Alright, I've come back again with some questions.

I've started using a Castsequence macro, on a 9 sec Judgement Rotation, coupled with my CS'ing.

I still have no access to Windfury, BS or anything melee oriented, except for a Feral Druid. (yay for 5% crit) And I'm starting to wonder what is good DPS when you have no Melee group?

As an alliance Paladin, I'm usually in 25-mans (SSC/TK) at 600DPS sustained for the night, hovering nearer to 700 on some fights (Usually on VR I am at 750), and nearer to 500 on the not so melee friendly fights. But by the end of the Night, I usually end up at around 600'ish for total sustained.

Is that good? Is that bad? Other than the obvious melee group lacking, what could I improve on gear-wise? I am praying for Legs off Solarian, Trinket off Leo, and Mace off Karethrash down the line. (well, when we get our firsts on Karithrass and Solarian.)

And are there any other useful macros I should add?

Currently I run with a simple

/castsequence reset = 9 Judgement, Seal of Command, and I insert the rank, depending on wether or not I have a Shadow Priest.

Any Advice would be great, I know I have a spot in my 25-man (They love my +3% Crit +2% Damage, JoW/L CS'ing.) But I want to contribute more in the manner of DPS'ing.

I am in a similar situation as you. I can’t seem to convince the powers that be to put into a dps group for most of the raid. I am either in the tank group to help the protection Paladin gain more agro or I am put into the left over group.

I usually end the night also around ~650 dps. I can’t answer if that is good or not. I don’t think it is bad for not being put into the melee dps group.

Here is my WWS logs for our last VR fight.

WWS Logs

Here is the macro I use.
/castsequence reset=10 Judgement, Seal of Blood, Crusader Strike, Crusader Strike, Judgement, Seal of Blood, Crusader Strike

I don’t know if this macro will help you or not because I am still trying to find ways to improve my dps as well, but it seems to work.

How's that macro work for you? Do you just spam it and it maintains a full, tight cycle?

i tried out making a macro to tighten up judging last night

/cast Judgement
/cast Seal of Blood

i found it worked 70% of the time, the rest it seemed to judge but not recast my seal.. i'm not sure why. i don't usually play about with macros too much.

i'm normally fine getting my judges off and resealing before the swing timer hits but i'm usually careful, with lag etc and try avoid doing so if the swing timer is past 50%. the idea of this macro was to try get them out later in my swing if that was when the cooldown falls..

any thoughts?

This I can help with. Remember that Judgement does NOT invoke your global cooldown, but seals do. This means if you use CS, and then immediately judge, you're seal won't cast because you're in the GCD, but you'll judge appropriately.

This is why the castsequence macro intrigues me, because the macro won't move on until you cast SoB, meaning your seal always goes up.

I was examining the graphic posted by Avitius located here:
http://elitistjerks.com/633109-post1982.html

Now I will admit it's been a long time since I've taken a math course, but I was a little unsure of the armor penn. line. As far as I can tell armor doesn't scale as a linear function. If you were to graph the function y=x^0.5 it would provide a good image for how armor scales (at least in my head, I could be completely wrong about this). For every 1% damage reduction you gain in armor you need even more armor to gain an additional 1% scaling exponentially.

But if you're trying trying to reduce a target's armor to zero wouldn't the line look more like the positive side of y=x^2? As you get closer to 0 armor you're reducing a mob's damage reduction exponentially, no? On his graph it appears to be a straight line.

Is there something I'm missing here?

The cooldown will always be linked to the first spell in the macro, so you can't prevent yourself from judging until the seal comes back short of simply showing restraint.

You could make the tooltip (and resulting cooldown swirl) show your Seal cooldown instead of your Judgement using

but if you did this, you'd never really know when your judgement is up.


