General Information for Ret Paladins in 4.0

[Smoff]

Hell everybody I have been testing out the aspects of Ret Paladins on the PTR for a better view of how pre-Cata release will be. After Extensive Beta Play I began to worry how well my Ret would perform as soon as 4.0 has gone live. (I apologize ahead of time for my derpy and quickly thrown together paint images)
A few General points: Keep In mind this is Single Target + Stationary Parses
1.You're certainly going to miss the major fun that was using cleaves to buff your numbers, Its gone for good.
2. As Far as Single target dps Ret is not as bad off as I had assumed at 80 (as least in comparison to blues at 85 and still less than Current Live Ret)
3. You Do not have Inquisiton (If Overall damage output is shifted more from Physical to Holy than this will be a much more important spell)

- The spec: This is the spec that I chose to use for level 80


Yes I took talents such a Divine Storm, Rebuke and Repentance in this mainly to reach the 31 Talent point for more so in the ideal that this were an actual raiding spec that would would be using. Rebuke and Repent are fun to have plus Divine Storm to AE.

- Glyphs: Prime would Generally be Templars Verdict/ Seal of Truth / Crusader Strike
- No TV glyph Available/No CS Glyph Available - Used Exorcism/Judgement
- The "Rotation": Once again a Priority, The General Level 80 Rotation is
- TV (@ 3 Holy Power) > CS > Exorcism > Judgement(@ 5 Stacks of Seal of truth) > Hammer of Wrath > Holy Wrath
- Trinket Rating
Using this Gear Set (Gemmed Str - No Reforges Excluding those in a trial where Hit was lacking)



I did several trials between the trinkets Death's Choice (258), Deathbringer's Will (277) and Tiny Abomination in a Jar (277)
Three Four minute parses with each of the Trinket combinations were recorded

- Rounded Average Dps numbers of each parse are shown below. The End value of each parse was cut off at Exactly Four Minutes
(For these parses I had 751 Haste - bringing my Crusader Strike Cooldown to 3.66 Seconds. 3.36 with JotP -)
Taj + DC = 8400 8800 peak
DC + dbw = 8200 9400 peak (DBW Procs: Str - Str - Haste) (Forged DBW Crit to hit, 0.03% off Hit cap)
Taj + DBW =8800 9200 peak (DBW Procs: Str - Crit - Str )

My Trinket rating list:
284 STS > 277 DBW > 277 Taj > 258 DC > 271 STS > 264 DBW > 264 TaJ > 264 WFS

- With the Nerfs to Seal Damage TaJ may look like it falls short of even 258 Death's Choice however the Seal damage + TaJ procs continues to keep it above Certain trinkets. Not only was Seal Damage nerfed but Strengths effect on Ret paladins was aswell (Loss of Divine Strength)so the overall DPS gain from the Trinket is less than live yet still over DC/WFS/Ect




As you can see on Live the amount of Mote Procs are nearly Identical excluding the amount of damage



Chaos Bane - You're Still going to Want to CancelAura Chaos bane. Just like Motes of Anger, Soul Fragments Continue to Stack almost as quickly as on Live
Not only because of the ammount of procs but because Strength has a slight less of an impact on the Ret as it does on live

[Thumos]

Are you using the CS,filler, CS, filler, CS, TV rotation. Or the CS, filler, filler, CS, filler , filler, CS, TV Rotation?

[Rlyskilled]

Interesting but leaves questions. What was your rotation? Did you test Herkuml War Token? I was pulling ~8400 sustained (using CS>Filler>Filler>CS) peaking just over 9k when RNG got real friendly with me with TaJ and the War Token. Unfortunately I don't have DBW or STS. :/

[Sonkie]

Interesting but leaves questions. What was your rotation? Did you test Herkuml War Token? I was pulling ~8400 sustained (using CS>Filler>Filler>CS) peaking just over 9k when RNG got real friendly with me with TaJ and the War Token. Unfortunately I don't have DBW or STS. :/

How much Haste, Mastery, Crit u have?im doing 7.1k sustained on dummy and i fell a bad. i still have 2 agy items

[Nairobi]

I'm in a similar boat gear wise (using 277 cryptmaker instead of SM) and was wondering how you got your values.
I've posted in the 4.0.1 trinket thread about this, but it's not really apples to apples with your tests.
Ive found 277 DBW and 264 TAJ > 277 DBW and 264 WFS > WFS + TAJ. Yet a lot of folks are saying that they're getting motes to stack slower. If that's the case, with the reduced seal dmg, TAJ should lose to an equal ilvl trinket. If motes are NOT nerfed at 80 in 4.0.1, it seems that TAJ is still viable. I still need to get a STS to play with, but until then, this is all I have (outside of a Herkuml, which I just picked up to play with. Pulling approx 8k on a dummy, although keeping stacks up in practice is much different than standing on a dummy).

I also reforged all my gear to Haste > mastery > crit, and was wondering how your tests would compare if you did that as well versus keeping baseline values. I was at 1070 haste, 13.90 mastery, and 27% crit.

[Rlyskilled]

How much Haste, Mastery, Crit u have?im doing 7.1k sustained on dummy and i fell a bad. i still have 2 agy items

That attempt was ~30% haste 26% crit and 12% mastery, my crit was a little low I admit I swapped a little too much over in favor of mastery. Glyphed CS/TV/SoT, flasked, food buffed and using bombs/sapper charges on cooldown.

