Bastion of Glory

How do you calculate the effect of the Bastion of Glory stacks?

I don't know whether the following calculation is valid, but from what I've read about other "stacking" spells, it could be. "Initial Healing" is the amount of healing provided by Eternal Flame or by Word of Glory:

Total Healing = Initial Healing x 1.10 x 1.10 x 1.10 x 1.10 x 1.10 ( for 5 stacks )

Although the initial amount in the following example is not the actual amount for any EF or WoG cast, it shows how significant BoG stacks can become if the calculation is as shown above ( initial healing is 1000)

Total = 1000 x 1.10 = 1100 (+ 100 )
= 1100 x 1.10 = 1210 (+ 110 )
= 1210 x 1.10 = 1331 (+ 121 )
= 1331 x 1.10 = 1464.1 (+ 133.1 )
= 1464.1 x 1.10 = 1610.5 (+ 146.4 )
= 1610.5

Each number in parentheses above is the amount added to the previous total by the stack as it is applied.

Again, I don't know whether the software calculates the effects of the BoG stacks this way. If you know the formula, then I will be very grateful if you would share it.

--- Adeya

So much overcomplicating :P

5 stacks of BoG increase the heal by 50%, that's it.

Worldie wrote:So much overcomplicating :P

5 stacks of BoG increase the heal by 50%, that's it.

I beg your pardon. I do not "overcomplicate" anything. Blizzard is responsible for doing that. :-)

How does the Bastion of Glory 10% bonus per stack interact with "Mastery: Divine Bulwark"? Theck wrote, in another thread, that the 20% boost to BoG that my paladin currently gains from Mastery increases the 10% bonus for each BoG stack to 30%.

Consequently, your answer implies that the total bonus for the amount of healing calculated for Eternal Flame (or WoG) would be 150%, i.e., the amount of healing multiplied by 1.5. Is that correct?

That's correct. Also the mastery bonus is additive as well.

Meaning it if you get 8% bonus from mastery, 1 stack will add 8%, 2 stacks will add 16% etc up to 40% extra bonus from 5 stacks, for a total of 90% bonus [(10+8)*5]
With your 20% mastery bonus, you have a total of [(10+20)*5]=150% bonus healing for your WoG. (thus, your WoG will heal for 250% of the base)

If I recall correctly, it was sometime around the end of BC or beginning of Wrath that they decided to make percentage bonuses consistently additive in order to bring some clarity to their maths. I could be wrong - I'm old.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it was the other way around. They converted a lot of bonuses from additive to multiplicative (haste was one of those). Most buff bonuses are multiplicative. Damage reduction is the most common example. Things like this are typically the exception to the rule.

Stacking buffs / debuffs have always been additive within each other (and multiplicative with everything else).

It would be horribly counterintuitive to make a stacking buff add moltiplicatively to itself :P

Yes, but stacking buffs/debuffs are technically a single buff/debuff. A 5 stack isn't 5 separate buffs. It's a single buff with an internal modifier, which while somewhat semantics, has a very different implementation. Multiplicity happens (most often...again with a few exceptions) when combining separate buffs as you noted.

They are consistently inconsistent. :)

At the beginning of Cata (or maybe Wrath), they were aiming for a strategy where like buffs were additive, but multiplicative with unlike buffs. So for example, two buffs that gave 10% damage to a single spell (say Judgment) would be additive, but they'd be multiplicative with "20% all damage" buff like AW.

Recently (MoP/WoD) they've been shifting back towards an "everything is multiplicative" strategy because it's just simpler to understand. But individual mechanics will depend on when and how they've been coded. Bastion is coded as additive with mastery because someone decided it should be that way (though to be fair, it makes more sense than a multiplicative implementation here).

Adeya, it's pretty easy to test this sort of thing in game. Go to a raid dummy, go through your rotation and mouse over your Bastion of Glory buff. You'll clearly see that each stack is additive (i.e. one stack will read 30%, two will read 60%, etc.). You can also take all your gear off and repeat that test to see the tooltip drop to 18%, 36%, etc.

