Gotcha. 5 stack refreshes timer (back to 15 seconds), but no proc of 33% damage when CS/DS dodged/parried/misses. Bizarre, but unlikely to really cause an issue. Once you get the stack it should stay up unless out of range for prolonged periods.

I agree with the missing buffs on live. 10man I suffer, 25 is far smoother (often 4 pallies or a shaman drops Mana Spring). I'm just tossing out there that if SoV is a buff (appears to be) and mana loss is more serious (faster CS appears to be) that it may be left such to make Consecration a balancing point. Highly unlikely an intention in the changes, but one they may look at and see as a side benefit. Time will tell.

I fail to see how the situation you describe (and which I experienced myself on the PTR this morning) is in any way, shape or form different from the current FCFS paradigm. We're still hitting buttons on cooldown as much as possible, clashes are more common and mana sparser. It might seem like "thinking on your feet", but the truth of the matter is, we'l crunch the numbers, come up with a priority ordering based on absolute DPS of each ability and, BAM, no more thinking on your feet: mash Cons over Exo everytime (or something similar).

I do like SoV as a DPS seal and, with some tweaking, I could see PvE ultimately ending up just fine. PvP concerns however have not been addressed in any meaningful way, while potency has certainly gone down with the higher mana costs and lower burst of a 4s CS, frankly ridiculous SoC damage (particularly the judgement portion) and continued absence of Exo in all but the larger 5s bracket - AoW is, afterall, one of the reasons we're called a defensive spec. If none of our attacks are going to crit for over 4k, we're going to need either: attrition type damage - cheap/free, expensive to dispell, hard to peel (think DoTs galore - which RV, Vindication and SoV provides, assuming the stack is dispelled one application at a time and some kind of charge to stay glued to a target), or a lot more control (beyond long cooldown stuns/incapacitates).

When an attack lands (does not dodge/parry/miss) that can proc a seal the of the following things happens independently of each other.

1) A strike which uses melee combat mechanics occurs. If it lands it refreshes/stacks SoV DoT.
2) If you have a 5 stack of SoV you will get a 33% weapon damage proc. This attack cannot be avoided, and can crit for 100% extra damage.

Remember #2 happens regardless of #1 landing, it just requires the Seal proccing attack (autos, cs, etc) to land.

I am not sure how #2 interacts when you have target besides your own with a 5 stack of SoV, since some people have seen unexpected results with it. I plan to do more testing on that part of it later.

Judgement of Vengeance is (1 + 0.22 * SP + 0.14 * AP) * (1 + 0.1 * SoV stacks).

I submitted feedback for crusader strike to hopefully change to 5% or 6% base mana, than the current 8% I believe it is. However something confuses me about the PTR tooltip. It's stating crusader strike is 93-94% weapon dmg, all sites I've looked at and even patch notes say it's supposed to be 75% and I can't figure out where the extra 18-19% is coming from.

*edit* nm I see where it's coming from, the tier 8.5 set bonus is adding the dmg.

Aha. I think I finally got it.

When an attack (white or special) hits/crits target, in sequence:
-Damage of attack applied or absorbed.
-DoT refreshes or not based on melee hit chance.
-Target takes the 33% proc damage which cannot be avoided, only absorbed or (partial) resisted.

When an attack misses/parried/dodged, nothing happens.

This should devalue hit and expertise a teeny tiny bit, since SoB could be dodged (and parried). It removes the second roll from two-roll on the proc and puts it on the DoT. 15 seconds to reapply is mostly a non-issue.

Are you sure of the JoV? Last I saw (multiple patches back) tests showed it was (1.1 ^ SoV stacks). Literally increased by 10% per stack. 0 stacks was 100%. 1 stack was 110 * 1.1 or 110%. 2 stacks was 110% * 1.1 or 121%.

Could someone perform a quick test with a very narrow range weapon and decent AP and spellpower? Turn away, Judge without a DoT a few times to get your damage range (hopefully 1 damage difference between min and max), turn build 5 stack and judge a few times - compare new damage range. If it's 1.5 we know it's flat, if it's 1.61 we know it's recursive (a further * 1.1 per stack).

Hmmm - wonder how the 5stack and judge interaction will work. We need to math out whether it's worth waiting for some level of stack before judge and avoid judge on pull. Probably not, but we should check.

Tooltip can include talents and item bonus changes. CS's tooltip does get updated by talents.

I am positive. One of my specs on the PTR only has Seals of the Pure currently. With 1909 SP and 580 AP, JoV does exactly 866 damage with a 5 stack.

Also someone said Judgement of Vengeance was refreshing Seal of Vengeance DoT. I am unable to reproduce that on the PTR. Judgement of Command procs Seal of Command though as long as you are in melee range, even if your back is turned.

