Statistical Analysis of Retribution Mana Consumption: An End to the Doomsayers…

With my last post, I assured you that I would return with a statistical analysis pinpointing the location of Retribution Paladins on the mana consumption map.  Here, I intend to make good on my word and more.  Before I begin, however, I believe a brief preface is due.

When Ghostcrawler announced Blizzard’s latest swings of the nerf bat in our general direction, I was among the first to claim my bandwagon seat on the highway to uselessness.  I requested no assistance with my seat belt and even inquired as to the time at which we would be served our cold and unfulfilling traveltime supper.  I can’t pretend to hide from the fact I was one among the vast majority of doomsayers plaguing the official Paladin forums nor can I shy away from the realization that I may have even contributed to Chicken Little’s exodus from sanity.  Even so, there comes a time when one of a similar mindset to my own must accept fate regardless of the sky’s trajectory and definitively show one way or another what the coming days hold.  We were either to be buried in clouds or left standing as fools but either way I was determined to bring closure to the issue.

This post is that closure.

As an introduction, I would direct to my armory:  http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Stormreaver&n=Synovia.  In the instance that I am not logged out in my PvE gear, please accept the following as the full listing of that which I had equipped during my testing:

• Lightbringer War-Helm
• Shattered Sun Pendant of Might (Scryer Exalted)
• Lightbringer Shoulderbraces
• Shadowmoon Destroyer’s Drape
• Lightbringer Breastplate
• Furious Shackles
• Shivering Felspine
• Libram of Avengement
• Brutal Gladiator’s Scaled Gauntlets
• Red Belt of Battle
• Lightbringer Greaves
• Dreadboots of the Legion
• Unstoppable Aggressor’s Ring
• Band of the Eternal Champion (Scale of the Sands Exalted)
• Bloodlust Brooch
• Shard of Contempt

Should Armory not be available or should I have changed my talent spec by your reading of this post, you can find the spec I used at the following location:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sZ0xZxfrtbIufMsMuIo

As for buffs, I had only Blessing of Might, Seal of Command and Retribution Aura to my benefit.  My target was the Orgrimmar Master Target Dummy (Level 70).

To be clear, I would like to state a few facts that I have tested and proven.  Some of these may be obvious to you while others, as they were to me, may come as a surprise: 

1. The nerf to Judgements of the Wise is live (now and at the time of this testing) even though the talent tree tooltip still claims it as 33%.  This was verified by stripping my character down completely naked to notice a mana pool fo 3978.  I then cast Seal of Command and Judged it for a return of approximately 600 mana (within no more of a 5 to 10 mana error range)
2. Crusader Strike does proc seals – and does so at the same chance as auto-attacks
3. Divine Storm does proc seals – and does so at the same chance as auto-attacks
4. The nerf to Judgement damage is live (now and at the time of this testing) even though the Judgement tooltips themselves still claim their original values.  This particular fact is relatively inconsequential as far as mana is concerned but I thought I would share it just for completeness.
5. There is no internal cooldown on the Judgement of Wisdom debuff.  I verified this by watching my combat log closely as on many occassions I was able to give two Judgement of Wisdom procs from a single auto-attack, Crusade Strike or Divine Storm that also proc’d Seal of Command.

Lastly, I would like to define a few ground rules.  Each of my test cases to come were based around a given DPS rotation.  The syntax I am using to represent such a rotation is in a left-to-right fashion seperated by ‘>’ symbols.  For example, the DPS rotation of “Crusader Strike > Judgement of Justice” would mean that the only two abilities I used were Crusader Strike and Judgement of Justice and that in the instance of both being off of cooldown with 1.5 seconds of one another, I would always use Crusader Strike first.

All that said, I’d like to share with you my findings as follows:

• DPS Rotation:  Divine Storm > Crusader Strike > Judgement of Justice
  • Time until OOM:  6 minutes and 15 seconds
• DPS Rotation:  Judgement of Justice  >  Crusader Strike  >  Divine Storm
  • Time until OOM:  More than 20 minutes (extremely slow decline)
  • I continued to run this rotation for 20 consecutive minutes at which point I conceded that going OOM was only going to occur due to resealing Command every two minutes which was the only ability that was giving me a net loss of mana upon use
• DPS Rotation:  Judgement of Justice  >  Crusader Strike  >  Divine Storm > Consecration
  • Time until OOM:  1 minute and 49 seconds
  • Please note that due to the change of downranking with 3.0.x, downranked spells now are no longer cheaper in mana cost than the max rank abilitiy thus the only Consecration it made sense to use for this rotation was max rank.
• DPS Rotation:  Judgement of Wisdom  >  Crusader Strike  >  Divine Storm  >  Consecration
  • Time until OOM:  More than 20 minutes (seemingly infinite)
  • I continued to run this rotation for 20 consecutive minutes at which point I conceded that going OOM was highly improbable.  The difference between this DPS rotation and the second DPS rotation above is that I was achieving a net gain of mana even with the inclusion of so many reseals of Command.

