Retribution FAQ - Updated with 3.2 relevant info.

This is a little compilation of some frequently asked questions within the Paladin community. Im making this so it might help others getting a quick answer to their questions instead of making the same threads over and over again. Might be a helping hand for quite a few.

Im a wannabe-theorycrafter myself, and love to micromanage my class, thus I will try to keep this thread up to date when new issues arise. Special thanks to Cromfel & ElitistJerks for a lot of helpful hints along the way.
This thread is finally updated with WOTLK releavant information, suggestions and corrections is most welcome, as I try to keep the information here as specific and correct as possible.

[UPDATED]
August 18th, 2009 (v 3.2.0)


Q: Slow or quick weapon?
A: Slow. Every 0.1 speed slower is equal to ~20 DPS due to Seals and Judgements not being normalized.


Q: What about Seal of Command and Haste rating then? Will it give more SoC procs pr minute?
A: Yes, SoC now scales with haste.


Q: What Seal for PvE, and what for PvP?
A: Now that Seal of Blood is removed and Seal of Command re-designed, Seal of Vengeance/Corruption will be our main DPS Seal. Once you have 5 stacks of the debuff from SoV on the target, each swing will deal 33% extra weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage. For mobs/trash that die quickly (~12 seconds) you might be better Seal of Command however. This is because SoC now works more or less like a cleave/chain lightning, and it chains to 2 additional enemies within melee range.

For PvP, SoV is the better choice, but somewhat requires you to be able to stick to your target to keep the debuff stack up. Otherwise, stick with Righteousness (talent and glyph it aswell).


Q: What is the hit cap for retribution paladins?
A: 8% melee hit is the cap with a 2hander. you need 262 hit rating to reach the cap, or 32,8 hit rating to reach 1%. Note that alliance players with a draenei in the group will only require 7% hit on gear to reach the cap. In PvP, the hit cap is only 5%. In PvE, it is very important to be hit-capped.


Q: What about judgements? They are spells, right?
A: No, Judgements are now considered Melee attacks, that cannot be dodged, parried or blocked. They require the same hit rating as melee swings (262 hit rating or 8%).


Q: What kind of gear should i aim for?
A: There is no "correct" answer to this. I suggest you download Rawr (http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr) and start building yourself a template, based on where you stand content-wise.


Q: What stats is important then?
A: To begin with, you should aim for around 2500 ap and 25% crit. Strength is favoured over AP, because it scales with Divine Strength and Blessing of Kings. You should try to stack (in order):

1. Hit Rating - Stack until you reach the cap, which is 262 rating or 8%. (7% for raiding alliance paladins with a Draenei in your group)
2. Strength - Stack as much STR as possible.
3. Expertise - Should come naturally as your gear improves. You should try to avoid gemming or enchanting for Expertise. You can however use the Glyph of Seal of Vengeance, that will yield +10 Expertise when that Seal is active.
4. Crit Rating - It's not useful to have too much crit, so you should NOT gem for it. Gem for STR instead.
5. Agility - You need 52 AGI to gain 1% crit, but this only counts towards melee crit, making crit rating flat out superior to AGI for dps.
6. Haste - After the buff Haste rating recieved in patch 3.1, it scales pretty decent for Paladins. Haste does NOT reduce the global cooldown for melee abilities however.
7. Armor Penetration - This is a fairly useless retribution stat, simply because ~60% of our damage is unmitigated holy damage. Avoid this stat if you can.
8. Attack Power - Better than nothing, but certainly not better than STR. Sometimes you have to settle with AP over STR simply because there is no alternatives (i.e enchant on boots).
9. Spellpower, Intellect, Armor - Does next to nothing for our DPS.

Q: What kind of gems should I use?
A:Gem to meet your Meta requirements, and focus on STR in most slots if the socket bonus is worth less than any other option. However, here are the best alternatives based on color. )

• Yellow Sockets:
  - Crit & Strength - http://www.wowhead.com/?items=3.5&filter=cr=20:96;crs=1:1;crv=6:6
  
  
• Red Sockets:
  Strength - http://www.wowhead.com/?items=3.0&filter=cr=20;crs=1;crv=13
  
  
• Blue Sockets:
  Prismatic Gems (Only One Allowed - But thats all you need for your meta requirement) - http://www.wowhead.com/?items=3.8&filter=cr=20;crs=1;crv=5
  
  
• Meta Sockets:
  PvE Meta # 1 - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41398 (Less requirement, but also 0.5 DPS weaker than the Chaotic Skyflare one - My favourite however)
  PvE Meta # 2 - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41285 (Also counts towards spell crit)

Q: What is the weapon speed normalization for Crusader Strike and Divine Storm?
A: 3.3 ( Read more about normalization here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Normalize )


Q: Can Crusader strike and Divine Storm proc Seals?
A: Yes and No. They will not stack the Dot portion of Seal of Vengeance, but once you have 5 stacks on your target, they will proc the 33% extra holy damage. The other seals will proc off both abilities.


