One of the other reasons Gurtogg is so easy to hold especially once he's turned to you is that he's got the attack speed of a dual wielding mob without the hit penalty. In other words, he's Holy Shield heaven; while I'd say a normal average per Holy Shield cast would get, say, 2 or 3 charges used on a single mob, Gurtogg will easily use up twice that, making Holy Shield cause twice as much threat as usual... And even with the 2 to 3 charges used it's already one of the higher threat abilities we have.

It's also helpful you can swap to Seal of Wisdom during Fel Rage phases to regenerate some mana. While a Paladin's spirit regen isn't much, if you combine it with Seal of Wisdom it actually ends up giving a nice amount of mana back for each Fel Rage, meaning there's far less worry about running OOM.

I'm looking for a little advice for upgrading my gear. The World of Warcraft Armory

My guild is 5/6 SSC and 3/4 TK, and I've only been 70 for 3 weeks so my Reps are a little weak.

I almost have enough badges to buy the [Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian], but there will be an upgrade over that in 2.4. That could be a month away, however; and the vendor spawning even later than that.

Alternatively, I could buy the [Faceguard of Determination] since I only have 1.3 (although we always get R&J) chances per week of an upgrade from Kara.

I'm working on my Sha'tar rep to get that shield while I cross my fingers for a Nightbane/Gruul/Dragonhawk drop.

I'm not sure where to go with my necklace, I guess just wait for a [Barbed Choker of Discipline].


Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated.

1. Stoic is not getting upgraded. As of now, it is better than the 2.4 'prot paladin' piece.
2. Stick with the Felsteel Helm (blue, crafted, +defense). Eternium Greathelm and Tier 4 drop in Kara, and Engineering goggles are superior to tier 5 if you really want to blow money.
3. Sha'tar, ogrilla, and badge shields are all nice. Sha'tar is probably the least annoying to get.
4. Start with the Revered Cenarion Expedition neck then /pray for Barbed choker.

The last thread you cited here contains some wonderful insights for how various stats compare to one another in realistic encounters (i.e. boss fights) rather than theoretical "utopia" environments that we'll never see. Thanks for the post.

On that note, I'm wondering if anyone has done similar maths for paladins. If so, I'd love to see it. There are some pretty drastic differences between the classes when comparing stats such as block value and expertise. The mechanics of holy shield alone throw a substantial wrench into things, along with added itemization budget needed for spell damage and spell hit. On top of that, we need a raidbitch warrior to sacrifice personal DPS to keep up things like demo shout and thunder clap in order for us to obtain ideal values for each boss (and not every boss calls for excessive melee debuffs), and such a person would need to be seriously dedicated to the raid's success to keep 100% uptime on these two things. Chances are this task has not been tackled, but probably should be.

If you never do get a Barbed choker (like me!), later on you can grab the badge neck [Brooch of Deftness] when you can afford to drop the defense and still stay over 490. Great stam, and a good threat piece.

While I agree with this, for clarity's sake call it the hit/expertise neck, since the defense/agl one is not very good.

o.0 I think this is an example of good advice to ignore. If anything, while offtanking you would probably be MORE interested in threat than mitigation.

As a tank who has tanked through Illidan Phase 2, I think I'm quite competent for my class. Expertise and hit help for single target threat. Every trash pull in hyjal and many in BT are all about the aoe threat, which is based on consecration primarily. As you have multiple targets hitting you, you need more mit, and as 90% of your threat is based off a spell, spell damage is more useful than either expertise or hit rating.

Non-boss tanking isn't all AoE tanking. There are plenty of trash mobs that get single-tanked, and the vast majority of them do not hit hard enough to make min-maxing your survivability matter.

Taunt, while in theory never necessary, in practice often is, and resists tend to cause deaths which leads to time lost. (Snap threat in general - i.e., not having your opening threat moves miss/dodged/parried/resisted - tends to be more important on trash where no one is going to spot you a 3 second lead before opening up.)

