Random ret questions.

[azraelius]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...raelius/simple <-- My armory

Ok so I know its pretty much a tossup between haste and crit right now for rets, I parse really high constantly while going crit, however i see many other top parsing rets going haste,and others apparently trying to keep the two even.

1.What are you stacking atm crit/haste/trying to keep them even and why.

Another issue im having is with trinkets. I use Fury of angerforge - http://www.wowhead.com/item=59461#comments. and I use Darkmoon Card : Hurricane - http://www.wowhead.com/item=62049.

The fury of angerforge stacks build very unreliably and slowly. Each time, the buff lasts 15 seconds. If you don't get another stack in time, it falls off.I usually cant get it stacked up until about 45 seconds into a fight and that may be during a switch or downtime for melee or whatever so its really annoying. Im really tempted into going back into my ilvl 346 Heart of Solace - http://www.wowhead.com/item=56393#comments or the Helllscreams reach exalted melee trinket Impatience of Youth - http://www.wowhead.com/item=62469 or the Liscense to slay badge trinket ( Although id like to be able to save my points to get another tier piece for the 2 piece bonus )
I usually try to steer away from on use trinkets, favoring ones with equip stats,so that brings me to my second question.

2. What should I do about my trinkets. Should I trade the angerforge for Impatience of Youth/Heart of Solace/Liscense to Slay? What would you do if you were in my position.

In the same way many top parsing rets vary in stacking crit or haste they also vary in which weapon enchant they have, When i get an epic weapon the decision is clearly Landslide, but untill then im debating avalanche or hurricane.

3. Which weapon enchant do you recommend?

4. I recently just switched glyphs from the exorcism glyph to the crusader strike glyph as well, would like others thoughts on the two.

If there is something you see wrong with what im doing to my character plz speak up I need criticism.
Another thing, citing what EJ says in a response is fine, just dont assume they are correct on everything.

[zcks]

My suggestion would be to reforge as much of your excess stats as you can & some of your crit into haste, not only will it speed up your holy power generation which leads to more Templar's verdicts but it will go a long way to make the rotation more consistent.

As far as other changes go, you will want to change your glyph of exorcism for the crusader strike glyph, exorcism glyph right now only does damage based on is base damage before any bonuses from talents so it falls behind.

Also in terms of gear changes you might consider, if you have ever done any prot pvp ( or can put up with ret pvp) it may be a good idea to get the ret pvp set because atm it is currently our BIS when you have 4/4 because of the set bonus.

for weapon enchants, landslide is good when you get a weapon ull be using a while but till then hurricane is good as it does not seem to have an internal CD which makes it heavily outweigh avalanche though this may change.

For trinkets impatience of youth is alright if you reforge it but it is still subpar to 346 blues until the change to mastery goes through for us, I would suggest license to slay from the vender & reforge the hit into extra haste.

[t3hj0j0]

1) I stack crit. The only reason is that both spreadsheets, as well as my personal testing (nothing fancy, just reforge, test, repeat) show that crit is above haste.

2) It seems that for people who use 2-handers IoY is typically better, but due to mastery, Ret palys seem to be the exception. As for it stacking slow, that is an unfortunate downside of us using 2-handers. I would stick with FoA untill you can get Heart of Rage.

3) Avalanche is parsing MUCH better than hurricane. EJ has it at an almost 250 point difference, and friends (I'm poor, I use zerker for now >.<) who play rets are agreeing that Avalanche is better.

4) I still use exo, if not just in hope of it being hotfixed, it also provides a bit of use on those moments in fight where I can't reach the boss and hardcasting exo is my only form of dps. At this point though, I believe the difference is so minor it is not a major deal.

A bit of "criticism": It is sad but true, that for ret palys, the 352 (bloodthirsty) PvP gear is better than your justice point gear. The strength on the PvP gear outweighs the stats on the badge gear. If you want a bit more of an edge in dps, replace the shiny badge gear with shiny PvP gear (I know, those roics were painful, I got full badge gear before reading and testing this >.<).

All in all though, you've done a great job on your gear so far, and you should go as far as the spec currently allows. Good luck in raiding!

