DiamondTear

The funny thing is that the squares have the better tool. As a healer, I'd love to have a spell that heals the one that "needs" it the most and exactly the right amount.

It's easy to dismiss the idea of using the DS glyph because it would save people so rarely, but how often does 50 dps really matter?

I can see this being a very good trade at faction champions.

 

Elamahpla

In theory, this could be nice for guilds for players who are just starting HM in Uld. or for example, HM Mimiron or HM GV. The healing coupled with JoL/Divinity certainly would be NICE. but, as stated above me in prior posts, the loss of 50 DPS is very questionable.

I myself have used this on HMs before and it worked amazingly (As well as in 3s pre 3.2). But I certainly don't think that it would be viable in a hardcore raiding guild that focuses on HMs compared to the loss of 50 DPS.

 

Rasputin

Factions champions reduce Divine Storm damage by 75%, so it would sadly be of little to no use in one of the fights where it might actually be of some use.

 

Gormal

I could see it helping on Vezax HM if your guild is having more healing than dps troubles. Even the top guilds have nights where they run less than stellar comps due to absentees, so I guess there are times where it might be okay. My biggest problem with it is that I gear around the SoV glyph and don't want to keep a completely different set around so that 50dps loss doesn't turn into something greater just for one or two fights.

 

Shldnhearth

The fact that you would only be using this as a substitute for the Exorcism glyph makes the discussion moot for the overwhelming majority of Rets who use the SoV glyph anyway.

I'm all for raid utility (sometimes I feel like I'm too outspoken in favor of taking Divine Sacrifice) but in this instance I can't see the benefits of the trade-off.

 

• frmorrison

Assuming better gear (245 weapon), DS will heal for around 687 * 1.11 (Divinity + Tree Aura) * 15% glyph = 877 every 10 seconds or 87.7 hps or 76 hps without glyph.

With BiS (best gear in the game after hard modes) each glyph gives:
SoV = 142
Cons = 133
Judgement = 114
Exo = 42

I don't think I ever will use this glyph, but it is nice to see the added hps with normal DS as you gear up.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Redcape

Quite true. SoV Glyph is much higher dps if your gear setup makes it useful (which is does for most people I suspect). I would glyph for SoV instead of Divine Storm if that was a sensible choice given the gear I have. It isn't, and there are other people in that situation.

Of course we don't. We justify it based doing substantial dps coupled with excellent buffs and some very useful utility, which is the same as any other class. This isn't about begging your raid leader to let you play, it is about maximizing the contribution you can make to the success of the raid overall.

Minmaxing is not about you having the highest dps number on recount. It is about giving your raid the maximum chance possible to defeat the encounter given the tools you have. The essence of minmaxing is looking at every available option (even ones with very small effects) and considering their merits, regardless of what your raid role is named.

I would like to point out that EVERY top guild was extremely happy to take dpsers with terrible dps along to sunwell if they had high utility. In particular, consider shadow priests! They basically brought direct healing as well as indirect healing (mana showered onto the healers) and their dps was never competitive once you got to full t6 gearing. The fact is that smart raid leaders and guilds will gladly scoop up dpsers with substandard damage but amazing passive healing capabilities. At the moment there is no spec that does that since the JoL nerf, but the basic point that dps being sacrificed for healing is not new, crazy or the province of scrubs. It was considered standard/necessary in the past in extremely difficult content and only awaits the appropriate numbers for it to be chosen again. Glyph of DS is in no way similar in power to Shadow Priest mana return in Sunwell, but the tradeoff is identical: small dps loss for larger healing gain.

Obviously if everyone in the raid slacks off and raid dps goes way down the chance that it makes you lose goes up hugely. However I did not suggest that everyone in the raid lose dps to no end! Clearly losing a substantial amount of dps is bad, but losing a person is also terrible. People die. Even in top guilds people die on progression raiding. You don't lose every encounter to a enrage. Many, many encounters are lost when a single dpser dies (or the tank dies). The whole point I am trying to make is that when people die, you fail dps checks. Preventing player deaths will prevent wipes.
As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I am saying. In nearly every case of course you can run with that glyph slot blank and still perform your job exactly the same: We are talking about 1% dps. However, there are times when you will blast that tentacle with a strike and it sits there with 80 hp and the exorcism glyph would have been great. And there are times when the warrior WW/Cleaves 3 tentacles, gets a massive string of crits and is at precisely 50 hp because your DS healed him. Both situations don't usually come up, but both have the potential to be critical.
Again, are you suggesting that no one in your guild is ever dead until enrage is reached? Sometimes incoming damage is simply too much, or the healers have a lag spike, or someone gets graphical issues and takes slightly more damage than they normally do. When that happens, a small heal CAN matter even if you are playing with the best healers in the world.
So if an effect a glyph can generate is worse than Circle of Healing it isn't worth considering? By that logic we should not Glyph for 20% more exorcism damage because that effect is worse than Fireball. We aren't comparing major class abilities from other classes to our glyphs, that isn't constructive. Just look at your two options and see which makes most sense in and of itself.