Like always, tooltips can lie, but this is a big enough difference that you could check the rough size of your WoG's or EF's and see the difference.

theckhd wrote:They are consistently inconsistent. :)

....

Adeya, it's pretty easy to test this sort of thing in game. Go to a raid dummy, go through your rotation and mouse over your Bastion of Glory buff. You'll clearly see that each stack is additive (i.e. one stack will read 30%, two will read 60%, etc.). You can also take all your gear off and repeat that test to see the tooltip drop to 18%, 36%, etc.

Like always, tooltips can lie, but this is a big enough difference that you could check the rough size of your WoG's or EF's and see the difference.

That's interesting. I don't think that it has ever occurred to me to "mouse over" a displayed buff. I gather you are referring to the effect of Mastery: Divine Bulwark, which currently adds my paladin's 20% Mastery to the 10% bonus of each stack, and five stacks sum to 150%. So the total healing would be multiplied: ( 1.00 + ((0.10 + 0.20) * 5)) = 2.5 as Worldie wrote (.... ummm, not written that clearly).

Before it is increased by BoG, though, it is first increased by the effect of Vengeance's increase of Attack Power, half of which translates to an increase in Spell Power, which adds significantly to the amount of healing that would else be done by Eternal Flame or WoG.

So the bonuses from Mastery clearly make BoG an extremely important part of decsion-making, i.e., when to use EF or WoG. What bearing that Vengeance should have upon one's decisions to refresh EF or cast WoG is not nearly as clear.

So I must ask: in practice, just how feasible is it to consistently achieve 5 BoG stacks without entailing a significant risk that the paladin will be killed before s/he refreshes EF or casts WoG? If you continue waiting while 5 BoG stacks accumulate and/or Vengeance reaches some sort of peak, then it is entirely possible -- perhaps even quite likely -- that the paladin's health will drop so low that they will become irrelevant. You cannot heal a corpse.

From what I've seen so far, it is possible to reach about 3 BoG stacks consistently before EF must be refreshed, under ordinary circumstances. That is, without Holy Avenger, Sanctified Wrath, or Divine Purpose. It's much easier to get and apply as many as 5 BoG stacks during HA and AW/SW because they are predictable. You know how much HP can usually be generated while they last, and know when that will stop.

But Divine Purpose is shooting craps. Sometimes my paladin is flooded with the free casts, and all the while that is going on I know for a fact that soon they will rarely happen, if at all, for a long time. They can be rather beneficial if I am lucky enough to get them at the right time. But I cannot rely upon them at all. (As I have often observed, if the design of your game depends upon pseudorandom "rolls" to determine the outcome of events, then the player's satsifaction with your game depends upon pseudorandom events, thus, consequently, they determine the amount of your company's revenue.)

That said, I don't have any experience with using WoG during combat, just practicing against target dummies which don't actually do any damage to the paladin. But I do have experience with EF during dungeon runs, mostly, and in a couple of raids.

Speaking of mouseovers, while I was looking at my paladin's paper doll, I put the mouse cursor on the Mastery stat to see whether it displays the 8% that you all have been describing. I don't recall whether it did, because what I did see was something that I've never seen it display before. Beneath the usual mystic numbers it had a note about Divine Bulwark adding Mastery as a bonus to healing. I'm pretty sure that I looked at the Mastery tooltip at least once before, after I resumed playing WoW just before MoP 5.4, and it did not have that note. I have no idea as to when it was added.

--- Adeya

Adeya wrote:From what I've seen so far, it is possible to reach about 3 BoG stacks consistently before EF must be refreshed, under ordinary circumstances. That is, without Holy Avenger, Sanctified Wrath, or Divine Purpose. It's much easier to get and apply as many as 5 BoG stacks during HA and AW/SW because they are predictable. You know how much HP can usually be generated while they last, and know when that will stop.

