More on the Seal of Truth 4.0.6 buff

I wrote a brief blurb about the proposed buff, but I had a lot of questions myself. As you might have deduced my frequent inability to calculate the tip when I take my readers out for drinks at the end of every month (make sure to email Ana if you haven’t gotten an invite in the last few months), I’m a words guy, not a numbers guy.

So when I was trying to double check what I was asserting in that blog post (namely, that Crusader Strike procs SoT’s extra damage, and Seals of the Pure affects that extra damage), I checked the usual sources for some hard-and-fast “yes, Rhidach, you’re not crazy” facts.

Alas, I could find none, which required me to sacrifice a snow cone as part of the arcane rituals that summon Antigen and his testing prowess. I then charged him with two questions I needed the answers to, offered to pay him in Chipotle coupons, and then warned him that failure would result in the destruction of his hair gel supply. Well, that’s not all true… I never offered to pay him.

I digress–to get to the meat of this post, let’s see each of my questions and what Antigen replied with. (I’m not going to blockquote the entire post, so please just assume everything below except the last two paragraphs is from Antigen.)

I’ll see you all on the other side.

1. Seal of Truth’s extra holy damage proc is already set off by melee and Crusader Strike, yes?

Actual Seal damage only starts occurring after the first Censure DoT is put up. In other words, in a stand-still test of pure autoattacks, your number of Seal of Truth procs (T) will be equal to one less than your melee attacks (M), or:

T = M-1

I actually saw this happen on the 4.0.1 PTR, I’m not sure why I didn’t remember.

Currently, and curiously, the following can proc a Seal of Truth (after at least one stack of Censure is applied to the target):

• Autoattacks
• Crusader Strike
• Templar’s Verdict

It does NOT proc off of the following as of 4.0.3a:

• Judgement
• Exorcism
• Holy Wrath
• Hammer of Wrath

Yes, that’s not a typo. Even though the 4.0.6 patch notes imply that it doesn’t currently, I have tested Templar’s Verdict in a number of circumstances and have shown pretty reasonably that it does indeed proc a seal.

To do so, I either CS’ed a dummy to get three HP, or autoattacked until I got a Hand of Light proc (this method really tested my patience! haha), then reset my combat log, and did one of the following two things.

First, I simply turned around and cast TV. Templar’s Verdict is an omnidirectional spell, so by turning around I’m negating any interference from an autoattack happening at the same time. This was the “hit TV while the target has Censure” type of test.

Second, I switched to a different dummy, put my back to it, and cast TV. This was the “no Censure” control, sorta.

In the first case, I noticed that my Seal of Truth procs were equal to (M-1) + TV; since it is guaranteed that your first melee attack won’t proc a seal, since Censure isn’t on the target yet, and since I casted nothing else than autoattacks and a single TV, that extra SoT proc must have come from my TV. I reproduced this a couple of times to confirm it.

In the second, my number of SoT procs was just equal to M-1, which is exactly how I thought it would behave. Again, this test was performed in triplicate to be sure.

Not sure if there would be a difference in seal-proccing between a 1, 2, and 3-HP TV, but since we (ideally) would never use TV with less than 3 HP, the point is moot.

Short answer is, thus, yes.

2. Does the talent Seals of the Pure increase the damage from that 5-stack swing bonus?

Yes it does! For this test, I ran two separate trials, one in a spec with SotP and one in a spec without it. For each trial, I simply autoattacked a dummy for 100 melee hits, then backed off and let combat reset.

The first trial was in the spec without SotP. Out of 100 melee hits, I got 99 SoT procs. Of these procs, 92 were hits (of which the average was 802 damage), and 7 were crits (of which the average was 1438).

The second trial was in the spec with SotP. Out of 100 melee hits, I again got 99 SoT procs. Of these procs, 96 were hits (of which the average was 896 damage), and 3 were crits (of which the average was 1786).

I would say that there aren’t enough SoT crits to use those for a comparative analysis, but there sure are enough hits. To find the percentile increase in average SoT damage, we do the following:

[(896 - 802) / 802] * 100 = 11.7%

With a larger sample size, this number would get ever-closer to the 12% that the talent advertises.

So, yeah.

I realize this is all terribly obvious, in the sense that it’s something we all “know” (or, suspect) and it might seem silly to charge a well-coiffed Ret paladin to go smack around target dummies to prove a foregone conclusion. However, the main problem was that none of this stuff is written down anywhere.

I couldn’t find a definitive “yes, Crusader Strike procs Seal of Truth extra damage” and “that extra damage is boosted by Seals of Pure, not just the DoT” anywhere. The tooltips were vague and my usual sources were unhelpful. So I apologize if this is common knowledge but I’m sure that there are many people out there that had no clue about either of those two points. Hopefully all this has been somewhat enlightening, puffery aside.