Ask Coriel: Improving a Retribution Paladin

Firelight, from Steamwheedle Cartel, writes in:

As a raiding retribution paladin i'm really looking forward to 2.3 and the upgraded DPS it brings for me!

I wondered if you could take a look at my gear and tell me what you thinked about it, and what i could do to improve! Obvious upgrades for my are t4 shoulders and legs, and i'm only 5 nethers away from upgrading my chest armour as well.

Being one of the only ret-raiders in my server (that i know of) i've been finding it hard to gain acceptance from my peers who just whisper about me behind my back (retnoob etc) so i'm just wanting to be accepted by being able to do more dps!

You will need to change your talents once 2.3 comes out. I would suggest taking some points from Benediction and finishing off Fanaticism and Improved Blessing of Might (Build). Also, if you don't need Blessing of Kings, you could take 3 points from Protection and put them in the new Pursuit of Justice (Build - the last point goes in Pursuit of Justice). I'm a fan of speed increases as less time running equals more time DPSing. If you need to keep BoK for raiding, consider putting the Cat's Grace enchant on your boots.

On gems and enchants, I think you are putting a little too much weight on critical strike rating/agility, and not enough on Strength. Your crit rating is nice and high, but your AP is a bit low. Also, always go for Strength instead of pure Attack Power, because you get bonuses from Divine Strength and Blessing of Kings.

As well, once 2.3 comes out you're going to need some more hit rating, and you'll get 4% extra crit from talents and racials. Not to mention that Vengeance will last twice as long, so you can keep it up with a lower crit rating.

I would go:

Red slots = Bold Living Ruby (+8 Str)
Yellow slots = Rigid Dawnstone (+8 Hit) until you have 95 hit rating, then Inscribed Noble Topaz (+4 Str/+4 Crit)
Blue slots = Sovereign Nightseye (+4 Str/+6 Sta)
Meta = the one you have is good, but you might also want to consider Relentless Earthstorm Diamond (+12 Agi/+3% critical damage)

As for enchants, you look pretty good. Put a +6 all stats on your chest. If you can squeeze out an extra +16 hit rating (maybe from gems), consider using the Lower City head enchant. It will give you a little more AP and some more mana.

To be honest, you look pretty solid already. You just need to tweak things when 2.3 hits, and I personally would place more emphasis on Strength over crit rating when gemming.

Also, and I'm just throwing this out as an option, if you switched from armorsmithing to weaponsmithing, you would get access to some really nice weapons. But that's a big change, and you do have a decent weapon in Hammer of the Naaru, and you may not have a backup chestpiece.

Any other advice readers--especially Retribution Paladins--would give Firelight?

The Paladin Community

Looking over the comments on Threat Reduction for Retribution, it seems that people on the outside don't really understand the paladin community. You see comments like "First you asked for X, and now you're asking for Y?"

The paladin community is the most fractured of all the classes. There are four main factions: Holy, Protection, Retribution, and Hybrid. The different factions want different--often opposite--things and that leads to the confusing nature of paladin feedback. Each side generally champions one tree, and does not really care about the others. The only exception are the Hybrids, who generally support all three trees, but oppose efforts to overspecialize them.

The next complication is that the Holy faction is at war with the Retribution faction. Retribution derides Holy as "healbots", and Holy calls Retribution "retnoobs". If I can indulge in some armchair psychology, the reason both these factions are at each other's throats is because a paladin is both melee and healing/support. Protection and Hybrids still try do both melee and support, though in different ways. But Holy gave up melee, and Retribution gave up healing, and by attacking each other, they try to convince themselves that what they sacrificed was not of value.

So for example, the Retribution faction asked for threat reduction and increased DPS in raids. The Holy faction opposes out of habit. Protection doesn't really care, and the Hybrids are generally supportive.

Then Retribution gets permanent threat reduction, and the Retribution faction is happy. However, the way the threat reduction is implemented hurts the Hybrid ideal, and thus the Hybrids are the paladins objecting.

The final complication is race. Alliance paladins generally view the Blood Elves as interlopers, and the Blood Elves are more than happy to antagonize them back. As well, a large percentage of vocal Blood Elf paladins are Horde raiders who rerolled after seeing the effect of Alliance paladin healers. Where the Alliance paladins were sort of "pushed" to the healing side when they started raiding, the Blood Elves embraced it from the very beginning, and are often the most militant of the Holy faction. Ironically, the Horde-specific Seal of Blood is extremely good for Retribution, a fact which seriously annoys the predominantly Alliance Retribution faction.

So that's a quick guide to the paladin community, and why different paladins complain about different buffs/nerfs. I belong to the Hybrid faction, and thus I'm generally supportive of all three trees, but not of talents that overemphasize one aspect of the paladin at the expense of the others.

Question about Raiders

I'm thinking through an idea for my next post, which which will be relatively complex. But I want to make sure that I am not missing a possibility somewhere, so I'm asking for feedback on a couple of underlying assumptions.

