I tanked Sanguinar in the Kael fight Tuesday night and the fear worked as expected. He feared me, I ran randomly, and he kept beating on me. Sanguinar has a dragon-style (Ony/Nef) fear -- I think lorewise he's actually a dragon.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
There's a lot of effective health vs avoidance discussion in the warrior thread, but not so much here. Plus, that discussion seems mostly to focus on people proving that 65% avoidance beats 25% avoidance, which isn't really news.
So, for an example, unbuffed, I'm normally 14.3k health and 17.3k armor (incl. Devotion, I'm a stam stacker), with 45% avoidance. However, I can drop to 12.8k health and roughly 15.5k armor and raise my avoidance to 55%. I'm currently MT of a party wrapping up Kara (Prince is on farm, Nightbane isn't a sure thing quite yet) and through the first boss of ZA.
What's a good way of approaching the question of which gear set-up is better?
There's a lot of effective health vs avoidance discussion in the warrior thread, but not so much here. Plus, that discussion seems mostly to focus on people proving that 65% avoidance beats 25% avoidance, which isn't really news.
So, for an example, unbuffed, I'm normally 14.3k health and 17.3k armor (incl. Devotion, I'm a stam stacker), with 45% avoidance. However, I can drop to 12.8k health and roughly 15.5k armor and raise my avoidance to 55%. I'm currently MT of a party wrapping up Kara (Prince is on farm, Nightbane isn't a sure thing quite yet) and through the first boss of ZA.
What's a good way of approaching the question of which gear set-up is better?
Basically there's nothing fundamental that changes when you insert "Paladin" instead of "Warrior" in that thread. Really, it's a matter of personal and group choice. If you're a gamblin' man, and your group doesn't mind occasionally wiping to some "holy shit that was a lot of damage fast" moments, then stack avoidance. If you want your incoming damage to be as predictable as possible, even if that means you might just hit a wall someplace, then stack mitigation and stamina. Basically, avoidance will give you some freak deaths, and some freak successes, meaning sometimes you'll die on stuff you should easily beat, and sometimes you'll beat stuff you might not be expected to.
Personally, I'm not one for extremes, so I tend to try to raise both up equally. Also, you'll note a pretty big emphasis on removing crushing blows, which requires a high base avoidance to make sure holy shield covers the rest. So a pally is sorta required to stack more avoidance than a warrior, because pushing off crushing blows on some fights is an absolute requirement.
Presumably crushing blows are off the table no matter what set they use.
I would approach it two ways. The first is by looking at the amount of damage in that is required to keep mana available via SA (assuming mana pots as well). From that, you can look at specific encounters and determine whether or not that boss will be able to do that kind of damage reasonably given certain levels of avoidance. Or at what avoidance level is feasible.
The second is to look at the most common bad case scenario and determine whether or not your HP is adequate to deal with that. That can be accomplished by looking at special attacks, normal attacks, and speed of attacks; for instance, you could assume one special attack followed by a normal and then a parried normal as a baseline. Determine how much damage could possibly be done, and then see whether or not your HP could possibly deal with that after buffing.
My personal view is that it's a lot easier to buff stamina then it is to buff avoidance via consumables, and while less streaky damage is good it is better to deal with more avoidance after you've gotten enough stamina to deal with big streaks as long as the overall item cost isn't too high. In your specific case, I suspect that the 55% avoidance set is too sacrificing HP, and there is likely a sweet spot in between where you have 50% avoidance and around 13.5K HP. That's probably a better compromise.
Avengement Libram is probably not much of a threat increase since we don't really depend on our melee damage to begin with.
I think it's worth mentioning that the Libram of Avengement's crit rating buff applies to both melee and spell crit, although that doesn't really change much given that the only ability in our tanking repertoire that can crit is JoR.
I like the idea of using Libram of Zeal in the meantime. We don't normally run with a Ret Paladin, I specifically picked up Imp. SotC in my build and I definitely feel the threat increase from using JotC instead of JoW.
