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. Lasts 6 seconds (down from 10 seconds).
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 6 second raid save from Aura Mastery every 2 minutes (Icecrown boss mechanics do involve lots of AoE magic damage), a tank party save from DiSac every 2 minutes instead of 3.2's raid save every 5 minutes, or picking up every Ret utility/survival talent via 5/7/59.

I am be going 5/7/59, I don't feel DS and AM short durations are worth losing utility in 3.3.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.