Assumption 1: 25-man raiders are a small minority of the playerbase.

Assumption 2: A disproportionate amount of development time is spent creating content for them.

Can anyone refute these assumptions?

Also, assuming 1 and 2 are correct, why is it worthwhile for Blizzard to create content usable only by such a small portion of the player base?

I have my own ideas about that, and I've written about them before, but I'd like to see if anyone has any other reasons that I may not have considered.

Edit: For reference, here is the last article I wrote on the subject.

Threat Reduction

Blizzard is giving Retribution Paladins threat reduction:

After further discussion and testing we’ve decided to add threat reduction deep in the paladin's retribution tree. Fanaticism will now reduce threat caused by all actions by 6/12/18/24/30%, in addition to its current effect.

It seems like Blizzard is equalizing all the melee DPS specs at 30% threat reduction. Rogues, Feral Druids, Fury Warriors, Enhancement Shamans, and now Retribution Paladins will all have the same level of built-in threat reduction.

The only negative is that this talent will make it very hard for Retribution Paladins to tank or off-tank. So much for my Ret OT build. To be honest, I'm not sure I really approve of building such a large, permanent disadvantage into a talent. It seems against the spirit of talents.

In general, a paladin with talent points is always equal to or better than a 0/0/0 paladin at every task. This holds true for pretty much every class. But now it's possible that a Ret paladin will be worse than a 0/0/0 paladin at tanking. And that doesn't really seem right to me. Maybe the increased damage from the other Retribution talents will make up for the loss of threat.

I mean, Shadowform is an awesome talent for Shadow Priests. Would it still be a good talent if it was permanent? 99% of the time a Shadow Priest will be in Shadowform, but being able to turn it off is a lifesaver for that 1%.

Still, from a pure DPS point of view, this is a massive buff. Now, just kill Seal of Vengeance and give all paladins Seal of Blood, and Retribution will be in solid shape.

Then Blizzard can start work on the harder task: fixing Holy.

Hit Caps Post Updated

I've updated my Hit Caps for Bosses post to reflect the Expertise changes in 2.3. Take a look and tell me if you see anything that should be changed.

Also, if anyone can point me to the definitive Dodge cap number, that would be greatly appreciated.

2.3 Patch Notes

The 2.3 Patch Notes are out. Some first impressions follow.

Expertise: We have added a new stat and associated rating called expertise and expertise rating. Expertise rating converts to expertise at the same rate that weapon skill rating formerly converted at. Each point of expertise reduces the chance for your attacks to be dodged or parried by 0.25%.

Weapon Skill: All items and abilities that granted weapon skill have been changed. In most cases, they were converted to expertise or expertise rating. Ranged attacks do not benefit from expertise, so ranged weapon skill has generally been replaced by critical strike bonuses or hit bonuses. In a few cases, talents have been changed to other effects to avoid granting players excessive amounts of expertise

Bah, I have to go rewrite my +Hit Caps guide. Basically, this removes the disparity between the first 5 points of weapon skill and the subsequent points, which is a good thing. Hit caps will generally rise across the board for physical damage classes. At first glance, expertise rating is roughly equal to hit rating for melee dps classes, and twice as good for tanks. It also raises the possibility of capping out both hit rating and expertise rating, and always hitting/critting the mob.

Healing: Almost all items and enchantments that provide bonus healing now also provide a smaller number (approximately 1/3) of bonus spell damage. There are a few items and enchantments where this was not possible, such as random-stat items and Zul'Gurub enchantments, but this is now the case on virtually all other items.

Awesome! Simply awesome. I can solo in my raiding epics, and even add extra damage in between heals. Heck, I might even be able to disenchant my spelldamage set now and free up a entire bag worth of bank space!

Blessing of Light: Lower ranks of Flash of Light and Holy Light are now properly penalized when used with this Blessing.

This nukes downranking Holy Light pretty hard. Which is how it should be. In my opinion, costs are what maintain balance, and messing around with costs leads to degenerate gameplay. To be honest, I think Blizzard should do away with down-ranking entirely, not even offering it as an option. I think the game would be better for it.

Cleanse and Purify range increased to 40 yards.

Another great change. No more healing and then finding out you're out of range of a Cleanse.

Crusader Strike (Retribution) cooldown reduced from 10 to 6 seconds.
Exorcism mana cost reduced.
Hammer of Wrath mana cost reduced.
Holy Wrath mana cost reduced.
Improved Seal of the Crusader (Retribution) benefits folded into the base spell. This talent now gives the benefits of the Sanctified Crusader talent instead.
Judgement of Light: The combat log will now show the mana gained from rank 5 of this ability as Judgement of Light instead of Seal of Light.
Pursuit of Justice (Retribution) is now 3 ranks and increases movement speed by 5/10/15% and also reduces the chance you'll be hit by spells by 1/2/3%.
Sanctified Crusader (Retribution) renamed Sanctified Seals, which now increases your chance to critically hit with all spells and melee attacks by 1/2/3% and reduces the chance your Seals will be dispelled by 33/66/100%.
Vengeance (Retribution) duration increased from 15 to 30 seconds.
Vindication (Retribution) frequency and duration increased and now reduces all attributes by 5/10/15%, not just Strength and Agility.

