Hello, sorry if this is a silly question, but I was told last night by a raid leader who i have never before raided with that our ret aura's 3% crit to raid 3% all damage to raid 3% haste to raid is overridden by moonkin aura and shammy totems. I tried in my diplomatic way to inform them they were wrong, but have never had to prove it before. Just in case its me thats the nub, I thought i would ask here. Our raid buffs off of ret aura are there for anyone affected by the aura, correct?

Since WotLK, most similar buffs don't stack anymore.

3% haste can be provided by a Moonkin, 3% crit can be provided by an Elemental Shammy and 3% damage can be provided by a Beast Master Hunter (not moonkin or shaman as you stated), so if you have all three of those then yes as a Retadin you won't be adding any of those buffs to the raid.

On the other hand, from the hunters in my guild I understand that Survival is currently the way to go, so assuming that raid actually does employ a BM hunter, you'd be better served with him speccing Survival and you providing the 3% damage buff. (This is second hand info, if any hunter reading this wants to disagree/confirm that would be useful).


A generally helpful tool to see who can provide parallels to our buffs is this: MMO-Champion RaidComp (Hover over the right hand side).

3% damage can be brought by ferocious inspiration.
3% haste can be brought by moonkin aura.
3% crit is the same as Wrath.

None stack.

Thanks for the replies.

Posted from MMO-Champion. Announced 3.1 changes:

Clearly these are in addition to the other announced/expected changes.

Loss of 7% to Fanaticism and 10% to RV.

EDIT: If MMO-Champ's talent calculators are accurate, there's been some reshuffling of the talent trees, as well. Divine Guardian appears to be another tier lower than it previously had been and Improved Retribution Aura is missing. The trees are also missing the new Prot talent.

These changes were announced February 9th, and nothing on the talent calculators provided seems to reflect these either. Nor is there any mention of SA and the talents in deep Prot/Ret to offset it's loss. I'm hoping that this is simply a situation of inaccurate/outdated patch notes, because as was stated our "damage was where it needed to be." Otherwise I'm bothered by these changes -- they're a step in the wrong direction.

It seems odd that after being told that we were getting Exorcism castable on all targets because our current damage was where they wanted us, we're now eating a 7% crit reduction to Judgement and a 25% nerf to RV. It could just be the standard miscommunication of them meaning "the build I work on" and us assuming "the build I play". Plus we get even more points to play with, when we already had 5 with no use.

edit: Skeleton of the PvE build would look like this. We gain 9 points to play with, 2 from Fanaticism, 2 from RV and 5 from Kings. We could get pretty deep into prot or holy with these points, but with no real purpose for PvE since we will have dual specs if we need to perform a different job. It seems really weird to have this many points to play around with.

Additionally I noticed that Imp MotW improves stats by 1/2% so I'd say it's probable that Kings is sticking at 2% stats.

second edit:

Source

Some of the class sections do look woefully bare, notably Paladin, Warrior, Mage and Rogue. So I guess I'll wait until we get a ways into the PTR process before making any decisions about where to put those 14 spare points.

No doubt. I admit I might be a little cynical/worrisome from the TBC/Original WoW days where changes were unannounced, nonsensical, and seemingly implemented with little testing. It's reassuring to hear that the Patch is vastly incomplete. I do like the idea of streamlining the trees, but I would also like to keep the damage output that we do. And when it's stated we are where we're supposed to be, in terms of damage; I can't help but scratch my head at those changes on their own -- unless they have some other means of compensating for those talent changes. CS providing more damage/utility perhaps? Maybe 5 stacks of Vengeance will return. If that's in the works, then I'll happily accept the changes to RV and Fanaticism.

I do like the idea of merging Sanctified Ret and Imp. Ret Aura -- sets the PvP talent a bit lower into Ret to prevent those hybrid-specced Holy Pallies from being unstoppable in Arenas. Now if only they'd put Vindication a bit lower in the tree to prevent the Enlightened Judgments/Vindication combo...

Well, they gotta come up with something. We already had quite a few talent points free to spend on non dps increasers. With the removal of BoK talent, and lowering of Fana/RV, we get alot of points to spend that dont really improve us PvE wise.

I guess you could argue that you can go deeper into prot or holy, but neither seems very tempting. 40 yard auras would be nice, but the first 2 tiers of holy seems pretty worthless to a retri pala.
Lets hope they implement something nice for 11 point prot, and that they finally manage to add some flavor to plain boring talents like Sanctified Seals/Crusader Strike.

I mean, 2 talents that do the exact same thing, only in 2 tiers related to eachother? Gotta come up with something better than that.

CS also needs some secondary effect.

Thats my 2cents worth ;p

As I understand it, Imp. MOTW is going to give the Druid, and JUST the Druid, 2% more stats, as a personal reward for taking a raid-oriented talent.

BOK is going to be 10% more stats. They only broke it down to the 2% + Improved state it's in now because they moved it to tier 1.

