Thanks for all the tips, guys. Let me address this: Yes, I apologize for seeming so mopey. I had enough people I respected telling me "Pally tanks are worthless in t5 content and beyond" that I bought it, and it sapped my enthusiasm. To quote our MT: "I will give every one of our DPS warriors a full set of prot gear before throwing any to a pally." I held these assumptions up until very recently starting to armory various high-end pallies and finding them quite decked in t6-level prot gear, and now I'm kind of bummed that I gave up when I hit the t5 wall. But to be clear, I've been highly motivated by this thread to make it happen. I very much do. I can't think of a role I've ever enjoyed more in a PvE environment. Time to get back on the horse, and by the horse I mean honor/badge grind. Not true actually. Ret will proc off blocked hits, making it my aura of choice for any fight where threat is a bigger danger than spike damage.

[EDIT] Beaten to the punch by multiple sources. Yay posting at work!

Well the situation quoted was OT'ing one of those Crystalcore Devastators in TK. I'd absolutely want to JoTC first, then pop AW and have at it.

However most of the time I agree. If the expected life of a trash mob is very short, it's not worth judging Crusader, and I view judging Righteousness as analogous to our "Shield Slam" -- snap aggro move. I guess this also depends if it's a pull you can use AS on. If I can use AS and then Consecrate, I'm much more likely to judge Crusader. If I can do neither then I'm judging Righteousness and I'll get Crusader up on the next Judgement cooldown.

I think this will be a great meta gem for pallies, especially once you start to get a nice high block value.

Question I'm wondering on it is it 10% off the top, or 10% onto your base block value.

Shield specialization gives 30%
So say your natural block value is 300 (which is reasonable for SSC/TK) would give you 390bv with talents.

So is this extra 10% making it 10% more than the 390, or the 300?

300*(.3+.1) = 120bv total
390*.1 = 129bv total

So in this example it's an extra 30 or 39 block value.

Especially for fast hitting mobs, blocking an extra 30 damage per swing will add up pretty quick, and with health pools around 22k+ with buffs for an SSC/TK gear level this might be the spot to shave off a few hit points for survival.

A mob only has to live something like 8 seconds before the threat from JotC catches up due to Holy Shield, Consecration, SoR, and eventually another JoR, and like I said earlier, if you need snap aggro on the mob, judge JoR first. If the mob's at 30% health before you can do a second judgement, quite obviously you wouldn't put up JotC. But in a large majority of circumstances, JotC is useful. Being a second tank, I would always put up JotC because it just gives such a significant threat bonus.

I can put out 1100 or so TPS on trash, and DPS still has to somewhat limit themselves to avoid pulling aggro on occasion. But even so, this question was not about me, it was about the fellow who was having a hard time holding aggro.

If you lost aggro to the warrior due to bloodrage you're doing it wrong. As I said, you can make a macro that immediately seals righteousness. Melee hits with the seal is going to get you aggro. Sealing gives you some threat. If you need more than that, then yes, judge righteousness first. Hell, the warrior has to hit it to get any appreciable threat, so should you. But like I said, if you have to absolutely guarantee you get aggro off the bat, judge righteousness and pray that you don't get a resist. (JotC can not be resisted, JoR has a 13% chance with precision)

Consecration can almost always be used. You're the tank, so 99% of the time, you control where the mob is positioned. Move it away from the CC, and then consecrate. You're not going to generate much threat at all if you're just using SoR/JoR/Holy Shield without even judging crusader.

I see by your gear that you're mostly in ten man and tier 4 content. So maybe that's where we have a disconnect. Scaling gear up you get very marginal gains in terms of spell damage for the prot paladin, while DPS potential of your DPS classes skyrocket. When I started to notice that my threat wasn't pulling it's weight, the first, and most effective change I made was to start using JotC again. Now someone at a different level than myself is having an issue with threat, and so I'm just giving the same advice I used myself.

Use consecration even if there is CC in the pull, do it by moving the pull out of consecration range of the target.
JotC gives increased TPS at a decreased initial burst threat value. This is typically fine because most classes have some amount of ramp-up time as they build rage/CP/debuffs/sunder etc. If you need to secure initial threat, you can still judge righteousness first, but JotC gives great longer term benefit.

Noob question:

Using the gear spreadsheet that is referenced somewhere in this post, I tried to see what would happen if I start replacing some of my gems with +12STA ones. I juggled it around and got a good mix... then I remembered that the spreadsheet also takes buffs into consideration to get to the final result.

So, I go to the buff page and take out kings, MOTW, Mastery Elixir... and lo and behold I drop a few % in avoidance and become crushable.

Should I rely on buffs to be uncrushable or just rely on the gear?

