Assuming no item procs that increase crit chance, no specials with increased crit chance, a non-undead mob, a 3.5s weapon with SoB up, 2/2 imp judgements, all critting specials used precisely on cooldown, zero misses/parries/dodges/resists, SoB never being inside the 1s ICD, and no gear with haste rating or cooldown-reducing bonuses on, you get off just over 40 critting effects in 30s. So you need almost exactly 15% crit to have a 99.9% chance of keeping up Vengeance (under those ideal circumstances).

This is kinda misleading, you can tank just as well in ret spec in levelling instances as you can in prot spec (I've done both): use DS instead of HotR and Repentance instead of AS. Everything else is just numbers, which are more or less irrelevant while levelling; if you've tanked before, you'll do it well in either spec. Outside instances, though, as prot killing is a sickly cousin to ret, there's simply no comparison. (Specced Ret I can take on just as many mobs as I do Prot, kill them perhaps 4 times as fast, never run out of mana and barely need to heal myself, they just die too fast.)

While I'm certain Ret can DPS faster and better than protection. I would find it hard to believe you can take on as many mobs as a protection spec'd pally. There is definitely going to be a line and where that line is I don't know.

I've found that leveling prot is easy and fun except vs single mobs and allows me to run with just about any class that can heal. Specifically a Ret paladin healing in his Ret gear. If you've had the worlds worst nosepc'd healer healing you through all the low level instances. Great, I'm just reporting what I've found from lvl 70-74 often tanking things 4+ times my character level.

What are the best gems for a protection specced paladin? Or is that dependant on what you can't make up with your current gear?

I think the takeaway fact is that a Prot paladin can solo just fine, and a Ret paladin can tank just fine for leveling (non-heroic) instances. The best thing to do is to play the spec you want to play. The only thing I would note is that Prot gets a lot stronger for soloing at level 75 with ShR, so 70-74 is the best time to go Ret if you're on the fence.

First priority should be to reach 540 defense skill, which makes you crit-immune to level 83 mobs. (You can stop at 535 for heroics, since the highest level mobs in those are 82.) Keep in mind that you can use a flask to get the last 10 defense rating (~2.5 defense skill) so you don't necessarily need to be at 540 unbuffed. This is probably going to require you to push a lot of your early gemming/enchanting towards defense.

After that, I'm not sure there are any hard-and-fast rules yet. There are good cases to be made for dodge/parry/defense (saving healer mana is more important now with the removal of downranking), stamina (surviving bursts is often important) and strength (mitigation and threat). Going for socket bonuses is probably more useful now than it was for most of TBC.

From a purely PvE DPS perspective, what are the two best professions for Retribution Paladins?

The big advantage to going Prot though is the bag space. If you're Ret, you have to carry your tanking set, while Prot can just use the same gear for everything.

It can be a pretty big number. I've had annoying players fd/vanish dump 8+ even level mobs on me when Ret spec and come out in one piece, for example, though that many tends to result in some post-fight downtime. Bubble and instant heals are really effective.

I have found that Prot is vastly superior to Ret at soloing elites, though I was probably doing it wrong as Ret. I haven't had much trouble soloing 3-man quests in Dragonblight and Zul'Drak as Prot so far. Ret is vastly superior against casters, of course--they often die before they get a single attack off.

Prot gets much less annoying against single mobs with a bit of practice, especially if you keep an eye out for additional mobs you can move to while fighting. I've found I generally get the best results with Seal of Wisdom and Judgement of Light, while with Ret, I'd use a dps seal, judge Wisdom, and make up any health loss with Art of War heals.

The big difference between the ability of prot and ret to solo elites is that ret relies on killing fast while being able to get some instant FoLs and a bubble+heal to full, while prot can (if the mob does low enough damage) just tank it up forever with seal of wisdom and judgement of light. That means both specs are good at soloing elites, however elites with too much HP may only be soloable by prot (and then only if they do low enough damage). At the end though, remember this is quite insignificant for leveling efficiency. It's a very small portion of the leveling scene, and by the time you'll solo a mob that you couldn't have soloed as ret you'll get invited to a group to kill that mob anyway.

Now that Judgment has been changed, what's the ideal rotation for Ret?

Crit SoBs didn't proc Vengeance pre-3.0. I haven't paid attention since then, but if it doesn't that makes sense.


Judgement hasn't changed, it is still First Come First Serve, with the priority if all are ready and on a single target, you would use Judgement > CS > DS.

