The standard 3 glyphs for ret paladins are:

SoV
Judgement
Consecration

If you have massive expertise on all your best gear like I do, you can swap to:

Exorcism
Judgement
Consecration

All other dps oriented glyphs are simply inferior to these 4.

However, I think it is worthwhile putting forth one more glyph for consideration: [Glyph of Divine Storm]. I have personally ignored this glyph for all of wrath so far, but yesterday I sat down to do some math on exactly how it works and what benefit it could bring to the raid. Here is all that I found:

The heal from DS is a smart heal. It targets the lowest health raid member and heals them for as much as it can. It will heal only exactly their health total and then spill over up to two times. In a raid situation that heal should be used 99%+ of the time since it only doesn't do anything if the raid has full health on all raid members. The range of the heal is over 40 yards, though I didn't exhaustively test the maximum range.

On my spreadsheet given a dps of 487 on DS itself this glyph would supply 487 * .15 * 1.05(Divinity) = 76.7 healing /sec. Because this healing is smart healing on the lowest health raid member it will not suffer from overheal unless the raid is all at full. However, Divinity does cause 5% overheal if there is more healing than the lowest health person requires.

The Exorcism glyph (the worst of the dps glyphs) is worth 50 dps. This figure is taken from my latest Ignis WWS parse. So I have the choice between adding 77 hps or 50 dps.

I took a look at some healing parses and have found that healers typically log something like 3000 hps on fairly easy content and probably cap out at around 5000 hps. I think assuming 4k hps is a good benchmark. Given that dpsers are going to be doing 6k dps or so it is reasonable to model the Exorcism glyph at .8% increased dps. Exorcism is better against undead, so it seems entirely reasonable to model it as 1% increased dps given the composition of Coliseum and Icecrown. 77 hps is extremely close to 2% of 4k hps, so it is reasonable to model this as increasing raid healing by 2% of a healer.

Now, of course the job of a ret paladin is to dps. That said, if you could make this tradeoff of 1% dps for 2% healing over and over you would eventually end up at 0 dps and doing healing equivalent to 2 full healers. Clearly 1 person delivering 8k healing/sec effective healing is absolutely incredible. We aren't able to make that transition, but we ARE able to make 1% of it.

Now, some people like to argue that the job of a dpser is to dps and that if your healers can't handle it, replace them. I don't feel that that argument is a strong one however because by that logic your healers don't need to take 2% more healing talent points because they should be able to handle it without that help! Every little addition to raid survivability prevents people dying and makes it easier to drop a healer and add another full dps.

Clearly I am in the camp of people who think that a ret paladin needs to use all their utility when necessary. I do find that when I try to pay attention to debuffs, aggro, etc. on the whole raid to maximize usage of BOP, Cleanse, etc. my dps goes down both because of lack of GCDs and lack of focus. You will achieve higher dps numbers when you purely tunnelvision and focus only on your own survivability and cooldowns, so those types of utility have a cost. One big benefit of this glyph is that it requires no focus, no thought and no time. It is simply a passive ability that intelligently assists your healers without babysitting.

Note I am not advocating Glyph of Divine Storm as the be all and end all of glyphs. I do think though that in many situations your third dps glyph is quite lackluster and adding Glyph of Divine storm in its place is a greater net benefit to the raid.

One final consideration is that these numbers above assume a single target fight. In any situation where your DS is hitting multiple targets the contribution of your Glyph would be substantially higher, probably capping out at around 250 hps due to the fact that all 4 targets will certainly not be fully debuffed. On a fairly healing intensive fight like Freya + 3 for example this would be a really noticeable benefit in several phases. Even on the Conservator phase the splash damage on Freya is going to provide useful healing if not useful dps.

