You did put +40 Spelldamage on the Karazhan Prince Healing Hammer??
Wouldn't suprise me - I was using [Merciless Gladiator's Salvation] with +81 healing enchant as tanking weapon for a while. It had total of 168 spell damage, which was slightly better then for example Continuum Blade with +40 spell damage.
After upgrading to [Gladiator's Gavel] with +40 spell damage I ceased to do that of course, but point is that certain healing items might at some point be marginally better then spell damage weapons - especially considering that there is a good chance damage ones will be highly contested drops.
Well, with +81 Healing I could understand. Cause you can use the weapon afterwards as a healing weapon. But putting +40 Spelldamage on a pure (Priest/Druide) Healing Weapon would be way to expansive for me.
- Hammer of the Unearthed Secrets is a good SoVengance Weapon and can be bought on exalted lower City
- Sword of the Archmage the same for SoR and exalted honor hold
Best would be the PvP Hammer. 12 hours of PvP? Maybe 15? That is one PvP Weekend and you have a very nice starting weapon. 100% sure and no drop luck.
For those of you that do arenas, do you respec pvp holy before your matches, or have you found a 20/41/0 build sufficient for both raid tanking and arenas, in any cases?
Technically anything is fine for arenas...the main problem with prot paladins is the same as prot warriors: you can simply ignore them. Your throughput will take a sizable hit.
For those of you that do arenas, do you respec pvp holy before your matches, or have you found a 20/41/0 build sufficient for both raid tanking and arenas, in any cases?
If you're playing on a super-casual "we just want to do 10 matches each week and get our welfare epics team" then you can do that fine in your tanking spec. I didn't respec when I did arenas and it was no big problem. Just don't expect to go over 1500 (~350 points/week) if your team does this.
If your team is semi-serious and you want to actually climb the ladder and get more points, you'd better respec.
EDIT: I should note that at the level I'm talking about, a lot of people will assume you're holy as long as you're not wearing a two-hander and you don't give them reason to think otherwise. So they may very well decide to focus fire on you anyway, and it can actually be a lot of fun "tanking" in PvP, so long as your team has another healer.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
(1) If dps starts too soon that's their own fault, not yours.
(2) If a dps pulls agro and gets a BoP the BoP *temporarily* reduces their threat to zero, and you'll not be able to gain their threat lead from your taunt. BoP to save them *only* if your taunt is resisted or the mob is immune, because once BoP expires their threat on the mob will be restored/reactivated. Casters that get a BoP or taunt need to learn to stop dps while you regain a safe threat lead.
That said, you're armoury shows some pretty questionable gear/gem/enchant choices; your tanking weapon is, shall we say, sub optimal. I would suggest you reenchant your Light's Justice for healing and consign it to your healing set, and go back to either the KoT rep sword, or your Crystalforged Sword until you can either finish the grind to exulted with Lower City, and get their spell damage mace, or arena/honour grind for the Gladiator mace.
Braque - thank you very much for the input. Can you tell me (other than the weapon) what gear/gems/enchants are questionable? I'm new to this and want to be a solid tank so any pointers you can give me would be appreciated. I understand Lights is primarily a healer mace, it has lower stam (bad) but has higher spell damage so why is it a bad choice relative to the 2 blues I have? I've already got plans for this weekend to get the LC rep hammer but I'm trying to understand the logic so I don't make stupid mistakes again.
As for BoP I tend to ONLY use that to save a priest or mage's life and not as a regular taunt.
Braque - thank you very much for the input. Can you tell me (other than the weapon) what gear/gems/enchants are questionable? I'm new to this and want to be a solid tank so any pointers you can give me would be appreciated. I understand Lights is primarily a healer mace, it has lower stam (bad) but has higher spell damage so why is it a bad choice relative to the 2 blues I have? I've already got plans for this weekend to get the LC rep hammer but I'm trying to understand the logic so I don't make stupid mistakes again.
As for BoP I tend to ONLY use that to save a priest or mage's life and not as a regular taunt.
