Glyph of Divine Storm

Shamelessly stolen from EJ, but well worth discussing imo

I think it is worthwhile putting forth one more glyph for consideration: [Glyph of Divine Storm]. I have personally ignored this glyph for all of wrath so far, but yesterday I sat down to do some math on exactly how it works and what benefit it could bring to the raid. Here is all that I found:

The heal from DS is a smart heal. It targets the lowest health raid member and heals them for as much as it can. It will heal only exactly their health total and then spill over up to two times. In a raid situation that heal should be used 99%+ of the time since it only doesn't do anything if the raid has full health on all raid members. The range of the heal is over 40 yards, though I didn't exhaustively test the maximum range.

On my spreadsheet given a dps of 487 on DS itself this glyph would supply 487 * .15 * 1.05(Divinity) = 76.7 healing /sec. Because this healing is smart healing on the lowest health raid member it will not suffer from overheal unless the raid is all at full. However, Divinity does cause 5% overheal if there is more healing than the lowest health person requires.

The Exorcism glyph (the worst of the dps glyphs) is worth 50 dps. This figure is taken from my latest Ignis WWS parse. So I have the choice between adding 77 hps or 50 dps.

I took a look at some healing parses and have found that healers typically log something like 3000 hps on fairly easy content and probably cap out at around 5000 hps. I think assuming 4k hps is a good benchmark. Given that dpsers are going to be doing 6k dps or so it is reasonable to model the Exorcism glyph at .8% increased dps. Exorcism is better against undead, so it seems entirely reasonable to model it as 1% increased dps given the composition of Coliseum and Icecrown. 77 hps is extremely close to 2% of 4k hps, so it is reasonable to model this as increasing raid healing by 2% of a healer.

Now, of course the job of a ret paladin is to dps. That said, if you could make this tradeoff of 1% dps for 2% healing over and over you would eventually end up at 0 dps and doing healing equivalent to 2 full healers. Clearly 1 person delivering 8k healing/sec effective healing is absolutely incredible. We aren't able to make that transition, but we ARE able to make 1% of it.

Now, some people like to argue that the job of a dpser is to dps and that if your healers can't handle it, replace them. I don't feel that that argument is a strong one however because by that logic your healers don't need to take 2% more healing talent points because they should be able to handle it without that help! Every little addition to raid survivability prevents people dying and makes it easier to drop a healer and add another full dps.

Clearly I am in the camp of people who think that a ret paladin needs to use all their utility when necessary. I do find that when I try to pay attention to debuffs, aggro, etc. on the whole raid to maximize usage of BOP, Cleanse, etc. my dps goes down both because of lack of GCDs and lack of focus. You will achieve higher dps numbers when you purely tunnelvision and focus only on your own survivability and cooldowns, so those types of utility have a cost. One big benefit of this glyph is that it requires no focus, no thought and no time. It is simply a passive ability that intelligently assists your healers without babysitting.

Note I am not advocating Glyph of Divine Storm as the be all and end all of glyphs. I do think though that in many situations your third dps glyph is quite lackluster and adding Glyph of Divine storm in its place is a greater net benefit to the raid.

One final consideration is that these numbers above assume a single target fight. In any situation where your DS is hitting multiple targets the contribution of your Glyph would be substantially higher, probably capping out at around 250 hps due to the fact that all 4 targets will certainly not be fully debuffed. On a fairly healing intensive fight like Freya + 3 for example this would be a really noticeable benefit in several phases. Even on the Conservator phase the splash damage on Freya is going to provide useful healing if not useful dps.