PsiVen any chance you could include actual dps for your spreadsheet? I know there are lots of situations where getting a bit more dps is more important than even more absurd tps, especially since nobody can pull agro as it is now.

How is 10% more damage for HotR idiotic? True its not the greatest ability ever but its a nice boost to both threat and damage that we will be using all the time anyway. Considering some of the set bonuses they have given out in the past I would hardly consider it terrible.

HoJ is our interrupt and it sucks hard right now, but GC said they added an actual interrupt effect apart from the stun which makes it entirely reasonable. Since we can talent it down to 30 seconds and it has a 10 yard range we aren't the pathetic sitting ducks that we are on live.

Mana burn and silence are pretty painful and to be honest they should just change aoe silence/mana burn to not effect the tank the same way lots of other raid wide effects don't hit the tank. Problem solved. Alternatively having HorR, SotR and HS castable through silence would mostly work around the problem. I would love to see more bosses have rage burn mechanics just so I can laugh at the tears of the warriors who mostly haven't had to deal with it.

We worked the numbers a few pages back but we aren't crippled by being OTs anymore. We have to stop consecrating and ease up on our rotating depending on incoming damage but thats not really any different from any other tank. The nerf to SotR has taken our OT threat down a ton but I think it should still be reasonable. Divine Plea and the new BoSanc also help a whole ton.

As far as our taunt it has its ups and downs. The range and ability to pull multiple mobs from an overzealous aoe is a huge plus. The fact that its reasonably buggy and will sometimes go off and not do anything (and not be resisted) is very frustrating. The lack of being able to pick a specific mob off another tank is also a drawback. I know I've had plenty of situations where I would have loved to be able to pull just a single hard hitting add off the other tank so neither of us got bursted down. As it is we have to rely on the other tank(s) being able to taunt something back off us after we pull it off them which is a clumsy mechanic and not possible for another paladin tank. Again a big concern here is 4h with 2 paladin tanks. I don't expect to be raiding with another paladin tank often but some solution would be nice.

Also this isn't the official forums, calling someone a retard and saying WTB fix isn't really that constructive.

Cross-site redundancy issues aside, I'm at a loss as to how "tank" weapons are able to compete at all for threat generation. The only attack we have that uses weapon damage at all is HotR, which appears to represent a comparatively low percentage of our TPS. While strength scales better than spell power in general, that's a bit of a moot point when comparing a 25-30 str weapon to a 230-250 SP weapon (and of course the gap is even wider at 80). As soon as you add multiple mobs into the mix, weapon damage plummets in usefulness when looking at threat generation and the added spell power from "caster" weapons simply dominates. White damage still represents a tiny fraction of our overall threat generation, so the only real benefit of using a more traditional tanking weapon comes from the additional defensive stats that it might have.

Now, if overall threat generation stays at ridiculous levels like we've seen in beta the past month or so, I can see where trading spell power for additional avoidance would certainly have merit. But for raw threat generation, I can't see how a "tank" weapon comes even remotely close to competing.

Yeah Zapf (and any others I incedentally insulted) I lost it last night over things that were petty and stupid and not in the least WoW related, and lashed out in a personal attack fashion. Not okay.

I'm sorry for basically being a jerk, this board should be above that.


To add something constructive, I'd like to argue that our taunt is extremely powerful and -not designed for- in the current itteration of the game Rasczak. I attempted to imply that (in my stupid, stupid, bad post) but was unclear. I think we'll never see a taunt critical situation where that is the case in the future unless it is a situation where taunt/tauntback is available. From current design I personally don't think that pallies were designed to tank encounters (see: not being able to taunt off NPCs) until perhaps BT, but I think finally they've come around to the light that we're actually tanks. Admittedly this is instinct and hope, but..yeah.

My issue with HotR has been pointed out by Tilted. It's just too low damage and TPS to overcome the massive advantage of +dam.

Can you link that GC post? I had not heard that till just now, and I'd like to read her exact wording.


Edit:
That's what I get for rerwriting an appology 9 times, I am also extremely sorry for insulting Zapf personally and any others I did.

I'm well aware most people in here would know Maintankadin. But hey, most people isn't all people

GC's post on interrupts: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Tank] Boss abilities and Paladin Deficiency
There's also one later on in the same thread about Righteous Defense: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Tank] Boss abilities and Paladin Deficiency
I really do like Righteous Defense, I wouldn't trade it at all, but the class being unable to taunt a single target just seems like the sort of clumsy design that Righteous Defense had at the start of TBC. Back when we couldn't taunt a mob directly, we had to switch targets and hope it was a player who pulled aggro, rather than an NPC. As far as I know we still can't use our taunt to force a mob to continue attacking us while we have aggro, something which a druid, warrior and presumably a death knight are all able to do.

