I have a hard time believing they are buffing it enough to make up for a 30% regen loss, but we'll see I guess.

So probably running on fumes regularly in 10-mans if you can't rustle up a shaman (or two extra paladins). Great.

I dunno if anyone else does this, but I carry around a stack of int viii scrolls for situations where a mage or lock (with fel int) is not available...otherwise I don't run oom using all of my damaging abilities.

After playing around on the PTR, a couple things I've noted (for build 9722)

- Sacred Shield doesn't correctly scale (522 Shields w/ 1304 SP unless it's only supposed to have a 1.7%~ coefficient for Sheath of Light)
- AoW still doesn't reset the swing timer
- Righteous Vengeance seems to be fixed to 30% correctly, instead of the 24% it was at.
- CS and DS are multiplying slightly oddly.

DS is listed at 132% Weapon Damage w/ 2pieceT8 and AoW instead of the 133.1% (Which should probably get listed as 133 to 134% like CS does w/ the Glove bonus). CS is listed as 136% to 137% instead of the 139% to 140% is should be (It all multiplies out to 13915%).

The CS multiplier is easy to explain, as it's 1.1 + (1.1*1.15-1) instead of 1.1*1.1*1.15.

On Live, CS multiplies slightly odd to when the PvP Gloves are thrown in, as it's (1.1+.05)*1.1 instead of 1.1*1.1*1.05.

Edit: Oh, so any Damage Modifier from gear (2pieceT7 and PvP Gloves) is applied to the base effect of the spell. CS becomes 115% x Multipliers and DS becomes 120% x Multipliers. Now, I wonder if this applies to all spells or just % based ones. With that, I wonder how 2pieceT8 interacts w/ Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath.

All in all, CS is multiplying out incorrectly in the 3.1 PTR, build 9722.

Edit2: While bugged, the [Venture Co. Libram of Retribution] is producing hilarious results. It currently increases DS damage by 80% instead of a flat +80 Damage.

CS is working as it was previously, as I had mentioned a few times ~10 pages back, it works in a very odd way, but has been working that way all PTR. DS appears to apply % modifiers in the same way. I can only guess that it is implemented this way so that adding additional %multipliers down the road don't start adding crazy amounts of damage (since a 10% additional multiplier will always only add 11% more damage).

Was out testing RV also (when I ran into Arrent), and it does appear that it is fixed to 30%, however it is still behaving oddly with the the race specific half of crusade. We are gaining the 3% modifier on RV, even though we should no longer get any % modifiers.


Interesting little note, self-buffed only, judging Light, using glyph of Seal of Blood produces an infinite mana situation for me (results will change with gear). I was using glyph of SoB, judgment, and exorcism, with might (kings would make it even better with the additional mana from replenishment), using 4-piece,on a target that I alone was attacking. Using the basic FCFS priority rotation using everything (CS, DS, JoL, Exo, Cons), and was unable to get under 80% mana, then a DP would return me to full every minute.

In a fully raid buffed environment I would imagine using this Glyph would result in such an enormous amount of mana regen that we could actually throw around our AoW flash heals (now that they don't reset our swing timer) pretty much everytime we can spare a GCD with no threat of running oom. As well as being able to use JoL on healing intense fights without any personal loss (obviously casters and hunters may struggle with mana as a result, but if you need the healing to keep everyone alive it will be an option).

I confirmed this on test pretty well on my own. I did not start to dip til the target dummy went below 20% to use HoW, but even then it should last you til the end of the fight. This was without blessing of wisdom, and just self buffed kings. Using Exorcism/Consecration/Judgement glyphs. I'll edit this when I try without 4 peice T7.

Edit: It's fine without 4 peice bonus as well so I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you were say fighting...General Vezax. Then you might want to take a look at adding the glyph, or better yet if you have an issue with mana somewhere down the line go 10/5/56 and skip seal of command to pickup Divine Intellect--although I don't know how ret fares with the original fight since it was not implemented during a build where ret was not mana gimped. Of course Divine Intellect will not add alot for us solo, but it surely helps through replenishment and BE Arcane Torrent.

Just to back up what Bulwyth is saying, with the SoB glyph we should be seriously mana heavy raid buffed and able to throw FoL's at will to everyone and their grandma. I played around with and without the SoB glyph tonight, and either way it took me quite a while to go oom, using a full rotation without the glyph.(I did however use JoL with the SoB glyph because the mana from JoW is just wasted with that glyph, and used JoW without the SoB glyph.).

