Hammer of Wrath rotation

I have no idea if it's actually viable what I do, but often, when the boss is at 20% or lower, I drop from the 96969 rotation, in favor of:

Holy Shield
Judgement
Consecration
Shield of Righteousness
Hammer of the Righteous
Hammer of Wrath

And then rinse and repeat. I haven't really bothered to calculate if it's anywhere worthwhile. I just like pressing them that way after 96969 80% of the fight. By then threat doesn't have that much importance anymore.

I kinda realize I've gotten lazy on that department. 96969 is a great rotation of course, but what if we need to modify? If for example I have to refresh Sacred Shield, which skill in my rotation would be the best to drop?

What about swapping AS, Exo or HoW in (replacing one of the 5 basic skills on some of the rotations)? Would any of those be viable?

Last I checked, Theck mathed it out to show subbing out Holy Shield is the only worthwhile choice for a TPS upgrade. At least, without messing with glyphs.

When a boss is below 20% I tend to opt for:

HS
Cons.
HotR
Judge
SoR
HoW (or Exo, depending if Exo is up or not)
--which puts me right back at HS before it wears off.

It really depends on your rotation, if you're constant 96969 then I suspect, as Grehn said, that subbing out HS you be your best option.

Lets look at the rotation you suggest first over 18 seconds (the duration of the 96969 rotation):

Holy Shield
Judgement
Consecration
Shield of Righteousness
Hammer of the Righteous
Hammer of Wrath

Over 18 seconds you get:
2x Holy Shield
2x Judgement
2x Consecration
2x Shield of Righteousness
2x HotR
2x Hammer of Wrath

For a 96969 rotation you get:
2x Holy Shield
2x Judgement
2x Consecration
3x Shield of Righteousness
3x HotR

So the difference here is 2xHoW versus 1xShoR and 1xHotR. It might be gear dependant, but on my pally, both ShoR and HotR outdamage HoW. So using the rotation you propose would actually be a net loss in damage and threat for me.

Basically if you need to replace something you should probably decide to replace:

HS ==> Judgement ==> Consecration ==> HotR ==> ShoR

In that order. If you don't want to replace either HS or Judgement, then see if the ability outdamages Consecration.

For things like Sacred shield, I replace a consecration as I prefer to keep up HS and Judgement (JotJ) for hard hitters. For non hard hitters, HS is the first thing to go.

If you're going to neglect refreshing HS in order to modify your rotation keep an eye out for Redoubt.

when I do bother to use HoW, i switch to a 6 second rotation:

HoR ... 0
ShoR ... 1.5
HoW ... 3.0
??? ... 4.5
HoR ... 6.0

??? is whatever is up at the time. I usually alternate judgment and consecration. I have no idea if it's a threat increase (not that it matters at that point).

I don't like swapping out HS. Reducing my damage mitigation to pop just a little more TPS/DPS doesn't sound good to me. Likewise, I do like to keep judging every 9 seconds for all the extras it gives.

So the best thing to do is to stick to 96969 and totally ignore AS, Exo and HoW against a single target, and to drop Consecration whenever I need to refresh Sacred Shield?

I'm assuming it's worth to include AS in multimob tanking?

jere wrote:So the difference here is 2xHoW versus 1xShoR and 1xHotR. It might be gear dependant, but on my pally, both ShoR and HotR outdamage HoW. So using the rotation you propose would actually be a net loss in damage and threat for me.

Only thing to keep in mind is that that's the 3rd ShoR, the one not boosted by Judgement (well, in 3.1 at least).

Thels wrote:I don't like swapping out HS. Reducing my damage mitigation to pop just a little more TPS/DPS doesn't sound good to me. Likewise, I do like to keep judging every 9 seconds for all the extras it gives.

So the best thing to do is to stick to 96969 and totally ignore AS, Exo and HoW against a single target, and to drop Consecration whenever I need to refresh Sacred Shield?

I'm assuming it's worth to include AS in multimob tanking?

Given that you don't want to drop HS or Judgement, then yes, Consecration would be the next best candidate for substitution. I haven't done the math on AS in multimob situations, but I would guess that it is better (just a guess).

Thels wrote:

jere wrote:So the difference here is 2xHoW versus 1xShoR and 1xHotR. It might be gear dependant, but on my pally, both ShoR and HotR outdamage HoW. So using the rotation you propose would actually be a net loss in damage and threat for me.

Only thing to keep in mind is that that's the 3rd ShoR, the one not boosted by Judgement (well, in 3.1 at least).

I never assumed the ShoR getting the buff, just typical ShoR damage as is. Now in 3.2, it will depend on what your ShoR values look like, since it is getting nerfed.

jere wrote:Given that you don't want to drop HS or Judgement, then yes, Consecration would be the next best candidate for substitution. I haven't done the math on AS in multimob situations, but I would guess that it is better (just a guess).

Given that the judgement debuff lasts 20 seconds there's no reason to not replace every other judgement with a higher damage ability (HoW, AS, Exo). As long as you judge every other time through the rotation, the debuff won't fall off.

sarutobi wrote:

jere wrote:Given that you don't want to drop HS or Judgement, then yes, Consecration would be the next best candidate for substitution. I haven't done the math on AS in multimob situations, but I would guess that it is better (just a guess).