Thanks
I'm making a guess here that you're not MTing, either that or you made an extremely compelling case why you should get [Light's Justice] over a healing class( In which case my outstanding tip would be not to piss off the healers, they gotta luuuuuvvvv you).
In that case, don't stress at your gear level about getting to uncrushable. For the vast majority of stuff you're going to be called on to tank, it really won't be make or break if you take 1.5 hits every once in a while. Frankly, due to silences, stuns and, if you're me, occasional lapses in cooldown management, you're going to take the crushing blow here or there anyway. Your goal should therefore be to make it so you can take said blow without being insta-gibbed. Uncrushable will come with time( I feel that this is somewhat controversial advice of mine, so take it as you will. Additionally, if you're MT, you have to be uncrushable, so disregard everything earlier).
To that end, I'd replace all the +8 dodge gems with +12 stamina. Dodge is an expensive stat, and stamina will probably serve you better. Also, pay for the good gems, it's worth it. You've got a coupla hundred hp lower than were you to use +12's instead of your plus 9s. The defense is more tricky, because it is absolutely crucial that you keep that above 490 and you're not too far above it. I would switch out as many gems as possible till you're around 491 or so. Again, I'd say stack stamina. Your helm is socketed to get the strength bonus, which is fairly useless.
I wouldn't use [Light's Justice]. You only gain 7 spell damage over the [Crystalforged Sword] and lose 14 stamina and some cheap block rating (which would push you back toward uncrushable - block rating is easily the "cheapest" stat out there to get to uncrushable). It's just not really worth it, at least in my opinion.
Anyway, those would be my suggestions. The badge gear will put you ahead of where I was at that level, so there's no reason you can't be successful. The cloak and bracers are good pickups too, when you can get the badges.
I'm MT'ing kara yes, hope to MT stuff later (if it's possible with a tankadin). I took the light's because it was either take it or it was going to be sharded so I snatched it for my healing setup instead of getting yet one more void for the guild.
Ok thanks for the advice, I'll get +40 on my crystalforge sword and get the last 7k of rep for LC. I'm hoping to get the helm off the prince one of these days as I don't really think the stalwart defender is a very good piece of gear. I have 1/2 the cards for the furies deck and I'm hoping to complete that at some point as well.
I debated between using the libram off Mother Shahraz over the Libram of Repentance (the badge libram). My question is: would it be beneficial to use a mod that auto switches librams for you (such as Librameister) so that when you cast a judgement it switches to the libram off Mother for the 4 second buff, then back to the Libram of Repentance.
I have my judgement spell macro'd to cast seal of righteousness afterwards so the global cooldown is being used up anyway.
So now that Shade of Akama is unbugged, does anyone know why a paladin tank seems to generate very low threat on the Ashtongue Defenders? I assume this is a bug; perhaps they don't develop threat from holy damage?
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
bowbaq, I did some calculations a while back on another site and from what I remember, assuming you're using a good damage weapon (sun eater was the example) it'd take 170 spelldamage before you outpaced it with a spelldamage weapon. And that's on a single target; if you do any add-tanking seal of blood/AP is far worse since you aren't getting as much damage from consecrates.
Let's see. For AP equivalence:
1 STR = 2 AP
14 AP = 1 damage
For SoB, you get 30% of your damage as holy damage. The judgment scales with spelldamage, btw (another reason spelldamage is better: it improves SoR and JoR). So let's take the same base damage weapon:
base: 41.5 DPS
For SoB, each 14 points of AP is (1 + .3*1.9) threat, which is 1.57 TPS per 14 AP.
For SoR, each spelldamage is .5 TPS roughly. Thus you need about 3 spelldamage for the equivalent value of 14 AP. That's rough, but it's going to be close to this - so you can see how badly SoB scales for threat.
SoB is probably not a bad choice if you've got something like sun eater, don't have the spelldamage and are starting out - but it quickly becomes poor as you get better gear.
So now that Shade of Akama is unbugged, does anyone know why a paladin tank seems to generate very low threat on the Ashtongue Defenders? I assume this is a bug; perhaps they don't develop threat from holy damage?
This has always been an issue.
