Ret loses Spiritual Attunement. Opinions?

[Mordekhuul]

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/v...hp?t=20823

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

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.