Hylo

Some relevant GC post that I haven't seen here yet.
We already knew this is a bug.
It's a good thing they acknowledge this and might adjust things to be more "fair". Comparing us to Enhancement shamans mana-wise just doesn't cut it though - they have loads of int in their gear (+53int in T7.5 helm alone).
Again, something we knew was "under consideration". While Blizzard may not be happy with relative power of various mana drains, it seems that they are ready to embrace the percentage approach (yay!)

 

Redcape

This depends hugely on whether HoW and Judgement count as spells. My feeling is that they do not, specifically because of the DMC:Crusade. I would bet that the only spell that triggers this is Exorcism, which at 15 sec cooldown and 40% crit rate (which is what it will have, trust me) you are waiting 160 seconds for a proc after the internal cooldown. That would give you roughly 26 dps if you funneled that extra mana into Consecrate. 26 dps isn't nothing, but you would be far better off just getting a pure AP trinket instead.

Using the numbers on my spreadsheet the pvp libram is nearly twice as good as the pve one. AP is a huge stat for us, there isn't any doubt.

 

Amphi

Yea i thought so, but somehow i failed to compare them in your spreadsheet. Well thanks anyway for doing the job for me

What I also find very interesting, is that (even though i mentioned it before), [Madness of the Betrayer] still procs of EVERY judgement, regardless of seal type and judgement type. That means you're actually wearing a 5,67% armor penetration (at level 70 atleast) in addition to the other stats, as you will be able to keep the proc up at all times.

Guessing there wont be many trinkets even at level 80 that can match this one, atleast until you have raided for a while?

 

Iolanta

Tested many variations found on many sites and finally made dps cycle like that.

x[number] means breakdown. here you can use 1 ability which triggers gcd(Exorcism, Holy Wrath, Avenging Wrath, Hammer of Wrath, etc)
for example on boss demon x1 = Exorcism, x2 = Holy Wrath, x3 = Exorcism + Avenging Wrath(each 2 mins).

What do you think about it? Let me know if there is better cycle exists


UPD. Judg befor CS always to trigger [Libram of Avengement]
UPD2. [Glyph of Consecration] used

 

Njoror

Just out of curiosity, with all of the discussion about JotW and our mana pool being small and not scaling up very well, combined with other people not being happy about our seeming lack of utility relating back to our mana pool being so small would it be a sensible option to make art of war not only give the instant FoL but to also make the FoL free in the same vein as frost mage brain freeze giving a free and instant fire spell?

I don't think we would use it as much as we could but in those raid situations where lots of aoe damage is going out we could take advantage of our "utility" a bit more and in pvp it would help to conserve the precious little mana we have while at the same time giving us utility in those warrior/ret 2v's.

Just curious if it had been discussed or is even viable.

 

Anauel

I understand you may have researched this for a while, but I think we had already concluded that a FCFS rotation with a priority system is the highest amount of dps. Unless you want to memorize that long chain of abilities (in order) then you're better off by just hitting whatever is not on cooldown and following the priority list in a cooldown clash.

 

darf

Just curious, what would you choose when both CS and DS are available?

 

◊ Lord BEEF

If they wanted you to have more mana, they wouldn't have reduced judgment of the wise by as much as they did. Suggestions on ways they can give you more mana aren't productive.

The whole point of the nerf is to create an opportunity cost for healing, using consecration, etc. If you eliminate those you might as well undo the nerf, which isn't going to happen.

 

• Zurm

Against a single target, CS hits harder. Against more than one, you'd pick DS.

 

Njoror

I took the nerf as a way to decrease dps because that is what blizzard it saying is to high. I feel that losing our ability to heal (one of our utility abilities) is an unfortunate side affect of the nerf, and possibly even unintended as I have seen nothing from Blizzard saying less healing from ret is what they wanted. But my point was that I have seen posts that argue for JotW to be increased to somewhere around 25% because 15% is to low. We know that if that happened people would use the extra mana to work in more spells to their dps rotation (consecrate) which I think is what Blizzard does not want. I have seen other posts where people say due to the nerf we are losing utility and viability so I was trying to think of a way in which we could keep our utility without it being able to be manipulated into increased dps...if the FoL is free you don't gain mana that would allow you to consecrate, because I don't think most of us are using the free FoL's anyway on each cd opportunity, but would not lose needed mana from you standard mana pool for your critical rotation spells.

Either way I apologize for the post not being helpful. I glean a lot of information from these forums whether it be for rawr, rotations, gear, or spec and I do not get to contribute nearly as much as I take. I do not have the passion for mathematics that I can only assume many of you have, my degree is in Social Studies education. Fancy spread sheets are over my head and I couldn't create a program similar to rawr if the fate of the free world depended on it. If I am going to contribute it will have to be through ideas. However, I understand that that particular thread was probably better suited for the WoW forums.