I think that they are specially scripted to ignore many types of incidental damage, and probably periodic damage. This would make sense, since otherwise they would aggro on healers, or anyone casting an AoE, or a number of variable generic threat sources that would stop them from merely running towards and meleeing Akama. I figure they are just not responsive to the threat from consecration because of the style of damage it is, whether it is just because they ignore consecration or whether they ignore all holy damage I'm not sure.
Have you been able to keep aggro on them through SoR/JoR at all? I've never tried. I have just known that it didn't work for us, so I took a side. I like handling the sides better anyways because the mobs come out 3 at a time, which is perfect for Avenger's Shield.
I debated between using the libram off Mother Shahraz over the Libram of Repentance (the badge libram). My question is: would it be beneficial to use a mod that auto switches librams for you (such as Librameister) so that when you cast a judgement it switches to the libram off Mother for the 4 second buff, then back to the Libram of Repentance.
I have my judgement spell macro'd to cast seal of righteousness afterwards so the global cooldown is being used up anyway.
How do you do that?
Switch Libram -> GCD
Judgement 1.5 seconds later.
SoR Cast -> GCD for 1.5 seconds
Switch Libram -> No additional GCD because of SoR
Total time elapsed: 3 seconds
Time with Mother Libram Equipped: 1.5 seconds
If you switch after the judgement, of course you do not get the benefit of the libram. To me it is not worth triggering the extra GCD before the judgement. The heroic libram is of no use anyways once you have enough avoidance to push off crushes without it. And by the time you're at mother I would expect you would likely be well past that point.
I would simply use the Libram of Repentance as long as you need it for uncrushability. Then use the Tome of the Lightbringer when you do not. The only thing I keep the Libram of Repentance for is in case I have to tank Illidan.
Would a warrior-geared pal protec with strength instead of sp be viable ? Would he make aggro enough ? Wouldn't he hurt himself too much ?
I believe the general idea is that even if Seal of Blood did decent amounts of threat if you gear yourself towards AP/STR, everything else is going to suffer from your lack of spell damage. Your Consecrates and Holy Shields are both reliant on spell damage, and wearing Warrior-esque gear will cause your mana pool to tank (pun intended).
That being said, Judgement of Blood is very situationally useful. From the Retribution thread, it was concluded that JoB can never get a full resist, so if you ever need to snap aggro on a target, JoB will always come through.
I debated between using the libram off Mother Shahraz over the Libram of Repentance (the badge libram). My question is: would it be beneficial to use a mod that auto switches librams for you (such as Librameister) so that when you cast a judgement it switches to the libram off Mother for the 4 second buff, then back to the Libram of Repentance.
I have my judgement spell macro'd to cast seal of righteousness afterwards so the global cooldown is being used up anyway.
If you're crushable without the Libram of Repentance, it's not worth the momentary gap.
If you're uncrushable without the Libram of Repentance, it's not worth the swing timer reset.
------
I have some questions myself:
What do we know about Blessing of Sanctuary? Specifically:
1. Does the damage reduction apply to every hit, or on every block?
2. What's the minimum damage required to get the full 80 damage reduction on a hit? I know there's some sort of multiplier at work.
What are our gem recommendations for red and yellow sockets?
So I was off on the WoW forums getting flamed by some prot pallys for knowing nothing about the spec, so I thought I'd bring it to you guys.
1) How good is pally single target TPS compared to that of a Warrior or Fuzzball?
2) Is seal weaving between SoV and SoR a large TPS increase? Is it worth the risk of resists making stacks fall off for no threat?
3) On extended fights (>=10 minutes) do you have mana issues (even while main-tanking)?
Last edited by flyingtoastr : 01/15/08 at 3:48 AM.
For yellow sockets -- if meeting a good socket bonus -- I'll put in [Enduring Talasite]. For a red socket, there just isn't a good gem I like, unless you have [Regal Tanzanite] from Heroic SL, and again, meeting a socket bonus. I'm assuming socketing for a conventional tank -- i.e. I actually have 2x [Glowing Nightseye] in my [Crystalforge Shoulderguards] because that's something I use specifically for threat, I have [Pauldrons of Stone Resolve] going the other way.
