Cons looks like the best 3rd glyph for PvE dps. Note you start out with 2 major/minor, and maybe at 80 get the 3rd.

It is easy to swap, you just go the Lexicon of Power in any major city (unsure if Shatt has one) and put in the new ones. So for PvE use Cons and AW and PvP use SoC and Crusader Strike. I would never remove Judgement (even for Holy).

SoR is getting SP from Sheath, I tested that. It isn't hugely above SoB, but it is above in my model for 3/5 SotP or more.

Partial resists are calculated by giving the mob 8 resistance for each level it is above you. So a boss should get 24 resistance, or 4.5% reduction at level 80.

Note the above is current mechanics, supported vaguely by my testing against level 72 mobs on PTR. I have not done rigorous testing against a Boss level mob nor at level 80. That said, the 72 mob resisted about as much as the current theory suggests it should, so 4.5% seems like a safe bet.

Edit: Pronoun made more specific.

Edit again: I doubt that the AW Glyph is actually all that good. It only matters during sub 35% and during AW, which isn't a lot of the time. Also, when you spam HoW like that you can't hit your other abilities. From my spreadsheet expressed in damage per cast:

JoR 6716.15
DS+SoR 5373.85
CS+ SoR 4260.01
Cons 4895.34
HoW 5486.76

So HoW is worse than Judgement, barely superior to DS, and significantly better than Conc and CS. The ability to spam it more is nice, but given how little of the fight it will be available I think the actual dps benefit is really pretty low. It looks like you can do 1440ish extra damage every 6 seconds. Assuming a 6 minute fight with 2 minutes spent below 35% you have AW up for 20 seconds of the 35% phase. That means you get 4800 extra damage over a full 6 minute boss fight, which is 13 dps. By contrast the Judgement Glyph should be awarding something like 80 dps.

The consecrate Glyph is really hard to evaluate, but I found when building rotations that having it be 10 seconds was hugely helpful in preventing collisions, so I would give it easily worth 5-10% of consecrate's damage, so at least 20 dps, maybe as high as 45.

If SoV ends up looking good (which is does not right now) then that Glyph would probably round out the top 3 with Consecrate and Judgement, but barring that I think you just use AoW anyway even though it is really marginal.

I have a question for raiding paladins - does the new Repentance work on raid mobs? I.e. can it be counted as one of our raid utilities?

My guess is that it will work on any target that can be sapped.

It already works that way; you can Repent several types of raid mobs, and I believe the only thing to change in 3.0+ is the duration of the effect. I already use it as emergency CC in some places in BT and Sunwell(iirc most of the humanoid trash can be Repented).

edit: It also affects many more mob types now, and can be used on nearly anything. I would expect it to be useful as CC, although not primary, due to the fact that the spell has a cooldown so an early break can't be helped.

I havent tried repenting any humanoids. I will try it for fun, but I could have sworn it popped up immune when I tried to HoJ or Repent in the past.

Yeah, I was referring to accidental AoE. Sheeps can be re-sheeped, banishes can't be broken and can be re-banished, but if Repentance gets broken, that's it until the cooldown is up. This is not to say the spell isn't worth using; I use it to great effect in plenty of heroics at 80, and while I haven't tried it in Naxx due to having 2 tanks, if the mobs are vulnerable it could certainly be useful on some of the larger packs.

Saltycracker, I haven't actually tried it in a while, but I'm fairly sure the mobs can be repented but not hammered. I know they can be sapped. However, I could be misremembering as I haven't tried it in recent weeks.

One major problem with this is a raid instance like Naxx. While you will be DPSing all trash and the far majority of bosses with SoB, you will have to (or at least really should) use SoC on at least 2 encounters (Thaddius and Loatheb) and possibly a third (Sapphiron).

Are you going to port out to equip the SoC Glyph and port back again? With the annoying addition of requiring a "Lexicon of Power" thingamajig (which is at the jewelcrafting trainer usually) you can't just swap Glyphs inside an instance.


Does this factor in crit rates (considering the major advantage of HoW is the insane crit rate with +50% from talents).

You're probably right about the HoW glyph, however it does depend on fight length as well as the arguable benefit of the competitor Glyph (Consecration). If the Consecration Glyph only offers 1 or 2 less clashes in a shortish boss fight, it will hardly be worthwhile.

Level 70:
Glyph 1: +10% Judgement. No argument.
Glyph 2: HoW or Consecration?

Level 80:
Glyph 3: The remaining one from Glyph 2 or SoC Glyph when needed.

Minor Glyphs: 1% vs Undead, then mix and match randomly it shouldn't matter much. The +extra mana from LoH is arguably the most functional of the remaining.

