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Mozzad, what you are looking for is commonly called the 969 rotation, see this thread for a quick explanation and search "969" on the forums there if you're still having trouble.

I Think the Ret Pally should judge light, so the tank gets mana from healing.

@all

I'm confused with the tanking weapons now. I've read through the thread and only ended up even more confused. What kind of weapon should a prot pally use now? What has changed? Sorry if I didn't search good enough.

Short Answer: Prot paladins generally want to use real tank weapons now. Potency is the generally-accepted enchant.

Long Answer: Spelldamage weapons can still be useful on (very) large AoE pulls for the threat. They also generally give higher threat overall but on bosses (where it really matters) the difference really is negligible and the tank weapon's avoidance stats provides such a big boost that it's the way to go now. Potency gives threat AND block value, obviously, so it's a very good choice, but Mongoose may also be acceptible because of its avoidance proc (though with the diminishing returns on avoidance it really might not be worth it depending on how much avoidance you already have). A large part of this weapon change is because of Hammer of the Righteous.

The thread on Weapon TPS at Maintankadin is here.

Thanks a lot. So I should have taken Heartless in our twink-run yesterday But I thought it's too slow AND has no spellpower. I took Dark Blessing later, which was the worse choice . Ah well, I won't do it again.

Almost any weapon will do, really.

In my personal experience, I find that when running around with 1700 AP (buffed, of course), and with Hammer of the Righteous in our rotation, the extra 200ish spelldamage from Kael's mace is a much smaller chunk of my overall TPS stats than it used to be. A high dps tanking weapon is a good bet, especially if the anticipation change left you low on defense, but a standard DPS weapon is still good enough for threat, and, at worst, even with caster weapons for tanking (since stamina and agility tend to be more plentiful in those).

For what it's worth as a general benchmark, I'm in mixed badges/T4 and wielding the heroic MgT Kael'thas sword, and I did my first bit of "real" 3.0 tanking in last night (both a full Z'A run and a normal MgT for a guildie alt). In Z'A, with two tanks and playing a wee bit conservatively, HotR's damage was in the 25-30% range of my total dps, and for Malacrass I as able to completely drop consecration from my rotation for large amounts of the fight (makes it *much* easier to see his consecration) without much loss of tps. In MgT, AoEing to my heart's content, HotR was still 18-20% of my dps.

Heartless isn't exactly a stellar choice either. Whenever a guildie or friend asks me about Paladin tanking weapons, my reply is always: Whatever gives you the best mitigation.

The amount of TPS a "Rogue Main-hand" will put out compared to a "Caster Mace" or a "Fast off-hand" against single or multiple targets is almost completely irrelevant considering that your TPS will be in the multiple thousands.

Go back to Heroic Mech or your Thrallmar quartermaster and pick up [The Sun Eater] or a [Warbringer]. Hell, even [Grom'tor's Charge] is potentially more valuable, even if you're comparing to something like the [Blade of Savagery], because the TPS loss is not going to break the bank, but the mitigation increase is definitely non-trivial.

EDIT: As for enchants, I currently use Potency. I acknowledge what I just said about threat being irrelevant, but Potency's ~27 BV is consistent mitigation, as opposed to Mongoose's erratic avoidance.

I know this will seem a bit anecdotal (sp?) as I have no hard evidence to back it up (feel free to ask my guild members!), but just bear with me.

I tanked BT for the first time last night, on Teron Gorefiend. Using JoL I consistently stole threat from the MT (warrior). And by "stole threat" I mean no one had any possibility of catching up to me; at one point I was 40k threat (per Omen 3.0) ahead of the 2nd highest (a mage). Eventually, I made the suggestion to just have me MT so healers didn't get confused as to why I was always main-tanking.

We were slightly more melee heavy than I was used to (2 rogues, 2-3 ret pallies, 1 arms warrior). It was a multiple-guild raid and we're usually very caster heavy.

I believe this just re-iterates that JoL is "bugged". Any ideas on how to handle this for threat-sensitive fights? We moved on to Bloodboil and I had issues staying low enough to be able to switch off with a feral druid and warrior unless I rotated between JoL and JoW.

If you want to armory my crappy gear, I'm Vygor on Vek'nilash (US).

I had this problem on Bloodboil, I took over tanking at the start of the second normal phase, and then could not loose him despite removing BoSanc, Ret Aura, Thorns and stopping all attacks. Tanked to the end of the second normal phase and bubbled, then tanked the third normal for the few seconds left till he died. Next time I just wont be judging I don't think.

