◊ Cathela

True that it's been discussed before, but it's such a basic piece of information that I think it's worth posting in this thread.

The basic tanking rotation is what's called a 6/9 rotation (or 969 or some other combination of those numbers.) The idea is that you alternate between abilities with a 6-second cooldown (HotR, SotR) and abilities with a 9-second cooldown (Judgement, Holy Shield, Consecration). This requires one point in Improved Judgements, and it requires that you not have the Consecration glyph.

Basically, it looks like this:

(HotR) [Judge] (SotR) [HS] (HotR) [Cons] (SotR) [Judge] (HotR) [HS] (SotR) [Cons] and repeat.

6-second abilities are in parentheses, 9-second abilities in square brackets. It may look a bit complicated, but if you have a good display of cooldowns it's not hard to maintain, since once you get the order set up it basically amounts to "use whatever's not on cooldown".

Unfortunately, the Prot paladin threat rotation is GCD-locked, so you can't add anything (exorcism, divine plea, avenging wrath, avenger's shield) to the rotation without displacing something else.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

• frmorrison

I know the ghost hit from Precision was removed on my character.

However, I am not sure the 1% ghost hit from Ret Aura was removed.

 

turturin

Could someone comment on leveling specs?

Specifically, I have a prot pally at 70 that will likely be the next toon I level. Is there a consensus on a proper "prot leveling spec"? is the strategy to AoE grind melee mobs whenever possible, or is there another method I should consider?

Would I be significantly better off just speccing retribution for leveling (my most important criteria are total time spent and the ability to solo-quest effectively)

My starting gear on my pally is early T6-ish if that helps or changes the answers at all. Thanks.

 

• Smithist

As far as specs go I just went with a fairly generic tanking spec but am using Reckoning as I find it to be quick nice for solo content. I've read some people chose to wear more DPS oriented gear and possibly use BoW, but my ret gear was very lackluster so I wore a mostly traditional tank set with BoSanc.

The kill times are not fantastic against single mobs, but of course being prot means you'll kill a pack of them in about the same time, which speeds things up. The other big advantages being your ability to solo basically every group quest you run into and that you can hop straight into an instance if you'd like. Once you get to 75 things really change with SotR and killing a single mob becomes much faster.

Really it's just a matter of how you prefer to play. I leveled to 70 mostly as prot and I just enjoy the play style and the ridiculous durability you have. The tools we gained in Wrath mean that killing single mobs is no longer quite so inefficient and there's still all the other perks that go with being prot.

 

Andris

I hit level 79 this morning, thanks to 2 days of vacation and the weekend, levelling as prot from my 70 spec in T5+ gear. (With respect to "prot levelling spec" -- I used the James guide for Howling Fjord, then Dragonblight, then Borean Tundra (after the crowd had cleared). Once that was done, I just headed into Grizzly Hills around level 76, cleared a couple levels and got the quest achievement, and then headed to Storm Peaks.

As you alluded to, questing is probably faster levelling than instances, though you can usually get a spot in a group as tank spec. When you hit level 71, get Divine Plea, use it whenever you can. Ditto at 75 for Shield of the Righteous. It hits like a monster. You can pretty much skip the other trainings from what I've seen.

I started out in "semi-tank gear" -- I had the S4 ret gloves and S3 ret helm, plus a Chestguard of the Warlord gemmed for +strength, and expertise capped in my tanking gear. It's really not too painful with JoW/Divine Plea. I could also solo many of the "(Group 3)" quests in Howling Fjord, taking on +1 level elites without needing to blow any cooldowns except maybe a potion. Shield of Righteousness is great for single-target dps -- probably about 330dps (1.5k hit, 3k crit) in my current gear without a lot of particular attention to block value. I did put 3 points into shield of the templar for


Right now, it seems to me that BC Potency, Agility (0.5% dodge and crit), and Accuracy are probably good weapon enchants. Since I'm a blacksmith, I'm also looking at Titanium Weapon Chain for the disarm reduction -- with our new focus on instant melee attacks, losing your weapon/shield hurts almost as much as it would for a warrior.


I haven't noticed "Ghost" hit from previously having Precision before it was removed from the tree; I had it before 3.0.2, but I might have re-specced once between then and Wrath, plus I'm a single data point.


