As I stated I don't need it in my situation, but overall I'd argue that there's no reason for any ret paladin to be bringing imp might. If you are the only paladin in a raid you'll be using kings. If there is a prot or holy paladin in the raid they should have imp might anyway, and I don't know of any raids where there are multiple paladins who are all ret...

You didn't state that, and it doesn't change the fact that from a total PvE purist's perspective, Imp HoJ gives you absolutely nothing in terms of single-target PvE DPS, where Imp BoM might.

A Holy Paladin could equally well spec for Imp Devo and Divine Sacrifice+Guardian, so that point is questionable. Prot Paladin, sure, but unless you can unquestionably guarantee their presence, your argument doesn't hold.

Long story short - your logic, while technically accurate, is presumptuous and ignores variables that are beyond a typical person's control, hence the reason that the 'ideal' spec is not the one you have suggested.

I've seen a few people mention that the rule for FCFS priority should be "highest DPS first." I do not believe this is technically accurate. You should achieve better results if you go with "highest damage per cast/button press" first.

Let's assume (just to illustrate the point) that you have two abilities: judgement and crusader strike. Judgement does 30,000 damage on a 60 second cooldown. Crusader Strike does 1,500 damage on a 1.5 second cooldown.

The DPS of Judgement is 500. The DPS of Crusader Strike is 1,000.

That would mean, if you do "highest DPS first," you'd hit CS every 1.5 seconds, every GCD, and never hit Judgement. This would be a big DPS loss.

If, instead, you do "highest damage per cast first," you'd hit Judgement first, then a whole bunch of CS, then Judgement whenever it's off CD. In a minute, instead of hitting 40 CS for 1,500 each, you hit 39 CS for 1,500 each and 1 Judgement for 30,000. Obviously the judgement will raise your overall DPS / damage done.

If I'm missing something here, please let me know. But I don't think cooldowns should enter into the FCFS priority discussion (only if you're talking about clash resolution or a "rotation," but that's not FCFS).

Given that most ret paladins are judging Light, and JoL is a fairly significant raid heal, whereas Toughness, Stoicism, and Imp HoJ are of barely any PvE value at all, Divinity seems like the no-brainer choice. If for some reason you're always judging Wisdom, it's value is diminished, but I personally would value take 5% healing taken as a better survivability talent over the other choices.

This argument is flawed and was proven flawed months ago in the previous Retribution thread. A few points:

1) One cannot look at abilities in a vacuum. (i.e. you cannot compare CS versus Judgement by only looking at CD's and potential damage in a minute. The ability to use an ability/talent more often equates to more damage done by a particular ability.)
2) Highest damage =/= highest DPS. These are two different terms, they are not synonymous.
3) Fight duration and ability cooldowns play a critical factor in determination of "highest DPS."

Here's one of the explanations provided by Left, from the previous Ret thread. Here and here are posts from Avitus explaining how you can "bleed" DPS by prioritizing highest damge over highest DPS.

There are several more posts that explain this in the 3.0 Ret Thread and it's predecessor. I encourage you to scour through those, as they will answer nearly any/every question you may have re: FCFS and clash resolution.

FCFS really has nothing to do with clash resolution, though. I think you may be confusing the two. Clash resolution is merely a guideline if two or more abilities are going to come up simultaneously, it will simply allow you to choose the better (highest DPS) ability. FCFS means you should never really be idle: you are hitting abilities as they come up -- immediately. There is no wait or rotational reset that triggers some elaborate sequence: you just push whatever button you're able to as it is available.

When deviating from the standard recommendation of highest DPS ability as highest priority, it's very important to remember that a pushback on a lower DPS ability is generally less damaging to your overall output than postponing a higher DPS ability.

Personally, I've been using a variable priority system focused heavily on clash resolution (and thus deviating even from the FCFS line of thought) for the past few months, and with very good results aswell.
The REASON I chose this route was that I was confident that I would be able to reproduce the rotation I was after at any given time, regardless of whether I had to move or not.
Constructing an even more complex variant of the same system (which promised an even higher theoretical DPS output), I quickly noticed that the added rules for maintaining the rotation under any given circumstance ended up being too complex to put to any realistic use, and thus that whole adventure was abbandoned without even any field testing

When you switch abilities around in your priority system, you might end up with a rotation that does awesome DPS in a vacuum, but ends up being totally crap if you just shift an ability cooldown by a few seconds.

