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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.