Tilted

That is correct. I mentioned it because it can cause a problem if you're mid-fight and think, "I need to throw my axe now," but you have your normal tanking weapon equipped. If you wait to swap it you'll run into the problem where it won't be ready for another 30 seconds. Or if you swap early, that's 30+ seconds without the added spell damage from your normal weapon.

 

Mordekhuul

I have seen this a number of times in the past month or so. Last night was the latest. Our warlock tank was tanking Leotheras during the demon phase, had a massive threat lead, and suddenly wasn't on the Omen chart at all, and Leo went on a killing spree.

He didn't have BoP accidentally applied to him, didn't soulshatter, nothing.

 

vorda

But Omen must have picked something up in the combatlog to remove him from the table if your statement about him dropping from Omen is correct.

 

Redcape

I recently tanked Veras and found a basically foolproof strat for him. He appears near where he vanished, but has about a 15 yard wander range. I just tanked him way off to one side and when he was due back I positioned myself in the middle of the raid facing the area where he vanished and mashed

/targetexact Veras Darkshadow
/cast Avenger's Shield

I used [Praetorian's Legguards], [Glory of the Defender] and [Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart]. That much hit combined with 3/3 Precision puts me missing 1.5% of the time or so but means at least I am facing him and in a good position to intercept him if I do miss. Stacking some random + hit gear for this job seems prudent though since he doesn't hit all that hard. I picked him up once with spell warding on but I just got lucky, he was near me and I bonked him with my stick for a bit and somehow got him to stick to me.

One idea for picking him up with SW up is LOH. You could just find a person at low health and LOH them and drink a mana pot. It isn't ideal, but it does make some threat and hopefully puts you above other healers. I have never done this on Veras, but I did use it on Illidan once. I was tanking him and I died just as human phase started and had to be rezzed. I stood up and dropped LOH. Turns out that was plenty of threat to get him on me and we continued from there minus a dpser or two. I don't know if LOH has a 50% normal threat modifier like other pally spells but healing myself for 18k or so was enough. As a note though, my LOH heroics on Illidan were for nought, we died anyway. I did tank our first kill for him though, which made me no end of pleased!

 

Mordekhuul

I may be mistaken on the Omen part, but I don't think so.

I combed over the WWS log, and see absolutely no buff/debuff gains on the warlock tank that could explain anything like this.

Perhaps Omen picks up on it when someone that is the listed MT suddenly loses aggro to someone that it thinks should be way below him on threat?

 

Rasczak

Re: Spell hit

I've been looking into the relative value of spell hit, hit, and expertise a bit and found this analysis which seems about the same as the numbers I ran. Does anyone know if this is correct? If so the conclusion should be added to the first post, namely for a single non-undead target 1 spell hit rating = 1 spell damage at a threat output of about 900 tps, 1 hit rating = 1 spell damage at about 1660 tps, and 1 expertise rating = 1 spell damage at about 825 tps. And in aoe situations spell damage is even more valuable.

I don't know if that accounts for how SoV plays into things for alliance but it doesn't look like it. That would bring up the value of spell hit, but I don't think it would be a huge amount. Has anyone on EJ done a full analysis of the hit values that I have missed? I only skimmed through the thread I linked but it looks like their numbers are reasonable but are based on assumptions that may not be entirely accurate.

What all of this ignores is the value of having a smoother threat generation that having higher hit gives us. Over time spell damage is more valuable until high tps if these numbers are accurate. However over the short term being able to reliable generate threat can be more important such as fights with repeated agro drops where missing a few attacks may cause problems.

 

Gunn

Hi guys,
I see up above people are looking for good ways to pull mobs to them.

On several different fights I use Healing threat. Essentially I have two warlocks assigned to me that life-tap down to about 60% of their HP. Every healer in our raid knows not to heal these two warlocks at certain moments. I heal them. This generates the required threat to pull mobs to me. In particular I use it effectively for

Al'ar - Add tanking. I stand in the doorway into Al'Ar's room. When the add's spawn during Phase 1 I heal the warlocks lifetapping and the add's come straight for me. During phase 2 I position myself under the ledge of either ramp (because of the knockback I don't move in this position) and heal to bring the adds to me "IF" they spawn to far away for me to easily AS them. (we always have hunter's misdirecting too, FYI).

Morogrim - I tank add's in a corner where I can not be Graved. When the adds pop I heal the two warlocks up with holy light or FoL and all the adds come straight to me, I consecrate when they get their and they're mine. It's quite beautiful in it's simplicity.

Of course it's helpful when all healers have BoSalv on (including paladins) I usually do this blessing so I always remember to BoSanc. myself. Also it's important for no other pallies to have on RF, other than you of course.

Try it out, it's great and sounds like it would work fine on that boss you in BT, which I have not seen yet.