I hate to be "that guy", but frankly I disagree entirely. Especially on forums known for min-maxing theorycraft. I understand all sorts of people frequent these boards, but being one of those in a competitive guild, posts like this don't really help further ret knowledge. I understand that each guild is different, and sometimes talent/glyph sacrifices are necessary to fill gaps; however, thats a call for each paladin to make INDIVIDUALLY. The way these forums have worked (for other classes as well) is that you do everything in your power to perform YOUR raid job to the best of your ability, not someone elses (DKs with razorice being the exception rather than the rule).

It IS your job to DPS as a retribution paladin. There is no question there. Sure, you bring some utility... the occasional HoP or HoF, a HANDFUL of cleansing, especially on yourself (for the purpose of maximizing the DPS of you and other melee, or keeping people alive). Most of our utility, however, comes directly from DPSing (Vindication, HotC, haste, damage, judgements). Now I understand we are comparing very small figures here, 50 dps to 75 hps. However, there ARE dps checks in this game where that difference could actually lead to a wipe (especially if everyone's doing it). Yes, these exist mostly in hard modes, and the first one or two times you do said hardmodes. However, those first kills are PROGRESSION... the entire purpose of theory here to further that.

I will always be an advocate of "DPS first". Do I use AoW to heal myself to save a death, freedom a tank to let them keep threat, or BOP someone who pulled aggro? Sure. But I don't excessively cleanse or heal (unless I have to, such as yogg0 phase 2 portals), and I push every point of DPS I can. I talent and glyph purely for DPS, and I always will.

My point? Posts like this, shaving off DPS for minimal utility that absolutely must be covered by the healers in any competitive guild, simply frustrate me. They have no place, IMO, on these forums. Please don't take this as an insult in anyway towards you, Redcape; you are a VERY important contributor to these boards, and have done so much for the ret community. However, these boards are and always will be about maximizing performance in raids, and your suggestion, more often than not, will just lead to more overheal (not from you, but from healers). Also, the lowest hp person in the raid is very rarely the person who needs the healing the most. There can be plenty of people low on HP, but 99% of the time, that heal would have been better served on the tank anyway.

/rant

I'm not sure that glyphing for divine storm is really going to reduce the mental or physical workload on the healers. If someone is down a "critical" amount of health, say 50%, then a healer is going to hit them with a heal regardless, thus if your DS hits, it's just going to cause more overheal. I think the times when a healer would hold off healing someone and rely on passive healing (DS, JoL, LotP, HL glyph splashes) to bring them up if someone is in danger is very rare, and even then, those passive heals aren't likely to bring someone back from the brink.

I think the theoretical numbers are bang on, but in the real world with real people making healing decisions, it's going to result in more overheal, and provide less mental and physical workload reduction than you might think on most boss fights. On fights like Hodir with constant small active AoE raid damage, it would definitely be of use in reducing healer workload to a point, but eventually raid members will be low enough to need real heals. For your standard Jaraxxus type fight, with less people taking larger amounts of damage, it won't have a big reduction in workload.

Suppose a guild was working on a given hardmode, and after several failed attempts it was clear that they had more than enough dps to beat whatever timer was involved, but the healers were having trouble keeping the raid alive. One standard response to this is to drop one dps'er and add a healer to the raid. I don't think anyone would call that an invalid move.

So what's the difference between that and what Redcape suggests aside from the magnitude of the effect? Switching a dps glyph for the DS glyph is trading dps for healing, just on a finer scale, isn't it? Assuming you bring along stacks of various glyphs so that you can switch back and forth as necessary, I don't see the problem.

EDIT:
Indeed, we're not even talking about DS-or-not-DS here, we're talking about a small DS vs a somewhat bigger DS. So DS will hit the same people regardless, it'll just be larger if the glyph is present. You're 100% correct about that.

I think the utility is more in helping to keep people (slightly) more topped off, and thus (slightly) less likely to require emergency intervention in the future. Obviously this glyph won't make a magical difference in the survivability of your raid, but I think it's reasonable to expect it to have a minor effect around the edges (i.e., on par with the ~50dps you're giving up.)

I have had DS save other players on Freya and XT hardmodes (each were 10 man attempts) on at least one occasion each. Anytime this heal saves another player clearly it contributes to the raid a huge amount.

