This site makes extensive use of JavaScript.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser.
Live
PTR
10.2.7
PTR
10.2.6
Beta
[Paladin] AM versus DS/DG in 3.3
Post Reply
Return to board index
Post by
pezz
I’ve done a bit of theorycrafting to see which of these spells will do a better job of mitigating raid-wide damage, assuming perfect conditions for both.
First a few assumptions:
1. This raid-wide damage will be a steady, unavoidable Frost, Fire, or Shadow damage.
2. There will be no other sources of damage on the raid. This includes avoidable AoE’s (standing
in the fire on Koralon) or tank damage(Frozen Blows on Hodir).
3. There will be 10 seconds of this AoE (the maximum duration of DS)
4. The raid has a full 25 players.
5. A fully raid-buffed Holy paladin is looking at 25k health.
6. The Paladin is also specced into Divine Guardian.
7. All raid members are within 30 yards for DS, or 40 yards for AM.
8. No one has any damage mitigation talents.
9. WoWWiki’s formula for spell resistance is accurate.
10. The paladin successfully prevents his or her health from ever reaching 20% and cancelling the effect prematurely.
11. No one is wearing any extra resistance gear.
First let’s look at Divine Sacrifice:
For a 25,000 health paladin the amount of damage transferred from the other four members of your party before the spell cancels is this: 25000x40%x5 = 50,000 damage. Divine Guardian’s duration is being reduced to 6 seconds. To average out the damage reduction let’s say it’s 12% over a 10 second period.
Divided evenly among the other four party members over a ten second period gives us this:
50,000/10=5000, 5000/4= 1250 Damage absorbed per second for each of your four party members. This is 30% of the damage they’ll be taking after your 12% damage reduction from Divine Guardian and after the 23.5% damage reduction that your normal Frost, Fire, or Shadow resistance aura provides.
I would hope that the absorption is calculated after the ‘free’ damage reductions (otherwise this is a MUCH lousier talent than I think it is) so, working backwards:
If 1250 is 30% of the damage your party members take per second post mitigation, then 100% of this number is 4166.7 (meaning they take 4166.7-1250=2916.7 damage per second after everything).
Next we calculate how much DG is reducing their damage (along with your entire raid). 4166.7 is 88% of their pre-DG damage, so they are taking 4734.9 damage per second after your aura is calculated. Auras should mitigate 23.5% of the damage your raid is taking, so the completely unmitigated AoE is doing 6189.4 damage per second to every member of your raid.
Your four party members are only taking 2916.7 damage per second, and your raid is only taking 4166.7 damage per second. You, however, are taking the full 4166.7 damage plus 1250 x 4, or 5000 damage per second.
4(6189.4-2916.7) + 20(6189.4-4166.7) + (6189.4 – 4166.7 – 5000) = 13090.8 + 40454 – 2977.3 = 50,567.5 damage per second less on the raid than if you had not used any auras or spells.
So, over a ten second period: DS+DG+a relevant resistance aura = 505,675 damage prevented or absorbed in some way
, even after considering the paladin is taking 2977.3 damage per second more than had he or she not used any ability.
Now Aura Mastery:
All 25 raid members are taking 6189.4 damage per second before you do anything. WowWiki’s formula gives a 47% damage reduction to everyone within 40 yards for six seconds is you use Aura Mastery and a relevant aura.
25(6189.4x.47) = 72,725.5 Damage mitigated per second for six seconds.
After this, all you have to prevent damage is your normal 23.5% damage reduction aura.
25(6189.4x.235) = 36,362.7 Damage mitigated per second for four seconds.
(3/5)72725.5 x (2/5)36362.7 = 43635 + 14545.1 = 58,180.1 average damage mitigated per second on the entire raid over a ten second period, or
581,801 damage somehow prevented over the 10 second period.
So what we’re looking at is that over 10 seconds, DS+DG+ an aura = 505,675 damage mitigated, versus AM+ an aura + only an aura for the remaining duration = 581,801. Just looking at these two numbers, AM seems like a better choice.
Other things to consider:
DS is more versatile. There aren’t a lot of physical AOE’s, but for the few there are we don’t need theorycrafting to know DS is more useful than AM + Dev aura, just common sense. DS can also be used as a pretty decent tank CD if the tank is in your party, but AM has no such extra benefit to party members.
AM probably has a larger range. There’s nothing in the patch notes to say the range on DS is going to be changing any time soon, so for the moment AM has a 40 yard range and DS has a 30 yard range. I would also assume DG’s effect is tied to DS’s 30 yard range.
You personally will still be taking a lot of damage with DS/DG and while it’s less likely to kill you you'll be going down into very low amounts of health during heavy AoE damage, unless you make a macro to cancel DS right away and just leave DG running. To be honest I'd recommend that.
Assumptions 2, 3, and 5 have a good chance of being wrong, and could skew the results.