Our new tanking rotation is really tight -- I feel like I spend too much time watching the GCD. Does anyone have any suggestions for an addon which will let me track the GCD without having to look at my keyboard? I'm also getting the hang of weaving in e.g. Divine Plea and possibly Cleanse into my rotation, usually replacing Consecration.

 

Exewut

I'm not sure if it's actually worth picking up that enchant. You're more than likely to spec into ret as a secondary tree (something like this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft for example) and it's not that hard to spare the points to get pursuit of justice. These 2 disarm effects (50% duration) don't stack with each other so you're better of getting pursuit of justice for the extra speed, and a potency/agility enchant on your weapon.
Personally I really enjoy using Quartz for swing/gcd timers.

A small note for the slow/fast debate. Judgements and seals will still proc a lot more with a fast weapon, so it might not be a bad idea to prefer a fast 1h weapon to tank content you over gear. Mana can still be an issue.

 

• Chicken

To further add to this, the abilities in order from "best to replace" to "worst to replace" are, obviously depending on the situation slightly:

Judgement > Consecration > Holy Shield > Hammer of the Righteous > Shield of Righteousness

I always try to aim to replace a Judgement when I wish to use a different ability, as it's damage (and thus threat) is lower than your other moves, obviously the downside is it gives you a higher chance to lose the debuff. In a low mana situation you're probably better off replacing Consecration however, and I personally find that most WotLK 5-mans on normal difficulty are low mana situations.

It should further be noted that you can make the rotations somewhat simpler by going for two separate castsequence macros.

Works fine for both those abilities. For 5-mans you may want to swap it so that Hammer of the Righteous is cast first and not Shield of Righteousness.

The reset here is set to 5 seconds so that if you decide not to use Consecration due to mana issues you'll still end up using Holy Shield again before it runs out.

Obviously as always when using macros like these you lose out on some flexibility, though it does make things much easier to maintain if you have to alternate two buttons versus hitting five buttons in a more complex order, which can be nice if you have trouble paying attention to what's going on in the fight while keeping track of the full rotation manually.

It's also theoretically possible to replace the entire threat rotation with a single castsequence macro, but I'd heavily recommend against doing so as it causes you to lose close to all the flexibility of the method of using two castsequence macros.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Meranoth

With Glyph of Seal of Command being introduced, as well with the entirely new Judgement system, which of the two should I be using for most encounters (where taking the health loss wouldn't be much of an issue)? I've been getting better numbers on target dummies with Command at this point with a CS->Judge->DS->(alt)Consencrate cycle.


Too lazy to make a new account so Nothadin, Shadow Council, 80 Retadin.

 

Musclebound

Martyr should outpace Command in the long run for DPS, and the recoil from Martyr allows SA mana returns from healing, and combined with Divine Plea, Judgements of the Wise and Judgement of Wisdom, the lack of intellect on plate DPS gear is somewhat made up for. However for leveling I've found Command to be equally effective in terms of killing speed and more effective in terms of avoiding down time.

 

harkan

Most of the talent specs I have seen out there were put out before some of the recent changes. Any updates since then for a pve raid spec?

I was thinking along the lines of:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I didn't get BoK since that is already covered by another pally.

 

galzohar

I think ret raid specs are pretty straight forward. You have 74 talent points that you pretty much have to place and I dobut anyone would argue, and then 6 leftover points with no really useful place to put them (5 if you take command). Might as well put those 5 points in kinds just in case you cover it at some point in time, it's not like the other talents you'll get with those points are very useful.

 

Milou

Has anyone else tried out the Mirror of Truth trinket? The proc rate so far seems almost non-existant as well as not proc'ing from judgements. My understanding is that anything that procs for a hunter should proc for judgements now correct?

 

Prinsesa

According to Blizzard, Judgements are considered ranged attacks. If true, then yes, anything that works for a Hunter's shots should theoretically work with Judgements.

However, I recall another poster claiming in the Ret thread that Judgements were considered melee attacks, with a special flag to make them undodgeable/unparryable (which amounts to the same thing, really).

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Milou

Currious indeed, my shaman said he was getting loads of procs but I think I may have gotten 4 in 3 heroic runs.

 

Russta

Does Judgement gain enough "value" with the boost it grants to Shield of Righteousness in conjunction with [Libram of Obstruction] to perhaps move further up that list?

Sure feels like being a Warrior in 2pc T5 again!