I can give an answer based on my experience. I'm not always perfect, prioriy-wise, and delays hitting Shield of the Righteous more often than I'd like. Since I went above 8-10k Haste, I was able to get the 5 stacks within 30s most of the time (so the rotation tolerates some margin of error).

In the worst cases, when I really butcher my rotation, I have 4 stacks when Eternal Flame drops. Sometimes, thanks to Vengeance, a 4-stack EF will be better than the previous 5-stack EF, in which case I may simply recast it with 4 stacks (thanks to Theck's WA UI giving me the necessary information for a quick decision). But franckly, if you stay a few more seconds without EF to reach 5 stacks, you won't suddenly drop dead.

I got the 4T16 bonus just before I went on holidays, it solved any problem related to that anyway. ;)

If you're very close to 50% haste, and have the 4 set bonus, then theoretically, you can keep the 5 set bonus up from CS and J alone, assuming you keep a perfect rotation. AS and DF procs can make things a little easier. The big question is, do you WANT to? I personally don't consider it a maintenance buff.

First, if I'm at full health, there is no use in popping EF whatsoever, even if I'm sitting on 5 BoG stacks. The hot is meant to keep you alive, but it's not doing much while I'm at or near full health, and having a 5 BoG EF in the pocket to react to a sudden drop in health is providing a lot more survivability.

Likewise, if I receive a sudden drop in health while at 3 or 4 BoG stacks, popping EF has a bigger chance of saving my life, than sitting on the BoG stacks to get a slightly stronger hot at a later time, even if that means I'm overwriting my current hot.

Adeya wrote:But Divine Purpose is shooting craps. Sometimes my paladin is flooded with the free casts, and all the while that is going on I know for a fact that soon they will rarely happen, if at all, for a long time. They can be rather beneficial if I am lucky enough to get them at the right time. But I cannot rely upon them at all. (As I have often observed, if the design of your game depends upon pseudorandom "rolls" to determine the outcome of events, then the player's satsifaction with your game depends upon pseudorandom events, thus, consequently, they determine the amount of your company's revenue.)

Holy Avenger. :) It's similar to a burst of DP procs and then a long time of nothing, but at least you can choose when the "procs" apply. Sure, it has a lower total gain than Divine Favor, but being able to control your gain makes it so much better.

Adeya wrote:That's interesting. I don't think that it has ever occurred to me to "mouse over" a displayed buff. I gather you are referring to the effect of Mastery: Divine Bulwark, which currently adds my paladin's 20% Mastery to the 10% bonus of each stack, and five stacks sum to 150%. So the total healing would be multiplied: ( 1.00 + ((0.10 + 0.20) * 5)) = 2.5 as Worldie wrote (.... ummm, not written that clearly).

I meant you should literally mouse over the icon of the "Bastion of Glory" buff (or the equivalent in whatever buff addon you might use). With 20% mastery, a 5-stack of BoG should have a tooltip that reads something like "increases WoG by 150%."

Adeya wrote:Before it is increased by BoG, though, it is first increased by the effect of Vengeance's increase of Attack Power, half of which translates to an increase in Spell Power, which adds significantly to the amount of healing that would else be done by Eternal Flame or WoG.

Yes.

Adeya wrote:So the bonuses from Mastery clearly make BoG an extremely important part of decsion-making, i.e., when to use EF or WoG. What bearing that Vengeance should have upon one's decisions to refresh EF or cast WoG is not nearly as clear.

So I must ask: in practice, just how feasible is it to consistently achieve 5 BoG stacks without entailing a significant risk that the paladin will be killed before s/he refreshes EF or casts WoG? If you continue waiting while 5 BoG stacks accumulate and/or Vengeance reaches some sort of peak, then it is entirely possible -- perhaps even quite likely -- that the paladin's health will drop so low that they will become irrelevant. You cannot heal a corpse.

