[Retribution] Major Glyphs Solved

[Isolyphic]

It is widely known that the mana cost reduction glyphs are the only glyphs for Retribution that serve a reasonability to our DPS. Other knowing that Glyph of Divine Protection is a great damage reduction to the player we have four glyphs to choose from.

Glyph of Consecration
Glyph of Divine Plea
Glyph of Ascetic Crusader
Glyph of Hammer of Wrath

Using Mana costs averages per minute and Crusader strike cooldown of four seconds. This is my conclusion -

CS mana save = 10536 per minute (14049 with 3second CD)
Cons mana save = 4294 per minute
*HoW mana save = 4496 per minute
**DP mana save = 767 per minute


Theorycrafting clearly shows that
Major Glyphs should be Divine Protection, Hammer of Wrath and Ascetic Crusader

*Hammer of Wrath concluded at 16% of combat ignoring Avenging Wrath, including Avenging Wrath would increase the mana saving
**Using 3.0.6 Divine Plea numbers (18%) with the value of 25540 mana.


Formula Used.

(60 / cooldown * normalManaCost) - (60 / cooldown * reducedManaCost) - Crusader Strike
(60 / cooldown /(100*16) * normalManaCost) - (60 / cooldown / (100*16) *reducedManaCost) - Hammer of Wrath
(60 / normalCooldown * manaCost) - (60 / glyphCooldown * manaCost) - Consecration
((60 / cooldown) * (maxMana * 0.12)) - ((60 / cooldown)*(maxMana*0.18) - Divine Plea

Divine Plea gives a negative value but the negative value is the difference of mana gained between glyphed and unglyphed per minute. Simply turn it positive.

[Deleted]

Basing glyph choice solely off of theoretical sustained mana consumption is inane. One glyph you should ALWAYS have as retribution when raiding is Glyph of Divine Protection. It gives 40% damage reduction against magic, and all damage you will take in current content is magical based, and often comes in periodic bursts, which means glyphed DivProt is perfect for that.

Besides that, you should hardly ever be faced with mana problems, UNLESS you are going long periods without judging or on interrupt duty (rebuke also costs quite some mana). The only times where you may skip judgement for prolonged periods of time, is during AW+Zealotry. Also combined with the fact, that Hammer of Wrath costs a serious amount of mana, you can actually find yourself in the dilemma of going completely OOM while all your damage cooldowns are running (or sub 20%) or using Judgement instead of a higher damaging attack. Both leads to fair to drastic dps losses.

I would consider Divine Protection mandatory. Our best major glyph by far.
Then we know mana only becomes a strain either 1) during burst or 2) while interrupting. Hammer of Wrath and Rebuke are both great canditates.
And for the last slot: personally I don't find myself ooming even while interrupting so I skipped the Rebuke glyph and use HoW, and then I choose the best overall manasaver for the last slot, which is Ascetic crusader.

The glyphs might have a theorical mana saving value, but it needs to be put into real context to have any meaning.

[Deleted]

I've been using Glyph of Ascetic Crusader, Glyph of Hammer of Wrath and Glyph of Divine Protection as this best suits me in my 10m group.

It is not often i am using consecration anyway due to saving the mana for holy radiance in most fights to lighten the load on AoE healing which is incredibly hard for our 2 resto shammys and 1 resto druid.