Been thinking about how to make the AoW proc mechanic more compelling for us, and more "interesting" as a game mechanic.

I doubt we are going to see AoW refreshing Exorcism cool downs, because as people have pointed out, we can quite often average 2 to 5 procs per 15 seconds, thus we could potentially exorcism anywhere from 2 to 5 times more often in the same time period. That solution returns us to the Very bursty, and very boring situation we see currently, only with just a small shift in our priority.

My suggestion would be to first reduce the reset time of Exorcism to 10 or even 8 seconds. Then I think a reasonable change is to have AoW's first proc make FoL/Exor turn into an insta cast, and then subsequent procs add a buff to us that gets consumed upon using either FoL/Exor. This buff would be stackable (say up to 5 or something) and for each charge of the buff we get a percentage increase in the effectiveness of the FoL/Exor we use to consume it.

By doing this, it adds a some decision making to our FCFS priority system which now has a fluid element to it. An exorcism with no AoW charges is our lowest priority attack. An Exorcism with 3 charges might be worth prioritizing over Judgement, but perhaps not CS. An Exorcism with 5 stacks might be our first priority. In conjunction with the lower cool down we also are running the odds that we won't have 5 AoW procs within a 10 second period so we most likely can't count on having a maxxed Exorcism every time it's off cool down. So we have to decide... delay it to build up more AoW buffs or fire with what we got.

Sidenote: If the feeling is that having a 5 stack buffed Exorcism is too bursty, change the mechanic to instead apply the base Exorcism damage on cast, but then have it apply a dot which has an effectiveness tied to the number AoW stacks we had when we Exorcised.

The powering up to the FoL piece also adds a fun dimension. We could drop a life saving, pretty substantial heal 1 time but we do so at the cost of DPS because we just blew our buffed up AoW stack.

As for the mana issues we are seeing, returning to the idea of Blue rage, I think a deep Ret talent that returns mana based on some percentage of our SoV's dot tick could be interesting. We'd get more mana back the higher we stack the dot. It's a mechanic that harkens back to the SoB mechanic which was nice and has a Paladinish flavor to it.

Now granted this is probably stepping into wishlist land a little, but one other area I think they have failed to differentiate us in is AE vs Single Point(STILL). I still see no seperation of this and thus we have 1 and only 1 playstyle regardless of the tactical situation we are faced with. One thing I would like to see is a better distinguishing of the playstyles along the AE vs Single Point line.

I think DS being our Marque top tier talent is a bit lackluster and really doesn't have that uniqueness. It's Whirlwind with a heal which is just... eh. I think a modal change to how this skill works would allow us to set up two seperate playstyles each strong within their tactical niche (AE vs Single Point).

Firstly, I'd want to tie the Consecrate and Exorcism cooldowns together so each are mutually exclusive(the idea being we are either going to AE or Single Point.. not both). With the 1.5 second cast time this has little impact on the Prot or Holy paladins so no sweat there if we link these abilities. Here is where the Modal version of DS kicks in. If we use a consecrate, so long as we are standing in the consecrate DS changes into an AE attack possessing the following qualities:

--no limit in targets,
--does damage that in conjunction with Consercate's damage make us competitive AE damage
--has a reduced mana cost in this state, and it becomes a 1.5 CD ability.

The concept here is when AEing, you consecrate, and then spam DS for a steady source of AE damage. The SoVeng procs will build up on every target hit, and if an AE situation lasts long enough, DS eventually starts procing the 33% Weapon damage portion. This gives paladins an AE with a slow start but strong finish for those PVE AE situations. It keeps it reasonable in PVP because the paladin must stay on the consecrate to get the buff which allows DS to act like a Dervish, and the SoV procs won't accumulate into a 5 stack unless you happen to nail someone for 5 GCDs in a row or approximately 7.5 seconds worth of time standing there. It makes AEing with a certain threshhold of targets profitable, while penalizing the use of this tactic when engaging a single target. And as a perk, it gives us something that graphically and mechanically is unique and fits the paladin mythos(on consecrated ground we rock against the legions of evil)

DS in non-consecrate mode could either continue to work like it does currently(though I still think that blurs Single Point and AE too much), or something I think would be neat especially given that we are wanting to stack SoVeng now is when not under the effects of Consecrate it barrages a single target with 4 melee hits (the damage is retuned of course), thus giving us a way to drop a near full stack of SoVeng within a single GCD on a single target. This restores our ability to be able to switch targets effectively which has PVE and PVP implications, but has a limitation in that we can do this only every 10 seconds. And again this single point barrage is to my knowledge rather unique as I can't think of another melee class that deals damage in quite that fashion.

