Exewut

The firelord's adds despawn after a while (4 minutes?) when there's like 20 of them up. There's no way you can dps them fast enough solo even at lvl 80, you just need to wear them down.
All of ZG is easy soloable at lvl 80 except for hakkar because he enrages and you just don't have enough dps to kill him (I got to ~35%) and the bat boss because she spamheals herself for ~40% of her hp every 15 seconds or so. I tried it at lvl 70 but I just took too much damage to kill anything other than the panther boss. Same deal for MC, everything is soloable except for the bosses that have anti healing curses (gehenas) or do fire damage (baron). I didn't try Shazzrah, Sulfuron or anything past those, but I'm quite sure that a T8 geared prot paladin with some consumables will be able to clear nearly everything in there.

 

jere

As an aside, unless things have changed with the recent version, the author of palatank was using part of someone else's code without their permission:

Maintankadin :: View topic - Tankadin - FAQ

Some more information:
Maintankadin :: View topic - Palatank vs. Tankadin

Things might have changed since pre 3.0, but something to consider if that sort of thing bothers you.

 

Denogran

Interesting to note, thanks for bringing that to my attention. I'll try Tankadin instead then.

 

Russta

I was thinking about the whole elemental blocking thing today.

In the past, whenever it's occurred, it's been as a bug but if they really want to balance the equality of tanks surely this is quite logical as an intended change? Holy Shield is still a large part of our mitigation and threat and if we can't use it then we instantly become inferior to the other three tanks. Considering their much lauded master plan, this seems to go against their new tanking philosophy.

Also, here is a WWS of our Illidan kill from this past Sunday. Aside from auto attacking Illidan in phase one, all I do in the fight is tank the right Flame of Azzinoth and you can quite clearly see Holy Shield working on it. Once he's dead I just run to the back of the room and alt+f4 to my DPS Warrior so it's literally the only thing I fight there on my Paladin.

 

Intoxify

Since it's fairly well established now that potency is the premier enchant for paladins to be using, I have a question that follows along those lines-- Provided that we aren't sacrificing too much of our EH, would swapping out +15 stam gems for +10 str be worth it, due the stat scaling our threat and mitigation? I'm talking about the rare cases of items that are blue/red sockets, since there isn't really any good epic green or yellow gems to use in red/yellow situations.

 

◊ Cathela

10 strength is ~8 block value with talents and such, whereas 15 stam is 185hp. I think the stamina is a better deal for survivability. I'd probably go with pure stam in a blue slot and str/stam in a red slot if you want the socket bonus (assuming you're just choosing between stam and str).

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Intoxify

Thank you! Finally the sort of input I've been trying to ask around for.

 

Tilted

Just going from my own anecdotal experiences in the past week, the str added to our gear along with a "tank" weapon enchanted with potency is ample for threat generation. As long as we do "enough" threat for a given encounter, any more is wasted beyond the simple (and small) boost in damage we'd get by regemming for strength. In all honesty, my hyjal/BT gear has been ample for survivability as well, even in Sunwell, but when things go bad our survivability is going to save a wipe more often than threat generation.

The only non-standard thing I've been doing with gems is replacing my red socket SP/stam gems with +10 dodge rating. Even with diminishing returns I'm over 60% avoidance, and avoidance still scales very well.

 

Kayoto

Baron Geddon is pretty easily soloable assuming you have FR gear (which a fair number of Prot Paladins do due to being Flame tanks on Illidan).

You can actually solo Geddon as Prot or Ret, as long as you've got the resistance gear available.

 

Denogran

To be honest, I'm finding my gear to be more than sufficient for both threat and mitigation at the moment. The only times I'm dying at the moment are when I'm doing something stupid like pulling packs without healers or the entire raid is wiping. And threat-wise, well I'm not even close to optimizing my threat and I'm still stupidly ahead of my dps.

Now granted, my gear has gotten pretty good. Still need an upgrade on my helm (damn you Illidan!!!), shield, ring and weapon, but otherwise best-in-game. But the difference between last week and this week is huge. Last week was the dance between threat and mitigation so I wouldn't get insta-gibbed on Brutallus. This week it's forgetting to trinket on stomps and still being fine. It's just not even the same game now.

I guess my point would be I'm not sure it matters much how you gear now, or at least not for the next couple of weeks. We had a holy pally respec prot to tank Illidan this week, and he didn't even come close to dying while wearing healing gloves. It just doesn't even matter if you're even decently geared at all.

 

• frmorrison

I don't know if this was posted before, but the new rank of SotR is affected by spell hit (17% miss on bosses), also it adds 400 bonus damage instead of 300, all for a cost of 19g and being level 80.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Mordekhuul

After an MC blitz last night, I'll confirm that most MC trash is pretty easy to solo, at least until the lava packs, where stuns and such cause problems. I'm also not sure how a Firelord would go at 70, as he puts the debuff on that silences (we had 25+ folks there to get the achievement, so my ability to solo things was limited).

That said, I solo'd the first two giants while I waited for folks to show up. Easy, but sure takes a while.

Also, as one might expect, LBRS is quite easy to solo and how nice is it that the UBRS key gems all drop every time from the bosses now?

On another note, we discussed addons a few pages back, with regards to keeping a seal up and such.

As suggested, DoTimer is quite good for cooldowns and DoT durations once you disable the party buffs from showing up (just filter the /dot menu so that it blocks non-harmful dots/durations from showing.

Further, the Power Auras suggestion was stellar. Right now I have it configured in perhaps the simplest possible way. I have it set to show a white aura around me when SoC is up, a yellow aura when SoL is up, and a blue aura when SoW is up.

