When to use Divine Sacrifice in ICC

Since the 3.3 changes to Divine Sacrifice, the spell has become a much bigger part of my arsenal than it was pre-change. With a two minute cooldown and no need to take, DivSac should become one of your most oft-used spells in Icecrown as you work your way through Arthas’ minions.

But wait, doesn’t DivSac do damage to me?

Yes and no. We’re not really concerned with Divine Sacrifice, per se, but more with the Divine Guardian effect that kicks in when DivSac is activated. If you make a quick cancelaura macro from DivSac like so:

#showtooltip Divine Sacrifice
/cancelaura Divine Sacrifice
/cast Divine Sacrifice

… and then hit it twice in rapid succession you’ll turn on DivSac, then off (cancelling any damage), but Divine Guardian will stick and the whole raid will benefit from the 20% damage reduction effect.

Best times to pop DivSac in Icecrown

This list may or may not just turn into a list of high raid damage moments in ICC boss fights–though, six of one, half dozen of the other, I suppose. In any case, I’ll update this list when I see more of the boss fights.

Marrowgar

• During a bonestorm
• When two or more healers get spiked

Lady Deathwhisper

• When the exploding ghosts spawn

Deathbringer Saurfang

• When tanking DBS during the sub-30% frenzy period. Damage you take it carried across to anyone with a Mark, so you want to minimize how much damage you–and they–take.

Stinky

• Right after a decimate so the next pulse of his aura doesn’t hurt as much

Festergut

• When Festergut is casting his exhale to do the massive raid-wide damage. Helps if anyone missed an inoculation.

Rotface

• During an ooze explosion, in case rockets hit anyone

Professor Putricide

• Right before a green slime reaches its target and knocks everyone into the air. Proper stacking minimizes damage, but applying the Divine Guardian effect on top of that can’t hurt.

Blood Council

• If using a ranged tank, during their turn, while Keleseth is casting an Empowered Shadow Lance
• If an Empowered Conjured Flame looks like it’s getting too close to too many ranged at once

Blood Queen Lana’thiel

• When she goes up in the air and starts casting bloodbolts at people

When used correctly, and at the most optimal times, Divine Sacrifice/Guardian can give your healers some much needed breathing room. Depending on the moment, DivSac can even help prevent wipes. Use it like the dead vote in Chicago, early and often.

The definitive Divine Sacrifice/Guardian macro

Ok, so the macros I’ve posted previously do work but they have the inconvenient requirement of being activated twice to remove Divine Sacrifice. With this new macro from Theck at Maintankadin (which I am shamelessly reproducing in this space) you can apply and remove Divine Sacrifice in one button push.

/cast Divine Sacrifice
/in 0.5 /script CancelUnitBuff(“player”,”Divine Sacrifice”)

The “/in 0.5″ depends on your personal latency. As Theck says, .5 should cover most folks, but if you’re lagging really hard you might want to up that number.

I’ll go back and edit previous macro mentions to have the optimal wording now.

How to use Divine Sacrifice in 3.3

Save this macro (from Theck) now, and just drop it on your bars once 3.3 hits:

/cast Divine Sacrifice
/in 0.5 /script CancelUnitBuff(“player”,”Divine Sacrifice”)

Click only once, and thanks to the recent PTR change to Divine Guardian you’ll put up a 20% raid damage reduction without taking any damage:

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

3.3 is such a kick in the teeth.

A look at T10 bonuses, and the DivSac nerf

• Your Hammer of the Righteous ability deals 20% increased damage.

I’m a very big fan of this bonus. HotR is one the biggest contributors to our total threat in AOE situations (presuming we’re not talking about dealing with 50 whelps here, then obviously Consecrate is king) and any boost to the damage of our cleave will be a nice pad on the threat meters. I especially like the thought of having this as an opener at the beginning of a trash pack, giving dps a higher initial threat window.

• When you activate Divine Plea, you gain 12% dodge for 10 seconds.

There’s a pretty tedious debate roiling the tanking forums over this bonus, with all the Pallies saying it’s pretty “meh” when viewed in comparison to the damage reduction bonuses that the other three tanking classes get, and all the other tanks complaining about how overpowered Ardent Defender is. But then again, that’s the kind of intellectual discourse one can expect out of that hive of scum and whinery.

I’m not surprised that Blizzard didn’t give us a damage reduction bonus, because honestly the furor that would have risen up would have been deafening. All the various aggrieved DKs and Warriors would have whipped out their little calculators and furiously pounded out a myriad of numbers indicating that suddenly Paladins had widened the mystical EH gap (while Druids sat chuckling quietly to themselves in the corner). And so the effigies would be erected once more against us,

So much easier to just give Pallies a so-so avoidance boost (I say so-so because avoidance is still, when reduced to the lowest common denominator, RNG). Less trouble this way.

Don’t get me wrong, 12% dodge is nice, especially with no diminishing returns. But I’d prefer a damage reduction any day of the week. There’s just no comparison between the two kinds of bonuses.

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active.
• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the damage transferred to the paladin is now reduced by 50% before being applied to the paladin. Finally, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases.

This is a lame change. While it may seem like an improvement over the old DivSac (ie, no longer needing to Divine Shield to use it for maximum benefit), it’s a pretty big nerf for all intents and purposes. To get the best version of this spell, Ret and Holy would have to go 17 points deep into the Prot tree, which I sincerely doubt is feasible at this point, so the pool of how many people will be using this will be severely shrunken.

