I think this is another situation of both of us arguing the same point with the same conclusion from different angles. At request I will answer both questions.

Answer #1 - Who said it was realistic? I never have.

People were questioning priorities and how they were derived - I took your initial query as to how they were derived, not an excuse to assail your personally mathed and selected priority sequence. Ad hominem attacks are unnecessary. The tools are to derive maximum theoretical DPS in static situations so you can compare apples and apples. Glyph to Glyph, Talent to Talent (as if we had more DPS altering talents than points), and Item to Item.

Answer #2 - Yes. Any perceived advantage could be wasted.

Will a priority sequence spit out by these tools be ideal in every or even a majority of circumstances? I'd say, no. Will a priority based solely on DPS of each ability be ideal in every or even a majority of circumstances? Again, no and I'm not going to assume you claim it is. Will either produce something "good enough?" I'd say, yes. Will the DPS based one be superior more frequently? Inconclusive, most priority setups effectively become a rotation as they exactly ropeat every 20-30 (most, not all) - if you could keep this much time on target in a chunk then something else may be superior - but typically only by ~1%.

If a target is being constantly kited (I mean no pauses at all) it may be advantageous to move, say, DS ahead of CS, simply because pressing CS when in range and having the server decide "you're not actually in range, please try again" is lost DPS and DS hits from further than CS. These are the on-the-fly decisions made to separate good Ret from great Ret.

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."

Conclusion:
A merely okay Ret paladin would take the priority you have provided or one from a spreadsheet or Rawr. The good or excellent paladins (as you've shown yourself via WWS and considerable experience) know it is far more fluid and are therefore more likely to press the right button in the right situation, even if their priority didn't kneejerk recommend it.

Edit - oh, yeah, and any time you're off the target for more than ~15 seconds, Judgement should be highly important (and typically a no-brainer during those last 10 yds) due to raid utility of Heart and healing from JoL. I even said I personally use Exo during a move-the-boss pull for distance reasons. There goes the perfect priority!

Which is why I think something such as a "priority calculator" provided by the script is completely irrelevant, if not misleading.
You have people using your spreadsheet thinking "oh, it said this rotation is recommended, I'm sure this is important" where in practice, chances are incredibly low that what the script tried to model will actually happen (let alone the fact that it gives you 20 possible priority assignments with <.01% difference).

As we both seem to agree, in practice, combat is dynamic, fluid and will never ever go as inked on paper. Keep in mind I'm not saying "all theorycraft is unrealistic", I draw the line somewhere between 3-6 moves you need to perform perfectly as realistic and something like 20-30 moves you need to do perfectly to net a benefit as highly unrealistic.

The common practice when you reach this point in theory is that you move to a higher level of abstraction, which in our case means going back to fundamentals:

->Trying to reduce the average cooldown of the abilities that yield highest DPS by prioritizing them (and ignoring unrealistic goals such as clash reduction/avoidance 20-30 moves ahead). I've yet to see any other suggestion that can provide "provable", realistically executable benefits.


So yea, ultimately combat is fluid, not predictable and obviously common sense always supersedes, however past that, sticking to "highest DPS first" as a rule of thumb remains the best way to go in order to increase chances of a better yielding cast sequence over any other suggested priority lists which hope to achieve benefits through (keyword: unrealistic) clash reduction.

Key word: rule of thumb. Sit down and play your class for a while, and you know when to toss rule of thumb out the window.

ex: For whatever reason you're running low on mana. Move Judgement up on priority. Duh.
ex2: AoE trash. Why the hell wouldn't you prioritize DS and Consecrate?

For the overwhelming majority of the time though, the rule of thumb is what you stick by. Just don't get yourself so stuck to it that you can't adapt as needed.

Just to throw some practical experience into this discussion, I wanted to mention my take on our "rotation" from the bosses I have done so far.

Mana isn't an issue if JoW is on your target, so I put judgement on the backburner. HOW > CS > DS > Judge > Consec > Exor in this case has worked for me very well. On fights where JoW is not available, I move judgement to the front of the list, and all my problems are solved.