With regards to weapon enchants, I too felt I was missing something. Not a single one jumps out at me as being better than Potency which is a shame because the new art style is ruined by it's ghastly green glow. One that I feel people may be overlooking is [Titanium Weapon Chain]. My build has Pursuit of Justice in it so I don't feel the need for it but if I was to respec in the future and drop it, I would certainly consider the weapon chain. Though Disarm doesn't hurt us as bad as Warrior, it's still worse than it used to be and in conjunction with hit, it's really not that bad for it's cost. It only takes a few SotR misses to make you realize how much more to value hit in WotLK.

 

Mithriel

I actually had the feeling it procced quite a lot, i can not back this up with solid numbers, but i know the buff was up a lot of times during naxx clear/heroics.

Question myself: I remember in early theorycrafts, it was said that strength > hit to gem for no matter what hit you had. At the moment im sitting at about 120hitrating which is far from the theoratical hitcap (wtb drops). Should i still not socket for hit or did it become more important?

 

• Chicken

In a simple tank and spank scenario it makes no practical difference, you'll always be using Shield of Righteousness in the next 5 seconds after using Judgement, for example:

0 seconds	1.5 seconds	3.0 seconds	4.5 seconds
Judgement	Hammer of the Righteous	Consecration/Holy Shield	Shield of Righteousness
Judgement	Shield of Righteousness	Consecration/Holy Shield	Hammer of the Righteous

Though if you're worried more about initial threat than survival, starting off a pull with a Judgement and then using Shield of Righteousness definitely works. I usually prefer starting off with Holy Shield though, with blocking being a much larger damage reduction now, and threat typically not being an issue.

Edit:

As I just realized this, as for what to replace, the block value gain from one of the Librams is probably large enough to make Judgement better threat effectively than Consecration, though I haven't run the numbers extensively.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Bloodvalor

Has anyone come up with finalized numbers for what the new hit cap and expertise cap are? Actual number and percentage based. For 2handers and 1handers.

According to Recape's Ret DPS Calc numbers Hit and Expertise are still third and forth on the list. As such they are still important to get. Up to the point you reach the cap obviously.

 

Neverest

Can anyone give me some math number on run speed?

ex:
normal run speed XX yards per second

10% run speed YY yard per second
15% run speed buff, ZZ yard per second (with 2/2 Pursuit of Justice)

20%
25%
30%.......... yard per second
Since ret pally need a distance closing distance ability, I find possibility to increase effect of Pursuit of Justice is unique and if the math can back it up, combine with Hand of Freedom, we get a distance closing ability every 30s. Not extremely powerful, can still be countered with fear for example, think it will be balanced out.

 

Svetozar

Is there an ETA on Bellator's DPS spreadsheet update?

 

Kigale

is JotW broken. It isn't returning mana to me, nor is it proccing replenishment right now.

EDIT: it's working out of an instance. It didn't work while I was in Nexus. Any ideas?

 

• frmorrison

That was me that said that. If you look in Wowhead, it has a flag for judgements that says they are immune to dodge/parry which matches the data.

I don't know if hunter attacks have a similar flag, but they likely do.

 

◊ Cathela

Regarding [Libram of Obstruction]:

325 block value from the proc translates to 423 actual block value after Reckoning, and 549 damage on SotR after Shields of the Templar. Since each Judgement will get you one SotR with the bonus, you can treat this as 549 extra damage on Judgements (or 605 with one-hand spec) if you ignore misses and such. That's a pretty hefty boost to the effective damage of Judgements.

Also, another point about SoC vs SoB: SoC has a one-second internal cooldown. This isn't an issue for autoattack (which is why nobody really cared before) but it can prevent a CS/DS and an autoattack from proccing SoC if they're within one second of each other, and it also means you'll only get one SoC proc per DS.

If you do the math for glyphed SoC vs SoB, the overall damage is almost exactly the same if you ignore the internal cooldown. It's the internal CD and the extra mana through SA that really makes SoB preferable.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Goru

Is HotR applying Blood Corruption to 3 targets intended behaviour or should we expect a change in the future?

 

Prinsesa

Completely intended. HOTR and Crusader Strike and Divine Storm all proc Seals, and in the case of HOTR and Divine Storm, all proc Seals on every target that they hit.

For the most part, this means you can skip Consecration on any pull with less than 4 mobs, unless threat is pushing you really hard or positional wonkiness makes the HOTR miss its chaining.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler