4.3 Talent Spec & Glyph Guide

[Meloree]

After looking at the nerf to Divine protection (unless its a bug on the cata side of wow head), dropping our bubble wall down to 20% makes me think I will lean towards needing more cds and making Ardent defender a necessity. If the best a paladin can do is 20%, then we are far lower than the other classes and will need more cds to chain.

Shield Wall is 40%
IBF is 30% plus the ungodly amount of self healing they can do
Survival Instincts (60%) and Frenzied Regen (30% hp boost) are both superior as well

Here is for hoping for more balance...

GAnK is 60%.
AD is 20% with cheat death.
DP is 20% (1 min cooldown).

Our cooldown loadout at 80 sucks. That's not a major concern. Our cooldown loadout at 85 is pretty amazing. GAnK competes well with the other classes "major" cooldowns, AD competes well with the "minor" cooldowns, and DP competes well with the "really minor" cooldowns.

In fact, in each category, ours tends to be best in breed cooldowns. GAnK is as good as anyone elses major. AD is better than Last Stand or Frenzied Regen, and DP is worse than Shield Block for pure melee, and worse than Anti-Magic Shell for magic, but it does address both situations reasonably competitively.

[Arincia]

With glyph of Divine protection we could actually the preferred tank on heavy magic fights giving us 40% magic reduction 10 seconds on a 1 minute cooldown. As far as CDs we could use one almost every 30 seconds.

sec)
000:DP (20% or 40%)
030:Gank (60%)
060:DP (20% or 40%
090:AD (repeat if no AD)(20%dr+cheat death once)
120:DP (20% or 40%)
150:Gank (60%)
180:DP (20% or 40%)
210:-- (repeat if AD used)

So as you can see even using AD as a ohh shit we could keep Damage reduction from other cool downs very often. 30 seconds every 120 seconds without using AD (1/4 uptime) or 70 seconds every 210 seconds with AD (1/3 uptime)
If you consider that the main source of damage was magic with the glyph of DP we have a lot of magic damage reduction and AD means the breath itself never kills us. Heck if you really really wanted to as well you could taunt then pop divine shield for 1-3 seconds to have a endless CD cycle (also have LoH to use every 8/10 minute as well).

I would would say that LoH/BoP/DS could be considered cool downs as well but you would have to know how to use/time them properly to be considered.

[Solitatis]

theck, this is probably on your list of things already, but It would be nice to see when reckning reaches allmost full up time with what mastery rateing, and when you should only put 1 or 2 points into that talent for max single target threat.

Ofcause this depends on your avoidance and boss attackspeed, but would like to see some calculations like you did with the old reckoning at some point.

Keep up the goos work, huge fan of theck's mathlab.

on a side not, it looks more and more like we will be running with two tanking specs: 1 for aoe and 1 for everything else. Kinds sucks that we cant have an offspec for say ret..

[Neptuno]

I agree with what Theckhd has posted above, except where he placed Reckoning on the list. It's procs a lot on beta atm.

This is the build I'm playing around with right now on Beta at level 85.

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#sZcrhfRubdMhcbr:Vmq0RmmzM

I'm sure some of you will go....OMG!!! no AD!!!, but the whole point of a beta is to try stuff out, and that's what I've been doing. The glyphs shown are in game, but some are incorrect as to being prime or major glyphs. Still you get the idea.

I expect we'll get a new beta build shortly with a pass at the actual damage numbers. ATM CS is simply to weak to even use, but I'm sure it will be adjusted to be more in line with HotR.

You have a divine favor glyph? Unless that's just a strange placeholder thing, its a tier 3 holy ability.

Todays build destroyed other thoughts on this spec since reckoning is down to 2 points and they moved divinity over to prot now and that protector talent for imp ret aura etc is a self heal thing. Also WotL now = 60% increase to CS and Judgement damage! Add that to crusade and CS is almost double it's default. Looking back at this fact, I would now question how much haste to buff reckoning is worth compared to ensuring you have more crit for CS with Rule of Law... they are making the WoG spec a little more appealing with the Holy Shield addition, but I can't see it being worth it.

Anyway, the part that still matters is in response to Arincia:

20% melee attack speed buff and 6/9% haste from JoTP achieving a 2.0 second attack speed on a 2.6 speed weapon. I think that haste could really be a solid threat choice depending on the situation.

Haste needed for 2.6s swing down to 2s should be around exactly what your wrote. So why would haste as a stat be a "tanking stat"? I believe the rating curve goes to 128 at lvl85 vs 32 at lvl80, so gear stats would definitely be unfavorable methods for getting enough haste on tank gear to soft cap reckoning for a slow weapon.

As for spec in general, the topic's original mmo-champ links are broken now with the new build, but I wonder about the relegation of Eye for an Eye to "pvp" talents. Has any testing been down on this? Many boss encounters in ICC had spell damage involved though I'm not sure if say Marrowgar's coldflame is his or the "environment's" what about splash/aoe damage components on fights like Rotface,Dreamwalker (does the abom gut spray disease count)? Surely LDW's frostbolts would be a good threat/dps boost when they hit... or what about Sindragosa's breath? Surely this will be decent dragon talent. I'm just not sure there are enough tank and spank encounters that our "default" should be to ignore all magic damage.