[CrowShammy]

not only will it speed up your holy power generation which leads to more Templar's verdicts but it will go a long way to make the rotation more consistent.

i could be wrong here, but unless you're at the haste soft cap, bringing your cs down to 3 secs, you can't really speed up holy power generation. at 3 secs, you'd use a cs>filler>cs rotation (even tho EJ suggests you'd still use a 2x filler w/ a 3sec cs). any haste less than that soft cap means you'd be using a cs>fillerx2>cs rotation, thereby not increasing holy power generation via crusader strike at all.

nice how blizz's stated design intent was to make haste attractive for melee by increasing resource generation, but, yet again, failed on ret pallies, since unless we can reach that haste soft cap (which is what, 3500+ haste?, unobtainable in this tier) any haste less than that cap is equal to 0 haste in terms of how much faster you can generate holy power. (obviously not counting on divine purpose here for resource generation, as its unreliable, unaffected by haste, and is being removed, supposedly, in a yet to be determined upcoming patch).

[belfpala]

nice how blizz's stated design intent was to make haste attractive for melee by increasing resource generation, but, yet again, failed on ret pallies, since unless we can reach that haste soft cap (which is what, 3500+ haste?, unobtainable in this tier) any haste less than that cap is equal to 0 haste in terms of how much faster you can generate holy power. (obviously not counting on divine purpose here for resource generation, as its unreliable, unaffected by haste, and is being removed, supposedly, in a yet to be determined upcoming patch).

This is true, but not complete. Haste increases the rate of our HoL and AoW procs, which replace lower damage fillers. Thus haste allows us to "do more" as they stated. The question is whether it allows us to do enough (given that top dps specs thread I saw on the front page, ret is dead last as every spec below us has another spec of the same class above us...).

As for the OP:

1. Crit. After a lot of dummy tests, it seems to win out by a bit.

2. Agree with jojo above.

3. Avalanche unless you can afford Landslide. I tried hurricane and didn't find it very effective.

4. You can easily test which glyph is better for you. Equip the Exo glyph and do a semi-long training dummy test. Determine your non-crit CS damage and multiply by 0.05.* That's what the CS glyph would have done for you, on average. Compare to your actual Exo glyph damage.

* There can be some debate on how to do this. But even if you convert actual crit hits to non-crit damage, then add to your actual non-crit total, it still came out less for me.

[CrowShammy]

This is true, but not complete. Haste increases the rate of our HoL and AoW procs, which replace lower damage fillers. Thus haste allows us to "do more" as they stated.

well, ya, that is true, but, aow and hol does not increase resource generation per se (unless you get a lucky DP proc, which i stated i discounted for various reasons, especially once DP is removed). i suppose this is just splitting hairs at this point tho, something i'm not attempting to do w/ ya mr. belfpala. (just to state i'm not trying to be argumentative, thats something i leave to the argue-pro's here on the forums).

edit: been thinking about the upcoming change to hol/DP. afaik there's no icd on hol or aow. seems they might balance the new iteration of hol better if they added an icd to it, say, 6 or 9 secs. would still keep that proc in our spec to manage and vary the rotation somewhat, would allow them to perhaps balance around it better, given a set amount of procs in a set time frame, and would give us a chance to "feel" when its about to proc, thus allowing us greater room/freedom to expend holy power

[Deleted]

Haste all the way, when glyphed and with enough haste your crusader strike is your life.

[Deleted]

Haste all the way, when glyphed and with enough haste your crusader strike is your life.

You will still always use 2 fillers in between every crusader strike, so you don't actually speed up the rate of your crusader strikes the majority of the time.

Reforge crit for now. Both redcape and exemplars spreadsheet rates crit above haste, and I recommend crit as well - this is coming from someone who has Top2-5 parses on most current raid bosses, that that for whatever value it may have.

[Eurytos]

crit is above haste, albeit minimally, in both of the two most trusted stat weight theorycrafters weighings


reforge for crit, easy.

[azraelius]

Mew what are your opinions on my other questions

[Deleted]

Mew what are your opinions on my other questions

Exo vs CS glyph is a toss up. The exorcism one is currently bugged so the dot is calculated off the base damage, however 5% crit on CS is also pretty weak. I recommend doing some testing yourself, buy checking recount and having your calculator out next time you raid, but atm with my own gear it seems crusader strike glyph wins out a tiny bit on most fights (0.1%-0.2% difference)

Weapon enchant, Avalanche has been mathed out to be clearly superior to Hurricane. Even taking into account that hurricane can double proc (seperate one for spells and melee), avalanche is still the better choice until you can get landslide.

About your trinkets, it's a bit hard to say. I don't have experience with fury of the angerforge, but it seems really annoying so I would probably just go with Heart of Solace for now. Also save valor points for 2piece bonus (chest first, then gloves), and then buy License to slay later down the road.