[How-to] 5x Paladins Disscusion

[Stealthy]

Hi all,

It's been a while since I've been back to this thread, becuase I'm kinda focussing on my DK/Sham team at the moment. But I'm going to be having another go at my pallies again next week.

Mebben - I know what your saing about the DPS being a bit low, I kinda felt that myself. I read that using /stopcasting in macros resets the swing timer, which would result in low white damage - but haven't had a chance to test this out myself however, as I'm without internet at home atm (transferring to a new ISP), but should be back up and running in a few days.

The problem with using a /castequence is that you can't really take advantage of art of war procs, or rather when art of war doesn't proc it slows down the /castsequence. On mobile fights this would be a bigger problem, as you would effectively be stuck at that point until you stopped moving long enough to get the exorcism off.

I'll report back here when I've had a chance to do more testing...

Cheers,
S.

[Stealthy]

A tad off-topic, but still dealing with five paladins, so I didn't want to clutter up the board with a new thread.

Up until level 60, does it matter if I attempt dungeons without a Protection tank, or Holy healer? Basically, could I get away with running old world dungeons with a five ret team?

Or at least up until level 40, where I can dual spec them.

I ran 5 rets up until level 62 or 63...I was able to clear the first few instances in outland without too much trouble - there's pleny of humanoind mobs, and you can control pulls using repentance. However I did make it a point to grab all the quest gear upgrades first, since they made a huge difference to the gear I had from Azeroth.

Cheers,
S,

[mebben]

No worries Stealthy!

I agree about the Art of War procs and /castsequence, however as it is (atleast for me) the castsequence yields much higher dps then the /click one. My macro writing skills are limited, so you are welcome to haxxor up a new /click macro that's better :-)

[Stealthy]

Finally got a decent chance to play around with my pallies last night, after my recent internet outage while i changed ISP's.

I brought my pallies to Org and spent roughly an hour or so trying various combos on the heroic test dummy. The results were taken from my best geared ret pally - Hammertîme. He's not as well geared as Mebben's rets, and I'm using a few pvp pieces in place of pve, but close enough to make a comparison.

Each test consisted of 4 x 3 minute sessions with each setup. I was trying to minimise the RNG factor as much as possible.

Things to note:
- The results don't include any DPS from Hammer of Wrath since the target dummy never went below 30% health.
- My pally only has a 220 hit rating, which is about a 1.3% miss rate for yellow attacks on the target dummy, so DPS results will be a bit lower (263 hit rating = 100% chance to hit with yellow attacks).

Here are the results:

1. Click macro spam - result: 2.25k DPS
No surprise here - DPS on par with Mebben's results.

2. Click macro spam with /stopcasting removed - result: 2.4k DPS
This one was interesting. I had read that /stopcasting reset the swing timer, which would mean less white damage - the results seem to confirm this. I though that removing the /stopcasting might interfere with Exorcism casts (since the macro would still attempt to cast exorcism even if Art of War hadn't proc'd) however this didn't seem to be a pproblem.

3. Click macro with /stopcasting and exorcism removed - result: 2.0K DPS
This result just confirms that having exorcism in the rotation is a DPS increase, even if it means risking a cast without Art of War proc'ing.

4. Click macro with spells in different order - result no change in DPS.
Not surprising, since no matter what order the spells are in, the click macro still ends up casting the spells in a FCFS manner. Only really affects the initial cast order of spells.

5. Mebben's castsequence macro - result: 1.9K DPS
Drop in DPS for me using a straight /castsequence, but not really surprising. When you cast spells in a castsequence, the client always waits for confirmation from the server that the spell has been cast, before moving to the next spell in the sequence. If you're playing on a low latency, you wont see much of an effect. However for someone like me, playing from Australia with a latency of 350-400 ms, thats a significant gap between casts, and a resulting drop in DPS.

I'm going to continue testing over the new few days, as I think the timing on my macros can be tweaked a bit, particularly on the exorcism casts. I'll report the results back here if I manage to get an decent jump in DPS.

Hopefully this info will prove useful.

Cheers,
S.

[Multibocks]

Excellent thanks for the confirmation. I will have to go remove those stopcastings, heh.

[mebben]

Crocodile internet!

I have to do some testing today to see, but since I'm not having a high latency it could be why I am not experiance that drop in dps. Thanks for testing Stealthy!

[mebben]

Finally got a decent chance to play around with my pallies last night, after my recent internet outage while i changed ISP's.

Here are the results:

1. Click macro spam - result: 2.25k DPS
No surprise here - DPS on par with Mebben's results.

2. Click macro spam with /stopcasting removed - result: 2.4k DPS
This one was interesting. I had read that /stopcasting reset the swing timer, which would mean less white damage - the results seem to confirm this. I though that removing the /stopcasting might interfere with Exorcism casts (since the macro would still attempt to cast exorcism even if Art of War hadn't proc'd) however this didn't seem to be a pproblem.

3. Click macro with /stopcasting and exorcism removed - result: 2.0K DPS
This result just confirms that having exorcism in the rotation is a DPS increase, even if it means risking a cast without Art of War proc'ing.

4. Click macro with spells in different order - result no change in DPS.
Not surprising, since no matter what order the spells are in, the click macro still ends up casting the spells in a FCFS manner. Only really affects the initial cast order of spells.

5. Mebben's castsequence macro - result: 1.9K DPS
Drop in DPS for me using a straight /castsequence, but not really surprising. When you cast spells in a castsequence, the client always waits for confirmation from the server that the spell has been cast, before moving to the next spell in the sequence. If you're playing on a low latency, you wont see much of an effect. However for someone like me, playing from Australia with a latency of 350-400 ms, thats a significant gap between casts, and a resulting drop in DPS.

I'm going to continue testing over the new few days, as I think the timing on my macros can be tweaked a bit, particularly on the exorcism casts. I'll report the results back here if I manage to get an decent jump in DPS.

Hopefully this info will prove useful.

Cheers,
S.

Ok I've done two 5 min tests on both the clicky one and the /castsequence one

1. Clicky macro without /stopcasting yields 2,300dps for me

2. Castsequence - Noticed that my first one locked up due to divine plea being to close in the rotation, so i removed that + the last crusader strike and my rotation jumped up to 2,500

I'll continue testing

[Whowantstoknow]

5. Mebben's castsequence macro - result: 1.9K DPS
Drop in DPS for me using a straight /castsequence, but not really surprising. When you cast spells in a castsequence, the client always waits for confirmation from the server that the spell has been cast, before moving to the next spell in the sequence. If you're playing on a low latency, you wont see much of an effect. However for someone like me, playing from Australia with a latency of 350-400 ms, thats a significant gap between casts, and a resulting drop in DPS.
S.

Just wanted to Point out that this is not correct as the confirmation is within the GCD. If your latency was as high as 750ms (worst case scenario of 500ms if you could get your DP, exorcism, consecrate GCDs to 1s -ie unlikely) then it would start to be a problem. You only encounter this problem when using casted spells as the confirmation waits until after the cast ie not within the GCD

The cast sequence is not efficient though and still needs tweaking

edit: Click will probably win in the end as the rotation is priority based but I dont think that the difference will be all that great

[Multibocks]

Has anyone tried the super long ret castsequence dps macro to see if its better?
Think it's like 30 casts long or something like that.

[Whowantstoknow]

Yes read post 139 :P

The end of the sequence is inefficient but I think that may have been corrected now.