Finally, I love the names! It made me lol:

We have Divine Barkskin, Guardian of the Ancient Shieldwall, and Ardent Defender.

[theckhd]

I'm hoping to find time to update the guide soon (this weekend?).

As for E4E, it would be an incredibly gimmicky talent. On a fight like Lady Deathwhisper, it would be a noticeable threat boost, because she tends to chain-cast frostbolts. Most other bosses are primarily melee though. Even dragons, with their breaths, might not put out enough magic damage to make this talent worthwhile. It'd really depend on the frequency and magnitude of the breaths.

Coldflame counts as environmental damage as far as I can tell:

Code: Select all

[18:09:39.522] Coldflame Coldflame Theck 7097 (R: 2200)

It also doesn't show up under Marrowgar's damage on WoL, but as its own creature entity.

[Neptuno]

Yeah, I figured coldflame wouldn't work, but what about shadow-physical like Soul Reaper?

Also, to correct my earlier post, the melee haste buff has been nerfed to 10% with this latest build, so even JotP won't provide enough haste for proper reckoning maximization on a slow weapon. If I did the calculation right, haste rating required at 85 would be 2291 at 0/3 1851 at 1/3 1436 at 2/3 and 1045 at 3/3 to reach 2s with a 2.6s.

Seems like reckoning won't get that 4th swing outside of Bloodlust without stacking haste which would seem unwise as a tank. I'm sure we'll see some matlab for it later, but I'd say a faster weapon with same stats would be comparable to 3/3 JotP + slow weapon... so maybe go faster weapon and get another talent? For instance 3/3 JotP excludes a 3rd point in Rule of Law

[Arincia]

Well as i stated (or didn't state) it depends on the nature of it. If it is only white hits and no abilities included then haste could be a viable stat behind hit and expertise (competing with crit depending on how everything looks). WIth 10% haste nerf we can still work backwards to see what the highest possible speed could be.
2.4= 2.001 delay while 2.6= 2.18 so we would need 9% haste at 2.6 (believe you had already figured that out)

So 2.4 speed might be the optimal speed setting for reckoning but only if it cannot proc off a ability in that 8 second window. The main reason to do so would be increase our threat over time from additional white hits with seal effects. So even regardless of reckoning dropping our auto attacks to a lower timer does have the benefit of more passive threat from seals. That said a different question would be 2/3 in divinity with 4 talents to max out 2 of other optional talents or make it 3/3 and reduce it to 3 which is only enough to only max out 1 of them and partly in another.

[Flex]

Isn't Reckoning weapon speed agnostic and can be pretty much summed up as "Up to 8 seconds of double auto-attack (and associated) damage"?

[theckhd]

Well, the argument is that if your hasted weapon speed is 2.0 or less, you can use up all 4 swings in the 8-second period. If it's slower, you'll usually only get 3 of them. Thus, one would expect a discontinuity in Reckoning DPS as you cross that threshold.

That said, I could have sworn that we had this argument before and someone came up with a proof that it was, as you suggested, weapon-speed independent. But for the life of me, I can't remember the justification.

[Minarva]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 16&sid=1#0

Above is the said post.

[theckhd]

Ah, thank you, that's exactly the argument I was looking for. So my memory isn't as bad as I thought it was. There is a discontinuity (at least in the first derivative), but it's due to fast weapons giving you less overall damage. Anything over a 2.00 hasted weapon speed is thus equivalent.

Another thing to note is that the derivation given there doesn't consider seal procs. However, it's easy to see what happens when you do. Any seal proc that does a fixed % of weapon damage is irrelevant, it will act exactly like white swings. On the other hand, any seal proc that does a fixed amount of damage (i.e. X + sp*Y +ap*Z) will favor faster weapons (at which point we'd need to do some more calculations to figure out the break point).

Luckily SoT is weapon damage based, so the point is mostly moot. Slow weapons it is.

[Chicken]

Seal of Righteousness is also partly weapon based, while not based on weapon damage, it does have a modifier for weapon speed to determine proc strength. For Seal of Justice and Insight I believe proc chance is PPM based, so slower weapons would have a higher chance to proc per swing. Doesn't change much of course, it just makes it even more certain that slower weapons are the better choice.

[theckhd]

Seal of Righteousness is also partly weapon based, while not based on weapon damage, it does have a modifier for weapon speed to determine proc strength. For Seal of Justice and Insight I believe proc chance is PPM based, so slower weapons would have a higher chance to proc per swing. Doesn't change much of course, it just makes it even more certain that slower weapons are the better choice.

Yeah, anything which has a weapon speed modifier will be Reckoning-neutral. In my current code, I has SoJ working like SoR with lower coefficients, which if correct means that SoI is the only seal that still works on a PPM system.

I have a vague recollection of SoR being a static damage amount early in Classic, but I'm not 100% sure on that. I'm pretty sure it was changed to a speed-scaling model by the time I returned to the game in BC though.

[Neptuno]

Glad to see some past research on this has been done... would be more interested to see how that interacts with haste and JotP compared to other threat talents... as well as how much of a "hit" we take to avoidance/mitigation seeing as how the "tanking weapons" are all fast

[Prettysweet]

ok just a question does Reckoning proc on boss fights? I thought it never really used to, if it does i will need to relook at my talent set up for 4.0