3.1 Retribution Paladin Thread - Page 51

Vectivus · 05/01/09, 1:24 PM

Originally Posted by trv186

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.

The problem isn't that the feedback or help was or wasn't requested - the problem is that the discussion has been hashed and rehashed to death, and people are posting gear/specs/item lists without any kind of frame of reference. A two-page long post full of Wowhead links with absolutely no information on the settings used to arrive at that list is useless to anyone except the person who posted it. That, and since Rawr and the spreadsheets are openly available, everyone can get this information for themselves.

If people don't, or won't, use the tools provided to find out what gear upgrades they should be aiming for, that's their problem, not the rest of ours. The whole concept of best-in-slot is great and everything, but with the advent of Rawr and the ability for everyone to map an ideal upgrade path (such that they retain hit/expertise caps, etc.), it's mostly worthless. Everyone will eventually reach the best items available to them by following the advice of the tool, and that's infinitely better than any post here saying, "These are the items you should get, period."

The difference between understanding a basic mechanic (how attacks are computed by the server) versus an arbitrary gear list is that the former applies to everyone, and the latter - again, particularly without the necessary reference information - is all but useless to everyone except the original poster.

If you want to develop a best-in-slot list formally, PM Arikah and ask for your name to be listed as the person to send Rawr outputs and data to, and you can crunch through all that spam and garbage to arrive at the One True Set™, and then PM it back to Arikah for addition to the first post of this thread.

Now, per Kaubel, let's drop this pointless discussion, and focus on issues specific to Paladin mechanics and play style stemming from changes in 3.1.

Cevil · 05/01/09, 5:00 PM

Originally Posted by Vectivus

If people don't, or won't, use the tools provided to find out what gear upgrades they should be aiming for, that's their problem, not the rest of ours. The whole concept of best-in-slot is great and everything, but with the advent of Rawr and the ability for everyone to map an ideal upgrade path (such that they retain hit/expertise caps, etc.), it's mostly worthless. Everyone will eventually reach the best items available to them by following the advice of the tool, and that's infinitely better than any post here saying, "These are the items you should get, period."

I use a Mac. WoW is currently a Mac game, and I know many members of these forums use Macs. Rawr on Mac requires something called Mono, which for all intents and purposes is an emulator for the Windows framework that Rawr was written in. Rawr on a mac--- while technically feasible--is effectively unusable. You cannot use it as a tool.

Both spreadsheets use VBscript. Again, Mac versions of Excel and OpenOffice do not support VBscript, and thus, these spreadsheets are limited to non-functional. The spreadsheets therefore are also not an option.

I would love to use either of these tools. I cannot. I do use EJ forums for the discussion on WoW, and Ret in particular, and I think BiS is a valid part of that discussion. I am sure there is a strong urge to find a high horse and climb up on it about the Mac vs. PC issue, but frankly, I'm not interested. WoW is a Mac game. Players on these forums use Macs. They do not have access to Rawr, Redcape's, or Bellator's spreadsheets.

In the end, it's obviously up to the thread and forum moderators as to whether a BiS list or disccussion is pertinent or not. Just realize there are players who cannot use those tools, no matter how much they wish to. IMO, the conversation on BiS still has value.

• frmorrison · 05/01/09, 5:39 PM

Originally Posted by Cevil

I use a Mac. WoW is currently a Mac game, and I know many members of these forums use Macs. Rawr on Mac requires something called Mono, which for all intents and purposes is an emulator for the Windows framework that Rawr was written in. Rawr on a mac--- while technically feasible--is effectively unusable. You cannot use it as a tool.

So you can get a program that can run Rawr on a Mac and both are free, so that makes it unusable?

Mono 2.2 Downloads is the link for the correct version (2.2).

Anyway, what I believe Kaubel is not saying that no one should talk/post about BiS at all, just in this thread it doesn't belong. Making a new thread should be fine though. Edit: I went ahead and made a thread.

Just a note, it would be best to include a download link to the file used and all the parameters used.

Landos · 05/01/09, 7:21 PM

Both spreadsheets use VBscript. Again, Mac versions of Excel and OpenOffice do not support VBscript, and thus, these spreadsheets are limited to non-functional. The spreadsheets therefore are also not an option.

I'll post this because I haven't seen it posted in redcape forum post. IF you use a mac, and have problems with the script, you can still download the spreadsheet, and upload it as a google document where you can access via your browser. The sheet then runs slowly, but it still runs. All you need is access to the internet and a web browser to use redcape's sheet, and if you're reading this, then you qualify.

Redcape · 05/01/09, 7:30 PM

Originally Posted by Cevil

Both spreadsheets use VBscript. Again, Mac versions of Excel and OpenOffice do not support VBscript, and thus, these spreadsheets are limited to non-functional. The spreadsheets therefore are also not an option.
.