No, next time just don't be the 2nd tank. Be the first tank, bubble after the first normal phase if you have more than ~7 debuffs, tank the entire 2nd normal phase, and then either tank the last few seconds needed during the 3rd normal phase or die and let the OT take over for those few seconds.

=)

This. Although you'll still want your OT second on threat for when you get confounded. We did BT yesterday (because we have nothing else to do), and man, how different it is. We didn't even play well, and still cleared the place in 1/2 the time of normal. There were multiple times that we would have wiped last week, and easily killed the boss this week. Every boss in there is easily tankable by a prot pally now, even Mother - the threat generation we have is just so ridiculous. The closest a dps got to me was a mage on Gorefiend, when he was at around 92% of my threat toward the end of the fight. And that was weird - made me focus on tightening up my rotations. We had a holy pally respec prot to MT Illy (he wanted to), and he didn't even come close to dying. And no eyebeams makes flame tanking boringly easy now.

Also, chain pulling with Blessing of Sanctuary is awesome now. I had holy pallies using FoL going out of mana on me, while I'd end every fight at full health and mana. On big pulls, my screen is just a blur of scrolling 80-100 mana returned messages.

I will say that overall tanking is a lot more boring now though. I don't bother optimizing my threat, because I don't have to. It's just so seldom that anyone is even close. Hopefully that'll change by the time we start raiding at level 80, so I'll reserve my bitching until then, but I certainly hope being good at threat will sometime again be a useful skill to have.

I dunno, we didn't kill them that fast. I mean we only did one attempt, but we did get a Dark Barrage (only one), and not even a hint of an eyebeam. Usually, I would have expected 3-4 eyebeams in that time, and certainly at least one before our Dark Barrage.

No - the eyebeams have been significantly slowed. We had one eyebeam in our attempt, and it was after the first elemental was down. While we killed them quickly we didn't kill them THAT quickly.

Yeah, we did Illidan last night and saved heroism for phase 2 (we had a new tank with no FR so we wanted to kill the first flame quickly) and even then we still got an eyebeam well before we had the second one down, so I'm not sure why Denogran's group didn't see one. Anyway, yes: ridiculously easy, especially now that elemental melee attacks are blockable.

There's some speculation that gear scaling might boost dps threat more than tank threat, and in that case skill would become more important later in the progression, but I'm not aware that there's any evidence of that. Anyway, if things stay the way they are, then threat won't matter in normal tank-and-spank situations, but there can still be encounters where tanks have to deal with some kind of threat penalty.

Phase 1 of Gurtogg, for example, with the constant knockbacks, confounds, and aggro-switches, makes it hard for the tanks to develop a large threat lead. In TBC the answer was just "don't dps much in phase 1". In 3.0, tanks can actually generate and maintain enough threat to allow for significant dps, but it's not trivial and you have to know what you're doing. Now imagine Gurtogg with some kind of time limit (enrage mechanic, whatever) that basically forces you to dps during that phase, and you have something that challenges tanks to generate threat. If they do things right they can design specific fights where threat generation is important, even if "normally" it isn't. I think that's a good balance to have.

One nice thing I'm noticing is how much easier it is to build OT threat now. I can consistently stay above the dps on most fights when I'm not tanking, which is really handy on a lot of fights. We were getting serious lag issues on RoS last night that screwed up the interrupts on phase 2, so it was nice to have a couple of OTs who would pull aggro if the MT got the confound effect.

Another fun discovery is that if you forget RF, it's a lot worse than it used to be, because you lose your "anti-Salv" threat buff too!

Yeah, forgetting RF always sucked, but now its a real kick in the pants. I grabbed TellMeWhen and have it set up to put a giant RF icon over my toon when it drops off. I also set it up to do the same with JoL, so I get a big JoL icon if I don't have a seal up. Very handy.

We did Kara and ZA last night. Besides being stupidly easy, it was amazingly fun. The only person I had to threat issues with was our PVP spec'ed Ret pally, and that was mostly his fault for opening fights with CS->DS->JoW crits. The few times I lost threat I felt I could get it back easily, where as pre-3.0 I'd have to wait for Judgment to be off cooldown to taunt.

Having HoSalv and HoSac was nice. I could put HoSac on the other tank in ZA when I didn't have a mob and get some mana back from the damage. (Speaking of ZA, we finished the bear run with 20 minutes remaining. I can see why they removed it).

Instant cast shield toss is so useful, and makes playing Prot feel so much more fluid.

