PTR 4.0.6: Ret Roundup

For me, this past weekend was all about testing.

Rhidach sent me an e-mail at the end of last week, seeing if I knew anything about Seal of Truth, its procs, and how the talent Seals of the Pure interacted with it. Fearing for my raid spot, I hopped on the live servers and did some dummy testing, writing a lengthy explanation of what I did and what I observed.

When Rhi read it, he suggested I make it into a blog post. However, me being the lazy individual that I am, I told Rhi that I didn’t really feel like it… but he certainly did. It’s a good read, if I do say so myself. And I do say so.

With that out of the way, I was free to jump on the PTR and do some more testing. I set out with these goals in mind:

• Hit a heroic dummy with my rotation for 5 minutes, establishing a solid DPS baseline.
• Reforge my highest secondary stats to Mastery, then repeat.
• Verify new SoT-proccing abilities.

But just for kicks, let’s look at some quick changes.

Note: As the new stat conversion of our Mastery is 2.1% per point, rather than the 2.5% I saw on the PTR, these analyses aren’t intended to be conclusive in that regard, but merely serve as a ‘sneak preview’ at the functionality of our new Mastery, observing what possible effect Reforging can have in affecting DPS.

Seal of Truth and Censure

As of this moment, in the PTR I saw the following apply a stack of Censure to the target and/or proc SoT:

• Crusader Strike
• Melee
• Templar’s Verdict*
• Judgement
• Hammer of Wrath
• Exorcism

I used ‘and/or’ because you cannot proc Seal of Truth unless the target has at least one stack of Censure.

*I saw TV proccing SoT on live servers when there was already at least one stack of Censure on the target, the details of which can be found in the Righteous Defense article I linked previously.

Divine Storm

Divine Storm got buffed from 80% weapon damage to 100% weapon damage, essentially raising it up alongside the Crusader Strike buff. I didn’t even touch my DS button, though, so I really have nothing to add. I hate how they neutered Divine Storm and loathe using it in AoE situations, though I still do.

Divine Purpose

The lovechild of the ‘old versions’ of Divine Purpose and Hand of Light. While this is most certainly a nerf, as those extra couple HPs made our HP generation insane, if not a little unpredictable, the change definitely makes our rotation a little more concrete.

As you can see, it uses the same graphic as the old Hand of Light, and behaves in a very similar way, so there’s not another learning curve here.

Rebuke and Sacred Shield

Our precious is being made available to all flavors of paladins. Let me tell you, this is a very welcome change for Prot. Having two on-GCD interrupts while you’re tanking something you need to interrupt SUCKS.

Before you ask, yes, I had a tauren paladin. I decided to go with a pre-made to both see 4pT11 and to make things fairly reproducible if someone wanted to compare results.

I didn’t enjoy it, but that was the most basic pre-made paladin on the PTR, as humans, dwarves, and draenei all have hit or expertise racials that I didn’t want interfering with my gearing. And there was no pre-made blood elf paladin.

Anyway, since Rebuke is being removed as a Ret-specific talent, here is our “filler” talent: Sacred Shield.

We’ll be taking this for both PvP and PvE builds, I imagine. The only real contender for that single point is to go 1/2 in Acts of Sacrifice, making your Cleanse able to remove movement-impairing effects on yourself. I default to hitting Hand of Freedom when I’m snared anyway, so I’ll be putting my point into SS.

Hammer of Wrath – Bugged?

I had heard reports of Hammer of Wrath hitting like a wet noodle on the PTR, but I just had to try it out for myself…

Yes, that is a crit, and yes, that is during Avenging Wrath. If this is an intended change, I doubt we’ll even be using Hammer of Wrath during Avenging Wrath and probably very sparsely under 20%. Let’s just hope it’s a bug.

Hand of Light

The value on the PTR is higher than in the latest patch notes (each point of Mastery is supposed to increase damage by an additional 2.1%).  Nonetheless I wanted to see how it behaved, so I took to a target dummy.

Leaving my gear unenchanted and ungemmed, I used a 7/2/32 build, with the included glyphs active.

For my rotation, I followed the general Inq > Exo > HoW > 3-HP TV > CS > Judge > HW > Consecration, utilizing the four-piece Tier 11 bonus to get a 40-second duration on Inquisition at 3 HP, refreshing at 6 seconds remaining and lower.

There is some talk, with the 4p bonus, about refreshing Inq with only 1 or 2 HP, since the spell itself procs Divine Purpose (in fact, there’s a great write-up on this subject over at The Suicidal Zebra). However, I haven’t started doing this (as I don’t have four-piece yet), and am secretly hoping they remove Inquisition from Divine Purpose to eliminate this behavior. It seems really gimmicky and overly-complex to me.

PRE-REFORGING

A screenshot of my poor tauren paladin’s stats prior to reforging. Seal of Truth and Blessing of Kings were active at the time, as you can see from the metric ass-ton of Expertise he is sporting.

About 5 minutes on a target dummy produced this parse. Notice our Mastery, Hand of Light, registers as its own ability in World of Logs. Also interesting was the fact that it never crit (this is probably intentional, but I just found it interesting).

Anyway, I ended up getting 11,023.4 effective DPS out of that trial.

POST-REFORGING

A screenshot of my stats post-reforging. Note that this is without Seal of Truth. I wasn’t able to squeeze as much Mastery out of my gear via reforging as I thought I would.

Nonetheless, I took to a dummy again for a little over 5 minutes and produced this parse. That test produced 11,493.8 effective DPS.

CONCLUSIONS

With this data essentially being outdated, as the 2.5% per point of Mastery conversion isn’t making it to live, not many hard conclusions can be made from this data. However, I’ll include some observations in summary, instead.

Interestingly, with that modest 2.67 point increase in Mastery (6.675% on that build of the PTR at the time), Hand of Light went from 11.7% of my damage to 14.1%. Unsurprising is the fact that the average damage from Hand of Light increased after reforging, something we should definitely see.

While I can’t remark on the 400 DPS difference between the two trials, as I didn’t run replicate trials to establish an average and all that, it is interesting to see that Crusader Strike now comprises the majority of our damage. Seeing as it is our most-used ability (aside from simple autoattacks), this seems fitting, though I wouldn’t be shocked if we saw more patch notes lowering the coefficient to somewhere between the live and PTR iterations of the spell.

Overall, I’m looking forward to a faster-stacking Censure, a little more survivability thanks to Sacred Shield, and a more useful Mastery!