Anyone else thought of the idea if AoW instead of making Exorcism instant cast, allowed HoW usage above 20% ? As has been said, the current PTR version changes nothing, at most only makes you weary to use AoW for healing. What limits Exorcism usage will still be the cooldown, and not AoW.

HoW will most likely still be among the top2 on the FCFS priority, meaning you'll actually have to keep an eye out for the proc and use it when it's available, which is not the case for Exorcism which will probably stay our lowest priority attack. HoW's 6sec CD will be keeping extreme burst in control.

Regarding getting no mana from absorbed Judgements: I find this quite ridiculous, why should a spec with pathetic passive regen (50+ secs to regen enough for a Judgement, 20-40+ if you manage to get some ticks from Replenishment) be allowed to possibly have almost all their resource regeneration prevented against absorption shield using classes. I already had problems to even pierce a good geared Holy Pally's Sacred Shield with a non-crit JotM - now with JoC damage reduced, it'll be even easier to have your Judgements absorbed.

Although, anyone able to confirm is the new JoC weaker or stronger than the current JotM ?

Indeed that would be better (although almost pure copy/paste of sudden death), i always felt Exorcism as alien body in our "rotation".

This made me check your armory. 0 hard mode kills.

I'd really try some more demanding content before you start assuming DiSac "falls short".

Yea i hope someone will do the math on this. I mean, dropping expertise from a few items would in most situations leave you with more hit or armor pen, which isnt optimal either. Might be a close call.

Looking forward to this patch. I really hope they allow AoW to reset the cd on exorcism tho, otherwise it wont change much.

The only stats we can drop Expertise for is Crit, Haste, and ArPen (seeing as you should be Hit capped regardless and Hit does nigh nothing at cap) all of which are on par (Crit) or worse (Haste, ArPen) than Expertise. Really, the viability of Glyph of Seal of Vengeance as an end content glyph lies in the answers to a couple of questions;

- What does the CC itemization look like and, subsequently, allow for?
- What gear must we use (Tier gear, etc)
- How important does Expertise end up being with our combat changes

Yep exactly Its all about finding the best suitable setup. Looking forward to some actual numbers.

Not if they tie the cooldown reduction to the AoW talent. Could be as simple as, each rank of AoW reduces your cooldown on exorcism by 7/14 sec or 50/100% or whatever.

They would need to apply it to the proc or bury the cooldown reduction deep in ret. Personally, I'd rather they make us choose between AoE and single target dps. That would add a tiny bit of additional skill into playing ret.

I just wanted to point out for the sake of organization and clarity, that perhaps we should follow the lead of the prot paladins and carry this discussion over to a 3.2 thread, since what we are discussing now is not pertinent to 3.1.

Regarding some of the suggested changes above, I very much like the idea of AoW proccing the ability to HoW. Of course, to make it balanced the proc rate would have to be lowered by quite a bit, but it would still make the rotation more dynamic and interesting.

Could tie it to Swift Retribution for example then, 5sec cd reduction pr rank. The SR talent is a bit boring anyway, and could need a little spice.

Agreed, but balancing it would probably be hard, and it could eventually lead to PvP issues once again (and more RNG).

The largest issues as I see them are we still don't really want to use exorcism as it has a long CD and doesn't pack enough of a punch all the while keeping PvP balanced. The first possible solution that comes to mind is having exorcism's CD being reduced to 10 seconds (important for using it as an consecrate substitute) and have it's damage ramp up 10/20/30/40/50% with each application of the SoV DoT. This will help keep it from being too powerful in PvP (hopefully bit nothing is a given) while giving it more a punch in PvE. Just to keep this even less likable for PvP ret, make SoV ticks break repentance.

HoW above 20% would never make it live. The devs have had huge problems trying to balance Sudden Death (to the point where it now has to have a low proc rate and a low damage cap) and I highly doubt they'll repeat the issues with HoW. We'd most likely end up having to lose our auto-crit, our mana would really be shot to hell, and the proc rate on AoW would have to be decreased to the point where it becomes worthless for self-healing, which was the entire point of the talent to begin with.

If they want to make things interesting throw something onto a deep ret talent that causes CS crits (or whatever) to reset the cooldown timer on Exorcism. Wouldn't affect Arena hugely thanks to the crit suppression and heals eating AoW, and while Exorcism is our lowest DPS priority at the moment (thanks entirely to the long cooldown) it is one of our hardest hitting attacks and thus might be prioritized if there was a small chance it would be up every 4 seconds. Or something.

For me the biggest problem with divine sacrifice is that it forces you to bubble during the spell. This is quite annoying as it is a 50% less damage for 12 seconds debuff. It is a very potent abillity in hard modes and as a damage reduction tool but it is physically a pretty big cost to the casting paladin (note prot can rarely use it in raids if they are tanking).

But yes warriors dislike having to use demoshout (tanks) and dps warriors would rather not likewise warlocks don't use the curse too often. So vindication is useful in pve. Prehaps a bit too useful with ret bringing 3% damage, crit, haste, -AP, JoW/JoL, Blessings and replenishment.

Edit: Since I can't see a 3.2 thread for us yet my initial impressions are as follows...

