While you can think of it as a 24-man absorb, there's also a really good use of it to help soak damage on a tank. While it can't be fully utilized as HoSac on a single target, you can still time it to a boss ability to mitigate a good chunk of damage.

Maybe an interesting change in the design of the spell would be to make it castable on a target and base the absorption on their HP and redirect it toward you? I don't disagree it's underpowered for 25 man content, but it does help a bit.

crusade is dispellable

Not Heart of the Crusader. The talent Crusade.

Heart of the Crusader is a physical effect anyway.

From my experience so far there's rarely any 25 man encounter where having the Divine Sacrifice effect on a tank would be worth it where there isn't a ton of heavy AoE flying around on the raid eating it up and nullifying that objective, which is exactly the point: There is no control over the ability, this lack of control makes it fairly useless in 25 mans. (Even if there is an exception, this is the case for 99% of everything).

Sure it "statistically exists" (as in "every little bit helps") and there's no harm in using it when Divine Shield is up, but it's barely noticeable in that setting.

This. I was trying to defuse the "Divine Sacrifice is the best thing since sliced bread" frenzy of the last few pages, where people really aren't looking at the facts. Small groups yes, big groups not really.

I was also expecting more from the talent, but the real thing about this talent group (Divine Sacrifice>Divine Guardian) is really the sacred shield buff. It buffs our survival alot in Ulduar, but in the same time maintaining sacred shield up all the time can easily make me mana negative (the new SoB glyph isn't helping much tbh, no way near to justify the loss of dps glyph so far, at least in my experience) on many Ulduar encounters.

I continue to use divine sacrifice whenever im forced to bubble, to help "a bit", but wont use it on purpose anymore. It just dosen't worth the mana cost+dps loss for me in terms of mana saved for the group healers. Even in fights like the deconstructor.

It seems weird that you'd have mana trouble even with the sob glyph. I don't use the glyph and I've rarely experienced mana issues in 25 man. In 10, though, I absolutely have to switch to JoW and make sure my shaman uses spring. Our mana is definitely better, but it's still balanced assuming you have every raid regen buff.

BoW no longer stacks with Mana Spring, which if you have any shamans at all, should be down.

I agree somewhat, but as a few people mentioned it has the potential to be far higher than 1.6k~ negated per person if the paladin him self is immune to the damage Divine Sacrifice is dealing. In fact the buff doesn't get removed at all while under immunities giving a Raid-wide "Shield wall" at the cost of 50%(DS)/100%(HoP) damage momentarily.

A quick example would be Ground tremor at Freya with 1 elder up, it's roughly 11k damage to each raid member which would be 4400 reduced on 24 people, and then the 40% reduction continues on whatever incoming raid damage remains for the last 10 seconds of Divine Sacrifice while Hand of Protection/Divine Shield is active. Of course these are just rough numbers, but it's far from a weak talent.

Obviously this is true. The post you quoted is talking about using Hand of Sacrifice with Hand of Protection as something akin to pain suppression, which does not seem to be a very good ret option, but is an interesting idea for holy.

OK, reaching 3.1 i had managed to pick up 2 pieces of naxx gear with expertise on them. Chest from Maexxena and the Inevitable Defeat mace. Using these with the old Magister's terrace trinket i manged to dig out the bank, i can get to 6.25% or 25 expertise. At first on the dummies in IF it looked like i was pulling more DPS than normal had i equipped my Battlemaster's Hostility pvp crit trinket, T 7.5 chest and Cryptfiend's bite.

However since we started raiding ulduar, i have noticed a massive gimping to my Crit, drop from >45% raid buffed to around 31% with same group/buffs (25 man). And the number of crits from all attacks and spells was ridiculously lower than i'm used to. Hopefully WWS report goes up tonight for comparisons after i decided to switch gear.

So while being Exp capped is going to be a crucial to max DPS, it doesn't seem to be worth it if we're losing so much Crit due to our heavy reliance on it for DPS.

P.S hoping to run a quick naxx and maly this week so hopefully i get luck with pre Ulduar BiS drops and can determine an optimal way of pushing towards exp cap without losing DPS along the way due to lower crit.