During the testing above, when Judgement of Wisdom was used, each proc returned 125 mana.  My mana pool was 6243 for the testing.  The incoming nerf to Judgement of Wisdom states that procs will only restore 1% of maximum mana.  1% of 6243 is 62.4 mana which, if you double, comes out almost exactly to the 125 mana I saw in my procs during this testing.  Additionally, the proc frequency of Judgement of Wisdom is being cut in half (exactly 50%).  Neither of these two nerfs to the ability are live as of yet but based upon my testing, I am confident that the fourth and final of the DPS rotations above can still be used effectively when taking into account Spiritual Attunement, Divine Plea and other forms of mana regeneration that might fall the Retribution Paladin’s way.

We Giveth… You Rejoice… We Taketh Away…

Astounding.  I’ve reached a point in my World of Warcraft tenure where no price would seem unreasonable to have a seat behind the closed doors of a Blizzard conference room during the discussion of Paladins.  Upon launch, the Retribution tree was a random assortment of unorganized brain flatulations etched into a talent calculator and passed off as reasonable.  Before long, these flatulations took a more “solid” form as to say that although the Retribution tree was still complete and utter “fecal excrement”, at the very least it had fixed dimensions and was confined to a particular paradigm.  When patch 1.9 made its way onto our hard drives, it was almost as if Blizzard employees were taking the excrement and slinging it up against their white boards to witness what would stick.  The soiled remnants, after some modest deliberation, represented what we were left with as of the moment.

The Burning Crusade came as breath of “fresh” air in that Retribution Paladins seemed to, at the very least, have a place in this world.  For the first time it appeared as though some actual thought had gone into our construction, paving the way for a bright new chapter of the Paladin history.

The euphoria was short-lived…

No later than one month past the initial rework of the BC Retribution Paladin did the developers once again seem to meet within conference rooms and chuck “brown” matter at the walls.  The result was a mildly-effective, laughable archetype with a complete lack of any damage that could be considered as sustained. 

What we have today, ladies and gentlemen, is a repeat of the Burning Crusade travesty – only this time it is working from a talent tree that was largely accepted and appreciated by the Paladin community.

Blizzard giveth…  We rejoice…  Blizzard taketh away…

In the latest batch of Paladin “adjustments”, we are to see the following:

• Judgements of the Wise now only restores 15% of base mana (down from 33%)
• Judgement of Wisdom now only restores 1% of base mana (down from approximately 2%)
• All Judgements and Seals now do 20% less damage
• Hammer of Wrath can now only be used against targets at 20% health or less (down from 35% or less)
• Art of War now does a flat damage increase to Judgement, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm instead of a critical strike damage bonus increase.  The flat damage increase is at least 5 to 10% less than the critical strike damage bonus was.

If I may, please allow me to summarize the above in an eloquently-written and factually reasonable statement:

U GUYZ WUR DOIN 2 MUHC DAMUJ AND PEEPLE COMPLIANED SO NERF LOL

In all honesty, it isn’t the damage nerfs that frustrate me.  Putting aside the fact that Mages, Disc Priests, Warlocks, good Rogues and Feral Druids laughably destroy my Tier 6/Season 4 Retribution Paladin as we currently stand, I was understanding about a reduction in our burst capability.  What I am NOT understanding of, however, is an outright assault on our mana regeneration.  The math has been posted countless times for the developers to view but it seems to have fallen upon blind eyes.

Regardless, enough with the “woe is me”.  It’s time for me to officially investigate this nerf and present the facts in statistical format as I have done many times in the past for various other posts.  You can expect my next post, which should arrive shortly, to be one of statistical analysis with respect to the indentation left by Retribution’s hand-carved (unlike other classes ours seem to made of solid wood) nerf bat.