Now this is the exception in my view though, not the rule. The reason I say that is that DS heals have one very serious weekness; generally it is impossible to time them for maximum effect without a substantial loss of dps.

Sure, on XT tantrums I know that a few seconds in some mages (or insert your low hp class here) are going to be really low on health. I can try to change my attack order around so that if I am sitting on multiple clashes currently, I can hit DS approximately when I know my healers are most likely to be behind and have a chance at saving somebody. This would be helped somewhat if I had this glyph equiped since my heal would improve. But, for me this is an abnormal circumstance. Normally, I just hit DS when it is off cooldown, and much of the time there isn't a cooldown clash happening, so I don't have the option to use a different ability without losing dps from additional gaps in FCFS.

I guess my analysis weighs the following question: how often would the addtional healing provided by this glyph save a player that would have died had a different glyph been equipped. I don't think this is something that could ever be effectively modeled, but my intuition says that it would be a very rare (perhaps never) circumstance that this situation would arrise. If that is the case, is a voluntary loss of dps worth this slim chance?

A fairly large difference, actually. You're putting in someone who's ROLE it is to heal, rather than trying to fit a square peg into round hole. Not to mention a healer's HPS output far exceeds that of the paltry DS heal.

Furthermore, I just realized something. The situations in which you WOULDN'T use GoSoV is rare... and which point this entire arguement is pointless because then you'd be taking a massive DPS hit from dropping any one of your glyphs for it.

While in top 100 guilds like Zurm I am sure his group's healers are on the ball at topping everyone off, people that came to this boards are also in much lower ranked guilds that may need to help out their healers (which is partly why I have DiSac in my build).

If Redcap dropped Exo for Divine Storm I'd respec that.

I think something we're glossing over is Divine Storm's cooldown of ten seconds.

Divine Storm Glyph is useful IF you have someone needing healing AND IF the extra 15% makes a difference AND IF both previous conjoin when your cooldown is available. There is no doubt that holding your Divine Storm to try to heal at an effective time is an untenable loss of DPS.

The chance of someone needing the heal at the same time you're randomly providing it is extremely low. Gaining added heal on something that rarely will hit when necessary is fairly moot.

It's the same reasoning why Holy Paladin gem for Int, Crit, Haste, or MP5 - not spellpower. Holy Light overheals a significant portion of the time, increasing its healing potential for the tiny fraction where it may possibly prevent a death is not nearly as important as the longevity or reaction (haste) concerns.

I can see a few occasions for it helping, but if you have the expertise to not need the SoV glyph, your gear implies your raid has healers that don't need that little bit of help. That said, I know my tank's JoL already contributes a fair amount of passive healing that helps us cut to 2 healer for most of the 10 man encounters, and it's usually the overheal leader by an impressive margin.

I suspect that most of the gained healing from this will probably go the same route. Maybe try it out for a fight or two and compare the logs to see how much actual healing it provides on something like Freya+3? I like the concept and I'll do it if it's actually 50 dps for 77 hps just to make my healers happier on Faction Champs or Hodir or XT or IC Hard where there's a big raid damage component and I can try to keep people topped off.

I also feel like ret pallies are not faceroll balls to the wall dps like Zurm says. I like Ret pallies because of their utility to cleanse and buff. Otherwise we'd bring a Rogue or Fury Warrior. If you ignore one of your abilities cause it doesn't do dps you aren't playing your class to it's full potential. Cat druids doing a BR then popping into bear form to taunt and buying a tank a few secs to get in the fight is not mere dps, but I'm sure we've all had a wipe saved by it once or twice. If a ret had a talent that said raid healers do 1% more healing and you do 1% less dps, some would consider it and I think the question is a valid one even if it turns out to not be worth it.

Just taking a birds-eye view of this topic itself I think people may be mis-interpreting this conversation.

Redcape provided an argument showing how loss of dps for gain in hps (even if your role is dps) makes Glyph of Divine Storm useful. Probably only in the case of dropping excorcism, he didn't mention Seal of Vengeance in his comparison at least.

