I haven't personally done much math on the T7 bonuses vs equivalent gear slots, but my gut says that -1s on our largest dps nuke would add up over time (as well as increasing mana income, which lets you do more dps..). 2pc simply turns DS into a 110% weapon damage aoe strike, which is ...rather poor, if your DS accounts for anything close to what mine does for total damage (~9% of my damage normally, so 2pc is a 1% damage boost?). Does anyone want to run accurate numbers so I can add a little tier gear section?

Increasing the damage dealt by Divine Storm would still only be 10% of 9% of his damage - the 2pce bonus (Which is what he is referring to I believe) only increases the damage dealt by Divine Storm, not the seals it procs as well.

I'm mainly prot so I'm not intimately familiar with the retribution "rotation". I understand that due to clashing cooldowns retribution doesn't have a strict rotation any more, but follows a first come first serve system prioritising Judgement > CS > DS > Consecration. This tells me quite plainly what buttons to press at the start of a fight. What I'm curious about is when GCD clashes start occuring.

e.g.

(assuming 10 second Consecration):

00.0 - Judgement
01.5 - CS
03.0 - DS
04.5 - Consec
07.5 - CS becomes available
08.0 - Judgement becomes available

In this case, do I delay CS by 2 seconds by waiting 0.5 seconds when CS comes off cd to hit Judgement as soon as it's available, or do I delay Judgement by 1 second by hitting CS as soon as it comes off cooldown? First come first serve would suggest I just hit CS, but that goes against prioritising Judgement. Given that mana is reported to be an issue on occasion, this would suggest that triggering judgements of the wise at every possible opportunity would be a major consideration.

If mana wasn't a consideration would this change things? I know that judgement is by far the most damage per GCD, but will the damage gained from keeping judgement on cooldown offset the loss from delaying other abilities?

FCFS in this case is strict - if something is off cooldown, hit it immediately, even if you see something else that would've come off cooldown during the incurred GCD.

I just spent the last couple of hours running 3 different test for the ghost hit. I did have precision pre 3.0. The results are

No gear, no talents and no aura


A couple of odd things happened during this test. 2.2% of the attacks are blocked, but the next 2 tests don't have any blocks and my naked crit is 5,39% (might be off 0.1-0.2% because I forgot to write it down) while recount shows 1.8%

No gear, no aura, but with talents

No blocks, but the difference in parry and dodge covers it with a 0.1% difference. The crit is low again 13.03% on my character screen vs 8.3% on recount

No gear, but with ret aura and talents

Again no blocks, and the same crit differences as the 2nd test.

However the truely odd bit of information is that untalented, naked and no aura has the least misses out of the 3. So instead of getting a clearer picture I'm at an even greater loss to explain our ghost hit.

Just wanted to followup on this. I did get to test it (albeit as a prot paladin, not ret) on Friday. I have 1 second off my judgement cooldown. Simply standing and spamming judgement every time it cycled (and doing nothing else except autoattack) resulted in no dropped judgements at all. Arikah is right; whatever the bug is, it's not this (at least, not for 1/2 Imp. Judgements).

We can agree to disagree.

Since popping BL at 99% health makes sure everyone can benefit (especially 5k dps Hunters) rather than relying on people to have trinkets/cooldowns up at sub-35% to maximize its use, most guilds will see more of a benefit to using it at the start.


CS is a dps boost because it help allows me to spam Cons without going OOM, while AW is situational and requires "skill" to use properly.


Edit to address Recount:
Rogues, Hunters, and it appears to be Ret as well have a 4.8% Critical Strike reduction against bosses.

Hunters and Warriors have run tests in their section of the forums and have confirmed 8% miss on bosses.


I ran 1000 swings a week ago with Ret Aura and 0 hit and had 5.8% miss with 6.8% Judgement miss. I may do it again and then I can check Boss Anti-Crit as well.

This topic was briefly commented on in the old ret theorycrafting thread, but it was quickly lost in the sea of WotLK posts. The question is should consecration be before DS in our rotation?