For those saying CS hits harder than DS, it's hitting exactly 10% harder because of your T7 2pc. They hit exactly the same otherwise, and while the 2pc may be relevant to theorycrafting right now, it won't be for long. CS still should be higher priority, because of the faster CD (at least, IMO, and our modeling tools all agree).

A few other notes from my experience in Ulduar-25. AoW heals are crucial, and the fact that they dont' reset your swing timer is awesome. I would also say SS is required, along with the divine sac/divine guardian talents due to mechanics in certain fights.

Those worried about our DPS shouldn't be. I am placing 4-6th on every fight so far except for Iron Council (the casters got lucky with runes), and the players in my guild are all (again, IMO) quite good. I'm consistantly beating hunters, usually sit behind the two rogues, and some combination of warlocks and mages, or the occasional DK.

Zurm I think you're forgetting Sanctity of Battle CS should always hit harder than DS (by 5% if 2pieceT7 or 15% otherwise). As you put it however, yes it's ultimately irrelevant as it's DPS that matters and not simply damage, the CS cooldown seals the deal.


I can echo that, we just had the world first on Thorim hardmode and I finished in the top 5. The fight did have a fairly heavy aoe phase however.

Bosses where Ret really excels have been Razorscale and Kologarn (you can actually hit all 3 parts of him with your DS/Consecration spiking your damage significantly, topping meter or within the top 3).

This is despite having to prioritize Judgement most of this reset since we don't have much JoW uptime as we're only running 2 paladins so far (1 Ret = JoL is too vital not to have at 100% uptime, 1 holy = JoW with low uptime, can't blame em on heavy hitting progression content).

I'm not sure any of this needs spelling out, regardless how clueless we assume some people might be. What's important is that the rule of thumb they can fall back on actually is in their best interest. Nothing replaces common sense however.

I noticed in the potion section that only speed/mana were listed. Not sure if its been thought of or math done on the old mega thread. What about http://http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22828

Insane strength pots offer
120 strength
138 strength after talents
151 strength after talents+kings

300 attack power isn't bad. Especially if timed with a bloodlust or avenging wrath. I used them to some success in the past However I will leave the math to the experts as patch just hit and I'm sure things will be a mess for a little while.

exemplar is there a reason wrathstone is not included in your spreadsheet or is this a simple oversight?

Just trying to figure your if pyrite is really worth it since we are over hit capped?

p.s. can you explain how to add items as new items become available?

edit: seems wrathstone is in the drop down but if you select it you get an error in your spreadsheet, FYI i think it may have a bug.

I don't understand why I see so many people taking the 5% increased healing talent. (And yes I am aware of the double bonus when healing yourself)

In fact, this looks like the only sensible talent spec, unless your guild does not have a holy paladin.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...0&version=9767

What am I missing?

Aside: Being able to use a resist aura all the time is really nice, and perhaps the best ret change in 3.1.

You're taking Imp HoJ over Imp BoM, for one. Unless you run multiple Holy Paladins who coordinate specs, there's no guarantee anyone else is providing Imp BoM, and Imp HoJ is not a strictly PvE-relevant talent.

Other than that, though, there's nothing wrong with what you've suggested. The increased healing talent is a flavour choice, IMO.

As I stated I don't need it in my situation, but overall I'd argue that there's no reason for any ret paladin to be bringing imp might. If you are the only paladin in a raid you'll be using kings. If there is a prot or holy paladin in the raid they should have imp might anyway, and I don't know of any raids where there are multiple paladins who are all ret...

Most Holy Paladins won't/don't spec into Ret given the 3.1 changes, they will go the same route into Prot that many of us have chosen. (0/17/54) Nor will most Prot Pallies spec into that specific talent. In a single Paladin situation, I would still choose Might over BoK for myself. The DPS gains are far better from Might than BoK, especially if it's talented. If you're looking for survivability for a particular fight, BoK is baseline, so it will always be there.

If you raid does fine without you speccing for Imp. Might: fantastic. However, don't come to these boards and advocate your spec's use without some real math and reasoning behind it. What works for your raid composition may not necessarily work for other's.

