12CritR > 12 agi as far as crit goes. So from that point of view it is better. 3% crit damage > 24 ap so we have a clear winner. Anyone else want to play with a spreadsheet first?

Arthaal: this was on live. Some cases I was doing more then 100 dps over SoC. I'm going to run with SoMartyr tonight on Illidan and see how it does.

ya your right if it didnt have the 3% crit damage it'd be better, just made me realize i need to regem

I'm having a hard time remembering what changes went live and which ones were limited to the BETA or relegated to the next patch (3.03). After the SoC changes however I'm almost positive that SoB should be superior DPS... The pushback still scares me however.

The RED is vastly superior in every situation, and always has been.

I'd have preferred to keep the current Forbearance and have some system whereby casting one cancels the other (eg cast Divine Shield & cancel AW, or cast AW & cancel Divine Shield). You'll never get them both up at once, but you can still bubble up in an emergency.
Mind you I also think that Divine Shield reducing damage done by 50% (instead of increasing swing timers) would make better sense too, what with all our instant attacks: I'd be surprised to see many properly geared opponents in PvP dying when we're doing 50% less damage (and no AW up). These two changes would also let them undo the Sanctified Wrath nerf as well.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - ?'s most Paladins are wanting answers to.

Indicates that the current solution to AW/Bubble is not a permanent change if a better solution is found.

Here's hoping for a change to the bubble drawback.

I actually really like this idea at first glance. I agree with the nerf, I've been saying it since 3.0 to my buddies that being able to pop wings and bubble at the same time is ridiculously overpowered. Divine Shield is absolutely a defensive mechanic, I think a penalty to damage while under DS could bring balance to the offensive/defensive intentions of a player in a given situation. How much is debatable at this point, but definitively 20%+ so that if a player does used AW/DS as the same time, they gain no benefit to their damage and have made the decision to become defensive.

Time will tell, but I hope something like this is considered. The most important question to solve first though is how can a solution like this be overpowered in a given situation?

Seal/Judgement of Blood has always damaged you through Bubble (this is a response to a earlier post).


I still think Bubble/50% Bubble/Wings should have shared cooldowns so they cannot be stacked, but bubble/50% bubble/HoP should cause the debuff, and bubbles should reduce damage done by 50%. This would require a patch.

I'd like a small clarification here: When Blizzard said that they would leave SOB unnerfed (I believe the exact wording was "95% of where they used to be"), which original value are they talking about?

IIRC, pre-3.0 SOB was 35% of weapon damage, then it got lowered to 28% of weapon damage on 3.0 live, then further lowered to 22% on build 9095. As I understand it, SOB is going to remain as 28% and the 22% figure will never see light of day on live, yes?

EDIT: Or rather, SOB is going end up as 26.6% of weapon damage, which is 95% of 28%.

Can anyone help with a pretty good rotation for Raids/PvP? Im kinda stuck.

This is exactly it. Whatever solution they pick, I want to be able to use bubble in an emergency. Any solution that locks you out of using bubble for extended time "after" AW has been used is inherently flawed.

I understand at some point the idea was to trade off defensive measures for offensive power, however keeping a penalty "after" AW has been used and expired for a long (1 - 2 min) time just makes AW too cumbersome/risky to use in too many situations.



Regarding that "reduce damage done by 50% while Divine Shield is up" suggestion that's being thrown around here:

I can't believe I'm the only one who's going to come out and say this, but I strongly disagree here. I understand the need for balance, but for over 3 years I've used bubble as an offensive move much more often than a defensive move.

One of the core weaknesses of Ret is how vulnerable it is to fear/stun. Bubble gives us the functionality for 12 seconds every 5 minutes to ignore all such effects while you try to burn a target down in arena and in return you sacrifice having your bubble cooldown when you need it defensively.

As a matter of fact, speaking of pre-3.0 (before AW + Divine Shield which *is* imbalanced I admit and before having Divine Storm), I've probably used Divine Shield a hell of a lot more often than Avenging Wrath in PvP/Arena as an "offensive" tool.

It's the same functionality (more or less as): CloS/Evasion for Rogues, previously Death Wish for Warriors (they still have zerker rage which can be up a 3rd of the time), going big red and angry for Hunters (The Beast Within) and [Lichborne] which is what DKs are getting. Not for the defensive purposes, but as a long cooldown ability to allow you to avoid CC and put more pressure/kill your opponent.


Reducing damage done by 50% would make Divine Shield as an "offensive" tool almost worthless and would fundamentally change a key aspect of how Ret is played.

Now understand this: With the inclusion of a 3rd instant (Divine Storm) things probably need some tuning, but completely axing (50%) damage output while shield is up would kill a playstyle that has existed since ret was made and one that has always made sense: Sacrifice a defensive cooldown for offense.

My suggestions to balance would be (besides AW/Divine Shield being mutually exclusive):

-Unable to cast Divine Storm while Divine Shield is up, but damage output still remains 100% (with swing speed reduction as always): This would put us where we've always been pre- 3.0. You can still use DS offensively where it counts.

Or another idea and this is the one I'm leaning to would be to: Implement the 50% damage output reduction to Divine Shield that many are suggesting, but add fear/stun/cc immunity to Divine Protection. We wouldn't be immune to damage, but you would still have an offensive cooldown (at the expense of a defensive cooldown since you'd get forbearance and couldn't bubble for a while). Or straight out give us an ability like [Lichborne] (or CloS/Evasion, Berserker Rage, Beast Within) in return.

