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.

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.

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

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.