DMG = (wDPS + (AP/14))*4 is actually the correct Hammer of the Righteous damage formula, the weapon speed doesn't get factored into it. I'd need to do some in-game comparing to see if the formulas on the tooltips are correct, but I'll try and see. It's likely those don't take into account talents or similar effects.

Ah. Ok, that makes sense. I was mixing up weapon speed in there most likely due to my past experience using normalized weapon speeds in rogue attack calculations. But this attack is meant to be viable independent of weapon speed, so the lack of it in there makes sense.

I would assume that the tooltip formulas presented on Wowhead would be without talents taken into account. But we all know what happens when you assume...

However, if you do make the assumption that Wowhead is right, then it is possible to see at a glance which judgement offers the best scaling:
Justice/Wisdom/Light -> All scale at 0.25*SP + 0.16*AP (let's call this default)
Righteousness -> 0.32*SP + 0.20*AP (~1.25*default)
Blood/Martyr -> 0.25*SP + 0.16*AP (default), but also scales with weapon damage (0.36)
Vengeance/Corruption (Full Stack) -> 1.5*(0.22*SP + 0.14*AP) = 0.33*SP + 0.21*AP (~1.31*default)

Of course, Righteousness, Blood/Martyr, and Vengeance/Corruption also scale up with Seals of the Pure. Of these, Vengeance/Corruption scales the best, but Blood/Martyr starts off higher due to factoring in weapon damage on the judgement effect.

I verified this as well by checking Redcape's Ret DPS sheet. I admit, I have trouble following his methodology, but I did find the section where he has scalars for the judgements. The only one that disagrees with the tooltip is Judgement of Blood. The Ret DPS sheet has scaling of 1.31*default, but Wowhead's tooltip has only 1.0*default.

I should really sanity-check this in game. Maybe I can do that later tonight...

Weapon speed does not factor in at all.

The formula for HOTR is: (wDPS + AP / 14) * 4

The in game tooltip's display of your dps takes into account One Hand Specialization as well as attack power and what have you. Simply multiplying this by four will yield the expected damage of your Hammers.

I'd disagree. Even assuming that someday we will actually need to worry about threat, I feel that the Libram of Obstruction somewhat invalidates the 969 rotation, as that tends to pan out with one in three shield slams not being used during the libram's buff span, which is a huge TPS loss. When you ensure that ShR is used within the libram's buff span, you'll get an overlapping cooldown with or without Glyph of Consecration.. with or without Imp.Judgement 1/2. Consequently, the rotation is far less strict.

When you consider also that the prot pally is often the best situated to cleanse, use the various Hands, and throw out extra Sacred Shields...

(Off on a tangent, some time ago I stated that we'd tested and found that BoSanc and Vigilance stacked their damage reductions; however, sometime since then this has been fixed - Vigilance now overwrites BoSanc.)

Should have the armor -> effective physical hit points conversion on the main post. In BC was about 18k armor or something for a 100% increase, should require more armor now - but how much?

I don't really see what you're saying here. The only way to ensure that you have the libram up for all ShR's is to just do fewer ShR's. But a non-libram'd SHR is still 75% of the threat of a libram'd one, so omitting that third ShR entirely is a far bigger threat loss than doing it without the libram buff up.

If you don't need to do maximum threat, then sure, you can be a little more efficient by only slamming after a judgement... but if you're not worried about threat, the Consecration glyph isn't much use either.

Okay, yeah that was pretty unclear. My apologies for a rushed post, had a group bugging me to come play The complete argument is that, in the current state of the game, threat is an issue only when a new threat list is created - either through getting an add, summoned creatures, a threat-list being cleared, whatever.

With excess threat being generated on what we're already tanking, it's in our best interests to intentionally delay abilities so as to overlap cooldowns; thus at any given point, we can choose between two abilities with which to put significant threat on a new threat list. In effect, this inserts one "free" entry in the rotation (to be used on cleanses, Hands, or Sacred Shields), forcing the core threat abilities into overlapping cooldowns. You can forgo this when Avenging Shield is up, but 30 seconds is a long time.

Consequently, it doesn't matter whether your consecration is glyphed or unglyphed, whether you have one two or no points in improved judgements when using such a rotation, as you simply shift which abilities you delay accordingly. And consequentally, if your pairing does not place ShR after Judgement in preferred usage, it's a huge dps loss.

Of course, this is not a consideration for all fights. For trash pulls at a breakneck speed, or bosses that summon adds, enough to consider optimizing for it. I suppose it's a strange way of thinking, but to me the 969 dealie is more for optimal DPS, a worthy consideration, but not for optimal aggro in a sub-optimal world.

(I hope this makes more sense. It's all about flexibility in picking up fresh threat lists. It goes without saying that there are other activities that throw you off the 969 and loosen up restrictions on talents/glyphs, but that's not really the point I'm after.)