Zurm also wasn't saying Retribution is a 'balls to the wall dps' but that these forums when discussing retribution are focused mainly on increasing our personal dps in a raid situation. I think he knows and is well aware of the utility we bring but thinks discussion on these forums should stay focused.

We should try just take the facts of this conversation and understand both arguments.

There are a couple important points here. More than anything I think the idea that a dpser must only worry about their dps is faulty. You speak about pushing content as if that justifies dropping any amount of healing for more dps, but clearly you bring healers to progression raids. Therefore your guild believes that dropping dps for healing is necessary. Given that, the question is not "Is healing worth anything" because all guilds demonstrate that it is by bringing healers! The question is "How much healing do we need?" and that is a fine line on progression raids. Every guild strips every healer out that they can to maximize the dps pressure for progression, and adding more healing to the raid as a whole assists that.

Ask yourself this: How many progression attempts have you lost because the boss ended the fight after killing the last person and was at 5k health? You *might* be able to recall that happening once, ever. 50 dps over 4 minutes of boss burning is 12k damage. Then ask yourself again how many times during a progression attempt a dpser died partway through because the AOE was just a tiny bit more than the healers could handle? I bet the answer is pretty damn often. Now obviously DS isn't going to save every life, but will it save a dpser as often as a boss will survive with 5k health left?

Another incredibly potent point is JoL. Ret Paladins had a guaranteed raid spot in any raid until JoL got nerfed. That was healing from a dpser, in the same style as DS. You didn't have to think about it or do anything, you just healed the raid. After looking at parses you can clearly see how powerful that effect was and how valuable guilds found it. We all place a value on healing regardless of who delivers it, the important thing to look at is the *size* of the heal relative to the other damage incoming.

This is an oversimplification. If someone is down a lot of health healers don't get to choose the spell that magically heals them for exactly their missing hp total. They get hit with heals, and the extra health they have from DS will sometimes be hugely impactful (if it keeps them alive), sometimes useful (allowing a paladin to flash instead of HL) and sometimes be irrelevant (paladin crits a HL and massively overheals anyway). That said, DS will definitely save lives every so often and will very regularly save healers mana/time/focus.

I don't see how that is. Every time a random raid member gets really low the healers have to panic and get them up to a safe hp level again ASAP. Random heals popping on the raid assist with that. Remember too, if the DS heal isn't needed on the raid it will likely pop on the tank, which is obviously useful.

I can't imagine why you would try to time the DS to coincide with healing needed. Just hit it on cooldown and watch it go. If you happen to be good enough that you can change your priority sequence during a really bad damage period and save people, that is a bonus, but I would never suggest screwing up your rotation just to try to get that DS heal into the right spot. The biggest advantage of this heal is that you don't have to think about it or plan for it. Again though, you are comparing dps loss as if that is necessarily impactful, which is false. Unless the loss of 50 dps causes your raid to wipe, it is not changing your situation. The chance that 50 dps or 77 hps actually makes the difference between victory and defeat is low, but my contention is that 77 hps helps your raid *more* than 50 dps.

I will address the second point first. Many people have so much expertise that the GoSoV simply isn't all that. If it is only giving you a few points of expertise then you should probably use Exorcism instead anyway. If you do happen to be able to make use of the entire amount of GoSoV then you would probably want to keep your glyphs as full dps. I don't advocate Divine Storm in the face of all comers, but rather as a replacement for our rather lackluster Exorcism glyph. In my particular case I am over the expertise cap without even using GoSoV simply because so much gear has so much expertise. Downgrading to lower ilvl gear to get rid of expertise simply isn't profitable.

I can't imagine why what role you are assigned to matters one bit. If you accept that losing 2% of a healer to gain 1% of a dpser is a good trade, you should tell your holy priests to smite down because it will make the raid better! They will do zero healing and half the dps of a real dpser. Clearly that is a wretched trade, so as a whole your guild does not believe that the conversion you advocate is rational.