My spreadsheet (available in another thread in this forum) uses zero VBscript. It only uses basic Excel functions. That said, I will be publishing a new version (tonight, I hope) that uses VBscript quite a bit to ease use and also make my development time smaller. For the new version you will need to be able to use VBscript to make much of the sheet work, but the current published version does not.

Charmin · 05/02/09, 7:19 AM

Originally Posted by Arikah

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.

Your difference total damage done is somewhat significant, but your DPS difference isn't all its cracked up to be. Your rival ret has a 13% miss rate with SoB alone as oppose to your 1%. Most of his other abilities hover around the 7-9% miss range. It is really no surprise you did better than he did. So I'm not sure where you tag us as a "skill" class. It simply seems that you have itemized for hit and he hasn't and thus suffers because of it. Are we a poor choice of a raid slot? By no means; however, I really don't think we are "very competitive". I really can't wait until our changes our unveiled, but I am really only in favor of them if it is an overall DPS increase. Rather than a complication for complications sake that leaves us lingering around 6 - 6.5k dps range after BiS Ulduar gear is all farmed up and we are gearing our alts. If we are at the end of Ulduar in BiS gear and only capable of doing what some classes did in BiS Naxx gear I will be sorely disappointed. Our DPS ceiling is just too low atm; and a large portion of that comes from how we are built. There is very little difference between a good ret and an average one. Crit RNG factors for most of it.

I also disagree with your opinion of Ret Paladin performance on Iron Council as well. I typically find it to be one of our weakest fights in Ulduar. We would really need more powerful dots to be competitive on large movement based fights. Righteous Vengeance is really very underwhelming at the moment. I find myself getting destroyed by rogues and even druids on fights like Mimiron where to be competitive you really need to have reliable dots to DPS for you while you are off target. When Judgements use to hit big we were very reliable dps on fights with multiple target swaps, because we could change target and unload a large barrage of damage, and then relatively quickly do it again, but now I find that since the largest portion of my dmg requires me to be there auto-attacking the boss that when fights require me to switch targets often that my dps suffers greatly.

After saying all of that we are lucky that the large majority of Ulduar bosses are more about survivability that DPS races. Yes the faster a boss dies the less healing and CDs need to be used to keep the tank/raid going, but these fights are more about staying alive and that comes back to the player regardless of class.

In regards to some of the other topics that have been lingering around this forum:

I definitely do not apply to this school that rets need to be healing when they have a free CD with AoW or babysitting another player waiting to press HoS or HoF or some other utility. To be honest if you are playing as ret and you are having to heal your raid then something has gone wrong and you need to rethink your boss strategy. If I am in the raid as Ret (which I always am) then I am concentrated on maximizing my DPS and surviving the encounter. Yes you will have those rare 1% almost wipe boss kills where your Bubble saved the day or something, but you don't want that every week. You want to kill bosses quickly and efficiently, and we should want to be a strong DPS class that helps in that regard; and not a class that band aids our healers when they get over-whelmed. We bring plenty of passive utility. Leave the cleansing and boping for those Holydins bored of spamming Holy Light.

Charmin · 05/02/09, 7:35 AM

After looking at Arkiahs WWS parse it reminded me of something. I would like some Rets to take a look at is their crit rate on Seal of Blood. I have been noticing that it appears to crit at a rate much lower than even my unbuffed rate of 32%. I need to get on a test dummy and let it auto attack for a long period of time, but with SoB it will require me to babysit it so I don't kill myself. I don't know if I have given myself a case of "Onyixia Deep Breathing more" or not, but it seems most of my abilities (rng considered) crit around the range they are suppose to where as my SoB seems to crit at a significantly less rate.

Blutelf · 05/02/09, 8:20 AM

Well, this has not been yet mentioned in the current reincarnation of this thread, I believe.

WWS SoB crit rate includes SoB damage to you, which will never crit.

goose · 05/02/09, 9:46 AM

I noticed this 2 weeks back just after the 3.0 patch was launched, it just didnt feel that I was in the mana positive <20% in raids, I even tried using the SoB glyph but it never felt the same as it was on the PTR. I dont know why it has taken me this long to post about this possible bug but anyway it seem for me atleast that judgement of the wise isnt returning enough mana back after I judge. As a human paladin my base mana is 5584 and when I judge I get 1099 mana back from JotW where I should be getting 25% base mana back per judgement which is 1396 mana.
This to me seems to after looking at the tooltip of JotW that it is not giving me the right amount of mana back or I am reading it wrong. Even if I add the cost of the judgement (I dont see why it should be added) with the benediction added to it, it still doesnt add up. Can any see where I am going wrong or can anyone confirm this as a bug?

Melzas · 05/02/09, 9:49 AM

I'm also sure that some function of the two roll system probably affects our crit rate on the seal procs.

I've been putting up some decent numbers on some fights so really I haven't been worried about our pve dps too much.

What worries me is thier pvp based insistence that our dps rotation should be more "complicated" as if serving in a dps AND support roll isnt complicated enough.

jgRnt · 05/02/09, 10:27 AM

Originally Posted by Melzas

I'm also sure that some function of the two roll system probably affects our crit rate on the seal procs.