Really depends on why you even want to be uncrushable. A lot of people work really hard for this, despite the fact that they're typically running as offtanks or secondary tanks.

If you're tanking in 25 mans, and plan on tanking bosses, then you can assume you will have every class's buffs, so ensure you're uncrushable buffed.

If you're tanking in 25 mans, but primarily trash tanking or offtanking boss adds like embers of al'ar, coilfang guardians, murlocs, which aren't even 73+ don't even worry about being uncrushable.

If you're tanking 10 mans, and plan on tanking bosses, then ensure you're uncrushable even without buffs, because some classes might not even be there.

In my opinion it is fine to rely on buffs as long as you are sure you are getting them. My pally alt always runs with a druid every Kara run (usually 2 or 3 of them), so I factor Kings + Mark into my uncrushable calculation.

Alternatively, if you are worried about it, grab yourself an alternate trinket for more avoidance, check your avoidance prior to every boss fight using the macro in the first post of the thread, and adjust your trinket prior to the fight if you have to make it up. Also, realize that for dual-wielding bosses you can afford to drop some avoidance, as their miss rates are higher.

You should always have Kings (self-buff) and the elixir/flask/etc buffs, so definitely count those. Otherwise, like others have said, don't worry about it. Make your gear the best possible and you'll be ready for with-buffs or just slightly less ready for without buffs. Unlikely that anyplace where you wouldn't expect every buff it'll be the make or break difference.

Redaction to my earlier post: I PM'd Gurg about the "Paladins are still garbage" comment, and he was making a joke on Dares' guildname. He values both prot and holy paladins greatly in any cutting-edge content raid. I've edited my previous post accordingly.

Hi there, this is my first time posting here since I'm mainly ret in raids (you'll find me on the EJ ret forum a lot ) and only occasionally go prot or holy these days.

Still, I've managed to tank all trash in Hyjal, MT the first 3 bosses in Hyjal and some random bosses/trash in BT, including Sharhraz/Council rogue/Illidan flame adds/MT Illidan amongst others and until now my usual theory has been "if it doesn't kill me and I can keep aggro, I'm doing fine" (besides all the basic crit/crush immunity etc) vs ret theory where it's about point by point damage improvement.

However recently I'd like to nail down some things I'm not too sure of and optimize as much as I can, this is where this thread comes in. Anyway, I digress, just to explain my background for the relevant info.

I think I'm well versed about the mitigation/avoidance stuff (had a warrior alt pre-TBC which tanked up to 10 bosses in Naxx), my questions are mainly all about maximising threat further.

1. SoR vs SoV:

I know SoV can have some debuff upkeep issues (which are minimized by the new extra long duration last patch), but simply put: Over a 10 min fight where you can keep SoV stacks up (no phases where you can't hit the boss like illidan), which provides more threat? SoR or SoV? And at which spelldamage level is SoR/SoV better?

Unbuffed, I'm currently at 528 spelldamage with 2% threat on gloves (my armory profile should show my tanking gear atm).

I usually start off with SoR to gain some good aggro, before I start stacking SoV and then switch to that, other times I just stick to SoR all fight, I'd like to know which is better (at 528 spelldamage unbuffed), especially since they improved SoV now (with holy damage when fully stacked from the seal hits).



2. 1h spec vs Reckoning:

This is my usual prot spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

While this is a pretty solid spec, I've been considering getting 1h spec over reckoning.

What's the general agreed on norm here? Which causes more threat when tanking a boss with no adds? Does reckoning proc when you parry? Or only block/hit?

I also have 4 piece T6 bonus (+10% damage/threat from consecration) so that should tilt things slightly more in favor of 1h spec.

What do people advise? Or is there a spec that makes sense which has both without losing too much other stuff? (Dropping Ardent Defender maybe? Not sure)


Also connected to the first question: Reckoning promotes SoR?



3. Windfury vs Wrath of Air (101 spelldamage) totem:

Normally I ask for Wrath of Air, but have been considering Windfury as an alternative. Anyone done research on this? Do the extra procs + seal procs outweigh the added threat from WoA totem or is it not worth it?

Considering prot paladins don't have as many synergies as prot warriors to increase threat (feral druid/battle shout is worthless to us), is there any other party synergies that can be recommended besides Shaman/Ret pala? (SP misery in raid, but not in party)



P.S.: Hope you excuse if this has been settled before, I've tried to skim through most of this thread for conclusive answers but only made it through the first 15 pages or so.