So in summary I disagree, if you are speaking about non-boss tanking in general. You are of course correct that for strict AoE tanking hit and spell hit provide marginal use (taunting or judging mobs that break off after a DPSer or healer, mostly) and expertise is virtually useless.

I'm sorry, but you've had a judgement of blood miss or resist? Seems like pretty good snap aggro to me. AS -> JoB -> Consecrate = aggro. Period. If you are having dps take a mob off you, you arn't doing your job right. If you get lazy and don't judge when available or keep consecrate up or keep HS up, that's a skill problem, not a statistic problem.

Edit for clarification: This is assuming you have the gear level for tanking what you are supposed to be tanking. Obviously, if you are under geared, you may lose aggro on your targets.

Hey,

I heard something very nice from our Retribution Brothers. Vindiction procs Judgment of Wisdom. And now the nice thing, even on a immune target.

Think about it. 1 Talent point spend on this will generate about 500-700 mana per Minute.

I tried it while tanking in SSC and it is just incredible useful. I did not have to worry about my mana. Overall I needed less then 1/3 of the mana potions I usually drink.

Anyhow, I just hope they are not going to change this in 2.4 (currently works in PTR).

Damnathor:
I can see how your comments are intended to be of assistance to new protection pallys, however the comments are being applied so globally without much explanation or detail, and it appears mis-leading. I believe that you do know the value of different sets for different fights, and that not being a main tank can mean many things, and that your gear should matcdh the fight. AoE tanking, yes, spell damage and block is king. Offtanking single targets with a Hurtful Strike type ability only, threat isn't important, only survival and mitigation. Offtanking tank-switching bosses like Bloodboil or Void Reaver, single target threat is much more important, and even then, more important for Void Reaver than for Bloodboil. Threat and mitigation isn't that important in Council tanking Veras, but spell hit and melee hit are critical to be able to keep him from running wild.

So the changing fights require changes in gear, and if only 1 set of gear is getting you successfully through every fight through T5 and T6, then the rest of the raid is getting capped by you somehow, in threat or in how many healers they have to add to you to keep you up, depending on the fight. Or you are healing for every boss fight and your only tanking duty is trash.

Granted, Blood Elves need less +hit of either type, due to Seal of Blood, but again, don't apply a statement globaly without clarifying. Alliance paladins need much more +hit since our comparative seal needs to hit with our weapon to get a chance to proc, then get the proc to hit, then get the proc to be unresisted. We can get blocked 1 of 3 ways, where yours can't miss.

Again, I see your helpful intentions, but try to be less abrupt and vague with your statements, lest they be taken wrong.

You can get by with limited choices of gear, but to be the best possible prot pally tank, go with multiple sets of gear, learn the fights, and swap gear as needed depending on the fight. That is the material point.

Well said, Yenadar.

Just to add another tought regarding different gear for different fights: Even if your regular duty is not maintanking bosses, it's never wrong to carry the gear that enables you to do so. I almost never do the tanking part in our "progression" kills (if you don't count Bosses that require multiple tanks, anyway), however I ended up doing so for Teron Gorefiend, and I can assure you, I was glad to take this job for a change. Why just stick with one set, if swapping around a few peaces will enable you to do a better job, enable you do do anything?

There may be differences between Horde and Aliance Paladins, however, it can't be wrong to collect a few pieces of "warrior" gear with meleehit, so that AS just almost always hits Veras, regardless. Nor is it wrong to carry a physical tank weapon around, so I can swap once Veras gets the Spell Shield, or for the few occassions where there doesn't matter, but mitigation is king.

I don't think his comments are necessarily for new protection pallies. I think they're for people who know they aren't going to tank bosses and don't want to have to think about how to gear from one encounter to the next. For those folks, his statements are pretty much dead on. If you're not going to face anything above level 72, the value of things like spell hit and expertise plummet. A number of "up and comers" I work with on a regular basis just want one gearset (and spell rotation, for that matter) to do everything for them, and it's really not that simple. That ties in nicely with your closing statement:

The reality is this: a lot of people don't care about being the best. They just want to see what life is like as a pally meatshield. And most likely, those people aren't reading this thread, so it's not worth discussing further.