Mapping your rotation of choice is always a good thing, since it can result in you recognizing good spots to put your sacred shield and divine plea without causing unnecessary pushback, but especially so if you choose to deviate from the standard recommendation.

In short: play around with rotations all you like, since it's essentially a good thing to delve deeper into what you're doing, but be SURE that any changes you make are actually to your benefit.

Regarding prio: I used to think like Atgard - it does indeed make sense to use the hard hitting stuff first. However, when you look at a more realistic scenario, you can see how push back allows you to squeeze in more hits if you use abilities with a low CD. Here's an example (the values are made up to make it easy to understand).

Excorsism 15.000 per 15 sec = 1000 dps
Judgement 12.500 per 10 sec = 1250 dps
Crusader 9.000 per 6 sec = 1500 dps

Prio E, J, C during 60 sec:
0 Excorsism (E)
1,5 Judgement (J)
3 Crusader (C)
9 C
11,5 J
15 E
16,5 C
21,5 J
23 C
29 C
30,5 E
32 J
35 C
41 C
42,5 J
45,5 E
47 C
52,5 J
54 C

Total: 4E, 5J, 9C = 203.500 damage (218.500 if you manage to squeeze in another E at the end)

Prio C, J, E during 60 sec
0 C
1,5 J
3 E
6 C
12 C
13,5 J
18 C
19,5 E
24 C
25,5 J
30 C
34,5 E
36 C
37,5 J
42 C
48 C
49,5 J
51 E
54 C
59,5 J

Total 10C, 6J, 4E = 225.000 damage

As you can see, the additional casts leads to higher overall damage, since even if you *could* gain one more Excorsism, you'd still lose out in the end.

Edit: I should probably point out that this is a matter of ideal rotations in a PvE setting (i.e Patchwerk). In more realistic settings you are likely to use Excorsism/Judgement as openers when nearing the target (or when running away from them).

I'm trying to work out intro-Ulduar wep choice based on recent postings about 1) weapon speed and 2) the small margin of difference between hit, str, and expertise until hit/expertise are capped. The question is this:

I have Jawbone and BoH, and I am a human. Changing no gear at all, Jawbone gives me +10 expertise (literally jump from 16 to expertise cap 26) and .2 seconds slower on weapon speed (3.4 to 3.6). Buffed with Kings, they both provide roughly the same AP amount. You also exchange crit/agility for haste.

This is not a "help me chose my gear post", but a question about stat weights vs. raw weapon damage with all the 3.1 changes. Consider it a hypothetical for the sake of argument.

I suppose I want to put everything together in my mind: would the reweighting of expertise (plus the human racial) push a weapon like Jawbone up to where it is equal or superior to a weapon with more base dps (like BoH)? Is this even a proper way to approach the issue? Flaws in argument and thought process are more than welcome.

In 3.0, this question would be rather silly. But I've run some personal target dummy tests with both weapons and Jawbone always provided me a boost in dps of several hundred. These were not proper tests and could easily have been due to bad dodge streaks with BoH. I'm not hanging my hat on what I 'felt' was the case.

Thoughts?

Finally getting back to EJ posting again. FYI, I love the info you guys have on here, debates and all. Thank you for keeping those of us who want to push our A-game to the next level armed with the knowledge we need.

As usual, First time in VoA on the new boss (this time 10 man) and the Valorous Aegis Legplates dropped. I have the following already:

Legplates of Double Strikes

and

Valorous Redemption Legplates

Pre 3.1, I had used Redemption on trash, and Double Strikes on bosses. Now that 3.1 is here, I was running WWS to see which one would give me more bang for my buck. Using both the spreadsheet and Rawr (as of 04-15-2009) Redemption has an edge to some degree. I was shocked to see how low Aegis was on the rankings. Yet, on my WWS reports for 10-mans (and since my guild is 1/2 filled with "carry-me" chickenheads, we've barely crept into Ulduar after doing 3D Sarth25), I show Double Strikes doing a bit more.

Basically, the $20 question is, "Which one should I use?"

Thank you all in advance.

Aegis, hands down.

Actually, weapon dps is rated far above every other stat, so you'd need a significant amount of stats to outweigh higher dps. Also, BoH is of a much higher item level, so it generally has more stats.

Such tests don't actually show anything - it's all a matter of RNG. Use a spreadsheet or similar to see whether or not you'd gain dps by using X item.