Protection and you! - Page 49

Rhî · 03/26/08, 8:09 AM

FYI:

Tankadin-Threat

Nothing really new, except items. Hadn't enough time to make new features.

And a question while the EU-Servers are down, since the new patch we can taunt the mob, if the mob is targetting a friendly player, but we can not taunt a mob, if it is targetting a NPC. We have to select the NPC and taunt the mob off of him then. Anyone knows a macro command, that we can taunt the mob, if it is targetting a NPC?

Belzi.ET · 03/26/08, 12:54 PM

Originally Posted by Rhî

*snip*

And a question while the EU-Servers are down, since the new patch we can taunt the mob, if the mob is targetting a friendly player, but we can not taunt a mob, if it is targetting a NPC. We have to select the NPC and taunt the mob off of him then. Anyone knows a macro command, that we can taunt the mob, if it is targetting a NPC?

I'm using a small macro like the following (from WoWWiki)

#showtooltip Righteous Defense
/cast [target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Righteous Defense

I wasn't able to play 'til now, but it looks like it might still work cause it 'selects' the player/npc for you.

◊ Cathela · 03/26/08, 1:56 PM

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

One can also consider that they simply chose spell hit as the one to waste itemization points on, since I think it's quite a well established pattern of making these 2.4 badge rewards inferior to actual MH/BT despite their ilevel by virtue of bad allocation. That being said, they certainly could've picked something else: Parry Rating, Shield Block Rating, or even plain STA might be suboptimal without being quite as useless.

If that's their motivation, then it seems weird that they're taking it to such an extent that the new badge gear is not only worse than raid gear, it's worse than lower-tier badge gear.

Eir · 03/26/08, 2:07 PM

Originally Posted by Bryne

You didn't taunt once in an entire Hyjal raid? :P

Implied targeting works by default on friendly players now (duplicating the usual macro functionality) and you can indeed taunt mobs off friendly NPCs - but the implied targeting does not work. You have to cast RD on the NPC directly. I saw some people headscratching at Kalecgos about this.

Are you saying you were able to successfully taunt off Kalecgos? When my macro didn't work I targeted Kalecgos directly and tried to cast RD without a macro and was not able to get it to cast.

kalbear · 03/26/08, 2:40 PM

Originally Posted by zeidrich

For what it's worth, I consider 1hws pretty much mandatory as well. But Imp Judgement in general will give a larger threat boost than 2 points in reckoning.

Reckoning is about as close to 1hws in threat generation as you can get, and only gets better when you have more trash because of its longer uptime. 2 points in improved judgment gives about 1.5% more threat. Yes, in a 40 second span you get 25% more judgments but you lose 13% more sealed damage. 2 points in reckoning gives at least 2% more threat on bosses and much more on trash, doesn't screw with your cycle and has utility elsewhere; the main problem is that it triggers more parries. Hell, precision is better point-for-point than imp judgment is in improving threat.

The quoted post said anticipation was mandatory.

I wrote that post. Nowhere in there does it say anything is mandatory. It is listing what are the core talents. That's all.

I said it is recommended for lower gear levels, though at a certain point you can change it out for other talents.

Likewise, I wanted to note that point for point, deflection does more to put you towards crush immunity than anticipation does.

Crit immunity was never difficult for me to reach, even pre-kara. But if it is something you are struggling with, yes, take the talent. My point was not that it is a bad talent, but that it was not a mandatory talent.

Crit immunity is trivial to meet. What isn't easy to replace is the 3.2% bonus towards uncrushability. You can change it out for other talents - but you can do that with all sorts of things. 3.2% is not as good as 5%, true - but 8.2% is still much better than 5%. In order to get 3.2% more uncrushability you need either 38 block rating or 64 dodge rating. That's hard to come up with early on. Hell, it's hard to come up with through T4, thanks to the crappy T4 itemization.

0/49/12 is my recommended build. Put 5 points into anticipation and 0 in reckoning when you need the defense. Take them out of anticipation and put them into reckoning if you start to need the threat more than the defense.

Check out this topic on maintankadin where it's pretty well shown what improved judgment does and doesn't do.

jere · 03/26/08, 3:43 PM

Originally Posted by kalbear

Reckoning is about as close to 1hws in threat generation as you can get, and only gets better when you have more trash because of its longer uptime. 2 points in improved judgment gives about 1.5% more threat. Yes, in a 40 second span you get 25% more judgments but you lose 13% more sealed damage. 2 points in reckoning gives at least 2% more threat on bosses and much more on trash, doesn't screw with your cycle and has utility elsewhere; the main problem is that it triggers more parries. Hell, precision is better point-for-point than imp judgment is in improving threat.

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Check out this topic on maintankadin where it's pretty well shown what improved judgment does and doesn't do.