 

Tyralene

Like Redcape mentioned, if you keep Veras on the far side away from Gathios/the raid you should have plenty of room to pick him up. He stands still for a moment after reappearing, so if you have a mark on him and stand between his vanish point and the raid you should have plenty of time to locate him and get aggro between AS, JoR, Consecration, melee attacks and RD. I normally stand him near the bench on the left side of the room.

You can AS through BoP, and taunt through the spell warding. White damage with my Sun Eater and SotC has been enough for me to hold aggro for the duration of the spell warding. Capping melee hit is certainly not a bad idea for this fight if the trade-off in avoidance isn't too heavy for your assigned healing.

 

• Chicken

Last time I tanked Veras I actually seem to remember seeing an "Immune" message when I attempted to use Righteous Defense to grab him when he had a Blessing of Spell Warding on him. That's very anecdotal however, I haven't tanked him often, and I've only had a single opportunity to even test this.

And as the others said, he has to run a fairly large distance to even reach the raid if you tank him a good bit away. The only minor nuisance I've noted is that BigWigs at least (Unsure about other boss mods), does not report it when Veras gets Blessing of Spell Warding, so you have to give a yell in raid yourself if it happens at a bad time.

I'd also recommend keeping an avoidance trinket and Hammer of Justice ready. While Veras himself doesn't do much damage on you, he's the one source of damage you can easily put a stop to in the fight, which can be useful if you get a Flamestrike and Divine Wrath on you at the same time.

You also don't really need to use much mana to keep him on you, so you might want to consider helping out on healing people that get Deadly Poison while he's vanished; your Holy Light won't do much healing, but it beats doing nothing, and who knows, that 2.5k heal might mean someone just survives where he wouldn't have otherwise.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Mimir

From my experience:

Bloodboil: Yes, I've noticed that offtank aggro generation is considerably less painful. I think it's a combination of gear scaling and fight mechanics (more damage to offtanks - especially those that've been tanking recently and the current tank actively stopping threat generation).

Veras: You can't totally predict Veras' reappearance spot (so pre-dropping consecration isn't going to work), but as others have said, you can keep him in a rough area of the room. In my experience he reappears and stays in place for a couple of seconds before moving, which should usually be enough time to hit him with AS. If he gets Blessing of Spell Warding immediately after reappearing, a well timed Righteous Defense will usually work unless he's managed to aggro someone out of range. Hvaing hunters ready for emergencies is probably a good plan. Trying to cap +hit (yes, it is useful sometimes!) is very good for the fight, given that both AS and RD misses aren't good. Beyond this I wear two clicky avoidance trinkets and HoJ him each tanking cycle, which results in very low incoming damage (basically what Chicken said).

 

Gunn

I'd like to point out again that "healing threat can't miss"

Once he's close enough hit him with a judement, AS etc.. but get him coming to you by being highest on his threat meter due to healing. I haven't done the fight but my guess is noone else is touching and thusly he's going for healers first, you out threat them on healing meters and he's yours. Once he gets to you it's threat generation as normal.

I see it like this
he stealths (or whatever), warlocks life tap, you spam holy light on them, he pops, aggros you, consecrate, heal heal heal, gets to judge range, judge righteousness, *GG*

 

• Chicken

Due to the nature of the Illidari Council fight (It has extremely heavy random raid damage) having a Warlock life tap to very low amounts of health is as likely to result in a dead warlock as it is likely to result in Veras heading for you. It also means you can't count on your healers to do low/no healing, because again, that's likely to cause dead people.

There's also the factor that Veras getting Blessing of Spell Warding is only an issue if it happens immediately after his reappearance, and that doesn't happen very often at all.

While healing aggro certainly has it's virtues, in this case it's going to be an unneeded complication. You don't have to aggro him from a large range, nor do you have the chance for him to appear any place in the room (Instead he reappears about 15 yards away from where he initially vanished).

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

◊ Cathela

Okay, thanks for the info everyone. We had a lot more time to work on the Council tonight (~40% on our second to last attempt) and I noticed the effects you guys are talking about. I'll give the tank-in-a-corner strat a try next time we hit it.

For anyone who's wondering, Decapitator works like a charm when spell warding is up. It's instant-cast with what appears to be a 40-yard range, which makes it very nice for this particular fight.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

◊ zeidrich

Decapitator is always enough threat to get him. Unless it misses.

You also have a few seconds after he spawns where he's stealthed that you can get a melee hit or two on him generally, if you're quick about identifying his position and getting there. Obviously macro target him, and spin your camera so you see him as soon as he's up. I don't know that I've ever had him get spell warding while he was still in the "stealth" position. But that's not to say it can't happen.

I normally find that unless you're distracted, you can get into melee range. Of course, you have the bad-luck-combo occasionally where there's a blizzard spawning on you forcing you to take the long way around, and then you get a resist on your judgement and the decapitator misses, and you're stuck chasing him after your healers.