I've seen a few people mention that the rule for FCFS priority should be "highest DPS first." I do not believe this is technically accurate. You should achieve better results if you go with "highest damage per cast/button press" first.

Let's assume (just to illustrate the point) that you have two abilities: judgement and crusader strike. Judgement does 30,000 damage on a 60 second cooldown. Crusader Strike does 1,500 damage on a 1.5 second cooldown.

The DPS of Judgement is 500. The DPS of Crusader Strike is 1,000.

That would mean, if you do "highest DPS first," you'd hit CS every 1.5 seconds, every GCD, and never hit Judgement. This would be a big DPS loss.

If, instead, you do "highest damage per cast first," you'd hit Judgement first, then a whole bunch of CS, then Judgement whenever it's off CD. In a minute, instead of hitting 40 CS for 1,500 each, you hit 39 CS for 1,500 each and 1 Judgement for 30,000. Obviously the judgement will raise your overall DPS / damage done.

If I'm missing something here, please let me know. But I don't think cooldowns should enter into the FCFS priority discussion (only if you're talking about clash resolution or a "rotation," but that's not FCFS).

Given that most ret paladins are judging Light, and JoL is a fairly significant raid heal, whereas Toughness, Stoicism, and Imp HoJ are of barely any PvE value at all, Divinity seems like the no-brainer choice. If for some reason you're always judging Wisdom, it's value is diminished, but I personally would value take 5% healing taken as a better survivability talent over the other choices.

The problem with your argument is that we don't have any abilities that are spammable (IE, a cooldown as long as the GCD). A more accurate situation would be one with Crusader Strike on a 3 second cooldown. In this situation, with casting CS first, you are only delaying Judgement by a second and a half, as opposed to never using it. In such a situation, it's a choice between lengthening Judgement's cast by 2.5%, to 61.5 seconds, or lengthening CS's to 4.5, every 20th cast. Obviously it's not that simple with a real rotation involving cooldowns that don't dovetail together neatly, but it's closer to accuracy than the situation you suggested.

This argument is flawed and was proven flawed months ago in the previous Retribution thread. A few points:

1) One cannot look at abilities in a vacuum. (i.e. you cannot compare CS versus Judgement by only looking at CD's and potential damage in a minute. The ability to use an ability/talent more often equates to more damage done by a particular ability.)
2) Highest damage =/= highest DPS. These are two different terms, they are not synonymous.
3) Fight duration and ability cooldowns play a critical factor in determination of "highest DPS."

Here's one of the explanations provided by Left, from the previous Ret thread. Here and here are posts from Avitus explaining how you can "bleed" DPS by prioritizing highest damge over highest DPS.

There are several more posts that explain this in the 3.0 Ret Thread and it's predecessor. I encourage you to scour through those, as they will answer nearly any/every question you may have re: FCFS and clash resolution.

FCFS really has nothing to do with clash resolution, though. I think you may be confusing the two. Clash resolution is merely a guideline if two or more abilities are going to come up simultaneously, it will simply allow you to choose the better (highest DPS) ability. FCFS means you should never really be idle: you are hitting abilities as they come up -- immediately. There is no wait or rotational reset that triggers some elaborate sequence: you just push whatever button you're able to as it is available.

When deviating from the standard recommendation of highest DPS ability as highest priority, it's very important to remember that a pushback on a lower DPS ability is generally less damaging to your overall output than postponing a higher DPS ability.

Personally, I've been using a variable priority system focused heavily on clash resolution (and thus deviating even from the FCFS line of thought) for the past few months, and with very good results aswell.
The REASON I chose this route was that I was confident that I would be able to reproduce the rotation I was after at any given time, regardless of whether I had to move or not.
Constructing an even more complex variant of the same system (which promised an even higher theoretical DPS output), I quickly noticed that the added rules for maintaining the rotation under any given circumstance ended up being too complex to put to any realistic use, and thus that whole adventure was abbandoned without even any field testing

When you switch abilities around in your priority system, you might end up with a rotation that does awesome DPS in a vacuum, but ends up being totally crap if you just shift an ability cooldown by a few seconds.