Various Retribution buffs that seem aimed at PvP for some reason. I'm sure that it will help there, but threat reduction seems a curious omission, given that DPS warriors and Enhancement Shamans got extra threat reduction.

Weapon Expertise (Protection) renamed Combat Expertise, now increases expertise by 1/2/3/4/5 and total Stamina by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Solid change. I predict that the standard Protection build will drop Reckoning for Weapon Expertise. As well, with the changes to Improved Seal of the Crusader and Pursuit of Justice, the new challenge will be bleeding enough points from Protection to fill out Retribution.

Corpses that belong to someone in your party, but that you cannot loot will say in the corpse mouseover who has loot rights on that corpse. This will help skinners who want to know who to talk to in order to skin their corpse, as well as master looters when special loot drops on a normal monster. Everyone will then see that there is a monster that the master looter has loot rights on.

It comes late, but no raid shall ever be faced again with an unlooted Core Hound. Let us mourn the passing of the defining experience of Molten Core: "Loot the Hound!"

Lowered the fireball damage of Defias Pillagers.

Their unholy reign of terror has finally come to an end.

Elite mobs outside of pre-Burning Crusade dungeons have been changed to non-elite.

The burning question of 2.3: Has Hogger been nerfed?

Other than that there's a lot of UI cleanup changes, new low level content, a new 10-man, and guild banks. There's also some crazy Arms/Fury warrior changes which I don't really understand. All in all, a very full content patch. I don't think PvE Retribution paladins are going to be too happy, but it looks fairly decent otherwise.

Time to Max Level

In patch 2.3, Blizzard is reducing the amount of experience required to level by 15% (for levels 20-60). Most people are happy about the change, though there are some people (such as Tobold) who questioning if this devalues the existing levelling game.

I would like to look at it from a sightly different angle. Let's define a concept called Time to Max Level. It's basically the amount of play time the average player would have to spend for her first character to reach the level cap.

Here's my question:

Should Time to Max Level depend on the value of the max level?

I think that it should not, that Time to Max Level should be independent of the numerical value of the max level. That there's a sweet spot, probably around 8 months, where someone who is new to the game and plays a couple of hours a week can eventually reach the cap. Reaching the cap is a major milestone, and should be in reach of every player. If that basic goal seems out of reach, it's very discouraging.

When WoW first came out, many reviews praised it for being easy for even casual players to hit the level cap. The actual number of the cap didn't matter, only that people could reach it.

But if it takes 8 months to reach 60, and 4 months to go from 60-70, that's 12 months to reach the max level. And when the next expansion comes out, that's another 4 months. Soon it will be impossible for a new player to reach the max level before the next expansion comes out.

Of course, if you add more levels, you need to make the levelling time faster for the earlier levels in order to keep Time to Max Level constant. So I think that Blizzard is on the right track with speeding up 20-60 levelling. I hope they continue this trend with the next expansion, speeding up 60-70, and trying to keep hitting the level cap within the reach of even the most casual players.

Choosing Your Battles

With the removal of attunements, there is a point where a T4 raiding guild is faced with multiple possible paths for progression. Many guilds, in my opinion, are choosing a path which looks deceptively easy, but has a lot of negative repercussions.

After a guild kills Gruul, there are three or four possible choices for the next boss to focus on: Magtheridon, Hydross/Lurker in Serpentshrine Cavern, and Void Reaver in Tempest Keep. Of these bosses, Void Reaver is the easiest, and Magtheridon is probably the hardest. Given that Void Reaver drops T5 shoulders, a lot of guilds choose to tackle him after Gruul. I believe that this is a mistake, which ends up hurting the guild progression in the long run.

Casual raiding guilds, especially those on a limited schedule, need to organize their schedule for progression. There are three competing constraints that a raiding guild needs to follow:

1. Maximize the time spent on Progression instances.
2. Minimize the time spent on Farming instances.
3. Maximize the number of epics gained from the Farming instances.

You need to spend time on boss fights to learn them. The more time you spend on a fight, the better your progess is. But you still need to farm a beaten instance for gear in order to improve your raid. Spend too much time farming, and you won't get the experience on fights that you need to beat them. Spend too little time farming, and your raid won't improve gear-wise. (Not to mention that your raid will get discouraged from the lack of loot.)

The key to sustainable progression lies in how you manage your farming time.

So, keeping this in mind, let's look at the three options again. What happens after you put the target on farm?

