Need help with paladin damage math (lv 54-59)

[Calypsx]

At this level if I wanted to do pure dps, would it be better to spam the goring blade combo over and over? Or is RoH combo more potent? Just wondering in situations where I have hate and the enemy has the STR debuff. I'm really bad at math and figuring out how dot damage works.

[Sorax]

Only apply goring blade once as its damage is over time not instant. Let it run out like any other dot and reapply. You should be able to do 2-3 other combos before you reapply.

As below 60 PLD you have to use RoH in between dot until you get Royal Authority(I think it's called) even if the str debuff is wasted

[Sapphidia]

Warning : Boring/Irrelevant maths incoming.

The Goring Blade DOT hits for 40 potency for 24 seconds. Dots tick every 3 seconds, so a single application of Goring Blade is 8 ticks, for 320 potency total if all ticks damage. This is sort of irrelevant though - the important part is that it ticks every 3 seconds for 24 seconds once applied, and reapplying it before it ends doesnt affect this damage rate in any way. It does mean though that for every 3 seconds you lose with the DoT not applied, you lose a potential 40 potency of damage. This is significant enough to want to give the Goring Blade DoT as close to 100% uptime as possible.

The Goring Blade Combo does 150 + 230 + 220 potency damage on the three hits, plus applies the dot. This is a total of 600 potency over 3 GCDs, so an average of 200 potency per Global Cooldown. Add in the damage of the DoT, and this is a total of 920 potency across 3 GCDs if the DOT ticks its full duration, but this doesnt really matter as what DOES matter is the potecny of the hits outside of the DoT. Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Goring Blade Hit is an average potency of 200. That's the important part.

The Rage of Halone Combo does 150 + 200 + 260 potency, which is a total of 610 damage, or 203.3 average damage per GCD. This is higher than the 200 average potency of the Goring Blade combo ignoring the DoT. Thus once the DoT is actually running you'll do more damage by filling in the gaps with Halone combos until you need to Refresh the Goring Blade DoT. The same is of course true of the Royal Authority Combo when you get that - it does an average of 230 potency per GCD across 3, so the optimal DPS rotation is Goring/Royal/Royal.

It's worth noting that both Fracture (220 total potency) and Shield Swipe (210 potency) are DPS increases over just doing Rage of Halone combos in between applications of Goring Blade, provided you don't delay the reapplication of the DoT by more than about 1 GCD. As soon as you get access to Royal Authority, Shield Swipe and Fracture both are always DPS losses to use, but they can help up until then. You have to be careful with randomly inserting extra GCDs as you risk losing DPS if you let the Goring Blade fall of for long. You can fit a maximum of 10 GCDs in the 24 second dot duration with conventional skillspeed levels. 9 is also fine, as it only clips a small amount of the DoT duration.

The highest DPS you can do as a Paladin pre 60 is Fast -> Riot -> Goring -> ( 6-7 GCDS of Halone Combo/Fracture/Shield Swipe). With bulwark up and a lot of luck the highest dps rotation would be Fast/Riot/Goring -> Fracture -> 5-6 shield swipes, but this is very unlikely to happen. Most likely is 1-2 shield swipes, so you'd do a single halone combo between Goring ones and a Fracture. With no blocks at all you'd do two halone combos and a fracture between goring blades. You can generally ignore the fracture though as whilst it's a small DPS increase it's a big TP drain on longer fights.

TLDR: Before 60, Optimal rotation for DPS is Goring Blade combo -> Rage of Halone combo -> Rage of Halone combo -> Fracture. Add in 2-3 shield swipes replacing one of the two Rage of Halone combos if they proc enough, or ignore the fracture if you only get 1 shield swipe.

[Calypsx]

Thank you! That was a pretty awesome breakdown on how things work, very much appreciated.