Retribution: Where DPS Comes From

Lately while playing a lot of my characters I've been thinking a lot about where all of my DPS actually comes from. Which abilities, which rotation, which buffs, etc. So I decided to do a little bit of target dummy testing with Bandin in his newly minted Retribution spec and see what I could come up with. Basically the idea was to start with nothing but auto-attack and then add in each ability that is part of the more or less "standard" rotation one at a time and see how my DPS was affected.

I'll admit, I had a lot more fun doing this than I originally thought I would, and I intend to do the same thing (or a slightly adjusted version of it) for all specs of my characters over time.

First, let's go over the ground rules I used to keep things consistent:

Each test rotation I did was 5 minutes long. This was to try and alleviate any concern over the random factor that is rather prevalent in the Retribution rotation at the moment. I used Bandin's current best gear available for Retribution which averages out to a 349 ilevel; substantial, but by no means overly impressive. The gear is a mixture of Molten Front epics, dungeon gear, justice point gear, and questing greens from the auction house. DPS was measured using the most recent version of the Skada addon. Testing was done against the level 85 mob targeting dummy in Stormwind.

Spec and glyphs used for testing can be found here: 7/2/32

The only buffs active were Seal of Truth and Blessing of Might.

That's all I went with. Nothing too fancy as I was trying to limit the amount of factors that could have an impact throughout the tests. See below for the criteria of each test and the result.

***Unless specified, all abilities were used as close to on cooldown as possible***

AUTO-ATTACK
DPS: 2481.8

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT
DPS: 3406.0

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT + CRUSADER STRIKE
DPS: 6086.5

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT + CRUSADER STRIKE + 3HP TEMPLAR'S VERDICT
DPS: 8201.8

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT + CRUSADER STRIKE + 3HP TEMPLAR'S VERDICT + ART OF WAR PROC
DPS: 9275.9

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT + CRUSADER STRIKE + 3HP TEMPLAR'S VERDICT + ART OF WAR PROC + DIVINE PURPOSE PROC -> TEMPLAR'S VERDICT ONLY
DPS: 9733.0

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT + CRUSADER STRIKE + 3HP TEMPLAR'S VERDICT + ART OF WAR PROC + DIVINE PURPOSE PROC -> TEMPLAR'S VERDICT ONLY + HOLY WRATH
DPS: 10550.3

AUTO-ATTACK + JUDGEMENT + CRUSADER STRIKE + 3HP TEMPLAR'S VERDICT + ART OF WAR PROC + DIVINE PURPOSE PROC + HOLY WRATH + INQUISITION MAINTAINED 100%
DPS: 10154.7

There were two things that stood out to me when I was done testing.

First, I hit over 8,000 DPS using only three abilities on cooldown. That is about the average I see in a lot of heroics that Bandin does healing for, and above average for most of the normal version dungeons. I thought it was pretty impressive that I could put out that type of number only using about a third of my toolkit.

Secondly, when trying to maintain 100% uptime on Inquisition, my DPS took a hit by about 400 per second. Logically that seems like I'm doing something wrong because Inquisition is a 30% buff to my Holy damage as long as it is active. The only explanation I can think of is that I am either working it into the rotation incorrectly (doubtful after checking many, many guides by those much smarter than myself), or it has to do with damage scaling with my gear.

In order to keep Inquisition active I had to give up about 2 or 3 global cooldowns each minute that could have been used for additional Crusader Strikes or Templar's Verdicts. I'm thinking that when I reach a higher gear level the damage increase of those abilities will overcome the loss of the global cooldowns and net a DPS increase. It definitely gives me something to look for in a follow-up test someday.

Also, you may have noticed that I did not incorporate such DPS cooldowns as Zealotry, Avenging Wrath, or Guardian of the Ancient King. I did this on purpose. A large amount of time those abilities are used most specifically on boss fights, and that wasn't what I was trying to test this time. The use of those abilities really can swing DPS numbers all over the place if used improperly, so I intend to do a second test in conjunction with retesting at a higher gear level to see what happens.

Overall, it was certainly an interesting experiment, and I am excited to try again when I reach an ilevel closer to 360-365 and see if that makes a substantial difference. I also am very excited to see what sort of different doing this type of testing makes when using the Protection spec sometime, so keep an eye out for that.