If you kill Void Reaver or Lurker/Hydross first, your farming instance is Gruul's Lair. You'll get about 7 epics for your farm night, and you'll probably have to add Karazhan runs to supplement the extra gear. Or you'll end up working on SSC, but farming Gruul's Lair and Void Reaver, which takes a fair bit of time and nets 10 epics.

On the other hand, if you tackle Magtheridon first, it may take a bit longer to learn the fight, but once he's down you have a farm night of Gruul's Lair + Magtheridon, which is very fast and gives 12 epics. This allows you to give the maximum amount of time to the next raid instance.

In fact, I believe that a guild should ignore Void Reaver until SSC is complete and becomes your farm raid. Even though you can kill him earlier, going after Void Reaver earlier is non-optimal for the three constraints listed above.

In my opinion, raid progression should go in the following order:

1. Karazhan
2. High King Maulgar/Gruul/Magtheridon
3. Serpentshrine Cavern
4. Tempest Keep
5. Mount Hyjal
6. Black Temple

You should concentrate on one instance, and farm only the instance behind it. As you move down, you drop the oldest instance in favor of farming the next instance. For example, once you've killed Magtheridon, move into Serpentshrine Cavern and drop Karazhan. Once you've killed Lady Vashj, move into Tempest Keep and drop High King Maulgar/Gruul/Magtheridon.

Note that this list is not organized in order of boss difficulty. The objective here is not to cherry pick bosses as you are able to, but to optimize for the three constraints. Maximize progression time. Minimize farming time. Maximize loot from farming.

I believe that is the best recipe for long term success.

Blizzard's Secret Weapon

I don't really understand game companies. They say a lot about copying Blizzard, but then they never do. There has been one constant about Blizzard games ever since the first Warcraft: Odds are the game will run on your machine.

And this is crucial. If your machine can't run the game, why would you buy it? Blizzard constantly sets the system requirements low. They make their games available for Macs. They deliberately stylize their art so that it still looks good on low end machines.

Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft. Time and time again, Blizzard pulls the same trick, and no one else seems to learn.

And yet other companies do not seem to realize this at all. If you can't run the game, you won't buy the game. I play on a laptop, with a built-in video card. No nVidia, no ATi. And yet WoW runs, looks halfway decent, and thus I give Blizzard my money. I'm not going to go spend a couple thousand dollars just to play your game.

It's not the only reason Blizzard is successful, but I think it's a major one.

The 10-man to 25-man Transition

I used to believe that Blizzard made a mistake by starting raiding with a 10-man and then forcing guilds to move to a 25-man model. I thought that running two Kara groups and having to increase in size would be too much work and organization for most guilds, and would prevent the majority of guilds from really experiencing raid content.

I think I was wrong.

The data that has forced me to change my mind comes from WowJutsu. WowJutsu is an automated ranking site that crawls through the Armory. It notes when new loot from raids appears on characters and uses that to determine which guilds have killed which bosses. It's not perfect, but it is fairly accurate for the most part.

On the side, they have an automated list showing what percentage of raiding guilds have killed each boss. For example, only 3.37% of raid guilds have killed a boss in Black Temple. By comparing the number of guilds on two bosses that come right after each other in progression, we can see which bosses guilds are "stuck" on.

When examining the 10 to 25-man transition, we look at the end bosses of Karazhan and the first boss of Gruul's Lair, High King Maulgar. First, we make an assumption:

Assumption 1: If your guild has killed Maulgar, your guild has killed Nightbane.

This is a pretty reasonable assumption to make, in my opinion. From WowJutsu, we see that 74.51% of all raid guilds have beaten Nightbane, and 72.68% of all raid guilds have beaten High King Maulgar. This means that the vast majority of guilds who beat Nightbane go on to beat High King Maulgar. That they are able to overcome organizational challenge of getting 25 raiders. The conversion rate is a whopping 97.5%.

But maybe the assumption is wrong. Maybe there's a number of guilds who have killed HKM, but not Nightbane, and that's skewing our results. So let's soften it to:

Assumption 2: If your guild has killed Maulgar, your guild has killed Prince Malchezzar.

Honestly, if your guild has killed HKM, there is zero excuse for Prince Malchezzar to still be alive. Now we see that 88.88% of guilds have killed Prince Malchezzar. Again, the majority of guilds who beat Malchezzar go on to beat HKM. The conversion rate here is 81.8%. That's lower, but it's still very reasonable. 80% of all raiding guilds are able to navigate the transition from 10-man to 25-man.

I think that this is a reasonable result. It's not perfect, but between the Nightbane and Prince Malchezzar numbers, it's evidence that going from a 10-man to 25-mans was not a mistake, and the transition is within the capabilities of most guilds.

Respawns and my Guild

After some thought, I think I might hate trash respawns because they are disproportionately affecting my guild.

