Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Improved Retribution Aura, Addendum

I'd like to address something from the comments of my previous post. In response to my questioning of Imp Ret Aura's worthiness of two talent points, BigFire wrote:

If you're a PVE retribution paladin, the improved rebtibution aura is not for you, but for the tank, especially for a protection paladin in your raid. I'm a protection paladin, and for the most part, I put up improved devotion aura for the secondary effect of 6% extra heal. With your better scaled retribution aura, I'll do a whole tons of threat.
Now, I agree with him on principle - in a group setting, the points are not for me. BUT, the claim that a prot paladin would do "a ton more threat" seems... off. I thought I just got finished with a rambling rant about how the feedback damage is larger than if the ret paladin did not talent into Imp Ret Aura, but the numbers after avoidance and boss attack speed were figured in would end up smaller than expected.

So, let's take a closer look. Imp Ret Aura, as I last stated, is probably about ~30 DPS (rough estimate) at a T7 level of gearing and raid buffs vs a single target boss with a 2.0-2.5 swing and a tank with T7 levels of avoidance. If you take that as a given, you're looking at ~60 TPS (rounded up) for a prot paladin from Imp Ret Aura.

This will only add threat if the mobs are all ready attacking the prot paladin. But so will Holy Shield, Consecration, Hammer of the Righteous, and ticking stacks of Seal of Vengeance. The additional TPS from the aura will not help in picking up mobs, it will only help in cementing a threat lead. Are any prot paladins that hard up for AoE threat in this day and age? Are any tanks at all (aside from feral druids, they have issues with Swipe, so I've heard) hard up for AoE threat? Because, in truth, we're talking about less than 60 TPS, and I don't think that many tanks are having much trouble holding things in place nowadays.

Where else could the points go? Divine Purpose for situational stun removal, on the ret paladin, a healer, a tank, whatever. Vindication to chop down trash clears a smidge. Guardian's Favor to protect a clothie more often on initial mob pick-up - this is a pro-active way to let the tank get aggro instead of the passive Imp Ret Aura, which would only increase the aggro lead slightly and only once the tank has control. All three of those talents are two-pointers that have situational effectiveness, and might possibly be worth more than 30 DPS (or 60 TPS for the tank).

Weigh in with your opinion. Provide me with a reasoned argument why I should stay invested in this talent. And if you can quantify the benefits of Divine Purpose, Guardian's Favor, and/or Vindication for comparison purposes, I'll love you forever.

5 comments:

Gaizen said...

Maybe if we were back in 2.0 where ret paladins had to pretty much sell their soul to get into a good raiding guild, then yeah i guess having imp ret aura would be a nice selling point.

But now and days... ret paladins already give more than enough (3% Damage, haste, crit, health return, and mana return, x2 with JoW)

Pally tanks have been fine without the boosted ret aura for sometime as im sure they will be fine without it now and days.

However, All the things i mentioned above are all things that most PvE ret paladins would pick up anyway. So yeah it leaves a few points around to just stick anywhere. I picked vindication just for pvp purposes, im not changing to a pvp spec until duel specs come out. Vindication helps out with my stubbornness. But thats just an example of what we are left with once we get everything that we "need". Just extra pvp stuff or a lack luster pve skill. (All the ret aura talents should have been rolled into one talent imo)

Anonymous said...

is imp ret aura good for lvling?

Anonymous said...

I just posted my thoughts under the previous blog entry. I'm a tankadin and maintaining threat is no problem at all these days.

Fedaykin98

Anonymous said...

Justifying imp ret aura for pve is hard, as you said, the damage it adds is situational at best. I found it has its best place in a pvp build and even then isnt really worth it.

The improvements to ret aura make the tallent much more desirable but its still not near the value of any of the tallents around it.

In an attempt to quantify :)
In heroics they're all roughly of equal value, mobs will actually use stuns so you'll find a place for divine purpose. Vindication will actually work, personaly, if I was just doing heroics I'd take this, I see vindication as roughly a 10% health reduction to a mob since it will take you time to apply it. GF is probably more important in heroics to, since your probably pugging them. :)

Now... Imp ret aura. Consider this scenario, in a heroic, you pull 5 mobs, each mob has a 1.5 attack speed. We'll assume your imp ret aura hits for about 300. Thats 5/1.5 hits per second, so it would be ~3.33 * 300 dps. That adds 1000 dps! However tanks for heroics are probably sitting at around 30$ - 40% avoidance. So, reduce that by 35% and your looking at 650 dps which is still very impressive for 2 tallent points. It will help you clear trash faster but its much less useful against a boss.

Moral of the story, for heroics its worth it.

As for raiding, imp ret aura is a curious tallent as it scales backwards with gear in most situations. As your tank gets more avoidance, your ret aura will be hitting less often. That said, you can still use the scenario about, its probably safe you say you can double the number of mobs for most pulls in a raid, your aura is still effecting all the tanks.

Assuming 10 mobs, and useing the same rough stats as before its 2000 dps - avoidance which could easily be 50% for a tank in raiding gear.
Still about 1000 dps for a 10 mob pull.

All of that said. Personaly for raiding I'd go with GF and Divine purpose. Since I like to do a little bit pvp and imp aura is only good for the trash.

Sorry if this is hard to understand and its probably riddled with grammar and maths errors, but im way to tired to be writing this :)
Volityl - Cenarius

Alex - aka Firelight said...

I plumbed for the Imp Ret aura in my PVE build just because all of the other stuff you can choose from the talents that remain - all of them are PvP talents.

I hate seeing "immune" popping up on mobs when I'm trying to focus on DPS'ing a boss.

But like you say it is very situational - very good on trash mobs, and helps the tanks out on bosses a bit for threat generation.

If there was something else for me to invest my 2 points into then I'd go for them, but as it stands I'm happy to put my points there.

When Dual-Spec comes then this point will be mute. Due to the fact that you can switch to full pvp build for pvp, rather than running around almost squishey in battlegrounds in a PvE spec.