So, with the Sob glyph, we have pretty much infinite mana in any situation, raid buffed or not... and without the glyph we still have very decent regen even not raid buffed. I'm pretty impressed so far.

Nitpick: Paladin Base Mana is 4394, and Base Mana isn't influenced by race.

/EndNitpick

As for your numbers, you're off on the cost of Exorcism and Consecration. Presumably, you're taking the expensive, lower rank version of the spells into account instead of the cheaper, max rank ones. Exorcism is only 8% and Consecrate is only 22%, both are reduced to 7.2% and 19.2%, respectively, with Benediction.

Additionally, adding a half second to each abilities' cooldown more accurately results in an abilities real cooldown due to lag and clashes. And with that, you end up leaning more closer towards being mana positive the more imperfect your rotation becomes.

Edit: I figured that's what you were doing in Scourgeholme Bulwyth

Your calcs should use 25% for JotW (not 20%) and 110mp5 for BoW (assuming the improved version to be present in a raid setting isn't a stretch) as well.

He mentioned he included the net loss of Judgement in his calculations, which might be the missing 5% from JotW.

A 25% JotW is a net gain of 20.5% Base Mana, assuming 5/5 Benediction.

Had some time to do some testing of my own re: mana - results are interesting. Conditions: 320ms, self-buffed with might, no other debuffs on boss training dummy. My scribbles note what seal and judgement I used for each test, and if I did or didn't use DP on cooldown... also noted times until complete oom (no usable skills) vs oom signs (for example cons would blur out until I judged). This was using full fcfs, including AW, but did not use HoW unless specified and did not use belf racial ever. Here's what my notepad gibberish looks like:

Obviously I used SoR when I was not judging light, because this was a time til oom test, not a time til death test. On test #5, which basically reflects our mana situation when solo/5/10manning, I was actually unable to run oom. In fact I noticed that about every 70 seconds, my mana bar would for a split second return to 100%, before dropping down to ~80% due to consecrate. After 11 minutes on test 5 I started to use HoW, half because I wanted to see what it did to our mana pool and half because I was getting tired of pushing buttons... using everything except Holy Wrath it took an additional 105 seconds to go from ~80% mana to 0, and that I am aware of there are no bosses that sit under 20% for more than 100 seconds. Remember also that this was done solo, and raid buffs will increase our time til oom a fair bit. Suffice it to say that when glyphed with EITHER SoB or consecrate, we should be just fine on mana in pve, and probably in pvp as well.

As for glyph choices? Consecrate and SoB glyphs seems to be pretty damn close - in terms of pure mana return, SoB is about even with cons while unbuffed, making SoB clearly superior when raid buffed. What the consecrate glyph fights back with is decent clash resolution... maybe it's just because we've become used to a 10s consecrate, but it sure feels a lot easier to keep fcfs rolling with it. For maximum possible dps it looks like judge/exo/cons will become a standard (farm mode) loadout, while going with judge/exo/sob for pvp or progression/intense pve situations (like having to use AoW heals frequently / being forced to use jol instead of jow).

And yes, also confirming SS still not scaling (what's with the 522 number?), AoW no longer resets swing timer, and CS/DS tooltips are showing up a little strange (DS reads as 132% while still wearing 4pc T7..?).

edit: math above looks good highborne. I'm actually going to change my thoughts on the glyphs slightly since once again I forgot about the impact of losing the T7 bonus - it seems like you will be using the sob glyph the moment you lose 4pc T7. Several fights in ulduar last for 5 minutes or more, so you run the risk of being oom on them unless you use potions or loh, if you don't glyph sob.

I think one of the major things people forget is that with say 8 second J and no Glyph, you can probably never afford to truly use Flash of Light, Hands, even Divine Shield eats mana up.

If you broke even, say with 7 second Judgements, you could afford to toss a spot heal or a Hand spell or some other utility while DPSing because you wouldn't gimp your DPS massively.

This isn't an issue usually unless doing hard-modes and progression, but those are really what most guilds work on for the vast majority of content until new content since most do not complete and farm hard-modes/etc for extended periods of time.

Keep in mind that there is a lot of running and what not in Uldaur - time where we don't use any mana, but the cooldown on Divine Plea is still ticking. Having 40-50 seconds of dps time per 60 seconds is probably a more realistic calculation than non-stop dps. With 25% JotW, I really don't think we're going to need the Blood glyph, and can stick with the obvious choices: Concecration, Judgement, Excorsism.