 

JettJaguar

I didn't test HoW specifically, but I did try Judgement when I got a similar trinket (in the mid 70s) and Judgement does not trigger "on spell crit" effects.

 

Kyne

Bingo. Everyone has their "great fix" for Paladin mana regeneration, but there's a fundamental truth that some of you guys posting need to staple to your fucking forehead:

1) It's been made crystal clear that the intended Paladin DPS Rotation should consist primarily of Judgment, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm since we are supposed to be able to be able to maintain this 3 ability cycle "almost indefinitely". According to a couple of Ghostcrawler posts, using any extra abilities such as Consecration, Exorcism, and Hammer of Wrath should have our mana bar "dip" as a result. (Example:WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Question: Why do we need to care about mana?)

2) Mana figures on live are really fucked beyond all recognition while Judgment of Wisdom is broken. Your mana regeneration as it is right now will never be the same come patch, so trying to say you're "fine" on mana, or linking WWS parses showing the same ~60% of your mana return coming solely from Judgment of Wisdom means absolutely nothing because that's how it is for everybody, and it's going to change a lot faster than you think.

After the fixes to Judgment of Wisdom's mana return is reduced to 1%, after Judgment of Wisdom stops stacking like it does on live, after they reduce the proc rate, this is the cycle that you're going to be balanced around. You may still have loads on mana on live, but guess what Jack? If you still have an infinite mana bar, you won't starting ridiculously soon, and your mana bar is going to adhere to this model until Blizzard has some kind of a paradigm shift on the Retribution tree.

Mana regeneration is our bigguest issue for PvE DPS, but it doesn't mean anything when we can't validly test it until the game mechanics are fixed now does it?

 

Asheara

Doesn't DS hit harder vs. a single target because of its massive crit multiplier with RV (2.8x)?

DS: WeapDmg * (1 + CritRate * (2.8 - 1)) = WeapDmg * (1 + CritRate*1.8)
CS: (WeapDmg * 1.1) * (1 + CritRate * (2 - 1)) = WeapDmg * (1.1 + CritRate*1.1)

(1 + CritRate*1.8) > (1.1 + CritRate*1.1) for CritRate > 1/7

They get the same benefit/penalty from proccing seals/armor, so on average DS hits harder than CS if your crit is more than 14%, or am I missing something?

 

Anauel

While this is indeed true, the complete list of fixes isn't really known. We know that JoW stacking isn't going to work and that it's getting a 50% reduction in effect (or so I read), but the fact that GC acknowledged that we're not getting enough from it is still reason to think that they're going to change it.

And even if they don't fix it, GC specifically said that you should be fine using Consecrate as long as you spam Divine Plea.

EDIT:

Factoring in RV into DS, then yes, it should do a lot more damage than CS especially since it rolls. The question would then be: How is the DPS of RV+DS (which is on a 10s cooldown) compared to CS?

And the answer is: still lower.

 

tarja

I would hardly call this "crystal clear" given more recent posts by Ghostcrawler (WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> 15% JOTW leaves Rets With Zero Utility).

I totally agree with the rest of the post that I didn't quote though, we can't really conclude anything about whether JotW is fine at 15% until they decide what they're doing with JoW and then actually implement it (and also decide what they're doing about manaburn PVP issues).

 

Rasputin

I might have been confused in my math, but don't DS and Judgement have an effective 3.08 crit modifier, after RV?

You have 1.1 effective damage from Art of War.
Multiply that by 2 on a crit for 2.2.
Multiply THAT NUMBER by 1.4 to signify that Righteous Vengeance actually works off the critical damage and adds 40% of it, and you get 3.08. 1.1*2*1.4.

It seems like you're forgetting to add in Art of War. As I read it, that talent doesn't increase only standard hits by 10%, but damage done, making it 1.1 on regular hits and 2.2 on crits(when compared to pre-AoW). Am I wrong here?

edit: I'm not sure that changes the relative effectiveness of CS vs DS though, since both benefit from AoW. If you remove that from consideration DS has 280% crits and CS has 200%, making the relative effectiveness of a crit 2.8/2 = 1.4 stronger for DS, as per RV. So while it shouldn't change your conclusion about DS with a given a crit rate outperforming CS, DS and Judgement should be considered as having a 3.08 crit multiplier from their base untalented damage, or 2.8 if you choose to ignore Art of War.

 

Anauel

No, you're right, AoW works that way now. It's identical to the old AoW when critting and a 10% buff on regular hits. This doesn't change the rotation, though. I just did some math on a 5 minute fight, and the damage of CS is way higher than that of DS+RV.

