The Diesel, the Evil, and the GLORIOUSSSSSS

It’s been too long since I’ve updated again. I think I have my head screwed on straight enough right now to start posting weekly with some filler here and there where I can.

There’s a good bit of news to go around:

Firstly: With our combined Double Dragon powers, Shye and I managed to urge Voronwe into starting a blog. THE CIRCLE IS COMPLETE!

((( http://thethirdret.wordpress.com/ )))

He somewhat appropriately and humorously named it “The Third Ret” attributing to the fact that he was the 3rd of “The Ret™’s” to create a ShredBlog™. YEAH EAT THOSE TRADEMARKS MMMHM.

If the fact that Voro is one of the three eternal brothers of the shred is not enough to convince you to read his blog, I’d like to point out his diesel looking banner:

I didn't edit this at all, I swear! 😀 😛 🙂

On top of that I present a quote:

“…you may be wondering what in god’s name I plan on writing about. To be honest, I have no fucking clue.”

Spoken like a true Ret Jedi… this is a rough equivalence to what I said to myself when I started Art of Shred. An epic saga of Retribution awaits!

In other news I’d like to discuss a few things about Ret PVP:

The other night, after waiting for roughly 4 months, not only did Tiny Abomination in a Jar drop, but in heroic form! It’s pretty damn awesome, and its extremely good in pvp too. What I want to discuss is the seldom-considered, under-appreciated power of Seal of Command in PVP. It is finally becoming viable to use Seal of Command, however the requirements for doing so are a little steep.

Lets take a look at the benefits you’d gain from being able to use Seal of Command over Seal of Righteousness. Some common Ret builds feature a spec roughly similar to this:

5/11/55 Standard Divine Sac + 3x RV Build (Variations of this of course include Seal of Command for general use)

7/11/53 No RV Build with Unyielding Faith for fear duration reduction.

5/14/52 Improved Righteous Fury Build (Variations of this of course include Seal of Command for general use)

These each take the extra 15% Seal + Judgement damage from Seals of the Pure in the holy tree, along with Glyph of Seal of Righteousness to increase the proc damage by a further 10%.

The build I’ve taken increases surviveability and utility by a pretty good margin. Here’s the variation I have, if someone happened to play with a warrior/feral they could drop Vindication and pick up 3/3 RV for some extra crit-rolling damage.

0/19/52 Seal of Command Build

The disavantages/advantages of using this build are as follows:

Loss of Seals of the Pure: -15% damage done by Seal/Judgement of Righteousness and Corruption.

Loss of Glyph of Seal of Righteousness: -10% damage done by Seal of Righteousness

Loss of Improved Blessing of Might: Kings is the better choice in arena for pretty much every class/combo. If you happen to have 2 paladins in your Arena comp it may be worth it switching a few points around to get Imp Might as well for maximum buffs.

Divine Guardian: +30 second duration on Sacred Shield and +20% Damage Absorbed. Sacred Shield is a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit for. With 5568 AP (1670 Spellpower), my Sacred Shield with Divine Guardian absorbs 2582 damage every 6 seconds. Without the talent it would only absorb 2107, so the talent results in an increase of 475 less damage taken per 6 seconds which can also be expressed as a decrease of 4750 damage per minute or 79 damage per second. Divine Guardian also increases the effectiveness of Divine Sacrifice by 20% shield walling your entire group for 60 seconds. This effectively mitigates around 44% of the damage your group is taking, 20% being thrown away by the reduction and 30% of the remaining damage misdirected toward you.

Improved Righteous Fury: 6% Damage Reduction while righteous fury is up. While this is dispellable keep in mind that unlike a few patches back, RF costs no mana to reapply so it serves as both dispel fodder and damage reduction.

Improved Hammer of Justice: 20 Sec CD reduction on HOJ. This is extremely important in pvp in my opinion. With 40 second HOJ’s you can force trinkets more often and put pressure out much harder by stunning a target an additional time before their CD’s/Trinkets come back up. One of the most obvious scenarios is a druid’s Barkskin. If you can force a trinket with your first HOJ, and a barkskin with your 2nd, you can get a 3rd HOJ off with Avenging Wrath up and BRING THE ETERNAL SHREDDD.

Glyph of Seal of Command: You gain 8% of your base mana back when you judge in addition to the 25% granted by Judgements of the Wise. This means a judgement restores 33% of your base mana which ends up being 1451 mana. (1099 from JOTW, 352 from Glyph of SoCoM). It takes 1274 mana to cast a holy light, and 197 mana to judge. What this effectively means is for each judgement you toss out you can cast one holy light, giving you some serious off-healing efficiency when you need it. While its not huge for arenas, it is exceptionally useful in 2v2 and has its merits here and there otherwise. You can really support heal if you need to in a battleground which I like having the option to do. I did a standard close match of EOTS earlier today and dropped 1 million damage with close to 500k healing done as well. Offhealing support is invaluable assuming people around you know what they’re doing.

Now as for practical purposes I want to discuss the damage output changes. I haven’t done any major math on the differences but its pretty obvious how the damage flow changes. NOTE that you are not always going to use Seal of Command as this spec! Seal of Righteousness will usually still put out more burst damage, but for general pressure and cleaving multiple targets SoCoM will outperform it in the long run assuming you aren’t getting peeled like crazy. Also Keep in mind SoCoM is based off weapon damage so is less effective if you need to sword & board.

