To the first part, and I can't stress this enough - If you're dead, it doesn't matter how well you held the mob. We're tanks. Our job is to stand there (sometimes move around slowly) and take a beating. We're not there for our damage. So any threat you're doing past what your top dps is putting out is completely wasted. Having 400 spell damage and real tanking stats is far better than having 600 spell damage and weak tanking stats, unless your healers are mindlessly bored. As a tank, I always assume that while I'm going to get healed, it's going to be my responsibility to help keep myself alive as much as possible. Maxing out your threat beyond that of what your dps can do doesn't help, well anything.

As for the second part, that's entirely not true. Read through the Pally Maintanking thread in these class forums, and you'll find plenty of examples of paladins that gear exclusively in warrior gear, and compensate with a high spell-damage weapon, flasks and food buffs. Take a weapon like [Amani Punisher], enchant it with major spell power, and use [Flask of Blinding Light], [Blackened Basilisk] and [Superior Wizard Oil] and you're rocking over 400 spell damage without wearing any pally piece of armor. Given that [Flask of Fortification] buffs hp and not stamina, you only need to wear about 42 more stamina on your gear to compensate. Assuming from gem choices that 9 spell damage has the same itemization points as 12 stamina, you're getting over twice as much utility out of that flask - while at the same time probably increasing your tanking stats and ignoring weaker stats like intellect from the resulting armor choices. (I don't generally practice what I preach though, as my guild sells me Marks of the Illidari on the cheap, and my stamina/avoidance set isn't quite as nice as my spell damage set).

But you're not at all. Wearing mail and healing gear means you're not substantially better than a holy pally with a few points in prot. The only time I ever run out of mana on Al'ar's adds (and I'm very much the defacto add tank at this point), is in the early stages when I resist a explosion or two. With me tanking the adds, we can start holding them when he's around 50% in phase 1, which means we have 4-6 adds with ~20% health ready to be insta-gibbed when P2 starts. Trust me, starting phase 2 with Al'ar at 85% health makes the fight go way easier. And once you start holding adds in P1, you'll basically never run out of mana. Burn Al'ar down to around 30-35%, and then let your dps go nuts on him while you just easily kite the adds that show up around. Multi-mob control - that's our strength - use it (also, use your shield or taunt to pick up the adds, it's much simpler than healing).

Don't take this as me attacking you, I just don't understand how you're better in this role than a dps warrior or a ret pally with a shield strapped on? Or even a holy pally with a bit of tanking gear?

I gotta say, I sorta hate when people say this as a tank. In fact, I think it's the exact opposite, and minimizing damage intake while safely minimizing mana throughput is far and away the most important thing. If people wanted someone to solely come in and hold aggro, they'd find their nearest friendly lock.

Hi all

Being new to posting yet having been a reader of this particular thread for awhile I'll throw in my two pence worth.

I've found that Intellect is essential wherever you can afford it, I've forsaken +150 hp on chest in favour of +6 all stats purely for that extra bit of intellect. I've also put five points in Divine Intellect as opposed to one handed specialisation.

Having tanked in 25 man raids I have a bad habit of running out of mana on trash. Obviously on bosses that is not an issue and although I can easily change gear at the click of a button (thanks Outfitter) I still prefer to have a somewhat 'rounded' set that I can take into 25 man raids and not have to change from one pull to the next.

I'm also an enchanter and have given up the 24 spell damage on rings for the +4 all stats enchant on rings, as it not only gives 8 stamina but 8 intellect and 8 spirit (not to mention 8 agility). The spirit in a raid gives me a tiny amount of spell damage back via kindly priests putting points into making it improved.

So although I have improved my gear considerably in the few months that I have been tanking I highly value intellect and attempt to balance my stats out wherever I can.

I have on more than one ocassion gotten into a debate with fellow raiders about wanting Blessing of Wisdom over Blessing of Light.

Ultimately My spec and my preferences to it will always change depending on my gear and a Paladin tank with no mana is useless.

Regards

Demisamurai

Paladin

Odd way to get initial aggro on a single mob, but if it works for you, then that's fine.

We did Al'ar again last night so it's fresh in my mind again (especially as I won his cloak )
I don't tank the adds in my boss-tanking gear either.
What I do use is my 5-man aggro tanking set.
I take off my pure avoidance gear (Maiden's gauntlets, badge leggings, Nightbane's chest etc) and use T4 replacements for it.
My spelldamage goes over 500, my mana pool hits about 8k buffed and I drop around 3k hp - but I maintain high armour and over 490 defence.
We still stack adds at the end of phase 1, and can quite happily sit there with 3 or 4 on me while waiting for phase 2 to start.

