Hey, Did'Ya Feel That? Yeah, You Just Got Hotfixed, In A Good Way.

Last night Blizzard pushed a number of server-side changes (AKA Hotfixes) to the Live servers to address the DPS imbalances seen at level 80, and Ret was amongst the classes whose DPS was boosted. SIGNIFICANTLY boosted.

We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don't see a specific change referenced below, doesn't mean it didn't change.

With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:

1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn't do as much to tanking abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.

2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many Mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.

3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn't nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow's biggest spell.

4) We returned Searing Pain's damage to its 3.3.5 levels.

5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.

We don't have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic. (Source)

In my naivete I was anticipating a simple and straightforward buff to Seal coefficients. Well the very fine folks over at Elitist Jerks have been busy beavers trying to extract the changes and it appears that the Ret changes are much more comprehensive than I'd expected:

Exorcism - Base damage increased
Judgement - damage increased by 50%
Censure (The Seal of Truth Dot analogous to the old Seal of Vengeance Dot) - Damage increased by 33%
Hammer of Wrath - Damage increased by 230% (not a typo)
Holy Wrath - Spell Power coefficient doubled
Templar's Verdict - Damage increased by 30% when you cast it by spending 3 Holy Power

Thanks to Redcape on said forum for these coeffs. If there are any new developments I'll update this list.

You'll note that most of the changes are to the Filler abilities, and as you might expect the Filler priority needs to be adjusted. Furthermore, it now makes sense to separate your Zealotry and Avenging Wrath cooldowns in order to maximise your DPS, whereas previously Zealotry and AW would be activated together. There may also be further implications at level 85 if the coefficients remain the same, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The new Filler priority is:

1st:- Hammer of Wrath
2nd:- Exorcism + Art of War
3rd:- Judgement
4th:- Consecration
5th:- Holy Wrath

These are rough approximations. I believe that Exorcism+AoW and Judgement are pretty close together now in terms of DPS contribution, and Holy Wrath may just squeeze out Consecration due to Divine Purpose potentially proc'ing a point of Holy Power.

Glyphs also change slightly. In terms of Primes, Glyphs of Judgement and Exorcism are both probably better than Glyph of Crusader Strike now, with Templar's Verdict and Seal of Truth still being best in slot (the latter only if you are below the Expertise cap). In order to reduce the strain of casting Hammer of Wrath during Wings burn phases you'll almost certainly want to take it's corresponding Major Glyph to reduce the mana cost by 100%.

That's it from me for the moment, go out and give the changes a try for yourself. If nothing else your DPS level in static fights should be back up to 3.3.5 levels, and Hammer of Wrath crits are bloody hilarious.