Here is the WWS from our first night of heroic Malygos attempts which I'll be using for my calculations:
WWS Loading...

Consecration average damage per cast:

545*10 = 5450

Divine Storm average damage per cast (not counting SotM damage):

(1812*0.55)+(3840*0.43) = 2648

Calculating SotM damage is a big mess because of the way recoil damage is logged by WWS. From what I've gathered WWS logs 2 hits each time you connect with a target. 1 hit is your normal damage and 1 hit is recoil damage. The recoil damage, however, gets logged as a hit with 0 damage done. This means the average non-crit damage number and crit rate for SotM show up quite different from what they actually are. The average crit damage number is unaffected because the recoil damage is incapable of criting. Using these assumptions the actual crit rate and average damage per SotM proc are calculated as follows.

Crit rate for SotM:

2393(# of logged hits)-583(# of crit recoil hits) = 1810 logged hits (normal and non-crit recoil)
1810/2 = 905 total non-crit procs
583/(583+905) = 39% crit for SotM

Average non-crit hit for SotM:

351*2 = 702

Average damage per SotM proc:

(702*0.61)+(1628*0.39) = 1063


Summary:
DS+SotM average damage per cast: 1063+2648 = 3711
Consecration average damage per cast: 5450

There are way too many assumptions and places where my math could easily have gone awry, which is why I'm posting this here for you guys to double check. It does appear that on bosses that are not being moved out of consecration before every tick hits (ie Patchwork) that consecration does more damage per cast. Is this correct?

Thanks in advance, all, for double checking this for me.


edit: I completely forgot about Righteous Vengeance, but (as Exemplar points out a few post below) the numbers should still be skewed in favor of consecration assuming mana isn't an issue.

Ah ok, I suppose that sound logical considering all the other hit table 'categories' are affected by level differences.

I guess we can also conclude that the ghosthit is not baked into some ret talent as some have suggested here.

I didn't scrub the math, but you did forget to average Divine Vengeance DoT for DS crits. It's not a huge swing in DPS.

I'd come to the same personal conclusion before. However, Consecration is 22% base mana while DS is 12% base mana. This is 1.8 times the mana cost for around 1.5 times the damage (2 piece T7 inflates DS's damage altering the damage ratio to around 1.2ish, still in favour of Consecration). Even Libram of Resurgence doesn't push it to a ratio of 1.8 (equivalent Damage per Mana) or above.

In a mana rich environment easy math says you're right prioritizing Consecration over Divine Storm (1.2-1.5 times the damage is... you guessed it, more damage!). If you're going to have to drop something for mana (as we're supposedly designed for Judge, CS, DS spam) it will probably be Consecration. It has a very large opportunity cost - 22% base. You could get an extra unglyphed CS and DS (8% base + 12% base < 22% base) off instead. Or if you had exactly enough mana where a Consecration (22%) would drop you to 0 mana you could instead DS (12%) and still have enough mana for the next Judge (5%) to pump more fuel into your engine.

Anecdotally I find I still have mana issues on a lengthy fight, but Naxx is undead - less Exorcism and Holy Wrath could also make 100% Consecrate up-time more viable. Losing casts on both of those and more Consecration also appears a clear win - losing one HW (20%) or two Exo (2x10%) for one more Consecration is a win.

Movement fights also put DS way ahead - instant burst of damage vs entirely lost ticks. Grobbulus and Heigan would be excellent examples.

We're getting into dangerous "think before you cast" territory, rather than FCFS or "stick with priority x, y, z". People who want to faceroll or Ret as off-spec, I'd keep DS ahead of Consecration.

For those who missed it - I added link to Vulajin's test on crit reduction to my previous post.


TL/DR - It's a DPS vs Damage Per Mana trade off. If you have enough mana to spam Judge, CS, DS, and Consecration for an entire fight and no movement - Consecration is better than DS. If you move or have mana issues, Consecration is lower priority.