Assumption 8 is definitely going to be wrong if your tanks are specced correctly. However, since their mitigation will be in effect for either spell you choose to use, and since they're only going to be maybe three members of your raid, I didn't think it would really have an impact on the results. I could be wrong though.
6.2k per raid member is a pretty ridiculous AOE. I don’t think they’ve gotten that big yet, so you’re pretty safe in assuming DS won’t reach its damage cap in a hurry. In which case you could use it during something like Frozen Blows while in the tank’s group and provide a tank CD and raid-wide mitigation, most likely without using the entire effect. After six seconds there's no actual damage reduced by using DS/DG, it's just moving numbers around from your party members to you. It is, however, slightly beneficial to our style of healing. Beacon yourself and HL spam the tank,
especially
if you can stand next to your four party members (for the HL glyph) and you're healing much more of the damage than if you were trying to keep five people taking equal damage up, maybe even plus your tank if he isn't in your group.
I could have interpreted the patch notes wrong, and they're subject to change.
I haven't considered the new AOE damage mechanics. Provided you go into 25 mans with a full raid and keep all 25 people, it shouldn't really matter. You might just be crazy though and think 6.2k dtps per raid member isn't enough to keep your healers from falling asleep, though, and I don't know if that would change my results here.
A Protection paladin could take both of these talents if s/he was willing to sacrifice some threat. An Offtank's DS would be more powerful.
A Ret paladin could take one or the other, but it would be a pretty bad hit to their DPS if they did. I wouldn't recommend it.
There’s always a chance I screwed up the math. If I have, be kind when you point it out.
Post by
blademeld
Well done, I don't see anything wrong with the math at this point, but let's see if anyone points it out.
Couple of things I want to point out otherwise:
A Protection paladin could take both of these talents if s/he was willing to sacrifice some threat. An Offtank's DS would be more powerful.
A Ret paladin could take one or the other, but it would be a pretty bad hit to their DPS if they did.
Protection requires Vindication most of the time, so that's a negatory on that one.
Retribution won't lose DPS over that.
Nature/Holy damage is not covered by AM, another point other than physical damage.
Post by
pezz
Good points all around. Prot couldn't take both while keeping Vindication, and thinking about it there's ret builds which can provide either AM or DS/DG.
Here
is a rough talent build for a ret paladin taking AM. I guess it wouldn't be as big a hit to personal DPS as I thought since you're only giving up Sanctified Wrath, really.
And
this
might work for a DS/DG build. It also sacrifices Sanctified Wrath, as well as one point in PoJ. If you've got a good connection and good reflexes this shouldn't be a problem.
Sort of depends how much you value Sanctified Wrath versus more raid cooldowns.
The only point I can make is that I
very
much doubt we'll see a great deal of holy damage in ICC. Nature's plausible in the plague-based parts, though.
Post by
blademeld
Sanctified Wrath would be a trade-off from Vindication I would like to think, not AM/DG.
Post by
pezz
True.
One other thing I noticed though: You have to give up SotP to take DS/DG. That is going to be kind of a DPS loss. Since we already have HoSac for a tank mitigation CD I'd say that Ret paladins who want to have some extra utility would want to go for AM, unless it's completely useless in ICC.
Post by
blademeld
Yes, currently, DS (3.2.2) does both DS and DG's (3.3) job but that will change in 3.3.
Meaning that a retribution paladin can take a cooldown for a tank or take a raid wide damage reduction without sacrificing DPS.
Post by
pezz
Why take only DS though? HoSac does the same amount of mitigation on a single target and they're basically on a five minute shared cooldown if you want to use them in conjunction with bubble.
Post by
pezz
Mini-update:
Six out of eleven bosses Wowhead has data for so far in ICC have a lot of raid Frost, Fire, and Frost damage.
The two that there isn't information for are Professor Putricide (who is probably going to predominately use Nature damage) and the Lich King, and if there isn't Frost and Shadow damage everywhere on that fight I'll be pretty surprised.
Also, the Gunship Battle looks like pretty un-ideal circumstances for both AM and DS/DG, making it kind of a wash.
Combined with all of Aura Mastery's superior qualities, and the fact that it reduces Ret DPS less than taking DS/DG does, I'd say the best ret build for 3.3 is going to be 11/5/55, unless you're desperate for personal DPS and don't really care about raid utility.
Edit: I'm not sure when or why this turned into a Retribution thread, but there you go.
Post by
Rouen
Thank you for this post Pezz. Great job for laying it all out on the table. I really want to try speccing into Divine Sacrifice, but I'm personally worried about mana regen if I lose the 8% crit. I'm probably worrying about nothing though. DS and AM comes in handy for Marrowgar's Bone Storm (Whirlwind and fire).
Post Reply
You are not logged in. Please
log in
to post a reply or
register
if you don't already have an account.