As far as Ret-related changes that are only showing up on the talent calc:

Improved Hammer of Justice is now 10s cooldown reduction per rank for 2 ranks. This means that PvP Ret Paladins can only get a 40 second cooldown.

Glyph of Exorcism now increases Exorcism damage by 20%, instead of adding a 0 second interrupt. This was probably changed given Exorcism being castable on all players.

As Blizzard has decided to put exorcism as a member of our rotation, that means ours glyphs are going to change. I'm going to be swapping out glyph of crusader strike for the new 20% exorcism damage buff one. From that, we're gonna lose some mana efficiency. Rets are gonna be up against the wall even more with a new spell and the loss of crusader strike efficiency.

However, I think they're giving us a way to make this back up. By reducing talent point requirements in our tree and the removal of blessing of kings we now have a straight forward path to 4 or 5 points into divine intellect in the holy tree, a 12% or 15% bump in mana pool. My mana pool is around 6000 right now so somewhere between 720 to 900 extra base mana before raid buffs, as well as the increased spell crit rating.

I'll reserve the majority of my comments after 3.1 gets fleshed out more.

However, the Fanaticism and RV changes are nerfs despite them making the talent more valuable on a point-for-point basis. For nearly any other DPS class this would be a buff as they could spend it in other areas to gain DPS. Paladins, on the other hand, cannot.

Fanaticism was decreased by 7% overall, was reduced to 72% of it's current effectiveness, but gained 20% value per point. Righteous Vengeance was decreased by 10% overall, was reduced to 75% of it's current effectiveness, but gained 25% value per point.

Using personal numbers, my Judgement damage is about 25% give or take for a boss fight and RV pulls 8-10%. Now, assuming an effective 50% raid buffed crit puts Judgement crit at 75%. Using that, you can get a rough estimate of the damage decrease caused by 7% less crit on Judgements. I'm using a base Judgement hit of 1 for ease of math

1*.25+.75*2 = 1.75 average Judgement damage currently

Now, factor in a -7% chance to crit

1*.32+.68*2 = 1.68 average Judgement damage in 3.1

Using JUST these changes (again, 3.1 still has probably a lot in store for us) in a current 3.0.9.9551 raid environment, you'd expect to see a 1%~ damage drop in Judgement (25% to 24%) and a 2-3% damage drop in Righteous Vengeance from both less Judgement crits due to Fanaticism and less overall damage by RV.

These two changes alone post about a 3-4% potential nerf to PvE DPS.

With the new Glyph, I'm wondering if it's worth swapping out one of the usual ones (Judgement / Consecration / HoW) for it. Well not Glyph of Judgement ( :P ), but I wonder what our mana will be like say with 8 second Consecrations and Exorcism thrown in...

Sigh @ more mandatory glyphs. I actually enjoyed having a decision (read not a OMG-GET-THIS-GLYPH-OR-SUCK decision) for my 3rd Gylph slot for PvE. I ran w/ SoComm for the longest time when Command was enough to kill in PvP and now I run w/ HoW for both PvP and PvE reasons.

I doubt any of us would give up Judgement OR Consecrate glyph currently. Being able to yield the HoW/CS glyph becomes a question of mana efficiency which is still up in the air pending the regeneration changes we're supposedly going to be undergoing in 3.1.

EDIT: At closer inspection of the talent calculator on MMO-champ (grain of salt, etc) the 3% damage bonus from Sanctified Retribution applies to ALL auras, not just Retribution Aura.

While it certainly helps if a filler aura is needed, it would still be the ret paladin supplying Ret Aura in most cases as they have the most potent version.

As for the other nerfs, I'm guessing that the Fanaticism nerf might be an attempt at dissuading paladins from using SoB in PvP, as the burst would be less guaranteed than SoC. I am unsure of the RV nerf and its reasoning, however.

While on the subject of glyphs, Ghostcrawler promised a while back that we were going to see new glyphs in 3.1, anyone know if they're in the game files yet?

The change to Sanctified Retribution (3% applied to all auras) is in line with the new wording on Devotion aura. The 6% healing is now applied whatever aura happens to be up.

Imp Devo seems to have it aswell.

edit: argh already beaten

I was just wondering if anyone caught that Crusade doesn't effect our damage against giants? I'm just assuming that a lot of the boss encounters in Ulduar will have something to do with a giant mob.

Also we lose the 1% damage to undead with the sense undead glyph, again assuming that Ulduar does not have undead mobs.

Another 4% damage gone?

And the 3% haste is still tied to Ret aura only. This seems unlikely. I would read this as persisting through death similar to the way tracking abilities used to need to be reapplied after resurrection, but no longer do.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...fthetitans.jpg

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...plateboots.jpg

Are these best in slot and the new 2 blue used with Jewel crafting?

# Improved Stormstrike (Tier 8 ) now has a 50/100% chance to grant you 20% of your base mana when you Stormstrike.

This makes me think JotW should be bumped to 20% or more.

These plans are being released along side a brand new instance full of loot that is probably on equal footing, so time can only tell. If you're asking about right this second, comparing these items to what is currently in the game, then I would go with "probably."