Currently the .5 second duration seal-lingering effect intended to emulate spell batching and allow rets to seal twist on beta only works when twisting from righteous or command.
There has been a lot of discussion regarding whether or not it’s a bug, and given i cant remember as i was very young when i mained ret in tbc, I’d like to comment on how I feel it should be moving forward.
It seems like a bug since spell batching enables you to twist from any seal to any seal. even if it isnt a bug and blizz intentionally made it that way, i feel it should be reverted regardless. if the point of tbc classic is to give us the experience we thought we had, not the experience we did have, aka “without the warts”, rets should be able to twist from any seal into any seal, not just from command/righteousness. at the end of the day a ret paladin is a ret paladin and wont be dominating anything. this seal twist change just makes it more tedious and mana intensive for ret to keep up.
Only specific twists worked, and most of them required starting out in command to make it happen.
This current beta setup is closer to accurate than unilateral seal twisting. SoR shouldn’t really have that .5s delay in falling off though.
This method can’t perfectly replicate twisting. For example, it ruins legitimate seal of the crusader twisting, as that relied on taking seal of the crusader off in the delay between swing start and the white + seal hit, and the game now does the seal proc check immediately on the swing reset.
Making seal twisting work in all directions isn’t just a quality of life boost, it is also a pretty huge buff to ret paladins using it, and blizz stated they weren’t aiming to retune classes.
since i cant remember, can you explain why it only worked moving from command into others?
logically, since twisting was only possible because of batching due to artificial lag, it seems like it shouldnt matter what seal you started with, but im not sure.
anyways, i do feel like even if it isn’t a bug, it should be extended to at least seal of blood, since both factions will be able to use blood, and the primary dps combo for pve is command and blood. just to provide a smoother play experience. it isnt going to elevate ret to some crazy level of dps, it will just let them play without having to worry about mana as much since otherwise we have to swap to command before every swing.
at the end of the day, ret is ret. it took the entire wotlk ret paladin rework to make them compete in dps.
As Smeet said, seal twisting wasn’t a direct result of the spell batching but it did play a role. It was an artifact of how Seal of Command procs were processed. In original TBC the command proc was queued as a separate attack that happed during the next batch window. This allowed a player to re-seal during this window so the new seal was active when the bonus attack was calculated and the new seal’s damage would be applied. This is why twisting only worked from seal of command -> some other seal. It did not work the other way around.
From what I remember it was only possible if you started in Command. Because that’s just how Command worked, there was an actual delay in the effect/animation that allowed you to apply a new seal that then did damage on the Command proc attack.
That’s why Blood Elf Paladins were considered so much better than Alliance.
Seal of Blood scales off weapon damage, and it can crit. Seal of Vengeance doesn’t scale enough to make it worthwhile to stack up, and Seal of Righteousness can’t crit.
that standing, i still feel it would just be nice if it worked either direction in tbc classic.
if it stays the way it is now, every ret paladin is going to have a lot of dm:e/scholo farming in their future farming dark/demonic runes. twisting is still going to be a thing, good rets will still do it, it will just cost a lot more mana to do it.
There are basically 3 important timings in your swing.
Swing start
Seal proc check
Seal hit.
Seal of the crusader twists involved swapping off of seal of the crusader into a different seal between swing start and the seal proc check so that you would snapshot the haste, but still get a chance to trigger a seal.
The seal proc check is the next timing. Many seals, such as seal of command, have a check built into them to make sure that even if a twist was attempted here, only 1 will trigger. Seal of blood doesn’t have this check (or seal of blood checks slightly later, I’m not sure which), which is why it is possible to apply seal of blood within the same batch and ignore the fact that the game already triggered blood. The other direction does work, as seal of command is blocked from triggering if you started in another seal that triggers in this timing.
The seal hit is important as well, as if seal if command triggers, it hit a bit later, this allowed some seals that can trigger off of any melee hit (such as seal of justice) to trigger off if the seal hit because the seal of command hit counts as a weapon attack. Seal of blood can also trigger off of Seal of Command hits, so if twisting from command to blood, you end up getting 2 blood procs because of its non-check on timing 2, and extra hit from this timing 3.
Seal mechanics were kind of messy under the hood (twisting was an unintended use of game mechanics after all), so no simple universal mechanic can fully capture what it did precisely. The best we can get is a close approximation of the useful seals, such as 1 directional Command to Blood (or justice, etc.). The .5s lingering will allow some previously impossible twists, but it’s better than not having it at all.
Honestly, as SoR didn’t count as a weapon hit, there really weren’t any applicable seal twists involving starting in SoR, so the beta should probably keep the .5s buffer on SoC only.
i do hope that we can get it changed. As I understand, early in beta, you could seal twist different ranks of command with each other and proc command twice on some swings. Also, the way I understand it is theres a pretty popular tbc server currently that has basically exactly what tbc is trying to do with twisting, but it works both direction, to and from blood and command, and probably other seals as well.
There is, they implemented it shortly after blizzard made their first draft of the universal twisting.
I honestly hope that it does not stay (although the current beta build doesn’t have 2 way blood / command twisting, so more accurately I hope it does not return). It does awkward things to ret’s gearing priorities (it makes temporary haste boosts that push your weapon sub 3.0 speed worse than they should be), it takes over the rotation entirely in a way that is nothing like tbc was, and it makes the rotation more tedious than hunter shot weaving (and they at least get a macro to automate that).