Exorcism even if it were to have 100% crit would still be a gap filler compared to every abillity we have
Seal of vengeance feels rather slow alot less bursty but it deals quite alot of damage my fear is that the Dot will suffer alot from resists.
Righteous vengeance is only slightly better than exorcism not really something interesting to know
Consecration is roughly as good as divine storm on single targets, Personally I feel a necessity for AoE to be AoE.
Command is vastly inferior to Vengeance.

And this is all expected I just do feel that the 4 second crusader strike hasn't changed anything other than our gaps for using hands and increased key presses as for art of war exorcism just seems a band aid fix to allow ret exorcism in PvP and deny it to holy as it doesn't increase the interactivity of the class by any means.

Basicly the play style is still fcfs apart from judgement most likely ending up as important as CS.

I don't know if someone brought it up before, but I guess, reducing Exorcism base cd to 10 sec. AND linking it's cd to that of consecration, while giving it either more dmg/cast, or perhaps even some sort of reduced cd deep in ret-tree, would give the player the choice between AoE and single-target dps.
It goes without saying, that all the "new" mechanics should be subjected to melee rules or 3% spellhit should be integrated in some talent somewhere.

And a "solution" for other stats (read: ArP, Haste) being lackluster: I thought for some time of for example integrating into RV the possibility of increasing some part of your holy dmg by the amount of which your actual ArP would increase your physical dmg; If that were to be OP, reduce it to some key abilities, perhaps only Judgement, as it doesn't really hit hard, even less so on 3.2 I guess (not seen actual numbers); thus, ArP would increase RV dmg through all of the 3 abilities causing it. Haste could for example reduce the time between RV and/or SoV dot ticks.


[edit: but these ideas are only attempts to patch up existing problems, no real redesign away from FCFS as most prior posts pointed out]

I forgot to mention this before, but I modeled the new SoC in Rawr as well. It was ~1,000 dps less then SoV.

About the value of SoV glyph. You can have the Rawr optimizer optimize Glyphs as well. If you hit the "Talents" checkbox in the optimizer screen it will try out each saved talent spec (which also includes Glyphs), and use the best one.

Okay, quick post before I leave for work this morning. I just got on and tested some things on the dummy (go to silvermoon btw no one there) and I've seen (with only my personal buffs) about a 500 dps increase. I usually do 3200 on a dummy and I'm getting 3700 now. My Corruption Dot ticks for about 1200-1300 (if they change our 2piece to allow that to crit... zomg) I was getting 6-7k Judgments with Vengeance and my CS crits were just under 3k. Exo was always available through AoW every time its CD was up.

I can't wait to see how SoV performs in a raid later tonight.

I know we don't like to post anecdotal evidence but I didn't want any rets out there to feel discouraged.

Oh yeah and the "roatation" actually does feel MUCH MUCH smoother. I rarely had large gaps where I wasn't pushing a skill to do damage.

-peace

I think the idea is 5% more healing received still isn't bad. The last few talent points are all debatable utility - Divinity is one of the options to debate.

BTW - per Zurm's suggestion I posted a 3.2 Ret thread for discuss of PTR. Helps separate what's live and current impact vs. the rollercoaster which PTR changes are likely to create.

Hm I followed this thread for a long time and I think I get more and more into it, but after I tried some maths for the Judgement of Vengeance, I reached my maximum .

First of all, I ask this here, because firstly I used the formula from the first page:
Judgement of Vengeance:
(14% AP + 22% spell power) * (1 + number of Vengeance stacks * 0.1)

But it isn't right, is it? It should be (1 + 14% AP + 22% spell power) * (1 + number of Vengeance stacks * 0.1), shouldn't it?

But still, even with this formula I just don't get to the exactly number, which I get on my realm. I did take Crusade, Sanctified Seals, Vengeance, Judgement Glyph and Art of War into the math, but there are always missing around 5,1% (I tested it with several self-buffs like Grandeur, Berserking and BoM) and I just don't know from where? So sorry again, if this post should be in the Simple Questions Thread, I put it down here because of the formula on the first page.

Gave it a test on the PTR, Divinity does grant a bonus to the 2% return on Judgement of Light. Was hitting for ~422 untalented on myself, ~465 talented with the 10% bonus to self healing from Divinity. Not as big of a difference though, as you mentioned.

The biggest reason for taking divinity in a raid setting is the 5% more healing done to you from AoE healing following an AoE attack on the raid.

I feel Divinity is required now (pre-3.2) since Blood still does a lot of self damage, so getting 10% more healing from your JoL and buffing it 5% for the raid is useful. The additional healing from others is a nice bonus as well.

Another, since JoL's heal is being nerfed in 3.2, the talent has lost some of its luster (I'll likely still have it, since in 3.2 Paladins will have the lowest base health (shaman base is increasing above ours), so it is good to get more healing!).

A smooth first come first serve is still just that and its rather tiresome that a trained monkey could play the class. I don't care if its smooth I want some element of class knowledge/skill to be in play rather than just rolling my face on the keyboard.

Also the large gaps help not hinder us for one they allow some time for hands, cleanses and art of war FoLs. All it means is we press more keys and do less paladinish stuff.

This is my opinion no doubt this is intended and im far off the ball park on my opinion.