My guild raids 3 days a week, for three hours a night, from 6:30 to 9:30. We can go longer, but there are people who have to leave at 9:30, so we have to do swap-outs.

Most trash now respawns on a 2-hour timer. That means that trash respawns in our third hour of raiding. So we're always faced with the choice of reclearing trash and extending the raid to get more attempts in; or calling the raid early. We very rarely get to end the raid on time.

If trash respawned on a 4-hour timer, we would almost never see it respawn, and thus I would not really care about respawns. Or if we raided for four hours a night, it would be an inconvience, but a relatively minor one as we could reclear and get in several more attempts before ending on time.

Is a three hour raid window unusual? I don't think so. I think it's a very natural slice of time for a more casual guild to schedule a raid. Unfortunately, it just happens to mesh badly with 2-hour trash respawns.

My Gear Philosophy

One activity that I find very interesting is the making of gear lists. You see people making lists of their ideal gear, and then running instances over and over until they get the exact gear that they want.

This is something that I don't do. Mostly because Lady Chance and I have an understanding: if I want an item, it will not drop.

The only items that I have ever really wanted was the paladin Tier 2, Judgement Armor. I was in a guild that cleared Blackwing Lair. Yet I entered TBC with only one of the eight pieces (the gloves, I believe). I never got my helm to drop from Onyxia. I lost the roll for the legs to a paladin wearing a necklace from Scarlet Monastery.

So I follow a different philosophy: If you do stuff, loot will drop. Do a variety of instances, and upgrade whenever possible. Even if the item is not the "ideal" item for that slot, take it if it is better than your current gear. Spend your DKP freely, and do not hoard it for the perfect item. As long as you keep doing instances, things will work out. Work on all your sets at the same time. If you are Holy, and a good Ret piece drops, spend DKP on it.

Of course, show some courtesy to your fellow players. If something is off-set for you, and main-set for someone else, let them have it.

As long as you keep doing stuff, loot will come. I don't think it's worthwhile to worry about what the "absolute" best piece of gear for the slot.

About the only exception to this philosophy is crafted gear. It's worthwhile to look over the crafted gear in the game, and see if there are any pieces there worth working towards. But this is because crafted gear is not random.

So that's my philosophy. Don't sweat the "ideal" drops, and continuously upgrade. Eventually you'll end up with decent gear.

Seeking Divination in Retribution Changes

So far, Blizzard has announced the following changes for the paladin class:

• Mana cost for Exorcism, Holy Wrath, and Hammer of Wrath lowered
• Vengeance duration increased to 30 seconds
• Improved Seal of Crusader benefits put into base spell, talent benefits replaced with those of Sancitified Crusader
• Sanctified Crusader renamed to Sanctified Seals, which increases chance to critically hit with all spells and melee attacks by 1/2/3% and reduces the chance your Seals will be dispelled by 33/66/100%
• Crusader Strike cooldown reduced to 6 seconds
• Vindication frequency and duration increased and reduces all attributes by 5/10/15%
• Pursuit of Justice is now 3 ranks and increases movement speed by 5/10/15% and reduces the chance to be hit by spells by 1/2/3%.

These changes are interesting. First, the change to Vengeance means that a lower crit percentage will be required to maintain perma-Vengeance, and that Vengeance can be maintained even on fights which require a little running.

The Vindication, Crusader Strike, Pursuit of Justice, and Sanctified Seals changes are significant buffs to PvP Retribution paladins.

The change to Improved Seal of the Crusader is interesting. It takes the one major raid buff that Ret paladins have and puts it in reach for Holy or Prot paladins to pick up.

However, the glaring omission is threat reduction. Right now, PvE Retribution paladin DPS is limited more by threat than anything else. Without a threat reduction mechanic of some sort, these changes will not increase Ret paladin DPS.

However, these changes do open the door to a potentially more interesting possibility.

Disclaimer: This is complete speculation, and probably isn't correct.

Lets look at the breakdown of Retribution DPS. Assume that the paladin does 100 points of damage and is at the threat limit. From my experiences, the damage breaks down as follows:

- 55 points from Auto-attack
- 18 points from Crusader Strike
- 18 points from Seal of Command
- 9 points from Judgement of Command

Now, the change to Crusader Strike means that Crusader Strike damage will jump from 18 points to 30 points. But the paladin is still threat-capped at 100 points. So the new breakdown will look like:

- 55 points from Auto-attack
- 27 points from Crusader Strike
- 18 points from Seal of Command

What does this mean? It meanst that the paladin no longer needs to Judge Command.

This has two important ramifications:

1. You can use Seal of Command (Rank 1). Combined with no judging, This means Retribution DPS becomes very mana-efficient when threat-capped.

2. 100% of your damage scales with Attack Power. Retribution does not need Spell Damage anymore.

So what should Blizzard do with all that spell damage on Retribution? You could add extra Strength, but you're already threat-capped. Instead, you could replace it with straight +healing. Retribution gear would feature Str, Sta, Int, and +healing.(The fact that +healing now gives a little boost in spell damage only makes this option better.)