I know Str and Crit are my best friends as a Ret Paladin. How is Haste valued? I am finding it hard to drop some of my 70 epics for 80 blues because they have +haste instead of +crit. I don't mind the +hit on them but far to many plate pieces I have seen are +haste.

Haste Rating will reduce the GCD of everything except Crusader Strike and Divine Storm (and Hammer of the Righteous for Prot).

Haste is currently a low value stat, below hit, STR and expertise (I'm not sure how it compares to crit). It used to be a high-value stat back when it meant "more haste = more auto-attacks = more Seal procs", but with so many of our Seal procs coming from our instants anyway, the relative value went down.

I have been looking for a concrete figure as to what the hit cap is for a retribution paladin at the moment? I keep finding contradicting information.

Could anyone help?

Original Look, a quick search would have turned up this thread which is full of talk about stats for all classes.

[FAQ]Working theories of raiding at level 80

This is what I think you were looking for:

Was there a extended analysis on the full rotation? I'm interested in looking at something similar to the graph at the top of the original Ret DPS thread and the accompanying discussion.
I am a little bit skeptical of Judgement > CS > DS. I've been using CS > DS > Judgement.

A while ago, some of us simulated it out. The difference between priorities is very minor, something on the order of 2% between the best and fifth best. Judgement being top priority is mostly to ensure maximum mana regen. (It also happened to be the top priority scheme at that time as well.)

That suggests that it might still make sense to put only 1 point in Improved Judgements. In other words, it might be the case that the optimal rotation (in which Judgement is prioritized) turns out to be one in which Judgement is used every 9 seconds, given the time lost due to the cooldowns on Judgement and CS coming up at the same time (when the former is on 8 and the latter is on 6). Has anyone done the math on this?

Always put both points in Improved Judgement. Even if you *average* one Judgement per 9 seconds, you will often be casting Judgement right on cooldown at 8 seconds.

So tonight, my guild did our first raid, the first 3 wings of simple old naxx10. I was doing around 2.3K dps, fluctuating by several hundred depending on the number of undead in each pull. To put to rest several concerns of people who seem to be not believing the math, mana is simply not an issue. You will be fine, and have long sustained dps with no real problems, and on several bosses I was able to use +hast pots instead of mana pots.

My real question is about the +hit and + expertise. I know the theoretical caps, but I was running with 5.7% hit, and missed a total of 3 times (on my melee) in over 600 attacks. If we still had precision, i'd say, great, that's .3%, exactly where it should be. Obviously, we don't still have that. My spec was a general ret raid spec, picking up 5/5 kings and no points in vindication or Eye for an Eye. The raid comp was all physical dps (don't want to talk about how long 4 horsemen took us to figure out as a result) with the following comp:
DK (frost) / fury warrior (they swapped out)
Resto shaman
feral druid
resto druid
rogue
2x hunter
holy priest
prot pally
ret pally

In addition, I only had a few expertise (44 from shard and a +12 expertise gem) and my dodge and parry ratings were each below 2% for melee swings. Is there any explanation for this given the raid comp, or have other people raiding at 80 also found their hits table to be significantly skewed from how they think it should be?

I got the same experience like Landos, i've switched my gear from 8%hit (0 hits miss) to 6% where i also missed with nothing, but HoW( 1.7% ? ). I also think there is a 3% ghost hit or something like this
(no special raidcomp: rogue, feral, mk, hunter, melee shaman, mage/wl)

Deep assassination rogue with 3/3 Master Poisoner will increase 3% hit for all raid member on the poisoned target. If the target you were fighting isn't poison immune, this might be where the 3% extra hit coming from. Spriest misery from tooltip seems increase 3% spell hit only, but there's I think one more class for extra 3% hit, not sure though.



Btw, any information on if the Ret pally theorycraft gonna update? Or anyone will work on a more complete theorycraft thread on ret paladin, covering gear choice, talent spec, raid dps rotation, enchants, jewels, trinkets, libram, profession and so on? I know we already talked about those points separately, just hope someone will make a complete post for Ret pally in wrath, looking forward to it.

Question on gear choices and Rawr.

Is Rawr currently viable? And if so, how worth it is it to get the 2/4 set bonus from T7? When looking at Rawr, many pieces of gear could easily reach 100 DPS over any of the valorous pieces, so would having that big of a DPS increase be worth losing the set bonus over?