Mapping your rotation of choice is always a good thing, since it can result in you recognizing good spots to put your sacred shield and divine plea without causing unnecessary pushback, but especially so if you choose to deviate from the standard recommendation.

In short: play around with rotations all you like, since it's essentially a good thing to delve deeper into what you're doing, but be SURE that any changes you make are actually to your benefit.

Unfortunately you are right. Yesterday, I killed myself instantly using shield wall + Divine Sacrifice when the Deconstructor was using Tympanic Tantrum. It's really annoying that you have to combine a 1 minute cooldown with Divine Shield (5 min cd) in order to survive.

I'm trying to work out intro-Ulduar wep choice based on recent postings about 1) weapon speed and 2) the small margin of difference between hit, str, and expertise until hit/expertise are capped. The question is this:

I have Jawbone and BoH, and I am a human. Changing no gear at all, Jawbone gives me +10 expertise (literally jump from 16 to expertise cap 26) and .2 seconds slower on weapon speed (3.4 to 3.6). Buffed with Kings, they both provide roughly the same AP amount. You also exchange crit/agility for haste.

This is not a "help me chose my gear post", but a question about stat weights vs. raw weapon damage with all the 3.1 changes. Consider it a hypothetical for the sake of argument.

I suppose I want to put everything together in my mind: would the reweighting of expertise (plus the human racial) push a weapon like Jawbone up to where it is equal or superior to a weapon with more base dps (like BoH)? Is this even a proper way to approach the issue? Flaws in argument and thought process are more than welcome.

In 3.0, this question would be rather silly. But I've run some personal target dummy tests with both weapons and Jawbone always provided me a boost in dps of several hundred. These were not proper tests and could easily have been due to bad dodge streaks with BoH. I'm not hanging my hat on what I 'felt' was the case.

Thoughts?

Finally getting back to EJ posting again. FYI, I love the info you guys have on here, debates and all. Thank you for keeping those of us who want to push our A-game to the next level armed with the knowledge we need.

As usual, First time in VoA on the new boss (this time 10 man) and the Valorous Aegis Legplates dropped. I have the following already:

Legplates of Double Strikes

and

Valorous Redemption Legplates

Pre 3.1, I had used Redemption on trash, and Double Strikes on bosses. Now that 3.1 is here, I was running WWS to see which one would give me more bang for my buck. Using both the spreadsheet and Rawr (as of 04-15-2009) Redemption has an edge to some degree. I was shocked to see how low Aegis was on the rankings. Yet, on my WWS reports for 10-mans (and since my guild is 1/2 filled with "carry-me" chickenheads, we've barely crept into Ulduar after doing 3D Sarth25), I show Double Strikes doing a bit more.

Basically, the $20 question is, "Which one should I use?"

Thank you all in advance.

Aegis, hands down.

I would like to give you my own thoughts on this. During 3.0x, I designed my gear upgrades around BoH, meaning I made sure I was both hit and expertise capped when wielding BoH. I, unfortunately, lost the roll for BoH to a hunter, and am still wielding the Jawbone. In a lot of WWS parses, being hit/expertise capped using 1/5 T7.5 gear put me at or above those who were 4/5 T7.5 on most fights (the longer the fight went on, the better I performed vs the 4/5 T7.5 who was not hit/expertise capped).
There was a Dranei Ret who had JC/BS, 4/5 T7.5 and BoH with everything BiS, but he was not hit/expertise capped. Burn fights he would beat me. Duration fights, I would edge by him.

Now, we compare WWS reports, and even with me still using the Jawbone (my only upgrade since then was the Obsidian Greathelm), I am now surpassing him on DPS in both old Naxx content as well as Ulduar (for what little we could kill).

Long story short: These guys don't lie when they say hit and expertise is king until cap, then STR all the way whenever you can.

Actually, weapon dps is rated far above every other stat, so you'd need a significant amount of stats to outweigh higher dps. Also, BoH is of a much higher item level, so it generally has more stats.

Such tests don't actually show anything - it's all a matter of RNG. Use a spreadsheet or similar to see whether or not you'd gain dps by using X item.