In practice, with the right gear you will usually have little trouble refreshing EF before 30 seconds are up. At the beginning of SoO, I was able to do so in nearly full T15H gear quite comfortably. Gaining the T16 4-piece bonus has made it utterly trivial. I generally run Divine Purpose, so I often can refresh it within 15 or fewer seconds if necessary, and rarely need to wait more than 20. You can refresh it early to fish for additional Divine Purpose procs, though I don't actually do this that often because I prefer having the 5-BoG emergency self-heal at my disposal.

One tactic many tanks use is to refresh at high Vengeance, since the buff snapshots your attack power - thus recasting at high Vengeance means a very strong HoT. Similarly with haste buffs. Some of my WeakAuras are designed around conveying this information for exactly that purpose.

But Divine Purpose is shooting craps. Sometimes my paladin is flooded with the free casts, and all the while that is going on I know for a fact that soon they will rarely happen, if at all, for a long time. They can be rather beneficial if I am lucky enough to get them at the right time. But I cannot rely upon them at all. (As I have often observed, if the design of your game depends upon pseudorandom "rolls" to determine the outcome of events, then the player's satsifaction with your game depends upon pseudorandom events, thus, consequently, they determine the amount of your company's revenue.)

I pretty much completely disagree with your assessment here. Divine Purpose works quite well in the hands of a skilled player that can stagger cooldowns and adapt to the situation. Yes, you can get unlucky streaks, RNG is RNG. Use one of your other tools to handle it. Compensate with other cooldowns if necessary, use WoG or Lay on Hands for an emergency self-heal, bubble-taunt, yell at your healers on Ventrilo, etc.

Beneath the usual mystic numbers it had a note about Divine Bulwark adding Mastery as a bonus to healing. I'm pretty sure that I looked at the Mastery tooltip at least once before, after I resumed playing WoW just before MoP 5.4, and it did not have that note. I have no idea as to when it was added.

I think that tooltip specifically mentions the healing bonus of Bastion of Glory, not just a "bonus to healing."

Thels wrote:If you're very close to 50% haste, and have the 4 set bonus, then theoretically, you can keep the 5 set bonus up from CS and J alone, assuming you keep a perfect rotation. AS and DF procs can make things a little easier. The big question is, do you WANT to? I personally don't consider it a maintenance buff.

If by "maintenance buff" you mean that you don't believe that Eternal Flame should be activated and refreshed for continuous coverage, then what can I say?

In my experience so far -- I don't have the 4-piece Tier 16 set, or any set at all, yet, just the T16 Raid Finder gauntlets -- ordinarily my paladin can use SoR at least twice after activating or refreshing EF and maybe 3 times every third or fourth rotation. So there are only two or three BoG stacked. (This is while using the CLCProt addon which I've been updating and upgrading for WoW 5.4 MoP, so the rotation is as close to "perfect" as it can be, at least until I can obtain some data that might allow me to tweak it.)

First, if I'm at full health, there is no use in popping EF whatsoever, even if I'm sitting on 5 BoG stacks. The hot is meant to keep you alive, but it's not doing much while I'm at or near full health, and having a 5 BoG EF in the pocket to react to a sudden drop in health is providing a lot more survivability.

Likewise, if I receive a sudden drop in health while at 3 or 4 BoG stacks, popping EF has a bigger chance of saving my life, than sitting on the BoG stacks to get a slightly stronger hot at a later time, even if that means I'm overwriting my current hot.

The argument for Eternal Flame is that it mitigates the effects of damage spikes and allows your healers to respond more effectively. Theck has written about this convincingly: http://www.sacredduty.net/2013/09/04/ef-you/. You must have EF in place before those spikes occur. If you cannot predict exactly when they will occur and cast EF accordingly, then, at least, you need to have EF active before they are likely to be inflicted.

For most fights, that means "continuously". In his OP for the Elitist Jerks Protection thread, Wrathblood recommends activating EF as soon as possible after a fight begins and maintaining it continuously thereafter. (I haven't re-read it or that thread for a while so I don't know whether his recommendation has been modified since, but I don't imagine that it has been retracted.)