In my opinion 969 is for being lazy. It's a great way to generate great threat that is nearly optimal, without having to concentrate on your abilities or cooldowns. The greatest benefit of it is that you can cut out GCD collisions entirely which puts it at as near optimal for ability uptime as you can be, and you can do this without having to focus on conspiring cooldowns and other factors. This lets you keep an eye on positioning and mobs more easily.

However, I think that like Nobbynob Littlun said, there's occasional circumstances where you might want to shift up your rotation. For instance to make use of the libram. IE: If you're doing the second last boss in AK, you would want to judge first and then shield slam, and then wait until your second judgement is back up before you do it again (since you're only going to have time to hit her with 2 anyways). Or if you're pulling quickly and you need to generate a large amount of initial threat, you would want to hit shor and hotr first to get that initial burst in 3 seconds rather than spend 6 seconds waiting to go 9696.

Personally I typically waver between a 96969 rotation and a 6699669x rotation where x is a free GCD for whatever else. The 6699 rotation is based around the knowledge that there's enough things to interrupt my rotation that it's more important to be a bit more dynamic. It copes better with altered cooldowns and stuns/taunts/Sacred Shield recast/Divine Plea, but suffers more from GCD collisions.

Since threat has rarely been an issue for me, I like the control I get from avoiding the 969 rotation, however, when I'm getting tired or need to pay more attention to things other than cooldowns, it's far easier to just manage a 969 rotation.

As per Zeidrich, I as well deviate from a 969 rotation, more towards his 669669x rotation.

I prefer to save my ShoR for when i know an add will be coming/phase change/threat drop. As well, severe latency makes it nigh impossible to keep a perfect 969 rotation going.

Of all the abilites to drop though, which is the best?
Typically i find myself dropping consecrate/judgement, and rotation between which one i don't use. However now that i have the Libram, Judgement is an additional threat increase for my ShoR. Is it still worth dropping in favor of consecrate, and just keeping the judgement up?
(my lat spikes up to 2k+, so occasionally i can only get a HS/ShoR/HotR before HS is back up)

You don't have to do 969, even while doing 969... what I mean by that is, you can cut abilities out of 969 in order to insert Cleanses or Hands or whatnot, and then simply go back to the rotation. No matter which way you slice it, 969 is going to give you the most threat and the most survivability (as doing it right = max Holy Shield uptime). I'll routinely drop a HotR or a Cons if I'm ahead on threat and I need to SS myself or someone else, or reseal, or HoP/HoS somebody. Here's the trick: any rotation in which you are using an ability every single GCD, using ShoR every time it's up, and keeping HS up 100% of the time is a good rotation.

On the subject of JoL, you really should have the Ret Paladin do it unless your running on something very threat sensitive (no fight like that comes to mind). If your tanks can't overcome Ret threat w/ JoL, they're doing it wrong. I'm typically double the threat of the Ret Paladin in any sustained fight, and I only lose aggro to him on an initial pull where I miss with ShoR and he crits, or something similar, but those situations are not unique to Ret and have nothing to do with JoL. By having the Prot Paladin do it you're losing out on a signiifcant amount of raid healing, just to epeen threat (which, realistically, you should be epeening anyway just from the naturally obscene threat of Paladins 3.0).

Just how much difference does it make? I've yet to come across a good breakdown of this.

That's how I see it. The only thing I treat as an absolute is that I have to keep HS up when things are hitting me. With a 1.5-second GCD, 9 seconds is the only timing for HS that you can fit a whole number of GCDs into. That fits neatly into 969. (I don't see how you do 6699 without letting HS drop for 2 seconds between casts, but maybe I'm missing something.)

So really, my rotation is 9xxxxx, where the 9 is HS. If I need max threat, or if I have nothing else to do and I just want to do dps, then I turn it into 969. Otherwise, if I need to cleanse, SS, toss a hand, whatever, I just take whatever GCDs I need for those things aside from HS.

Coming back to what started this discussion: Given that there are times when 969 is your best option (max threat/dps) the Cons glyph still seems counterproductive to me.

I used to use the Consecration glyph on beta. It created a lot of situations where I had global cooldowns I basically couldn't spend, I was clipping cooldowns constantly, and it was a pain in the ass any time I wanted to move my Consecration. (If that new set of adds comes from the left and my Consecration is stuck on the right still, the situation becomes worse.) I can't seriously recommend it to any tanking Paladin - its only use is a slight increase in mana efficiency, and if you need mana efficiency, Consecration is probably just going to end up getting dropped from your rotation. (If yo're tanking enough mobs that Consecrate is the only way to effectively hold them, there's usually no reason not to seal Wisdom.) The only reason I used it was because I hadn't been doing enough reading and I hadn't thought about trying to build a good rotation.

