For example, let’s say you only have 3 Paladins in your 40m raid. What would be the essential Aura and Judgment assignments for MC, BWL, AQ40, and Naxx? Also, are any of the essential Auras/Judgements affected by talents?
Devotion Aura, Concentration Aura, and Judgement of Light
Everything past those 3 are situational or negligible.
For auras:
- Devotion is good in the tank’s group for the bonus to armour, or as the default in a group if you’ve got nothing else that needs doing.
- Retribution is good for Paladins who are AoE tanking, but not really much else in PvE.
- Concentration is the best choice for the Paladin in the caster group.
- Resistance Aura specifically if the fight needs it.
- Sanctity is only for holy DPS. A Ret Paladin might want to use it for themselves, but that’s about it.
For Judgement:
- Light is the best judgement, and offers a fair amount of healing to the melee
- Wisdom is another strong judgement for your casters, and can often be considered.
- Justice has basically no use in raids
- Crusader is for holy DPS. Only consider if your raid is stacking Smite Priests and Ret Paladins for some reason.
With only 3 Paladins I would probably put: Devotion on the tank and Concentration for a caster and healer group. Judgement of Light and maybe WIsdom, depending on debuffs and if the Paladins had Lasting Judgement or not.
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How about assignments? Does the Devo Aura Paladin also apply the JoL? You mentioned that some are negligible, but just how negligible is JoWisdom?
Simple answer to this is that all three common auras (Devotion, Retribution, and Concentration) can be Improved via talents. Devotion Aura is at the top of the Protection tree. Retribution Aura requires 15 points into the Retribution tree. Concentration Aura requires 15 points into the Protection tree.
NOTE: There were also Improved Blessings, so which paladin went for which Improved Aura impacted what Improved Blessing they might have. Wisdom took 15 points in the Holy tree, Kings took 10 points in the Protection tree, and Might was at the top of the Retribution tree.
Assignments are however the raid leader fells like assigning things. The Pallies are liable to argue over JoL, though, since it will pad their heals.
JoW has it’s uses, but it’s limited by proccing on melee, so casters would need to run into melee and melee the boss to use it.
It’s purely dependant on the actual encounter/raid/party they’re in.
9/10 of the time it’s going to be a resistance aura,with minor uses of devo and concentration.
Judgements are easy, 1 does light, 1 does wisdom the other either does light or wisdom depending on whether they want to be threading casts inbetween white swings or whether they want the bonus healing from having light active (can’t remember when this was a thing though).
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Great breakdown, but hey, as for Ret Aura, got any math for TPS when this is applied to the MT?
Also, this is a tangent, but Blessing of Sanctuary (like 30/21/0) for the MT worth it?
Depends purely on what they’re tanking. fast attackers maybe,big slow hitters not so much.The tps from ret aura is neglible in vanilla tanking thanks to the fact you’re rarely AOE tanking, Multiple thorns casts are probably the way to go.
Nah, you can use a wand to proc it. That was the best way.
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Retribution Aura does 20 damage whenever an enemy strikes the target, and most bosses attack every 2.5 seconds.
So for a Warrior tank with their 45% increased threat in defensive stance, that’s only 11.6 TPS. Even if you had a Ret Paladin with Improved Ret Aura, it would amount to 17.4 TPS.
Blessing of Sanctuary is best in AoE tanking or against fast hitting things in general, though considering that Holy Shock itself is a rather mediocre talent to begin with then I would say it’s probably worth it.
Even on fights where it’s not super useful, you aren’t giving up a ton by not having Holy Shock.
I forgot Wands counted as a melee attack
Spells don’t work, but weapon attacks do, including wands and bows. Unless you can pull up the spell where it says melee on it, I’m confident that it isn’t melee only.
Judgement of Wisdom procs off spell casts as well.
I don’t have the link offhand, but I used to believe it was wands only myself; then someone showed me a video of actual vanilla where Frostbolt procced JoW for the mage casting.
There are very, very few debuffs better than JoL or JoW. You almost certainly want to have both of them up at all times.
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This is accurate for direct damage spells. For those pesky mages, warlocks, and hunters it’s worth a minimum 11.8 mps or 59 mp5 for them which is a lot of spare stats for more dps. The reason wands were obvious is that everyone uses wands including healers.
Thats 22 extra dps that a warrior can do before he hits the threat ceiling compared to maybe 1% extra damage reduction on physical attacks.
BoSanc is ~15 tps for a warrior tank. As for the damage reduction, it works for all damage, for the whole raid. That can be a crap ton of healing saved over the course of a fight depending on the fight.
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It’d amount to around ~12 extra DPS, which is about as big a difference as that 1% extra physical damage reduction.
If I remember right it would functionally be a bit less than that, since I’m pretty sure Ret Aura only triggers on a damaging attack and not a parry, dodge, or miss.
BoSanc would also be useful on fights with constant but small amounts of raid wide damage, true.
As I said, a fat 22 added to the all important threat ceiling for warriors and your warlocks. Or 30 for your ignite mages.
It triggers on blocks and hits. Meaning, roughly 60% of the time. It is still not an insignificant number. If it were, warriors wouldn’t put shield spikes on their shield instead of the stam enchant.
It only costs the paladin holy shock to get and it is definitely worth using with at least 3 paladins as the guy salvation-ing can apply it to the tank.