I’m not sure how correct this is, but I thought it would be fun to compared how much Sacred Shield can absorb against a regular source of raid damage (in this case Sapphiron’s frost aura in Naxx25)

The mechanics of SS is a little strange, best to read up on the skill on WoWHead, or WoWWiki

  • Each tick of Sacred Shield absorbs, 500 + 0.75% of your Spell power.
  • Each tick has a 6 second cooldown, and the buff lasts for 30 seconds
  • We are using Sapphiron’s frost aura in Naxx25 for this example. 1600 frost damage every two seconds, to ever member of the raid
  • Our paladin also has has 2000 spell power (which works out to be 2000 absorbed each tick)

Example time line (2 ticks):

00  SS Cast

01  Take   1600   SS Up (2000 left)
02  --
03  Absorb 1600   SS Up (400 left)
04  --
05  Absorb 400    SS Down
    Take   1200
06  --

07  Take   1600   SS Up (2000 left)
08  --
09  Absorb 1600   SS Up (400 Left)
10  --
11  Absorb 400    SS Down
    Take   1200  
12  --

This gives us our base numbers

  • Every 6s, absorb 2000, miss 2800
  • Each cast, absorb 10,000, missing 14,000
  • With 25 people in a raid and a 1.4s cast time (all GCD)
  • SS can kept up on 21 people (1.4 * 21 = 29.4) at a cost of 445 per cast
  • Every 6 seconds: Absorbs 42,000 damage (miss 58,800 damage)
  • Every 30 seconds: Absorbs 210,000 damage (miss 294,000 damage) and costs 9345 mana
  • This results in a very reasonable 7000 damage absorbed per second, at a cost of 1500MP5

Sounds like something fun to test next raid

Updated: Blizzard nerfed SS in 3.1 allowing it to be only cast on one person at a time. Everything above is now as useless as SS itself.