That said, the castsequence macro that was posted below

will ensure that your seal will ALWAYS go up again after, but it's ridged, and if you want to switch buff-seals (JotC -> JoW for instance), you have to wait til your castsequence gets to judgement, then activate your buff seal, and then continue with the castsequence. It does let you shut your brain off, however.

blarg... hrm.. what i really need is it to show the judgement cooldown, but for it to also force display the GCD when i hit another spell even though judgement doesn't require it... wonder if that is possible or not.. well, i'll ask the boffins in the forums if they have any ideas.

i don't like the idea of the cast sequence, especially meshing CS in it. with different Cooldowns on abilities i think it could fark things up for me a bit..

Hi guys,

I'm gearing up a (SoB) retadin alt for ZA. My guild is a guild of reasonably experienced raiders (including a fair few Naxx-pre-TBC players) who for time reasons can't commit to a regular 25-man schedule. Because our raid time/week is very limited I hope to skip Kara entirely. Because we're a group of real-life friends rather than a raid guild, we can't really recruit. We've got a high-DPS (for t4 anyway - frontloading DPS was > 3 healers for us in Kara) 10-man raid with a hard-hitting trinity of Shadowpriest, Affliction, Destruction (+2 healers rounding out the "caster" group). Healer/Caster mana is our bottleneck in ZA.

I'm here for a bit of advice, (and also to introduce myself since I enjoy theorycrafting in general).

1) Regarding the worth of Retribution paladins in 10-man
There's been a lot of discussion that I've seen regarding retribution paladins in 25-man raids. Common wisdom is that the extra blessing, the judgements, JotC and Sanc Aura in a Rogue/Rogue/Ret/Enh/Feral group increase raid DPS.

However, we're wanting to do some experimentation with a Ret Paladin in our melee group (setup would be Prot warrior, Feral Druid, Combat Rogue, Enh Shaman, Ret Paladin) since we usually end up with either a spare caster or our holy paladin in there.

Would you expect the synergy of Feral/Combat/Enhancement/Ret (plus the synergy of JotC with Imp SB, and the extra JoW uptime) to justify the inclusion of a Ret Paladin over a "pure" DPSer? (We would be replacing either an Arcane Mage, or a Moonkin, but we also have the option of a 2nd rogue, a hunter, or an arms warrior)

2) And here's the meaty bit
The reason I'm looking at Ret is that compared to the other options it seems very easy to gear up a retadin to ~t5 level without actually stepping into a raid instance. Plugging the following into the spreadsheet:-

4/5 Season 3 Arena
Pauldrons of Gruesome Fate
Season 3 Honour Boots + Bracers
Red Belt of Battle
Cloak of Darkness
DMC: Crusade
Libram of Zeal
MG Bonegrinder (or Lionheart Executioner in 2.4 if arena season 3 weapons still have the rating req.)
(filling up other slots with random tat that's easily availible as soon as you hit 70)

- gets me a theoretical peak personal DPS in the 1100-1300 range depending on buffs, I'd expect that to be around 700-900 in a real encounter - which would put me on par with my raid before taking into account 100% JoW uptime or JotC.

However, I've had anecdotal evidence that PvP geared Ret paladins are being scorned in raids. This doesn't seem to parse with the results from the spreadsheet. The high iLevel of the season 3 items, combined with their PvE-friendly (compared to, say, DPS Caster or Healer season 3 sets) point allocation seems to make it ideal gear for starting out as a retadin - in almost every case it seems to be a DPS upgrade over any other pre-raid gear including the ZA badge gear. Does this match the common wisdom? I've noticed that the season 3 gloves are considered the best gloves in the game. Is the rest of the arena set looked down upon?

Thanks in advance.

Download Quartz. It has a GCD monitor in addition the the cast bar, latency, and swing timer tools it offers.


M0wglie: There's nothing wrong with using PvP gear that happens to be itemized well for PvE. The S3 gloves, for instance, are the best in the game currently. With the addition of ArP to the warrior S3 gear, you're probably seeing a lot of them swapping their instance drops out. I use the S3 helm, gloves, and weapon currently, and am always in the top 5 for personal dps while bringing the extra set of blessings, judgements, and sanctity aura. As always, its less about trading one class for another, as it is one player for another.