In that respect, I think that trying to always launch or refresh EF with a stack of 5 BoG just because WoW allows you to have that many can be counterproductive. Inevitably, what is possible depends in part upon the paladin's gear and its modifications through reforging, gemming and enchanting. But it also depends upon the regular use of SoR as soon as there is enough HP to use it (its cooldown is 1.5 sec. although it is off the GCD). What you can do with the 4T16 set bonus is, after all, possible only after fighting a lot of fights while equipped with lesser gear and weaker weapons, and looting the dead bosses afterward. :-)

Frankly, your comment about "... having a 5 BoG EF in the pocket ..." puzzles me. When SoR generates a Bastion of Glory, the buff has a duration of 20 seconds. Each time that another BoG is applied, the duration is refreshed for 20 seconds. So far I have not observed whether using SoR after the stack reaches 5 BoG will refresh the duration without, of course, adding another BoG to the stack (I doubt that it will). So maybe you can maintain a stack of 5 BoG for as long as you use SoR at least once before it expires. Regardless, it seems to be a very expensive "reserve" to acquire and maintain -- especially if the duration cannot be refreshed beyond the last 20 seconds of the 5th BoG. You had just as well cast it regardless of your health, especially if you know that a barrage of incoming damage is imminent.

EF is not all that great for after-the-fact healing, insofar as the initial burst is not nearly as much as what WoG provides, even if EF is cast with a stack of 3+ BoG. Casting WoG with the same BoG stack is just as strong or stronger and the healing is in one lump sum. :-) Of course, you cannot have both EF and WoG.

But, again, from all that I've read, apparently there can be a significant risk that the paladin will die from a cascade of incoming damage spikes before the player's cast of EF (or WoG) can do much about them. So the best practice is to have EF in place before the damage is done. Eternal Flame is not Word of Glory. They are not interchangable. They are different tools for staying alive.

Adeya wrote:But Divine Purpose is shooting craps. Sometimes my paladin is flooded with the free casts, and all the while that is going on I know for a fact that soon they will rarely happen, if at all, for a long time. They can be rather beneficial if I am lucky enough to get them at the right time. But I cannot rely upon them at all. (As I have often observed, if the design of your game depends upon pseudorandom "rolls" to determine the outcome of events, then the player's satsifaction with your game depends upon pseudorandom events, thus, consequently, they determine the amount of your company's revenue.)

Holy Avenger. :) It's similar to a burst of DP procs and then a long time of nothing, but at least you can choose when the "procs" apply. Sure, it has a lower total gain than Divine Favor, but being able to control your gain makes it so much better.

Yes, HA is my favorite L75 talent, but I suspect that it is not always the best for every fight. Sanctified Wrath is actually better for fights with a lot of mobs, or if you're tanking adds. Avenging Wrath lasts 50% longer, so you kill them more of them and more quickly. You cast Judgment twice as often, thus roughly doubling the amount of damage you do with it (+20% for AW), and it generates 2 HP instead of 1. Add the Grand Crusader procs, and you may not have a stack of 5 BoG to refresh EF, but you should have no trouble getting 3 (even with ilvl 541 gear).

Thanks for your remarks. Your perspective is interesting.

POSTSCRIPT UPDATE (2014-07-31): I wrote, about "maintaining" a stack of 5 BoG,

.... So far I have not observed whether using SoR after the stack reaches 5 BoG will refresh the duration without, of course, adding another BoG to the stack (I doubt that it will). ...."

Since then I have observed that the player can use Shield of the Righteous after a stack of 5 BoG is acquired to refresh the duration, which is 20 seconds. Of course, doing that costs 3 HP, but the stack cost 18 HP to acquire so, ordinarily, it would be worth maintaining for some time pending its use.

theckhd wrote:

Adeya wrote:That's interesting. I don't think that it has ever occurred to me to "mouse over" a displayed buff. I gather you are referring to the effect of Mastery: Divine Bulwark, which currently adds my paladin's 20% Mastery to the 10% bonus of each stack, and five stacks sum to 150%. So the total healing would be multiplied: ( 1.00 + ((0.10 + 0.20) * 5)) = 2.5 as Worldie wrote (.... ummm, not written that clearly).

