On other news, 3.03 brings Ret aura from 2% damage to 3%, which is the same as the hunter's ability.

Slight correction. Since 3.0, Judgements can miss, but the Judgement of X debuff will be applied whether you miss or not.

On our first night of raids post 3.0 I decided to try out Seal of Command for the heck of it since what I had read up to the point was only a 1% theoretical difference. Was using the glyph as well for command. I should have stuck with Seal of Blood!

I've been analyzing both my log and the current high dps pally on Brutallus according to wowmeteronline. Of course Smirk's DPS was much higher but I wanted to see exactly where it was higher. There a few things of course I could have done better, besides not comparing gear wise. But there are surprisingly some similarities (maybe due to a difference in consumables)? Our base melee attack damage was roughly the same, our ratio of judgments and crusader strikes to melee attacks were roughly the same. Keeping in mind the melee attack damage numbers, Smirk had much higher damage from Seal/Judgement of Blood relative to my Seal/Judgement of Command. This is where I was surprised given that there was only supposed to be a 1% difference

Seal of Blood is proc'ing off of auto attack melee, judgement, crusader strike, and divine storm. Whereas Command is a ppm proc. It appears that either I had a bad day at the casino (pun intended) or seal of blood's coefficient combined with the proc mechanics are just quite a bit better (at least for a non-stunned target).

I would have had 155 procs of Seal of Blood Damage instead of 58 procs of Seal of Command had I used seal of Blood.

So Seal of Blood is supposed to be .28 of weapon damage, Command is .56. Command is 2x greater than blood, but blood is hitting 3x as often for me. Seal of Blood in my case would have been 50% better damage. That almost exactly correlates between my log and Smirk's log given our base melee damage are similar. Smirk's seal of Blood damage is 113,350 where as my seal of Command damage is 99,130. Smirk downed Brut in 155 sec, Me in 199 sec. which is about at 75% ratio. If you extrapolate out Smirk's damage to my dps time, Smirk's seal of blood damage would have been 149,381 (113350/.75). That is right on the money 50% better than my seal of command damage (99,130).

Furthermore, Judging Blood has a coefficient of .45 whereas Command has a coefficient of .30, everything else been same for calculating the judgement damage. If you compare mine and Smirk's damage from Judgements, Smirk had a slightly lower ratio of Judgements than I did (24% vs 26%) but Smirk had a higher crit rate (78% vs 70%). So its somewhat similar. But Smirk equaled my judgement damage in 75% less time (remember our base melee damage is really similar).

So bottom line to me is seal of blood clearly wins out.

Here are the two logs:
Pereg
Smirk

Pereg, your damage was really inferior to him overall. Smirk vastly outgears you (+240ap, +9%crit, +15 expertise, +8% more haste,he's got Apolyon, you've got the badge axe).

I don't think comparing the two seals based on different characters makes sense. Try going to Brutallus next time and using SoB, then post the logs. That'd be a much fairer comparison.

Also were you having a lot of lag? I posted 3000dps on Brutallus but the lag was atrocious (2000ms) and without it I'm certain I could've pushed 3400 (I also forgot to use demonslaying like a genius). This was using Seal of Command, glyph for soc/judgement, and of course the badge joc libram.

I know Smirk outgears me by quite a lot, but I'm just looking at base melee damage we both did. Its the same per hit. So maybe my consumables brought me up AP wise to be comparable in weapon damage. Our crusader strikes are also basically the same per hit. In fact I had a higher avg crusader strike and max crusader strike per hit (non-crit). Same with my Divine Storm. I had a higher non crit max and avg Divine Storm.

Since weapon damage is what Seal/Judgement of Blood and Command are based on, that is where I thought it was a reasonable comparison of Seal of Blood vs Seal of Command only. Now overall of course Smirk had a lot higher dps. But it got me thinking what if used Seal of Blood instead? I'm reckoning, based on what I found and compared, I would have been in the neighborhood of 200-300dps higher just with seal of blood.

So the fact stands though I would have proc'd seal of blood 3x as much as seal of command and my judgements would have been higher had I been using seal of blood.

