• frmorrison

This is for discussion of the Retribution changes on the 3.3 PTR shown here WoW -> Test Realm Patch Notes. The 3.2 Retribution thread is for discussion of the live game.

Ret PvE changes:
Here are the Tier 10 Lightsworn Battlegear set bonuses:
2 Pieces: Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to reset the cooldown on your Divine Storm ability.
4 Pieces: Your Seals and Judgements deal 10% additional damage.
Here is a link to the Ret T10 264 set:
World of Warcraft Database - Sigrie
Libram of Three Truths Relic - Your Crusader Strike ability grants 44 Strength for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
This adds up to 220 Strength, however has at a minimum a 16 second ramp time. Theorycraft says it takes about 50 seconds for the new libram to match the current 245 libram. It is a superior option for AoE though.

Misc Changes:
Repentance: This crowd control effect will no longer break early from the damage done by Righteous Vengeance.
Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. It can absorb 40% of your health x your party size. If you are in a party of 5, it will redirect damage to you that is taken by the party up to a max of 200% of your health. If you are in a party of 2, it will redirect damage to you that is taken by the party up to a max of 80% of your health. If you take enough damage to drop you below 20% of your health, the spell is canceled.
Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect with Sacred Shield except with the Infusion of Light talent.
Lay on Hands: This ability now places Forbearance only when it is used on yourself.
Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)
Divine Intervention now has a 10 min cooldown. (Down from 20 min)
Divine Intervention no longer clears the effect of Exhaustion and Sated on target, unless the target leaves combat when DI is canceled.


Commentary:
The 2T10 bonus changes the priority to Judge>DS>CS>HOW>Cons>Exo with 2T9 and 2T10 bonuses. I am unsure what happens after you break 2T9.

Regarding the Misc changes, Rets will have three choices for where they wish to be specialized: a raid save from Aura Mastery every 2 minutes (depending on Icecrown boss mechanics, but I predict lots of AoE magic damage), a tank or party save from DiSac every 2 minutes instead of 3.2's raid save every 5 minutes, or picking up every Ret utility talent via 5/7/59.

At the moment I will be going 5/7/59, I don't feel DS and AM are worth losing utility in 3.3.

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

 

• Zurm

Since Blizzard mentioned that we will be able to test the T10 sets soon, one thing that should be tested early on is how the 4pc applies to SoV. Just the Procs? The DOT? Both?

 

Tobrexa

As I understand it, I would keep the normal rotation and hit DS only on first priority, if enabled by the t10p2.
CS with it's fast hitting cd, seems in my eyes still to deliver most of "normal" Seal damage; 10p4 is going to scale hugely in my opinion... In the end it comes all down to the numbers of actual procs of 10p2 I guess.


The wording of the 4p (which is, as we know, not binding) seems to exclude Blood Corruption/Holy Vengeance.


Edit: Will using DS enabled by proc put it on a new 10 seconds cd, or will it keep the old cd?

 

• Kelevevick

Unless the DS proc is extremely high %, won't this bonus be very difficult to determine? RNG could easily proc when 8 sec have already elapsed. Wouldn't this sort of bonus be better on a longer cooldown ability like Exo?

 

• frmorrison

Exo is a weak choice since the ability doesn't hit for very much. DS hits hard, however it is a lower priority than Judge and CS due to the long cooldown. This set bonus is very exciting, since it changes the rotation however it means there will even less free GCDs. Note clcret would tell you if the cooldown was up on DS early, so you just look at the mod to use the set bonus properly.

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

 

• Zurm

My guess is a new 10s. It doesn't say it gives you a free DS, it just resets the cooldown.

 

Lesrek

The only thing I worry about is that the change makes having a g15 even better. We are still the only class who can use a one button macro on a keyboard to maximize our dps. Now, we just put DS first in the rotation and every single time it comes off cooldown, the g15 will use it next.

With that however, I do feel it is a step in the right direction and I would not be surprised at all if it became a set bonus out of early cataclysm workings. Something that we actually have to pay attention to in combat is huge, and to put it on a massive hitting ability like DS is really nice. I also don't think I am along when I say that DS is my favorite ability to hit. It is a psuedo ranged attack and hits like a truck.

What I am also interested is how this will increase the value of Haste and ArP. Those are two stats that are horrible for us right now and this kind of set bonus could bump them up. Probably not to crit/expertise levels, but I would imagine quite a bit higher than they are right now.

 

Tozar

Moving my post from the 3.2 thread:


Assuming that the 40% chance applies to melee attacks, not just white swings, this would make it proc from both seals and white and yellow attacks. This leads, though my extremely basic napkin math, to a 64% chance per swing, since each swing procs a melee attack. Now assuming we swing at the boss once every 2 seconds, this gives Divine Storm a theoretical average cooldown of 3 seconds. Since it already hits harder than Crusader Strike, this puts it at 2nd priority, with Judgement first for two reasons. One, its our highest damage attack, which will prove even better with the 4 piece t10, and two, it is our primary source of mana. Divine Storm effectively costs 10% of our mana pool(i know, its slightly less, blah blah) so our mana could become an issue. Mana may not be as much of an issue, since this new rotation will effectively drop Consecration, our highest mana ability, from the mainline rotation due to GCD locks.