So now we have a mana-efficient melee character, with a decent amount of +healing, and who is expected to have to hold back DPS because of threat issues. Add to that the fact that Vengeance now lasts twice as long. This allows the paladin to break off DPS and toss a heal without Vengeance falling off, while staying near the threat cap.

Perhaps this is Blizzard's latest attempt at creating a paladin who melees and heals.

Crazy? Maybe. Reality? Probably not. Madness? Sparta. Worth trying? Definitely.

Retribution using Seal of the Crusader?

A reader writes in:

I have heard a lot of outcry for some sort of heal-per-dmg component to the ret paladin, as some people see that all we bring is an extra 3% crit to the raid (which in my opinion is invaluable depending on your raid group). I however am in the process of purchasing my Khorium Champion, and then the mats for a Battlemaster enchant.

I also plan on using a modified physical damage build with seal of the crusader ALWAYS on to get as many procs from the weapon, the enchant, and of course the wisdom and light that I can keep indefinitely judged on mob from any other paladins in the group. the build I have right now is linked here. I was wondering what you thought about it. I have aura mastery to benefit caster dps who stay at their max ranges from Sanctity Aura. I was wondering where you think those last few talent points should be allotted to.

I realize the nerf to my possible damage output by using a less than 3.6 speed weapon and not using Seal of Command, but I feel like those are tradeoffs I would gladly take to see the amounts of stacking heals from procs, and judged light, and mana recieved from judged wisdom.

I don't really think that this is a good idea. The problem is that you give up a *lot* of damage by not using Seal of Command. As well, SotC does not improve as you get better gear, while SoC does, so as time goes by you are giving up more and more damage.

The trade-off is something like losing 30% of your damage for extra Light, Wisdom, and Battlemaster procs. If it was a smaller number, like say 5% or less, then it might be worth experimenting with. But something like 30% is way too high to lose.

If you take a DPS slot in a raid, your first priority is to provide massive amounts of damage. Paladins already do lower DPS than other classes, and what you propose would lower that still further.

What this type of playstyle is really good for is grinding or farming. Here you can use the extra procs from Wisdom/Light to keep your mana/health up and reduce downtime.

If you have a slow green or blue 2H, try using both these strategies on some mobs with a damage meter enabled. (People say that you can use the Deathstalker in Shadowfang Keep, I've never tried this.) SotC will add the same amount of damage to a slow weapon as it will to a fast weapon. So you can see how much DPS you do with SotC vs SoC, and you can see if the trade-off is worthwhile. Just keep in mind that the gap between the two will keep growing as you get better gear.

Then you can make a decision on whether to invest in the sword and the enchant, or if there are better weapons out there.

Utility is good, but in the end you will live or die by the DPS you put out. For a DPS player--which is what a Ret paladin aspires to be--maximizing DPS is more important than maximizing utility.

Those are my thoughts, but my advice is to try them both out (before buying the expensive weapon!). It could be that I am wrong, and the difference between the two is much closer than I think it is.

Patch 2.2 First Impressions

Ahh, patch day raiding. So much troubles. My raid UI was completely messed up with groups being stuck in the middle of the screen. If you have that problem, type /reloadui until you can click on them, then close them immediately. After doing that several times, things got cleaned up nicely.

Also, my UI scale seems off. Everything seems very slightly larger, and things are not fitting together quite perfectly.

I think the new sound engine is working well. Everything seems to sound a little bit better to me, and the game performed slightly better. As well, there are new sounds scattered about. I haven't tried the Voice Chat yet.

The buff changes are extremely nice. 10 or 30 minute buffs are great. Also, the changes to pet buffing are really nice. If you're wondering how pet buffing with greater blessings works, it goes like this:

1. Hunter pets share blessings with Warriors. Buffing a warrior will hit all the warriors and hunter pets. The jokes just write themselves.

2. Warlock pets share blessings with Warlocks. Buffing a warlock will hit all the warlocks and their pets. The only exception is a phase-shifted imp. If the imp is phase-shifted, it will not receive the buff.

This is a great change, as it means that the pets get buffed without any extra effort on the part of the paladin.

The nerf to Blessing of Sacrifice was muted. The cooldown was reduced to 30s, which is the duration of the spell. So that means you can still use it in PvE on tanks. It is still useful in PvP, but it can be countered by Purge.

I haven't tried out the new Seal of Vengeance yet, so I can't comment on it.

Other than that, the patch looks pretty decent. Many people have commented that it's not worthy of being a "full" patch, as it doesn't have a lot of new content. However, I think introducing a new sound engine is a big enough change that it warrants its own patch.

Raids and Trash Respawns

Questionc, in a comment to a previous post, writes:

The way you describe the trash spawn, it doesn't really sound any different from respawns used in any other part of the game... as an instance time limit. A good example of this is Scarlet Monastery, where failure is taking so long that you have to fight to get out of the instance.

