Paladin Seal Switching for Ugh and Lyon

[Starbuck_Jones]

Pretty simple. I macroed seal switching to my Judgement key.
Prot priority as follows: Hammer of Wrath, Holy Prism, Shield of the Righteousness, Avengers Shield, Hammer of Righteousness, Judge/Seal, Consecration/Wrath/SacredShield.

I just use an ISBoxer faceroll macro that pushes the buttons in that priority. Once the haste kicks in, you can refresh the seals up to 25s in duration even though the tooltip says 20 seconds. SotR ignores global so it can honestly go anywhere. Sacred Duty also gives you a touch more than 15% as well. The room for improvement would be my last filler slot, con/wrath/ss. It doesn't get down there very often but it does keep SS on most of the time with it's 36sec duration though.

If I move the judge/seal macro up a slot in priority, I loose about 1k-1.5k of DPS but the seals never fall off. Maybe in a more survival mode that would be important, but doubtful.

Judge/seal switch macro is:
/castsequence Judgment,Seal of Truth,Judgment,Seal of Righteousness,Judgment,Seal of Insight

Here is a quick fraps of it in action.
http://youtu.be/FFRwHMCw-E0

As I post this, the vid still had a few hours to go on upload and encoding.

[ebony]

looks like you about got this sorted,


or though as the other topic said this is going to be up and down on what blizzard thinks to it i can see it getting removed in 6.1 and changed.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I like Empowered Seals. As soon as I logged on and read what the options were I knew this would be the power talent. The Holy Shield talent is pretty spiffy as an extra 15% block is nothing to sneeze at for prot spec. Secondary procs and cooldown resets rely on block and it acts as a damage shield as well. I've read the elitist jerks and icy-veins on ESeals and they don't even consider it. God forbid one less Consecration gets cast over 100% uptime of +15% haste, atk power and 1% heals that scale.

Ret gets the move speed seal and that's pretty op as well. You can zip around all over the place with 150% move speed.

Seraphim.... Bursty or pvp in my opinion. You're gonna lose out on a lot trying to bank up 5 holy power for a 15s buff. Unless you get lucky with cooldown reset procs, it's only going to give you a handfull of hits before it's gone. Yeah, I've seen the Seraphim, Holy Avenger, Avenging Wrath crits of Hammer of Wrath and it's sick. But Seraphim isn't something that fits into my playstyle and I don't have a realistic way to passively manage it through macros. Skipping SotR for 5hp to get Seraphim off as a Tank isn't viable. You need that damage absorb buff as much as you can.

Paladins are simply silly sauce right now. They just throw out DPS like it's nothing and spray healing all over as well, and that's while tanking.

I was full raid geared back in LK and got my arse handed to me when Cataclysm opened. I think the second or third quest in I died several times to normal mobs. Pandaland was a little better, but I didn't play my paladin much. Feral druids were king in Pandaland. Paladin is back with a vengeance in WoD. I feel sorry for my ele-shamans, they still suck.

[Lyonheart]

Thank you SBJ!

[Mercurio]

Yep, thanks for passing this along, Starbuck! I've set up a prot pally keymap based on having Holy Shield and one based on Empowered Seals. Good to have options!

[Starbuck_Jones]

I'll be honest. I played around with Seraphim for a few hours the other night and it was pretty decent. I'm not sure how it will play out later on, assuming seals remain. I managed to get 1.5-2k more dps using Seraphim over seal switching. I topped out just under 13kdps on the three target dummies in Stormshield at 623 iLev. However it was erratic and at a considerable loss to survivability. I can see later on when everyone is bum rushing heroics like they did in WotLK and you over gear, survivability isn't as big as an issue. However seals my pass it by then as % increase buffs will scale over flat bonuses. Hard to say.

I expected a lot more from the 1000 bonus armor buff. It only upped the damage reduction by 8-9%. That's a big hit for giving up on half of the uptime on SotR. Someone who is much better at making a smart macro probably could do wonders with Seraphim. It synergies well with a glyphed and talented Divine Protection. This puts them both on a 30s cooldown timer to help with survivability lost by banking five holy power. You can start with DProtection until Seraphim gets up, 15s later by the time it's done you're only a few seconds away from DProtection again. A few SotR to fill in the gap and your on a decent rotation.

But, there is just a lot of wasted holy power. Avenger Shield procs get wasted and force extra cooldowns that can make the timings get off. SotR and DP don't respect the GCD so that can throw it off. Haste throws off all the cooldown timings as well. You try to macro in 15s of cooldowns but 1000 haste makes you finish in 12s and for 3 seconds your dry fireing. Fire off a filler and haste drops and you just went five or six seconds w/o a defensive buff. Now everything is off for 30 seconds as you wait for Seraphim to come off cooldown. Once the timing got off, DPS dropped about 10-15% below what I get from Seal Switching.

Also, self and splash healing all but disappeared. Unless someone makes a perfect macro/rotation for Seraphim, it's not a realistic option for Prot. I also don't think it's an option for multi-boxing when we need things to be as simple as we can make them. We have enough to keep track of already which is why Holy Shield talent looks pretty sweet.