Our method for me getting aggro is for one of the hunters to aggro the add when it spawns, and as it arrives at the base of the ramp, I simply taunt it and JoR. The hunter has to put 3 or 4 shots on it then go back to Al'ar, so it doesn't interupt his dps much, but it saves a heck of alot of my mana instead of trying to get it by healing aggro. After a quill I follow the tank to the upper platform and wait there for a new add, picking it up with consecration, or avenger's shield if I was a bit late arriving.
In phase 2 I have a macro that will target one of the adds spawning from the meteor, raid mark it, and cast avenger's sheild at it, allowing me to quickly get aggro and back up to one of the walls, while range dps take down the adds one at a time - marked one first. I tank both adds together in phase 2, freeing up the other tanks for taunt rotations on Al'ar himself, or bear tanks to go dps.

If the ranged dps get trigger happy in phase 2 or I resist a couple of explosions in a row, then I may start to run into mana problems and need to pot. Mana for phase one has never been a problem though.

I have no idea what gear you saw when you checked my armory, however I can assure you I wasn't wearing healing gear. I did replace Warrior gear pieces with Spell damage pieces. and I was holding on to multiple Al'ar adds at a time. This was our first kill on Al'ar and I do want to tank more adds to bring into phase 2. I can tell you that with the gear I had on I could have easily taken on 4-5 adds at once without any trouble. And the adds I did take into phase 2 were at 15-20% HP. The reasons I wore the spell gear are
A: I was drawing aggro by healing, the more healing the more threat. It actually works VERY well, I suggest you try it
B: The faster I get threat the faster DPS can burn down
- Right now when an add spawns, the Warlock is at 50% HP. I heal him back and by the time the Add(s) get to me I will consecrate once and judge righteousness on the first one to be killed. DPS can immediately start after I judge. BTW the adds go right for me and rarely ever hit anyone else first. I don't have to worry about misses and hardly ever need to use avenger shield (unless i just want to help out DPS).
C: The only time I take substantial damage is when the Add blows up, all the Def/avoidance in the world isn't going to help that only FR will.

If you want to see it in action go here Impervious 1st show al'ar The video is filmed from the perspective of the warlock I was healing to gain Healing threat.

I'm not offended at your comment, I like constructive criticism. I'm trying to be the best pally tank anyone's seen.

Added stats from Al'ar fight below
Here is the average Normal damage I took from al'ar adds in that gear is "959"
The average Fire Damage (when the blow up) is "6032"
Even with 5 adds pounding me I still have more than enough HP to stay alive
and that is with mostly DPS gear substituted for pure Warrior gear.
* it's worth noting that I hardly used Holy Shield at all during the fight

Speaking of mana efficiency and maximizing threat, is there any consideration to using a SoV/SoR rotation while offtanking? (Obviously, Alliance-only option here.) IE, SoV... Judge, SoR... Judge, rinse, repeat. The idea would be to stack the 15 second DoT from SoV AND also get a significant benefit from the higher per-swing damage of SoR, allowing some freedom to down-rank consecration and have the same threat output.

SoR obviously scales much better with spell damage, but SoV has a really nice judgment and a very high base DoT. It seems like if you could get a 100% SoV DoT + 50% SoR damage you would be giving yourself quite a threat boost. Or is it simply too risky to get a refresh on the SoV DoT in the 7 seconds you have left after going through 8 second of SoR, between resists, dodges/parries, and the proc chance?

My paladin just got SoV now, and he obviously hasn't had a chance to tank any raid bosses with it, being level 64. I will see if I can pull this rotation on some 5-man bosses, though, and see how it works out.

SoV/SoR rotation works to an extent but it's next to impossible to keep up if any sort of movement is involved.
With my S2 mace speed I can just about start with SoV, build a 5 stack, judge it and SoR for 10s, JoR and SoV again without losing the stack of SoV, but it's not reliable and SoV will drop off more often than not. It's probably more doable with the 8s improved judgement.

Doing anything more than that to try and maintain higher threat would mean resealing SoV before you are able to JoR in order to maintain the SoV full stack, and would entail more mana usage. This makes the problem worse as paladin OTing is about trying to maximise threat with limited mana - if we are taking enough damage to have unlimited mana then OTing is not really an issue (constant consecration, judge on every cooldown, avenger's shield on every cooldown etc).

Well #1 if it misses you're busy chasing birds around the board.

If I'm getting the birds by healing aggro then they come to me and I don't have to chase them.

You're right I do want to get hit, and I absolutely do get hit by them. By them blowing up that is

I personally find that it's too risky. SoV just falls off of boss mobs way too fast. Whether or not it refreshes the stack is luck based and there's not much that we can do about it other than inefficiently spacking spell hit if you are using a 1.6 or 1.8 speed weapon. I sometimes have a 5-stack fall off even when it's the only seal I'm using. However, it is well known that using a slower weapon greatly helps SoV uptime. One thing that you could do is build the 5-stack using your spelldamage weapon then after the 5-stack is up, you can switch to the Lower City Exalted mace. This 2.4 speed weapon is supposedly extremely good at keeping SoV up.

