I have a question about gemming. I got a helm w/ a meta spot in it, and put in an activated Eternal Shadowspirit (81 stam, +5% block value), thinking that would increase my block value from 30 _> 35%, or 40-->45% w/ holy shield effect. Instead, on my char sheet, it seems to be changing BV from 30% to 31%, which I asume means it's taking my BV *1.05 and ending up w/ 30.6% BV or 40.8% BV w/ holy shield. The tooltip description of the gem definitely made me think it should work the other way. Has anyone tested this?

Here's the actual spell effect on wowhead: Eternal Shield - Spell - World of Warcraft

It's only providing 1% at the moment. Whether this is a bug or the text on the gem itself is erroneous is unknown.

Does WoG produce any threat ? and if so does it benefit from RF?

I realize that threat is a relative non-issue at the moment but I'm curious and have not been able to find any definite answer to this question. As a personal observation (I'm not that good with numbers), my threat seems to jump significantly (in Omen) more when I use SotR than WoG.

WoG does produce threat, and you are correct, SotR generates noticeably more threat, especially when you take advantage of a big stack of vengeance and the judgement proc.

About RF, i'm not sure but i assume all your actions benefit from it.

WoG produces normal healing threat which is affected by RF. However, Paladin healing generates 0.25 threat/health healed (unlike other classes were are 0.5. This was briefly fixed but was revered within a day or so), so it goes up to 0.75 with RF up. As of mid-Beta, with good Vengeance, a 0% overheal WoG would do about 30% the threat of ShoR, but with scaling changes its probably more like 20% now.

Its worth noting that the shield generated by GbtL on WoG overhealing produces virtually zero threat (someone on Maintankadin worked out that the shield generates a flat 15 or so threat regardless of shield size).

The Divine Shield macro isn't working for me. It doesn't cancel the effect of the buff. I used the


#showtooltip
/cast Divine Plea
/cancelaura Divine Plea

Cast and remove divine plea so I could have the "free" WoG. It doesnt' remove the buff. I also tested it with Divine Shield. Is there another /command to remove a buff effect?

A little updated info fo professions and gems.

Cogwheels equip like gems in cogwheel sockts if you have engineering. The epic plate goggles you make at 525 Eng have cogwheel sockets in them. Not what other items have cogwheel sockets or engineers will be abble to add cogwheel sockets however so limited use atm.

cogwheel - Wowhead Search

There are more cogwheels than listed there as well. Sold by Engineering vendors in Twilight Highlands.

NM. You'v got that in there.

Looking for clarification here.


The Rule of 102.4%
Where is this 102.4% number coming from? The number represents your total avoidance...



BM = Base Miss chance of 5%, DC = Dodge Chance as displayed on your character, PC = Parry Chance as displayed on your character, BC = Block Chance as displayed on your character

If you are wondering where Holy Shield is remember that the talent has been changed to provide a bonus to block damage reduction instead of block chance.


Curious how exactly holy shield fits in here. If I understand correctly Holy Shield used ot count as 35% of the 102.4% so roughly you'd want an average of 20% block, parry and dodge.

Are we looking at changing that to say 55% block and 20% parry and 20% dodge? (rough avarage estimate I don't mean exactly 20% per - just average)

Holy Shield no longer provides any block chance or rating, instead it provides an additional +10% to the amount of damage blocked by a successful block. Meaning that if you have 20% chance to block, and no block meta gem (you're only blocking 30% of damage when successful), and you activate Holy Shield by using one of our Holy Power dumps, your chance to block will remain at 20%, while the amount that you block, when successful, jumps to 40%.

Regarding the Guardian (0/34/7) spec, which you say the spec focuses on Word of Glory self-healing and single target threat generation, Rule of Law is more single target DPS than Seals of the Pure while also gives Word of Glory a 15% increase critical. Moving the 2 points from Seals of the Pure to Rule of Law in the Retribution Tree will be more beneficial.

I play a Pally tank myself and I'm considering un-forging back to some more mitigation stats.

With the current top guilds, I'm seeing an awful lot of tanks (pallys and warriors alike) that seem to be not bothering with the exp/hit caps. This is of course, unbuffed.

My best guess is that tank threat is not an issue. I just find it hard to believe that tanks are that far ahead on threat that they aren't concerned about misses/dodges/parries.

Does anyone have any insight to this or have seen how raid threat meters are reading?

Threat is not an issue at all, other than the first few moments of the fight. Hit/Exp isn't needed until you're at the 104.2% "cap". Use mitigation/armor/avoidance to reach that number, then any excess you can start getting hit/exp. Survive/mitigate damage first, that's priority. After a few 30k SotR, threat no longer matters.

edit: I had the numbers backwards. It's 102.4%!

Several threads on top-50 guild forums had their maintanks answer similar questions with the answer that was already given. Threat quite simply isn't an issue. Since I've reforged from exp/hit to avoidance and mastery I've lost aggro exactly once, and that was me being silly and not putting up RF.
Survival is a lot more important than threat right now, even in normal modes.