Not to sound like a jerk, but who cares if you get a significant threat bonus on the target that DPS isn't focusing on? All you need to do is outpace the healers, which SoR alone should do. By the time the first target dies you should have a commanding threat lead and it really doesn't matter much what you do. Seems to me JoW would be better to put up after you have an ample threat lead on the healers (2nd judgement, basically). That way your DPS can get a little mana back when they switch to your target.

What is "doing it right" then, assuming some other tank body pulls or shoots a target to initiate a pull? If your answer is judge->reseal->melee, then I'll refer you to my earlier post about how that's failed for me. If I taunt, I end up with 3 on me in a hurry, with the other tanks in a bind because of HS threat on me (not to mention giving the healers a heart attack). If I use AS, it's even worse. I can judge JotC which doesn't cause any initial threat and then have a chance at my first attack seeing a miss/dodge/parry, or worse it might change directions before I even get a swing in. Or I can juse JoR and virtually guarantee a mob locked onto me the moment it's within 10 yards of me. We're talking trash here, too, which is almost always level of 72 or lower, with a 3% chance at a resist on JoR (1.4% for me, given the spellhit on my mace) or less. That's a lot lower chance than that first melee swing failing to connect.

I also use AW liberally. That 3 min cooldown comes back pretty darn quick.

I can see where it looks like I'm doing T4 stuff from my gear, but my guild is one of the many 5/6 SSC 3/4 TK guilds at this point (ZA fully cleared), with me filling some sort of tank role on every boss in those zones. My DKP was screwy for a few months because my mage was my main that I accumulated a ton of DKP on, and that didn't get squared away until recently even though I've been tanking this stuff a good 5 months now. In fact, the main reason I care so much about alpha threat is because of my mage and nuking behind tanks that couldn't quickly snap aggro onto themselves. I use a different gearset for trash with ~550 spell damage and the Al'ar trinket, which might be why I'm having success with this.

I really don't want to sound like I'm bashing SotC, as it is an exceptional tool for sustained threat generation. But at least for me, it rarely ever sees the light of day unless I'm tanking something that will live longer than 20 seconds and is #1 target for DPS.

I ran the numbers for totem comparison using some generic baseline stats earlier in the thread, HERE. One major thing to note is if you use WF you cannot use wizard oil. WoA + oil is better in most cases, but if you're grouped with warrior tanks WF will still give you a substantial threat boost while benefiting them as well.

As an aside, Reckoning + WF + SoV means you'll almost never need to worry about losing the stack. However, as you get in more swings SoR's effectiveness jumps up greatly.

I think the actual question here is:
Is the +10% added to the 30% to equal a +40% increase? {[Base] x (1 + 0.3 + 0.1)}
Or is the +10% multiplied into the total? {[Base] x 1.3 x 1.1}

It doesn't matter if it is {[Base] x 1.3 x 1.1} or {[Base] x 1.1 x 1.3}, the result is the same. I am inclined to believe that this will be the case, but verification from someone on the PTR would be great.

The number shifts between +1,000 spell damage and +1,400 spell damage, depending on whose numbers you look at, but under this number, Seal of Vengeance will always outperform Seal of Righteousness, given that you can keep all 5 stacks up. I rarely drop a stack at all, possibly due to my spell hit and melee hit gear I use on single targets, so I always favor SoV.

Reckoning will only proc when you take damage from a melee or ranged physical attack. It will not proc on Miss, Dodge, Parry, or Full Block. It will only proc on Partial Block, Hit, Crit, or Crush. As your gear scales up, you eliminate more and more of the hits on yourself that would proc it.

1hws increases all damage however, including fire shield, thorns, retribution aura, holy shield, avenger shield, seals, judgements, consecration, and white damage. The increase across the board from this is hard to ignore compared with the diminishing returns from reckoning as you gear up.
However, at the highest current gear levels, there are more and more circumstances where increasing all damage is a bit less important than keeping that SoV up. I am not at that point yet, so others here may be able to answer you better.

I haven't seen many specs that go with both Reckoning and 1hws, though if you were to drop 5 points for reckoning, then the best place would probably be to pull them from Deflection, since Deflection specifically decreases the chance for reckoning to proc. The only time Ardent Defender is worth dropping is if you are getting hit for 36% or more of your health per hit, which is very rare, and normally a warrior or bear would be tanking instead.

@ Thorgred,

Any new updates being made to your spreadsheet? I'm quite interested in it and have been working on my own protadin sheet for some time.

Hi
Well I'm just curious if anyone has noticed any issues with threat generation. In particular is there a TPS cap?
I typically out TPS anyone in my raid, I even can pull agro off our MT after he has initial threat on it. Meaning he's already been taking hits and I pull mob off without RD or HS threat.