If the encounter designers get a memo saying "don't rely on the tank having a single target taunt", that's cool and I'm happy I don't have to worry about it. But if they don't then alongside mana burn and silencing mobs, it's something paladins will need to work around that the other tanks won't.

Our 4 pc bonus is superior to every other tanks' set. The other 3 sets modify the "shield wall" ability only. Ours modifies Divine Shield as well, which in an OT situation is very powerful if you find room for Divine Guardian in your build. Removing 30% of the incoming damage for the entire raid is quite an ability.

Think of how powerful this ability would be in Sunwell. Brut's stomp on the other tank. The end of Entropius or KJ when there is massive raid damage flying around.

This ability probably won't find a lot of use for a prot pally who is solely a MT and only tanking 1-tank encounters, but for encounters you aren't tanking or 2-tank encounters that allow you to shield, this ability is really nice, and getting an extra 3 seconds for free from our set bonus, is indeed a nice "bonus".

Trying to play catch up one step at a time and looking at the numbers on the maintankadin forum, it seems that this idea would help us alot:
- The effect of Blessing of Sanctuary being merged into Righteous Fury (and merged with the imp. RF talent)

The scaling issue for Druids and Warriors where they have problems tanking lower tier instances has to be addressed in their own talenttrees - Not in ours. (Warriors already have a 'gain rage on block' talent).

On a side note, personally I would be very happy if someone on the US forums could stress it some more, that Righteous Fury needs to be base undispellable or at least give Protection a talent for it.

Well, I may have answered my own question.

In comparing [Hammer of Judgement] to [The Brutalizer], two weapons with identical ilvl and both available to the level of content I face, I started throwing some numbers together for single-target threat situations. The result threw me off, and it appears the devs might have actually done something right.

The raw DPS difference between the two is 59 DPS. After armor (using 25% reduction for theorycrafting) and dodge/miss/parry, this is closer to 35, and after the "baked in" salv boost to Righteous Fury, the TPS difference is about 50. Note that the expertise on the axe pretty much cancels out the lost hit from the hammer. Additional armor reduction favors the axe even more.

Here is where HotR comes into play. A 59 DPS difference between the weapons means HotR lands for 177 more per hit. When you consider dodge/miss/parry along with crits, that adds another ~450 threat per use, or 75 TPS.

So here's the question... Does the ~125 more TPS from switching to a tank weapon cover the difference that 236 SP would make? My calcs show that this much SP accounts for about 100 TPS, assuming SoV over SoR, meaning that for single target threat generation the tank weapon wins out.

I could be way off, but it looks like things might be moving in the right direction.

EDIT: This only seems to hold true while tanking 1-3 targets at once. Against large packs SP still wins out.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Would appreciate a Blizzard response re: SHoR

I wonder if this means that we'll get rank 1 of it earlier and rank 2 at 75.

Personally I hope the last rank comes at 80. The final rank of shield slam comes at 80 and has ~120 additional damage to the base over the rank available at 75. The later we get the final rank, the higher the base damage portion will be.

Will getting a rank at 70 make leveling a little faster? Yeah, sure but that only matters until level 75.

Will getting the final rank at 80 make the spell stronger for the entirety of raiding in WotLK? Yes it will, thus this is far more preferable to adding a little threat / damage to prot leveling prior to 75.

I think you're being a little absurd here. GC is clearly attempting to balance things at 80, and has devoted very little conversation to balance at any other levels. SHotR will be balanced around level 80 regardless of when we get the spell.

With regard to the 1st rank of ShoR, I'm a little curious whether they're willing to let us slide through the last month of 70 raiding with a severe threat deficiency. If they aren't the balance will be difficult to manage when we are missing one of our core 80 abilities. Exorcism and AS taking ShoR's place in the rotation mitigates it enough that it won't be an issue for those of us in Sunwell, but is it even a large consideration?

Jere, the numbers should be in there with the coefficients I've tested, IIRC I got results of 6% AP 18% SP plus a 1.3 multiplier from Shield of the Templar. They're under IHS (Improved Holy Shield) while the old unimproved HS numbers are just sort of sitting there unused.

I'll look into adding a real-damage component shortly, it won't take too much. Basically dividing all the holy damage by 1.9 and ShoR by another 1.2 should get you there.