Hey Veilyn! Small world

I've been using Quartz (and various other cooldown monitors - I'm considering writing one because I know what I want it to look like and none of the others do the job quite right) to keep an eye on my GCD. I get the problem though - that an accidental early press of your judge/reseal macro leaves you without your seal up until your GCD finishes. What you'd really want is to apply the GCD to the judge/reseal macro even though you can judge off the GCD, right?

Is that possible?

/cast judgement
/cast seal of whatever

will cast both abilities.

/castsequence judgement, seal of whatever

will require that you click twice.

I have been using the macro for awhile now and I find it works well for me. It does reseal after CS and Judgement is cast.

So I have one macro which starts my attack and cast Seal of the Crusader. Then I use this macro.

The only think I see happening with this macro that I am not sure about is because of the two crusader strikes in there after the first judegment and reseal, it will wait for the second CS to cast before it cast the second judgement and reseal.

The reason for this is shown in the original DPS cycle mapping that's available in the first post of the thread.

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/1581/retcycle2ym8.jpg

Take a look at the 8 second judgement cycle. They mesh accordingly.

So an opener macro that reads.

/startattack
/cast Seal of the Crusader

Followed by the

/castsequence macro, would be preferable to a

/cast judgement
/cast Seal of Command macro, DPS-wise, do you think?

I use OmniCC. It shows cooldowns for all of your abilities. I have the judge/reseal macro and the addon shows the timer for the judgemt. It also shows when the GCD is up. Hope this helps.

Ah yes, I can see it. thanks!

The synergy of the group you described is great. Provided that you have decent gear, there should be no issues with you replacing a rogue in that group. If you don't have a paladin healer, the blessings alone would be more than enough justification to bring you along.

With regard to the shunning of pvp geared paladins, I think it's just a rumor. Like you said, the pvp gear is excellent for pve (I still have 3 pieces of S3). Some of the items you listed are the best or close to the best in the game. Once you start doing ZA, you'll have access to upgrades such as [Jin'rohk, The Great Apocalypse], [Cloak of Fiends], [Signet of Primal Wrath], and [Berserker's Call]. Only advice is to run Heroic BF for [Libram of Avengement].

I created a few macros to help with switching.

/startattack
/cast Seal of the Crusader

/startattack
/cast Seal of Wisdom


/startattack
/cast Seal of Light

etc

You are absolutely right, the increase in dps from armor pen is not linear. However the plot of the graph that you're referring to is in fact not linear (it just looks it), the reason being is that it is only showing a change of 500 armor so to the eye it is looking linear. However if you check the dps increase at 0,50,100 itemisation points you will see the gain from 50-->100 is more than the gain from 0-->50

Alternatively you can enter 50 for the armor pen / itemisation point to get a bigger armor change range, adjust the scales accordingly and you will see the line does curve as expected.

When you do the Analyze Items in Bellator's spreadsheet, does that take into account things like hit rating/precisions/etc? Reason I ask is that after my 2 latest upgrades (neck and weapon), the spreadsheet now lists no upgrades at all for shoulders, and I'm in Justicar. It used to list at least a pair or two (albeit very minor DPS upgrade amounts), or is something else amiss?

Yes, it takes into account all of your current stats. Hit is an important stat, but shouldn't be overvalued. For example, i current raid with 75 hit, simply because wearing the [Ring of a Thousand Marks] to get capped does not make up for the DPS lost by wearing [Signet of Primal Wrath].

That being said, I wasn't aware the spreadsheet had an "upgrade" feature... but if there is one thing MaxDps.com is useful for, its finding potential upgrades. Try swapping some of those items, such as the [Pauldrons of the Wardancer] or T5 shoulders and see if you can get a dps increase.