Going alchemy mainly for the potion? Not sure if that would be worth it. The trinket is very nice for healing but far from it when tanking with all the alternatives out there.
I'd probably go BS and Enchanting if I were to tailor my professions for protection.
When you say you tested it, did you just read the tooltip after switching out? I would suspect that you would lose the block, but it would not surprise me if the holy shield spell checked for the libram, versus the actual hit checking for the libram. Basically the difference between:
<snip>
I think the only real way to test this would be to dress up in gear that is just at the avoidance cap w/libram (for whatever level of mob you're going to be testing on), and then see if you can cast holy shield, remove the libram, then see if you ever get a normal hit with charges left.
Mmmm, yeah, I didn't do something that exhaustive; I should. I looked at the character sheet and my tank points mod. I'll go try it out now while I wait for my raid.
Yeah, I cast holy shield, changed librams (which, while I was in combat invoked the GCD, so I'm not shure what all the hubbub is about), and was still hit when I should have been seeing only blocks,parries, dodges, and misses.
Last edited by Petersen : 11/16/07 at 12:12 AM.
¬The Original PalaTank, William Erik Petersen The Unbreakable
Tanking with a Paladin since before it was cool.
I went Engi/Ench myself. The Tankatronic Goggles were just too good to pass up for me since I never thought I'd ever be in T5+ content. Also, the +45 STA trinkets are nothing short of awesome. They're no Darkmoon Cards, but I reckon I've spent less on Engi than if I bought Madness and Vengeance. The Flying Machine just seals the deal
My Enchanting isn't actually high enough for me to use the Ring enchants yet, but that's my goal.
IMO ench is the prof every class of every spec should pretty much have, at least at some point of the game. It's a bitch to level but I really can't see any other proffession that would beat that, and even if you decide there is one, then you won't find 2 meaning you should still have enchanting.
Are you really using mana/rejuv pots over ironshields when tanking? Doesn't the extra armor from ironshield automatically makes warriors better tanks for physical damage too if you're needing to use other potions? Not to mention alch stone gimps a trinket slot which can be a bit extra stam (but nothing compared to the extra armor).
There's a lot of effective health vs avoidance discussion in the warrior thread, but not so much here. Plus, that discussion seems mostly to focus on people proving that 65% avoidance beats 25% avoidance, which isn't really news.
So, for an example, unbuffed, I'm normally 14.3k health and 17.3k armor (incl. Devotion, I'm a stam stacker), with 45% avoidance. However, I can drop to 12.8k health and roughly 15.5k armor and raise my avoidance to 55%. I'm currently MT of a party wrapping up Kara (Prince is on farm, Nightbane isn't a sure thing quite yet) and through the first boss of ZA.
What's a good way of approaching the question of which gear set-up is better?
Gearing for stamina increases the total amount of burst damage you can survive; gearing for avoidance reduces the chance of that worst case happening. But it doesn't reduce it to zero; at some point that worst-case burst will happen, and you'll have to be able to survive it. Given the choice between "I can definitely survive any burst up to 18k" or "I can definitely survive any burst up to 16k and there's a small but non-zero chance of me getting bursted for more than that" I'll take the former.
The other argument is that gearing for avoidance also saves healer mana. But I've never seen a fight where healer longevity was a greater concern than tank survivability, given the amount of mana that can be had from flasking, chain-chugging potions, etc. Going for avoidance might save your healers some gold spent on potions or whatever, but if you wipe because your health pool wasn't quite big enough to survive a burst, then your healers are out all the consumables they spent on that attempt, and so is your dps, and so are you.
That's why I always go for stamina, stamina, stamina, so long as threat and crushes/crits are covered.