I certainly don't want my tanks equipping gear with crit. I DO want them to think about what abilities they use and how they can maximize they output given acceptable losses in survivability. Thing is, if your tank could lose 1 hp and gain 4k dps, you would make that trade instantly. Again, you clearly aren't going to trade 1k sta for 1k crit, but there is a point where the tradeoff is worth it and it is worth investigating where that point is. In the case of your MT the tradeoff is probably so crazy that it will never come up and simply looking *only* at survival is the same as considering your theoretical 1 stamina to 80 crit ratio. In the case of a dpser though, if your personal dps is halved but you bring absolutely massive benefits you can still easily find a raid spot.
This is a mistake. No rational ret paladin is using every AoW proc for FoL because you are trading off a 7k strike for 3k healing. I am suggesting trading off 50 dps for 77 hps, which is dramatically better. If you want to up your healing you should use the DS glyph FIRST because it is a much greater return on your tradeoff and use Flash as a secondary option.

I am not convinced this is relevant at all. The heal hits your lowest hp target first. Only if the entire heal is consumed does it spill over, so it will be hitting precisely one target in 99%+ of raid situations regardless of how many people are in your raid.


To summarize my point:

The Glyph of Exorcism is only useful for those with extremely heavy expertise on their gear and who do not have good nonexpertise sidegrades. If you are in that situation then GoE is your best remaining pure damage glyph, though it is a weak one. Trading off dps for healing willy nilly is a mistake, but trading off the extremely weak effect of GoE for the slightly less weak (per my argument, anyhow) GoDS is a net gain for overall raid success.

Maximizing damage is extremely important, but our job is not to do maximum damage, but rather to maximize the chance that the boss dies instead of us. My contention is that the GoDS is a better choice given that mandate.

 

Maylander

Not quite sure what you are saying here. You're saying that it's 87,7 with the glyph and 76 without it? That's not correct I think. The calculations are as follows:

With glyph: 687 * 1.11 (Divinity + Tree Aura) * 40% glyph(15%)/basic DS healing(25%) = 305 hps
Without glyph: 687 * 1.11 (Divinity + Tree Aura) * 25% basic DS healing (25%) = 190,6 hps

The difference is 104,4 hps from what I can see, with the upgraded gear. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu, Art of War

 

Neraya

The problem with the DS glyph is that it falls outside of the scope and intent of this forum. The retrtibution part of this forum is focused on increasing dps and doing that at the cost of all else. It's up to each paladin individually to decide how far you're willing to take things... is the DS glyph usefull... In the right setting and when the right circumstances are there, yes. definately. But I've also seen wipes at 1% where that little bit of extra DPS would have killed the boss. Which is the better and which is the worse is a gray area. Gray area's don't fit well into a min/maxing approach to things. Min/maxing tells you that as a DPSer, your 50extra DPS > anything else.


The site advocates (in the BiS thread) taking leather and mail gear, even though that will gimp your survival. A dead DPSer does 0 DPS. Is gimping your own survival for that tiny bit of extra DPS warranted... For some it will for some it won't, for a lot it won't even matter because their guild loot policies will prevent pala's even getting that gear anytime soon. But the ret threat also advocates socketting red gems in blue sockets. Even though Str/Sta ones would increase your HP and sometimes that bit of extra HP may be the difference between staying alive and dying. Yet, nobody questions that and brings it up that we should have enough HP as well so we should socket blue sockets with Str/Sta or even full Sta. Bigger HP pools also help healing afterall in giving them that little bit of extra breathing room. It's all valid points, but... It's not the points that are for a "how to maximize your dps" type of forum.

 

Maylander

To be perfectly honest, there are quite a few fights where a lot of people are forced to either get PvE items with stamina, or use PvP gear. We just don't ellaborate, because there's nothing to discuss, no information we're lacking - if a boss has an ability that does 25k damage to a random target, everyone knows that we should push above 25k using whatever means necessary (or if the boss can do 12,5k twice in a row, sometimes to the same target).

