Anaxie's Totally Revolutionary SoO Retribution T16 BiS & Theorycraft

[Deleted]

As it stands now, the cleave trinket is useful for this:

Challenge modes and other 5 man content;
Garrosh phase 1;
Galakras phase 1;
Thok during bat phase.

The problem is that for it to work, you basically need a sustained AoE situation, and so far, the only fight where we really had that during the whole of MoP was Wind Lord Meljarak. there are some other fights where it might be useful, but most of those fights still require decent DPS on the boss anyway.

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Also, my second paladin now reached 60 half an hour ago, and got the instant 90 boost from WoD, as I intended all along. Didn't really have any other decent choice: my DK was 86 so that would be a waste; my hunter has a few high itemlevel items waiting for 80 and 85; I don't like playing my monk, and my druid is a mix of all of these.

[Saferis]

Depending on your tactic there's not as much cleave on spoils as you might think, + adds pretty much always move so your cleave trinket won't always hit enough targets to do it justice. Do your guild pull the big or small boxes most of the time?

We usually take bigger boxes, but have bouts of small boxes chain-opened briefly. We haven't downed it yet (closest we got was the attempt i reached 5% cleave damage on--during the last phase one side was 50/50 while mine was at 46/50).

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

what are you wiping to? (obviously enrage) but if adds die instantly or within like 10 seconds (small boxes, sparks, other small adds) then you don't even need DP or the cleave trinket, Spoils (completely depending on how your guild pulls boxes) is mistaken for an aoe fest encounter when it really is just a single target zerg with short cleave phases. Depending on the other classes in your raid and maybe more importantly the healer buff all the passive cleaves and semi cleaves will take care of all the adds. Also the faster the big "boss" boxes die the less raid damage there will be. Just talking from my own experience obviously but for progress I never specced DP because we had warlocks and whatnot that could handle everything aoe, same deal on garrosh really. If you don't need the aoe, go single target, on garrosh I don't cleave until MC starts. Everyone is so dps horny so why make the fight longer just to pad meters for 10seconds...

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

When I was ret on spoils heroic I stuck with Sanctified Wrath. Our wipes were due to the big mobs not dying fast enough. If you're opening mostly mediums and larges (with the gear we have now there is absolutely no reason to open a ton of small crates other than number padding) there isn't much to cleave down, especially if you have warlocks. If you get the healer buff there is absolutely nothing to cleave down anyway.

[Saferis]

what are you wiping to? (obviously enrage) but if adds die instantly or within like 10 seconds (small boxes, sparks, other small adds) then you don't even need DP or the cleave trinket, Spoils (completely depending on how your guild pulls boxes) is mistaken for an aoe fest encounter when it really is just a single target zerg with short cleave phases. Depending on the other classes in your raid and maybe more importantly the healer buff all the passive cleaves and semi cleaves will take care of all the adds. Also the faster the big "boss" boxes die the less raid damage there will be. Just talking from my own experience obviously but for progress I never specced DP because we had warlocks and whatnot that could handle everything aoe, same deal on garrosh really. If you don't need the aoe, go single target, on garrosh I don't cleave until MC starts. Everyone is so dps horny so why make the fight longer just to pad meters for 10seconds...

We don't often leave the big adds alone when we open the big boxes; often we bring a medium/small add with them in order to be cleaved down. I use DP because otherwise I can't really cleave a secondary add effectively enough by using DS at appropriate HP, HotR and Censure stacking. I guess you're saying it's not really my job to cleave them down, and that I should leave that for others?

[Bonkura]

So, DP isn't that far behind SW on single target, yet on Spoils, where you will almost always have at least two targets to hit, you go for SW? Way to shit on your own damage. Seriously, the only times Ret even can compete on meters is on fights like this, why ruin it?

Cleave trinket however does feel redundant on Spoils. At least with the way we do it by opening as few small boxes as possible. I've tried it myself couple of tries and it was like 1-5% of my damage. Definitely not worth dropping AMP or CD reduction for.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

It's not about competing on damage, it's about killing bosses. You can spec DP and go with cleave trinket on HC Garrosh or Paragons and cleave your fucking heart out and look somewhat good on meters but that doesn't mean the boss dies faster on in a more efficient manner. If you have 3 warlocks and 3 hunters (like my guild has) for HC garrosh aoe is 100% wasted in P1 because they pretty much do it alone so why on earth would you do HotR or DS (unless 4set) to cleave over single target? Same deal for spoils (or any fight), spec into what your raid needs... Don't need aoe? Spec into ST, need aoe? Spec into aoe. It REALLY isn't complicated. Now obviously this is more for progress, nobody cares once it's on farm and you're killing things for the 15th time.

