My Rawr says the chest off Maly25 (leather) is the best Chest item, and for helms while Obsidian is high it is beat by a few helms. I am pretty sure 4 T8 would be BiS, the question is which four.

Anyway, new items are being discovered even today, so it is worthless to make a BiS list just yet. The hit/exp cap makes that tricky without knowing everything!

I know the whole DG absorbing such a small amount of raid damage has gotten everyone down however it is still very powerful when you do both DG and hand of sacrifice on a tank and bubble. With macros/good timing i know I have saved our MT on a couple real dangerous moments. Using DG at that time is just icing on the cake really.

Our guild has had more issues with tanks dying on fights such as ignis,thorim and vezax. Being able to deliver comparable DPS and provide an extra 10 seconds or so before the tank dies and constant JOL is plenty of utility.

Did you completely miss my post? I'm in the process of going through the rest of our logs, but based on what I've seen as long as you pop bubble before using Divine Sacrifice it appears to have no cap on the damage it absorbs. This means it is an amazing, and probably overpowered, talent in its current form.

I will try and test this tonight I do not usually run WWS but I will ask one of my guildies to check it. I have been bubbling first for all my DGs because I did not want to risk dying before the GCD came back up.

If that is the case I doubt blizz will let us keep it sadly and it would be either nerfed or hotfixed if it is able to be fixed.

Right now it is difficult to tell if the extra absorptions seen at time is from lag possibly. It is also very hard to test like we would a normal DPS rotation because the boss target dummy does not do massive raid damage to 25 other people like a real raid boss

Anyone have Ulduar reports showing you holding your own vs. other hybrids, particularly feral druids/enh shaman? Our feral druid and enh shm are blowing my doors off. I'd really like to take a look at a good parse and see where my missing damage can be made up... Or are ferals and enh shaman just that far ahead of us atm? (our feral is nipping at our rogues heals on most fights, so I will be surprised if rets are keeping up with ferals)

Ferals/Enhance are both pretty rediculous right now. I came in 4th on Ignis behind a druid, enhance, rogue. But it was also a sloppy kill, and I wasn't wearing any real BiS gear. I'll try to take a combatlog this upcoming week and see what I can get.

To be honest, I kind of side with those that discredit Rawr for not providing the most accurate picture. The main reason I'm thinking to go Gloves/Chest/Pants/Shoulders is because I'm expecting a little bit of difficulty in keeping around the expertise cap and being more than able to maintain the hit cap.

But, to be fair, I did plug in my info to the latest version of Rawr. It's saying T8 is better than T8.25 with similar gems and enchants :P Beyond that, though, it actually seems to support the 4-pc gear I'm kind of leaning on. If I had more expertise on other pieces of gear, I'm sure the results would be different (other helms in Ulduar have a lot more STR on the budget than OS in addition to crit/hit/haste). Regardless, it's just speculation on my behalf at this point.

I know I should probably regem for expertise right away, but my plan is to be a little lazy and wait to see where I am by the end of next week before dumping the gold >.> However, the point of an expertise cap against mobs below lvl+3 and on bosses where you might have to attack from the front has its merit, especially on progression where you might not be able to readjust safely to the buttes of the boss due to unfamiliarity with the encounter / placement of an rng you have to relocate to.

As for the person asking how we're holding up to hybrids, I have to admit I'm a little disappointed with where we ended up. Ferals are doing amazing on my side as well, but I haven't seen much of an epeen threat from enh. shamans yet.

I guess one last thing is on my mind that I should ponder aloud here. If you were an engineer/blacksmith, would you use the pyro-rocket mount or hyperspeed accelerator on the gloves? I'm too happy about the rocket glove gcd removal, higher damage, and shorter cooldown to immediately make a switch just yet (i.e. the novelty has consumed me), but I'm starting to think I should just switch to the haste use, including a macro for wings+pot+gloves if it's at all possible. I don't know if the engy CD applies to potions, I never bothered to check.

Edit: Maybe the Divine Sacrifice spell is operating on a per swing mentality? Absorbing 40% per target, per hit taken, for the duration?