Yea, but hard to model running time, non-attacking time, passive out of 5 second rule time...etc.

I would take SoB glyph for the insurance of infinite mana and the ability to even toss a few spot heals if sh*te hits fan.

Exorcism isn't a huge chunk of damage and really, unless they give some major sustained DPS buffs, that extra bit of DPS is not worth the essentially infinite mana in my eyes.

But seeing how our dps is rock-bottom as it is, passing up on anything that increases our dps, however slightly, is not a good thing...

Movement during fights, latency and human errors etc that decreases our mana usage but allows the continuous ticking of DP and replenishment should make us mana-sufficient (hopefully, with fingers crossed).

Nontheless this is a temporary solution. When we finally swap off out T7.5 gear for better drops, we'll become mana-starved again, and will be forced to take the SoB glyph. I'll probably drop the consecrate glyph and try to work around the GCD clashes...

Just a little bit of QQ.. when will they finally do a major overhaul of the class mechanics like they did for 3.0.2 and finally do something about our mana and recoil? Probably next expansion or so...

I'm glad to see they are finally talking business with the CS changes, messing around on the PTR with possible ways to go is a good start. Would have surprised me if this change had gone live, but I'm eager to see what they are planning.

On the new Regen mechanics: With a major part of our mana regen still directly linked to judgement and it's recoil - wouldn't this make hit climb up on the priority ladder? Being almost mana positive with the current state could turn into a mana nightmare with some unlucky judgement-RNG.

Note, you are correct there I fixed those two items (exorcism and consecrateion costs) and updated a few other things as well. It actually makes both glyph setups (one including blood, one not) doable. I'm still modeling using abilites as they come off of CD with no additional cooldown modification. My goal was to model someone having the "perfect" rotation. Obviously, the more imperfect we become the more it tips mana regen in our favor. GCD clashes happen, movement happens, lag happens but there is not way to reliably model it - it's safe to assume your mana regen will be better than someone who was hypothetically able to do a perfect cycle adn that YMMV. Keep in mind I also didn't include things like Avenging Wrath, Tossing out a Hand of Salv (which I do need to do on 6 min maly), etc. All in all, my goal was to give a close ballpark estimate as to what our mana regen looks like with the changes.

I think so. I've already prepared some items/gems to reach the hit cap if needed, as it would be horrible for us to miss Judgements twice in a row now that almost all of our mana comes from it. Even if we only miss a Judgement every now and then, it would still be enough to make us go OOM over time (since 25% barely keeps us floating at this point).

Then again, Ulduar gear seems to have loads of hit, so it's not something I would worry too much about (no shame in popping a few hit gems untill the first sidegrade/upgrade with hit is available).

Unfortunately, I won't have time to actually test this, but it would be nice if someone could do a quick dummy test with various hit values to see how it affects our mana (i.e 4%, 6% and 8%).

While you would lose quite a bit of mana by missing a judgment, if you have the SoB glyph I don't think it would be as painful. I say this because that glyph makes you mana positive by quite a bit. Without the SoB glyph it would be much more painful. But I also agree that getting hit capped will be a joke once the Ulduar gear starts flooding in. I foresee it being a juggling match to not be over hit capped.

One thing I have never liked about glyph of consecrate is that in fights where I am not mana challenged and the boss is mobile, I have 2 extra seconds to wait before I can redrop conscrate under the boss. Based upon above posts it seems probable this scenereo is going to come into play now more often since we will be more mana neutral.

I guess the question becomes, do I want to risk FCFS clashes for increased mobility with consecrate? Is two seconds shorter cd on consecrate enough added mobility to really increase dps in fights that have more mobility? Clearly on fights like patchwork this would not be the case. However, fights like Noth where he is blinking around etc. could possibly benefit from the quicker reaplication of consecration in a new location.

My instinct is that I could gain more dps from using SoB glyph and dropping Conscrate from my list of majors now that mana will be less of an issue. I am trying to think of a solid way to test this though and I am not sure how this could really be demonstrated.

A good compromise to Blood recoil could be making it unable to kill you, i.e. it would drop you to 1 health at most. You would still have to be careful but at least you won't be killing yourself on gimmick fights like Gluth (or Prince Malchezaar in TBC). Lifetap already works on that principle, I don't see why Blood couldn't.