For the past couple of months, I have been inadvertently ignoring Avenging Wrath. I used to use it all of the time, not sure why it got moved off of my bar and why I didn’t notice…lol (probably when I was re-keying my spells a while back). Anyways, Avenging wrath is a level 70 spell that gives you a 30% boost to all DPS; Melee, spell, or otherwise for 20 seconds (it also blows your DS cooldown).
A 30% boost to DPS is a 30% boost to your threat. Avenging Wrath is an excellent spell for frontloading even more threat. I know I keep saying that threat isn’t really an issue, but the higher you can raise your threat bar, the more the rest of the raid can DPS without pulling aggro. As your guild’s DPS scales higher and they become more and more geared, your threat will have to as well.
This is what I will usually do: Blow Avenging Wrath, pull with Avenger’s Shield, Holy Shield, Judge Crusader, Consecrate, Spam SoR/JoR. If JoW or JoL is needed, I’ll rejudge it after AW fades. The extra threat boost is a nice cushion (so that the guild aggro whores don’t have to throttle their damage…you KNOW who you are!).
…and speaking of ignored spells: Seal of Vengeance. SoV is an alliance only paladin DoT. It stacks up to 5 times, doing 120 holy damage over 12 seconds per application. There are two problems with SoV:
- It takes a while for all 5 applications to stack. Like SoC, it has a flat ppm application rate (which is 20, unless it was changed in 2.1). So with a 1.8 speed tanking weapon, it has around a 60%ish chance of applying per swing. It can take anywhere from around 10 to 15 seconds to fully stack if you are unlucky. That’s a lot of time.
- If SoV fades, you will have to re-stack it all over again. As long as you can keep meleeing uninterrupted, it’s relatively easy to keep 5 applications up on the mob. Against bosses and mobs that knockback, fear, whatever frequently, SoV isn’t really useful because it takes too long to reapply.
Keeping that in mind, in the long run, SoV and JoV does more holy damage with a 1-hander than SoR and JoR, as long as you are tanking a mob that doesn’t interrupt your swinging for too long. I was playing around with it in my spell damage set the other day and SoV was doing quite a bit of holy damage…unfortunately I don’t have time to look up the formulas at the moment or to examine how well it scales.