 

Asheara

I was considering (or rather, ignoring) the AoW that's on beta, which doesn't affect the crit multiplier, rather a general damage multiplier to both abilities.

Considering more damage multipliers that affect both CS and DS doesn't affect my comparison.

EDIT: Yes, as Rasputin says below, I think that's the way to look at it. As far as I can tell, nothing else in the game will change this relative effectiveness between CS and DS, except for the odd libram that may need to be taken into consideration.

 

Rasputin

That's true Anauel, but can't you just remove all those confounding factors since they are all multiplicative and they all affect each ability equally? You can just consider RV as the deciding talent because regardless of the multipliers beforehand, it still results in DS and Judgement doing 40% more damage on crits. The absolute numbers will scale up, but the relative power of each ability should remain constant.

As for your results they're not really surprising when I think about it, since even when DS was Holy damage and had the 25% extra crit damage CS still did more DPS due to its lower cooldown.

 

eclipse212

do I understand the CS vs. DS priority discussion right in regards to that once RV is changed to applying a deep wounds-like dot, DS would take priority to ensure dot uptime?

 

Anauel

No, definitely not. CS will always be your priority, even after factoring RV damage to DS. So your rotation remains FCFS with CS > DS in a cooldown clash.

I've corrected my earlier post. Thanks Asheara and Rasputin.

 

Rasputin

I've seen this posted everywhere from the Beta boards to the WoW boards to here, and I'd like to stamp it out.

It is utterly unimportant that you have RV DoT uptime, or that you maintain a rolling stack. Regardless of when you crit or whether you roll multiple crits together into a single DoT, you will always do the same amount of damage, namely an additional 40% of your crit damage. Whether you roll multiple crits together for huge ticks or crit only once every 8 seconds, you will ALWAYS do only 40% additional crit damage on your Judgements and Divine Storm, never more or less.

As an additional note, Judgements continue to not proc Seals in build 9155. The exception is again Command, which will proc Seal of Command from Judgements. No other Seal procs from any of the three judgements.

 

Kyne

Of course, and I agree that it's impossible to know exactly what all the fixes going into place will be, but I wouldn't read too much further into anything GC says beyond that. If we got more mana from Judgment of Wisdom than we do on live we'd be back at infinite mana bars, and since it's been made pretty clear that infinite mana bars are not the design intention outside of the 3 ability cycle that would completely defeat the purpose of the JotW nerf and we'd effectively come full circle.

Fair assertion, but consequently there's other posts that indicate that they're trying to steer away from using Consecrate and other "AoE" spells by finding other ways of compensating a la: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Making sense of the changes, World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Post 9138 build Nax WWS Parse (Ret Fails).

The ham-handedness of GC's posting history doesn't really lend a whole lot of credibility, but Consecration in all likeliness isn't going to be part of a standard rotation, but a mana dump for any "excess" beyond a basic rotation. To what extent though is unfortunately impossible to test in the current iteration of the game.

 

Wrathblood

Has anyone seen a blue post suggesting what the developers intend with regard to seals procing off judgements?

Given the state of affairs, I could just as easily see them intend to have seals NOT proc on judgements (or any instant for that matter) and to have screwed it up, as for them to intend to have seals proc as usual.

On a slightly different note, I agree with the folks who have pointed out the uselessness of testing ret pally PvE mana sustainability. So many things are currently out of whack that its a fruitless endeavor.

However, that raises the question of: why did Blizz release the current bundle of ret changes to live? They're perfectly aware of how dissimilar mana recovery on live is from where it is currently planned to be post expansion, and thus how useless testing would be.

That question has bothered me for a bit, and I think Avitus's answer of "Its just a PR thing" is close but not quite it. Blizz claims Ret pally PvE dps was too high and they need to rebalance, but I think that's a load of crap. If they actually wanted the mountain of PvE testing data releasing a change into live would provide, they would have done it while the mechanics were close enough to correct for the results to be meaningful.

No, I think what they're looking at right now is purely PvP mana and burst testing. Most of the stuff that's broken is stuff that isn't really a big deal in Arenas and especially in BGs. JoW's various issues simply aren't a problem there and Blizz CAN get reasonably useful data with the current state of talents. Plus, they can watch the crowd response, and are probably hoping, as per Avitus, the masses will be appeased that ret isn't a juggernaut anymore, especially now that everyone realizes we can be mana-burned into the ground.

 

JettJaguar

From this post Retribution DPS Theorycraft it seems as though DS would take priority over CS because it is higher damage despite being lower DPS.

EDIT: Or, there should be some theoretical crit % at which DS would overtake CS.