I glyph for it because of the way we handle the interupt. Our warrior stuns with about 2 seconds left on the SS timer. I follow up and chain the stun to cover the duration. Before the new BigWigs came out, and before we had reliable timers, I didnt want to cut it close and not have my stun up. I could get away without glyphing for it, but its just more peace of mind than anything else.

It also is nice damage and mitigation for the one tank to be able to stun them every 15 seconds, off DR. It also is nice to stun the little adds during submerge to prevent high stacks of the debuff being on people going into the last phase.

I'm not sure, but sometimes the Shadow strike is not very consistent. I don't glyph for it but our other paladin who usually is prot uses it for his ret spec because he is primary on stopping shadow strikes. Also if you use DBM it is about 10 seconds off for phase 3 of Anub. I switched to Dues Vox Encounters just for this problem, even though I hear bigwigs does fine as well.

There initially was an add on mod for BigWigs that took care of the iffy shadow strike timers that were in the normal BigWigs. It was in the BB forums, but BigWigs has since come out with a new version that included new and accurate timers. I use the new BigWigs and can say the timers are dead on and finally got us Insanity this week.

Well, that's because the Seal-portion of the attack hits first. If it kills the mob you were judgeing, you'll probably won't get any mana return which can be quite fatal, especially when using Holy Wrath a lot. As you said before, it's best to just CS/DS a mob that is about to die, and keep your judgement for one, that isn't likely to be killed by it. HoW is also a bad idea sometimes when it comes to finishing these adds, because of the relatively high mana cost.

I might be misunderstanding, but its worth noting that the stuns from HW are no longer off-DR.

This change was hotfixed in a few weeks ago(don't remember the exact date) to prevent raids that were bringing in 4+ pallies glyphed for HW from being able to effectively remove the burrowers from 25 H Anub P3 with minimal effort.

But yes, for those who don't know it's worth remembering that the HW stun now shares DR with most (if not all) other player stuns.

This is what most guilds do that have one add tank. The haste buff they get makes SS a 1 second cast, and most rogues or warriors wont be able to "consistently" get the pummel/kick off in that time frame, mainly due to positioning and there main target being Anub.

Our prot warrior and myself chain 2 stuns over the duration that could be a Shadow Strike. If for some reason they decide to cast it right after the duration of the 2 stuns, Arcane Torrent also works, and has saved us quite a few times.

Ah, I see. Its kind of nice having a fight where the prot pally is arguably the premier cast interrupter instead of distant 3rd.

Out of curiousity, could you move the prot warrior out of the interrupt rotation entirely by throwing an AS when they'd shockwave, then HW, then use hammer/torrent to cover the off-cycle casts? Or is it more that between the HW and Shockwave you don't really have to be paying attention to their casts at all for most of the cycle since they're ALL stunned and interrupted, and then just watch it during the 15 seconds you're waiting for HW to come back?

(edit - nm, answered my own question. haven't gotten that far and hadn't realized their cast time drops all the way down to 1 sec by the end making individual interrupts problematic. plus, Glutton has some quick reflexes.)

AS hits three targets at best, one of which may be Anub'arak. It's not a reliable interrupt for Shadowstrike unless you happen to be using a two OT strategy.

Little off the Anub topic, but I have a quick question. I was wondering if anyone has crunched any numbers to see when is the optimal time to pop wings (and trink) on a typical tank 'n spank fight.

Right off the bat takes advantage of the greatness/beserking proc, but you lose out on corruption stacks. I can do it ~13 secs into the fight when it does stack, but greatness is gone by then. Or i could wait a full 45secs until greatness is back up with the corruption stacks, but, obviously lose out on wings/trink time for the fight.


Also, along those lines, I'm assuming its better to wait the 15 seconds until greatness comes off cooldown (45s x 3 procs) to pop wings/trink? Or is the added up down time to much to make it worth it?