TL;DR: Our priority looks like it will become Judgement>(HoW)>Divine Storm>Crusader Strike, with Exorcism and Consecration more or less following this, depending on how much you're moving and whether or not you glyphed Exorcism for expertise capping reasons.

One thought on the expertise issue: My bis list i created pre-25H nets me 16 expertise. However, when i change to my 258 gear, i'm forced to wear more of the expertise pieces since there aren't 258 versions of the 10 man heroic pieces. If i throw a couple of Accurate Ametrines in my gear, in 258 gear i push myself to 264 hit and exactly 26 expertise. It seems to me that at this point, if you don't have access to 25H gear, you should be thinking about using the expertise glyph to cap yourself, but if you're actively clearing(or at least close to killing anub), you should be thinking about going to full 26 expertise route.

chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner - my 245 gear set

chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner - my 258 set, including the dropping of the 10 expertise glyph.

 

Malleus

If you don't have access to ilvl258 gear, you can still get to 25 expertise plus change with the 245 versions of Bloodbath Belt, Greaves of the 7th Legion and the T9 legs. Using the T9-245 over Legguards of Ascension is a loss of 30 DPS, which drops to just 8 if you replace Glyph of SoV with Glyph of Exo. (Those figures are derived from the current rotations and values, but I can't see the proportions shifting much unless ArP rises sharply in value.)

Another point is that with Consecrate becoming a filler ability instead of part of the full rotation, it may no longer be worth Glyphing it. Doing a bit of napkin math: at current gear levels Glyph of Consecrate is worth ~1500 damage per cast and Glyph of Exo is worth 800 damage per cast. Thus, if we end up casting two Exorcisms for each Consecrate - which isn't unlikely if mana is going to be a concern - Glyph of Exo will be worth more to us than Glyph of Consecrate. It must also be noted that with the possible exception of Valithria Dreamwalker, all the bosses in Icecrown Citadel are Undead. This raises the value of Glyph of Exo to 1200 per cast, making it the preferred option if our Exo:Cons ratio is 5:4 or better.

 

Tozar

While it's true that you can get that extra expertise with the t9 legs, I see no reason to pick them up since the wrists i'd be using to cap myself with the 258 gear drop from Hard Mode Beasts, and I am therefor much more likely to acquire them.

I mean, if they dropped in Vault i'd pick them up, but i don't want to spend 75 badges on them.

 

HamSlammer

New ICC libram. 220 total strength with 100% uptime versus our current 200 strength with 96% uptime. Has a longer ramp up though. Might be worse than Valiance if there's multiple 15 second gaps in fights in ICC (Currently, only NRB features long transitions). It will probably be superior to any of the Gladiator libram in an AoE situation.

 

• frmorrison

Yah, the ramp-up time can hurt if there are a few encounter where you can't hit anything (like Icehowl and the little adds on Anub) for a bit. However, it is outstanding on AoE when you need to swap to Command, so it should be the new BiS libram come 3.3.

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

 

Angel of Wrath

The libram looks underwhelming, but we also have to consider that we're only upgrading from ilvl 245 to ilvl 264 this time instead from "useless junk" to "awesome libram". The other relic slot items revealed so far are quite similar, so our libram is in line with the others. The long ramp-up time might make it inferior for certain encounters in ICC to our current libram, but we'll see.

 

Kvaern

The new libram looks like a very nice up/sidegrade to me seeing how it fills the gap between awesome SoV libram vs. crap any other seal libram we're currently suffering from.

but I don't get why DK's get almost twice the itemization points on their "strike" librams ?

 

• Mex

I'd guess that the 5-stack is a typo, and it's intended to be a 3-stack.

Currently relics seem to offer either 3x73 (219 points) or 5x44 (220). The DK DPS Sigil is the only outlier here, so I assume it would be fixed.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. ... this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

 

Glutton

IMO it's an oversight; the five should be a three. For example, the Enhancement Shaman relic is 3*146 AP = 438 AP. The Ret relic is 44 STR*5 = 220 STR / 440 AP (before talents). The "fixed" DK relic would have 73 STR*3 = 219 STR / 438 AP (before talents).

 

HamSlammer

In a raid buffed scenario, the ICC Libram is ahead of the [Relentless Gladiator's Libram of Fortitude] even at a measly 2 stacks, which takes place ~6 seconds into a fight (depending on how you open).

I just ran some rough numbers, but it appears that somewhere around 70 (+/- 5) seconds, the ICC libram surpasses [Libram of Valiance] using the 4.5 sec effective CD on CS.

Assuming Valiance has a 96% uptime, it amounts to a static 192 Strength.