However, in this particular case, there was obviously a lot of information missing. How many of us knew that DS was a smart heal? I certainly did not, and have always considered the ability useless beyond the damage aspect. Now I realize that DS is, in fact, quite a useful tool. All the healing you see done by DS on Recount was actually used on the lowest target. If you check out a WWS or similar of DS healing, you'll see that it's a significant amount.

I'm not really talking about the glyph specifically here, I'm just saying that providing knowledge and information is our main job, so people can make decisions based on *facts*. We're not here to tell people exactly how to do their jobs.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu, Art of War

 

Finkum

I keep seeing this argument crop up and it baffles me. While the focus of these forums is certainly effective play, I don't see it written in stone anywhere that all discussion about a DPS spec must focus ONLY on ways to improve said spec's DPS and nothing else. There are many other ways that to improve your raid performance, some of which have been raised earlier.

If you take a gander at, say, the mage forums, there are threads devoted to topics like Amplify/Dampen magic, where they are effective, where they aren't, whether it's worth talenting into them; to Frost specs, and whether they have a place in CC-intensive fights like Freya+3, despite being ~20% behind the DPS of typical Fire/Frostfire raiding specs; to the question of Magic Absorption (+80 resists), and whether it is useful to spec into for hard modes and what points you can trade out to get it. All of these are interesting and worthwhile discussions, despite the fact that they don't directly relate to improving your boss DPS (beyond the obvious dead player = zero DPS). So why is a similar conversation here provoking such controversy?

Redcape has simply done some interesting research and presented the HPS/DPS tradeoff results for people to analyse for themselves, and kudos to him for doing so.

 

Neraya

Yes, there are fights were survival is more important... For our first Mimiron HM and Freya+3 kills the Raidleader requested everyong to have a certain amount of HP and to use Stamina flasks rather than DPS ones. Sometimes exceptions like that are necessary, but at such moments, everyone is also fully aware that increased survival comes at a cost in DPS and healing throughput. In such cases stamina is king...

So... Why isn't there a discussion about socketting Str/Sta or Pure Sta in blue sockets...? It's a "gray area" scenario that requires you to deviate from the norm. We could have a whole post dedicated to best gear setups and best methods to dps/heal/tank for each individual boss, but that just isn't really feasible.

We could make a separate thread describing in detail how each of our glyphs and each of our talents and abilities work and in which special case scenario's they could be useful and when not, but is such a thing even necessary ? Maybe it is, it's obvious a lot of even "old time" paladins didn't even know the DS heal is a smart one... The DS glyph certainly isn't a bad one, and yes, in the right circumstances it may be good to the point of being OP. But that doesn't mean it deserves a place in the main 'ret' thread. It'll just end up being confusing more than anything...


I did say the "focus" and "intent" of the ret part is DPS. I never claimed there is no room for anything else. There certainly is... When needed I throw heals around, dispell, give someone a hand (protection/freedom...), etc. But such things are hard to quantify. Rawr ret module doesn't have a "healing throughput" indicator whereby you'd select gear, rotation or glyphs, and I'm not saying it should. And is the ret paladin that did 40K healing with FOL a better paladin than the one that did no healing ? Without the circumstances, you can't even tell if those 40K heals were necessary, or just ended up causing overheal for others.

Pff. mages... they're just trying to appear more interesting than they actually are :-)

Yep, and indeed kudos to him. But we have other glyphs and "odd" talents and abilities that in the right circumstances have a reason of being also. Are we goign to have a separate post for each one ?

 

• Zurm

Of course people die before the enrage is reached, but 90% of the time it's because SOMEONE messed up (think "stood in the void zone" scenario, or a tank/healer died due to said scenario). Almost without exception, the other 10% of the time it's because our general strat was wrong or we need to swap classes.

Where we differ is that you feel it's your job to cover the slack others have; quite frankly, in end-game content like hardmodes, the encounters (while you are first learning them) are tuned in such a way that everyone must do THEIR job, and do it perfectly, or you will fail. Pre-nerf Mimiron hard or Yogg0k are great examples of this.

Anyway, this topic has been beaten to death. It doesn't even belong in a new thread, IMO, this probably should have all taken place in the existing ret thread. Can we all agree on this?

Our primary purpose in raids is to DPS. Occasionally, depending on the fight and our raiding environment, we may have to increase our utility use and decrease our DPS. Each paladin must use personal discretion when deciding when to use this utility, and when to spec/glyph for it.