However lately I've been having a harder time and my DPSers are often agroing off me and I have no reason why!
I even have a ret pally in my group generally, I've added 2% threat to my gloves and had some upgrades to my gear. Which says to me I should have less and less problems generating threat and holding mobs on me. In particular I'm noticing problems on single target adds.

Is this a bug?

my only other idea is that our tanks are getting better since I'm out performing them in threat and thusly they needed to step up their game and/or our DPS classes have gotten use to my threat generation and are thusly DPSing sooner then they should. (which I know happens, nothing worse then a pyroblast when your Judgement of Righteousness misses).

Incidentally, does anyone know how to see TPS from wowwebstats?

Thank you for the quick response. I did here about the RF bug and I do always make sure i have it rebuffed before bosses. However I don't necessarily do it before every trash pull. I wonder if Blizzard has confirmed this to be an actual bug.

Hmm going to have to check some TPS meters to see if I can narrow the problem down. I was concerned there was a threat cap I didn't know about.

*delete* double posting badness

I'm quickly levelling a tankadin as an alt for usage in 5-man heroics/10-mans, as within my guild and group of friends there seems to be a dearth of tanks willing to run these (all our 25-man tanks log off/respec the moment Hyjal and BT are cleared for the week). Admittedly I've never played a tanking class before, and as a healing lead the majority of my understanding of paladin mechanics only relates to their healing and utility capabilities, but I'm doing my best to educate myself so I can be ready to jump right in at 70.

However, I have a couple of questions about some observations about tankadins I've seen, and theorycrafting I've seen posted on other paladin boards.

The primary question I have is about gearing for Mitigation vs. Avoidance as a tankadin, and closely related to that, the usage of Reckoning. I was shocked to find that hardly any high-end pally tanks spec for Reckoning, as I was under the impression that this, along with Righteous Fury, was the single most powerful threat tool in the tankadin's arsenal. I thought the whole point of foregoing CC in order to hold threat on multiple mobs in instance pulls was to be able to get as many creatures beating on you as possible and therefore proccing Reckoning as often as possible, allowing you to easily build threat. As such, I figured that the best gearing strategy for a beginning tankadin, once Defense cap is met, would be to gear towards block rating and block value; parrying and dodging weren't really in my best interest, as I would actually WANT to get hit, but of course try to soften the blows of these many hits through Stamina, AC and block rating/value.

However it seems that most tankadins are gearing for avoidance instead of mitigation, and dropping Reckoning altogether. Is this a strategy that only becomes necessary in 25-mans with extremely hard-hitting raid bosses, and for the sort of content I'm planning on using my tankadin for, Reckoning + mitigation gear is going to serve me well? Or is it silly to gear/spec for mitigation even in heroics and 10-mans?

It's not that high end tanks don't want Reckoning (Trust me I miss it while soloing. Dishing out 2.5k damage in one swing as prot? ), it's that all things considered there's better places to put your talents. Most people have chosen either Reckoning or 1-handed spec for their threat points.

Reckoning excels in two places. The first is with a fast hitting boss, like Prince in Kara. The second is when you have a lot of things beating on you at once. The problem with the second, is that when you do have multiple mobs hitting you, Reckoning's threat increase will only affect the one mob you're attacking. 1-handed spec affects all sorts of threat sources, like consecration, holy shield, etc.

Mitigation gear will serve you well in heroics and 10-mans, although you'll notice you want to up your avoidance a bit for places like ZA. I also doubt you're actually seeing a lot of paladins gearing up specifically for avoidance. Most of the banter in this thread and the ones it replaces leads me to believe that most pallies gear similar to protection warriors a lot of the time. Less emphasis and hit and expertise, with that devoted to spell damage instead, but pretty similar.

About wanting to get hit. Turns out that this is only really the case for when you overgear someplace. On any progression content (even if it's only progression for your alt...), you should get plenty enough mana returned from SA, even if you're gearing a bit not to get hit. And once you get overgeared, then you can do things like removing your shield (yay Al'ar's adds...), or turning your back, in order to take more damage.

Whats the righteous fury bug that affects threat haven't heard about it yet.

I've been told there's currently some sort of a weird bug with Prince and paladin threat mechanics. Maybe you guys know something about this.

I was brought in for Prince last night on my tankadin. Fine, no problem, tanked him dozens of times. When he got into phase 2, I'd actually be low on mana from taking so little damage, never spiking below 80% health, and then suddenly BAM.



That's 17k damage instantly. I didn't get parried or anything. It's like he charged up an old school reckoning bomb and laid me out with it. (not sure why those unblocked hits, either he ate through my holy shield charges or caught me in the gap between uses. I do have >103% avoidance unbuffed using the macro in the top post.)

Can anyone explain this?