Repentance shouldn't be different than any of the other CCs. If the other CCs work on a specific raid mob, repentance probably will. If it's a CC immune mob, then it probably won't.

Somewhat outside the scope of your question, but while we're discussing repentance:

Obviously it's going to be necessary to keep track of what works on what.

New Repentance: Demons, Dragonkin, Giants, Humanoids and Undead
New Sap: Humanoids, Beasts, Demons and Dragonkin
Polymorph: Beasts, Humanoids (and Critters)
Banish: Demons and Elementals
Hibernate: Beasts and Dragonkin
Shackle Undead: Undead

Unless I'm missing something, it seems "Giants" are our unique specialty, while Beasts and Elementals are the only two mob types we can't use repentance on. Also afaik Cyclone works on "everything", though I didn't list it since it's a pretty weak CC in PvE (6 sec duration and quickly suffers from diminishing returns on recasting).

Repentance pros: Works on more mob types than most CCs, long duration (1 min), instant cast, castable in combat, 20 yard range, not an "annoying" banish that you can't break if you want to

Repentance cons: Breaks on damage (the flipside of this) with a 1 min cd meaning if someone messes up you can't re-CC

My personal conclusion is that while repentance will be an awesome tool in 5 mans and maybe some class combos of 10 mans, due to the punishing downside (breaks on damage and has a cd) you'll probably never be actually assigned to CC anything in 25 man raids except possibly Giants, as all other mob types have classes with CCs that have no cooldown/can be recast if they break.

Of course this is not to say that even in 25 man raids, repentance should be a very worthwhile situational emergency tool and/or worth using in a pinch (as it's instacast/20 yard range) if something breaks early while someone recasts their CC.




Regarding /Castrandom

This is an optimization issue I'd like to get some feedback on. It's been very briefly mentioned before, though I do think it deserves some discussion and people weighing in. I'll add a little backstory to get people up to speed.

Pre-3.0:

We currently have a strict priority system ("rotation") so besides simple Seal+Judge macros and /startattack lines, the most efficient/optimal is to manage all attacks manually.

Some people do use /castsequence with a whole bunch of abilities queued up in a specific sequence in order to try to emulate this priority system, however this is lazy and results in a DPS loss as it is not as efficient as doing it manually. Additionally at this point /castrandom would make no sense at all as it would ignore all priorities.

Enter 3.0:

With 3.0, the working theory is that FCFS ("first come first serve") rotations are currently top.

While I'm sure some of us have been known to hit cooldowns like a metronome once they get down to it, no matter how good you are we're all still bound by human reaction times. It feels almost too stupidly simple, but how would a /castrandom macro with the a whole bunch of abilities work out in PvE (CS, Judgement, DS, maybe even Consecration/Exorcism)? Would it be worthwhile even to shave off a few milliseconds off activating abilities while watching the GCD? What do people think about this, pros? Cons?

Also a pretty vital factor: Does /castrandom "smartly" ignore abilities that are out of range/on cooldown when it's randomly picking an ability or can it pick an ability that is on cooldown and give you an error message, thereby wasting a button press (= button mashing required for results)?


Anyway, regardless of the outcome of all this, I do think it would be a very stupid play style if it does work this well. However it's at least worth exploring as a theory.

I imagine it would depend on how many abilities you set in a castrandom, but if you manually started the cycle, using CS, DS, Judge and then start to spam castrandom you should then land consecrate and the rest of the abilities as they come out of cooldown. I recall that castrandom would ignore abilities that could not be cast (oor for judge, or wrong target for exorcism) but it has been a while and I cant log now to check it out.

If that works then once you start the rotation you would I imagine at most loose a few GCDs on a priority ability and instead use a "lesser" one. dps loss negligible.

Avitus, those numbers I quoted were with all raid debuffs, and counting crit, miss, etc. That is the full damage expectation from a cast.

The castrandom will not use any ability on cooldown, but I do not know about OOR concerns. I don't see that being an issue very likely, but you never know. The other problem with it is that it doesn't take into account that our abilites are not all created equal. Judgement is just massively better than the others and as such it really needs to be prioritized when we have 2 abilities come off cooldown at the same time. Castrandom won't achieve that, so it won't be optimal. I would bet though that castrandom would be within 1-2% of the perfect rotation, so you won't really be able to tell if someone is using it as long as they play well otherwise.

I will certainly be hitting buttons manually since I don't find a one button class to be all that interesting. If someone really wants to watch TV while playing all they need is a castrandom macro and a mod to make a dinging sound when their seal falls off. You could even just add AW and HoW onto the castrandom for additional lazy hilarity.

