If it is every melee attack we have, then that'd be Judge, CS, DS, white swings, and seal procs. The DoT from Vengeance/Corruption will most likely not be allowed to do it. That adds up to more than 1.5 seconds for every melee attack.

Let's say we have a 3.0 weapon swing (raid buffed) and a latency of 150ms. Weapon swing and seal proc make that two times in 3s, so already at 1.5 only accounting for weapon and seal. Our effective GCD would be 1.65 for melee abilities, or 1.8 abilities used in 3 seconds. Adding them together would result in 3.3 procs in 3 seconds, reduced to 1.1 procs per second. Going to ten seconds means an average 11 procs, so we actually get 36% chance for it to proc in ten seconds. (1- (.96^11)) This might get stronger when using Command if all its hits can proc the bonus.

It's very RNG, but if DS came down to an effective 5.8 CD or faster, then it beats out CS DPS. Given that, perhaps it's safe to assume that using the proc only when it's usable within 5ish seconds of the previous DS would be better DPS?

1. I can still holy wrath if needed but usually it is already taken care of.
2. Everybody is forced to do as much dps on this fight as possible, especially on adds. I don't know where you get the idea that you don't dps the adds in part 3 but it is essential to kill them before the others spawn or it can lead to a wipe. I'm speaking strictly 25 man here, as 10 man is a joke.

The T10 4-piece really needs to reset the CD on judgement, reseting the CD on our 3rd best button to push with the current situation of near GCD lock will not be much a DPS upgrade in most cases. I would not be surprised at all if after the numbers are crunched our BiS ends up being 2 piece T9 (258), 2 Piece T10 considering T10's two piece will increase the damage received from T9 2 piece.

Definitely going to have to wait to see what % goes live, just don't forget when T9 was released everyone assumed the terrible 4-piece was just a placeholder, then it went live.

All this speculation is currently useless. People are only looking at the set bonus, but are forgeting the ilvl improvement on the items themselves. Until we get the stats for T10 we can't say anything relevant about BiS.

It is lackbuster, but 4T9.258 is still BiS due to ilvl difference.

I made a longer post about this in the Holy thread, but to summarise: to a Ret Paladin in 3.3, DiSac is not a raid save for 30% every five minutes. It's a tank save for 50k every two minutes.

EDIT: Regarding the 4pc T10 bonus - would I be right in saying that when you strike multiple targets, this bonus rolls to proc for each strike of Divine Storm and not just once for the whole ability? If so, then when you're hitting three mobs with SoCom up you have roughly a 22% chance to reset the CD on DS every time you use it.

4P t10 could be eventually of use in long and heavy AoE situations.

The T9 4 piece is only BiS for BE's last I checked, and I am not sure how many times you have killed Anub, but the time it will take to get 4piece 258 is pretty much absurd, to get an entire raid in full 258 T9 it will take nearly half a year, getting mad skill or better every time. Realistically 4 piece 258 isn't obtainable (and remember, the offset pieces you use are also 258, the ilvl difference isn't what makes 4 piece slightly better than offset for BE's).

That said, of course the stat upgrades are nice and could out weigh the currently terrible 4 piece T10. However, our 2 piece T9 is so far ahead of any 2-piece we have had the choice was always easy before, now that we have an incredible set bonus that will likely provide 300+ dps in some Icecrown gear it will be much more difficult to make up that damage through new stats alone. I may be going out on a limb here (it is still very early) but if this set bonus goes live as it is I simply cannot see 4-piece T10 being the way to gear, at least not until the hard mode loot is available, and even then I bet it works out to be pretty close.

Still early, but it is best to get to work on these things as quickly as we can, if it turns out 2 pieces of 258 T9 will stay BiS till very late in ICC that knowledge would be extremely relavent to our gearing decisions in ToC (like taking 258 over someone who will likely replace it early in ICC).



In order to get the average DS CD down to ~5.8 we would need to see a proc approximately every 13.85 seconds, which works out to about 4.3 procs per minute, or ~26 procs over a 6minute fight (I like 6 minutes as a nice round fight number). In order to see that many procs per minute we would need ~107.5 attacks per minute(an unreachable number), so this set bonus will not bring DS up to the level of CS in terms of DPS, and remember every time you hit DS instead of cons or exo (the only buttons you would hit it instead of) you lose the damage from those abilities to gain the slightly higher damage of DS, now looking through some parses I notice that in a single target fight my consecrate and DS are nearly identical in DPS (in fact consecrate is a higher DPS ability for me more often the DS is, which is odd since I prioritize DS) so really hitting DS over cons is pretty much a wash, making it so you will really only gain damage when you get a 4piece proc and can use DS instead of exo, the rest of the time the proc will be wasted since every other button you could push would result in higher dps. Perhaps my reasoning is off, if it is I would love to hear where people think I am going wrong, but if my reasoning (and my little math) is correct, this set bonus is going to end up being absolutely terrible when it comes to DPS gains.

I can see 2 piece (ilvl 258) T9 set bonus lasting long enough till we her IC hard modes. If I remember right, loot in normal 10 man is going to be ilvl 251, heroic 10man and normal 25 is going to be ilvl264 and hard mode 25 man is going to be ilvl 272.

I just cant see the ilvl 258 t9 2 piece pieces bonus being that good to overcome the stats difference compared to 2 items of ilvl 272, specially considering Blizz said they were saving the best itemisation for IC.

But yeah, our 4 piece bonus for T10 seems to be pretty bad, at least at 4% proc rate. We need to test it out and see what exactly makes it proc and how often it procs, on average, say, over a minute. If it procs enough times to decrease the effective cd of DS by 30% or 40%, then its possible DS would be much more valuable to the point we hit it whenever its up. That said, mana might be an issue as using DS more often means we use less CS and possibly less judgements too (depending on the new priority).

If the proc is any good, haste gear will probably become a little more valuable and SoR will probably become a lot stronger, at least for aoe.

Umm, judging from the numbers I get regularly now, I predict that 2x ilvl258 T9 + 2x T10 will really outweigh the T10 4x setbonus DPSwise, but perhaps it's getting implemented with another idea, maybe to improve the healing it does to the melee on heavy AoEing, although in my eyes it seems a bit insignificant.

The 2xT9 bonus is probably the best we've had so far, resulted in an insane damage increase with me and considering that Seal of Corruption is usually top2 on damage dealing abilities, buffing its damage is godlike. Possibly there will be encounters where you won't be able to keep up your stacks 100% of the time, so it might be useful there. We'll see as more information leaks out.

You have to keep in mind that a lot of those numbers are placeholders, and we still don't know whether or not "melee attack" means just white attacks or some comination of strikes/judgement.

And the main draw to the 2pc T9 bonus isn't that it's just amazing... that actually depends greatly on your gear. The power of 2pc T9 is how insanely it scales, especially with crit which we now have a ton of. If you're wearing mostly naxx gear and just 2pc t9 from the 232 set, it's probably a fairly bad bonus. However, in high-end TotC gear, 2pc T9 is rediculous. In full IC gear, it will probably be upwards of 400 dps from the bonus, trumping any item upgrade from ilvl for those slots.

Imagine a situation where your next ability to use is DS and the proc happens, it's a waste. And there will be quite some situations where it will be a waste.
Looks like 2P T9 and 2P T10 will be the way to go, but the PTR is still here for a while and many changes could occur about our spec and eventually this 4P bonus.