Thanks

I think you'd have to define the fight length to get a concrete answer. Does waiting that extra few seconds each time push an extra Avenging Wrath off the table? Say the fight is five minutes in duration. You'd be able to AW at : time 25s (SoV five stack), time 145s, time 265s. Push the last AW to higher than time 280s and you'll lose out on a full duration AW opportunity.

Let's look the problem graphically (in the attached Excell file) in terms of maximizing the number of Greatness/Avenging Wrath overlaps in a five minute long tank and spank. From what I can tell you can maximize the number of AW uses and maximize the number of full Greatness/AW overlaps by:

1. Use your first Avenging Wrath at time 0.
2. Delay the use of the second and third Avenging Wrath until a Greatness proc occurs.

For this five minute fight you won't lose out on any possible AW up time or total number of uses, and your Greatness will have a full overlap with AW three times.

Different fight lengths however may yield a different answer, and of course very few fights are a true tank and spank. As a general rule every third Greatness proc (~135 seconds) has the possibility of having a full overlap with Avenging Wrath (every 120 seconds) if you delay the use of that AW by 15 seconds. Depending on the fight length this delay strategy may or may not cause you to lose out on a possible AW opportunity. In the case of a five minute fight you do not.

Yeah, think I'd have to agree with you there assuming a 5 min fight. However, if it's 5:45 or longer, I believe a fifth scenario (delay AW till the second greatness proc and match them up each time thereafter) would yield the best results. You get the same number of AWs and the first one isn't wasted with no corruption stacks.

To get around this, you could re-equip DMC:G just before the pull, effectively forcing the internal cooldown and allowing yourself enough time to build a 5-stack before trinket can proc again. Assuming a 2.6 speed weapon (and a 45 second cooldown on the trinket), it would be optimal to re-equip the trinket 32 seconds before engaging.

Bearing in mind it is also relevant when in the fight your raid group is using bloodlust. I often pop my wings at time 0 only to find that 30-35 seconds in the raidleaders will call for bloodlust. IS having DMC:G proc for the duration of AW better than saving AW for bloodlust (at which point you would probably use a haste pot as well)?

Yeah, there's a lot to take into account and each boss will different. However, ironically enough, the day after I started this little side thread, I just got myself a shiny new Dark Matter to replace my Wrathstone. So this might be more of a RAWR thread question, but I'll toss it out here first:

Dark Matter is supposed to be a 60 dps increase over Wrathstone, but if I'm popping my Wrathstone along with wings in conjunction with a greatness proc, would it net me an overall increase over the Dark Matter which i can't control the proc of?

And what are you basing this on ?

If you're just looking at RAWR, then you have to realise that rawr doesn't model 2Min 'on use' trinkets under the assumption that you will ALWAYS be popping them together with AW. And potentially a pot and heroism/bloodlust as well. This severely undervalues any 'on use' trinkets with a CD of 2Min (or less).

Under those conditions I still think Wrathstone > dark matter.



Also keep in mind that many fights have a need for "controlled burst" on several moments during the fights and that often so important last 20% of the kill. In any such fights a controllable damageboost is a lot better than a random damageboost even if overall said random damageboost would be better.

I'll be hanging on to my wrathstone and probably will still be using it on selective fights in IC as well, even if I do get the trinket upgrade(s) I'm after (I'm sure you can guess which ones I mean :p)

Only looking at RAWR or any spreadsheet is not a good idea, as they are merely tools to help- not rely on- in decision making when it comes to gear. Make no mistake, RAWR and many of the spreadsheets out there are usually extremely accurate, but like you said there are some things they can't be used to model.

As far as controlled burst fights, that would be what I meant when I said it falls down to individual judgement. If you need on-demand burst, on-use trinkets can provide that much better than proc trinkets, but on the same boat if you're merely trying to line up AW/trinket/pot/BL, you can often manage that with a proc trinket as well, you just need to be more careful. If, say, your raid pops BL/hero 2 minutes into a fight and your trinket hasn't just procced within the last 15-20 seconds, you can opt to delay AW and pots until it does proc (unless you're using something with a terrible procrate like mirror) so you still get the benefit of all at once. With on-use trinkets this is more controlled, but the fact remains you can still get some of the same benefit from proc trinkets, just not as often.

