It's not that simple. I don't think any ret has pulled a boss via JoL. But consider adds that may not be glued to your tank (i.e., murlocs on morogrim). JoL is an raid-wide aoe instant heal that you cannot "turn off" when adds come into play. I have little doubt that there won't be a situation where that much threat could be a bad thing.

Yeah this was a point I had meant to elaborate on but then neglected to. With the clashing GCD's in mind has it been established what ability should be used in terms of a priority? Purely based off of intuition (probably bad) one would assume that for maximum DPS (single target, not undead/demon):
1) Judgement
- Mostly because of recoil gains from SA and JoTW
2) Hammer of Wrath
- Obviously if available

And there is where I get confused.

Crusader Strike/Divine Storm? I'm caught up here because of Righteous Vengeance coming off of Divine Storms and not Crusader Strikes. Obviously consecrate has to be taken into account too.

And the rotation changes up some for undead because of Exorcism and Holy Wrath. Apologies if I missed this earlier in the thread, but taking some mana issues into concern is this worth a re-visit?

Edit
Regarding Judging light versus Wisdom I think it's all situational. We were having some fun in AQ40 (trying to down C'Thun for that achievement) and we had difficulty with the twin emps. The issue came from their warp and aggro reset (key component here being aggro reset) and vigilance. Either way, I'm just using this as an illustration to why Judging Light is kinda situational. Depending on the aggro mechanics of the fight a simple Hand of Salvation isn't gonna bail you out sometimes.

The priority system has been discussed (i'll look for a post later) but the main point of the post you quoted was that if you don't take GCD into account, your "calculated" mana usage will be much higher than actual mana usage

Complete side-issue, but doesn't AW trigger a global cooldown now? Has seemed so to me, since 3.0.2, which would render such a macro much less useful anyway.

I'm pretty sure most of us have come to the conclusion that Crusader Strike should be used ahead of Divine Storm, mostly due to the RAW damage differences. Since both abilities are now Physical damage, their differences show up a lot easier now.

Crusader Strike + Art of War is 120% weapon damage ( says 121% on tooltip ) 6 second cool down.
Divine Storm + Art of War is 110% weapon damage 10 second cooldown.

Tho Divine Storm does gain RV, it relies on it to crit to gain this effect.

The largest portion of RV damage done comes from judgements. The RAW damage from judgements are significantly larger than Divine Storm, they will skew the damage on a plain and simple look at a recount.


Using some napkin math CS would surpass DS over a 20 second span, or I should say after 2 Divine Storm uses.

Weapon damage = 1000 going to assume 100% crit chance just to signify RV proccing. Crit rates will be different due to RNG.


CS (1.2*1000) * 2 = 2400 * 3 = 7200 Assuming 3 CS crits in a 20 second span so a total of 7200 damage

DS (1.1*1000) *2 = 2200 * 2 = 4400 Assuming 2 DS crits in a 20 second span
RV (2200 * .4) * 2 = 1760

Totaling 4400 + 1760 = 6160

So CS is up by 1040 damage in this time.

The damage difference would be higher even with a zero crit chance. So technically showing CS would surpass DS in any given situation.


CS will do more damage in 20 seconds than DS will.

The world isn't perfect and RNG can be a bastard from time to time, so the results would vary in action. Also there would be a larger window for the damage to be done in as well, since DS won't come off cooldown exactly at 20 seconds after you begin dpsing. Just trying to explain 2 uses of Divine Storm and how many Crusader Strikes get used in this time.


Of course this changes during aoe.

Turning off JoL is pretty easy - judge justice and light is gone.

Judgement does have an 8 second cooldown so depending when an add phase starts you may have a bit before you can Knock off Light. It is nice to not have to worry about aggro at all, so that is why some Ret Pallies judge Wisdom.

Going back to the subject of AW/DS/Forbearance, would it be that huge an issue to just make casting Divine Shield remove AW from you? While you're at it, why not make AW uncastable while you're under the effects of AW? Great. Now paladins can use AW, still be able to bubble, and won't be able to use both at once. Using bubble during AW would be discouraging because you'd be losing seconds of AW, but not impossible because you aren't locked out of DS.


edit - english

It simply condenses two buttons into a single button. Just me being lazy but it works and isn't a cause of the phenomenon.


A quick question on the Rotation I should be using. Since Judging Blood does more damage is the rotation...


JoB > CS > Con > DS

Looking at the spreadsheets it is unclear what my opening move should be. I am using an 8 sec judgement without the -1 set bonus.

