Sacred Duty + misses

[vexryn]

My original understanding of the Sacred Duty mechanic was pretty straightforward: if the buff proc'ed from a judgement, you kept it either for 15 seconds (the duration of the buff), or until your next SotR landed - as a crit, per the proc itself.

I swear that's how Sacred Duty was working a few weeks ago, but now I'm noticing that the Sacred Duty buff merely stays up until the next time I *try* to land a SotR. Which means if the SotR misses, or is dodged/parried, I lose the Sacred Duty buff. When the next GCD comes up, I can try again to make my SotR land, but now I don't get the Sacred Duty crit bonus anymore.

Perhaps Theck can confirm, but I also am not sure if the current talent/rotation comparison is adjusting for this fact. At the margin, this seems to put even slightly more (relative) emphasis on the value of hit and expertise over mere strength for a threat stat, as the consequences of "losing" a Sacred Duty proc due to a miss/dodge/parry on a SotR is a very material impact. Conversely, the relative value of Sacred Duty itself as a scale would then appear to scale significantly with hit and expertise; the value of the talent is much higher with high-hit/high-expertise sets.

So I guess my general questions are:
1) Did Sacred Duty always fall off if your next SotR had a miss/dodge/parry and I just didn't realize it, or was this in fact a "hotfix" sometime after 4.0.3?
2) Any implications to talent, stat, or rotation weightings/decisions in light of this, especially in low-hit/low-expertise sets that seem increasingly relevant for progression content (as a tankadin)?

I don't think there's a "substantive" change here to stats: hit/expertise just become even more valuable for threat stats (if you want them). And Sacred Duty is still astronomically high as a dps/tps talent...

But perhaps if your hit/expertise are so low that you "waste" a material number of SD procs anyway, an Inquisition-based rotation becomes more relevant even for single-target?

[tlitp]

It's been that way since beta, IIRC. Using the default raid set (average ilvl ~359), SoT, CS/SotR framework :

Code: Select all

ph=physical hit (%)
exp=expertise (skill)

               dps.per.point@veng=0.3   dps.per.point@veng=1.0
ph=0,exp=0               243                      376
ph=8,exp=0               300                      465
ph=8,exp=26              359                      556

[theckhd]

As tlitp said, it's been that way since beta, and the MATLAB code has always handled it appropriately.

[dDStyle]

Thx, answers alot, but still have a question regarding this.

When the Sacred buff goes away you keep your 3 stacks of holy power.
Is that "working as intended"?

[vexryn]

As tlitp said, it's been that way since beta, and the MATLAB code has always handled it appropriately.

Thanks for confirming. I swear I never saw that before; I guess in retrospect I probably had enough expertise and hit I just didn't notice it. Now that I've "geared up" and worked my hit and expertise down to almost nothing, I notice it a lot more.

[theckhd]

When the Sacred buff goes away you keep your 3 stacks of holy power.
Is that "working as intended"?

Yes.