JoL is an incredibly nice spell, but unless you are the only paladin in the raid you can't take all the credit for it when talking about viability of raid spot. Say if they sat you, then another prot or holy paladin should pick up keeping JoL up. While it will be not as strong, your benefit is how much stronger your JoL is over theirs.

The healing meters also don't take into consideration how many healing spells cast it prevented (or redirected to someone else) which is the real value of JoL.

SoB is not normalized, the slower the weapon is, the better.

Right, since all SoB hits are unnormalized, a Ret Pally playing properly will have SoB as the top source of damage. It also should mean that the 2200 rating weapons are best.

Pre-3.1 Sword of Justice 167 dps (3.8 speed) was a sidegrade to 187 dps Naxx-10 3.4 weapons, I would guess it would actually be better now that SoB hits so often.

In 9/16 slots iLevel 213 gear and no Tier items in an Uldur-25 run, my JoL hits were healing for this range on party members on a regular basis (Event Horizon report off of combatlog):

JoL was responsible for 957 HPS, whereas the top (sustained) healer was at 1,371 HPS. It's no extra healer, but still significant.

I ask because Rawr can sometimes be misleading.

My original question still remains about whether Vold is indeed better or Furious Glad are. Putting Rawr's info aside.

Maybe I'm doing the calculation wrong but here goes...Please feel free to correct mistakes, as I am atrocious with math.

Assuming you had the same gear with both on.

The difference in AP between both weapons for us, taking into account just Blessing of Kings (aside from divine str) for additional str buff...is 53.

With Furious Glad: 5500ap
With Vold'rethar: 5553ap

the furious glad will have 114 more avg wpn dmg.

Now. Vold does have more crit rating (15 more) and 70 armor pen, as opposed to Glad's resilience which is useless. Guessing 15 more crit rating and roughly 5% more armor pen isn't equal to 114 more avg wpn dmg.

The usefulness of certain pieces is directly related to the rest of your gear. Plug in what you have in every other slot, then try both weapons. Questions asking about which item is better then which when everything is known about both weapons is pointless when you have access to the exact same tools we use. Rawr and all the other spreadsheets give you ideal dps with various rotations/gear sets, use them rather then expecting us to do it for you.

Our dps is (surprise surprise) very much based on skill, experience and gear, and we can be very competitive with hybrids and pures as we are now. I have a somewhat unique parse to offer to prove this skill thing: Wow Web Stats . There are 2 rets in this parse, since I had to deal with something in the middle of the raid we swapped myself out for a casual ret that just happened to be online (alywin). Sadly last week's WWS of my kologarn/auriya kills can't be found for a direct comparison, but I remember doing ~6600 on kologarn and ~6000 on auriya (yay adds) - both numbers are well over 1000 dps difference, and we had roughly equal gear (got both rings last night on thorim/trash). It shouldn't be a shock to anyone at all that ret is capable of crushing the dm's on hodir, because of all the multipliers flying around - we also do quite well on council, despite it being a movement based fight, and do a ridiculous amount of healing in every single fight because of JoL. I don't agree with the sentiment that we are showing to be a low dps hybrid compared to other hybrids simply because "wmo says so"; sites like wmo and the former wwsscoreboard got to be very inaccurate and only showcased what happened when you stacked raids (in sunwell, wwsscoreboard) or when you have an extremely small sample size (wmo). WWS also occasionally fubars up on determining kills... my hodir parse is incorrectly flagged as a "try" when it was a kill.

As for JoL, most tools like wws and recount are able to differentiate between effective healing, and overhealing. People scoff at the numbers JoL puts out and immediately claim that recount ect only show total healing, but it makes sense that it is extremely powerful on some fights; 20 people hitting/casting on a mob, getting healed for 1100 every other swing/cast... yeah, it's going to add up. As has been said, the true utility of JoL is in being able to bring less raid healers, or to have your current healers focus on other tasks instead of spamming CoH. The fact that we don't have to change rotations or lose gcd's in order to (re)apply a passive effect, like a holy or prot paladin might, is what makes ret and JoL a perfect match.

I'd like to request help on BiS gear lists, despite some people saying that this kind of discussion belongs in another thread. Eventually, I'd like to have several BiS lists available; one for horde, one for humans/dwarves, one that only uses 226-232 gear (non hardmode), one that includes leather (please keep the latter 3 lists plate only). Ideally these lists would also be available to download directly into rawr, bellator's and redcape's sheets. Right now the OP only contains pieces that are "universally bis" (they fit into every single bis setup) because complete lists are so dependent on what your situation is.

I see we still don't know where the Private Messages button is.

Also, in response to this:

As a former raid leader (total of ~3 years spread across late Classic and all of TBC), I know what you're saying. I liked being a Prot Warrior because I knew that I hit Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate x2 while queuing Shield Block and Heroic Strike as appropriate, without fail - nothing ever changed there. Some classes/specs still get this, to a certain degree - Arcane Mages do ABx3, AM no matter what procs/trinkets/buffs are up. The problem with ours isn't even that it's not complicated - honestly, what I think it comes down to is, they don't want us sitting around with our thumbs up our asses and a bunch of unspent GCD's (which is a bit of an overstatement, I realize, and we find uses for them currently, but the point stands).

Everyone is claiming the sky is falling and Ret will never be the same, and I think that's crap. Blizzard has made it eminently apparent that they're interested in Ret being viable, but balanced; now, they've added "mechanically interesting" to that list, which I think is spectacular. Bear in mind, this eventual change has other deep implications, too - we'll be getting Exorcism in PvP back, in all likelihood, and that's a significant point.

If all they changed was to shorten the cooldowns of our primary DPS abilities (CS, DS, Judgement, Exorcism) such that your optimal DPS rotation with those didn't have any floating GCD's, that wouldn't be so bad. If it's some convoluted, unnecessary attempt to impose some form of "combo point" system or bizarre stacking debuff or whatever else, you have every right to be unimpressed. Until then, I'd give them some credit.

I currently have 2pce t8.5, when exactly should I sub out my 4pce t7.5 and lose the t7.5 bonus?

Should i wait for 4pce t8.5 or is 2pce enough to justify that change?

The whole reason people liked the 4-piece T7 bonus was that it was a major buff to both our mana regen and our top DPS ability. Now however we gain more mana from JotW anyway, and our Judgements hit for a lot less, so the bonus is a lot less attractive.

To quote Arikah:

"I'd like to request help on BiS gear lists, despite some people saying that this kind of discussion belongs in another thread"

Sounded like he asked for help with BIS lists. Rawr is not fail safe. For example if someone selects all the possible upgrades it becomes more inaccurate.

Since 3.1 has come out most the discussion has centered around a topic of whether or not Ret is viable or not based off way too little data which cannot lead to a conclusion at all. In the process people who have tried to find BIS lists were banned or had their posts deleted. Besides Altvius's opnion on expertise cited like 5 pages back this just resembles the WOW Paladin forums.

One of the main reason people come to these forums is to know the BIS gear and not everyone uses the Rawr, redcape or Bellator's spreadsheets as well as others.

Saying dont test for a BIS list is like saying dont test for a double roll system on our specials and dont post the data because its "spam" after all a post full of swing stats on a target dummy for 5 hours is pretty lame but the community partcipates and adds input.

To be honest I think we could have had all the BIS lists done and on the OP by now but instead we just have people saying Ret is good no ret is bad. When at the moment blizz intends to keep us viable and raid leaders are not benching us for being bad dps.