I've been putting up some decent numbers on some fights so really I haven't been worried about our pve dps too much.

What worries me is thier pvp based insistence that our dps rotation should be more "complicated" as if serving in a dps AND support roll isnt complicated enough.

Well, considering our dps rotation consists mostly out of 4-6 buttons spammed when they get off cooldown and our "support" is mostly there without us doing anything special, it would be nice to have something more complicated and perhaps if done really well, would yield higher personal dps for the paladin that pulls it off really well, creating some kind of gap between a good paladin and a great paladin.

alenari · 05/02/09, 11:52 AM

Originally Posted by goose

I noticed this 2 weeks back just after the 3.0 patch was launched, it just didnt feel that I was in the mana positive <20% in raids, I even tried using the SoB glyph but it never felt the same as it was on the PTR. I dont know why it has taken me this long to post about this possible bug but anyway it seem for me atleast that judgement of the wise isnt returning enough mana back after I judge. As a human paladin my base mana is 5584 and when I judge I get 1099 mana back from JotW where I should be getting 25% base mana back per judgement which is 1396 mana.
This to me seems to after looking at the tooltip of JotW that it is not giving me the right amount of mana back or I am reading it wrong. Even if I add the cost of the judgement (I dont see why it should be added) with the benediction added to it, it still doesnt add up. Can any see where I am going wrong or can anyone confirm this as a bug?

Basemana is Total mana - Mana from Intellect.
At level 80 a paladin's base mana is 4394.

Ayanae · 05/02/09, 1:51 PM

Revisiting the Hybrid vs Pure dps debate, there is an issue that needs to be addressed:

hybrid has the chance to use their utility abilities, sacrificing DPS in doing so. A Pure DPS class has no choice but to DPS.

While the first half of this statement may or may not be true depending on class, spec, and situation, the latter half is absolutely false. Mages often need to decurse. Hunters are often required to tranq, trap, or kite. Rogues may be asked to keep a specific poison up on a boss. Warlocks…well, historically warlocks have had to tank phases in specific boss fights, and they may or may not need to do that in WotLK. Some of these examples may be a bit contrived, but it is the case that pures need to use their “utility” from time to time rather than simply stand still and dps.

Now, going back to the first part of the statement, there are at least a few hybrid classes who can use their utility without losing dps. Most DK buffs/debuffs are baked into talents and spells they use anyway and don’t reduce their own personal dps when they provide these buffs/debuffs to the raid. Shamans seem to function similarly, barring the need to reposition totems. Of course, paladins don’t do anything extra to provide replentishment, JoW, 3% haste and damage, and HotC, but I don’t think these are the types of things we really mean when we talk about utility; every class does these things. This begs the question of what REAL (taxable) utility shamans and DKs bring to a raid, or to be more specific, what Blizzard considers “taxable” utility. Can heal? Can tank? Is this really utility on the same scale as paladin utility? More importantly, does Blizzard view it in the same way? There isn’t anything wrong with having utility. Again, pures have it too. The major difference being that pures aren’t taxed for their “utility”, used or unused, while hybrids are.

Let’s look at feral druids. Currently they are capable of amazing dps—comparable to pures. Their utility is being able to battle rez and occasionally innervate, which greatly affects their dps when they are asked to do so. But again, like pures, they are able to make up for lost ground once they resume dpsing and don’t appear to be taxed for “presumed utility”. This, in my opinion is the correct model. As Alleyra stated, if my purpose in the raid is to dps, my dps potential shouldn’t be penalized simply because I can use my time doing something else. To be honest, it’s for this very reason that I think removing the swing timer reset penalty from AoW procs is a step in the wrong direction. Hooray, another reason to have my dps penalized for my utility! There should be a penalty for using our utility, the same that pures suffer. However, it shouldn’t be automatically assumed that “all ret paladins heal, shield, Dsac, Hosalv, HoF, ect, etc every opportunity, every encounter and thus, their dps should be lower accordingly”. Yes, there should be a dps penalty for using utility, but it shouldn’t be enforced unless I actually use my utility.

lowsanity · 05/02/09, 3:18 PM

Arikah, i see there's no macro for rotations, i personally hate using too many buttons, so made one. You may, or may not be interested in a macro for the suggested rotation, so here what i use and proved to be 100% working on 3.1:

/castsequence reset=1, Crusader Strike, Judgement of Wisdom, Divine Storm, Exorcism(Rank 9), Crusader Strike

Now you may wonder "but why CS again at the end of the list? To prevent a bug where you have to wait until EXO is out of cooldown to start your rotation again. Did not put HoW or HW because they're only situation-specific, so use em manually, i would suggest putting em close to your macro-rotation button.
Any number before 1 in the reset time will make it not work.

lowsanity · 05/02/09, 3:24 PM

Delete, double posted accidentally because of connection lag.