Moreover, it went from a flat 40% raid damage soak to a 20% damage reduction. Again, huge nerf. The only upside is, like I said before, the removal of needing to burden yourself with Forbearance to use the spell, but just about everything else is a downside. Thanks Blizz, for crippling one of our best utilities.

Adgamorix did a great analysis about this change that was a bit more upbeat than my take. I suppose the buff to how damage you can nab from your party is nice, but I’d still prefer a 40% raid damage soak.

Better Late Than Never Friday 6/26

Holy cow has it been a while since I’ve done one of these. Every time I put it off I hope that expanding my date range on keywords in Google Analytics will yield better searches. This time I was sort of right, but oh boy was it a pain reading 933 keywords to pluck out these eight.

can steel breakers fusion punch be dodged?

No, unfortunately not. It’s going to hit, and it’s going to hurt. Make sure to cleanse that dot off asap!

do pallies use divine sacrifice

They better. DS is an amazing skill that can do wonders for raid survival in tough spots with lots of AOE damage. I (as I’ve written about before) use it all the time in raids, and it’s been a tremendous boon to our healers and their stress levels. In my tank-biased opinion, every raiding Paladin should have this in their build, regardless of spec.

gaelic word for righteous

Fíréanta. Cool word!

how to grind defense skill wow

Let stuff hit you, haha. When I hit 80 I needed to grind out the last 5 skill points so I could start heroics so I ran a normal instance and by the time I walked out I was at 400/400 defense skill. Just make sure it’s level 80 mobs hitting you, you’ll gain the skill much faster than if you aoe farmed Stratholme.

shield of righteousness expertise

ShoR does not depend on expertise because it can’t be parried. It can miss though, so hit rating will affect it.

righteousness can remain a tanking seal typo

Yeah, I’m not quite sure what Blizzard meant when they said that. I’m hoping what they meant was “Seal of Righteousness is primarily used to tank” not “tanks primarily use Seal of Righteousness for tanking”. I suspect they just worded it poorly.

shiver vs titanguard paladin

Shiver is better for survivability because you can put a stamina gem in there. Would be better for threat too actually if you gemmed strength (which you shouldn’t!). I’d go with Shiver. Side note: I envy and loathe anyone with this dilemma.

any tanks wear archaedes

If there are tanks running around with an extra 50 defense or so in their gear and can afford to wear these pants, then more power to them. Unless they’re Paladins, because these pants have expertise in spades, which is ultimately a junk stat for us (in comparison to other tank stats, that is).

When to use Divine Sacrifice in Ulduar

You do have Divine Sacrifice in your build, right?

If not, and you raid often, you should. Primarily, the reason why is that Divine Sacrifice (DS for the purpose of this post) has the potential to be a raid saver at several occasions (especially in Ulduar) and gives a better return on that one talent point investment than any of the other “bridge” talents that bring us deeper into the Prot tree. That is, it’s better than shaving 20 secs from an interrupt, or Reckoning, for obvious reasons.

Admittedly, the spell is much more flexible while offtanking (one of the ways that Blizzard has been subtlely reaffirming tankadins as trash tanks), but as I’ve mentioned before, in 25man I tend to offtank more often than not. As such, here are times when I typically pop DS in Ulduar:

XT-002: During the Tympanic Tantrum use Divine Sacrifice to reduce the damage everyone takes from 80% of their total health to only 56%. This was a much bigger deal when Tantrum did 120% of everyone’s health, and DSing reduced damage to 84%, but your healers will still thank you. This is also probably one of the few times you can get away with bubbling while maintanking, as XT stops meleeing during a tantrum and will only turn to face the highest aggro. You just need to be careful to remove bubble asap once the tantrum is over and make sure you have XT’s attention.

Assembly of Iron: If you kill Brundir last, whenever he goes up the air to follow people around, run nearby and pop DS if too many people get caught under the lightning storm.

Kologarn: This happens quickly, but if you’re fast enough you can probably use DS to eat 30% of one Shockwave, which can do up to 16k nature damage to each raid member in 25man.

Auriaya: Assuming your group is stacked up well you’re going to still take some heavy damage from Sonic Screech (on Heroic mode I would say between 5500-6500 damage is a good split). Give your healers some breathing room by shaving that down a little.

Hodir: Frozen Blows does raid wide frost damage. While this should be mitigated somewhat by Frost Aura/resist gear, it’s still helpful to shave off some raid damage.

Freya: The only major high-raid damage part of this fight is when the main little adds spawn and explode when killed. Sometimes the dps gets a tad overzealous and can wipe the raid by killing to many lashers at once. DS makes that zeal a little less threatening.

Mimiron: In this case you’ll want to use DS to help out whoever is tanking Mimiron during the plasma blasts. You can use Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice on two different plasma blasts to help the maintank live through those very high damage instances. If you have the abilities off cooldown, you might also want to use them during Phase 2 when there’s no aggro and the potential for some nasty hits is a huge possibility.

Handy macro! Lastly, I have my Divine Shield macroed as:

/cancelaura Divine Sacrifice
/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

(I can probably combine lines 1 and 2 with a comma, I suspect.)

When I intend to pop Divine Sacrifice, I hit my bubble macro first applying Divine Shield. GCD ticks and then I hit Divine Sacrifice. When I want to drop bubble/DS/both I hit the bubble macro again and both are cancelled. I never want Divine Sacrifice active without Divine Shield, so this makes sure both are off at the same time.

Now I turn it to you guys. Any times you pop DS in Ulduar that I didn’t list here?