Some one suggested making the JoB recoil a dot. Instead of "A paladin swings his weapon so hard it bounces off and hits him in the head" type thing it becomes "seal of the emo crusader: the paladin slashes his wrists, letting his holy blood soak the blade to do extra damage to his foes", which is pretty cool imagination wise! Solves the PvE problem of killing yourself when something hit you really hard, but becomes OP in PVP as a self dot means no sheeps, blinds, wyvern stings, etc.

Giving a slowing proc for crusader strike, or SoC kind of makes is have 2 snares. You would have to judge justice on mounted targets and switching to another judgement for the rest of the fight, unless they sprint or go travel form etc. If the snare they give us (if they want to at all) reduces movement speed by <50%, we have 2 snares for different situations. If the new snare is >=50% it makes JoJ obsolete for pretty much all situations.

I had the same issue with the Paladin PVP section, as it was started when holy was 99% of paladins in arenas, ret paladins are now more popular and I think require their own thread as there is not enough information in the current topic, most of it is holy. once I have some free time, if no one started the collection of ret pvp knowledge, I will start it myself.

There are matching boots and belts everywhere.

I walked out of Naxx ten with Death's Bite yesterday and it is a small pve upgrade according to Redcape's spreadsheet, but I wondered if there is a way to do a good comparison of these items for PvE. I made an item comparison here: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft and Death's Bite is showing as just a little better with those numbers as well. I know this forum 'isn't for PvP' but I thought I wouldn't be too out of line asking the question.

Strength and stamina are similar, DB has about .5% more crit. It has a lot of hit which can be hard to come by for PvP. But Inevitable defeat has a lot of expertise.

I wonder if the answer is situational. Would Inevitable Defeat be better against characters with high dodge like rogues and hunters? Any insight would be appreciated.

The matching boots, belt and bracers (though obviously the last one is of little importance) have historically always been for the spell power plate, in other words for holy.

This tool is questionable for Ret PvE palas, it shows that Jawbone have 7 points less than Death's Bite.

I mostly linked it for ease of comparison rather than accuracy. EDIT I redid the item weights according to Redcape's numbers: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft.

Edit. Still not sure that I have that comparison set up properly.

Surprised no one has pointed this out yet, but Premonition posted a parse of their Patchwerk DPS Test from the PTR last night, and along with a great bunch of data about tanking (Prot Paladins are lagging, surprise!) The Ret Paladin (Trajer - Premonintion) came in dead last with ~4500 DPS, while the Rogue was at ~6300. This is an almost 20% gap. Personally, my Patchwerks show up at a little over 5000 DPs. 5400 is my record, but I feel it was tainted by an unusually short kill.

Trajer has all the correct gear, 4pc, Obsdian, BoH, fine choice of trinkets, etc. Exorcism made up 3.5% of his damage, and his highest Martyr crit was 9,700. That 9,700 bothers me; this is a Patchwerk with 2x the health, meaning it should take a lot longer to kill. Surely many of us in here have had Martyr crits for 11-12k if not more on Patchwerk. It makes me wonder if there was a stealth nerf to Martyr damage (my own initial "solo grind" testing presuaded me there wasn't).

It also makes me really question the nerfs to Judgement crit and RV. There doesn't seem to be any reasonable explanation for it, especially now in light of a huge gap between top and bottom.

Here is a link to the parse: Patchwerk (PTR DPS Test)

I don't have the time to really pour over this, so further feedback and investigation would be helpful.

Incorrect, mouse over his average crit Judgement damage and you'll see the range, the maximum of which was just over 13K. As far as my testing goes, we killed that Patch twice last night, and I saw sustained DPS of a bit over 5000, which placed me well below the halfway point on DPS. Definitely a bit lower than I usually do on Live, where I usually hit 5500 or so and end up 5th or 6th on the meters. Seems to be a bit of a nerf DPS-wise, which when combined with the buffs to other classes who were lacking DPS, definitely bumps our place on the list down a couple of slots.

