Holy Avenger vs Divine Purpose

[Deleted]

Interesting in hearing opinions of HA vs DP for prot paladins. Specifically the dps gains for each rather than holy power generation. I've been a huge fan of HA for the longest time and always felt it strong with how it can be lined up with heroism/crit banner/stormlash and such, but lately i've been seeing a bunch of people around the forums who seem to be fans of DP. I'm approaching 18k haste and wondering if there's any information around regarding the dps viability of both talents.

Also inb4 firefly tries to sell me the benefits of SW, I know I know

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

HA gives you controlled bursts of full ShoR coverage, DP gives you a slightly higher uptime% over-all above ~30% haste, but you can't control when it happens.

[alucardtnuoc]

I use to run DP, because i didn't like managing another CD, so i was being lazy....

But now i am running HA and love it, not only is it great defensive CD, it's great offensive too.

[Deleted]

But remember the benefits of S...

Also inb4 firefly tries to sell me the benefits of SW, I know I know

Oh

Okay, let me chime in here. For me, SW and HA falls into the same boat, so whatever floats your boat is fine. You comparing HA vs DP is the same as me comparing SW vs DP, other than that, SW is naturally more awesome and increases your rank from Captain Awesome to Major Awesome.

My reasoning this tier has simply been. Do I need an extra CD for a specific moment of this fight? Yes? Go SW/HA. No? Go DP. It is not really harder than that.

I gotta admit that I have been very lazy this tier and have not even bothered changing talents a lot of the time. Confession bear time here. I have played with DP and SoL (byebye LAotL) for the past few raid resets. In the beginning of this tier I just to run with LAotL on all fights except Ji-Kun where I used SoL. Now I am just to lazy to change since I can do all fights I do with LAotL almost as good with SoL, though not vice versa. Same goes for DP, pure laziness and I have come to actually like it. I used to use SW(readas HA) primarly for Durumu in the first week, the only fight where it was really really needed (mostly since I was going into ToT extremely undergeared with no loot luck).

So it is really as simple as that. Ask yourself, do you need the extra cooldown and base your decision for that.

Personally I would say that the extra cooldown (HA/SW) is great for:

Horridon - Last phase
Tortos - All talents work well here
Megaera - (only SW not HA)
Durumu - Colorblind mode
Primordius - All talents work well here
Dark Animus - For the pull, if you can handle the pull without CDs, use DP
Iron Qon HC - For when the puppies want some love. Normal use DP.

Fights not listed I would use DP normally.
With reservation for missing something very obvious and making an insanely stupid mistake since I am kinda tired atm, 4:30 AM.

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 02:43 AM ----------

I'd like to use sanc wrath more because in concept it's my favourite, but its aids right now.

Gotta agree with you here. A lot of the fights are balanced very well for DP this tier. There is simply not a need for that extra CD.
Though in the same fashion, HA is large HIV aswell. Only really Horridon and arguably Durumu + Iron Qon on heroic that really favors HA over any other talent.
I think it is funny that some fights that would normally favor HA over SW because of the burst duration does not really do it because of the high portion of magical damage, such as on Primordius HC.

[Deleted]

Hmm, gonna avoid making this into a SW vs HA thread since this was about HA vs DP (or by extension SW/HA vs DP)
Just gonna say shortly, I totally get your point, completely valid one. I have used HA from time to time myself. Using WoG during HA makes it very strong as you mention for those big spikes, that, the duration and the CD is the benefits of HA. The benefits of SW comes when you can enter the CD with 5 HoPo allowing you to keep SotR up for 25s in a row with 20% healing aswell. Weighing those against eachother has to be done on a boss to boss basis, and what you said about HA really only applies on a few fights this tier (and there HA shines), making DP an extremely excellent choice on several fights this tier.

DP rocks this tier. Really love it, used to hate it. Expecting to continue using DP next tier aswell.


and SW does not cripple haste. You reach 2s judgement at the same time as 3s on cs. Not sure why you would want to reah 1.5s J since your GCD is 1s

[Deleted]

I guess it's all situational. These days I play more like a dps than a tank so I'm a fan of the burst HA provides. It's always seemed to me like it's the better choice in a purely damage sense than SW/DP though I have no math to back that.

On a fight to fight basis I'd have to consider the "Do i need a cooldown" element, though I feel like HA is strong on tank swap fights as well as it lets you have a greater SotR uptime when you actually need it. Whereas something like the Primordius patchwerk-style tactic might favour DP for the greater coverage.

I guess I really fail to see the benefits of SW outside the 20% healing. HA provides better SotR uptime and seems (Captain Anecdotal to the rescue) to also provide more dps. What reasons do you have for liking it over the other two options?