Why is healing coming from a person labelled 'dps' inferior to the SAME amount of healing coming from a person labelled 'healer'?

Remember, more than anything, this isn't about a purity contest between healing and dps. It is about looking at the relative value of a specific amount of healing and a specific amount of dps, and in the case of progression raiding your healers and your dpsers are both going to be stretched to the breaking point doing their jobs. Adding more healing or more dps to the raid is useful, and in this case you are making a positive tradeoff. In any challenging encounter people die sometimes and preventing that situation is of value, regardless of your spec or raid role.

Edit: Slight number change - 9600 -> 12000

Your question here is based on two faulty assumptions. Your first assumption is that the fight has no mechanic where one or more bosses gain HP, and where the boss has no raid obliteration ability. The DPS in my guild is our strongest group; we all tend to place very highly on WMO's rankings and always get good parses for our class. That being said, it wasn't uncommon for us to wipe on Algalon or Iron-Council hard mode with the last boss at 500k hp or less. Does 50 dps from one person matter that much? Probably not. But if everyone let themselves slack 50-100 dps those attempts, they could have been wins (especially since algalon ends the fight early).

Your second assumption is that the entire encounter's DPS check is based around one (or a small number) of very high-hp mobs. Anyone who's attempted Yogg (especially 1k or 0k pre-nerf) can tell you that one person slacking on tentacles in the portals can lead to a wipe due to an extra crusher spawn. Are you telling me 20% extra damage on an ability with a high burst factor does not outweigh a measily 15% extra healing on a weak heal to begin with in this situation?

And no, I've never experienced a situation where the AoE was just a "tiny" bit more than the healers can handle. When you have the strat wrong, its obvious. When you get the strat right, it's a joke. Also important, however, is composition. If you aren't running with the ideal classes of healers, then yes, you may experience problems I have not. Again though, I point to min-maxing. To those who counter "but so many people here aren't in a Top 100 guild" or whatever, you are forgetting why they came here in the first place. Sure, some want hand-holding, but these boards are here to spread knowledge and fact about a class... opinions based on unproveable notions like "it COULD help a healer if the stars align and you wear no pants and you eat a bowl of crushed garlic 3 days before" don't help as much as knowing you can do X more DPS.

I suppose we have differing viewpoints here. It's my opinion that at any given struggle with a raid encounter, there are only two possible options: the strat is wrong, or one or more people failed at their raid role. There are, and will always be fights which fall into a gray area for hybrids. My point is that while its ok to enter that gray area, its not ok to cross it. Lets look at the new faction champions fight. This past week, I hardly had to dispell or use defensive cooldowns. Notice I said I didn't have to, not that I simply didn't. Why? Because people were doing their job. CC kept mobs under control, and healers, who have the mana and haste to support it, did dispells and kept people alive. As a result, I was able to have the second highest damage, even with severely nerfed AoE damage.

And that's my point. Some of you feel it's appropriate to put a bandaid over the real problem and gimp yourself in the process. I don't. We can agree to disagree on that point.

From the sound of it, you seem to believe that I think healing is pointless. The power behind JoL wasn't the fact that it healed, but the fact that it healed WITHOUT INCURING A DPS LOSS. And JoL wasn't just powerful, it was grossly TOO powerful. If suddenly ret began to shit out 50k holy lights for 200 mana, you can bet I would be healing my ass off; you can also bet an actual healer would lose a spot and another pure DPS would come in.

From the standpoint of a top 100 guild, I'd probably side with zurm on this one, in that 50 dps from a single dps spec is probably worth more than 77 hps that you have no control over. In theory 77 hps saves your healers maybe 1% of their total mana over a fight? It definitely cannot replace a healer or even save anyone in the raid in this day and age, where healers are capable of 5000+ hps and where raid damage can hit everyone for equally high amounts. That I can remember (per your example situation above) there were exactly 2 times in wrath raiding where I've died from raid damage that had less than 200 overkill - one was unavoidable and the entire raid was wiping anyways, and the other was my own damn fault for standing in fire.