The nice thing about Engineering aside from the helm is that either Gnomish or Goblin engineering gives you access to 45-stam trinkets that are not unique. For people who don't have the cash for Darkmoon cards or an epic mount, that can be a pretty nice option.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
Avoidance saves healer mana via canceling while stamina saves healer mana via less overhealing, really, so the actual benefit for healer mana is really hard to figure out. The point is that you can't say avoidance helps healer mana while ignoring the healer mana saved by the extra stam, not to mention armor.
Another thing is that for paladins avoidance is actually more useful than for warriors (after crush immunity of course) as the chance for wearing off holy shield with a slow attacking boss (via parries) isn't as high as for a warrior since it requires you not avoiding all the 5 hits (so that they become blocks and use HS up) or have even more boss parries to compensate, which is just much higher chance than for a warrior to not avoid 2 attacks on a parry burst. Since for a paladin there's a (1-avoidance)^5 and for a warrior there's a (1-avoidance)^2 in the "do I get burst?" factor, avoidance helps paladins more. How much more depends on what chance that kind of burst really does have to happen and how much avoidance reduces it - but if it's high then reducing it means it'll still happen and you need to have the stam for it, and if it's a rediculessly low chance (as in something that would happen on average once every 50 fights or more...) then why the hell are you worrying about it anyway, worry about bursts that are more likely to happen.
If you treat all different "types of bursts" the way I just did, you'll see that the effectiveness of avoidance against them is actually not really that great compared to stamina, or that they just have such a low chance of happening (say 5 parry hastes and a crush...) it's really not what you should be worrying about.
So basically either the chance for the burst to happen is already extremely low or that stamina will help you handle it better than the avoidance reducing its chance to happen. And even the low chance burst would still be helped with more stam...
Even though paladins gain more "reduce chance of burst" from avoidance than warriors due to how holy shield works, stmina is probably still better to keep you alive through fights.
Even though paladins gain more "reduce chance of burst" from avoidance than warriors due to how holy shield works
I am pretty sure you have that completely backwards, considering holy shield is twice as many charges over time than warrior's shield block (8 in 10 vs 2 in 5 ). This means we have a far lower chance of getting crushed. Unless you are referring to some boss that could strip holy shield so fast that its the time before we can put it back up again that you are referring, to.
Something I thought that you might want to address in any FAQ-type section is how your threat from getting hit works off partial and full blocks. i.e. You still will get full threat from Holy Shield/BoSac/Ret Aura off a partial block, the only difference when you fully block an attack is that Retribution Aura will not damage the attacker. BoSac/Holy Shield will always proc off ANY block. See evidence below.
I'm saying since you have far fewer chance of getting crushed, additional avoidance boosts it even more, since it has to fail that many more times in order for you to get crushed while for a warrior it only needs to fail twice.
But again no matter how you look at it, it looks like stamina comes on top regardless.
Mmmm, yeah, I didn't do something that exhaustive; I should. I looked at the character sheet and my tank points mod. I'll go try it out now while I wait for my raid.
Yeah, I cast holy shield, changed librams (which, while I was in combat invoked the GCD, so I'm not shure what all the hubbub is about), and was still hit when I should have been seeing only blocks,parries, dodges, and misses.
Mmm that's too bad, but clearly the way it would be expected to work. This was really the only situation where it seemed to make sense to switch librams for. Thanks for testing that.
I think for prot paladins engineering needs to be one of the choices. The tanking helm is just great for mitigation/avoidance and is fairly easy to acquire early on (basically requires one heroic). The goblin rocket launcher is one of the best pulling weapons in the game and is a great complement to AS, given that it only hits one mob no matter what and requires no mana. That it gives +45 stam is delicious gravy.
There are other nice things about engineering. Bombs are good for paladin leveling in aoe, you get handy things like underwater breathing skills and parachute cloaks and cloaking devices and remote controls. There's no reason to do blacksmithing for the weapons for prot, and the armor has one piece that is at all better than the alternative, and it's not really that much better.
Jewelcrafting isn't a bad choice either given the unique gems, but I don't think it gives the benefit that the helm and trinket do.
