Oh, baseline Repentance certainly wouldn't hurt anyone's chances at getting into a 5-man. But it's not something the other specs need, as healers and tanks aren't expected to provide CC the way dps are.

And Repentance is still quite a bit better than the CC any other healer has: Five usable categories of mob, no cast time, a duration equal to its cooldown, and it's a true incapacitation. All of the other healer CCs have weaknesses in one or more of those categories.

And tanks have no broadly effective CC's; if 51-Prot paladins could have Repentance they'd be hands-down better than any other tank for 5-mans.

I misread the above post. Can this be deleted?

That actually wouldn't be a surprising change if it's intended. Considering how much easier it is to keep a judgement up now, losing the refresh-on-melee effect wouldn't hurt a lot.

Losing the CS refresh would hurt a lot. It's pretty assuredly a bug.

Or maybe just make it HIT harder. As has been mentioned, considering it's really nothing more than a gimped MS that requires 10 more talent points, it could use some love. Maybe boost the extra damage by a tiny bit or make the extra damage holy damage. Hell if they'd changed art of war to "Crusader strike also smites the target for holy damage equal to 10/20/30% of your spellpower" I would have been content.

Just out of interest has anyone put together any decent ret cycle?

On the Prot side, with shield and hammer being on 6sec CD, HS usable on a 9sec CD, and slackening Judgement and Consecration to 9 seconds, everything cells so nicely into an 18second cycle.

With Ret though having DS on 10 second CD, you have a 6,8,10 sec ability. Nothing seems to gel, and i cant seem to get any nice cycle down on paper i'm happy with

CS is not MS. MS is a PvP utility. CS is a PvE utility. There is nothing alike about them except that they are instant weapon attacks.

CS's utility is fine. It now allows a single ret pally to keep up a holy pally's judgements during the "downtime" when a holy pally doesn't want to be judging (between t=20 and t=30). It doesn't need any additional utility beyond that.

The one thing that I would like CS to do is that when it refreshes a non-ret JoW/L, it applies the ret-palas AP/SP to the jow/l proc. Other than that i agree, i'm perfectly happy with CS.

I've got a dps model up and running, so can run different rotations through it with ease. However my issue is that all those rotations you posted look messy. Please note this isnt a go at you for making messy rotations, just that the abilities and their cooldowns force messy rotations. Prot has a nice cleam 18 sec rotation with 3 HotR, 3 SotR, 2 cons, 2 HS, 2 Judgements. It all fits perfectly. The ret abilities just dont mesh as well.

Although the cycles look messy, they are all fairly easy to use. To use CS = DS > J for example, just hit Crusader Strike and Divine Storm as soon as they come up, while casting Judgement only when it won't interfere with the two above (just like we are using CS now).

Honestly Ret cycles have never been pretty. In all respects we'll be using the same system we are now (priority cooldowns) except with Divine Storm equal to or above CS.

Are we assuming our mana will let us include DS in a ret cycle?