The only complaints I had where having dead time in my rotations (which will be fixed with shield bash) and a few mana issues if mobs died to fast (which will be fixed with divine plea). Over all the changes to Prot are great, and its a ton of fun now.


Sidebar: What kind of block numbers are other people seeing? My gear is decent and I could get 1014 or so buffed up with very little block gear on.

Get Palatank and have it yell "RIGHTEOUS FURY" at you when it wears off( with a graphic that fills your screen). The only real annoying part about it at the moment is that it yells at you when you die, which isn't all that helpful. PallyPower (which if you don't have - GET!), also has the top box on the buff list as RF, which is a nice place to keep track of it.


As for block numbers, I'm up in the 800's without having changed my gear at all, and never having been all that block minded to start with.

Actually I've started using PowerAuras and just having it project a low-opacity RF icon in my HUD area when it's up. I've also found this really helpful for making similar indicators to show what seal I have up and how long it has left, and similarly for Holy Shield.


On a different topic: Anyone found any interesting AoE-farming areas/instances? I've soloed Strath and Scholo since 3.0 for achievements, and with the high auction price of runecloth right now it's been decently lucrative. Anyone tried something more ambitious like non-heroic Shattered Halls?

EDIT: I'm also going with Potency for now. With the standard talents+BoK, it's 16 block value, which isn't too shabby at all. It's also good dps for soloing.

I easily solo'd non-heroic ramparts on the PTR, pretty much chain pulling and never dropping below full health/mana. It'd be a kind of fun way to make some gold and definitely something fun to do once.

I did Strat and BRD last night, though the portion of Strat dead with the gargoyles that drop 15s un-resistable webs on you that also silence was quite annoying until I started being more careful.

I'm sure a few other outlands instances can be solo'd. It really just depends on when you run into a high magic damage boss or worse yet, mobs that put out significant healing.

I am really curius what folks are solo'ing in ZG and MC. Obviously Garr can be solo'd, and I've heard of folks doing Lucifron. How about Firelords? Do they give you fits, or can you get their adds down in time to keep things under control?

In ZG, I solo'd some trash, though found the early pulls with double axe throwers were very, very hard because they chain knock-down on you the whole fight, meaning you both take a lot of damage AND cannot deal much damage. I'd love to think we could solo Mandokir or Thekal, for the rare mount drops, for instance, but haven't heard of anyone doing it.

I haven't done it on Live, but on the PTR the weekend before it went down for the patch I soloed normal Shattered Halls up to the first boss, in a really short time on my own Prot pally. Eminently doable, though I was doing it solely to see if it could be done, and wasn't looking at the drops. First boss is (I would say impossible, but I know someone would prove me wrong) decidedly difficult to get past, however, solely because you're the only target for Death Coil...and it comes at a very short interval. If you're able to do that though, I see nothing that would stop anyone from getting through the instance as a whole. The trash won't stop you, that's for damn sure.

With threat generation being relatively easier and crushing blows being removed, what kind of tanking sets are you guys maintaining nowadays? I find it hard to justify wearing anything besides whatever has the highest TankPoints since 3.0, or is that just a symptom of Kara/ZA simply not challenging my gear level enough?

I actually managed that as a fresh 70, though that was with abuse of the old Ardent Defender.

Anyway I haven't done too much AoE soloing myself, but I've been doing other "Oh hey it's a big mob with a lot of health, let's solo it" stuff. The "hardest" thing I've done up until now has been the Headless Horseman from the Halloween event, he isn't terribly intimidating in my gear, and luckily doesn't use his Conflagration if you're there alone. I've also soloed normal Blood Furnace and normal Slave Pens to complete the Outland Dungeonmaster achievement.

I'm pretty sure I could solo the level 70 instances as well, though I haven't taken the time for it yet. It was actually how I was planning to finally get Thrallmar exalted.

Edit:

I believe Firelords have the issue that they can cast Soul Burn which would then start a downward spiral. They also melee for fire damage, which is still unblockable judging by tanking a Flame of Azzinoth earlier this week.

We did MC for the achievement last night, and on the flame packs I noticed that I was actually blocking and resisting fire damage based attacks.
Now i remember in the WOTLK thread someone mentioned this has changed, but the general conses seemed for it to be a bug.
Has anyone found mobs that deal unblockable elemental damage?

And has anyone found any word from Blizzard on this? It is not mentioned in the patch notes.

Not that I dislike the change but it just seems to be weird.


Edit: Ok posted at the same time, so it seems Flame of Azzinoth's melee can't be blocked.