[celinamuna]

I guess it's all situational. These days I play more like a dps than a tank so I'm a fan of the burst HA provides. It's always seemed to me like it's the better choice in a purely damage sense than SW/DP though I have no math to back that.

On a fight to fight basis I'd have to consider the "Do i need a cooldown" element, though I feel like HA is strong on tank swap fights as well as it lets you have a greater SotR uptime when you actually need it. Whereas something like the Primordius patchwerk-style tactic might favour DP for the greater coverage.

I guess I really fail to see the benefits of SW outside the 20% healing. HA provides better SotR uptime and seems (Captain Anecdotal to the rescue) to also provide more dps. What reasons do you have for liking it over the other two options?

It's doubles the AW dps benefit (and seeing how out CS / Judgement are the weakest DPA abilities we have, +20% in other places is better), it turns AW also into a decent CD with + healing taken, and also high HP generation (if you do choose to spam Judgement)

[Deleted]

It's doubles the AW dps benefit (and seeing how out CS / Judgement are the weakest DPA abilities we have, +20% in other places is better), it turns AW also into a decent CD with + healing taken, and also high HP generation (if you do choose to spam Judgement)

It's only 50% longer, not double. Also Judgment does more damage than Holy Wrath does it not? I guess I can see the benefit on multiple targets with the consistent boost to AS and consecration, but it seems like the ability to push out so many SotRs with HA makes it the more powerful choice for dealing single target damage.

Edit: Scratch that, i'm using the out of date Holy Wrath tooltip, never mind!

[Deleted]

I guess I really fail to see the benefits of SW outside the 20% healing. HA provides better SotR uptime and seems (Captain Anecdotal to the rescue) to also provide more dps. What reasons do you have for liking it over the other two options?

Edit Disclaimer: Oh god, made this into another SW/HA thread DP rocks!


To make it simple.
There is 3 reason to use a defensive cooldown.
1. Planned out ahead for a big period of damage / damage burst
2. Oh shit button
3. Throughput

When you have a cooldown like SW or HA, you are most likely using them planned out, like "Okay, boss is going to go into a rampage in 10 seconds and hit me like a bloody truck and I need a big cooldown". You are far less likely to use it as an "oh shit" button. If you are using them for throughput, DP is better anyway.

There is 1 exception to throughput, and that is fights where you get artifically increased uptime due to tank swaps and similar. Say you have a boss that does not have any high damage phases at all, just hits you the same all the time (a.k.a. no big damage periods to prepare for), and you have tank swaps or phases where the boss do not attack you. Say you got a tank swap every minute. That would make HA extremely good since you would have it up almost always when you are actually tanking. Though these are the exceptions, not the rule. A lot of the times even with tank swaps it falls behind, it becomes a matter of using common sense.

In case you are using it as an oh-shit button, HA pulls ahead of SW ofc since it gives the biggest benefit being unprepared. However, in my opinion, you will never use HA as an oh shit button, and here is why. Since we already established that you did not take HA for throughput, in that case you would have DP as it pulls ahead both in SotR uptime and DPS and HPS. You did not take it as an oh-shit button.
"This boss randomly spikes me down insanely fast, I better spec into HA so I can react to the spike", said no tank ever.
So right now we established that you did not pick HA for oh-shit even thoug hit pulls ahead of SW in that regard, you simply dont pick it as that since you got AD and LoH anyway that fits that role better.

This leaves the last option, you picked HA for a predictable period of damage.
And that is the thing with predictable periods of damage, they are predictable. If you can predict the damage, and you are atleast a semi decent tank, it is pretty safe assume that you bank up 5 HoPo for that predictable burst period. If you have saved up 5 HoPo, chaining SotR with SW with a perfect rotation will allow you to keep SotR up with 100% uptime between 15 to 25 seconds depending on your haste level (from 0 to 50% haste). This is disregarding GC procs. So lets say 20 seconds to make it easy.

What this means, is if that predictable burst damage last shorter than 20 seconds, you have two choices.
1. 100% sotr uptime with 20% healing taken increase
2. 100% sotr uptime
Not really a hard choice. After those 20 seconds pass, SotR will still be strong, and arguably on par or just slightly behind for the remaining 10 seconds. I would say that if the damage is insanely high, it falls behind due to reliablity but if the damage is healable it pulls ahead due to the healing taken increase.
Back in 5.0 I made a very nicely (sarcastic) drawn picture to illustrate this effect. This picture is presuming 0% haste.