World of Vanillacraft: Blizzard’s Assault on Uniqueness

As I look back on the past year, I inevitably gaze upon the vast potential for the individual.  It would be misleading to state that everything was fair and balanced but to say that uniqueness didn’t exist among the various classes and talent specs would be even farther from the truth.  From a PvE perspective, if you were interested in increasing your raid’s DPS, you might consider a Retribution Paladin for 3% raid-wide crit, 2% extra damage to his or her group and 100% Judgement of Wisdom uptime.  Comparatively, you might send an invitation out to an Enhancement Shaman for 10% extra attack power, Windfury and Bloodlust for his or her group.  Still yet you might mull over the presence of a Beast Mastery Hunter who, although not bringing quite as much utility as the previously mentioned classes, had far higher DPS potential while still providing a very useful buff for his or her party.  I could carry on with this list ad nauseum, but I trust you understand what I mean:  things weren’t perfect by any stretch but at least there was a sense of uniqueness amongst the classes and specs that warranted a conscious decision on raid make-up.

This very sense of individuality within World of Warcraft is under attack with Wrath of the Lich King looming on the horizon and the onslaught is being lead by none other than the game’s creator:

Posted by Jimmythenumbers

As Ghostcrawler has been posting recently, we’ve decided to make a change in the way we allow buffs and debuffs to stack exclusively in a raid. For the most part, what this change means is that many buffs and debuffs which were previously allowed to stack together no longer can, and that many buffs and debuffs which only a single talent specialization could bring can now be brought by multiple different specializations. The philosophy behind this change shows up in many of the changes we have made in Wrath of The Lich King, such as when we made almost all buffs raid-wide. We want players to be able to form raids and parties based on who they want to play with, rather than who has the correct talents and abilities to min-max their raid performance.

The implications of this are already to be witnessed on the Beta realm.  Rogues, for example, have received a new ability called Tricks of the Trade which is more or less a Misdirection.  Additionally, Wound Poison no longer stacks and is a 50% healing debuff on the first application (aka Mortal Strike and Aimed Shot).  As we already know, Hunters now have the capability to dispel with Arcane Shot but did you know that Unleashed Rage from Enhancement Shamans no longer stacks with Trueshot Aura (Marksmanship Hunters)?  We already are aware that Tranquil Air Totem (Shaman) doesn’t stack with Salvation (Paladin) but the proverbial slap in the face on this one strikes even harder given that totems are now raid-wide.  Were you aware that Bloodlust now works on the entire raid but once someone is affected by it they cannot receive the buff again for 5 minutes due to a wonderful little debuff known as “Sated”?  This also applies to Heroism.  Have you heard about the change to Windfury Totem?  It no longer provides extra attacks but rather increases Haste.  So does a properly-talented Retribution Aura but the two certainly don’t stack.  Speaking of Retribution Aura, if you have Sanctified Retribution talented, you can provide your 2% flat damage increase to the entire raid – but don’t expect it to stack with a Beast Mastery Hunter’s Ferocious Inspiration because it doesn’t.  Surely you’ve seen the wonderful change made to “Improved Devotion Aura” where it now increases healing received by affected targets?  Given that auras are raid-wide now this seems to be an excellent piece of utility for having a Protection Paladin in your raid.  Just so you know, however, it won’t stack with the aura from Tree of Life.  Certainly though we can take some pride in our recently-buffed Blessing of Might can’t we?  If you’re casting it on yourself, then feel free to do so but if you are using it in a raid, know that it won’t stack with Battle Shout any more.

I could go on and on with an even more exhaustive list revealing specific removals of class/spec uniqueness.  No longer are the days when we were afforded the opportunity to build a raid based on our preference for its performance.  No longer will we be able to sway our raid composition in the interest of increased DPS simply by swapping out one pure DPS class for a Retribution Paladin or Enhancement Shaman.  Is this truly where the game needs to go?  I can already here the groans from disgruntled WotLK players as they are denied a raid spot based on the presence of a class that already provides the buff they would otherwise bring.

[Ret Paladin]:  invite to raid please

[Raid Leader]:  sorry, we already have an Enhancement Shaman

[Ret Paladin]:  okay so he can provide my haste rating but what about my 2% damage increase?

[Raid Leader]:  sorry, we already have a Beast Mastery Hunter

[Ret Paladin]:  well, then what about keeping Wisdom up?

[Raid Leader]:  Our one Holy Paladin has that into his rotation for proccing Judgements of the Pure

[Ret Paladin]:  Isn’t there anything at all I can be useful for in your raid?

[Raid Leader]:  Yeah – you can stand outside the instance and throw us all your Improved Blessing of Might when we zone out just before a boss encounter.  Oh wait.  Nevermind.  I forgot we brought a Fury Warrior.  Good luck in Arathi Basin tonight.

