Trying to help one of raiders out

[Deleted]

Hello everyone, i am a raid leader of a semi hardcore guild currently 7/10 in heroic Nighthold(first day).

anyway to the point, we have a retri pala that is performing solid but i have the feeling he can push much more. Seeing as i am not a paladin myself i have very little info i can give him to improve himself. So paladin community my question to you guys is could you give me some useful info that i can then pass on to him.

His info:

eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/twisting-nether/Drbliz/simple

Here are some logs of last nights raid:

warcraftlogs.com/reports/FTkr9dh2ZL8GXRaD#source=17&type=damage-done

i am not able to link anything yet so i hope these will do.

Thanks in advance for any info.

[Goldenboy1]

Warcraftlogs is currently not working for me. I will take a look later however, he is very geared and should be dealing 500k plus dps, except for skorpryon that should be higher at 880 heroic i pulled 870k dps here. Expect me to come back later once the logs are up.

[darkwarrior42]

There's a simple site I'm fond of for checking dps performance called "Check My WoW". The address, obviously enough, is checkmywow.com

You can plug in a warcraftlogs report, and it'll bring up some basic metrics for a fight of your choice.

For instance, on your Krosus kill for your ret pally, it tells me:
-He cast 64 Templar's Verdicts. Of those, 55 were cast with Judgment up, 9 were not. That's a big hit to DPS.
-4 casts of Word of Glory. Is this something your raid needs him to be casting? That's obviously a big hit to dps, dropping word of glory would let him dump that holy power right back into damage. If the raid needs Word of Glory, then that's fine, just recognize it will hurt his dps.
-Lost some holy power. It can be hard (and a loss of dps) to avoid wasting any holy power on Wake of Ashes, but wasting 3 HP on Blade of Justice is a bit more questionable, and there's no reason whatsoever to waste any HP on Crusader Strike. He wasted 3 HP on Crusader Strike, which means there was 3 times during the fight he was at max holy power and hit CS anyways.
-He cast Crusade twice and Wake of Ashes 8 times; for the fight length, 4:21, he could have squeezed out one more of each. He delayed the second crusade until the 3 minute mark. It's entirely possible he had a good reason to do so, and with a fight length of 4:21 he wouldn't have gotten full duration out of the third crusade anyways, but given how much ret DPS is dependent on the Crusade being used properly, making sure he has a good reason not to hit it as quickly and often as possible is essential.
-Very quick and dirty sim shows Blade of Wrath a little bit ahead of Blade of Virtue. It's close enough that you probably wouldn't notice much of a difference in practice (sims come out at 547k for Blade of Wrath, 542k for Blade of Virtue), but it's still there.

So the tl;dr version: Make sure he's using TV when Judgement is up at all times, make sure he's using Crusade as best he can, don't waste HP without a good reason, and either ditch Word of Glory or accept the loss of dps.

- - - Updated - - -

Couple other quick points:

1) cetraben point out Mark of the Claw on his neck, so I ran another quick sim. Switching to Hidden Satyr sims out to be a ~4k increase.
2) He's missing an enchantment on one of his rings (Ring of Ascended Glory).

[Goldenboy1]

I will be using the Krosus fight for my analysis on your paladin. This is due to the lack of overall mechanics, as well as the tunnel on boss. This just makes it so theres less deviation in his parses on that boss.

Firstly he is using word of glory, this is the worst thing he can ever do. Your paladin is throwing away Templar Verdicts, 4 to be exact.

Secondly, he has two casts of Crusade resulting in a total of 21.03% uptime or 54.8883 seconds of usage. During this encounter he could only use 2 Crusades. I am assuming he is using the proper relics and each Crusade should last for 35 seconds. This means he is potentially missing out on 15.1117 seconds of Crusade. This is a huge amount of time and the delay of lining up cool downs is not worth it in this instance.

Thirdly, he used 2 Hammer of Justice casts. This means he wasted 2 global cooldowns for no reason what so ever but this could just be a fat finger. Either way, dps loss.