The rest of us, on the other hand, want to get punched in the face by every boss in this game, and live to tell about it.

Here is some analysis of the usefulness of [Tome of Fiery Redemption] and 5/5 Reckoning that might be useful to newer paladins considering either the item or the talent, and their benefit to TPS. It would have helped me when I was deciding on the trinket, anyway.

Note: These stats are pulled from a single VR kill. I obviously could have been very lucky/unlucky compared to a norm with proc rates or the like, but its nice to see a solid example sometimes.

This particular VR kill is a good sample for a pally tank, as I tanked VR from first pull to dead without losing aggro (stacked TPS consumables and managed to dodge/parry 83% of the knock-backs).

WWS Link to Buffs Page for the VR Fight


[Tome of Fiery Redemption]
7 Procs, including (and this is almost always the case) during the first 1-2 spells casts as I pulled, meaning my initial threat build-up was fantastic with AW up.

Blessing of Righteousness is the name of the buff. It had an uptime of 105s during the 352s fight, so 29.8%.
That comes out to an average +dmg gain of 86.4 over the whole fight, but keep in mind that I had the full 290 during at least the first AW use.

Assuming 1 spell damage gives us around 0.5 threat per second, conservatively the trinket added 43.2 TPS over the whole fight.

Reckoning
7 Procs, 33 extra hits. Average melee hit for me was 122. Average SoR hit was 214.
Threat from an average hit then should be (122 + 214*1.9) = 528.6 threat.
So 528.6*33 = 17,443.8 Threat generated over 352s.
That comes out to an average boost of 49.6 TPS.

Note that on this fight in particular, the boss hits like a little girl, so trading Ardent Defender (useless here) for Reckoning is a no-brainer, particularly with a significant and useful threat boost.

I will update this post with any corrections made, so feel free to tell me where I went wrong on any calculations. I originally picked up ToFR as I was first entering TK wondering if I'd REALLY get use out of it, but I have found it procs early and pretty much always during my first AW use, and am now glad I did.

Well, I was giving weight to the Paladin chest vs new paladin chest, but indeed the new 'warrior' chest piece has more desirable stats and the 'paladin' legs are better than current. I was just tunnel visioned in my response on those two pieces, not those three.

Yes, paladin T5 sucks except for the shoulders. Up until recently I did use Tier 5 pants to offset some spell damage I lacked in other spots. Now I'm using the illdari rune shield and badge pants.


And the expertise math has been done by Dorvan on Maintankadin. 1 expertise = 1 spell damage at 825+ TPS.

My comment wasn't a generalization at all. It said specifically, that on "all hyjal trash pulls and most bt" - I'm specifying trash tanking. It wasn't an "over-generalization" - talking about hatefuls and such is not at all what I talking about. Please, read my entire post before making general statements about my not-so-general statements.

I read the first page again and it now says that you need 97.4% avoidance. I thought it as 102.4, as written in macro. What is the correct number?

102.4% is correct. I assume the number on the first page is to say the avoidance needed from gear and talents which is 97.4%.

Why the difference? There's a 5% base chance for the boss to miss you.

So:

102.4% = 5% base miss chance + 97.4% from gear/talents (which is dodge, parry, block and whatever your defense gives you).


Hope that helps

its 102.4 (97.4 +libram will make it 102.4)

I'll just point to the addition in parentheses:

(Again, these are as shown on the character screen, there is an additional 5% base miss rate which is not shown on the character screen, which covers the difference)

Hello all. I would like to say that on Monday night my guild and I killed Void Reaver. In that fight I was the main tank and I held aggro the whole fight, we never transitioned to another tank. This was due to my tank spec with sanctity, and the fact that I peak at 1037 spell damage. I was just wondering if that has been done before and how common or difficult it is.

btw I am wearing only t4 and SSC or lower gear, and one trinket I got from the eye.