Itemization:

One important focus when using Seal of Command is the need to stack crit. Once you are over around 5k AP there’s not a huge need to stack Strength/AP to the ends of the earth, because unfortunately shit classes will be shit classes with their retarded passive spell damage reduction and easy ability to stack high levels of resil (I’m looking at you vile Shadowcasting filths), and your 10k AP duel Death’s Choice judgement will still only crit for 4k. (Woo!). The advatange Seal of Command gives over Righteousness is that its seal procs hit for more damage than SoR and also have the ability to crit. To really utilize this you’re going to want around 40+% crit in pvp gear.

The way you accomplish this doesn’t matter, be as efficient as possible using what gear you have, whether you gem a few 10 crit/str gems in your red sockets or use some Agi pieces: a high crit level is needed to make Seal of Command perform. On top of that Tiny Abomination in a Jar is probably the best trinket ever for the spec as well, it gets slightly more utilized than SoR would be when the extra attack is blasting of a SoCoM proc. Some advice I can offer is to avoid pure +hit pieces, like the PVP ring/neck/cloak variations. Instead get the highest ilevel pve hit/crit offpieces you can get your hands on and use those.

Some paladins focus more/less on hit than others. 5% is a standard normal number, and is fine in most cases. However you’ll have some problems with certain class/combos:

Blood Elf: +2% chance to miss spells = 7% chance to miss exorcism.

Blood Elf Paladin: +2% chance to miss spells, +4% chance to miss spells/ranged attacks = 9% chance to miss a judgement, 11% chance to miss exorcism.

Night Elf: +2% chance to miss melee attacks = 7% chance to miss a melee attack/judgement.

Night Elf Rogue: +2% chance to miss melee attacks, +4% chance to miss spells/ranged attacks = 7% chance to miss a melee attack, 9% chance to miss exorcism, *11% chance to miss a judgement.

*Note: I am not 100% on this but I’m pretty sure that the 2% chance to miss melee attacks may stack with the 4% ranged chance and penalize judgement to an 11% miss chance, making NE rogues the worst race/class combo to fight.

Because of racials like this I personally prefer to use 7% hit. This means at least I won’t miss a crusader strike on the druid I’m HOJ bursting.

In general I want to note that I don’t feel that it’s a good idea to drop below 1000 resilience at any point as ret, so prioritize a minimum of 1000 resil over having more than 5% hit if it comes to that. Every little bit of resil over 1000 gives you just a little more leeway to survive against the wizards waiting around the corner to spellcleave the everliving fuck out of you as soon as you pop your head out.

Some general advice:

2v2 Double DPS: Run as much resil as you want, find a good spot for how much damage you want to do vs your surviveability. It’s easier to use less resil and more pve gear if you have a partner capable of heavy CC, but keep in mind some classes like a warrior or rogue will tear you in half if they’re on you for long without high resilience.

2v2 Ret + Healer: In this case I play Ret + Resto Shaman, so not sure if this really applies to other healers. This is one of the most nerfed comps out there compared to its former viability in S5/S6. It’s extremely difficult to play a comp like this unless you’re rocking some bursty weapons like Shadowmourne or Bryntroll, TAJ/Death’s Choice and engineering for Pyro Rocket. Certain teams will pretty much run all over you (Warrior + Holy Paladin). You probably want right around 1000 resil for a good balance between surviveability and damage. There are a lot of comps where you will need to stand on your own and keep pressure up so your healer can get a few ticks of mana drinking.

3v3: I recommend anywhere from 1000-1200 resil. Rule #1 for Ret 3v3 is to LOS like crazy against Wizard Cleaves, especially if Bloodlust is up. Shadow Priests in particular will fucking ruin you in a matter of seconds.

5v5: Honestly as long as you’re over 1000 resil in 5v5 you’re pretty much as good as it gets. Line of sight, paying attention, and Korean swaps of burst damage are the most important factors in 5v5. Standing in the open against almost any team will result in you getting carved up like butter. You can switch your gear depending on the teams you are coming up against in queue. If there are Wizardcleaves around I generally get focused and stack more resil. If I’m not getting pressured (Most other comps that aren’t caster heavy don’t hit me) then I drop below 1000 for some extra burst potential.

I’m going to wrap this up here, this is only touching a little of Paladin pvp mechanics and I tried to keep this focused mostly on the Seal of Command build and how to itemize for it. I’m going to drop a shot of my current gear since you never know what you might catch me in on the armory. :-OOO

To be honest I will very likely end up updating this screenshot and post, I put this variation of my set together pretty quickly today and I’m pretty sure I can squeeze a lot more point for point out of it with some item changes.

These are my stats completely unbuffed (except Aura):

I have Wrathful on in all areas but the following slots:
Neck: Wodin’s Lucky Necklace (If I had Deathwhisper’s neck or a good Strength neck I’d use that over this, Agility gear is a pretty hefty stamina loss over Strength gear a lot of the time)
Cloak: Cloak of the Triumphant Combatant
Legs: Relentless Gladiator’s Scaled Legguards
Ring 1: Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance (Agi Ring)
Ring 2: Wrathful Gladiator’s Band of Triumph (Crit Ring)
Trinket 2: Tiny Abomination in a Jar (277)
Weapon: Shadowmourne
I’m not gemming for crit at the moment, I simply match sockets (Blue = 10 Str/15 Stam, Red = 20 Str, Yellow = 10 Str/10 Crit). This may change as I experiment more.

That’s it for today folks!

~ The Ret

~ by Reeman on June 8, 2010.