Anyhow I think between two changes like this to seperate our AE vs Single point, we are then given another layer of complexity to our playstyle and decision making and it provides the needed hooks for blizzard to balance us around 1 tactical situation independent of the other, instead of the constant jumble we deal with now.

I like both of those idea's.

I think that changing AoW to work that way successfully makes exo/FoL interesting and a big choice between dps and utility while making our single target dps more potent. The thing that would help support this change is making the exo glyph add x% hit chance to make up for spell hit, or add it into a talent already in our tree.

As for the change to DS/Cons I agree our AE needs to be separated from our single target. As long as the damage on DS was not too high single target then this would work, otherwise it would be too bursty in its single target form. This change to DS in single target would make SoV our pvp seal since DS could stack 4 SoV dots in one GCD. My favorite part about your idea is our ability to switch targets due to the quick re-stacking of SoV. I wonder though if DS in single target hitting 4 times would be too much dmg with the proc of SoV at 5 stack. (possible dmg nerf on DS would fix that i guess)

I have always thought that consecrate should offer a larger benefit for its mana cost then it currently does. Say that Cons could be dropped by one paladin and it gave a buff increasing holy damage done by other paladins while standing in the consecrate, thus making having more than one ret/prot paladin in the raid beneficial. A raid with two ret paladin's would have to choose between who dropped cons and who did not. Most prot paladin's drop Cons in their rotation making ret's job alot easier, not to mention saves mana. Only downside to this that I can see is bosses with large hit boxes, the ret paladin may not be able to stand in the Cons of the prot paladin. (which many ulduar bosses are large)

I apologize, it wasn't vengeance being stacked on judge, it was the FotFF stacks.

I agree, the changes won't divert our playstyle from the FCFS system we use currently and inevitably a new series of skill priorities will be drawn up when the numbers are set in stone. The reason for my 'thinking on your feet' comment however still holds true in my opinion. As it stands on live, I have significantly fewer clashes as a whole, however the extent of these clashes is much greater than on the ptr due to 3+ cooldowns coming off at the same time. Patch 3.2-wise, whilst the clashes occur in more frequent increments, they tend to only last 0.5-1.5 secs causing the overall time lost to actually be quite similar.

By having fewer free GCDs we will be forced to choose between exorcism / DP and our other dps abilities far more often. By contrast, on the live servers its quite rare that I ever find myself in a situation where the FCFS and priority system require me to take Exorcism into account. It tends to fall neatly into a free GCD with ease. Of course this isn't true for the ptr. Also, the use of utility abilities (AoW-FoLs, HoSalv etc) will actually impact our rotation, rather than simply waiting on the many areas of 'cooldown downtime' that we get on live before we decide to take advantage of them. This means that depending on our situation, we will have to actively change our priorities mid-combat.

I guess my (exceptionally long-winded) point is that Blizzard stated that they wanted to make our 'rotation' more dynamic. To an extent i believe they've accomplished this.

Patch 3.2 for Retribution will be again a very interesting one, but far from finished how i see it. There are a lot of open ends with the "improvements" in the Retribution tree.

Mana problems in PTR will be solved, i guess they first want to see what the influence is of changing the CD of CS, how quick do we build the stacks of SoV and the uptime of AoW. Only don't really understand why reducing the CD of CS makes the CD clashing more interesting, that it will change the FCFS and what is the goal of it. So i guess that in the next phase of the PTR there will be a second effect on CS again. A second effect with 'eating' a buff was something that GC once metions like possible changes.
The idea's of Telumehtar how to implement this sounds very interesting. Only spamming DS while standing in Cons might not happen. In the Q&A of DK's is said that Rogues, Elemantel Shamans and Warriors are the only 'good' melee AoE. DK's will be lowered and i guess Paladins will stay low AoE and have to releas our fury to "the skull".

I strongly believe you should post this in the suggestion/PTR forum. It can't hurt, and might give devs an idea they hadn't thought of. Best to get these things in early, so there's time left on PTR to develop and test them.

Also, is everyone who's tried raids (please not target dummy tests, those have so many exceptions and issues that they don't have any real accuracy) on PTR noticed a *massive* dps increase? From what I hear from Endoscient, Rawr is showing minimal DPS increases (~350-400 dps atm) on a single target, some people however are noticing increases of over 1k in practice, such as this guy on MMO-champion forums. While I obviously take such posts with a grain of salt, it seems his methodology is sound. He does state that hes hitting an undead target, which gives automatically more weight to exorcism... but it's so low compared to our other sources I just can't help but feel there is more going on here than we know. He's also using the new, bugged libram. With 100% uptime, its like a 300 DPS increase. Even so, he shows 7015 dps with BELOW expected crit on PTR, while seeing 5.8k on live under typical circumstances. That's more than just a minor increase.

