Level 70 Threat Cycles in 3.0

[PsiVen]

With the 3.0 patch will come the changes to our cooldown abilities:

- Cons still 8s, can Glyph to 10s
- HS now 8s, lasts 10s
- HotR, new spell at 6s
- Judgement now on the GCD at 8-10s
- AS, now instant at 30s
- Seals now cast much less often

Barring some revelation I will assume that the principles behind the 9/6/9/6/9 hold true for L70 even though we are missing Shield of Righteousness. This means that you need to be able to treat Cons/Judge/HS as 9sec cooldowns, so the Glyph of Consecration will screw up your rotation, and you need 1/2 Imp Judgement at least. In the 70 version, we skip a GCD for ShoR:

Prep SoV
00.0 HS
01.5 HotR
03.0 Judgement
04.5 (free) <-- AS
06.0 Cons
07.5 HotR
09.0 HS
10.5 (free)
12.0 Judgement
13.5 HotR
15.0 Cons
16.5 (free)

18.0 HS (starting over)
19.5 HotR
21.0 Judgement
...

First of all, notice one thing. If you have 2/2 Imp Judgement, you can sacrifice the GCD at 10.5 to cast at 11.0. This lets you recast by 19, but you can't cast it anyway until 21.0! Those two seconds you gained are completely wasted. Similarly if you take 0/2 Imp Judgement, you can't Judge a second time at all until 13.0, but there's no open GCD until 16.5 unless you want to push back your entire rotation by a second which would cut your TPS by ~7%. Waiting until 16.5 to Judge leaves you judging as if your cooldown was 13.5sec, then 12sec, repeating so a loss of about 29% of your Judgement damage relative to the 9sec cooldown.

Secondly, you'll see we have 3 free GCDs in those 18sec. If we have the mana -- and on a boss, we almost certainly do -- we can do a couple of things in there to increase our TPS. Avenger's Shield on cooldown fits perfectly into the rotation, taking up 1 GCD out of every 5 open ones.

This leaves clusters of 4 GCDs at 6sec intervals, 12sec apart. That means it's seal twisting time. Now, like RF spamming on Brut, this has limited application. Don't be going OOM trying to do this because aside from what I just mentioned, it's definitely the least efficient thing you can possibly do with your mana pool!

With Vengeance at 15sec, it's too dangerous to leave SoR up for that 12 second time window -- one miss or mistiming and the stack falls off. So what we want to do is open the fight with SoV and use those 4 GCDs to do SoR,SoV,SoR,SoV. This gives us 12/30 or 40% uptime of SoR, at the cost of 40% of our SoV Hits (the tiny bonus damage at a 5-stack) and 9% of our Judgement damage (since 40% of the time they're doing 125% instead of 150%). It also drains 413 mana per cast, which translates into 55 mana/sec or 52 TPS from Spiritual Attunement.

The final rotation:

Prep SoV
00.0 HS
01.5 HotR
03.0 Judgement
04.5 (free) <-- AS
06.0 Cons
07.5 HotR
09.0 HS
10.5 (free) <-- SoR
12.0 Judgement
13.5 HotR
15.0 Cons
16.5 (free) <-- SoV
18.0 HS
19.5 HotR
21.0 Judgement
22.5 (free) <-- SoR
24.0 Cons
25.5 HotR
27.0 HS
28.5 (free) <-- SoV
30.0 Judgement
31.5 HotR
33.0 Cons
34.5 (free) <-- AS
...


To the folks adapting the TPS spreadsheet for level 70, the proper uptimes for this twisting rotation are as follows. Note that I mentioned SA threat up there which isn't modeled at all in my spreadsheet, but mana costs are independent of weapon choice.
HotR,SoV,AS = 1.0
Judge = .9333...
Cons = .888...
SoV-Hit = .60
SoR = .40


TL;DR:
1/2 Imp Judgement
No Glyph of Consecration
96969 using AS in place of ShoR

[Magnusharkov]

Excellent post, I'll be practicing this on the PTR later. I'd be intrigued if you could post any TPS numbers when using this rotation.

One thing that may be worth looking into is what to do when Hammer of wrath becomes available at 35% and lower. I assume that you go back to a lvl 75+ style rotation with swapping ShoR for HoW and every fifth HotR for an AS

[Maelstream]

One interesting thing I noticed was that HotR seems to apply the Seal of Vengence (now this was prior to the last patch, so it may have been changed). Thus, you may want to keep SoV up as long as possible to get the debuff ticking on as many mobs as you can (ie avoid seal twisting in AoE situations). I would sometimes find that by the time I switched to the second or third mod in a pull, it already had a full stack of SoV debuffs.

[WATERBOYsh]

One interesting thing I noticed was that HotR seems to apply the Seal of Vengence (now this was prior to the last patch, so it may have been changed). Thus, you may want to keep SoV up as long as possible to get the debuff ticking on as many mobs as you can (ie avoid seal twisting in AoE situations). I would sometimes find that by the time I switched to the second or third mod in a pull, it already had a full stack of SoV debuffs.

seal twisting in an aoe situation will likely not be worth it. Consecration and tabbing around using HotR with SoV should be plenty of threat...