I’d like to see some sims on twisting. I’m not convinced it’s the silver bullet for ret dps that everyone seems to think it is. Twisting is going to cause frequent delays in using Crusader Strike on cooldown. Even if they make twisting bidirectional that only leaves a single GCD per swing window. This would be ok if you had a 3 second attack speed and no lag but most weapons are going to be 3.6+ second unless you stack a bunch of haste rating.
You have S1 active, a 3.5 second attack speed after haste, and waiting for the next swing which is T0:
T0: Swing goes off
T0: Judgement
T0: Cast S2 - GCD triggered
T1.5: GCD ends
T1.5: Crusader Strike - GCD triggered
T3.0: GCD ends
T3.5: Swing goes off
T3.5: Cast S1 - GCD triggered
T5.0: GCD ends
T7.0: Swing goes off
T7.0: Cast S2 - GCD triggered
T7.5: Crusader Strike off cooldown
T8.0: Judgement off cooldown
T8.5: GCD ends
T8.5: Cursader Strike - GCD triggered (delayed 1.5 seconds)
T10: GCD ends
T10.5: Swing goes off
T10.5: Judgement (delayed 2.5 seconds)
T10.5: Cast S1 - GCD triggered
T12.0: GCD ends
T14.0: Swing goes off
T14.0: Cast S2 - GCD triggered
T14.5: Crusader Strike off cooldown
T15.5: GCD ends
T15.5: Crusader Strike - GCD triggered (delayed 1 second)
T17.0: GCD ends
T17.5: Swing goes off
T17.5: Cast S1 - GCD triggered
T18.5: Judgement off cooldown
T19.0: GCD ends
T19:.0: Judgement (delayed .5 seconds)
T19.0: Cast S1 - GCD triggered
T20.5: GCD ends
T21.0: Swing goes off
T21.0: Cast S2 - GCD triggered
T21.5: Crusader Strike off cooldown
T22.5: GCD ends
T22.5: Crusader Strike - GCD triggered (delayed 1 second)
Crusader Strike total delay: 3.5 seconds
Judgement total delay: 3 seconds
With a base 3.8 speed weapon you have a 44% chance to proc command which changes your +35% weapon damage with blood to a possible 140% weapon damage with blood x2 and command proc. Not to mention all the mana you’re going to burn reapplying seal of blood since you will not be getting full benefit from Sanctified Judgement.
to be honest, it sounds like the way you want it makes haste boosts worse, considering you need to swap to command and then t oblood before every swing. if that werent the case you could run significantly more haste as all youd need to do is swap to the other seal before a melee swing. you could run pretty close to 2.0 attack speed comfortably that way.
and honestly i dont understand why people want to play an afk spec. ive had guild warlocks crap-talk affliction because it takes more effort to play. “why play this when you could spam shadowbolt all day.”
if thats how you want to play nothing is stopping you from toggling on blood and afking for the next 30 sec like everyone did in tbc. id like to play my spec.
i think the idea is on gcds where your crusader strike/judgement is available you dont twist, or you prioritize them over twisting. at the end of the day twisting is banking on the chance for command to proc. CS/Judgement is guaranteed dmg.
Honestly, it doesn’t due to the fact that you alternate between using CS without twisting and a seal twist swing, so there isn’t that same pressure on your GCDs due to half of your swings not trying to twist.
2 way twisting is more haste limited as you can (and should) twist every swing, and faster than 3.0 is where CS can’t be fit in as a free global cooldown and you start losing twists for CS hits (CS is higher value than a twist)
Personally, I’m going to be taking a much different approach with my ret pally. I’m not going to be twisting at all and instead gear purely for AP->Haste->ArmPen. Since my mana will hold out easier I can chew haste pots instead of mana pots and just use runes to keep mana up.
As Smeet mentioned you have a hard floor of ~3.1 attack speed if you want to twist each swing. Anything below that and you will not be getting consistent CS globals. Also remember windfury toten is a flat % chance on hit which unlike the weapon buff the totem does not have an ICD so scales linearly with haste. Also, faster swings mean more JoW procs and more SoB damage which directly increases your mana income over time. Having those globals will also allow the free use of bombs/grenades, flame turrets, and other gadgets. If you’re twisting, none of those extra things will be available to you.
I like your approach much more. Twisting always sounded gimmicky.
Besides, I started off holy. I have a tendency to watch health bars as well… When needed, I’ll stop hitting whatecer6and start healing my team (unless it’s a BG… The rest of those guys can get bent.)
The question is whether this reduced batching window and seal persistence (the seal is not specified; the wording allows for ALL seals to be twisted) is specifically for Classic or whether these changes continue into TBC.
If seals are meant to work this way in TBC, as well, then it’s definitely a bug. I can’t imagine they added seal twisting to Classic but not TBC where seal twisting was actually more prevalent and impactful.
theyve hammered out some other things with seal twsting. originally this change caused seals to linger for a full second, which definitely made it too easy to twist. also early on you could twist different ranks of seals with each other. the most notable one was command since lower ranks of the seal didnt change the seals own damage, just its judgment. this allowed rets to get essential windfury procs. obviously this was not intentional either (though i do wish i could have had fun with this one a bit)
the latest change is the one i still wish theyd change back. the more i think about it, im pretty confident twisting every melee swing you dont have a cs/judgement off cooldown is still going to be expected. if it were changed back it’d just give more leeway to do the same dps ret will still be doing right now. just a “without the warts” experience