Fourthly, out of crusade his damage barely breaks 300k. at 890 ilv with 2 set this should not happen and it comes down to him not using Judgment properly, wasting global cooldowns.

Fifthly, upon looking at his Traits. He is using awful relics. God awful, ilv means nothing at this point because the Wrath of the Ashbgringer trait so so much stronger than any other trait available. A wrath of the ashbringer trait giving 50 ilvs throughput value equals 74ilvs.

Six(ly?), if you compare his Templar Verdict damage between the two peaks, you will see he did more damage on the latter one. This makes no sense when you incorporate the lust on pull. This means he did not use Judgment+TV properly on pull.

484k dps at 890 ilv with 2 set is ok, however, his gear i amazing stat wise. It comes down to perfecting rotational mechanics.

[Deleted]

Thank you all for the suggestions already.
I have another question that you might be missing because we are focussing only on a single target fight. To me a none paladin, he seems to play the wrong talent in 60 talent row for any none pure single target fight? atleast this is what i see from looking at other paladin logs. please correct me if i am wrong.

[darkwarrior42]

Regarding the level 60 talent row, that was the Blade of Virtue vs. Blade of Wrath sim I ran. For him, it's only about a 5k difference (less than 1% on the sim).

Blade of Virtue increases the critical damage of Blade of Justice, Blade of Wrath gives it a chance on autoattack to reset its cooldown. The higher your critical strike, the more powerful Blade of Virtue becomes, and your ret pally does have quite a bit of crit. My sims still showed Blade of Wrath a bit higher for him, but he'll see a lot bigger dps gains from getting his rotation right than he will from switching that talent around.

Really, just making sure he's getting the most of his crusades, making sure he always has judgment up when he hits Templar's Verdict, making sure he's getting out as many Crusades as possible, and ditching Word of Glory would make a world of difference.

Edit: Blade of Wrath would probably be a better choice for any situation where he'd be using Divine Storm (aka: adds). Even if the two talents are about equal for him, Blade of Wrath = more holy power = more finishers. The extra damage from Blade of Virtue is pure single target only, the extra damage from Blade of Wrath can translate into more AoE if you're on an add heavy fight (or if you have a fight where you're cleaving down adds sometimes and focusing the rest of the time, like Skorpyron.)

[Deleted]

Like i mention earlier i would understand that he would go for blade of virtue on single target. that is only 2 bosses really on nighthold. Wouldn´t Divine hammer? be superior on any cleave fight and still be pretty decent on single target aswell. it seems most paladins are playing this talent. (based on warcraftlogs)

sorry for the annoying questions

[billyjean]

LOL , everyone is bashing him for using word of glory to heal raid up instead of doing more dps but he is actually helping the team instead of chasing personal glory , be glad u have such a good team raider in your roster.

[darkwarrior42]

*shrug* Divine Hammer is a gain for multi-target, so if you want him on adds or multiple mobs then divine hammer would be superior. I just think there are probably other sources of greater improvement if he gives you push back. They're also going to be buffing Blade of Justice on Tuesday, so it'll be stronger single target (though Divine Hammer should still win on anything with more than 1 target, and will easily win at 3+).

LOL , everyone is bashing him for using word of glory to heal raid up instead of doing more dps but he is actually helping the team instead of chasing personal glory , be glad u have such a good team raider in your roster.

1) Nobody who is looking at higher end raiding decries raid utility. Keeping yourself and the team alive are always valuable. However, dps is also valuable, and aside from that being the reason you bring dps (and many mythic teams dropping healers in favor of dps), there are many cases where higher dps does make a fight easier. On Krosus, for instance, raid damage is highest at the end of the fight, so the faster you finish the fight, the less damage the raid will take.

2) The topic at hand is specifically asking for ways to improve dps, and dropping WoG in favor of something else will do exactly that.

3) On the Krosus kill, the log in question, the ret pally in question did 2.75% of the total healing for the raid. Of that, 41% of that healing was from Word of Glory. They have a 25 man raid with 5 dedicated healers: 2 holy paladins, 2 resto shamans, and 1 resto druid. With that setup, they should be fine without WoG.