The other option is to just go mad money and get herbalism. If I were to do it again, I'd probably do herb/eng or herb/alch. Mining is nice but hardly necessary for engineering, and herbalism makes more money later on.
In other news, there have been some interesting parses recently from Hyjal (at maintankadin)where holy shield factors in only marginally in the overall threat output. I was kind of surprised, but HS was accounting for less than 10% of total damage. The person in question had about 60% avoidance and was averaging one HS charge per cast. Their threat was still good and this was not gimping for avoidance either. I'm starting to wonder whether improved HS is actually needed post-SSC given a high enough avoidance. I realize that you can't get rid of it early on, especially against certain fights - but later when your gear has high avoidance, it might not be necessary.
Personally, I do not feel at ANY given point is it wise to drop anticipation. It is worth 3.2% crush avoidance and counts towards the anti-crit cap, something that can actually be tough with T5/ZA level gear when you are gearing for max stamina.
If you are speccing for an MT role, your soloing is crappy either way. Don't gimp your raid for what you do off-time. Its time for reckoning to be dropped.
In other news, there have been some interesting parses recently from Hyjal (at maintankadin)where holy shield factors in only marginally in the overall threat output. I was kind of surprised, but HS was accounting for less than 10% of total damage. The person in question had about 60% avoidance and was averaging one HS charge per cast. Their threat was still good and this was not gimping for avoidance either. I'm starting to wonder whether improved HS is actually needed post-SSC given a high enough avoidance. I realize that you can't get rid of it early on, especially against certain fights - but later when your gear has high avoidance, it might not be necessary.
Imp Holy Shield is definitely more beneficial to single target tanking than AoE. It gives us one of our main benefits over Warriors and Druids - ability to negate crushes on fast hitting bosses. It also provides a nice threat boost against single fast hitting mobs/bosses.
In an AoE situation, you don't care about crush avoidance and you block so often from a decent block rating that the short uptime on HS charges don't factor in much. On a typical Hyjal trash clear, HS accounts for a little over 10% of my damage while Consecrate counts for 50-60%.
I think it's a mistake to gear for avoidance in an AoE situation. When I first stepped foot in Hyjal, I ran with over 40% block rating at the cost of very little avoidance. It's down to around 28% since I no longer use a seperate AoE tanking set, but avoidance is the last thing on my mind when I'm tanking Hyjal trash. I would much much rather block a hit than avoid it. Staying alive is the least of your worries in Hyjal. Healing on the trash waves is so trivial if you're taking too much damage just tell one more healer to stop DPSing and throw some heals on you. The name of the game is threat and you will generate much more threat with a low avoidance/high block rating set.
Imp Holy Shield is definitely more beneficial to single target tanking than AoE. It gives us one of our main benefits over Warriors and Druids - ability to negate crushes on fast hitting bosses. It also provides a nice threat boost against single fast hitting mobs/bosses.
Right, but what are the probabilities? In 10 seconds time, how many bosses can hit 8 times against a paladin that has 50% avoidance?
It's really necessary against something like Prince, but Prince isn't the best example of a generic boss. If you're the one responsible for tanking the fast hitters then it seems like it's going to always be useful, but if you're not and you're tanking more in general, other talents may be better.
I don't know whether it's worth cutting the points in general. It seems like it is another OH SHIT button, where most of the time you won't eat through those charges but occasionally you will. I suspect downranking is more profitable, but it's an interesting thing to note that HS does not appear to be as much threat as other sources as you progress, and it is very rare to fight a boss that can hit enough times to eat more than 4 charges in 10 seconds time.
And this wasn't tanking Hyjal trash; this was tanking Rage. I was curious and checked out other parses, and against things like Hydross and Mag, HS damage was only 14-15% of total threat. Prince accounted for 35-40% of total threat, but that's not much of a surprise. Obviously this is only a few parses, but it's interesting to parse boss fights that aren't so paladin-friendly.