I meant you should literally mouse over the icon of the "Bastion of Glory" buff (or the equivalent in whatever buff addon you might use). With 20% mastery, a 5-stack of BoG should have a tooltip that reads something like "increases WoG by 150%."

Sorry for the long delay in replying .... First, I still use the default Blizzard UI, although I've reduced the scale of the buttons to 85%. Perhaps you haven't seen it for a while? Second, when I use Shield of the Righteous a BoG "buff" icon appears along the top of the display screen, where all of the buffs and blessings are displayed in a series that grows toward the left from just to the left of the minimap. Often the line becomes so long that another one is created below it, beginning from a point near the minimap with the icons displayed in order from the right toward the left. When I put the mouse cursor on that BoG icon the following text appears in the "tooltip":

"Your next Eternal Flame used to heal yourself heals for an additional ___%". With 1 BoG on the stack, the number which follows the last word is 35%; with 2 stacked, the number is 71%; (I missed the 3rd BoG); with 4 BoG the number is 142%; and with 5 BoG the number is 178%.

At the time, the tooltip for Mastery on the paladin's paper doll had the following text:
____________________________________
"Mastery 25.70%
(8% + 17.70%)
Mastery: Divine Bulwark
Passive
Increases the damage reduction of your Shield of the Righteous by 25%, adds 25% to your Bastion of Glory, and increases you chance to block melee attacks by 25%.

Mastery 10620 (+17.70 mastery)
______________________________________

So, you were right that it explicitly mentions Bastion of Glory and not just "healing".

Adeya wrote:So the bonuses from Mastery clearly make BoG an extremely important part of decsion-making, i.e., when to use EF or WoG. What bearing that Vengeance should have upon one's decisions to refresh EF or cast WoG is not nearly as clear.

So I must ask: in practice, just how feasible is it to consistently achieve 5 BoG stacks without entailing a significant risk that the paladin will be killed before s/he refreshes EF or casts WoG? If you continue waiting while 5 BoG stacks accumulate and/or Vengeance reaches some sort of peak, then it is entirely possible -- perhaps even quite likely -- that the paladin's health will drop so low that they will become irrelevant. You cannot heal a corpse.

In practice, with the right gear you will usually have little trouble refreshing EF before 30 seconds are up. At the beginning of SoO, I was able to do so in nearly full T15H gear quite comfortably. Gaining the T16 4-piece bonus has made it utterly trivial. I generally run Divine Purpose, so I often can refresh it within 15 or fewer seconds if necessary, and rarely need to wait more than 20. You can refresh it early to fish for additional Divine Purpose procs, though I don't actually do this that often because I prefer having the 5-BoG emergency self-heal at my disposal.

One tactic many tanks use is to refresh at high Vengeance, since the buff snapshots your attack power - thus recasting at high Vengeance means a very strong HoT. Similarly with haste buffs. Some of my WeakAuras are designed around conveying this information for exactly that purpose.

All I can say is that I usually do not produce more than 2 BoG stacks before EF must be refreshed, and perhaps produce 3 BoG every third or fourth "rotation" -- i.e., without using Holy Avenger, or Avenging Wrath with Sanctified Wrath, and without Divine Purpose procs even if Divine Purpose is selected as the Level 75 talent.

Please note that I am using the "standalone" CLCProt which was a module of clcInfo, AKA the "FCFS Rotation Helper". It displays the icon for the skill that has the highest priority which is currently not on cooldown, if all the conditions are met for its use, such as whether there is enough Holy Power. In my experience, it and its Retribution counterpart have always produced the most effective and efficient use of the "instant cast" active spells (called "actions") in the "rotation" although they are evaluated according to a sequence of priorities specified by the player.