 

• frmorrison

The extra 50 stam "lost" per piece of Leather you wear isn't as issue as a Ret, since I will Flash/SS or maybe Lay on Hands myself if I drop to around 20% health. Rets have lots of health, the only time I die first is trash (if I attack too early or the wrong mob, and 1k extra health wouldn't have saved me).

Also, the extra agi gives a good amount of dodge, so that can save you if you pull on trash sometimes.


To someone asking about the heal calculation, without glyph it is 25% of damage done, with glyph it is 40% of damage done as healing to lowest person, so just multiply the normal hps by 1.15 to get the glyph hps.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

gatgat

Im pretty sure your math here is wrong, increasing from .25 * x to .40 * x is a 60% increase in healing not 15%, so you would multiply the non-glyphed healing by 1.6 not 1.15

 

Exemplar

Divine Storm has a cooldown of 10 seconds. On average any one of those seconds the chance of dying is as high as another. The chance Divine Storm will heal on the proper second is 1 in 10 (10%).

Divine Storm smart targets lowest health. So (typically) do human beings and several actual healing spells. The chance that DS heals three targets who are also targeted by human beings/other smart target is significant. In many raid damage situations there are people mid-to-low health who are not lowest, hence not targeted by smart heals or top priority of raid healers.

With the way damage is produced in raids (typically large chunks, rather than small continual Sapphiron damage) it is only slightly less likely that the 4th lowest person will die from a single additional hit compared to the lowest three.

As such you have a 10% chance to heal on a given second, an X% chance to heal the correct target, a Y% chance they would die without the heal, and a Z% chance the heal is enough to prevent death even if it hits (more than overkill).

I will select not just reasonable levels for X, Y, and Z, but levels highly in favour of Divine Storm succeeding.

Chance DS smart targets right	90%
Percent of raid raid will die on a given fight	40% (4 in 10, 10 in 25)
Chance overkill is less than extra healing of Glyph	25%
Chance to Heal at right time	10%

Total: 90% * 40% * 25% * 10% = 0.9%

0.9% of boss fights you may save a single player's life. Even fudging numbers (significantly) in Divine Storm's favour, the chance is ridiculously low. You would, on average, save two people per week using all of your 50 tribute attempts (entire raid dies, not 40% of it, so 90% * 100% * 25% * 10% = 2.25%).

Additionally, this does not factor how frequently they will still die in the next second due to DoT damage such as Flame Jets, Frozen Blows, High Voltage, or a Fire effect they still haven't escaped. Or a meaningless save because it's a wipe in progress (dead tanks/healers).

Personally I find it rather easy to argue that extra Exo DPS will push a phase change or boss kill even 1 second earlier with enough frequency to save as many (or more) lives. Beating another rotation of a boss cooldown, a berserk timer, or killing an add (Faction Champs?) is not to be underestimated.

Glyph of DS adds value, true. It can save lives, true. So can increasing DPS on all the DPS race fights. The Glyph does not have enough value added to seem worthwhile.

Rock: "We're sub-standard DPS. Nerf Paper, Scissors are fine."
Paper: "OMG, WTF, Scissors!"
Scissors: "Rock is OP and Paper are QQers. We need PvP buffs."

 

Maddjester

I'm surprised this thread is going for as long as it is. Simply put both sides have presented their points:

1) Xyrm's - Max your dps, you shouldn't sacrifice your #1 goal for #2,3,4... aka utility
2) Redcape/others - take advantage of your raid utility, because it may* be worth a tiny dps loss

Clearly both sides have presented arguments and opinions, and we all agree it's ultimately at the discretion of the player and their raid situation to either max their dps or add a little extra healing. Posting numbers about how much % you can increase either dps or healing really doesn't help deliver an "answer" to the idea (not even a question) originally proposed, especially since even without crunching numbers it's obvious that the DS glyph isn't raid breaking like the old JoL. Xyrm summed it up nicely above, so can we move past this?

 

zamm

Ret is picked primarily for DPS, not healing. We should be eeking out every last drop of DPS we can on nearly all bosses. Sure, a 50 or so DPS loss would probably not get you kicked from the raid, but I am not sure it is the correct attitude to take. The heals from DS are not enough to give DPS up for as they are not noticeable, and generally not big enough to save a wipe. 50 DPS over a fight however can make the difference. Our other utility, that we give up DPS for, is obvious. DivSac, HoP, HoSac, even LoH are all things that people notice. The healing from Glyph of DS is not like this, it is just there in the background.