Q: What professions would be the strongest combo if i want to max my DPS?
A: Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting is the strongest combo for retribution.


Q: What weapon enchant is better?
A: If you have a decent weapon you KNOW you're gonna use for a while, you might spend some money on Berserking. If you're less on cash or know you're about to replace your weapon in the near future, Massacre or Greater Savagery does the trick.


Q: Does Crusade and Exorcism work against players in PvP?
A: Crusade applies to all attacks, including Eye for an Eye. Exorcism is once again usable on players.


Q: What is our base rotation for PvE DPS?
A: During the beta it was agreed upon that because of vastly changed mechanics, our rotations should be thrown out and thus came to be known as FCFS (First Come First Serve) - and this is still true in 3.2. (quoted from ej forums).

3.1 FCFS prioriy is as follows: HoW > CS > Judgement > DS > Consecration > Exorcism > Holy Wrath


Q: Whats the best food buff for DPS?
A: Fish feast is slightly better than Dragonfin Filet, but at a much steeper price. Aim for Dragonfins if you cant afford / have time to cach the fish required for the feast.


Q: What is the best DPS spec for raids?
A: Ofcourse minor tweaks and arguments comes into play here aswell, and is somewhat based on your playstyle. However, here are the essentials:

• http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sVZVZVfbxbIuhdIfsu:0oamc0

This gives you 7 talent points to put wherever you prefer. I put two points in Divine Purpose to break stuns, which again often yields more dps, however you can free up these two points aswell if you prefer.


Which Glyphs should i use?

• Major Glyphs:
  Glyph of Judgement (Must Have)
  Glyph of Consecration
  Glyph of Exorcism
  Optional: Glyph of Seal of Vengeance (Replaces the Exorcism Glyph, For +10 extra Expertise.)
  
  
• Minor Glyphs:
  Glyph of Sense Undead (1% Free damage to undeads. Just dont forget to activate Sense Undead for the bonus to apply.)
  Glyph of Lay on Hands (5mins off the cooldown)
  Glyph of whatever blessing you prefer

Other useful links:

Inner sanctum of theorycrafting:

• http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t68951-retribution_3_2_a/


Rawr - A great program used to compare gear/specs and what to obtain.

• http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr

Thanks for moving it here :)

Too bad this was already done two times

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=302780422&sid=1

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=450455423

Yay for a blue reply in another useless thread I guess, while the important ones continue to be ignored

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Q u o t e:
Too bad this was already done two times

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=302780422&sid=1

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=450455423

Yay for a blue reply in another useless thread I guess, while the important ones continue to be ignored

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He had your guide link and EJ forum guide at bottom ;)

Nice thread :) Good work!

Aha thanks :)

Excellent thread!

My few comments, as a veteran ret pally:

Q: Slow or quick weapon?

You might want to point out "slowest possible" rather than just slow. My Deep Thunder even for PvE seems better choice than some other weapons with 5-10 more dps but 0,2 faster, not even mentioning PvP

Q: What about Haste rating then? Will it give more SoC procs pr minute?

I've seen some players talking about mongoose haste effect and they were quite sure it did affect SoC proc rate. They were saying, that chance to proc SoC is based on weapon speed before haste applies to it. But unfortunately I don't have any link to relevant theorycraft... still it's worth exploring as haste is so common in high raiding.

Q: Is Seal of Command rank 1 is better than rank 6?

Again, I've seen a post saying, that rank 6 has slightly higher PPM than rank 1 (believe it was Cromfel post).

Q: What is the hit cap for retribution paladins?

You might wanna point out, that 9% is a hit cap for raid bosses and that in PvP it's only 5% (with some classes having talents to increase this)

Q: What kind of gear should i aim for to begin with?

Imho, crit is not that important for PvE ret paladins, player can safely concentrate on taking AP over crit, the lower AP one has, the less effective crit becomes in terms of DPS considering 30 sec vengeance. In my own theorycraft I've gotten to following numbers:

at a level of around 4500 AP 1 crit rating gives you the same benefit as 2 AP
at a level of around 3500 AP 1 crit rating gives you the same benefit as 1 STR (including BoK and Divine Strength talent obviously)

Those numbers are very high even for a BT geared player with ench shaman in his group. Considering talents only will provide 8% crit, that leaves ungeared unbuffed 13% crit which alone is arguably enough to keep vengeance up (barely but still), so ultimately AP >>> crit in PvE in terms of item budget - just go calculate from my theorycraft, at a level of 1500 AP 1 crit = around 4-5 AP.