[Andox]

One interesting thing I noticed was that HotR seems to apply the Seal of Vengence (now this was prior to the last patch, so it may have been changed). Thus, you may want to keep SoV up as long as possible to get the debuff ticking on as many mobs as you can (ie avoid seal twisting in AoE situations). I would sometimes find that by the time I switched to the second or third mod in a pull, it already had a full stack of SoV debuffs.

I'm almost 100% sure that HotR always done like this. But it is pretty nice now when you have a glyphed AS, HotR + SoV and Consecration makes up for the burst threat lost from AS.

[ShaiHulud]

Does Hammer of the Righteous refresh Vengeance stacks or it'll just apply it while SoV is up? They should make it so it refreshes it if not so it's just like warriors Devestate.

[Splug]

Seals trigger on hammer of the righteous as though it was a weapon swing. It should refresh or add a stack of SoV if you're using that seal, or do additional HoR damage if you're using that seal.

I haven't done anything with my paladin other than disenchant stuff in about 4 builds though, so that may no longer be true.

-Splug

[PsiVen]

HotR both applies and refreshes Vengeance; it procs all seals in exactly the same manner that a melee autoattack does.

Though I didn't mention anything above about AoE tanking, seal twisting is almost certainly not worth it in these situations because:
- Rolling multiple stacks of Vengeance is quite powerful with HotR, but the risk of dropping the stacks is high if there are more than 3 targets even if you keep SoV up the whole time
- It's very unlikely that you'll be getting enough mana to sustain it
- There are very few AoE situations which call for a standard threat rotation anyway

One thing that may be worth looking into is what to do when Hammer of wrath becomes available at 35% and lower. I assume that you go back to a lvl 75+ style rotation with swapping ShoR for HoW and every fifth HotR for an AS

Yes, I would expect exactly this. I haven't looked into what our HoW damage will be like at 70 but I'm fairly certain this would be best. HoW at 75-80 most likely would displace HotR entirely, leaving AS to be cast only when Glyphed and in place of a Judgement or Consecration.

[HollerTH]

I cant see seal twisting being worth it. When fighting more than one mob its not to good, when fighting undead/demons its not to good, when target is below 35% hp its not to good. To top it off would require moving seals onto easy to use hot buttons because of the constant spam.

Also the issue that fights rarely let you sit with a perfect rotation, something a boss does will almost certainly interrupt that rotation, and if it gets interrupted while SoR is up that could mean SoV stack droping.

[Andox]

Would be pretty fun to try Hyjal with those abilities. First of all we get alot of Block Value, so the damage taken from the trash will sink. Drastic. But thanks to BoSanc we won't have any problems with our mana, since we have all those mobs beating on us we should have full mana all the time thanks to BoSanc and the heals we take.

If we combine this with the new, improved, Retribution aura aswell as Holy Wrath, which is instant with a small stun (think it's 3 seconds) our threat would be pretty nice. Even nicer if we add HotR + SoV and Consecration. Damn, I want to try this. Sadly, my guild stopped raiding until Wotlk come. Maybe it's work getting a pug to Hyjal, just for this.

[ShaiHulud]

So if I'm reading it correctly then HotR will proc whatever seal you're using. What I propose is HotR refresh Vengance stacks without the seal being up like Devastate does for warriors and Sunder Armor.

[Ocin]

can we sticky this thread? would be great to see it updated as 3.0 drops and then WotLK

[baghead]

yeh great post psi! Looking forward to having a working in game threat meter to be able to see how much we're generating.

[gmf1]

So is improved judgements worth getting? Is it guna be more tps with 2/2 imp judge 3/5 seals of the pure or 0/2 imp judge 5/5 seals of the pure? I assumed with all our new abilities we wouldnt need imp judge.

TY.

[Kelaan]

So is improved judgements worth getting? Is it guna be more tps with 2/2 imp judge 3/5 seals of the pure or 0/2 imp judge 5/5 seals of the pure? I assumed with all our new abilities we wouldnt need imp judge.

Reading PsiVen's post carefully, we can see that 1/2 Imp Judgement is better than 2/2:

If you have 2/2 Imp Judgement, you can sacrifice the GCD at 10.5 to cast at 11.0. This lets you recast by 19, but you can't cast it anyway until 21.0! Those two seconds you gained are completely wasted. Similarly if you take 0/2 Imp Judgement, you can't Judge a second time at all until 13.0, but there's no open GCD until 16.5 unless you want to push back your entire rotation by a second which would cut your TPS by ~7%. Waiting until 16.5 to Judge leaves you judging as if your cooldown was 13.5sec, then 12sec, repeating so a loss of about 29% of your Judgement damage relative to the 9sec cooldown.

(emphasis mine)

So: 1/2 judgement is what you need.

TL;DR:
1/2 Imp Judgement
No Glyph of Consecration
96969 using AS in place of ShoR

^-- This is a more concise answer to your question, and in the original post.