One thing about that thread that kind of got me thinking. In the analysis, we compare the improved judgement cycle (8s) to a near-perfect world where no cooldowns mesh (no damage loss) but we do have latency. So we say we lose 13%ish seal damage based on that. I didn't notice anywhere where we did the cycle with a 10s judgement and included consecrate and latency and compared that to the 8s cycle. Since consecrate has an 8 second cooldown, I would expect some loss of seal damage at some point with that. Also, I would expect a different amount of consecrate damage in the 10s cycle than in the 8s judgement cycle. I think it would be better to compare the 8s cycle to the 10s cycle rather than the 8s cycle to a "no loss" cycle. I don't know if the results would be better or worse, but it would probably give us a more accurate picture.

• Chicken · 03/26/08, 5:18 PM

I can confirm that Avenger's Shield does not break Crowd Control. Currently only tested it with Hibernate and Polymorph though, but it doesn't hit CCed target unless you specifically target them.

• Theras · 03/26/08, 5:51 PM

I also tested it with Sap and Freezing Trap today. It doesn't appear to break any crowd control.

◊ zeidrich · 03/26/08, 7:34 PM

As for the debate on reckoning/1hws/imp judgement:

Reckoning does go up as you're fighting more trash. But typically when you're fighting more trash, you are going to be focusing on AoE threat. 1hws helps consecration, reckoning does not.

Reckoning's potential goes down as you get more avoidance. I'm normally sitting at 62%+ avoidance.

Imp Judgement gives you a potential of 25% more JoR threat. If you are going to judge early, you do it at the expense of HS uptime, not seal uptime. There are a great many situations where threat is a larger concern than 100% holy shield uptime. It also allows you to more easily recover from lag/timing mishaps. Especially as your avoidance gets higher and threat from Holy Shield becomes more unreliable.

Also, letting HS occasionally drop for more threat is not unacceptable. Poll your warriors and see if they've never let a crush in to gain more rage on some content.

In general if you want all of the survival talents, you're looking at 0/49/10 + 2. Those 2 points can either go into reckoning, or to improved judgement.

Personally I get much more use from Imp Judgement because circumstances where I desperately need more threat arise much more tanking trash than tanking bosses. In those circumstances holy shield uptime is less important.

Likewise on fights where you are generating secondary threat, such as void reaver, gurtogg, in my case RoS p2, reckoning gives no benefit when you're not being hit, Improved judgement does. These are circumstances where threat is most important.

I'm going to stop arguing the point on Anticipation. Quite obviously if you're at a low gear level and struggling with crush immunity, then you need to take Anticipation. You may even need to gem defense. If you have to ask, chances are you need the talent. But when Lolpaladins said that it is mandatory, that is incorrect. The tradeoff for anticipation, in general, is Reckoning.

Eir · 03/27/08, 6:19 AM

So I tried taunting the demon off Kalecgos tonight and it seemed to work. It was during a wipe when I was specced Holy and I think I got him on a taunt and it wasn't just switching because of normal aggro. Was pretty sure I tried it yesterday and it didn't work when I used the RD icon on my HolyHope add-on directly on Kalecgos. I put the spell itself on my bar tonight and tried it that way. Maybe my add-on was screwed up, maybe they changed it, or maybe I was just seeing things. Anyway, since we killed him tonight, I won't be able to verify until next week.

Did any other Prots try to tank him Tuesday night? Was RD working for you then?

Xylaan · 03/27/08, 9:34 AM

I was one of the tanks on Kalecgos Tuesday, and my RD macro, as pointed out by other posts in this thread, wasn't working. So after the raid, I went to Zangarmarsh and experimented with the sporeloks there, as there are several friendly and unfriendly NPCs fighting there.

Eventually, I figured out that the friendly NPC's aren't considered 'helpful' by the macro system. But they aren't harmful either. Either way, by switching the macro to use noharm instead of help, it works consistently on NPCs and PCs

My updated macro:

#showtooltip Righteous Defense
/cast [noharm][target=targettarget,noharm]Righteous Defense

Eir · 03/27/08, 1:04 PM

I kind of like not needing a macro anymore for everyday tanking, but if that's going to require having to switch targets when I need to taunt off a NPC, probably good to use a macro that will take care of it. Thanks for the tip!

TangoDigital · 03/28/08, 7:56 AM

Personally I get much more use from Imp Judgement because circumstances where I desperately need more threat arise much more tanking trash than tanking bosses. In those circumstances holy shield uptime is less important.

Likewise on fights where you are generating secondary threat, such as void reaver, gurtogg, in my case RoS p2, reckoning gives no benefit when you're not being hit, Improved judgement does. These are circumstances where threat is most important.

One more major point for imp. judgement ist the fact that you can just react better to situational changes. When that mob turns around and goes for the partymember those +2 seconds CD on judgement can get him killed.