1) How good is pally single target TPS compared to that of a Warrior or Fuzzball?
I haven't done the math on TPS generation across Warrior/Druid/Paladin ability rotations, but one thing to note is that our Holy damage (and consequently our threat) ignores armor, which makes us shine on heavily armored bosses.
From the raid boss armor values thread, the most heavily armored boss is Void Reaver, with a 50% physical damage reduction.
2) Is seal weaving between SoV and SoR a large TPS increase? Is it worth the risk of resists making stacks fall off for no threat?
Another question related to this: Is the extra Holy damage applied per swing given a 5 stack of SOV enough to refresh the SOV stack?
[Re: Akama Defenders]
Have you been able to keep aggro on them through SoR/JoR at all? I've never tried. I have just known that it didn't work for us, so I took a side. I like handling the sides better anyways because the mobs come out 3 at a time, which is perfect for Avenger's Shield.
I didn't specifically try using just SoR, but the threat seemed just terrible regardless. Thinking back, it "felt like" I was only getting threat from white damage. I only tried twice though before switching with one of our warriors and handling a side (which does indeed work very well.)
Originally Posted by flyingtoastr
So I was off on the WoW forums getting flamed by some prot pallys for knowing nothing about the spec, so I thought I'd bring it to you guys.
1) How good is pally single target TPS compared to that of a Warrior or Fuzzball?
Lower, especially since the inroduction of expertise (which helps us a bit, but helps the physical-damage tanks a lot more.)
2) Is seal weaving between SoV and SoR a large TPS increase? Is it worth the risk of resists making stacks fall off for no threat?
In my experiece, SoV is problematic enough without even trying the seal-weaving. I suppose this might be viable with enough hit/expertise/spellhit, but you would need a lot of each.
3) On extended fights (>=10 minutes) do you have mana issues (even while main-tanking)?
Only when seriously overgeared for the encounter.
Originally Posted by Prinsesa
Another question related to this: Is the extra Holy damage applied per swing given a 5 stack of SOV enough to refresh the SOV stack?
The instant holy damage occurs if SoV procs when the stack is full. A proc also refreshes the stack, but that's independent of the damage it does (i.e., procs with a full stack refreshed the debuff even before the extra damage was patched in.)
IMO, a good tweak for SoV would be to have all melee hits refresh the debuff duration while the seal is active (so, e.g., if you switch to SoR the debuff will tick away unless you switch back to SoV and hit the target.)
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
So I was off on the WoW forums getting flamed by some prot pallys for knowing nothing about the spec, so I thought I'd bring it to you guys.
1) How good is pally single target TPS compared to that of a Warrior or Fuzzball?
2) Is seal weaving between SoV and SoR a large TPS increase? Is it worth the risk of resists making stacks fall off for no threat?
3) On extended fights (>=10 minutes) do you have mana issues (even while main-tanking)?
1) Depends on your gear level. Warriors pull ahead at the very high end for single-target tanking, but paladin threat is plenty good until your DPS is very well-geared, and even then it's solid.
2) Sorry, horde.
3) The length of the fight doesn't have a whole lot to do with paladin mana longevity. It's all about the damage we're taking-- either you're taking enough damage to sustain a max threat rotation, or you're taking less damage than that and you have to downrank. Unlike rage-based tanks, paladins "store" more than 100 rage worth of juice and have the ability to go into a full threat rotation from the start, but without incoming damage being healed up a paladin can only maintain a max threat rotation for perhaps 45 seconds. Nobody ever accused a non-holy paladin of being mana-efficient.
So I guess the answer to that last question is more that there are fights on which your mana is a concern, and there are fights on which your mana isn't a concern, and the fights where it's a problem are roughly the same fights during which warriors will be rage-starved regularly.
I'll get +40 on my crystalforge sword and get the last 7k of rep for LC.
I would say you should pretty much ignore the LC mace, due to its low amount of stamina and [relatively] low amount of stam...given the weapons that we can get so easily now.
