Cons glyph is about a 150 dps (from less GCD issues) + less mana used for me.

AW one is bad, because you would have to delay use of AW to use it properly.

As long as your total number of AWs is the same by the end of combat, wouldn't it still be a DPS increase then? I only recently got it, and I have run into times where i've popped AW too early to get any effect out of it.

Valid swap for CS glyph then perhaps?

You should be delaying your last Avenging Wrath of each fight for use sub-20%, specifically to buff HoW. Optimally, the Bloodlust will be called for at a time where you can stack both Lust and AW sub-20%.

While I do agree about the first two I am of a slightly different opinion for the third.

I do not doubt that the CS Glyph does help with some mana efficiency, but I do not feel that it does so enough to be worth that last slot. I would rather use it for the Seal of Command glyph, as that does wonders on any and all fights where SoC is needed to avoid the self-harming of SoB. It also helps for grinding and such, but that is of course in no way relevant to the conversation here, but it is still nice.

Fights that require the use of SoC are of course in a vast minority, but I find that in Naxxramas at least there are more fights where I have to use SoC then there are fights where I have to use a mana potion to get through the whole fight. So all in all I feel the SoC glyph is a better overall DPS improvement for me, for the time being at least.

I've found a few things out so far.

SOcomm is not required for any fights, even loatheb. the aoe healign I receive is gigantic, and I instaflash myself the moment the healing period is open. the only fight in the game I REALLY need it for is prince from kara.

so, use glyph of cstrike

also, i looked at judge/cstrike relationships and mana efficiency. I found that I usually judge-cs-ds-consec-exo, and used each cooldown exactly as it came up; that meant that I'd CS a second time right before I'd judge a second time. well, I stopped doing that, and i gave up the 0.5 seconds to judgment, and I have been able to keep relatively full mana in raids with it. Maybe it works out to be more DPS in the long run too, by getting the judgment off cooldown as quickly as possible. using CS first is counter productive because the 0.5 seconds difference im sure is made up by judge's immense dmg, and a couple more things: using cs first not only gets on the 0.5 seconds, but it also activates GCD on judge AND wastes another ~300 mana. I find that by using judgement over cs as long as cs will trigger any GCD overlap is far better dps and efficiency, and I can keep consec up 100% and exorcism on cooldown.

thought I'd let u guys know.

I wish I could agree, but I definitely can't use SoB on Loatheb. I've played around with it, but getting 10k+ JoB crits relatively consistently have made it so I can't. Next time we're in it I want to try occasionally twisting in SoB for a DPS boost only to see if the seal twisting will be manageable without going OOM.

If the boss encounter is under 5 minutes, the best time to use Bloodlust is sub-35% to take full advantage of talented buffs that occur at that point. Everyone should plan to have their cooldowns up and ready to use at that point. For Paladins and most other classes this involves simply popping cooldowns at the beginning of the fight, then holding on to it if the boss drops to around 55% or below before the cooldown comes back up. Properly stacked cooldowns are one of the best ways for many classes to maximize their dps.

If stuff goes from 20% to 0% in under 20 seconds, the fight didn't last more than 2 minutes in the first place. In this case, your original popped cooldowns haven't come back up anyway, and if you used them at all, it's because you didn't expect to blow through the fight so quickly.

The AW glyph is still very situational, but does provide a dps boost, which is more than can be said of the CS glyph.

I recently rerolled from a rogue to a ret paladin for the guild so I have a few nub questions.

First of all I understand the priorities on Judgement, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm but where do Consecration, Exorcism, and Holy Wrath fall?

Also I have made a gear list that I would think is the best gear in game currently but would anyone be able to tell me a site that has the best gear so I may double check this list? I've tryed maxdps but I don't like hwo changing your stats changes the gear so if this is the site tell me what numbers to put in to get the best gear.

Thanks for answering the nub questions.

Ah, good to see a new ret thread here

Regarding glyphs, I go with consecration, undead, judgement, the 2 LoH ones (because their utility and awsome mana regen on demand, when I want it, providing the cd is up).

I always use SoB, in every fight so far, even lothaeb. You healers should be able to top you up.

Against patchwerk, ive noticed the slime does affect our regen. It seems to me if you dive into the slime, while in combat, before judgements or divine plea, it regen suffers a lot (ie geting around 350 mana on JotW isntead of around 650). It is bugged, but i recommend judging and using Divine Plea before diving in the slime and never doing it while in the slime (or with the debuff still).

I would also like to talk about t7 set piece bonuses. Considering most of the t7 gear (apart from shoulders) arent really that good, are we better off missing out on bonuses and geting better pieces on those slots or are we better off taking the not so good t7 for the bonuses?

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?

Boaz: Consecration and Holy Wrath are likely to take precedence over Crusader Strike in an AOE situation. Judgement is still a priority to feed our mana.

In a single-target situation, Consecration fits in after the other three base abilities (Judge/CS/DS) are already cooling down, with Exorcism and Holy Wrath in 5th and 6th place respectively (and where applicable).

EDIT: I was confusing the Divine Storm set bonus as a cooldown reduction. Please disregard.

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.

Ok, so the tier 7/7.5 2p set bonus's contribution to dps is fairly easy to calculate.What, though, about the 4p set bonus, reducing our judgement cooldown by 1 second?

How much can we expect this to improve our dps, improve our mana generation, etc. How does this affect Junlex's scenario where judgements are coming off CD .5 sec after CS (besides the obvious of having it come off CD 1 sec before CS during the first 10 sec of a fight)?

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).

@Nisall - Rogues recently have been testing crit reduction on a raid boss. Link to Vulajin's extensive testing thread

It appears you lose about 4.8% crit vs a +3. This seems to fall in line with your tests and paper doll vs. experimental results. This appears to be something to take as a raid expectation (like glancing, armor mitigation, etc) rather than ret-specific (ghost hit, only first tick of consecrate can resist, etc).

Hit in general:
Sadly, I was Holy when 3.0 hit (respecced for raids due to healers on vacation) so no precision. My personal tests this weekend had no ghost hit - 8% was my magic number with no hit gear. I was fully Ret specced with Ret aura on and max weapon skill. I ran a modest 1000 autoattacks, but this was enough for my own peace of mind regarding nearest whole number. I noticed a higher rate of miss on Judgement (near 9%), but sample size was significantly smaller and I'm satisfied this was sample deviation, not difference in caps. Hit does not appear to be baked into any current talent, I'm inclined to believe ghost precision.

I can only encourage every individual Ret to run some 0 hit rating tests on a boss training dummy to figure out where they fall in the spectrum.

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.

Consecration actually does more damage per cast than any of our abilities on average other than Judgement and Hammer of Wrath, and assuming every tick will hit and mana is not an issue, should take priority over the other abilities, even in single target situations.

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.