I also have the auras configured to show a timer just underneath my character that counts down how many seconds are left on my aura, so it is very, very obvious when my aura is about to expire, without having to look over at my list of buffs and find the icon in ElkBuffBars, for example.

I'd like to find a way to have a flashing or animated red aura show up when one of those seals is about to expire, but I haven't seen an option for it yet, but what I have now is working quite well even without it.

 

• Chicken

One somewhat random thing of note: Touched by the Light increasing the total healing done by your critical heals by 30%, not just the extra healing you get through crits. This means your critical heals will do 95% more healing than your non-critical heals (Which is large boost compared to the normal 50% more healing on critical heals). As I previously noted, this works well with Flash of Light if you have a fairly high crit rate healing set. Your Holy Light crits will largely be overheals though.



Further in regards to soloing, as someone mentioned above, the trash to the first boss in Shattered Halls is easily soloable. Just focus your primary attention on the casters in the pulls first, and the pull sizes are more than large enough to keep your mana full from Sanctuary alone, so use Judgement of Light on your primary target as well. Swap to Seal of Light if you find it's needed to keep your health up. Due to the amount of mobs you tend to pull your weapon speed is pretty inconsequential: Any weapon you use will be sped up significantly by the amount you will be parrying attacks.

The first boss of Shattered Halls himself is a large pain due to the frequency at which he can cast Death Coil. I'm considering trying him out again someday while wearing Shadow Resist gear to mitigate this, but I can't be sure whether this would mitigate the effect well.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Mordekhuul

That was me, and good thought on SR gear, although man would our damage output suck while doing it.

On the SH trash, focus on those hunter-like folks. They are the most dangerous because they scatter shot you and then the pack of mobs all smack you because you can't dodge, parry, or block.

 

Smurrf

I wasn't going to say anything, I figured people could go back and look for themselves if they really wanted to know who Chicken was referring. I'd like to see where you mentioned it though...I know I did here: Protection and you!

Perhaps I missed something somewhere? (Don't mean to derail, but if you're going to take credit, at least have done something to take credit for.)

 

Tilted

I gotta say, I'm pretty pleased with our performance now in non-tanking situations. I was able to pull off 1243 DPS on Gorefiend last night in my DPS gear using my tank weapon/shield, and I even forgot to equip my DPS 1-hander. The new SoV scaling is definitely helpful, and HotR is an amazing addition for sheer damage output. I would've broken 1300 easy with the 4x HotR (still 3x now on live I believe), and it'll get even better once we hit 75 and get ShoR. Granted, it's not the 2400-2500 it would have been as ret, but I at least feel useful now when not being attacked.

 

Mordekhuul

I was sure I'd mentioned it in the post just before yours, but your'e right, it was you.

 

Dekkar

HotR is 4x damage. It's just a tooltip typo at the moment saying it's three times.

 

Sozar

I crit HotR for 2200 in ZA the other night using my Decapitator. I'm pretty sure its 4x on live.

If a HotR crit is calculated as (BASE_DPS+AP/14)*HOTR_MOD*ONE_HAND*CRIT=(BASE_DPS + AP/14)*4*1.1*2 = CRIT_DAMAGE

4x DPS = ((2200/(4*1.1*2))-92.1)*14 = 2210 AP
3x DPS = ((2200/(3*1.1*2))-92.1)*14 = 3377 AP

Assuming my math is right, sounds like 4x to me.

 

• Smithist

The in game character sheet will show your weapon dps after ap and One Hand Spec. Mine is 168.8, x4 yields ~675 which is exactly what my hammers hit for.

 

Tilted

Thanks guys for the clarification. I did get a HotR crit for 2982 in that same kill, which was definitely a pleasant surprise.

 

Nobbynob Littlun

I think the biggest benefit of us having this kind of dps is that it provides new incentive to the dpsers to perform better. People get embarassed when their tank is topping the damage meters.

[ninja edit] No longer must I play Enter the Gladiators in Ventrilo! Though... I probably will anyway :P

 

jere

Just be careful using the character sheet if you have haste gear. Your character sheet will probably show you the modified DPS based on your haste rating, while HotR is based off of your weapon's base DPS and the AP contribution only, not modified by haste if I remember correctly.

 

◊ Cathela

That's probably right, jere. The original version was "weapon damage" and then later on "120% of weapon damage", both of which would be unchanged by haste. The new version is just supposed to remove weapon speed from the equation so we can use warrior tank weapons.

--

My impression of threat since 3.0 is that we're a bit behind warriors, mainly because they have all their tools at level 70 and we don't have SotR yet, but we've still got plenty of threat to stay ahead of the dps. (Haven't had a chance to compare myself to a bear yet.)

The only threat problems I've had have been (a) dps warriors, which are doing insane damage right now due to the deep wounds bug, and (b) sometimes on horseman runs, where I take pretty much no damage so I have to watch my mana pool. In either case, HoSalv works very well to solve the problem. It's really fun to slap that on someone and watch their threat bar drop.

Incidentally, I've been using the Classic Blizzard ThreatMeters addon, which basically just activates the threat interface that was built into the game but left disabled. Very simple and clean; the only real drawback is that it only shows a maximum of 5 people at once.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

And healing feels just about as buffed, if not more. Last night I was OT in ZA, so I tanked the adds on Hex Lord. After they were dead, I was able to very meaningfully assist with healing with just a weapon/shield/libram swap. Flash of Light hits for over 1k and crits for 2k are meaningful, especially with the spirit bolt damage ensuring infinite mana (as long as I stuck to FoL). On Zul'jin I wore healing gear... Flash of Light crits for over 3k are extremely nice, heh. Definitely a huge buff to both healing and DPS when not tanking.