From a purely logical standpoint: SoV glyph allows me to drop my weakest pieces (which I relied on for exp cap) such as the badge bracers or uld trash ring. In my experience you will never 'downgrade' to a piece with no expertise, because the expertise gear was weak to begin with - Ilvl also has little bearing on my definition of weak. Expertise is often traded out for pieces with haste or crit or more STR (like the badge bracers vs hodir10 bracers) - they are our "inferior/extra stats", but they do provide a boost. Think of it this way; if a glyph provided almost half of our hitcap requirements, would it be silly to equip it and drop hit pieces?

Exo glyph is worth 50 dps, so it's worth roughly 2-3 red gem slots. If you find yourself frequently low on HP, aside from getting better healers, you could simply use 2 purple gems in blue slots, gaining 300hp and losing less dps than a glyph tradeoff. Divinity also provides about as much extra healing (75 hps or so), so why lose a glyph slot when you could gem or talent for better effects?

Just as an aside red, don't take any of this the wrong way. I'd love to actually have to choose between glyphs and make thoughtful choices, but 15% more healing on a skill that randomly heals people for very little sounds pretty bad. For perspective, a single FoL heals for more than DS does and can crit; a shadowpriest in your group heals for much more than DS does, and an actual group heal like CoH blows DS away. If there is appreciable raid damage going around, it is your healers' job's to be ready with their respective group heal skills. If they are not healing the raid damage, what exactly are they doing? Healing coming from dps specs such as ret or spriests is just a bonus, and will never ever match the reactive healing from dedicated healers. I think that is why our healing capabilities are viewed as inferior red; partly because they simply are, and partly because it's all just gravy, much like our AoE capabilities in 3.1.

Personally, I feel that our job here at EJ is to maximize our overall performance in every situation, even situations that require us to use Divine Sacrifice, FoL, or perhaps even use this glyph if need be. All Redcape is doing is informing people of the option, and letting them make the individual choice, instead of telling them that "this should never be done".

Now we know the exact effect of the Glyph, and can make the choice between Exo and DS glyph with more knowledge at hand than we previously had. This is never a bad thing. We're not here to give people a text book answer on how to play Retribution - there are too many different guilds, different playstyles and different settings for that. We're here to inform everyone of how our class works, and how to maximize its performance in any and all raiding situations.

Allow me to make an analogy. From my viewpoint, all of you arguing about our healing and utility make about as much sense to me as a tank or healer trying to maximize their DPS. Is it nice and potentially helpful? Sure, but NEVER at the cost of your primary role. To any degree. This is seriously like the holy paladins making a thread to discuss how to maximize their judgement damage.

Not that I disagree, but I wouldn't go so far as to use downstairs Yogg as an example for your point of continually pushing DPS at the expense of all else. It is one of the few places where 'gimping' your personal DPS via AoW FoL's and Cleanses is far and away preferable to letting a Hunter too stupid to turn away from the skulls die.

Minor sidenote, but if you're throwing AoW heals, you're not throwing Exorcism. In that particular situation (Yogg downstairs, 1k or 0k), you actually would gain more from the Glyph of DS than you would Glyph of Exo, since you're not using Exo very much and your DS is likely healing the others downstairs fairly periodically.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting re-glyphing for Yogg, as I side with the "DPS'ers should max their DPS and the healers need to step it up" camp on this issue.

But remember that (unless you're running between mobs) AoW FoL is always a DPS loss (and if you're running between mobs your DPS is zero so it doesn't matter). You're always pushing the effective cooldown of some other DPs ability longer to toss that heal. It's the same thing with any of our utility spells - from Salvation to Divine Sacrifice to Cleanse - if you're using a GCD and whatever you're casting doesn't miraculously line up with one of the two free GCD's per minute we get to play with you are flat out losing DPS.