[Maegor]

My guild just got past spoils a couple weeks ago (with input from you guys) and I felt that SW was more effective through the fight. 30s worth of hammers and an extra 12s of increased damage was beneficial. I went the middle road though - used hammers on my ST priority and used aoe attacks (ds instead of tv on the big guys) any time I had more than one thing to hit. Struck a pretty good balance of getting the priority targets down while taking care of the rest of the shit. I tried a few pulls with DP and really didn't notice a bump in damage from the pulls I had SW specced.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

You could apply the same logic on immerseus (or any boss for that matter) adds. If you have warlocks, why should anyone else aoe?

Aoeing and cleaving isn't just to whore damage. The faster things die, the less chance someone will die. Sure you can use that damage on the boss instead, but what gain is that? If you cleave off of key targets (Garrosh in this case, or [insert medium/large golem]) then the loss is very minimal in terms of single target compared to what you get out of it.

Also the spoils argument on 2 big ones is stupid. The reason you wipe to him is not because he is up for too long, but because the golems he spawn increases his damage by 20% per golem. Divine Purpose to kill adds lowers that damage far more than any single damage on him is worth.

The key is to know what actually needs to be cleaved and what doesn't, sure if a spark (or golems) doesn't die in time that's a problem but if they die in time then there's not much point having 6 people cleaving and losing single target just to kill them 5-10sec before the next wave spawns. on Spoils (or any number of bosses) if you're behind you slow down with pulling more, if you're ahead you do what you can to benefit from that. I.E you set a couple people to stop aoe and focus single target instead, I can't count how many times my guild gets the third Farseer (wolf rider healer mob) on HC garrosh because people are aoeing the second wave of adds down to 10%-20% when they don't need to be taken lower than 50%-60%, whenever that happens we lose 2-3% (of max hp on garrosh) in damage. Like I said, it's about knowing and assigning people to the correct thing.

[thegoodrogue]

I might do an AMA on these forums since I am pretty much the premier ret paladin, it will talk about theorycrafting and how to hit your buttons hard to get tons of damage, anyone interested??

[Kalandrios]

I did your AMA for you Ben:

American Medical Association
American Motorcyclist Association
Academy of Model Aeronautics
American Management Association
American Marketing Association

[Bonkura]

It's hard to take you seriously when you start comparing going DP for Spoils with doing it for Garrosh/Klaxxi AND putting on the Cleave trinket. Everything on Spoils should be killed asap and there's few specs that can cleave/AoE better than a Ret while still maintainig their single target damage. The only part of the fight where you want to focus single target for a long time is the Mogu bosses and that's when you should use bloodlust either way. Assuming you have CD's up for that the gain of going SW over DP is very low while you for the rest of the fight will do much better with DP.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

I'm just throwing examples out there Bonkura, if you have 18 ret paladins and everyone have DP and cleave trinket things will die in a blink but you ST will suffer. Now if you had say 10 aoe specced rets and the rest single target you'd kill the big things faster while still killing the rest in an acceptable speed.

Also the single target difference between only focusing on ST if you have SW and usual trinkets vs the ST damage if you're using DP and focusing on cleave is a lot.

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I might do an AMA on these forums since I am pretty much the premier ret paladin, it will talk about theorycrafting and how to hit your buttons hard to get tons of damage, anyone interested??

The more the better.

[ujx]

Will part of your AMA include exploiting Paragons and having to relearn the fight when it gets fixed?

[thegoodrogue]

Will part of your AMA include exploiting Paragons and having to relearn the fight when it gets fixed?

Stop, this is defamation.

[crooklyn]

Will part of your AMA include exploiting Paragons and having to relearn the fight when it gets fixed?

please learn the lore ujx

thegoodrogue was not part of the raid when they exploited paragons

[anaxie]

@Thegoodrogue

This is getting really old really fast.

Stop

[Malthanis]

Okay, seriously. No more provoking other forum users, no more bickering.

[Deleted]

Now that T16 is cross realm enabled, anyone on here who would take a fellow ret paladin for a free SoO 14/14 heroic boost in EU? or is this asking for disaster?

[anaxie]

Mercenary for hire