There are a couple fights were you can absolutely get more benefit from something like wrathstone vs dark matter, like breaking shields on twins 25H (BL/hero for the first, trinkets/pots/CDs for second, etc) or killing XT's heart (though this is less of a case now), but in general fights that benefit heavily from controlled burst like that aren't as common. This isn't to say that they aren't there and as such wrathstone is worthless, but I've found something like wrathstone to be of less value in my experience than a trinket like dark matter (though personally I don't like either). And of course, there's always RNG and random situational hijinks to take into account as well that can tip the scales either way (getting two same-color shields or vortexes in a row that are opposite your color, getting chain bombed on heartbreaker, etc).

In short, my statement was not made to claim that wrathstone doesn't have its merit, or that on-use trinkets in general can't be of value in different scenarios, but rather that in my personal experience I haven't found much use for them. This isn't to say that having it to fall back on for certain fights is a bad thing, because I like to claim the opposite: it's better to hold onto your gear- even from previous tiers- as you replace it because you never know if you may need to fall back on it based on fight mechanics or overall changes to your gear.

Even if you only do heroics, and solo daily quests, there's quite a decent amount of really good items you can get your hands on although some of it might be slow to get.

Running heroics you get Conquest emblems, and doing the daily, you can get an additional 2 Triumph emblems on top. Those triumph emblems can get you the very good 232 T9 items (granted, it'll take a while by only getting emblems from the daily). The conquest emblems also open up quite an extensive amount of loot options.

Then there's the colliseum dailies and the stuff you can buy from the faction vendors, and if you're championing all factions and are exalted, there's another vendor available.

Ant lets not forget some of the decent drops drop TotC 5man in both normal and heroic mode. There's usually quite a few farm groups for TotC 5Man normal since the trinkets are quite in demand, join one of these, run it a few times and you should already ba half decent geared.

Getting a decent amount of hit shouldn't be that hard to come by,
Precision enchant on gloves and icewalker on boots are easy ones and enchants that you can swap around as needed as you upgrade gear and your amount of hit fluctuates.
A single trinket like mark of supremacy (128 hit) for 'only' 50 emblems of triumph can already give you 4% hit
T9 232 shoulders (30 triumph) give 52 hit rating and are quite good as far as shoulders go.
If you do only heroics, you probably have plenty of stonekeeper shards (?), turn em in for WG marks of honor and for 40 of those you can get Titan-Forged legguards of triumph having 64 hit rating
Stuff like breastplate of the imperial joust 48 hit rating drops in TotC 5man.

It's quite easy to get especially if you look a bit further and also consider leather and mail items dropping in instances. While hit is a valuable stat, there usually isn't a need to gem or enchant for it even if you're a somewhat short of the hitcap, but yes, if you're VERY low on hit, it may be necessary to gem for it. Just use something like rawr and see what it suggests for gemming, and look on the various vendors what potential upgrades they offer.

I strongly disagree. By the same token, you could say it undervalues DM:G or Death's Verdict... as you SHOULD be lining up AW's to use with them. You shouldn't do this at the sake of casting fewer AW's, but if you're good and attentive with an ICD mod, you easily make the vast majority of your AW's land during those two proccing. This is just as much of a mark of a good ret pally as macroing on-use trinkets to AW.

Proc effects are a weakness of Rawr, true, but it affects all non-static buffs the same.

With 2pc T9, crit is EXTREMELY powerful. If you line up a DM proc with AW, you can lay a world of hurt into your target.

Death's Choice/Death's Verdict

Is it true you can stack the 2 Paragon buffs from the 245 and 258 trinkets? I always thought, since both trinkets share the same name and buff, they wouldnt stack, or at the very least, share the same icd. But ive heard today that they do indeed stack. If so, is that the case on PTR as well or is it geting nerfed/fixed? Has anybody here done any testing on this?

Yes it does stack. The answer has been given tons of time already.