[Smoff]

How much Haste, Mastery, Crit u have?im doing 7.1k sustained on dummy and i fell a bad. i still have 2 agy items

Im not exactly sure, best to go by the Character sheet, I tried Reforging all my excess crit on gear to haste but the numbers werent as effective. Somewhere around the 800 haste mark, 31% crit and 8% mastery. I just pretty much took my live character and put all strength gear on. Im sure that my Numbers could easily be more efficent if I had taken time to set up my UI. This was done using the Blizzard UI and the garbage holy power bar in the top right corner.

As for the RNG I would say nothing out of the ordinary, multiple Hand of Light Procs per parse and the rotation was more of a double filler in between CS's.

Im going to try gemming and Reforging for as much haste as I can possibly get as soon as I get a chance.

[theredviola]

Would you suggest Herkemi War Token for the extra haste? Or would it be a waist still because of vamp-up/drop off time?

[Smoff]

Would you suggest Herkemi War Token for the extra haste? Or would it be a waist still because of vamp-up/drop off time?

I wouldnt suggest it mainly because Strength still outweighs haste significantly, using a trinket that provides STR will always be an upgrade (and in the case of TAJ, pure damage out put). You're Still going to be gemming strength from what it looks like in cata However I would encourage players to test out speccing into Seals of the Pure over Arbiter of the light then Reforging all possible crit on your gear into haste.

[Thumos]

Does Seals of the Pure increase Censure damage?

[Badpaladin]

It should.

[Rlyskilled]

I'm hearing a lot of "gem haste, gem haste" in other topics and I'm not sure I entirely agree.
I'm actually sitting in a good spot at the moment with +5% spell haste and JotP. Gemmed pure strength outside of a Nightmare Tear to activate my meta I get a 3.17s CS cooldown without going out of my way for haste. 2.97 with gloves activated. The only reforging I did was extra hit to haste and some expertise to cap.. naturally capped on live, removed gems and glyphed SoT, needed to make up for the loss. As you can see I haven't seen a Skeleton Lord's Circle in months and swapped to Ring of Rotting Sinew from my Seal of Many Mouths.



My trinket and ring procced when I judged the dummy so my base stats are on the bottom right if anyone's curious. I also had kings and removed it.

[Nairobi]

Mind quickening = TSD meta?

All the fuss about haste isn't solely about getting to 3sec CS, altho that does wonders for our HoPo incoming and rotation smoothing (ie CS > fill, repeat) and makes Zealotry/wings suck less (literally spam CS, then TV for 20 seconds). It also affects censure/SoT (around 22% of our damage) linearly, yields more exorcisms through AoW, more TVs via mastery, faster mana regen, more SoC damage. That said, haste does a lot, and 1080 (the magic number to "soft-cap" 3sec CD on CS with raid buffs) is pretty easy to get without going out of your way.

Going OVER that cap (ie DBW proc, engi gloves, heroism, etc) is NOT a net DPS loss by any means. It is, however, a DPS increase at a decreasing rate.

As for the crit vs mastery debate, I did some napkin math on the EJ thread and at our gear levels, crit will win out over mastery at a rate of about 1.8:1 still.

[Rlyskilled]

Mind Quickening is the Shadow Priest's +5% spell haste passive buff.

And while haste effects a lot, strength effects everything. I want to see the math where gemming str/haste is better than gemming pure strength. If 14 or 16 strength and 10 haste is better than 20 strength until a certain point that's fine I just wanted to make a point that we're currently getting +spell haste buffs and it's a nice bump.

I suppose I really did lean on the CS cooldown but I thought it was a good example with what I had. If I had a Windfury buff it'd be easier to talk about attack speed, heh. Anyone that knows me, knows I'm cripplingly terrible at math. -_-

Str/haste > Str stacking just doesn't make sense to me, but if there are solid numbers supporting it, then I will concede.

[Nairobi]

Mind Quickening is the Shadow Priest's +5% spell haste passive buff.

Derp. I forgot that moonkin/sp give haste now.

[Simca]

The huge irony with this shift towards haste is that everyone was saying that Haste was going to be the new ArP and that it was a horrible stat.

Since that point, nothing significant has changed about Haste. I guess the community has just done better math now, but either way it's amusing to see people shift in the opposite direction.

[Rlyskilled]

The huge irony with this shift towards haste is that everyone was saying that Haste was going to be the new ArP and that it was a horrible stat.

Since that point, nothing significant has changed about Haste. I guess the community has just done better math now, but either way it's amusing to see people shift in the opposite direction.

That's the great thing about having a community of people you can talk things over with and prove or disprove theorycraft.

[Badpaladin]

The huge irony with this shift towards haste is that everyone was saying that Haste was going to be the new ArP and that it was a horrible stat.

Since that point, nothing significant has changed about Haste. I guess the community has just done better math now, but either way it's amusing to see people shift in the opposite direction.

That was before we knew that "haste effects" really meant FUCKING HASTE EVERYWHEERRREEE. If it was haste rating alone, you'd need such a ridiculously high amount of it to get to 3.0s that it pushed haste's value down extremely low.

[Ronark]

Str/haste > Str stacking just doesn't make sense to me, but if there are solid numbers supporting it, then I will concede.

As said in another thread- Using Redcape's L85 values for STR of 1 and Haste of .27, you would need a socket bonus of 8 STR or more for 10 STR 10 Haste to overtake 20 STR.

[Rlyskilled]

As said in another thread...

Yeah, sorry, I haven't had the time to scour threads lately but if it's been said it's been said. I don't think sticking level 85 values to level 80 gear is the most.. accurate.. way to go when you're talking exact numbers but it seems to suggest in most cases you're gemming strength over strength/haste which is what I believe anyway. Heh.