I believe at that point, sarcasm aside, skill would come into play. There's no reason to nerf one of the best things about Ret, and a major portion of why we get raid slots, just because of situational threat issues. We're never going to see raidwide no-threat healing, same thing goes for Spriests.

I dont see why there is even still a discussion about whether we should be judging wisdom. We are a dps spec, and thankfully ones that can now do credible dps. It's your job to do as much damage as possible given your available tools.

Learning when to hold back and/or change your rotation because of situational fights is part of the game. I personally dont want to see anything else added to make the raiding process easier (IE threatless healing JoL). Consider it from a Dev's perspective, we still have a 5min CD threat drop/immunity 'O S%$7' button, if you are in a situation where your personal dps is so godly that you cant be tanked for, use it...

.... Or just HoSalv.

110% weapon damage * 10% is 121. Avirtus did a post about a week back that explained quite well why in FCFS you use the highest DPS ability, and the comparison between CS and DS was done there as well.

Start with JoB (wisdom) that way everyone starts to regen mana from the first use, not to mention its also the highest dps ability we have. For leveling perhaps save Consecrate DS for mutimob pulls so your mana stays at around 90% for a rainy day.

There was a post by one of the better math-minded Ret Pallies, and the Crit for DS to bypass CS was what I recall, it was a week ago, 307%.

So CS is always better than DS in a single target situation. Also, this is further strengened by the CS Libram that should be the most popular libram.

Thank you for that part. I recently woke up when I posted my last response. My brain was still trashed from last night.



Another added bonus to CS. Adding additional AP is never bad =p

No one is asking for JoL to be nerfed. I certainly don't want it to be.

The reason why there is still a discussion is because JoW will give us more DPS than JoL. Yet as you just mentioned, JoL is a major portion of why we get raid slots. So we have a choice of either more DPS or more raid utility. Which is the better option? That's the purpose of this discussion.

I believe you will find we 100% agree that JoL should not be changed from its current incarnation. That's simply not the issue at hand.

Personally, I think it goes more towards preference than situation/skill. I don't want to count on a holy paladin to keep wisdom up always and even though another's JoL provides minute amounts of SA mana it is still mana. Every little bit I can get I will use to milk more DPS.

For those reasons I prefer JoW. It's not because of threat, although I have died more than a couple times because new adds come straight for me. I still agree that JoL is an effective way to go, don't get me wrong. I just don't think there is only one right answer on this one.

I would say given the scarce amount of intellect on level 80 DPS gear, JoW is a better choice in most situations. In general the mechanics of Hand of Salvation kind of lack the immediate "go away" effect other threat reduction abilities have on aoe packs and such, so that's a decent motivator too. Between Chain Heal, Wild Growth and CoH (barring the changes Blizzard has mentioned in the works regarding the last two spells), raid wide healing is more or less covered, so it wouldn't kill anyone if you use your judgements for your own devices. In the event that your tank is a Paladin, he should be using it as part of his threat rotation anyway.

Not to stray off topic but what was the reasoning behind dumping the "refreshes all Judgements on the target" effect on Crusader Strike, and would it be unreasonable to restore that effect?

Ah that makes sense. I assumed that may have been the cause but was never certain. I suppose the only justification for would be freeing up a GCD for holy paladins to cast another heal but I've honestly spent no time as Holy so I wouldn't know at this point whether judging light is good for a healing rotation or not.

Holy is required to judge something at least once per minute to gain an benefit from their Tier 10 5-point talent Judgements of the Pure. JoL is their only baseline "AoE" heal so it's certainly a good choice, but as many have observed in this thread, Ret can put that JoL to much more use for the raid, at the expense of risked mana loss for our rotations.

So in summary, Holy judges Justice (non-vital to keep up so no need to judge more than once a minute), Ret judges wisdom, Prot judges Light for added threat and everyone's happy?

For the sake of discussion, assume a 10man raid setting with only 1 paladin, who is Ret, specced 0\10\61..
What kind of numbers for mana regen per minute vs raidhealing/dps lost are we looking at?

Removing the Prot+JoL and Holy+JoJ factor from the equation, does the mana gain outweigh the raid heals?

Napkinmath please

Assuming Light is being covered 100%, the Holy Pally should be judging Wisdom to not make yet another debuff slot (You used to be able to have double JoW, but I believe it was removed).


Wisdom really helps out all the mana dps not have to stop to use mana gaining abilities (like Life Tap, Evocation, Dispersion, AotV, etc.), so it is tough to compare that to all the dps and tanks getting a HoT.

I thought it was proven that your own Jol provided SA return?