I strongly urge you to reconsider this. The best advice right now is to reforge even hit and expertise to mastery or avoidance. It's proven in highest-end raiding and is the best way to maximize survivability with no real downside beyond the hypothetical lost aggro that isn't an actual factor in the real world.

One problem I've been having with this concept, although I do agree with you that maximizing survivability is the way to go at the moment, is whenever I am reforging a piece of gear with both avoidance and threat on it, but the avoidance rating is higher. If you reforge the threat into mastery, although that increase your survivability, you'll gain less mastery that way than if you reforge the avoidance.

If the goal is minimizing incoming damage you'll have to do the math but 40% of a high number of mastery + 100% of a lower number of avoidance is sometimes better than 40% higher number of mastery + 60% of higher number of avoidance. (That sentence is confusing, how can I word it better?)

Mastery is more efficient at reaching block cap than avoidance, but that's because over the long fight it's only a 40% (41% with meta) reduction as opposed to the 100% reduction from avoidance. Dropping 1% dodge for 1.25% block might look good on the block cap macro but it's actually increasing the net damage you'll take and therefore the healer mana you'll consume. There's a balance between smoothing damage and minimizing damage and that line has never been easy to determine, but I think that getting as much hit/exp off our gear (and into survival stats) is going to be preferable to trading avoidance for mastery.

Looking forward to T12, it should be even easier to make some of these choices as by then block cap should be attainable without as much effort so we will actually be turning some of our mastery back into parry to avoid wasting itemization.

Your insight is correct; dropping 1% dodge for 1.25% block will be a net loss as far as minimizing total damage taken, but will be a gain in "attack table coverage," or minimizing the chance to take an unblocked hit.

So it really depends on what we're trying to minimize. Do we care about minimizing total damage taken, or minimizing the chance of taking an unblocked hit? I think an argument could be made for either case, but most of the top tier paladins I've spoken with think that minimizing unblocked hits is more important, as those are the damage spikes that cause healers to panic and use mana-inefficient heals.*

My opinion is that the difference you get from reforging isn't going to be significant enough to make either strategy "bad." A simple rule of thumb like, "reforge threat stats before avoidance stats" will get you close enough that the difference is irrelevant.

Nonetheless, you can come up with mathematical equivalencies for these two. To avoid derivation-spamming this thread, I've worked out the details here. The short version is:

The break-even point for total damage taken is
where dRt and dRv are the amount of threat and avoidance rating on the item, respectively, Cm'=2.25/Cm is the amount of mastery rating required to achieve 1% block, and Ca'=k*Ca/(1-A'/C)^2 is the "effective" avoidance rating conversion factor after considering the diminishing returns on base+A' character sheet avoidance. k and C are the constants in the avoidance diminishing returns formula.

In practice, at about 12.5% character-sheet avoidance, this works out to be about 0.075, meaning that unless the item only has 7.5% as much threat rating as avoidance rating, you'll be better off reforging the threat rating to mastery.

The break-even point for combat table coverage is considerably higher:
which works out to around 63% under the same conditions. This means that if the amount of threat rating on an item is less than 60% of the avoidance rating, you actually get better combat table coverage by reforging the avoidance to mastery.


*However, most of them are also reforging their threat stats into mastery instead of their avoidance stats, which as the derivation above shows, is the opposite of what they say they want to do. *shrug*

Alright, I've updated the manual with a new section called Trends in Paladin Tanking in order to track oddities or exceptions relating to how things are "normally" done. The only thing covered so far is the "over" threat issue and the need to no longer stack hit/exp. I'm not making any firm recommendations of exactly what to do outside of not hit/exp capping. I'm noting that depending on gear/enchants/gems/etc hit/exp can be reforged into survival stats. If people feel there should be more detail give me suggestions of what to put and whatever justifications (if necessary).

Beyond the new section I've made some other changes. I've been making changes here and there to my master file over the past few weeks so I don't recall all the changes that are in. As usual if people could please peruse the manual to make sure there are no technical problems (typos, broken links, etc) and PM me any that are found. Beyond that let the discussion continue.

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Follow the development of the Cataclysm Protection/Tanking Field Manual; find out how you can help, additional instructions, and the to-do list at the link below:

» Paladin Protection Field Manual 4.0 Version - To Do List

Since T12 bosses will be level 88+ (or however they end up designating it), won't higher ratings be offset by the need for higher ratings vs. those bosses?

tier 12 bosses will be 88 just like any other boss, All boss have always been +3 levels of the current cap, Why would this change in this expansion.

Blizzard has said that in Cataclysm they are thinking of upping hit/expertise tables from tier to tier.

Is there a bluepost about this, I must have missed this completely, Sounds really wierd to up the level of a boss atleast. Seeing as a 89 boss would need aloot of the new ratings? ;> Maybe an small change that affect only expertise and hit and still keep the level 88 on bosses.

In the context of the discussion it would only mean a .8% higher threshold for block cap so the point remains rather unchanged. I'd think we'd gain far more then .8% combined combat table coverage in a whole tier of upgrades.