It's a gray area. There are times when it is acceptable, even preferable, to cut your DPS for some outside benefit. The downstairs in Yogg happens to be a good example of this in my experience. It is why I don't like the whole "you job is to do DPS and only DPS" rhetoric that this thread seems to be attracting. Our primary job is to do as much DPS as possible, but it doesn't mean completely ignoring everything else.

For the record though, while the Divine Storm glyph sounds interesting, I don't feel that it's worth the tradeoff.

Really the issue is the magnitude of the effect. Imagine for instance that we no longer had Judgement of Light. Instead we had Judgement (which did damage), and a Glyph of Judgement of Light (that gave the current JoL effect). I would guarantee that Ret paladins would use the JoL glyph as their third glyph.

Divine Storm does a very small amount of healing, at a 10 seconds minimum interval. That's not consistent enough to help anyone.

Here's my counterpoint: Ret paladins already have a way to modulate their damage down to increase healing done. This is through FoL on AoW procs. It's even "smarter" than Divine Storm because you choose who to cast it on. If you want to modulate healing up, you can use every AoW proc when Exorcism is on cooldown to heal.

If you use every AoW proc and still feel that you need more healing, then you can take the DS glyph. If you don't need to use every AoW proc to Flash of Light, then you don't need the DS glyph (because the ultility of the DS glyph can be pretty much replicated by casting an AoW FoL).

Since no reasonable paladin is using every AoW proc for FoL, I then see no reason to take the DS glyph. As if you absolutely NEED that emergency healing, you have that option through FoL, and it will be more reliably available than trying to use DS.

Due to the nerf to Illumination, that wouldn't be such a bad thread. Judgement only returns mana (with SoW up) if it hits. While you get 4% hit as Holy, hit does give some mana regen over time.

Anyway, due to the change to CS, it is rare to have a free GCD to throw a FoL. Assuming you throw a FoL to heal a low HP player to maybe save them and Exo is next on the priority you may hit Exo and miss an autoattack (this has happened to me a few times).

Since Redcape said the DS heal is "smart" in that the first heal goes to the lowest HP target (the only two heals are random), that increases the value of glyph of DS to me. I didn't know that DS acted that way, but Redcape is a very knowledgeable pally.

Also, looking at Redcape's armory, it looks like he raids 10-mans primarily. A situation where you are healing 3 targets out of 10 (30% of the raid) with 2 healers in the group seems a lot more valuable than where you are healing 3 targets out of 25 (8.3% of the raid) with 5-6 healers.

Ah, I simply can never resist the great utility v. dps debate. This always seems to be touchy & I fail to see why people get so heated up about it, but I'd just like to make a few points.

In the case described here we're talking about ~50 dps v. ~75hps. In addition, the 50 dps loss we're incurring is in the form of 20% of one of our highest damage per cast abilities. Over the course of an entire raid, I'd have to say the effects of either glyph are for the most part irrelevant. The real discussion here is the situational benefits of each. Glyph of DS has the potential (albeit low potential) to buy healers a little time to top the raid off. This would most likely have its greatest effect in a fight like Mimiron where there is a lot of damage going out & a 1500 heal on the lowest raid member can mean a lot, even if it is only every 10 seconds or so. The glyph of exorcism favors dps races & situations where a large crit can really make a difference.

Zurm is exactly right about the gray area between using your utility & not doing your primary job. This argument & the points on both sides help define this gray area & throws a little math at what utility we can add to a raid & how much dps it costs. I'm sure sacrificing 200 dps for 1000 hps is a trade most of us would make, so there's probably a point somewhere at which the dps loss would be offset by a utility gain & I think it's important to at least take a look at the gain & loss due to changing something like these glyphs. Nonetheless, choices like this should be made according to your own specific situation. If you see your raid a little slow on topping people off, maybe this is for you. If you're already running into enrage timers, maybe you should stick to exorcism.

In this case I personally don't think the gain is great enough to warrant the change, but I'm happy that high end ret pallies are at least looking at the possibilities & taking the time to explore all options.