Retribution DPS Theorycraft - Page 266

GSH · 10/27/08, 9:26 PM

That's actually a pretty nice solution, Wrathblood.

I was going to say that there is a more drastic solution: link the cooldowns of Crusader Strike and Consecration. You would get to use one or the other, but not both.

Hylo · 10/27/08, 9:37 PM

Nice solution maybe, but that would cut out any use of the spell in ret build. There are situations where a genuine AoE is wanted or even needed. Making it so costly you can't cast it even while it would be The Most Logical Spell to use is not very intuitive.

djkillingspree · 10/27/08, 9:44 PM

I think simply increasing the cost and damage of it could be the solution. It's basically worthless for PvP, but then in PvE it could be a useful burn spell when you knew a fight was going to be short but not something you'd want to use all the time.

Baldwyn · 10/27/08, 10:04 PM

Just another item on the agenda that doesn't make sense in relation to Ghostcrawlers recent statement regarding the "rotation" they thought we would be using to do 5-10% (~200dps) less dps than a "pure", is the fact they are raising armour levels of level 80 bosses due to hunter dps. Now that CS and DS, part of our apparently staple rotation, are physical attacks plus Auto attack, where does that leave us?
Seriously this is all rushed, knee-jerk, regardless of what they say. We have no ArP on our T7 gear to compensate for this at all, and a set bonus that is for one of our weakest attacks now.
On the mana return debarcle, we may well be able to in a raid using SoB/SoM, in cohesion with the SA glyph mana regeneration improvements keep a reasonable rotation up with consecrate/exorcism/holy wrath, but it'll be a struggle, on top of this it'll be the usual scenario where we are taking damage in close and worrying about far too much to do our job as intended.
In my eyes they are seriously digging themselves deeper and deeper each day that goes by. Trying to find quick answers to problems that are far more wide reaching.

Anauel · 10/27/08, 10:45 PM

Originally Posted by Wrathblood

Double the cost of casting consecrate, make it also heal any friendly units standing within its radius for the same amount it does in damage to enemies (non-stacking, so no piling 10 pallies on top of each other for abuse), and significantly increase the scaling it gets from spell damage. The missing 11 point prot talent can then be "Improved Consecrate" which cuts the cost of consecration by 50%.

Doubling the cost of it and then reducing it as the 11 point prot talent would really solve nothing. Every spec can get it. Hell, the spec that would be hard-pressed to get such talent would be holy. Ret and Prot would be getting it with ease, while Holy would probably have to sacrifice crit talents from Ret.

Cevil · 10/27/08, 10:51 PM

If one has faith in Blizzar—and their speed in responding to our uproar is restoring some for me—the recent news should be seen as quite positive. We now know that the goal for Ret is an infinite cycle of CS/DS/Judge. Whether we are there or not is immaterial, we now know where we need to be. We can test for that, and show whether we are, or aren't. We don't have to test for "OOM in 6 minutes," or "OOM in 7 minutes." We now know our baseline.

What this does it it makes Consecrate a "zerg down" spell. It gives us the ability to "turn it up to 11" so to speak and up our DPS at the high cost of our longevity. If it's a 6 minute fight, perhaps we can afford to use conescration more, and up our representation on the meters. If it's a longer fight, probably not. it gives us the choice of short term gains for long term sacrifices, and the ability to adapt to each situation. This is a good thing.

It's one question out of the way, letting us focus on things like SA mana gains turning into mana dumps via other spells, or how much DPS we can squeeze out of a Divine Plea.

This isn't to say everyhting is fixed, or that there aren't new problems that arise from this, but at least a core question has been answered, and it's solid ground to start from.

flyingtoastr · 10/27/08, 10:55 PM

It's a little less than a "turn it to 11" thing. Even if you're sustaining at 100% from a base rotation Consecration costs 860 mana per cast with 5/5 Bene.

That means even with a full mana pool of 7900 you're still only going to get 9 casts. And given how HoW > Consecration it really is just about safe to say Consecration at the moment is a purely protection spell.

Foxconfessor · 10/27/08, 11:03 PM

From GC:

We design the classes in WoW so that the possibility exists that you make a mistake, that you use the wrong spell at the wrong time. This is one of the things that rewards knowledge of the game and mastery of the class and in return lets players become more skilled at PvE or PvP. It's easy to come up with situations where a rogue or warrior uses the wrong button at the wrong time and very well might pay for that mistake.

I really feel compelled to comment on this. What passes for skill is apparently deciding to use consecration or not deciding to use consecration. That is not skill in my mind. To me skilled is something like twisting blood and command every few attacks with a 3.1 weapon speed pre-3.0. Deciding whether to use consecration or not isn't skill, but instead simply having something dangled in front of your face that you could grab but you won't, because you know the consequences will be dire.