The ICC Libram, on the other hand, amounts to 44 Strength for 4.5 seconds, then 88 for the next 4.5 seconds, then 132 for the next, then 176 for the next, then it reaches it's maximum potential of 220 Strength for X-18 seconds, where X is the fight length. Provided time spent in X is greater than or equal to 75% of the fight length, the ICC Libram will be superior.

It will ultimately depend on the fight style/mechanics in Icecrown though.

(If someone could double check my numbers, I'd appreciate it.)

The DK Sigil is mostly a the next victim of errors in datamining unreleased, and generally not finalized, values. My guess is that it stacks 3 times for 73 Strength per stack. It fits with the 219-220 stat point allotment the ICC relics seem to have and it plays well with the (in)frequency those 3 strikes are used for certain builds (Blood only uses 2x Death Strikes per 20 seconds).

 

bg_sanata

If we going to use this new libram I think we have to change our rotation a bit. We have to start with CS and use it on every cd just too keep stacks from the libram up. Plus 4P set bonus which give priority to judgments dmg and 2P bonus.... I think our rotation will be very confused.

 

HamSlammer

Speculation on 3.3/2pieceT10 and how it influences our rotation is premature at the moment as we don't know how precisely the 2piece works and if it'll even stay as is.

That said, I severely doubt it'll be so impactful that we have to make a conscious effort to CS every 15 seconds to "keep up our stack". More than likely, CS will get dumped to the 3rd rung in priority making it a 4.5-6 second effective CD depending on 2piece procs. Also, keep in mind, CS is getting an indirect buff in 3.3 with the 4piece.

 

Kvaern

It could be a typo but keep in mind it was the same with [Libram of Radiance] vs. [Sigil of Awareness]

 

Q_Xoz

DK's wont get more str then us its just a mixup.
They just have their tank values for the dps sigil atm.

Death Knight T10 Tank Relic (Runestrike) - Your Rune Strike ability grants 44 dodge rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

Paladin T10 Protection Relic (Shield of Righteousness) - Your Shield of Righteousness ability grants 73 dodge rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

 

flyingtoastr

It is possible that you will switch to a prioritized CS during the opening few seconds of a fight, but with a 15 second durration you should not have any problems keeping it up once it is rolling.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Noraj

Ramping up damage is a reasonable solution for evening out burst, as we've seen in the past, but isn't an upgrade which requires over one solid minute in combat a bit much of a comparative ramp-up?

Let's assume that we open with Crusader Strike, and that Libram of Valiance' buff applies on the first tick. Let us then assume the crusader strike is cast every 5 seconds. We should see a full stack of the new libram's buff approximately 20 seconds into the fight if this were the case, 30 seconds at most.

I understand that up until this point our T9 libram would be well in the lead, but how does it work out that it requires another full 40-50 seconds for the T10 to "catch up" as it were before surpassing its predecessor? Are my rough estimates of the time to a full five stack extremely off, or am I just not considering how big a difference we're looking at for the first 20 seconds?

"The question is not how far we are going to take it... the question is, do you possess the constitution to go as far as needed?" - Il Duce

 

Neraya

I don't really see any need in changing rotation to favour the libram stacking.

Worst case scenario: you stick to your priority and delay your first CS to 3sec into the fight. (DS, Judge coming first). I don't see those 3 seconds going to make much of an issue over the course of a fight.

Best case scenario: you open with CS and then fall into the normal routine. While opening with CS first does change the whole sequence of events after it, it's not something we care about anyways because it changes nothing (really).
It's one of the thinigs I truely like about the way ret does DPS is that nomatter what happens, be it needing to perform a spell (dispell, dp, HOP, whatever) not in our rotation or skipping a spell (we're chasing a mob so dropping that cons would be pointless, or need to avoiding aoe so no DS). We always immediately fall back to our normal routine of slamming the highest priority button off CD and we can be sure of doing the best possible DPS.

The libram isn't even anywhere near as bad as SOV since it's a self buff you carry on you from one target to the next so swapping targets isn't a problem, only a case of not dpsing anything for 15sec is an issue, and those cases are rare.

 

HamSlammer

The way I ran my numbers was with the assumption that Valiance provided 200 Strength at a 96% uptime, which nigh identical to a 192 Strength buff with a 100% uptime. So, I just found the point in which the ICC would achieve and surpass 192 static Strength, which is roughly any time where you've spent 75% or more of the fight with a 5 stack.

The reason for the slightly long catch up time is that Valiance is far and away better at the start (T<20). At any time point in between attaining a 5stack (T=20) and achieving the break even T point, the ICC Libram is yielding a higher DPS contribution (obviously) just at a relatively slower rate than Valiance comparatively did in T<20.

In the end, the Icecrown Libram is only about ~40-45 DPS better than [Libram of Valiance] in ToC gear (You can easily edit a Gladiator Libram in RAWR to the ICC one)