Either way, if you're alliance you have a huge OT advantage over horde paladins because of SoV. I would go crazy if I were horde and this is something that I think they really need to give to BE pallies. The advantage comes from the fact that you can pop trinkets, get PI, get spelldamage procs etc. then proceed to build up a stack with what would effectively be more than 1,000 spelldamage.

I don't think it's reasonable to minimize damage too much; if you minimize damage too much, you minimize your threat too much and can't down anything in a reasonable amount of time. That's why I said 'safely' maximize damage taken. Safe isn't taxing your healers too much. Safe isn't being able to be killed in a flurry or a series of lucky blows.

Really, you should take enough damage to maintain your threat cycle. You don't want to take much more than that, and you don't want to take much less. Sorry if I wasn't clearer with that statement.

As to keeping SoV up with slower vs. faster weapons, someone did some theorycrafting on this at maintankadin, and it turns out that the difference is fairly minor. Slower weapons win out, but it's only like a 2% difference. Some others have given some really astonishing numbers on SoV/SoR rotation TPS success though, where it's upped their TPS by a few hundred given the same spelldamage.

I agree. Sorry; I should've said 'is 8 SD worth 30 Int?' When you're maintanking I don't think it's an issue ever; no amount of int is worth any SD. For offtanking it becomes a more reasonable question, but even then I believe it comes out in favor pretty much any time the fight lasts longer than a few minutes.

We have a holy paladin healing with Improved RF and no salv up, so 85% of the time I know where the birds are going anyway. Since I specced for Precision in 2.3 I don't think I've ever had a problem getting aggro on both birds between RD and AS. If one does get missed, the healadin can easily stun/self-heal until RD cools down or until I pick up aggro on it through consecration.

That is correct that the difference is minor, given that faster weapons get more chances to refresh the stack despite the lower proc rate. And while you can theoretically bounce between SoV and SoR for crazy threat gains, it's almost never worthwhile because your chance to lose the SoV stack skyrockets. I used to try things like this and had very poor returns on it, so I switched to just using SoV/JoV for sustained threat. But even then I was losing the stack from time to time, even on fights like Prince where you're basically standing in one place the entire fight (barring crappy infernal placement). A quick look at some math shows why...

Assume a 2.0s weapon with 3/3 Precision and 5/5 Combat Expertise and no +hit gear for sake of analysis, attacking a level 73 target. I'll be using "best guess" numbers for dodge/parry since countless WWS parses haven't determined exact numbers yet.

* Chance to miss boss on any given swing = 9.00% - 3.00% from Precision = 6.00%
* Chance for boss to dodge any given swing = 5.60% - 1.25% from Expertise = 4.35%
* Chance for boss to parry any given swing = 11.20% - 1.25% from Expertise = 9.95%
* Chance to proc SoV on weapon hit = 2.0s / 3.0s = 66.67%
* Chance for said proc to not be resisted = 83.00% + 3.00% from Precision = 86.00%

In order for SoV to even have a chance at proccing, you need to hit or crit your target. Given these numbers, the chance of this happening is 100.00% - 6.00% (miss) - 4.35% (dodge) - 9.95% (parry) = 79.70%. If you actually land, the chance of the SoV stack incrementing/refreshing is 66.67% * 86.00% = 57.33%. So, every 2.0 seconds, the chance of SoV landing is your chance to hit/crit (79.70%) times the effective proc rate after resists (57.33%), or 45.69%. With a 2.0s weapon, you will average 7.5 attacks in the 15 second window you have to reapply SoV. So, at any point in the fight, the chance of a given swing starting a string of failed procs is (1-45.69%)^7.5, or 1.03%. In layman's terms, the odds of losing the stack at least once in a 5 minute fight consisting of 150 swings is about 2 in 3.

With only a 7 second window to refresh SoV after a SoR/JoR sequence, the chance to start a string of failed procs jumps to (1-45.69%)^3.5, or 11.81%. In a 5 minute fight you're virtually guaranteed to lose the stack multiple times in the fight, causing your overall threat generation to actually go down rather than up.

Now, this is a pure theorycraft scenario that ignores other factors that will make the odds much worse for you. Things like boss repositioning, stuns, fears, silences, etc. will all drastically reduce your chances of keeping the stack active. Long term, if you want to use SoV for sustained TPS, you'll need a fair amount of melee hit and spell hit gear to avoid plateaus that typically result in a DPSer pulling aggro and probably wiping the raid.

Given that it's already this risky just to keep SoV active, there's no way I can recommend trying to bounce between SoV and SoR for long-term threat generation.