Quote:We think Protection needs Spiritual Attunement for obvious reasons, so we are making it a deep Prot talent.

We don't actually like Holy and Ret having SA. It makes their mana regen depend too much on the encounter specifics. On fights like Patchwerk, they have no mana from SA. On dragon fights, they have a ton. That makes it hard to tune on our end because they are either starved in the first case or drowning in the second case.

We want to tune Holy through Illumination and Ret through Judgements of the Wise and let Prot use SA. All 3 can Divine Plea, but Prot can do it more often. (Source)

Spiritual Attunement
Spiritual Attunement is a great mechanic for a tanking paladin who needs the mana and gets it from taking damage. For other paladins it just complicates balance. On Patchwerk you get no mana from it as Holy / Ret and on Sartharion it gives you just a ton of mana. So you're either bone dry on one fight or drowning in mana on another, totally depending on raid damage.

The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.)

GC... you do realize that everyone in the paladin community is taking this as a promise you will buff jotw, right?
Such is my lot in life. We need to get some numbers for Ret mana after all of these changes and make a call at that time. I was just pointing out that we have plenty of knobs to tweak to balance the class without SA.

Remember, the goal here is not to nerf Ret mana. It is to make it more stable instead of varying wildly depending on the encounter. While encounters will always be different to some extent, when you look at the mana provided by SA on different fights, it can be pretty extreme. Ulduar balance is going to be tricky because we want the normal encounters to still be accesible to most raiders while the hard modes need to be balanced on a knife's edge. Having so much variation is just going to get in the way of that.

The Seal of Blood glyph will most likely have to be changed to accomodate this change. (Source)

Quote:Anyone else have some insight?

Quote:We want to tune Holy through Illumination and Ret through Judgements of the Wise and let Prot use SA. All 3 can Divine Plea, but Prot can do it more often.

Quote:The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.)

Quote:Remember, the goal here is not to nerf Ret mana. It is to make it more stable instead of varying wildly depending on the encounter

Quote:The Seal of Blood glyph will most likely have to be changed to accomodate this change.

Quote:indicating they're still on track for the April week 1 release they hinted at.

Cheers,
~FragB)

Quote:I'm not too worried. They haven't screwed over ret yet, despite all of the whining and crying every time they made a major change in preparation and after wrath of the lich king, and they have stated they don't intend to, even providing an answer to how they might tweak ret to make sure they can still kick ass if their mana is running dry too fast in 3.1.

I haven't noticed an analysis yet, but assuming mana isn't a limitation, will exorcism become part of the standard ret rotation?

It generally won't for prot, on progression bosses at least, except when off-tanking, but some analysis shows that punching exorcism every cooldown is a massive threat increase for prot, despite it meaning a reduction in holy shield uptime, so I imagine we'll have a fun toy to mix in on farm encounters or when off-tanking.

Quote:It generally won't for prot, on progression bosses at least, except when off-tanking, but some analysis shows that punching exorcism every cooldown is a massive threat increase for prot, despite it meaning a reduction in holy shield uptime, so I imagine we'll have a fun toy to mix in on farm encounters or when off-tanking.

Quote:Mordekhuul, what analysis is that? How can it be a massive threat increase? Remember, you have to drop an ability to cast Exorcism in the 969 rotation.

Quote:Some take-home thoughts from this:

* Consecration substitution, which looked advantages from a mana expenditure point-of-view, always lags a standard 969, regardless of what spec you pick. As such, it's never the answer, even glyphed.
* Neither of the 6's-substitution schemes ever hold a candle to standard 969, because HotR and ShoR are two of our biggest threat moves, so replacing either with a weaker one is always going to trail a rotation that keeps both of those skills on cooldown.
* Judgement substitution can boost both DPS and TPS as long as Exorcism is glyphed - without it there's no noticeable gain.
* Exorcism on cooldown is always the best DPS and TPS output, and performs best when Judgement and Exorcism are both glyphed. I haven't tested without the SoV glyph yet, but since we've narrowed down the rotations we're interested in, I can look into this a little further in a later post.
* Holy Shield replacement is by far the best DPS and TPS boost, at the expense of Holy Shield uptime. This is likely to be our new prot-dpsing rotation, as well as the rotation we should use against casters that do not melee (or at least, not hard).
* Note that all of these graphs assume the 1% Sense Undead bonus, but don't assume Exorcism is automatically a critical. I should have taken off the Sense Undead modifier, but frankly I forgot, and since it's a flat 1% bonus, it won't change anything except the final numbers.
* I intend to test with some version of Exorcism auto-crit later on to see if that helps either of the 6's replacement strategies. However, they're so far behind in most cases that it may not be enough to save them.

Quote:Not quite. When fitting in exorcism you have a lot of options to think through.

You could sub it for one of the 969 abilities every time the cooldown is up, such as substituting exorcism in place of holy shield whenever exorcism is up and its time to punch HS, meaning you don't hit HS that time around at all. This is referred to as HS substitution, as an example, in a thread I'm going to link.

You could also do your full 969 rotation but delay it whenever exorcism is up to make sure you punch exorcism every single cooldown.

Here is a breakdown of both threat and DPS for each of the exorcism rotation options and for various tanking specs: http://www.failsafedesign.com/maintankadin...p=382613#382613

This thread is linked to from a master thread on the matlab analysis done by the author, and many other links are of interest there, though off-topic here: http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/viewtopic.php?t=20823

Finally, here are the conclusions from the exorcism analysis, if you want to skip the graphs:

Quote:Not sure I agree with the author about dropping HS for that set of 9s rotations, I would agree more with Wimpy in delaying the HS would probably be the better choice. HS provides more than just threat, it also provides you with longevity by making a smaller window for getting an unmitigated hit in. With the amount of Block Value most Prot Pallies are throwing around, mitigating up to 5% to 10% of a bosses hit is significant longevity.

Quote:I'm also both excited and worried about being able to use exorcism in place of HS when off-tanking and trying to be second on threat....I already pass any of our other main tanks on threat if I try to off-tank without having another high threat move to use:P Guess I'll have to continue my selfish "I'll just MT unless someone else cares" line.

Quote:I'm not fretting, I'm just irritated. You know me, I don't like gutting something without the fix in hand. It's the way I program databases, and build sites. It might be a little slower, but I know when it goes live, there are far fewer problems.

Quote:If anything comes off cooldown simultaneously with another because you've delayed it, you have to judge on the spot: Which is more threat? Is it worth breaking the rotation for a small threat boost right now? Is there a secondary reason aside from threat why I can't choose to replace this?

Quote:Delaying abilities isn't smart. The 969 rotation isn't a priority rotation, it's a CD rotation. If anything comes off cooldown simultaneously with another because you've delayed it, you have to judge on the spot: Which is more threat? Is it worth breaking the rotation for a small threat boost right now? Is there a secondary reason aside from threat why I can't choose to replace this?

Of course, you can adhere strictly to the 969 rotation, but that isn't optimal.

Quote:Judgement is damage and gets you either health or mana back.

Quote:I only see it being of use where you're either off tanking to maintain threat for some kind of aggro drop for the MT (like Archavon) and times where you can skip HS cause you're not taking direct hits.