It could be argued that a rotation involving consecration actually involves more skill. The more abilities coming off cooldown that you have to juggle, often within a gcd of each other, the more likely you are to make a mistake and lose dps. Using a three ability rotation of judge, CS, DS things are pretty spaced out, errors are almost impossible. They should be looking at adding more abilities for us to use, not removing the viability of existing ones.

Siawn · 10/27/08, 11:28 PM

Since then, what we're finding is that Ret's dps seems okay on PvE but only if they use a lot of expensive AE spells like Consecration and Holy Wrath even against single targets in long fights (e.g. raid bosses), which in turn causes them to run out of mana too quickly. Players suspect that if they don't use those spells that their dps won't be competitive. That is what we are looking at right now. Buffing Martyr / Blood might be an option since those are more often used in PvE and riskier to use in PvP.

We are going to hotfix the nerfs to Judgement of the Wise (from 33% to 15%) and Seal and Judgement of Command (down 20% damage) to live. We need to start getting more testing on these changes right away to see what they do to Retribution in PvE and PvP. We still intend to lower the damage of other Seals and Judgements (except one - see below), but to hotfix those requires touching a lot more data so we think that change can wait for the 3.0.3 patch on live.

We are also hotfixing the beta to return Seal and Judgement of Blood and the Martyr back up to 95% of where the used to be. Live will just never get the nerf to these abilities at all. Hopefully this will compensate PvE Retadins for relying less on more expensive AE abilities that risk putting them out of mana.

As I posted in one thread, you should be able to use those core abilities (Divine Storm, a Judgement / Seal and Crusader Strike) without going OOM. Some players are finding that to be true, so please let us know if you aren't.

If you do add Consecration or healing, your mana should drop down lower. You're making a choice not to be sustainable in order to do something else.

Divine Plea should help offset that at 80. Some of the Int on your gear should help offset that for now.

So let me get this straight.... They find 11th on meters in Naxx "okay?" Or are there some other parses I'm unaware of that don't make us look quite as feeble? Then they talk about buffing SoB/SoM.... that they just nerfed by 20%. I'm really losing any faith that they have the slightest clue how to balance Ret. It almost seems like they're throwing darts at a board labeled Ret changes.

Now they're going to hotfix the JotW changes to live, specifically because they haven't tested it, so we're literally paying to test content for them. I think the best part of all this is that when all is said and done, they're still nerfing SoB/SoM by 5%, and yet expecting us to maintain our damage without consecration, which is 10% of our damage at present. Add to that the fact that they seem to only want us to be able to hit three buttons without going oom, and I'm not exactly thrilled with where we're headed. Anyone else actually see a light at the end of this tunnel that I'm unable to detect?

Khaelarys · 10/27/08, 11:30 PM

Did you really not see the hotfix coming? I thought it was todays restarts.

Idk · 10/28/08, 12:03 AM

If consecration isn't supposed to be part of our full single target rotation, it seems to make sense to give ret paladins the opportunity to have an offensive instant cast ability (or attack) with no cooldown other than the global cooldown but providing no direct damage. For example, make a stacking debuff on the target that increases holy damage taken by a percentage.. but that only affects the paladin who cast it (much like stormstrike). Make this debuff a magic effect that's dispel-able. Make it do 0 damage so it doesn't break repentance and can't proc seals. Give ret paladins enough mana return from JotW to either keep the debuff up or offer AoW spot healing or use consecrate.. but doing two of these things leads rapidly to being oom. Keep the debuff on a relatively short timer.. like 10 seconds.

The idea here is that..

1. a paladin's damage ramps up as he adds this debuff, but the debuff requires the commitment of maintaining pressure on the target
2. a paladin can't do max damage at the start of a fight limiting their burst value in pvp
3. it creates a rapidly replenish-able magic debuff stack on a target that makes it considerably harder and more expensive to perpetually dispel that friendly target in pvp and makes it much harder for RV procs to be dispelled (assuming they're dispellable)
4. if a paladin takes time to heal their party, they then have to choose between returning to direct damage attacks or keeping the debuff up (making it so they can't just hit their instants on every cooldown when backup healing is in the picture)
5. since it does 0 damage, it gives the paladin more utility with their repentance in pvp.. take the time to put a few debuffs on the target or take time to heal or close the gap
6. if you want to provide more pvp utility, make a talent that improves it by adding a 6% movement speed impediment with each stack (for 30% speed reduction with 5 stacks). Imagine being able to close the gap with repentance and get one or two of these off to drop an opponents movement speed to a point where you can actually keep the slowing effect on them.
7. a paladin can keep a sustainable cycle of single target dps, limited aoe dps, or mediocre dps + spot healing.. but has the choice to burn mana much more rapidly to do multiple things at once.