Given that the judgement debuff lasts 20 seconds there's no reason to not replace every other judgement with a higher damage ability (HoW, AS, Exo). As long as you judge every other time through the rotation, the debuff won't fall off.

Judgement also increases your block value from the libram. I value that more than a possible small increase in TPS.

And having Exorcism and AS off CD all the time can help with picking up mobs.

sarutobi wrote:

jere wrote:Given that you don't want to drop HS or Judgement, then yes, Consecration would be the next best candidate for substitution. I haven't done the math on AS in multimob situations, but I would guess that it is better (just a guess).

Given that the judgement debuff lasts 20 seconds there's no reason to not replace every other judgement with a higher damage ability (HoW, AS, Exo). As long as you judge every other time through the rotation, the debuff won't fall off.

JotJ debuff could fall off if you miss a judgement and are swapping out every other one.

Also there are a lot of fights where you want to save your ranged abilities to pick up adds - Ignis, XT Hardmode, Freya, Yogg

And there are other fights where you know you're going to have to run out of melee range occasionally and it's better to save your ranged abilities to use at that time rather then having them on CD and doing nothing.

The bottom line is that there are way too many variables to say you should always do one thing or the other. Figuring out what's best to do in each situation is the key.

I was under the (seemingly mistaken) impression that once you had something along the lines of Last Laugh's 171.6 dps that Hammer of the Righteous actually outperformed Hammer of Wrath in terms of threat/dps. I realize that most of you are talking about subbing out a judgment or Holy Shield, but in terms of sticking with the regular rotation, am I way off here?

Ancalimë wrote:I was under the (seemingly mistaken) impression that once you had something along the lines of Last Laugh's 171.6 dps that Hammer of the Righteous actually outperformed Hammer of Wrath in terms of threat/dps. I realize that most of you are talking about subbing out a judgment or Holy Shield, but in terms of sticking with the regular rotation, am I way off here?

Don't talk me about that weapon

Dropped several times in a row in the early days and lost the roll every time.

Then when about everyone but me had it, it stopped dropping

To address the questions in this thread:
First of all, here's the Ability Damage/DPS breakdown for 3.1

Unfortunately, I didn't give absolute numbers in that post (an error I'm remedying with the 3.2 analysis). However, I did post them here, where we were discussing other rotations:

Code: Select all

        'ShoR'         [4816]
        'LoO_Bonus'    [ 968]
        'HotR'         [2951]
        'Cons'         [3315]
        'Exor'         [2483]
        'JoV'          [2135]
        'JoB'          [1469]
        'JoR'          [2042]
        'AS'           [2564]
        'HoW'          [2527]
        'SoB'          [ 567]
        'SoR'          [ 334]
        'VDoT'         [4672]
        'HS'           [ 889]

As Jasari pointed out, the HoW rotation drops 1 HotR and 1 ShoR for 2 HoW's. It should be obvious from these numbers that this will be a net loss, since ShoR and HotR both outdamage HoW individually. The exact numbers are:
Lose 2951+4816=7767 damage
Gain 2*2527=5054 damage
Net loss of 2713 damage, or 150 DPS (about 400 TPS).


As for the 6-second rotation Ascendant suggested, let's compare it to 969. From the other thread I linked, we have:

Theck wrote:For standard 969: In 18 seconds, you get
2 Judgement (x 2135 = 4270)
2 Consecration (x 3315 = 6630)
3 HotR (x 2951 = 8853)
3 ShoR (x 4816 = 14448)
Total damage: 34201, or 1900 DPS.

For the 6-second rotation, in 12 seconds we have:
2 HotR (x 2951 = 5909)
2 ShoR (x 4816 = 9632)
2 HoW (x 2527 = 5054)
1 Judgement (x 2135 = 2135)
1 Consecration (x 3315 = 3315)
Total damage: 26045 over 12 seconds for 2170 DPS.

It's not that surprising that this comes out ahead - you've basically dropped Holy Shield (which the quoted calculation isn't including) and about half of the Judgements and Consecrations from your rotation to gain an extra, slightly weaker HotR every 6 seconds.

If we recalculate the 969 rotation with HoW substituted for every Holy Shield, we add:
2 HoW (x 2527 = 5054) every 18 seconds, for an extra 280 DPS, which would just slightly edge out the 12-second rotation (1900+280=2180 DPS).

Ancalimë wrote:I was under the (seemingly mistaken) impression that once you had something along the lines of Last Laugh's 171.6 dps that Hammer of the Righteous actually outperformed Hammer of Wrath in terms of threat/dps. I realize that most of you are talking about subbing out a judgment or Holy Shield, but in terms of sticking with the regular rotation, am I way off here?

Yes, I believe Last Laugh's DPS is just above the level where HotR outscales HoW. Knaughty calculated that way back in the early days of 3.0.x. All of the numbers I just posted are using Last Laugh as the weapon, in any event.

Last Laugh refuses to yield to me, so I'm doing it with Stoneguard for the time being. That's pretty close in ilvl still.

Thanks for those numbers.

I assume all of those are single target effects, which means that for AoE tanking (which is not the same as offtanking 2 mobs while tanking the main DPS target), AS shines over ShoR. Other than that, it's sticking to 96969 even when Exorcism/AS/HoW are available.

Thanks for the heads up