Today I logged on the PTR to test out the new Seal of Justice change, and found that the one stack of the “Justice” debuff was still being consumed and doing damage when Templar’s Verdict was used. Although I assume this is a bug, I believe Blizz stumbled upon the perfect solution to fixing Seal of Justice. Therefore, I did some testing and during two 5 minute tests (with SoT and SoJ) I found the following:
Test 1 – Seal of Truth
SoT – 247 hits – 1,271,646 damage
Censure – 112 hits - 1,522,583
Total damage = 2,794,229 ~19% of total damage
Test 2 – Seal of Justice
SoJ – 199 hits – 1,608,911 damage
“Justice” hits – 36 - 284,400 damage
Total damage = 1,893,311 ~13.5% of total damage
Damage Difference
(2,794,229/1,893,311) = 1.48 times more damage with SoT
I believe this change is EXACTLY what Seal of Justice needs to become viable is arena/RBGs. It gives Ret 1) a snare 2) decent consistent damage and 3) a little extra (25% weapon damage) damage with TV; all of which are much needed. The tradeoff here is that SoT/Censure still deal considerably more (~1.5x) damage than SoJ/Justice. I understand this change is probably a bug, but mixing the 5.1 SoJ with the remade SoJ is exactly what the spell needs to become viable and see use in certain situations.
In addition, with these changes it would probably be prudent to add a 20 second shared cooldown between SoT and SoJ to prevent seal twisting.