Yes, I recognize it's basically a holy hybrid of sunder but I do believe it brings some new things to the table in both pvp and pve that support the undervalued side of the class and dampens the overpowered aspects of the class. On top of this, I'm sure all the mechanics already exist to create something like this so implementation (it would seem) would be relatively easy.

I suppose you could also just change it so that it's like lacerate.. a stacking, holy dot that doesn't break repentance.. but that'd be an awful lot like seal of vengeance.

Continuing on.. I think you could place this talent in the same spot that crusader strike sits. Give crusader strike to all paladins. Give crusader strike a special effect based on what seal you're using. This is an opportunity to give additional utility or dps viability to prot and holy paladins (by affecting the seals that they use) without giving additional power to ret paladins since they use a different set of seals (ideally they would, at least).

---

I feel like there are some very creative ways to solve these problems while making the ret spec more interactive. I agree completely that using or not using consecrate/exorcism/holy wrath hardly counts as "skill".

• frmorrison · 10/28/08, 1:24 AM

Originally Posted by Khaelarys

Did you really not see the hotfix coming? I thought it was todays restarts.

MG hasn't had the hotfix to Seal of Command and JotW yet. It is certainly coming though.

I wonder if GC if going to fix/or did fix SoB not procing off Judgement? I tested on Beta this evening and it still was not doing it.

Foxconfessor · 10/28/08, 2:54 AM

So, we're told that the int on our gear will, via replenishment, make up for the lack of divine plea at 70 after the hotfix goes live. Currently I have T6 chest (31 int) plus 14 to all stats worth of enchants. So that's 45 int, granting me a whopping 8.5mp5. Now things really have reached surreal levels.

Cevil · 10/28/08, 3:01 AM

Hotfix went live for me. First thing I'm noticing is that the only thing keeping me from dropping Seal of Command completely from my spec, is the Seal of the Martyr Judgement damage to myself makes it a bit risky to use.

3 stack of Vengeance up:

Judgement of Command Crits: ~2000.

Judgement of the Martyr Crits: ~3200.

Those numbers will go down once all the crit bonus is gone, but Judgement of Command doesn't even seem worth it anymore. That's all I got right now, I'm going to try some naked rotations.

Prinsesa · 10/28/08, 3:05 AM

Cevil, is Seal of the Martyr proccing from Judgements or not? It would seem like a significant shot in the arm if this bug went unfixed and they're basing DPS assumptions off of it (as I suspect happened with Judgement of Wisdom).

Cevil · 10/28/08, 3:07 AM

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

Cevil, is Seal of the Martyr proccing from Judgements or not? It would seem like a significant shot in the arm if this bug went unfixed and they're basing DPS assumptions off of it (as I suspect happened with Judgement of Wisdom).

Yes, it is. However, I never knew this, but Seal of the Martyr crits are not triggering a Vengeance stack.

Again, confirmed, Judgement of the Martyr using all three judgements is proccing Seal of the Martyr.

Cevil · 10/28/08, 3:11 AM

4 minutes of Judging Command now, not one proc of Seal of Command on the Judgement. This is back turned judging on a target dummy, naked, with the 20% SoC glyph. Not one proc.

Rasputin · 10/28/08, 3:12 AM

Well that's just amusing. Did they mean to prevent SoC from proccing off Judgements to reduce our burst even further, but somehow inverted it so only SoC procced while no others did, then got it right before they hotfixed it live?

edit: Oh one thing Cevil, are you sure you were in melee range? Even with your back turned SoC was unique in that it needed you to be in melee range to trigger off a Judgement.

Taraxuss · 10/28/08, 3:15 AM

The biggest problem I have so far is that GC compared our use of Consecrate to a mage's use of Arcane Explosion for DPS on a boss. The problem I see with that comparison is that mages have other, more efficient, both damage and mana-wise, single-target spells, that have no cooldown (IE can be casted back-to-back, as long as they have mana). Paladins have no such button. We use Consecrate because we're filling GCDs in order to maximize our damage. Again, I'm with the rest of you as to how they're going to make our damage comparable in PvE, without making our burst in PvP absolutely rediculous, without giving us the mana to either consecrate or to perform some other DPS-boosting action. I don't understand the rationale behind the nerf of JotW, seeing as how that extra percentage didn't do much to boost our DPS in PvE environments (aside from Consecrate), and it was what would fuel our utility in PvP, while keeping us from being negated so effectively by mana burns / drains.