And honestly, it's a good gentle mechanic. It's fair for them to put a time limit, and much nicer than just kicking you out of the dungeon if you take too long.

The problem with this is that there is a fundamental difference in expectations between raid instances and 5-man instances.

When you go into a 5-man instance, you expect to clear it, even if it is your first time going to that instance. You may wipe once or twice, but the general expectation is that you will finish that instance. In this case, an instance time limit is a good idea. If you hit the trash respawn, it's a sign that something is wrong, and perhaps it might be a better idea to try again later, maybe with a different group or after gearing up a bit more. If you wipe enough that trash respawns, it is unlikely that your group will successfully complete the instance.

In contrast, in a raid boss fight, you expect to wipe a lot. That the fight is intricate enough that learning and mastering it will take multiple hours. It took us two or three evenings to refine our strategy and master The Lurker Below, and he's generally considered an easy boss in SSC.

Respawns, rather than being a time limit, are interruptions in the learning process. As well, they are interruptions which eat up a lot of valuable time. If you raid from 6-9pm, and you get respawns at 8:30, you may as well call the raid. That means you lost half an hour of learning time, which is a lot for a casual guild.

Respawns are annoying because they make you waste time. Time is the one thing that casuals do not have a lot of. It takes a lot of coordination and administration to gather the people necessary for a raid, and some of that work gets tossed away because Blizzard decided to have respawns.

If we didn't have respawns, we could make better use of the time we have available, we could accomplish more. Probably not a whole lot more, but still. Trash respawns are obvious busy-work. We've already proven that we can defeat them once, why do we have to go through it again? We want to focus on the boss, why not let us focus on the boss?

The point is that respawns are unnecessary. Different guilds have different time constraints. Given that learning bosses is an activity which requires multiple hours, it would be best if guilds could raid to match their own constraints, rather than having to deal with frustrating, artificial constraints as well.

As for the idea that respawns are needed to slow guilds down, I don't think that is true. Respawns don't stop the elite guilds. Multiple guilds have already completed the raid content in WoW. Why slow down the non-elite guilds to an extra degree? Solid and demanding boss fights will keep a damper on progress.

I guess it boils down to the fact that I really don't like "artificial" barriers to content. The content itself should provide the challenge. The challenge in raiding is mastering the boss fights, not clearing the respawned trash that you've already beaten once that evening.

(Which is not to say that there should be no trash. Trash provides little "mini-challenges" and makes the instance feel alive. But once the challenge has been met, that's the end of it, and the trash should stay dead.)

Priests are the Hybrids of Healing

I had an amusing thought about healing Priests in WoW.

Traditionally, the problem with hybrids is that while they can do multiple things, they can't do them as well as a pure class. You can tank, heal, or DPS, but not as good as a pure tank, a pure healer, or a pure DPS. And when putting together a raid, rather than taking two hybrids, you get better performance by taking 2 different pure classes.

If you look at the healing classes, you can see the same pattern emerging. Paladins are the best single-target healers in the game. Druids are the masters of heal-over-time spells. With Chain Heal, Shamans are number one when it comes to healing splash damage.

Priests can do all these things. They can direct heal, they have a solid HoT, they have decent splash heal tools. But they aren't the best in any one category. They're second-best in all 3.

Priests are the hybrids of healing. And thus they suffer from the traditional problems of a hybrid class.

The Lurker Below

We killed The Lurker Below in Serpentshrine Cavern last night. It's an interesting fight. Basically, Lurker is a giant fish and you fight him on a couple of islands. He does a "spout" which is basically a beam of death. You have to dive underwater when he spouts to avoid it. If you kill all the trash, the water around Lurker is superheated, and does 500 damage every couple of seconds. If you don't kill the trash, the water has these crazy fish which will kill you very fast. There's also a phase with naga adds. It's a control fight more than a burn fight.

I really hate trash respawns though. The trash respawned after a few attempts, while we were still on Lurker's island. So we did this very complicated warlock summoning chain to get back to the platforms where the trash were and killed them again before finally downing Lurker.

Seriously, Blizzard, trash respawns are a terrible mechanic. Just let us work on the boss in peace and at our own pace. Heck, because of respawns we stretched the raid out an extra hour, just because we were so close. If the trash hadn't respawned, we could have killed Lurker and ended the raid on time.

Most guilds have their time constrained by outside, non-game factors. Adding extra time constraints in-game is unnecessary. The elite guilds who don't have outside time restrictions don't really care about trash respawns, and it's been shown to have very little impact on them. So why punish the non-elite guilds like this?

Theorycraft vs Trial-and-Error

In response to the previous post, Jason comments:

Hmm what this is showing me is that DPS actually takes a lot more brains and initiative to play well. More than it does to play a tank or healer well. As tank and healer might have results slapped in front of them, so they can correct easily.