Right, but what are the probabilities? In 10 seconds time, how many bosses can hit 8 times against a paladin that has 50% avoidance?
It's really necessary against something like Prince, but Prince isn't the best example of a generic boss. If you're the one responsible for tanking the fast hitters then it seems like it's going to always be useful, but if you're not and you're tanking more in general, other talents may be better.
I don't know whether it's worth cutting the points in general. It seems like it is another OH SHIT button, where most of the time you won't eat through those charges but occasionally you will. I suspect downranking is more profitable, but it's an interesting thing to note that HS does not appear to be as much threat as other sources as you progress, and it is very rare to fight a boss that can hit enough times to eat more than 4 charges in 10 seconds time.
And this wasn't tanking Hyjal trash; this was tanking Rage. I was curious and checked out other parses, and against things like Hydross and Mag, HS damage was only 14-15% of total threat. Prince accounted for 35-40% of total threat, but that's not much of a surprise. Obviously this is only a few parses, but it's interesting to parse boss fights that aren't so paladin-friendly.
Sorry, I didn't realize you were refering to just tanking Rage Winterchill. In which case none of what I wrote applies.
We're back to the old avoidance vs. mitigation or avoidance vs. stam debate which has been covered quite a bit on various threads in these forums.
As for HS itself, I agree it could be buffed because it contributes so little against slow or infrequently hitting mobs. But I honestly can't see anything worth giving up our role as the best tanks against fast hitting mobs for. Two talent points buys us that niche. For me, it seems a fair price to pay.
Two talent points buys us that niche. For me, it seems a fair price to pay.
I think you're right, and those two points are one of the things that separates pally tanks from the rest. But it's something that was somewhat of a taboo subject before. I mean, you ALWAYS take imp HS, right? and you always cast it at max rank because of the high damage and threat it produces. Well, turns out that this isn't always true, and in cases where mana is something of an issue it may actually be better to save on holy shield and spam consecrate and keep the Seal/judgment rotation going.
It's mostly a matter of me trying to find any points that might be considered untouchable to get other talents worth getting.
I think you're right, and those two points are one of the things that separates pally tanks from the rest. But it's something that was somewhat of a taboo subject before. I mean, you ALWAYS take imp HS, right? and you always cast it at max rank because of the high damage and threat it produces. Well, turns out that this isn't always true, and in cases where mana is something of an issue it may actually be better to save on holy shield and spam consecrate and keep the Seal/judgment rotation going.
It's mostly a matter of me trying to find any points that might be considered untouchable to get other talents worth getting.
Only one way to find out, right? . Personally, I'm not to the point where I can safely drop imp HS, either from a threat or crushing blow perspective. But if your job is only to ever tank single target mobs that aren't as crazy as TW or Prince, then I could see dropping it.
I'm not so certain about lower rank Holy Shields though. The only fights I have trouble with mana on are ones where I'm not taking enough damage, and then it's not that important to me if I get a crushing blow here or there In this case, downranking will actually hurt you twice, by not giving you more damage and by the reduced inherent threat of the lower ranked blocks.
Forget our HS vs SB, in terms of pure damage mitigation and avoidance thunder clap trumps anything we have, especially on single tank encounters such as Arch and Teron.
Maintanked practically everything for a full Zul'Aman clear tonight, so I'll add a section covering the basic idea of "What to expect" on Zul'Aman tomorrow most likely.
The later half of the instance (Eagle, Hex-Lord and Zul'jin) were also done with me as the only tank present; no significant issues. Righteous Defense is great for grabbing those adds that creep up from behind in Eagle's gauntlet.
11/15/07, 4:43 PM
. Personally, I'm not to the point where I can safely drop imp HS, either from a threat or crushing blow perspective. But if your job is only to ever tank single target mobs that aren't as crazy as TW or Prince, then I could see dropping it.
Similar Threads