Cevil · 10/28/08, 3:18 AM

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Well that's just amusing. Did they mean to prevent SoC from proccing off Judgements to reduce our burst even further, but somehow inverted it so only SoC procced while no others did, then got it right before they hotfixed it live?

edit: Oh one thing Cevil, are you sure you were in melee range? Even with your back turned SoC was unique in that it needed you to be in melee range to trigger off a Judgement.

That did it, I was not in melee range. Thank you for pointing that out.

As far as a naked DPS cycle, it would appear I can keep an infinite cycle of CS/DS/Judge going if I use JoW. With JoL, it is a net negative cycle, but I'm so focused on watching my mana I'm probably not doing a proper cycle.

JoW = net neutral to net positive.

JoL = net negative.

I'll start doing times.

Using Judgement of Light, Seal of Command, and only using CS/DS/Judge, as a naked level 70 Ret Paladin, I went from 100% mana to OOM using a somewhat amateur rotation prioritizing Judgement over all else in 3 mintes, 9 seconds.

Judgement of Wisdom appears to be unlimited mana only using CS/DS/Judge.

I am not testing for DPS numbers, simply longevity here.

◊ Turik · 10/28/08, 3:50 AM

Just did 2v2 with a disc priest on beta... and I had no mana to do anything but rejudge. Whenever the hunter remembered to viper sting me, I was out and had to sit and wait for the 5 second rule to kick in, and judge a nearby target. I've been very patient about the changes, but the mana was just way too hard.

Cynar · 10/28/08, 4:31 AM

Hello, first time poster here, but I've been reading this thread and the WotLK Paladin discussion thread for a while now, but thought I'd chime in with results similar to Cevil's.

Geared in mostly Badge/ZA gear, only buffed with Might and Ret Aura, I used Seal of Light, Judgement of Light, and just the basic rotation of Judge > CS > DS, and ran OOM in 5m22s, with 770.8DPS.

Changing to Seal of Blood, still using Judgement of Light and the same basic rotation, I ran OOM at basically the same time 5m19s with 1080.3DPS.

I could change to JoWisdom, but then I would kill myself on Blood, lacking Seal of Command.

Breakdown of Seal of Blood follows:
Count:184
Hit:95
Crit:61
Parry:20
Dodge:8

33 Judgement of Blood, it also never missed, nor were there any dodges/parry
97 Melee, 11 were split between dodge/parry/glancing.
43 Crusader Strikes, 5 were split between dodge/parry.
28 Divine Storm, 5 were split between dodge/parry.

ginerashon · 10/28/08, 4:49 AM

Tested a bit on dummies, and I wanted to test spamming exorcism and HW, but i can't use exorcism on dummies

Command is terrible, pointless to get etc...For PVE raiding it's seal of blood/martyr all the way now, it's like proccing the seal when you judge too so it's just that much better.

As far as mana goes, with someone healing me I don't think raid buffed with wisdom and all that ---that I would actually go oom. I was spamming everything except exorcism too.

I'll post tomorrow when i do sunwell all the way through!---Pray for us!

Cynar · 10/28/08, 5:13 AM

I bit the bullet and respecced for Command, to test it out, my numbers follow:

Time to OOM was 8m53s, not sure what was so different about my rotation this time, I thought I was hitting Judgement at roughly the same time, but maybe I clipped CS/DS harsher.

DPS averaged out to 1033.6DPS at the end, it started off strong ~1500DPS and dropped to ~950 then decided to average on the last 2 or so minutes around ~1020.

Breakdown:
162 Melee 23 split glancing/dodge/parry
128 Seal of Command, 10 split dodge/parry
61 Judgemnt of Command, no dodge/parry/miss
67 Crusader Strike, 4 split dodge/parry
46 Divine Storm, 7 split Dodge/parry

I only have 88 Hit Rating, which I guess is roughly enough to not see any misses from the 70 training dummies.

----

All in all, I can see that mana won't be the biggest issue Ret will face while raiding, it will be boredom, again, I was falling asleep watching judgements coolwodn, and a couple times I found myself so focused on it that I forgot to watch my Seal's cooldown, so it actually fell off a couple times.

Xequecal · 10/28/08, 5:27 AM

Uhm, if Seal of Blood/Martyr are not nerfed, isn't this a substantial DPS buff? You probably can't see it on live right now, because RV and Art of War are still in their old forms, but surely with the new versions it's a major buff. If you use Seal of Blood, you take no Seal/Judgment damage nerf, your Judgment/Divine Storm crits do 280% damage instead of 225%, and you get +5/10% damage on DS/CS/Judgment instead of +10/20% crit damage, another buff.

The only places where you lose DPS are switching HoW from 35% to 20%, and not being able to use Glyph of Seal of Command anymore. Vanilla SoComm is less DPS than Blood anyway, it required the glyph to push it ahead.