Basically the red line illustrates SotR being up, the green line illustrates SotR + Healing increase being up or just healing increase.
For the first 15 seconds (0% haste), SW clearly pulls ahead.
The blue line shows how it would differ with SW at 50% haste.

So that is the reason why SW individually is a stronger defensive cooldown than HA presuming you can prepare for the damage intake.
However, there are 2 exceptions here.

1. SW runs on a 3 minute CD, HA runs on a 2 minute CD. On some fights, 2 min naturally synergize better. This was far less of an issue in T14 when SW had 95s CD, and later 125s CD. really sad they changed that. So now, you have to think if the 2 min CD fits better. On a fight like Durumu, the colorblind phases are exactly 3 min apart, so it is kinda awkward to have HA there as you will delay its cooldown, so there either SW or DP feels like the optimal choice, even though HA is not bad. SW ofc gets weaker since you have an MS debuff, however you normally clear your stacks in the colorblind phase, aswell as the fact that it is a lot of magical damage if you are solo soaking a beam.

2. HA has a longer duration. If the duration of the damage nuke is longer than SWs duration, HA pulls ahead normally. Empress last tier, Horridon HC P5(P6? whatever, last burn anyway), Iron Qon HC when all quillens land etc. Still while this is normally true, if the duration is just slightly longer than SW, you can chain SW with a GoAK afterwards and depending on how the fight works, even though the duration favors HA, it could still favor SW, though more likely to favor HA.

HA also got the benefit of generating a surplus of holy power, so that if the duration of the nuke is not so long, say only a 30 second nuke phase, then you will not have to use all your holy power on SotR, you can actually afford to throw a WoG in between the SotR if you need it. You can probably only get off 2-3 WoGs anyway under a HA, so it is not insanely strong, so it will also depend on the fight. SW provides a very nice solid heal increase, so it becomes a matter of straight heal % vs burst heal with some CD (to build up BoG). If the duration is short, you can also use WoG with SW. That is more awkward though.

So, it becomes a question of.

1. How important is throughput (is DP great?)
2. How important is it to have a defensive CD (do I need SW/HA?)
3. How long is the damage nuke (HA or SW?)
4. How frequent is the damage nuke (HA or SW?)
5. Is the a large part of the damage physical or magical? (HA or SW?)

To bring up some practical example. Lets take a look at a few HC fights from some random paladins. (not cherry picking at all)

Tortos HC
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/v...?s=3049&e=3412


What you will notice is the very frequent short spikes. Does not take a genius to figure out that it is the bats. Now this is a log of a paladin solo tanking, if you are not, then you have to look at your own logs and see your own damage in-take. I am only trying to get you into the mindset right now, so what tactic they use is irrelevant. You should look at your own logs and see your own patterns. But for now lets look at this guys.
So we see extremely high spikes during bats and very low damage outside of that. The fact that the damage in take is extremely low outside of the bats, tells out that we can safely afford to bank up 5 HoPo before the bats, as damage outside of that is really irrelevant.

This is reaching a border where it may get interesting, where the time between the bats is almost short enough for HA to cover 2 bat waves, sadly, it is not so you will only get to cover 1 bat wave, which is very short with HA. SW would reach the exact same result even better result at covering said bat wave. You would however get to use 1 more HA in this fight than SW, so SW would only cover 2 bats and HA 3. So it would become a matter of how you use your other CDs. The thing to not here though, is that you got a total of 7 spikes, all equal in proportion. So in this case, DP should really be considered, since while it will not do the best job at protection you from 1 wave of bats, it will help you equally on all 7 bat waves, so DP is actually quite strong here. It all boils down to how you use your CDs. If you feel like you can rotate your CDs liberally on all waves, DP is a clear winner. If you feel like you can cover 5 waves good with CDs, SW pulls ahead over HA. If you do not think you can cover 5 waves, maybe only 4 with CDs, HA pulls ahead over SW. It is that eternal balance, there is no cheatsheet here. It depends on how you do the fight.

Lets take a quick look at another fight. Horridon HC? Again! How this guilds tactic works is irrelevant. Looking at his specific situation, so you have to look at your own since it may differ from his.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=4612&e=5298


What we will see on his damage in-take, is that in the beginning it is extremely low, the first 7 minutes is irrelevant to his talent choice. If the fight was only the first 7 minutes he would probably be using DP as damage in-take is not high enough to warrant a defensive CD. Though looking at the end of the fight, he takes a shit ton of damage for a long time when the last burn phase starts. SW would not really be optimal here since the duration of the high damage phase is to long. HA would be a beast here since it would help so much for the first minute or so of the phase
The phase is arguably long enough though for DP to make sense. So in this case it would boil down between HA and DP, do you want to gimp yourself in the first 7 minutes of the fight to get that extra CD to make the first minute of P5 easier, or do you keep DP since it works great in the first phase and the second phase is long enough for DP to actually make sense to use. Again, looking at this guys logs, how you do the fight may differ the results in your talent choice. So for this guy, there is really no right or wrong answer, both DP and HA would work. SW would not be the best choice since the phase is to long.