With less CD on judgement you're just that much more flexible in situation where you need to react fast and grab that mob before it whacks somebody else (Leotheras!).

kalbear · 03/28/08, 2:13 PM

One more major point for imp. judgement ist the fact that you can just react better to situational changes. When that mob turns around and goes for the partymember those +2 seconds CD on judgement can get him killed.

With less CD on judgement you're just that much more flexible in situation where you need to react fast and grab that mob before it whacks somebody else (Leotheras!).

Why would you have your judgment on cooldown with Leo? I guess my feeling is that if wings, AS, exorcism, judgment,consecrate isn't sufficient to grab Leo, another judgment 2 seconds early isn't going to help either.

As I said - imp judgment is good because of its utility. It's not the best threat option among the reasonable threat options a prot paladin has available; it's basically the worst on a per-talent point basis. Whether or not the utility is worthwhile to you is a personal thing. Honestly, I don't think that 2 points in 1hws, reckoning or imp judgment will make the difference in keeping threat.

• Chicken · 03/28/08, 5:02 PM

Since it's more in place here than in the 2.4 Patch thread, I'd like to point attention to this recently discovered passive effects on all bosses in the Sunwell Plateau: Sunwell Radiance - Spells - World of Warcraft

Basically, it comes down to a 25% reduction in your avoidance (Less if you somehow have less than 20% chance to dodge, but I doubt you're tanking much in the Sunwell Plateau if you do). Now in principle this doesn't really matter much, you take a bit more damage sure, but so do other tanks, but it's a bad thing when you need that 102.4% to get rid of crushing blows!

Now luckily I know for sure the following bosses in the Sunwell Plateau do not crush:

- Kalecgos
- Sathrovar the Corrupter
- Brutallus

Other bosses I'm not sure of whether they crush or not. I don't have and can't find data on Felmyst, and obviously bosses past Felmyst are currently not yet available.

With my current set I'm a bit more than 15% away from being uncrushable in the Sunwell Plateau (The 10% number I mentioned in the other thread was counting the Libram of Repentance); I'd guess other Paladins with a (nearly) full tier 6 quality gear set will need to fill in a comparable amount. Luckily I still have some other gear left to swap in, varying items which are probably good to swap in if Uncrushability does become important include:

[Blue's Greaves of the Righteous Guardian]: 4.31% (1.5% gain over [Tide-stomper's Greaves]; these new boots will be available for Badges of Justice once the vendor for those is unlocked on the Isle of Quel'danas)
[Figurine of the Colossus]: 4.06%
[Libram of Repentance]: 5.33%
[Lightbringer Waistguard]: 5.89% (1.12% gain over [Girdle of Mighty Resolve])
[Seventh Ring of the Tirisfalen]: 4.12% (2.2% gain over [Band of the Eternal Defender], 2.36% gain over [Band of the Abyssal Lord], 1.7% gain over [Ring of Sundered Souls])
[Shadowmoon Insignia]: 4.09% (No Block Rating like the other items I linked, but still very high uncrushability)
[Styleen's Impeding Scarab]: 4.28% (Probably unrealistic for many people to get one of these)
[Unwavering Legguards]: 5.24% (0.9% gain over [Lightbringer Legguards])

That's by no means a full comprehensive list of all good items. These are however the ones I could find which would least sacrifice your stamina and/or armor.

I'd appreciate if people could point out more items to me.

◊ Bryne · 03/28/08, 8:16 PM

It's a good item list, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that none of the bosses in SWP will crush. The addition of the Radiance buff without an across-the-board removal of crushing blows would be a pretty outstanding act of idiocy.

The existence of something like this makes it pretty obvious that avoidance has gotten out of hand and they aren't necessarily happy with the way the crushing blow mechanic is working. We'll probably see changes to one or both systems in 3.0.

◊ Oggie · 03/28/08, 8:46 PM

For what it's worth, my logs thus far seem to back Bryne up. No crushes in SWP at all.

◊ Cathela · 03/30/08, 12:29 PM

They've said in the past that they aren't happy with the way crushing blows work, so it looks like they're using Sunwell as a testbed for some ideas on ways to change it. I imagine they've been planning to do something like this for some time. After all, they haven't addressed any of our issues regarding crushing blows (the difficulty of gearing to avoid them early in the game, the lag gap between Holy Shield casts, etc); presumably they felt no need to fix a system they were planning to scrap anyway.

Anyway, with regard to this debuff in Sunwell, I wonder what the merits of completely ignoring dodge when gearing are.

Start with 490 defense, Deflection, Holy Shield up, Libram of Repentance, and let's say 125 agility buffed. Against a level 73 Sunwell boss, this gives you:

5% miss / 15% parry / 0% (-5%) dodge / 45% block / 35% hit.

