Monday Morning Musings

So much to talk about this week - even if the upcoming 3.3 changes are non-existent for Paladins (seriously, thank goodness for that). Paladins may not be perfect right now, and I think SoC is bugged still, but we're in a good place.

First though, I want to give a big welcome back to my Troll. He was gone for a while, but made a guest appearance last week. His spelling and grammar haven't improved much, but hey - he's my Troll and I'm going to love him just the same. Even if he isn't a Rhodes Scholar.

SoC may be broken

I may be the only one seeing this (well, our residnt retadin as well) - but it looks like SoC is proccing off Divine Storm once, just like SoL and SoW. Now the tooltip specifically states that it should only proc on strikes that are intended to hit one target - leaving DS and HotR out of the list. However SoL and SoW have ALWAYS proccd off the first target hit by DS - which makes me wonder if SoC will proc as well. We have a week off from raiding - so I may go out and test this theory.

If this is true, it brings up the possibility of running a build with SoC and Reckoning for trash/farming. It certainly opens up the tedious nature of seal twisting - though I imagine Blizzard will nerf this soon.

For retadins, putting up 5 stacks of SoV (yes - I know it's Corruption for Horde - but having two SoC's here gets confusing) should take about 15 seconds, plus or minus a bit depending. Once that's done, they have 15 seconds in which they can switch to SoC, get off their CD based attacks, back to SoV to refresh the stack, and then repeat. I don't recall off the top of my head if the seals themselves are on the GCD, which would make this a much easier rotation to maintain.

If the seals are on the GCD, this rotation becomes much tighter, but can still be maintained. You will see a severe drop in DPS if SoV falls off though (much like a rogue losing poison stacks), so it's better to err on the side of caution and switch back to SoV early. DP must also be used religiously, as spending 14% of your base mana every few seconds can get quite costly.

Yeah yeah - back to prot - is it worth it?

Without any hard numbers to back this up - I still have to say that SoC isn't worth speccing into. In order to make it viable you'd have to spec into reckoning, plus you run into the same issue as ret - you don't want the stacks to fall off your targets. First, that's a loss of DPS from the DoT - second, it's a loss of 33% increased damage from all sources - Ret aura, Holy Shield, etc.

It's also my experience that when solo AoE grinding, it's the use of SoL and SoW that makes it so effective. Self healing/mana regen means never having to stop. Twisting SoC with SoV, and SoL/SoW as needed just makes the whole thing more complicated. Yes, with theorycrafting you could probably show a slight increase in damage, and the folks at maintankadin.com have done some math showing the TPS increases as marginal - in exchange for giving up some survival talents.

I don't know about you, but survival wins every time for me. I'll eek out as much TPS as I can, simply because the more TPS I have means the more DPS the raid can push - and the faster they can push it. I am pretty sure that my DPSers have hair triggers. I swear I've seen fireballs and arrows hitting the boss mere instants after my shield does.

It's ok though - that's why GC gave us Sacrifice....

Later this week - haste vs. Int - and when you make the switch.