Going back to "starter gear" issue, this simply means to concentrate on STR (AP) much more than crit , fill all sockets with STR when possible, get all STR / AP enchants because it just scales good.

For PvP I would say crit is important, but then why to have lots of crit and low AP if your target will have 300+ resilience anyway? Better to just hit harder and hope someone will assist you... so AP wins here too.

Hope someone will understand what that gibberish above means... lol.

Q: What stats is important then?

Considering paragraph above, you may delete "if you lack crit".

Q: What weapon should i craft when im a blacksmith?

The 0,2 speed difference between Thunder and Lionheart makes up for Thunder lower stats and non-PvE proc, I'm not saying which one is better, because in my opinion they are equal in terms of DPS. Thunder is obviously better for PvP.

Q: Savagery or Mongoose enchant?

Unless in a very good gear with high AP, Savagery beats Mongoose in terms of DPS, I've got mongoose myself just to prove this. High-end raiding with ench shaman in your group, go for mongoose. Still leveling, doing instances, Karazhan - pick Savagery.
For PvP Savagery wins by a mile due to resilience (also tested myself).


That's it, hope I was helpful and not annoying.

EDIT: Typo: Savagery instead of Mongoose as PvP enchant.

Thanks for the input, ill update that the PvP hit cap is 5% aswell :)

Until 2.3 hits, human paladins only need 48 hitrating with precision and 95 without it to reach the hitcap if they use a sword or mace, this is due too the +5 weaponskill racial which equals to roughly 3% hit.

It's only true until next week anymore, but might be worth pointing out for historical reasons.

Oh, and 5 percent hit(PvP/Level 70 cap) equal to 79 hitrating without precision, 32 with precision, 71 for humans with sword/mace without precision and 24 for humans with sword/mace with precision(That is, until 2.3 hits, of course.)

See http://sp00n.pytalhost.com/wow/weaponskill.htm

You always have to round UP, even when <.5 because WoW floors(cuts off the part after the decimal separator) some of it's numbers.

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Q u o t e:


Very nice initiative :-)

Adding this to the “Informative and useful Paladin threads” compilations sticky: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=305840625

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I find it sad to see that a post like this (which we have seen plenty of) gets a reply and our complaint posts and the large numbers of questions we have get completely ignored.

This is mostly aimed at alliance paladins right?

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Q u o t e:
This is mostly aimed at alliance paladins right?

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Not really, as the mechanics are similar to both, with the sole exception of Seal of Blood.

Will do some updates regarding SoB vs SoC aswell :)

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Q u o t e:
Q: What is the best spec to level with?
A: Again depends on how you prefer to play, but this might be a good guide on how to start:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sxZZVfct0cuiIkt

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id say aoe grinding as prot is fastest. perhaps not funniest if you like retri but fastest. and usually alot easier to find groups as a tank than as the "loladin".

for quests id say retri but for pure speed.. prot

^^ U mean the horde have paladins?


unbuffed atm i only have 1510 ap, with bom its 1740, admittedly i need to get my crit up, its 22% atm. i just cant see me doign as much dmg as other classes or offering enough utility to warrant putting me in a group. knowedegable people, plz check my gear and point out wrong bits and imporvements. ive got sum holy gear still but am bg'ing like mad also getting the s2 gloves this wednesday

getting vet belt/necklace/boots libram from BF and s2 gloves

it would be usefull to put a spell rotation or somet of that sought up, as even with bow i tend to oom a bit to quickly.

cheers

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Q u o t e:
it would be usefull to put a spell rotation or somet of that sought up, as even with bow i tend to oom a bit to quickly.

cheers

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If you're really interested in DPS cycles and how to combine damage and longevity , you should really read this thread:

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17193-paladin_retribution_dps_theorycraft/

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Q u o t e:
Add something to the FAQ

What does weapon speed normalisation mean?

Yes you can google it but that's not the point of an FAQ is it? Good work though.

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Ok' ill add it :)

Thank you for the nice post. I am leveling that paladin now and all that you wrote is very usefull for me.
I am waiting you to write more about pvp. Its a pity you will migrate from Daggerspine my level 70 undead warlock with same name wants to thank you too, he he :)