 

Buffie

Posting the math behind the glyph is exactly the point. Letting everyone see the numbers makes it a lot easier to decide if the healing output increase is enough to offset the dps loss. In that respect this thread is wonderful. What I really find odd is that it bothers so many people so much to have a little side space out of the main ret thread where we can discuss matters like this. I actually wish the OP wasn't about a specific glyph, but about how much of a dps sacrifice we have to make for utility in other aspects as well.

I do have to disagree with Zurm about this not warranting a thread. Prima facia, he's right, the math on GoDS should be part of the main ret thread, but it was completely inevitable that this age old discussion would break out again & putting it in a separate thread is a good way to contain that discussion & keep it out of the main ret thread. Maybe this discussion does warrant a thread here as I think it would be better to discuss the "gray area" & explore other options rather than immediately deeming it a dps loss & leaving it at that.

I have a feeling that if Redscape had found that you can add say 500 hps to your raid in smart heals, the choice would be a lot more difficult for some players depending on their guild. I think that since we have the potential to add more than our dps to a raid, it's a good idea to at least have an open mind about it & weigh the pros & cons before shutting it out. In this particular case, the added healing probably isn't worthwhile, but there may be other things we're not seeing where we can positively impact our raid in a significant way by losing a small amount of dps. Having another thread to separate this discussion from the main ret thread would be a good way to be able to look at things like this & not forcing anyone who is uninterested to read it.

 

chinoquezada

The effectiveness of a class/spec stems from the best use of all of its available skills towards achieving the goal of defeating Raid Bosses (PvE) or Human Adversaries (PvP).
We paladins (regardless of spec) have the great challenge of having a very diverse set of skills.

Ret Paladins that don't think the idea of trading a very small ammount of dps (50 dps) for an comparably small amount of hps (75 hps) to be "worthy of consideration" probably chose the wrong class in my opinion.

I recall many times where my quick AoW heals, DS/DG, LoH, BoP, etc have saved my raid.

I can also recall many situations where a "smart Divine Storm Heal" would have saved my raid but it just wasn't big enough of a heal.



All Redcape said is, "This is worthy of consideration".


The responses that basically read "Ret Paladin = DPS Class, we should bring the highest dps possible all the time" clearly don't acknowledge the differences between encounters.
More specifically, how some encounters don't really require "balls out" dps but rather raid survival skills and high hps from all possible healing sources.

 

Wrathblood

While I think the posters above me, especially Madd, summed up the discussion well enough that we're nearly done, it feels like a lot of people are still missing the boat on Zurm's argument, so I'll do an extremely brief recap of it:

To kill hardmode X, you need to bring 6 healers (for example), assuming the rest of the raid is playing basically perfectly. If the ret paladin(s) in the raid glyph DS, even if you had a raid full of them, its not enough healing to let you bring less than 6 healers. Since the rets lose dps by glyphing that way, the raid has overall lost dps and is thus worse off. So, DS glyph is worse than the Exo glyph, period.

Since the hardmode will only be beaten if everyone plays perfectly, benefits like "reducing the chance of someone randomly dying" are negligible because if anyone was going to die randomly, they probably aren't playing perfectly, and you're gonna wipe anyway.

For a less demanding fight with more slack, glyphing DS might be a benefit, and that's up to each ret paladin and their RL.

 

Zaelar

What if you're attempting a hard mode, need more dps, but if you go from 6 healers to 5 you don't have enough healing? Having 3 rets glyph for ds could be enough to get you to only need 5 dedicated healers. You lose 150 dps among the 3 rets but gain several thousand from the class change.

There are plenty of times cutting into your own dps is talked about and even suggested here, such as picking up just about any improved buff. It's always about raid dps, not personal dps.

 

SwordSa1nt

3 rets in raid? Huge sacrifice, stacking one of the worst stacking spec in order to gain minimalistic heal on 3 people every 10 sec. Not to mention that even on boss that you can hit 4 targets all the time with ds, and you get 4 crits every time, you will still be propably outhealer by healing stream totem.

 

flyingtoastr

Ret's personal DPS is high enough at the moment that there really isn't any reason not to stack them if you have them.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Zaelar

Then change my anology to having ele/enh shamans glyph for healing stream. Or change it to just one ret paladin and lower the numbers. Your argument would be like someone saying Wrathblood's point is invalid just because no hardmodes require exactly 6 healers. The numbers don't matter, it's a matter of if either the extra healing will allow you to drop a healer or not, or if the extra healing is all you need instead of dropping an entire dps character for a healer.