The DPS game is more subtle and requires keener observations and more diligent research.

This is not quite true.

(As an aside, I don't really understand why people care if DPS or healing is innately harder or easier. I care if one is unnecessarily harder.)

There are generally 3 ways that people learn to play:

1. Theorycrafting. This means looking at the math behind the game, and extrapolating tactics based on the math.

2. Trial and error. The player tries something new, sees if it works better than the old way, and decides whether to use it or not.

3. Appeal to authority. Get someone who is better to tell you what to do.

The third one inevitably chains back to the first two, so we'll discount it for now.

Of the first two, most people learn through trial and error. As they get new abilities, they try them out, and based on their experiences they use the ability or not.

A few people, though, are theorycrafters. They build mathematical models, and the models imply that certain abilities should be better than others. They test out the abilities and use the results to improve the model.

Certain activities are easier to learn or improve with different strategies. For example, crowd control is generally learned through trial and error. The difference between a good trapper and a poor one is more a matter of practice than theorycraft. Healing is very similar. Theorycraft helps, but the better healers tend to be the ones who heal a lot.

Trial and error requires feedback. Test something, see the result, incorporate the change. If you can't see the result, or if the result is hard to understand, you can't use trial and error to learn something.

So raid DPS is hard to improve if you use trial and error, like most people do. However, doing good raid DPS is relatively simple from a theorycraft point of view. Where the theorycrafters go into their long discussions and crazy math is determining the optimal raid DPS. But you don't need optimal DPS to start with, you just need good DPS.

Here's a general algorithm for doing high DPS:

1. Rank your spells from highest DPS to lowest DPS.
2. Cast the highest DPS spell.
3. If you cannot cast the highest DPS spell again (because of a cooldown), cast the next highest.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, going down the list as necessary.

It seems very simple, but following this will provide you with a decent spell rotation for every class. It won't be the optimum rotation, and you might have to drop a spell because it costs too much mana, or does too much threat, or has a really short range. The work comes in ranking your spells correctly. (The main trick here is that when calculating DPS for a non-burst fight, you only look at the cast-time of the spell, not the lifetime of the spell. For direct damage they're the same thing, but not for DoTs.)

This is a good starting algorithm to develop a rotation. After this, you have to consider "enablers" such as Mangle, or Improved Scorch. These are spells which have a lower DPS, but improve spells above them on the DPS chart. Then you have to see if the DPS lost while casting the enabler is made up by the gain on the rest.

And then after that, you have to consider mana costs, which is where it gets complex. But getting a decent DPS rotation is not very hard from a theorycraft point of view. (Getting the single best rotation for a given fight is where the fun lies.)

A very simple example is the Frost mage rotation. If you ranked the spells, it would probably look something like:

1. Summon Water Elemental (3 min/45s cooldown)
2. Ice Lance (against a frozen target)
3. Frostbolt
4. Fireball
5. Ice Lance (against a non-frozen target)

So when looking at the DPS rotation, you go Summon Water Elemental first. Then you can't cast Summon Water Elemental again, so you move down the chart. The boss isn't frozen, so you move down to Frostbolt. You can cast Frostbolt again and again, so you don't go further down the chart. When Summon Water Elemental comes off cool-down, you cast it again.

That's a relatively simple rotation (in the game you should also Cold Snap to reduce the cooldown on the elemental). But the basic principles apply to every class.

So that was a really long post, but it essentially boils down to: raid DPS is easier from a theorycraft point of view; healing is easier from a trial and error point of view; and tanking is a bit of a mixture of the two. The problem is that the majority of people learn using trial and error, not theorycraft.

A Perfect Example of Improving DPS

BigRedKitty posted a perfect example of what I was talking about in the last two posts.

A hunter named Jeor has been trying to improve his DPS. His complaint:

So again I have to ask, what am I doing wrong? what is the secret that no one is telling me? is it my shot rotation? something about my build or gear? is there a special macro that no one is telling me about?

The key element here is that Jeor doesn't know what he's doing wrong. He's not stupid or unwilling to improve. However, the game has not provided him with any of the feedback he needs in order to improve.

BRK talks to him, tightens up his spec (Beastmaster), changes his shot rotation, and does a little re-gemming, and the results are staggering. Jeor provided WWS parses for Gruul attempts for the week before his tweaking and the week after. He jumps from 451 DPS to 964 DPS, a gain of over 500 DPS!

Look at Jeor's first week shot mix. Not using Steady Shot enough? Check. Missing shots? Check. Not using Kill Command? Check. The same hunter mistakes, again and again.

Compare to his shot mix the next week. Now that's acceptable DPS.

BRK's post was very useful precisely because of the WWS parses, only 1 week apart. Feedback improves your play, and DPS players don't get feedback from the game, so they have to go outside it (to BRK in this case) in order to get the feedback they need to improve.