Anyways, I would hardly say in general you're screwed when he gets spell warding. It is only difficult when he gets spell warding and starts moving before you have a chance to get into melee range, and decapitator misses or is on cooldown. That requires a particular set of circumstances, and I've still recovered in those cases, though we might lose a priest >_>.

 

Gunn

If everyone is taking heavy damage then it makes it even easier for us to heal and get threat. Because you don't have to heal warlocks, just heal anyone who needs healed. If everything is working great for you awesome. I'm just saying if you have an issue picking him up you may want to try my suggestion. I was skeptical at first until I saw how awesome it worked and it only fails if I don't have RF up and healers aren't salved.

However take this with a grain of salt since I have never seen the fight and don't know the specifics. I know alot of folks are hesitant to try healing threat with pally tanks. It works awesomely when applied correctly.

 

JulianMaiev

I haven't seen the fight yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if Seal of Blood works on him for us horde type when BoSpell Warding is up.

The seal (not the judgement, just the seal) can hit other things that are immune to magic, like the worms after curator.

 

◊ Oggie

Last night I got a very unpleasant reminder that BoM makes him rough to hold onto, and I was wearing my hitcapped suit. Horribly frustrating. I do wonder if there's a period where he's targetable before BoM goes up (I got him a couple times with this) or if the timing just happened to work out for me there, but 4 BoMs on a single fight is just frustrating.

I do have a decap rotting in my bank though, so I can be sure to bring that from now on, and already have a melee hitcapped suit so that should be that. That'll make my life easier.

 

• the KRIS

When I was raiding six months ago, the click-use on Decap had no hit check. It absolutely could not miss. That may have changed in the last few patches, but I never saw anything about it.

 

◊ Cathela

One commenter on Wowhead says he used it 300+ times and never saw it miss.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Regan_

I have seen expertise becoming far more common in "warrior" gear than in ours. While I acknowledge the fact that it's a far better threat stat for them than it is for us, how do you rate it as a tanking stat in order to reduce parry burst? I was thinking on going after some of the new warrior badge gear. For example Sunguard Legplates have an acceptable distribution of stats in adittion to the expertise, but don't know if it's worth going for the expertise instead of gear more directly tailored to our needs.

 

• Chicken

While I can't provide you with any solid number on the benefit of Expertise (My math skills simply aren't up to that task), some simple logic on my part concludes that Expertise is about half as valuable for us for burst mitigation as it is for Warriors. The thought behind that is that we have a parryable attack once every [your weapon speed here] seconds; or twice in that time if you have Reckoning up. Warriors, on the other hand, will achieve a parryable attack once every [weapon speed here] seconds and close to every global cooldown. (There's some further muddling due to Parries speeding up your swings, but I'm choosing to ignore that since parry is theoretically equal between both our classes)

Expertise also shouldn't be underestimated as a threat stat for a Prot Paladin; it's actually the best single target threat stat that isn't spell damage by a small margin due to it's high returns per rating. This post by PsiVen has the numbers on it: http://elitistjerks.com/535650-post186.html

Anecdotally I can add that I can't really remember parry strings causing high burst damage on me, but that's also in part because I typically leave the harder hitting bosses to other tanks. You can't build up an experience on stuff like that without actually experiencing it.

Doing a search for 'Expertise Math' in the Protection Warrior topic got me the following two posts which might interest you:

http://elitistjerks.com/574234-post251.html
http://elitistjerks.com/575578-post260.html

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Regan_

That post by PsiVen is wonderful, I'm going to bookmark it. I'm not that interested on the threat component of expertise but it's certainly better than I myself expected and it's good to know when considering tradeoffs.

Regarding experience, why lie, I haven't tanked anything harder than Gruul (my guild has just reached the critical mass where we are able to put out 25-mans regularly). But after checking some of my logs, a big % of my deaths in - for us - challenging content were due to parry haste by the boss, so I'm intrigued if mitigating that kind of spikes was a feasible way to improve my performance.

Those warrior posts you linked have also some very interesting block value math which is also something I'm researching on. I've neglected it and it's probably a much better point per point mitigation stat that I've personally credited it for.

 

Becca

According to Dorvan, who has done the math on maintankadin, "1 expertise rating = 1 spell damage at about 825 tps." This would, of course, cap to equal to the hit rating once dodge is off the table. Thus "1 hit rating = 1 spell damage at about 1660 tps."

For council I tried a long time to Righteous Defense first with /tar Veras as the first line. The problem is Veras is selectable out of stealth before he attacks. He can often sit there for 3-5 seconds doing nothing, at which point the RD debuff wears off and he kills your healers.

A far more effective strategy is to first rely on Avenger's Shield. A macro such as:
/tar Veras
/cast "Avenger's Shield"

If the avenger's shield fails, he is going to be behind you. The target will go through as normal, though, and you can then rely on righteous defense as the debuff will more assuredly last long enough for you to throw a judgement at him.