So that is the basic thought process. The SW vs HA was easier last tier when we had reduced CD on AW, aswell as SW used to be a bigger damage increase than HA, which it is not now. So SW really lost some ground, but imo so did HA since DP is just beast mode right now.
So SW vs HA boils down to, shorter, stronger cooldown on longer CD vs longer weaker cooldown on shorter CD. Whichever fits the fight best wins. SW just works so nice with your self healing, as you get 20% increased healing done and 20% increased healing taken, basically increasing your SoI by 44%.

As I mentioned earlier, I am mostly using DP, it is so great. I hear so many people say that DP is unreliable, the thing for me, I do not really think it is. When I get procs, especially double procs, it gives me time to regenerate holy power. Say I am at 3 holy power, use SotR, proc, use again, proc, use again. I now have a 9 consecutive seconds of SotR. During these 9 secs I had time to build up to 4 holy power again. Since I had SotR up for 9 sec I am probably at pretty good health allowing me to take a few full hits without reducing them to let my HoPo build up to 5+1 (having 5 HoPo + HoPo generator of CD). Now I can once again reapply a 6 second SotR (and if one of those procs I have time to build up HoPo again) etc etc. This is why I just love DP, that each proc gives such a good ability to bank up HoPo.

I realise this is very long so lets hope it is not too much text. Firefly dropping the wall of text bombs at 7am............ I should probably sleep.

[Deleted]

Makes sense. I agree with the strengths of SW on tortos but I've taken to using HA there anyway as i can cover every bat wave by rotating around HA/guardian/painsupp/ironbark+barrier which makes the bat tanking somewhat trivial. I'll have to think about figuring out how to fit SW in there as I'm sure the extra consecrate damage would be of great benefit. In regards to HA vs DP - do we know for sure that DP provides a greater dps benefit than HA does? This was kind of the main thing I was wondering about when I created this as I've seen some conflicting opinions going around.

[Deleted]

Well as I said on Tortos, I think SW / HA draws pretty much equal but DP arguably being the strongest.
Like I said, SW was incredibly strong last tier. This tier DP is extremely strong. So SW/HA is more an oddball now.
I was just trying to repeat the point that was made for SW last tier, however SW fits worse into this tier, and is not as insanely OP now that we dont have lower cooldown on wings with retri 4p. SW now is more something to keep in mind rather than a standard talent. DP should be standard now while swapping in HA/SW intelligently depending on boss and your strategies.

I am in now way trying to sell that SW is the go to talent this tier, it is not, that is DP, no argument. Just saying that it is not as useless as people think (and that last tier it was really the go to talent), and that for the fights that you need an extra cooldown, a.k.a. not DP, the choice between HA and SW is not as easy as 90% of the people think.

In regards to HA vs DP - do we know for sure that DP provides a greater dps benefit than HA does? This was kind of the main thing I was wondering about when I created this as I've seen some conflicting opinions going around.

No straight answer to this. Depends on vengeance levels. If you spend 75% o the fight at 50k vengeance then jump up to 200k vengeance every 2 minutes for 30 seconds and you can time HA with that, then HA would probably pull ahead, but if you are not using HA at your vengeance peaks, or you have pretty steady vengeance, than DP pulls ahead yes.

[Deleted]

I was assuming a steady vengeance, should have noted that. Obvious enough that HA is far burstier.
On a random note my tortos graph looks somewhat different to the one you linked (barring a mess up with my shell dropping and bats leeching at one point and tanking 2 waves at the end during the burn). HA lingering onto non-bat phases and the cooldown rotation we have set up seems to smooth the damage a bit.



Obviously it's mostly useless and I'd actually be tempted to try something else if our tactic wasn't reliant on a 2 minute HA at the moment.

[Deleted]

Well yes, that is exactly my point, everyones graphs looks different. I just took some random guy from WoL. Your graph look very smooth actually except for the last few seconds. Though if you look at the other guys log, he never reached over 60k DTPS, so even though his logs look way spikier, they were not.
The reason your graph looks different is because your upper limit is over 100k DTPS while his was 60k DTPS.

If you are a working tactic, then there is no need to change it, just keep on going.

To bad your tactic revolves around HA though, really like DP on Tortos, it works great with bats.