Are where I would say it's at as far as upgrades from Crystalforge Sword / Continuum Blade are at. Both are [relatively] easy to acquire, and more worth the mats for +40 SD.
Definitely get +40 SD on a Crystalforge Sword though, that ~1.4% block can come in handy later when making resist sets / swapping gear et cetera.
1) How good is pally single target TPS compared to that of a Warrior or Fuzzball?
2) Is seal weaving between SoV and SoR a large TPS increase? Is it worth the risk of resists making stacks fall off for no threat?
3) On extended fights (>=10 minutes) do you have mana issues (even while main-tanking)?
1) I see responses that we're "not as good", but I feel that's oversimplifying the situation. In theory there is a way to match paladin TPS to warrior/druid TPS, given different combinations of abilities and gearsets. For instance, there is a value of spelldamage available for a paladin to attain using HS/Cons/JoR/SoR that would match a warrior using SS/Revenge/Devastate/Devastate. The calculations would be pretty obscene because everything that affects threat for both classes needs to be taken into account (avoidance, expertise, crit%, etc.), but there is no question that it can be done.
2) I mentioned this a few pages back (EDIT: here), but ultimately it's not worthwhile because the risk of losing the SoV stack is too high. However, this tactic is situationally useful on fights with threat drops so that you can burst threat and allow your DPS to unload. I use this on Leo when he switches from demon to elf, and our DPS literally stops for about 2 seconds before cranking it out again.
3) Already mentioned, but mana issues are directly tied to your incoming damage, which is directly tied to your level of gear. Right now, the Lynx boss in ZA provides me infinite mana because he hits so hard, but I know there is a gearset that exists where I'd need to pay attention to my mana usage. It's too situational to directly nail down, but have mana pots at the ready in case you need them (and ironshield pots for the bosses that keep your blue bar full).
I see responses that we're "not as good", but I feel that's oversimplifying the situation. In theory there is a way to match paladin TPS to warrior/druid TPS, given different combinations of abilities and gearsets.
I disagree; while you can theorycraft at what point a paladin can match a warrior, the reality is that warriors do more single target TPS than a paladin at equivalent gear for good enough rotations. In some gimmick fights that might not be true (Prince is a good example: fast-hitting bosses that also can be exorcised are paladin gravy) but it certainly is true in the general case and is very true as you're hitting T6 content. At the highest levels, the problem with paladin gear is that you cannot go as threat-heavy as a warrior can without sacrificing too much in the way of defensive stats.
Can't say how well a druid's threat scales by comparison. I would imagine it's about the same as a paladin for about the same reasons; itemization for non-warrior tanks has consistently sucked.
2: horde as well. Heard good reports on SoV/SoR interweaving but I've also heard it's unreliable.
3: mana isn't an issue while we're being healed. As long as the damage being taken is high the mana received is high. Still have to pot now and then though.
3) The length of the fight doesn't have a whole lot to do with paladin mana longevity. It's all about the damage we're taking-- either you're taking enough damage to sustain a max threat rotation, or you're taking less damage than that and you have to downrank. Unlike rage-based tanks, paladins "store" more than 100 rage worth of juice and have the ability to go into a full threat rotation from the start, but without incoming damage being healed up a paladin can only maintain a max threat rotation for perhaps 45 seconds. Nobody ever accused a non-holy paladin of being mana-efficient.
In situations like that, would it be beneficial at all (for horde at least) to switch to SoB with a higher base DPS weapon to "create" incoming damage and help your regen out a bit?
Originally Posted by DeeNogger
Every time I bite into an oatmeal raisin cookie mistaken for a chocolate-chip an angle loses its wings. Fucking trani's of the cookie world!
In situations like that, would it be beneficial at all (for horde at least) to switch to SoB with a higher base DPS weapon to "create" incoming damage and help your regen out a bit?
It's usually just as good to unequip and reequip your shield. SoR/JoR account for a very good amount of your threat, and SoB with SD gear isn't going to compare. Really, if you're not taking enough damage you can likely just drop holy shield instead.
SoB is not a bad choice at all for off-tanking since you won't be getting hit as much, but there are other options to lose health that are a bit more efficient than using SoB.