2 seconds apart, I felt they would collide less if you separated the cooldowns right as they matched up, or you will always collide immediately after the match, on the next swing for each.


EDIT: While I'm here, it's seems like now would be a good time to figure out the armor values for the various raid bosses. We're all still assuming 20-30% armor reduction in the calculations, but if the difference ends up beign as small as 4 DPS, it seems like the armor values would make a big difference.

Anyone know if armor values for the various mobs has been determined yet?

EDIT AGAIN: DarkNecross, did you save the file with the 12 rotations? If so, how did you determine mine was on top, just via total delay?

If you find the time, it would be appreciated if you could post the list of the rotations and the average cool down of the abilities (or even just the total length of the rotation and the number of swings). I don't have a spreadsheet program, and doing each rotation by hand via a time line in notepad is very tedious.

I have about 150 haste in Beta (just got it) but so it is hard to see the GCD effect, since at 70 vs 68-70 mobs all die in 3 hits .

I doubt the 0.1-0.2 seconds of Judgement GCD makes a difference, since CS and DS have long cooldowns.


Having melee haste affect casting such as Pally Mount and Flash of Light is pretty nice.

After a long hiatus, I have returned!

I recently spoke with the lead dev of Rawr ... and I will be picking up Rawr.Ret once again for WoW 3.0 models. As such, I'm interested in opinions on how best to model the various cycles you guys are talking about into the program... I'm going to try to test them out in excel and see how they compare with different stats. My thoughts are that our cycles will likely change as we get gear upgrades... increasing the importance of CS/DS and decreasing the importance of Judgements and HoW.

I also have a beta key so if you guys would like me to test some things on the beta servers let me know

I can make a 20s repeatable rotation with:

2 Divine Storms
2 Judgements
3 Crusader Strikes
3 Hammer of Wraths (or open GCDs pre-HoW)
2 open GCDs
2 seconds of unusable space


I'm not sure how this will compare to a priority scheme with no fixed rotation. On the other hand, this can be macro'd fairly easily for button mashing purposes. I think it's a good baseline to judge other proposed schemes by.

It's kind of amusing that all of this caused by DS having a 10s cooldown. If it was 9s (cost/effect balanced around that), the rotation would be trivial. I'm not sure if that would be good or bad.

SO far it's looking like Any kind of FCFS rotation is going to beat any strict rotation. SO far the FCFS rotations have been very similar. I also noticed a goofy bit where it might be better to switch priorities mid rotation. I'm still playing with it.

I'm a bit hesitant to put damage numbers to it right now though. I would think they're going to be changing Righteous Vengeance, since two talents very close together with the same effect seems kinda wonky.

I could always change the numbers, I suppose.

Looking forward to the 3.0 model. Rawr is my friend.

As a side thought, would it be possible to simply set the rawr model to allow the player to select the rotation they wish to use? All you need is the average cooldown, for the program itself. You wouldn't need to program in the full rotation.

I can definitely see the rotation changing when you go from one mob to two, or three, or four, and DS multiplies in damage, but judgement and CS remain the same. Additionally, the heavier armored targets might require a slightly different rotation than a very low armor target.

The differences might be slim, but hey, we're min/maxing.

I have the some fun math for PTR ret talents.

Art of War is supposed to give 20% more critical damage (240% crits? 220% crits?) to Judgements, etc. Instead it is giving 40 more damage.

Not 40 percent, 40 damage, and that damage is added to the crit damage. So if you have RV too, you get 50 damage instead. Good implementation!

Also, the 3% crit metagem actually gives 206% crits, not 203%, so bellator and I both need to update our spreadsheets.

I only tested judgements so far, but that sure is one amusing bit of information.

Edit: Amusing piece of information 2: AoW gives 20 damage to CS and DS. Still multiplied by RV for the DS version.

It really depends since more than a few classes are still very buggy. The common spec to compare ret paladins against would be enhance shaman who are currently very bugged and do horrible dps. On Murmur in my 10 man beating me was a rogue but I haven't seen any hunter dps yet. Normally I'm 2nd on damage on both trash and bosses and this tends to mean 1st on damage for the entire run.

The answer may be very different on the Northrend/Lich King beta servers since classes have access to Sunwell gear, enchants, epic enchanted gear and most importantly hit rating. Perhaps ask this question again after the next beta build.

Incidentally, with the consolidation of ratings, all those spell haste gems will be giving melee haste as well. New best ret gems? Or will str gemming still win?

Strength directly scales white damage, Seal of Blood/Martyr, Judgements, CS and DS, giving AP at a rate of 2.53:1 with Kings. Haste scales only white and seal damage. The balance is close on live, and I'm pretty sure the addition of ap scaling on Judgements and the addition of DS plus the 50% better Divine Strength will make strength our best stat by a wide margin.

But where is break even point? It's definetly somewhere. But how high and can you get enough str from gear to get there?

At the moment on the beta str is over triple the value of haste for a ret paladin. I can't imagine a situation where haste ever comes even remotely close to str in power since autoattack + seal is the only thing haste affects (lowers GCDs too, some of them, but that is really unimportant for ret) and 2 instant strikes + seal on both + judgement + HoW/Consecrate all use str extensively.

Spreadsheet

Note this version isn't totally complete, but does give you a really good idea of how much Str destroys every other stat.

Right now the hit/miss tables for some of the prot powers aren't updated with my most current data.
Metagem not properly implemented, only giving 203% crit instead of multiplicative 106% damage on crits.

These won't change numbers in any significant way for ret, but I am working on keeping it updated as much as possible. It will change prot powers some though, so expect those to change a little bit.

Just as with crit v. strength right now there will be a point of inflection where haste becomes better than strength. It is going to be obscenely high, most likely to the extent that we won't see it happening on gear, but it will be there.