Thank you both.
Sorry about the brain fart. long night/morning.

Actually, you could use a trinket with a 20s on USE haste buff, and swap it for a different trinket before combat starts. It could well be worth doing for a patchwerk style fight in the same way that using scourgebane is a good idea.

(eg the [Mark of Norgannon])

[EDIT]Turns out the buff is removed when you swap trinkets. Odd t hat trinkets have this behaviour when Librams don't.[/EDIT]

There's a decent amount of discussion by Protection Paladins about in combat libram swapping. In ideal circumstances you're going to extend the GCD by ~0.25 to 0.5 seconds. In actual raids, your results may be substantially worse depending on your latency. Libram swapping does lower Protection DPS substantially, but there are certain situations where your threat isn't relevant but your mitigation is relevant, i.e. holding Freya or Steelbreaker.

I'd expect libram swapping to be a net DPS loss for Ret, as it is for Protection.

That is not a bad idea, but it would only work with trinkets without a proc. If you were to switch it for the greatness card, you would have to wait 45 before it is capable of proccing.

If you also throw in a potion of speed prior to the start of the battle, you could go in with +991 haste. That's pretty crazy.

EDIT: Doesn't work

So far the ptr patch notes make no mention of a change to the SotP talent, so wouldn't 5/5 SotP mean an "effective" 37.95% weapon damage SoV proc when fully stacked?

This should certainly show an increase in overall seal damage with the added JoV proc and 4s CS, even if the individual seal procs are < SoB.


[Avoiding double post] Originally I was thinking "yes, that looks right" but I just played around in Rawr 2.2.10, 3.2 mode w/ SoV, and after fiddling with the FCFS Simulator, the highest dps was given by: HoW > J > CS > DS = Cons > Exo. My overal dps is then 6053, and I don't know if J & CS would switch places depending on gear.

I don't get this talk about swapping On Use trinkets, since it's common knowledge that once u unequip an item with an on use effect that buff is gone.

With all these recent changes to the SoV mehanics, are we still looking at an overall 8-15% dps increase on most boss fights without doing any seal twisting (I probably wont since I tend to suffer from premature burst aggro anyway)?

This is the first bit of recent news that's made me a happy camper. Granted we are losing our up front burst, it seems our burst gradually returns as we build up the SoV stack, and if this ends up being an overall dps boost (which it sounds like it is) I can live with that.

Now if they'd just let DS stack the SoV dot that would be a very reasonable compromise that would not be OP. This would put the ramp up time at roughly 10 seconds regardless of haste gear, would allow for the slow accumulation of SoV dots on secondary targets which would reduce our ramp up time on close by targets in some target swap sitations, would give us a slow ramp up on our overall aoe damage, and would not have a huge impact on the pvp balance blizz is looking for with this change.

Get it done Blizz!

Edit - in it's current state, I'm liking my hyperspeed accelerators tinker more and more!

With the changes to damage being done, I would most definately prioritize judgement over CS. Judgement is going to hit like a mack truck when you have 5 stacks of SoV on a target. Putting Judgement off for anything (like not speccing into it) would be a serious drop in DPS.

You can't even make the argument anymore that CS is consistently better damage because of the seal proc because Judgement is also proccing the seal.

If something should have to 'wait' a bit on the CD, it should be CS.

Now; this is only once you get your 5 stacks up on a target. I am not sure if we should alter our rotation at all for the first few seconds of being on a boss; but I would -think- that opening with judgement would mean your next judgement would be right around the time that you get your 5th stack.

Another interesting idea is to base DS's damage on your current target's Holy Vengeance stack without applying any additional sacks. This is how I was expecting DS to function after Blizzard announced the removal of SoB. Oh well, one DPS boost at a time

On the topic of spell priority, I agree that Judgements should be #1. A Judgement crit hits like a truck on the PTR.

I thought of a few questions and after reading through this thread, I don't think I saw any of them answered. I have a feeling that in a situation where you have a ret and a prot pally in the same raid, it may be beneficial for increases in Ret DPS.

1. Currently, Prot will still use SoV as their main seal, given the fact that it still provides the most threat, the awesome glyph to give them 10 more expertise, as well as being able to apply to multiple mobs using HotR. But, has anyone seen if this will end up clashing with Ret using the same seal? I was under the impression that there cannot be more than 1 stack of Holy Vengeance on the mob at one time. So will Prot override Ret and our DPS will suffer? Or will Ret override Prot and the tank suffers with threat? On a sidenote, if the stack counts for both Prot and Ret, and you have two pallies applying it, will it stack faster and therefore even reduce our ramp up time more, giving SoV more viability?

2. With the changes to JoL, it seems that this will be the Seal of choice for Ret. How do you convince your tank to use JoW instead?

3. For anyone on the PTR that might be able to test this.... if you apply a full stack of HV to one mob in an AoE group, then use DS... will the Seal proc on the 3 additional mobs as well, or will it only proc on the mob that has the full stack?


Also, just as an aside, I think they could easily make SoComm more viable in PvP if they simply reduced the damage on it and folded Seal of Justice into it, giving it a chance to do a 2 second stun on each hit.