The really odd thing about this entire discussion is that we had the talent, in its overpowered form, on a 5 minute cooldown, available to us for quite awhile prior to 3.1 and very few people complained about it until more guilds started on their Sarth3D attempts. The only thing you had to sacrifice to get it was the replaceable 3% haste improved aura and, arguably, it was better since you only needed 1 GCD to use it.

Yes it might be too powerful as is, but Blizzard let it live the way it was for a few months before even touching it on the 3.1 PTR. I don't know that they would be that motivated to address this potential issue.

I'll try to find time to go over the log and format the results; it may take a while though. But the reason that we posted that log is that there are 23 instances of DSac to look at under various conditions (Bubble first, bubble second, etc). Most of them absolutely fade before full duration; the average length is 4 secs, regardless of whether you bubble first or not. So there is odd behavior here somewhere, the real questions are: why? and what is the intended behavior?

edit: Here is the full log for the night with no filters so the link won't expire.

The point is that while Rawr might "potentially" have isolated bugs (find them, zoom in on them and report them), you cannot discredit inaccuracy of calculations anymore since it does seem to correlate with Redcape's.

The reason Rawr had a bad rep a short while ago was due to somewhat of a limbo around WotLK beta/launch where there was a change of authors/many of the old crew lacking time to help out, however right now it seems to be pretty accurate if we assume the spreadsheets are as well.


That sounds perfect, looking forward to the processed results

If it is a bug, the obvious response to "Why" is because it cancels on damage taken. When you bubble, you receive 0 incoming damage from the effect so it continues to absorb for the full duration of either the ability or the bubble.

If you read the thread/first post of the Rawr.Ret thread it says there is a bug that the set name for T8-25 isn't correct at first, and you need to refresh the items from Wowhead/Armory so they properly activate the set bonus. Besides that you gave no indication on why you think Rawr is not accurate.

Kinmaul, the situations I talked about with Divine Sac fading under bubble, I did bubble first before casting DS. I will try to get a parse to provide more then anecdotal evidence, but this week none of the normal people combat logged since they forgot there autologging mod wasn't updated to include Ulduar.

I'm not discrediting the entirety of Rawr, I really like Rawr. The modeling system and ability to configure everything with a very user-friendly interface is amazing. The only grumblegrumbleramble I have with it is the gear choices for BiS choices is sometimes weird, and like you said, you need to report it so they can update it. When I'm seeing a piece like T8 and T8.25 with the 10-man being almost 15 dps better than the 25-man with identical gemming / enchants I can't help but feel like I should ignore that aspect. To that regard, I was only trying to suggest the gear choices presented by Rawr should not be taken as word from the gods.

edit: There were a few other situations where some of the stats one pieces of gear were similar with one having more of x,y, or z but still being considered lower than the other. I realize the 8 and 8.25 probably wasn't the best way to present this, and feel quite sheepish now. My apologies for the downs moment.

All we're saying is that "inaccurate" doesn't accurately describe the situation with Rawr

Inaccurate, no. Potentially has bugs, yes.

Did the old talent have the 150% cap, memory fails me again. Additionally you could argue it's even more powerful now that it absorbs 40% talented rather than just 30%.


While we're at it, does anyone know of a website that has a "history log" of old talents, talent changes, old calculators and so forth? Is there some way that wowhead provides this (I found nothing)?

I frequently find myself a few patches later trying to find data about old versions of talents and the only source to reconstruct that data has been old patch notes and forum posts, which both are far from complete.

DS discussion is very interesting, and despite what I've noticed seeming to point to it not being effectively capped while under immunities, I can't understand why this would be the case. The previous iteration, called Divine Guardian, simply activated automatically whenever bubbled, and was a hugely powerful talent on fights like Sarth 3D with both Shadron and Vesperon up (well, on that one fight anyway ... nothing else was hard enough). I can't really figure out why it would have been changed in such a round-about manner if it were to have the same effect, unless of course it was to allow Prot paladins to use it while tanking (which in itself seems unecessarily dangerous). The whole thing seems very fuzzy still, especially with different people posting evidence for both cases.