Going from a tattered mess of a FCFS with priority rotation that I set up for myself in beta and comparing it to 6/9/6/9/6/9, the difference is profound. If you want cooldowns to Cleanse or Hand of Protection, drop abilities from the rotation. If you want to save Hammer of the Righteous for that 3-pull that's about to spawn, save it. Switching out of 9/6 rotations (with substitutions where appropriate) for a Protection Paladin tends to basically just be wasting global cooldowns for the sake of having them "free."

Could this be similar to whats causing judgements to fail, i.e. being fully resisted? They don't appear in any logs either when it happens. I often see "immune" messages, so I'm curious now if something is causing the target to fully resist the judgements?

Edit: nvm - the immune messages are from Vindication, but still curious if the judges get fully resisted and not logged?

This, in my opinion, is really the key. Pick your priorities, and stick to them. In most cases the priority lies in keeping Holy Shield active while judging at least every 20 seconds. That pretty much covers it, and the rest can fit in as needed. In the case that you vastly outgear the content, you might want to pull as much as possible with Consecration and HotR as your priorities, but either way you do what's needed then "whatever else" to fill in the gaps. Ultimately, if you try to stick to a rigid 9-second rotation, you will run into situations where you need an ability and it isn't available. Intelligent play will always win over optimal threat rotations.

As im not dooing that much of TPS maxing theory myself im just gonna ask you if this is really bad.

Im using the libram obtained by badges and therefore i use a rotation that is HS>Judge>Shield of the righteous>Hammer>Consecration>Exorcism>Hammer of Wrath> Holy Wrath (this ofc changes if im multi target tanking and also if im multi target tanking undeads). this makes my cooldowns clash sometimes but when they do i use this order of priority. This means that im only using Shield of the righteous every 8sec when i have judged (got 2 points in reduced judgement CD). Sometimes thou the HS CD finishes in between judgement and Shield of the righteous making me have to wait another 1.5 sec to cast shield of the rightous. So what i wonder is how big the loss/gain in TPS is by waiting with Shield of the righteous untill ive judged every time. (check armory for Hallio on server EU-Darksorrow if needed)

On a different matter. People are arguing that expertise is not that good a stat for paladin TPS but it seems like you are all neglegting the -parry wich in my head counts as mitigation.

For now im personally going for Stamina>BV>STR>Expertise>Defense>Dodge>Parry in my gear and hit just comes along on some of the items wich is fine but i would never prioritise this pure TPS rating over any other.

Im using Consecration, SoV and Righteous Defense glyphs.

I am totally unfamiliar to the 969 rotation (i can ofc understand what it means with Judge, Shield of the righteous and HS cds matching). I just feel like everybody leave out the big boost in block you get from judging ASAP with the 352BV (481 with talents and meta) for 5 sec after judgement.

Im sorry if my english is not perfect but im sure you all can catch my points explain me any flaws in my way of thinking.

I just found that Rank 1 and Rank 2 Shield of Righteousness are on separate cooldowns. Has this bug been noticed before?

You are missing something. With a 969 rotation it is guaranteed, when performing it properly, that your next Shield of Righteousness after Judging will get the extra block value from your libram. You will always perform a Shield of Righteousness in the next 5 seconds after Judging. In other words, with a 969 rotation you get the exact same benefit from the libram as waiting for your Judgement to cooldown first and then immediately using Shield of Righteousness, while also being able to fit more Shields of Righteousness in the same time span.

To put it somewhat more graphically:

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

What can be worth doing is to ensure that your first Shield of Righteousness benefits from the Libram, since that isn't a certainty. You will always get some unboosted Shields of Righteousness with a 969 rotation, but delaying your entire rotation to make sure all your Shields of Righteousness do get full benefit from the Libram is a TPS loss.

By waiting for Judgements you're effectively putting your Shield of Righteousness on at least a 8 second cooldown which is a 25% decrease in your potential Shields of Righteousness, which also doesn't fit neatly into GCDs. It is only a better idea if your block value is so low that your Shield of Righteousness hits for less than ~550 damage, and if it's hitting that low, I have to wonder why you're tanking in Holy gear.

I can confirm that this is the case, which I hadn't noticed before. This is a pretty silly increase to our single-target damage.

This is just amazing, and I can't see this not being fixed soon..

Untill then, I replaced my SoR button with this macro:
I suppose in case of single target tanking, the best spell to drop from my 969 is Consecration? And just replace my HotR which would be the second '6' with a SoR r1?

Judgement is the best to drop, and making SoR rank 1 and SoR rank 2 the 6s in a 969696 makes the most sense. (Swapping HotR into Judgement's place when you don't need Judgement for the buff.)