Has anyone ever tried using Seal of the Crusader for DPS? (The Seal, not the Judgment – it gives +AP and +40% attack speed.)
Basically, I’m thinking of a white-damage-focused approach. You’d need to have decent +hit and +crit, and ideally a fast 2H with a proc (built-in and/or enchanted). With those taken care of, you could judge Light or Wisdom or Crusader, turn on SotC, and have a fairly easy time keeping Vengeance up. Instead of spending mana Judging and re-sealing a DPS seal, you could drop higher ranks of Consecration.
Something like this:
https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/paladin/500501-503-542300512003151
(As you can see, holy damage seals still fully available.)
I’m just musing here, I have nothing to base this on. Just curious what people think? 
No trick missed. They’re terrible. Keep trying different shades but it’s still just lipstick on a pig.
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This was a meta on Private servers, but no, it doesn’t work in classic.
Crits from SoC are just too big for vengeance uptime compared to increased haste from SoCr. With a really slow weapon like Sulfuras Hand o Ragnaros you should expect to have around a 42% proc chance for seal of command plus you get to judge the seal every 8 seconds. SoCr doesn’t give you as many hits per minute, and due to the haste you’ll see lower overal hits and crits.
Some paladins do try to seal twist utilizing spell batching to get the benefit from both seals, but it’s very mana intensive and none of the top parsing paladins seal twist because it’s not guaranteed to work.
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Seal of the crusader also dramatically nerfs your weapon damage. It’s just not a very good seal except maybe for weapon skill leveling, unless you can gain weaponskill off righteousness. Then righteousness is the best for weapon skill.
Additionally, if you are judging crusader, you’re gonna start pushing off other debuffs from bosses and piss off your entire raid as they keep having to reapply them. Same thing with consecrate.
Light or Wisdom are the only judgements really worth the debuff slot in a raid setting.
OK, cool.
Yeah I’ve been trying different things while leveling, like this ^^^ and also rank 1 SoC into a crit, followed immediately by SoR which gets judged before Vengeance ends, then rank 1 SoC etc.
Thanks for the replies!
Just get prepared to put on a dress like a good lil pally when you’re done leveling.
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I am, of course, prepared to heal as needed. Fortunately, my guild is ret-friendly. Either way, is it really necessary to be so demeaning about it? 
You sound sour; I can’t imagine why. Is it because you’re Horde, and paladins are pure awesome-sauce? Would it help if you told us where the mean Paladin smashed your arrogant, self-righteous pie-hole in touched you? 
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Lol. I got reck bombed once when leveling before the nerf. I just laugh when a ret tries to kill me. Though I laugh at healing pallies too. I got a curse just for ya.
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That’s cause you are the true counter to a pally lol.
Come back on a priest and I’ll let you gloat it out.
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Ret is the spec that Blizzard failed to fulfill the class fantasy with. A Vanilla dev admits that. Private servers couldn’t find enough to make it as viable as feral dps or other “meme specs”.
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Ok. I’ll bring my shadow priest too. Bet I can steal your mana before you kill me.
I always laugh at shadow priest that go oom spamming mana burn on me while I’m at half mana. /shrug
ideally you have seal of crusader opener into judgement and seal of command. That seal debuff substantially increases your overall damage. I imagine the problem is the debuff slot is valuable, and if that debuff falls off, you lose that damage bonus and the potential damage that could have been done with judgement of command.
By itself, seal of crusader isn’t impressive. Seal of command is significantly stronger.
Ret is fine. It does more than is necessary to do and be useful in any content. They just get cannibalized in minmax environments.
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Every so often somebody comes on the forums thinking they’ve found a trick to make ret better. Bro, people have been playing this game for 16 years. The chances of you thinking of something that hasn’t already been tried are very slim. Ret is not good in Classic. Even the devs said it. It is what it is
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if ashbringer scales with spell power, they should actually be decent in naxx. That + exorcism and holy wrath fully world buffed in t2.5 would be alright.
For reference, I’ve gotten hakkari manslayer to proc for over 600 in some spell power gear.
but the game is basically over by that point and you’ll still be miles behind.
Anyone get Ashbringer on the PTR yet?
asmon and staysafe are on horseman right now. So… I guess its possible somebody else got it already?
Every so often somebody comes on the forums thinking they’ve found a trick to make ret better. Bro, people have been playing this game for 16 years. The chances of you thinking of something that hasn’t already been tried are very slim. Ret is not good in Classic. Even the devs said it. It is what it is
Ret is a fun to play and powerful levelling spec. 520 seal of command crits at 36 are a blast. It struggles with purges, debuff slots, and warrior propaganda. It’s also a hybrid, so it has certain tradeoffs in order to keep a lot of the utility they keep(including the cheapest dispel magic without a cooldown, which doesn’t even exist on retail).
The reasons why it gets cannibalized in competitive environments where speed matters is obvious(a dps that also spends globals to do things that aren’t dps? don’t make me laugh!). They are still a very good spec.
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Bruh…reroll warrior or Rogue till Wrath to get your melee
pew pew on.
I played Retribution specifically because of the challenge.
I had no illusions: the developers hated paladins and other hybrids. But I would play one anyway to spite them, to succeed. Considering I have pretty good gear, I’d say I’m close to winning. Just need 2.5 set and its GG.
Going to do the same in TBC as well.
Playing Wrath afterwards will be fun.
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