Shock and Awe: The Art of Dual Shockadins in Arena

Given the interest shown for my previous two posts regarding Shockadins, I have decided to keep the proverbial wheels turning and offer up yet another perspective on the potential of this spec come WotLK.  As always, please feel free to post comments and ask questions.

If you’ll recall, J referred us to a rather entertaining video of dual Shockadins breaking into the 2000s during Season 3.  It would be inaccurate to claim this video as the first instance of entertainment regarding the spec but I certainly would go as far as to say it acted as forum-wide eye-opener for those having never experienced or even seen this particular build.  I can say, with the utmost of certainty, that I’ll never be able to part with the lingering vision of watching an MS Warrior, in perfect line of sight of his Druid partner, fall to the ground within 3 seconds of witnessing the wings of Avenging Wrath suddenly extending from the backs of his Shockadin enemies.  The Druid, with Nature’s Swiftness still sitting idly on his buff bar, stood in disbelief 20 yards away.

Shock and awe indeed…

Today, let’s evaluate the future of this combination and gauge whether or not its potential will remain in tact upon the arrival of November 13, 2008.

Upon achieving level 80, the Shockadin will essentially have four sources of instant damage at their disposal:

• Judgement
• Holy Shock
• Hammer of Wrath
• Shield of the Righteous

Although the first three are certainly applicable, we can rule out Shield of the Righteous as its damage is directly tied to the Paladin’s block value – a statistic which will be largely if not entirely absent from a Shockadin.  The remainder of this post will then evaluate both Judgement and Holy Shock from both Shockadins and gauge the potential for a swift kill on an opponent.  I am purposely omitting Hammer of Wrath as it can be used only as a “finisher” and, although it can inflict significant damage, will not be part of initial burst of a Shockadin (I have always defined burst as the amount of damage one can cause within the span of no more than 3 seconds).

First, let’s take the build from my previous post:

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sVAzxbzhVzZZVfMtbIzfMox

Evaluating Holy Shock first, we have the following modifiers for the spell:

1. Healing Light (12%)
2. Crusade (6%)
3. Sanctified Retribution (2%)
4. Vengeance (9%)

In total then, we will see a 29% increase in damage for Holy Shock after spell power has attributed its own effect to the spell.  To demonstrate this, I’ve done some research and come across the level 80 Arena set for Paladins:  http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?itemset=767.  To begin, let’s take a look at this full gearset including the honor pieces (note:  at the time of this post, I am unable to get the wowhead tooltips working properly so you’ll just have to follow the links):

• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40931
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=42026
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40961
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=42058
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40904
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40972
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40925
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40966
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40937
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=40973
• http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=42110

For the two trinket slots, let’s assume 200 spell power in total and for a weapon and shield let’s assume 500 spell power in total.  Both of these assumptions are based off of items I found in the WotLK database at WoWhead situated around an item level of 200 (the item level which seems to be the base for epics at level 80).  In addition to these two assumptions, I am going to neglect enchants, inscriptions, glyphs and any other sort of enhancements to spell power either directly or indirectly with the lone exception of gems.  As far as gems are concerned, I will omit the meta socket of the helm but will gem entirely for spell damage otherwise.  Allowing for these statements, we then arrive at the following spell power total based upon the gear above:

• 1528 spell power - from gear alone
• 207 spell power- from 9 gem slots at 23 spell power each (Runed Cardinal Ruby)

So in total, we will have 1735 spell power.  Knowing this, let’s take a look at what this means for Holy Shock and Judgement when combined with the aforementioned modifications:

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Holy Shock has a maximum base of 1047 damage at level 80.  Since it is instant cast, it utilizes the 42.86% coefficient for spell power.  Running those numbers, we arrive at the following:

• 1047 + (1745 * .4286) = 1795 maximum base damage after spell power

Now let’s add in the modifications:

• 1795 * 1.12 (Healing Light) ==> 2010
• 2010 * 1.06 (Crusade) ==> 2131
• 2131 * 1.02 (Sanctified Retribution) ==> 2174
• 2174 * 1.09 (Vengeance) ==> 2370

With that done let’s factor in Avenging Wrath:

• 2370 * 1.20 ==> 2844

Lastly, let’s take into account the user of Divine Favor to force a critical strike:

• 2844 * 1.50 ==> 4266

What this shows us is that, omitting any mitigation by resilience, we have a maximum potential for 4266 on a Holy Shock critical strike.  With this proven, let’s move on to Judgement.