As said, it's not something I intend to do, just covering some theorycrafting ground on something that was not fully explored yet.


Regarding the damage per cast breakdown, can you also add where JoB and JoC stand in the same gearset/conditions you used for the other abilities.

As far as "alternatives to SOB on gimmick fights" go, how does Seal of Vengeance measure up? I acknowledge that it doesn't scale with haste, but 10 expertise from the Glyph seems like quite a lot

I tried castrandom with DS, CS and JoL, it worked well (other than the game saying you can't do that yet). I lost maybe 200 dps by not doing it manually.

SoV got its damage nerfed by alot, it is only good for Prot when they have lots of bad guys in front of them, since Hammer will put a DoT on each.

Wouldn't the /castsequence work instead?

Especially if you have a set rotation that your following anyway, that eventually repeats. It may suffer from some DPS loss as well, but you control what abilities happen when you want them.

May have to re-seal manually though. Planning a 120second rotation for a macro doesn't seem like fun.

I found that my rotation didn't repeat even when I extended it out to 90 seconds of combat time. That would be one hell of a long castsequence macro. I am sure you could just change things a bit to shorten it, but I think the better option is to just hit your buttons manually.

/castsequence Divine Storm, Crusader Strike, Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, Judgement, Crusader Strike

It is definitely less dps than a perfect FCFS rotation, but not by a whole lot. (Just map out the rotations in Excel, you'll see that FCFS is a bit more compact.) It's quite possible that for most people, loss of DPS due to player error during the FCFS rotation will be higher than the loss of DPS due to the macro rotation.

Yeah, it's not the only button you hit. But you can see where the free GCDs are, and fit in extra abilities like Consecration and Exorcism there as needed.

Was it just one time you tried that? Just by nature of "random" it seems you may lose 200dps this time but maybe gain 200dps another time, or break even another time. The longer the fight or encounter goes, and how much movement there is could make a difference too with how effective a /castrandom macro would be.

Also when it says, "you can't do that yet", is it stopping at that point and have to press the macro again? Or does it try another ability automatically?

If FCFS is optimum, then it seems the point of /castrandom would be to spam that fast as possible so that it catches the next ability off cooldown instantly making it truly FCFS, possibly even binding it to your scrollwheel like hunters do with their macro. /castrandom I would agree isn't a very skillful way of playing, but if FCFS is optimum it has a couple of benefits:

1. Its possible /castrandom could optimize your dps.
2. If FCFS is the approach, then you are really playing "whack-a-mole" with abilities coming off CD, and /castrandom then would let you focus on other things during the course of the encounter.

There's quite a few abilities to consider during the course of a boss encounter now, especially demon:

Judgement of Light/Wisdom
Divine Storm
Crusader Strike
Consecration
Exorcism
Holy Wrath even if you had the mana, being that its instant cast and could spare the GCD?
Hammer of Wrath

Other than DPS rotation
Reseal
Maybe hand of Salv
AW + Trinket + Pot + drums, etc.

My point being I guess, is that with such a multitude of abilities to consider (which is fun btw), it might be worth looking into more having or using a /castrandom macro for encounters that it made sense on. Which encounters those are, I suppose would take some testing and experimenting out on.

I put the /castrandom macro as a mouse wheel keybind. I assume I lost dps because I didn't continuously scroll the wheel (hearing I can't do that yet was annoying and I don't recall which mod I have that removes that).


The macro does seem like it could be useful if you needed extra time to focus on positioning and using Hand spells and you were good about continuously scrolling the wheel. However, I felt "dirty" using it, since the macro was doing all the thinking.

That isn't how it works. Actually hitting your buttons in a FCFS rotation prioritizing Judgement because it is the highest damage ability is the highest dps rotation. Castrandom macros cannot be better unless you really can't spare the time to look at your cooldowns and you need to focus on other things. I suppose that having all your abilities on normal keybindings and a castrandom on your mousewheel could be good because at that point you can just use the castrandom whenever you are moving about or things are crazy and you aren't able to manually hit your abilities.

When I was testing castrandom I found there was a distinct delay in my abilities going off even when hitting the macro as fast as possible. I don't know if it is possible to hit it so quickly that this goes away or if the game has a speed limitation that would prevent it.

Why do you use /castrandom as opposed to
/cast Divine Storm
/cast Judgment
/cast Crusader Strike
with error suppression. If the first thing is on CD it'll go to the next. There's some implied priority but so what, if they're all equal priority from a DPS standpoint then it doesn't matter. Probably should put judgment first because of mana return then go down on decreasing CD.

Unless something changed on beta, and I suspect that is not the case, that macro would not work. It would properly cast Divine Storm then do nothing until Divine Storm was off cooldown.