Normally we prefer to launch Eternal Flame with 3 HP. Then the player has about 25 seconds during which to produce another 3 HP for EF, plus 3 HP for each Bastion of Glory. If you want to refresh EF with a stack of 3 BoG, then your paladin must use Crusader Strike (CS) or Hammer of the Righteous (HoR), Judgment (J) and/or one or more Avenger's Shield (AS) Grand Crusader (GC) procs for a total of 12 times during those ~25 seconds. That means casting one of those spells at an average of approximately every two seconds.

Doing that is quite close to impossible unless:

(1) Your paladin seldoms casts any other spells, such as AS without a GC proc, or Holy Prism, Holy Wrath, Hammer of Wrath or Consecration -- practically all of the paladin's attack necessary to maintain threat must come from Shield of the Righteous and the Holy Power producers.

(2) And until the paladin's melee haste reduces the global cooldown and the spell cooldowns of CS, HoR, J, AS, and SoR (et al.) as described for the Sanctity of Battle. The way that the benefits of the Seal of Insight are stated apparently does not imply that any spell cooldowns are shortened -- a 10% reduction in "casting speed" does not seem to have any meaning for an "instant cast" spell, so I suppose it affects Flash of Light and Redemption .... is there one that I am overlooking?

Haste is simply dependent upon the paladin's gear, not only as a secondary attribute, but with respect to reforging, gemming and enchanting, too. There's nothing that a player can do except to maximize Haste without reducing Hit below 7.5% and Expertise below 15%.

Which reminds me:

(1) Is there a Haste "cap" for Protection spec paladins? What I would really like is a formula to convert the numeric total of Hast to the percentage shown on the paper doll, and vice-versa. :-)

(2) Do you know of a formulary relationship between melee haste and spell haste? For example, my paladin's current melee haste is +23.16% and spell haste is +35.47%. The WoW API has a function to get the paladin's current spell haste, but there isn't one for obtaining the paladin's current melee haste.

Adeya wrote: But Divine Purpose is shooting craps. Sometimes my paladin is flooded with the free casts, and all the while that is going on I know for a fact that soon they will rarely happen, if at all, for a long time. They can be rather beneficial if I am lucky enough to get them at the right time. But I cannot rely upon them at all. (As I have often observed, if the design of your game depends upon pseudorandom "rolls" to determine the outcome of events, then the player's satsifaction with your game depends upon pseudorandom events, thus, consequently, they determine the amount of your company's revenue.)

I pretty much completely disagree with your assessment here. Divine Purpose works quite well in the hands of a skilled player that can stagger cooldowns and adapt to the situation. Yes, you can get unlucky streaks, RNG is RNG. Use one of your other tools to handle it. Compensate with other cooldowns if necessary, use WoG or Lay on Hands for an emergency self-heal, bubble-taunt, yell at your healers on Ventrilo, etc.

Lucky you! In my experience with WoW, all pseudorandom number generator outcomes for everything are always in "streaks", and they pass through "normal" only briefly on the way from one extreme to another. (Would you like an example for the distribution of Black Trillium Ore vs. White Trillium Ore?) If Divine Purpose actually did proc at least once out of every four times that I cast EF or SoR, then I would not have made the remarks that I did. It won't proc twice out of eight or even sixteen casts without doing so three or four consecutive times, eventually, then nothing. It does as I described. It always has. Indeed, often I wonder whether the WoW developers do implement and use an actual pseudorandom number generator in the game software. If they do, then it does not seem to me to be a very good one. Or maybe it has a bug(s).

May I remind you that you can't use WoG if you select the talent for EF? Lay on Hands is nice, though, and Unbreakable Spirit reduces the cooldown to 5 minutes!!. Yes, I am familiar with all of the other cooldowns .... both their usefulness and their limitations. For the time being, though, the healers are whomever shows up for the dungeon run or for the raid, and I'm not acquainted with any of them in any other context. I must ask though:

What is a "bubble taunt"?

My paladin can do a "bubble hearth" thanks to the Glyph of Righteous Retreat, but the other members of the raid tend to be rather unappreciative of any tank who has the nerve to use it. :-)

By the way, thank you very much for telling me about Text Area Cache! It works very well in my experience so far. :-)