Although the Judgement system has undergone extensive change when contrasted with its existence currently, we still need only consider the damage caused as a result of having Seal of Righteousness active when one of the three Judgements is cast.  For this type of Judgement, we have the following modifications to make:

1. Seals of the Pure (15%)
2. Crusade (6%)
3. Sanctified Retribution (2%)
4. Vengeance (9%)
5. The Art of War (20% critical strike bonus)

Take straight from the description of Seal of Righteousness on wowhead, the formula used for its Judgement effect is as follows:

• 1 + 0.25 * AP + 0.4 * SPH

where AP = Attack Power and SPH = Holy Spell Power.  Granted a Shockadin’s attack power will be very low, let’s at least assume 400.  For spell power, we can use the calculated value from above of 1745.  Now that we’ve got our initial values, let’s crunch the numbers:

• 1 + 0.25 * 400 + 0.4 * 1745 = 799 maximum base damage after attack and spell power

With a base of 799 to work with, let’s now consider our first four modifications:

799 * 1.15 (Seals of the Pure) ==> 919

919 * 1.06 (Crusade) ==> 974

974 * 1.02 (Sanctified Retribution) ==> 993

993 * 1.09 (Vengeance) ==> 1084Throwing Avenging Wrath into the mix we have:

• 1084 * 1.20 = 1301

Lastly, let’s consider a critical strike.  For this consideration, however, there are two points of interest.  The first is that Judgement of Righteousness is considered a spell thus it is does 150% damage upon achieving a critical hit.  The second is that we are receiving a 20% bonus to this 150% to bring it to 170%.  This leaves us with the following upon critically striking:

• 1301 * 1.7 = 2212

Now that we are finished with the calculations for Judgement of Righteousness, let’s put it and Holy Shock together for a traditional Shockadin burst combo:

• [0.0] Pop Avenging Wrath, Divine Favor and cast Holy Shock (4266 damage)
• [0.5] GCD from Holy Shock
• [1.0] GCD from Holy Shock
• [1.5]Judge Righteousness (2212 damage)

Now, we must consider mitigation.  Since both Judgement of Righteousness and Holy Shock are consider as Holy spell damage, neither can be mitigated by armor or resistances.  As a result, the only form of mitigation possible, other than through class-specific talents or possibly certain glyphs, is through resilience.  Obviously, this form of mitigation only applies to critical strikes in our case thus we can run the math from that point.  Although the amount of rating required to reach the resilience cap will be a great deal higher at level 80 due to statistic scaling, it is currently assumed that resilience will still max out at 25% critical strike damage reduction as it is on live servers today.  Running with this assumption, we can simply subtract out 25% worth of the critical strike calculations for both Holy Shock and Judgement of Righteousness as follows:

• 2844 * 1.25 (instead of 1.5) ==> 3555 damage from Holy Shock
• 1301 * 1.45 (instead of 1.7) ==> 1886 damage from Judgement of Righteousness

What we have now shown is that, against a target of capped resilience at level 80, one Shockadin will be able to unload a maximum of 5441(3555 + 1886) damage within 1.5 seconds.  It then follows that two, equally-geared Shockadins will be able to unload 10882 (5441 * 2) damage within that same 1.5 second interval.  As a reminder, this value does not include any enchants, inscriptions, glyphs, buffs, popped trinkets or even a meta gem.  Additionally, it does nottake into account any debuffs that may be associated with the target such as a Warrior sitting in Berserker stance (10% more damage taken).  As a result, one can easily expect damage output superior to that which we have calculated.

To close out this post, I leave you with the following story:

Two Paladins walk into the Ruins of Lordaeron, both bearing a mace and a shield.  Across the way, a Warrior appears but stops shy of the central tomb.  Hesitantly, he reaches back and wiggles his nails against the far side of his scalp in utter confusion.  Now standing aside the tomb themselves, the Paladins stand shoulder to shoulder and, in complete unison, motion for the Warrior to approach them.  Licking his lips, the Warrior unsheathes the most devastating weapon of war seen to date and charges abruptly over top of the tomb.  In an instant, wings emerge from the back of each Paladin and runic symbols flutter defiantly above their heads.  The Warrior falls to his knees in debilitating pain as a Druid appears from the shadows.  Just as the Druid’s hands begin to emit a translucent green hue, two crystalline hammers materialize out of nothingness and strike downward in a resonating symphony upon the Warrior’s kneeling form.  He falls lifeless to the cobbled floor only a a second and half following his initial engagement. 

The Druid, out of sheer awe and wonderment at what has been displayed, implodes within himself and emerges a wisp defiantly exhibiting a clouded and transparent middle finger aimed in the Paladins’ direction.