When using Divine Shield offensively I honestly couldn't care less most of the time if I still took 100% damage (and I'm guessing this complete immunity to damage while wailing on people probably plays the largest part in them being frustrated by it), it's the immunity to fear/stuns/charm/cc that matters while being able to do 100% instant (and 50% autoattack) damage.

I'd say this is on a case by case basis. If you're on full mana when 20% hits and have a lot of additional mana income (mana spring, BoW) you can probably prioritize HoW. If it's a 10 man and you're lacking some of this, or you're half mana prioritizing Judgement would probably make more sense. In the grand scheme of things you won't lose much damage by prioritizing Judgement over HoW, so I'd suggest that as the default actually.

Just tossing this idea out to see what other paladins think of it.
If AW also made you unstoppable similar to Beast Within, would you consider using it instead of bubble in PvP even if it meant locking bubble out on a long cooldown?

That would still run into the problem of being unable to use AW as a DPS cooldown in a situation where your bubble would be locked out for a portion of a fight where you'd need it.

I hate to compare classes, but a Mage/Rogue can Ice Block/CLOS out of a nasty debuff and still have their Arcane Power/Adrenaline Rush available to sync with the Bloodlust that comes 5 seconds after the debuff application.

I don't have enough PvP experience to comment on the "offensive bubble" scenario, but it's the PvE implications of this change that really bothers me.

@ Avitus

You bring up a strong point with the functional history of DS, It really is used offensively as much as defensively (give or take in any direction, pending on the player). I can say I personally had not opened my mind to all scenario's rather just looked at the times where I could used AW and DS simultaneously. You're right though, I agree that running into a situation where I use bubble to prevent myself from being easily CC'd, it's function would then be questionable if I was only going to do 50/80 or whatever percentages that has been listed.

I'm going to sound like a broken record eventually, but the first task in an idea is to find it's faults. Thanks for pointing out what now appears obvious. In retrospect I don't think I would make much utility of DS as an offensive tool if it was going to hinder my damage significantly.

Isn't that the point of a damage reduction, though? If the freedom from CC still outweighs the gimped attacks, then the attacks aren't gimped enough?

Im fairly sure that everyone can agree that AW + bubble was too much, as is the nerf. Just make them not stack and were fine OR make bubble a -50% damage but make Sanctified Wrath give instead of 50% shield penetration (bugged atm isnt it?) an immunity to CC/ fear / stun / purge for its duration (doesnt cause forberance)

I'm sorry mate, but all your data from live, and your current experience in it is moot.

It has been agreed over and over again that with the current bugs (that you pointed out) any conclusions you can amount to are nil, as at lvl 80, bosses will have much more armor, you will not have the T6 bonus (realistically), and JoW will be nerfed heavily.

The discussion here is about end-game Ret, bugged lvl 70 conclusions have no place here.

I hate to rag on anyone's performance because there are alway extenuating circumstances, but honestly this one report should not be the baseline we're comparing ourselves to at 80. Look closer at those WWS reports and you'll see that he's either raiding with horrible lag or he's just not very good at using abilities as they come off cd. Add to that that his gemming reflects someone who isn't exactly focused on min/maxing, and you really have to take those results with a grain of salt.

He finished 8th on Patchwerk (the DPS standard for Naxx) while only using Judgement every 9.22s, CS every 8.03s, and DS every 10.82s. That means people who are hitting closer to 8.5s, 6.5s, 10.5s (and some will even beat that) are going to be top 5 easily in that group. That means, while we may be OP at 70, we are currently exactly where Blizzard stated they wanted us to be at level 80. Just some food for thought...

Not to be to blunt with you but the game right now is still level 70 and we are still playing on Live.
All speculations of what will come out of Beta are still just speculations whereas what you get this on live is still to see. What this forum is about is PvE Retribution damage and theory.

WotLK are bugged and as uncertain as Live at the moment. We have to try and stay prepared and try to calculate the changes in game mechanisms to stay on top of our game when WotLK hits. That's at least why I think most of us are here.
I was trying to give some hope for some players that seem to think that things are beyond bad, which they are not.

No real conclusions can be drawn but I remain fairly optimistic.

As much as I appreciate the data contributed through lvl70/live WWS parses etc, All of this talk about lvl 70 stuff is really what got us into short-sighted devs scrambling for knee-jerk fixes, for things to look ok at lvl 70

I'm afraid these conclusions on Live might hurt End-Game Ret. at lvl 80. Things might be ok on Live/70 with a bugged JoW and T6 bonus (and T6 mana), take this away, and I doubt things will remain ok.

In 10 days, lvl 70 is over, we should be focusing on our performance at lvl 80 now.

Agreed, all lvl 80 data we have is from beta, but truthfully, that's where we should be focusing, instead of bugged Live data.

As much as I agree with your first statement, mostly because I use it offensively a lot more than defensively, I must say that I don't think this is the way it was intended to be used. As far as I can tell, Divine Shield has always been a more defense-oriented move. Here's the reasoning. When vanilla WoW launched, we had no strikes, only SoC and autoattack. The -50% swing penalty actually reduced our damage while bubbled considerably. This isn't so anymore. We now have 3 instant attacks that can hit for a lot, as well as one autoattack while shielded.

I do understand the concern of being CCed and DS being our way out, so I think your proposed idea is pretty good.