I wonder how long it will take before recoil damage and our poor DPS put us out a raid spot. Are we worth bringing for an extra paladin buff and a garunteed judgement? Yes. But we definitely do so at a higher cost than most other specs, at present. Another question: Will our 3% haste bonus talents for ret aura going to remain unchanged? Seems that Blizzard seems to be trying to give classes incentive for speccing into such talents, most recently with the changes to Unleashed Rage.

There are almost certainly new talents incoming to the Ret tree - it's downright anorexic right now. Amongst other things, it's the only tree in the game without 5 points in the penultimate tier, which i'm pretty sure is against whatever informal talent tree design guidelines they have. Overall, it's about 10+ points short of the rest of the trees in the game (most the rest of them are about 75-80 points or thereabouts in total, PTR Ret right now is 66 points).

One can only hope that whatever they plan to add to fill out the tree is a dps boost that counteracts the Fanatacism/RV nerfs.

A little reassurance from Ghostcrawler

No specifics though.

Xav from Premonition said that Trajer was constantly disconnecting while they were testing. So I don't think his numbers are valid.

Can anyone point out other examples? #2 is a Destructo Warlock, which today would probably not get the #2 DPS slot given the situation with their current state.

I've seen a number of other Patchwerk PTR posts, and they're (horrifyingly) similar. Sure, 3.1 comes when it gets here, but if this is a sign of things to come, ouch......

Our DPS is only "great" on that fight due to the fact that there are tons of adds and we're able to utilize DS and Consecrate to their full potential. The truth of the matter is that on single-target, non-AoE fights (like P1 Malygos) we're far behind Fury Warriors, Rogues, Hunters, etc. Even on Patchwerk, where we can utilize every spell/ability, we will fall behind a player of comparable skill and gear playing those classes. It's just the way mechanics and balancing are at the moment.

I'm hoping that with 3.1 we possibly see the addition of an ability/spell (outside of Exorcism) that will help our single target DPS. DS is great for trash and multi-mob encounters, but very lackluster in single-target fights. Alternatively, if DS could perhaps be tweaked in a way that if there weren't multiple mobs in the vicinity, then the 4-target maximum of attacks were all applied against that single target: that would go a long way to helping close any DPS gap on single-target encounters and keep our 41 point talent useful in any situation. Granted there could be ramifications with that in the PvP spectrum, but I'm looking at it from the PvE perspective.

Reassuring? A little. It also makes me feel that there aren't all these talents in their pockets ready to fill the Ret tree back up. Ghostcrawler makes it sound like they're surprised by this fact. If they had tricks up their sleeve, I can't help but feel he would've said something.

They nerfed PvE DPS, buffed PvP DPS (Exorcism i nexchange for the 8% crit on Judgement, I'll take that ANY day.), and no say "Ret DPS, especially [implying "but not limited to"] PvE is lower than we want," instills more fear, not hope, to be honest. They now have to figure out what to do, because it wasn't before.

Rant:
Can we please get away from the stupid Dress/Kilt idea? It's ugly and makes us look terrible. Nothing is wrong with us wearing normal pants, or with the way our tier gear looks currently other than the helm. Just turn that shit off.

Back on topic. Ret is below where it should be on the PTR, a few of our talent changes lowered our damage. RV is one of them, as you can tell from the post linked from Juggernaut. Even though the lower crit on Judgment is probably due to PvP issues, it could very well be one of the reasons for the lower damage on ptr.

I'm more worried about mana when it comes to testing, as I haven't been able to do any yet. How is it with Ju, CS, DS, Exo, Cons going all the time?

Yes, my DPS is probably not the best to make judgments from because I was DC'ing and lagging pretty bad through all attempts. There were FPS problems with all of us and those conditions made a top-notch rotation pretty much out of the question.

However, retribution damage HAS been nerfed, there is no question about that. You will not see higher numbers on PTR than on live (I normally do around 5200-5300 on Patchwerk, highest being 5600).

Take that as you will, if only with a grain of salt.

As far as the information currently posted goes, the glyph isn't available on the PTR yet (at least no new discoveries were possible as of a few days ago).

Yea, on PTR I'm using consecration/judgement/avenging wrath glyphs. Which do you recommend swapping with exorcism? Consecration?