I'll definitely use SoB next time and update my post with the log.

Edit: can't compare lag times of course, but I usually run anywhere between 100ms and 225ms.

OK I see what you're saying about lag, where lag may affect your instants that proc SoB to lag. That's something to consider then. I'll make a note of my lag next time.

I more mean cooldowns would all get messed up because of lag, not able to keep my rotation very tight because...well, 2000ms.

Just wanted to say thanks for the work on rawr.

Ok so I've been playing around with Rawr for a couple hours now, and I've compiled a list of things that seem weird and/or possibly incorrect to me. Hopefully this can be of some help with getting to the bottom of differences between Rawr and calculations from various spreadsheets. With the particular gear I have input at the moment (T6 level raid gear, 7.8% hit, self-buffed, 6 min fight against level 73 boss with 7700 armor):

Checking the buff box for Ferocious Inspiration adds 4.3% damage to JoB instead of 3% like all other damage.

Checking the buff box for Sanctified Retribution adds 0.8% damage to JoB and Nothing to SoB, instead of 2% like other damage.

Checking the talent for Sanctified Retribution (without having the Sanct Ret buff box checked) adds 10% damage to SoB and JoB, but nothing to White, CS or DS. Looks like it is still coded as Sanctity Aura?

Checking the talents for 2/2 Imp Ret Aura adds 2% damage to White, SoB, CS, DS and 2.9% to JoB. Shouldn't add any DPS to anything?

Checking the talents for 3/3 Heart of the Crusader does not add damage to anything, and it isn't listed as a buff box to check (neither are any other 3% crit buffs provided by other classes).

Is Windfury missing as a buff or am I blind?

3/3 Vengeance adds 12.9% damage to JoB instead of 9% like all other damage.

3/3 Imp 2H spec adds 2.43% damage to JoB. Shouldn't this either be 6% like all other damage, or else 0% if Judgements do not count as "damage done with a 2H"?

5/5 Righteous Vengeance adds 0% damage to White, SoB and CS, 5.6% to JoB and 13.6% to DS. 2/2 Art of War adds nothing to White and SoB, 5.6% to CS, 4.5% to JoB, and 10.7% to DS. White and SoB are obviously correct. CS seems reasonable but I don't really know. There's no way that DS can benefit more from AoW/RV than JoB, when JoB has a 25% higher crit rate. My gut feeling is that the values for JoB seem too low and DS seems way too high.

With the current gear I have input, I am at 7.8% hit and expertise capped. If I check the buff for 20 hit food (making me hit capped), I gain 1.4% SoB damage, 0.82% CS damage, 0.76% DS damage, and nothing from white damage or JoB. JoB is correct, it cannot miss (by the way since there was some confusion about this, I just tested this in game to make sure). White damage is definitely wrong, as it can definitely miss. SoB seems like it is probably correct, but I don't see how CS/DS can be so low.

On another note, while I was testing on level 70 target dummies to verify whether SoB and JoB can miss (conclusion: SoB can miss/dodge/parry, JoB cannot), I saw miss rates for White, SoB, CS, DS of 1-2% even though I had no hit gear at all. Now my sample sizes were fairly small, but each type of attack had at least over 100 strikes (so a total of over 1000 attacks between all attacks that can miss), and they were consistently under 2% miss rates for each type of attack. Shouldn't I have been missing ~5% of the time against a level 70 targets? Is there something different/bugged about target dummies? Did I miss an announcement about Precision being "baked in" for Paladins when they removed the talent? Something else?


Actually from what I can tell testing it out just now, the exact opposite is true. With over 200 Judgements of Light cast (with Seal of the Martyr up), the damage portion of Judgement of Martyr never missed, was never dodged and was never parried. However, the debuff Judgement of Light was resisted several times.

For example, here is a screenshot of the combat log with my back to the target dummy casting JoL each time it came up:

ImageShack - Hosting :: jolresistwb8.jpg

This makes sense. Think about it this way: Say str is worth 1.5 dps, hit is worth .75 dps and crit is worth .5 dps.