In theory, starting from this point you're better off just stacking parry and block and not bothering to try to climb out of the -5% dodge hole. Does gear exist to make this feasible? My guess is that the answer is no; there's too much dodge scattered around on tanking plate, so in practice you'll just have to eat the first ~95 dodge rating and then proceed as normal.

Another interesting point here is that Redoubt suddenly starts to look pretty useful again.

• Chicken · 03/30/08, 4:53 PM

You're missing the part where you get some basic amount of Dodge regardless Cathela. It's actually closer to 10% dodge you get if you only have defense to be crit immune.

Parry Rating is definitely superior for the most part due to the debuff... If you can get below 20% dodge, which isn't easy. If you could drop all your extra dodge past what you get by getting crit immune somehow, a cross-over point at which dodge rating once again becomes better would be at approximately 900 rating. However, that's in a theoretical environment in which you could drop all your dodge rating for an equal amount of parry rating and the other way around. In practice that's not gonna happen.

H0mez · 03/30/08, 8:06 PM

I am starting to work on my Tanking gear as I am mostly healing these days. I am having trouble finding places that list gear I should start targeting so I can being tanking heroics and stuff.

I couldnt find gear links here or on WoW forums. I know there are a couple of BS stuff I can get made becuase of the availability of Vortexs and Nethers.

I can grab the gladitors weapon for spl dmg and stuff, anyone got other suggestions?

Thanks

Feya · 03/30/08, 11:27 PM

Has anyone attempted to put together some statistics relating to the new 2.4 tanking enchants and meta gems in relation to protadin tanking?

I noticed the first post has not been updated in some time, and some relevant changes have occured since then. Anyone done any more in depth research lately on the new goodies?

◊ Cathela · 03/31/08, 12:35 AM

Originally Posted by Chicken

You're missing the part where you get some basic amount of Dodge regardless Cathela. It's actually closer to 10% dodge you get if you only have defense to be crit immune.

I was including that plus the 125 buffed agility to get 15% base dodge. Hence, the "-5%" dodge after the penalty is applied, though I guess I should have specified that more clearly.

I think you're right; it's just not going to work in practice with the available itemization.

Karoshi · 03/31/08, 5:09 AM

Originally Posted by Feya

Has anyone attempted to put together some statistics relating to the new 2.4 tanking enchants and meta gems in relation to protadin tanking?

I noticed the first post has not been updated in some time, and some relevant changes have occured since then. Anyone done any more in depth research lately on the new goodies?

It's still safer to go with stamina, but I recently got myself the new chest- and cloak-enchant.
The cloak enchant itself is quite superior compared to the good ol' agility.
I don't feel like I lost too much by trading my chest's 150 hp for 15 def, but that's still a matter of gear level. If I was still sitting on T4/5 I wouldn't have taken the new meta & the enchants.

Maybe thats just me, but is anyone else under the impression, that RD is a bit "glitchy" at the moment? I can taunt off NPCs with the "noharm" attribute, yes, but it seem that the mobs often switch target immediately after being taunted. They turn to me for a second and switch back to their old target again. Same happen with other players, so I don't think it's a problem with the over-npc-taunting.
I know that this could happen before 2.4 also, but after one week of raiding I'm quite sure that's not just bad luck.

Anyway, I finally got my [Commendation of Kael'thas] yesterday and I think it works great for paladins, especially with Ardent Defender, I'm only wondering if any of the new JC trinkets deserve to get a slot. I don't think there's any reason to switch out [Shadowmoon Insignia] (besides threat).

• Snowy · 03/31/08, 5:13 AM

I went to the Steelweave enchant for my cloak, but for now I'm passing on the new meta + chest enchant. Frankly I'm swimming in defense as it is. I think these are great options for paladin tanks that are starting to gear up, helping them to bridge the gap into uncrushability at an earlier juncture.

• Chicken · 03/31/08, 7:27 AM

Originally Posted by Karoshi

Maybe thats just me, but is anyone else under the impression, that RD is a bit "glitchy" at the moment? I can taunt off NPCs with the "noharm" attribute, yes, but it seem that the mobs often switch target immediately after being taunted. They turn to me for a second and switch back to their old target again. Same happen with other players, so I don't think it's a problem with the over-npc-taunting.
I know that this could happen before 2.4 also, but after one week of raiding I'm quite sure that's not just bad luck

I've seen our Warriors and Druids suffer from the same issue on some NPCs (Kalecgos specifically). I didn't really have any issue with it when I tried it out in Hyjal however, could easily taunt off the NPCs there and as long as I made sure to throw a Judgement and/or Exorcism on the mobs too they stuck to me after I used Righteous Defense. If it was a Tauren NPC I was taunting off I typically had to keep the mob it's attacking targeted though or I'd lose it again after a while.