Xav was mentioning about doing more Patchwerk testing tonight, but it turns out it's only going to be the tank test.

On a side note, most of myself and Bulwyth's damage seem correct in terms of % - except judgement and melee. I'd like to place the blame on lag/DC's for that, which I would assume is the case, however I can't be sure. I know I'm using 4pc and judging on CD, so I'm not sure how he would have such wildly higher numbers from judge than I would.

Exo should be switched with AW. AW is certainly nice, but the DPS gain from it is inferior to Consecration. Consecration glyph brings a ton of DPS indirectly because it cleans up our rotation a lot more allowing for less ability clashing. Especially now that Exo is now a standard part of our rotation. I don't have the specific numbers on hand, but I believe they are in the Redcape's Spreadsheet thread.

As a side note, why couldn't they have gone with the other helm design that's been posted for T8?! It's clearly MUCH better looking, and if it's been designed enough to have an in game shot, then put it in!

Edit: Fixing as much of my bad grammar as I know how

We did a few PTR Patchwerk tests today, I averaged around 5.2k, with a best of 5.4-5.5k and a few low ones at around 4.8k (rng being a complete bitch).

This usually ended with me being between 10th and 13th place, with BM hunters topping the chat at close to 7k DPS


Conditions:

-Fully buffed/consumables, capped gear (with the exception of cape and belt), 1x speed pot, 3x Avenging Wrath and 1x heroism.
-Glyphs: Judgement, Consecration, Exorcism
-Around 400ms on the PTR, also there seems to be some very annoying framerate issues specifically in that fight at the moment, haven't been able to nail it down beyond "it's a PTR"
-Heroism that consistently goes off 20 seconds too early for the 3rd AW cast, go figure



So conditions weren't optimal, but they were equally crappy for everyone. It's evident that we're far below where we should be, especially considering Patchwerk is undead.

Also varying between ~5.4k to 4.8k on different tries felt like RNG is too heavy of a factor.

Funny tidbit: BM pets (T-rex) was doing ~4.4k with the hunter doing ~2.5k.

The Exo glyph has been in the game since Beta. The old spell interrupt was changed to 20% damage and the tooltip was updated on the PTR. I tested the glyph, it is working as it should.


4.4k for the Devilsaur is because they unnerfed the BM tree and added additional dps talents for the pet. The devs know the issue.

We were able to get all of our parses up on WWS after some editing (WWS doesn't recognize this version of Patchwerk as a boss, so you have to split the combat log manually), we had a total of 5 DPS tests, and a few tank tests (all though really we just killed tank test Patchwerk).

Wow Web Stats

That is the link to our WWS page so you can browse the separate parses as you please.

One thing I have noticed over all of our tests was a loss in DPS from RV alone of ~300, versus on live right now. Of course a portion of that comes from the shorter fight lengths leading to higher cooldown uptimes, however the extent of the loss in damage from RV is quite extreme(40-45% loss in RV dps). In fact RV is doing so much less damage I can't help but wonder if there is a bug in it somewhere.


Also do not believe the damage from the DK's, in reality both of ours were well over 6k dps on every pull (WWS doesn't record their pet damage correctly), one was blood one was unholy.

Exorcism with the glyph is incredible, and I noticed fairly large increases in DPS once I started prioritizing it second to judgement. I would warn anyone out there that favors the BIS > 4-piece gear set, without any real mana conservation glyphs anymore we simply cannot afford it. Our first pull I was using BiS and with the relatively long 20-0 at the end I ended up having to cut consecration out completely at the end, and had some dead GCD's waiting for enough mana to HoW. Four piece is an absolute necessity now.

Due to the broken WWS for the Patchwer DPS Test mob, WWS is showing the damage I do to myself with judgment of the martyr in my total judgment damage. It isn't added to the total damage done however, so it doesn't effect my DPS or my place on the meters, just the breakdown. If you want to see the real judgement damage simply take the damage done with judgement and multiply it by .66 to take out the 33% recoil damage. After doing so you will see our judgment damage was fairly close.