One thing that I will mention, is that I doubt very much that the damage would simply be capped exactly at 150% of the paladin's health (effectively). With abilities like Tantrum, you're effectively absorbing 4% of the combined HP pool of the entire raid (or whoever's in range) every second. If that number is say ... 19k, and the 'cap' of DS is 40k, then the first two ticks won't remove DS. You'll have absorbed 38k, and the next tick of tantrum will still be absorbed as usual (because I can't imagine it being worth the effort to have it calculate exactly what % of everyone's damage to mitigate to bring it to exactly 1.5 times the paladin's HP pool), leading to a total of 57k absorbed, before DS finally stops. I think this could certainly lead to apparent cases of DS not being removed, simply due to the way it calculates the absorbs.

One ability which would be a fairly good test I think is Plasma Blast, which seems to hit a tank without CDs up for roughly 25k a hit. That'd be 10k absorbed every second for 6 seconds, totalling 60k damage, and as long as your health was <30k, then you should see at the very least the final tick go through at full damage (you could even remove your weapon, click off fort / comm shout to lower the cap). It's channelled, so there shouldn't be any melee damage during the cast, and as long as nobody still has napalm DoT or steps on a mine during the cast, I think it could be a fairly accurate and useful test. There may be other factors which I've missed which would invalidate this, but I don't know if Emalon (is that his name? New VoA boss) would be the best, since an exploding add is simply a single hit, which I believe would be mitigated at 40% regardless of how much health the paladin has.

Also regarding expertise, correct me if I'm wrong but aren't mobs unable to dodge or parry whilst stunned / casting? I remember being told that expertise was a near worthless stat vs Shade of Aran for this reason. This may have changed in WotLK, but matches my recollections from TBC fairly well. In such a case, expertise would have a lower value on fights like Razorscale (where the boss is stunned for 50%), Iron Council vs Stormcaller (who spends a reasonably large amount of time casting, although on the other hand he is interruptable), possibly Hodir, and maybe Deconstructor (I was prot, and expertise soft-capped already, when I did him on Thursday) if his heart can't dodge/parry. In most cases I don't think these bosses cast enough to make a significant difference, although it could be the deciding factor between Str and Exp if both are so close. For Kologarn though I can definitely see the value in stacking expertise, even beyond the cap (although at this point, hit / str would most likely surpass it, so not worth gemming for, simply not 'useless').

Expertise items are fairly commen in Ulduar. To name a few which are very good for us:

[Sif's Promise]
[Bladebearer's Signet]
[Belt of the Titans]
[Conqueror's Aegis Gauntlets]
[Steelbreaker's Embrace]
[Godbane Signet]

Addtionally you can pick up the badge bracers or Zeliks gauntlets if you need expertise to hold you over until you get some drops ( I have not gotten a single upgrade yet ) I also replaced surge needle ring with Circle of death and happened to have the chest off maxenna lying around.

Seeing how there is no reason to keep 4 pc t7 ne more you should be able to cap expertise quite easily as well as hit. In Ulduar there are very many expertise pieces which have loads of str on them for us as well.

I do wonder about this; it seems definitely that there's either some strange bug that causes Divine Sac's cap to scale to absurd levels, or it really is just infinite absorb, though the two cases would be functionally identical.

At any rate, the original Divine Guardian talent (from Beta) activated on both Divine Protection and Divine Shield with no damage cap. Obviously taking this talent made a Protection Paladin's shieldwall a suicide, so it was removed. At current I can't provide proof in the form of links (seeing as I'm at work) but I'm 99% certain that this is the way things went:

From 3.0.2 to 3.0.9, Divine Guardian absorbed an uncapped amount of damage when Divine Shield was up. It generally wasn't a 'problem' so much because Holy always went into Ret and didn't take it, Ret didn't take it because they didn't have the points nor the inclination, and Prot didn't take it because they don't use Divine Shield. But when Sarth3D attempts happened, people realized its usefulness.

