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.