 

Syria

Regarding Veras, I'd like to second Beccas post, i do the target/AS macro as well, and keep RD as an emergency backup for the rare cases AS misses, but the fight is quite easy to shift your gear around, so you can easily be hit capped there, provided you have some warrior gear around. It's about the only fight i'm glad I picked the ring of Supremus...
Since Aggro is a non-issue there, besides a few random DoTs no damage done to Veras, I switch to a "real" weapon there as soon as he gets the spell shield - not that it makes a huge difference, but like in any other fights where threads doesn't matter, it's good to have a warrior tank weapon around, those get dissed anyway once the one or two warriors got them, so pick one as well once you have the opportunity. Happens not often, but there are indeed cases where we can make good use of them

However, I did read most of this thread, but mostly the first few, and about the last ten pages, and i've never seen Ashtongue Talisman of Zeal (Ashtongue Talisman of Zeal - Items - WOWDB) mentioned. I've never done any math how this compares thread-wise to a spelldmg trinket, or the Tome of A'alar, but it's realy a 50% procc chance for 480 Holy damage, so it's up very often, especially with the Imp. Judgement talent. I use it quite often, especialy when i'm seriously overgeared (heroics, kara, hell, even in ssc/tk) and the extra aggro it provides is very helpfull for me.
Like i said, never done the math how it compares to other aggro boosting trinkets at all, but for me it has worked like a charm, so i wanted to share this.

 

Yenadar

3 new bosses for me to comment on tanking on last night:

Bloodboil:
Our 2nd kill, I was tanking instead of healing. We killed him on the 3rd pass, but the issue I was having was too much threat. I was holding just below the 2 warriors until I picked him up as the 3rd tank in the cycle. I had him for ~8 seconds before he enraged, and in that time my threat climbed 40% past the warriors. After the enrage, I had to bubble after a bit to get him off me. On the killing pass, one of the 2 warriors went down, and the other warrior was having a ton of trouble staying ahead of the Circle of Healing priests by around 25%, and I was using bare minimum to hold him above healing, trying to give him a short of distance as possible to catch me. For the last 15%, he dropped to 7th on the meter, behind nearly all the healers (but still ahead of the DPS), and my only option was to keep him, and I full-threat burned on him to keep him on me in the de-aggro, and was hitting single target TPS around 1800-2100, without burning my +30%.

I agree, there is something more than just having unlimited mana at your disposal in that fight. The warriors had no rage issues at all, but were struggling.

Mother: (First kill!)
I offtanked for this ridiculously easy fight. My contribution was enough SR and health to soak, and keeping up judgement of wisdom. Not much else about it. She dropped my Tome though

Council: (8% best pass)
I tanked Veras, and our first 2 wipes were almost entirely due to Veras getting loose, so I thought I would post up my observations for any other pallys that enter that fight fresh.

The first wipe was due to one of the holy pallys getting aggro from Veras from BoPing the mage that ran in to pull. I took over BoPing from there on, and it pulled him to me 100% of the time after that on initial pull.

The 2nd wipe was due my mis-understanding of how he de-vanished. 'Random Location' often mentioned wasn't clarified, and I was running all over the room looking for him. The location is random, but within 15 yards or so of where he vanished. Holding him away from the raid makes picking him back up a piece of cake.

3rd pass and on, I held him fine. I have a macro to /target Veras, /cast Judgement. I found this works better than Avenger Shield, since I can be on the run and still judge, where if I stop to throw my shield, and it misses, I often have more room to make up to get to him and no time to do it, as he is now moving. If judgement is resisted, then RD pops him back to me. Twice he came out of stealth with the magic immune shield, and RD worked perfectly to grab him, and then put up crusader to hold him on me, and it held fine, though with risky threat (healers reaching to 129% of my threat). Next attempts, I am going to be bringing the DPS 1 hander from ZA (forget the name, Pheonix boss drops it), and hot-swap it to help during the shield.

My only healer, a holy pally, had no issues keeping me up, so we ended up tanking him almost in the raid so that her mana pool wouldn't be wasted, and she could heal the rest of the raid during the vanish, especially the poisoned ones. Later attempts, I got into a shadow priest group, and then was tossing flashes around while Veras was vanished. We didn't have a melee Dranaei available, so I only had one of them, but remember that if you are Alliance and having trouble with spell hit or melee hit on this fight, ask your raid leader to help stack your group to give you the racial bonus for both melee and spell hit.

I also started taking alot of Envenom hits once I tanked him closer to the raid, which I preferred over a priest getting it. Not sure if my proximity matters, or if this was just luck of the draw, but by the end of the night when I was nearly in the raid, I was getting hit with the poison almost every vanish.