During the initial PTR phase Premonition did extensive tank-testing and showed that cooldown chaining could result in a situation where a tank always had some form of -damage% active, causing the boss to never hit for a full swing. In response to this Blizzard imposed a limitation or cooldown increase on every mitigation ability of that sort. During the PTR builds before Divine Sacrifice was implemented, Divine Guardian was two ranks, doing what it does now, but with a cap of 150/300% of the Paladin's health. After that, Divine Sacrifice was implemented and Divine Guardian was changed to what it is now.

The short answer is, Divine Guardian's old form did have a cap during a brief period on the PTR, but I'm virtually certain that the old 3.0.9 version was uncapped. It was probably a case of laziness because content "didn't matter" since Naxx was so easy.

Alright, google image search to the rescue:



There was no cap in the tooltip, so that's why we can't say it was bugged back then.

(My question still stands if anyone knows a good source of "history log" for old talents/calculators/changes).

Pay attention No one is asking why is this happening, we're wondering why it doesn't seem to "always" happen: Why does it seem to be selective in its behavior?

Funny that you'd mention that as this is exactly the ability I was trying to mitigate and seem to recall DivSac fading. Using Divine Shield + Hand of Sacrifice + DivSac on the MT before Plasma Blast hit, I remember DivSac going off fairly quickly.

You're right, this would be a very good way to check. I think it's worthwhile if people can report back from that encounter.


I can say for a fight like Hodir that you spend significantly more time circling around the boss and hitting him from the sides/front than you do while he's casting. You're constantly trying to dodge the icicles and trying to get into the lights that expertise is definitely worth it.

There is definitely merit in what you're saying, but I believe it's the weaker factor here.

This is a fun log to look through. A couple things of note - Krodor first puts up DSac (after using DShield) at 2:39 and it drops off 5 seconds later at 2:44, after absorbing about 87k (well above 150% of his 26k hitpoints, but well short of the max duration). You can also see what happens when two paladins put up DSac at the same time a minute later. (Nothing happens, the raid get 40% absorb, both paladins take the damage)

But I have to recant a bit, while there are instances like this where it drops off early, of the 23 instances of it going up, it stayed up through the full duration 18 times, leading me to believe that the early drops may be the anomaly.

In response to gemming for expertise: Do remember that expertise is not necessary against certain mobs, even from the front. While beating on trash you don't need to cap your expertise, and there are quite a number of trash mobs in Ulduar boss encounters. Certainly a primary consideration is getting dodge capped against a boss from behind, but if you are beating on a level 80 mob your expertise beyond 5% is doing nothing from any facing.

Obviously 5% expertise is absolutely nuts good. I would even suggest that capping expertise against the parry of a + 2 mob (what is that value?) is likely a good benchmark. Certainly in Ulduar I think that having capped expertise is better than my spreadsheet raw value suggests, though until I know the parry cap for a + 2 mob I don't know exactly the value I would tend to aim for.

This certainly is trickier than the spreadsheet assumptions first suggest.

Your comments about Rawr's "inaccuracy" really aren't useful. If you think it is rating an item incorrectly please post in the Rawr.Ret thread your character file, and what items you think are wrong. So we can see what is going on, instead of your just saying this is wrong and discrediting it, but not actually substantiating your reasoning in anyway.

I'm not sure why people are trying to prove things that aren't even being questioned. No one disagrees with the fact that the damage cap applies when you use DivSac without immunity.

However, since it has been proven that it does not seem to apply when under immunity, the remaining question is: Why doesn't it ALWAYS work like that under bubble? Why do some of us remember DivSac fading under bubble, was it bad recollection or is there some other mechanic/bug we're missing?

Edit: Seems Mooncrow says there's proof of early fades under immunity, which underlines the above question.

It is definitely a mystery which I hope we can crack soon. A log of Mimiron's Plasma Blast and a log of Emalon seem like good tools to get closer to this.

It could be something similar to fuzzy mechanics as Mex mentioned or a completely lame reason like lag (though I would assume all damage calculations are done server side, which makes this unlikely).