[Deleted]

Well yes, that is exactly my point, everyones graphs looks different. I just took some random guy from WoL. Your graph look very smooth actually except for the last few seconds. Though if you look at the other guys log, he never reached over 60k DTPS, so even though his logs look way spikier, they were not.
The reason your graph looks different is because your upper limit is over 100k DTPS while his was 60k DTPS.

If you are a working tactic, then there is no need to change it, just keep on going.

To bad your tactic revolves around HA though, really like DP on Tortos, it works great with bats.

Noted the upper limit, hence the mention of the shell dropping (the spikes close to 80k because of bat leeching) and the tanking of 2 waves at the end. Not sure if I could work around using DP though, I'd have to spend some time plotting all of the cooldowns we have available and see if I have enough to fit every 45s.

[Deleted]

DP away

[Prokk]

I believe the talent choice is based on personal experience and opinion. Both HA and DP have their strong points. For me, if I know I will have 100% uptime on the boss, I have benefitted more from using DP over HA many a times. Of course, at my haste level it is more beneficial. Where a tank swap is needed, I always use HA for that extra burst/CD. For example on H Bore-idon, DP works great and H Turtle. For H Animus, HA is great when swapping back on the boss. H Rei Shen, (see what I did there), I soak a Decapitate, swap to the boss and pop HA... great uptime on SoTR and good burst damage with lots of vengeance.

It's all personal preference, methinks.

[Nairobi]

Just to chime in, as I'm one of the largest advocates of HA since t14 started, I will concede that I have been using DP more and more, with growing levels of excitement about it.

I still swear by HA on fights, as discussed above at length, where there are long, high-damage periods (specifically looking at you HC Horridon and HC IQ final phases). I also really like it on tank-swap fights like JinRohk, where I can cover pretty much all my tanking time with HA. But I've been trying DP on more fights, and really enjoying it on Tortos, Primo, and Twins. Will probably try it on Durumu this week, even though I really enjoy the "self-sufficiency" of AW/HA after the maze ends to allow people to go handle beams/walls.

I felt one strong suit of HA last tier was the synergy it had with UbS at lower haste levels (i.e. t14 normals) to ensure that bubble/LOH got full CD redux, and that you could bookend HA periods with DivProt. However, with haste levels where they are currently this tier, DivPurp allows full reduction anyhow, so that lost some ground. I will concede that DP seems to be the "default" talent with moderate haste levels, with HA being the "take if you need" option this tier.

Still don't like SW. Doesn't play well with attainable haste, and I've always been underwhelmed by the talent in terms of both offensive and defensive utility as Prot.

[Nanaboostme]

Holy Avenger

because you get Ashbringer

[Lethora]

Well, for me it's DP for Horridon, Council, Tortos, Megaera, Twins since I have almost 100% tank time there.
For the fights where I don't have to tank for extended period of time (like Jin-rokh with me taking 3 out of 4 tank throws just because it happened that way during learning, obvious Ji-Kun with almost 1 minute of inactivity, Durumu/IQ - we still 2 tank it because other RL wants to be safe on tank side, and the rest, since they require tank swap in some form) it's HA. Since it covers most of the time that boss spends hitting on me.

[Nairobi]

Snipped from the main Prot thread, because relevant:

Ok, so....still puzzled. Here's last night's HC Tortos logs for me: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-cd...?s=4378&e=4758
ShotR uptime of 63.9%. That's hardcapped Exp, 15001 haste and using DP, on boss only fulltime (lolmonk-kite). It's as close to tank-n-spank as I can get, and aside from stomp stuns, I had full boss uptime.

I'm just not seeing how posters can be getting 70-75% given what average gear levels are (without extremely lucky AND consistent procs of DP/GC, anyway). I had 26 DP and 16 GC procs. Maybe I'm just fundamentally missing something, though....

On a related note, raid last week (and this week) has been absolute shite. We've been smashing our heads into Primo HC for almost 90 attempts, after downing Durumu in ~30 and Twins in 4. Between attendance issues and an overwhelming feeling of embarrassment for our shitty progress, we ended up wiping for like 45 mins to HC Megaera, so I ended up going back to HA on Meg (and keeping it on JiKun and Durumu) instead of DP, as I was getting lower uptimes with DP than I was with HA still. Small sample size, sure, but do I just need more haste? Or was it bad luck? I still like DP on a few fights, but not really digging it as the "go-to" talent based off of what I've seen the past few weeks when taking it.

PS - If anyone has any tips on italicized rant (specifically Primordius HC), please let me know before I put a bullet in my head on Thursday.