My spreadsheet modeling (similar to Endo's Rawr tests) showed a few hundred DPS increase in my current gear. Around 300-400. For "massive" increase, I blame the Libram. It looks to be about 260 DPS better than Furious Glad.

1 item purchased with badges - 260 DPS more than best avail in 3.1.
Or in a vacuum, about 360 DPS just from 1 item.

So, sounds right. A huge swing of 600-700, maybe a bit more.

Edit: That's running numbers on things not getting added benefit from Crusade. Undead would get extra Crusade scaling, plus Glyph of Sense Undead and Exo auto-crit. Therefore the changes would scale significantly compared to what we're pulling in Ulduar. I think I could see ~1k more DPS in Naxx with Libram compared to live in Ulduar.

I apologize in advance if this was mentioned earlier in this thread, however I'm just making a quick post from work while i was reviewing some data i forwarded to my IPhone (lol).

I ran 10 man OS and Nax on PTR with a premade Pal while awaiting my actual character to be transfered. While the numbers look good on dummies, they are not as good in the field so to speak. Yes our single target damage does seemed some what improved, however, our AoE damage on trash and during certain boss encounters is tremendously lowered as we aren't getting the old SoM/B procs on our Divine storm with the new SoV because as we all know it requires 5 stacks of our dot. I found this quite disheartening to say the least as a significant amount of my value (and more importantly fun) came from the astronomical numbers i could put out while clearing trash or clearing adds during boss encounters.

I'm not sure if it warrants it alone, but I'm seriously considering using one valuable point and specing into SoC so that I can maintain this lost dps on trash. I realize this may seem a bit petty, however i feel it almost necessary. It was quite disheartening for me to feel like the raid was carrying me through trash.

Please post your thoughts about this. I realize that what really counts are the boss fights where our single target will shine, however it does sacrifice the awesome aoe dps we once promoted. Thanks again.

Just don't forget that the DoT deals damage too, and Divine Storm applies the DoT. This is a problem on mobs that last for less than 15 seconds, but anything longer and I'd have to take a good look at the numbers to consider that a foregone conclusion.

There's also the option of using tab-targeting to build the stack on adds that require high longer term DPS. Then maintaining the 5-stack and causing the 30% damage every 10 seconds really wins out over just 48% damage per 10 seconds.

Yes, we'll lose some efficacy on packs of 4 or fewer micro adds that need to die very quickly. We'll gain a bunch on long term fights where we can hit multiple targets. (Say something like Kologarn for instance)

In 3.2, the BE racial Arcane Torrent will interrept PvE mobs. It has a long cooldown (2 min), but it is something new for the Horde.

I support this idea and I think it should really be postet in the PTR forum.

On a different note: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Ret DPS Comparison - Live vs PTR: WWS data

Due to still downloading the PTR patch (which is going to take a while), I can't test it myself - can anybody confirm this claim? Almost 5% more weapon damage per Seal proc does seem significant.

SoV's DoT portion is affected by SotP but not the 33% of weapon damage on hit. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not working as intended as it would be an incredibly strong dps talent if it affected both portions. Time will tell.

That is NOT a reliable interrupt. Granted, it's off GCD which I suppose is nice, however, what about Alliance Paladins? As shown in the thread I linked, you'll see some valid points made, while I still do need to add more to the overall statement, it's something that's needed. If you look at it like this, A BE Paladin on General Vezax has a one minute down time of no interrupts (Assuming they're using Arcane Torrent and HoJ to interrupt SF every time).

I'm sure as well as most that view this discussion, would agree that it's something NEEDED by Paladins.


Edited for clarification: I'm not saying that it's not a start or disagreeing, just pointing out that we as Paladins still have yet to have something simplistic as an interrupt.

Together with druids, warlocks (unless they use a shitty pet) and priests. Considering prot palas do have an "interrupt", you can add hunter to the list above as well.
Putting HoJ off GCD would add some utility, but I do not believe every class should have the same possibilities.

After a liitle bit of testing on the ptr, could it be, that the 33% weapon damage proc of the seal is not affected by sotp? The numbers seem to be right when I only added Crusade, Sanctified Seals, Vengeance and Two-Hand Weapon Spec.

edit: Forget about it, Endo wrote this at the first page .. Head -> Table ^^

edit2: What I still can't figure out is, why I just don't get on the right judgement damage. I am always missing around 5,9% in my math compared to ptr. But Judgement of Vengeance isn't affected by 2 Hand Weapon Spec, is it?