A 5 str/5 crit gem is now worth 10 dps. A 10 hit gem is worth 7.5 dps. So even though hit is better than crit, a gem with hit in it may be worse if the str on the crit gem is good enough.

These numbers are in fact very close to the numbers my spreadsheet produced for level 80 gearing. I don't know that they are correct for 70, but it certainly explains what you are seeing without suggesting crit > hit. I am quite certain that hit is in fact much better than crit especially once consecration is factored in.

Edit: I have done some working with Rawr 2.02, and found the same things as above. It has some really buggy implementation of the talents right now.

My guild has been doing the Horde faction bosses today which are supposedly level 83 boss mobs now.

We had 3 ret paladins in the raid, all under significantly under the hit cap (I only had 77 rating = 4.88%, I was wearing my PvP gear).

Going over a 20 min log, there were only Judgement hits and crits, no misses for any of us, so this is definitely correct.

I'm a little perplexed then, because I have absolutely seen Judgement misses in my combat logs. I didn't think to record them because I assumed it was working normally. I would happily swear by anything anyone wanted me to that I have seen Judgement of Command misses in PvP. Could this be an artifact of spell or ranged miss talents on people, such as Divine Purpose?

Judgement of Command could miss. Judgment of Light, Judgment of Wisdom, Judgment of Justice could not miss. Judgment of Command has been removed from the game, the remaining judgment spells are incapable of missing.

Yes, I understand that. I guess I should have said that I would swear that I have seen misses when Judging Command with JoL and JoJ in PvP.

The patch notes claim that they are treated as ranged attacks. Now the question is, what's the needed hit for ranged yellow attacks? Is it like melee where yellow have a lower hit cap than whites? That would explain why people are not seeing misses.

That or the patch notes lie, that could also be possible I guess.

Ranged attacks have the same miss rate as melee attacks. As I said previously, the only difference is that ranged attacks cannot be dodged nor parried.

Ranged attacks can be blocked, but I've never seen one happen in all my time tanking. It's possible that this is due to Judgements being Holy damage instead of physical, but as I'm able to block elemental melee attacks (such as Vexallus' Arcane melee), its possible that non-physical ranged attacks are still unblockable and the change only applies to non-physical melee attacks.

True elemental melee attacks cannot be blocked though, and they ignore armour.

Obviously stuff is changing and will continue to change, but, now with the change to Divine Storm, is Crusader Strike the way to go? Should we try spamming Judgement & CS while filling in DS when we can? (This is all assuming you're on a boss fight, as in any AOE, DS is obviously the way to go.)

The FCFS way to do it has worked so far for me, just if multiple things are up, Judgement should be the one cast first. Even on demon/undead mobs you can juggle all the different GCD's and CD's without clipping things too much.

As for the earlier discussion in watching Cooldowns, I find PolMonitor to be a really excellent way. I just set it above my swing timer, the buttons fade out when they are unavailable or the GCD is in use but the pie chart and the cooldown numbers make it easy to see which will come up first/second, etc. It makes it incredibly easy to keep on top of your cooldowns and use them wisely.


And because I don't think I've said cooldowns enough in this post: cooldowns cooldowns cooldowns cooldowns cooldowns cooldowns cooooollddooowwwns okay I'm done.

Boo hate patches, make me impatient.

Anyways these stat changes have thrown me on my butt in taking into consideration what badge legs i want.

On one hand we got the Blood thirst Leg plates. Crap ton of strength making it extremely dps enhancing now that STR is worth nearly 40-50% more per point then other stats. Total 76 STR after gems BUT item level 128

Then we got the Legplates of Unending Fury 72 STR after gems BUT item level 141. However it has haste in its item budget which im hearing is not worth as much anymore.

Before the patch the Unending Fury would've been fairly obvious badge legs choice.

So its quite the pickle. Hopefully we'll have an awesome Rawrness set up on tuesday with the patch.

Does rawr account for spell GCD reduction from haste? Would this be a significant factor? More than half of our attacks are spells, and with more useful abilities rotations are getting much tighter. I'd think haste would be even more valuable on undead mobs, but I'm not a theorycrafting pro so I could be way off.