For more details: Maintankadin :: View topic - On the Effectiveness of Various Threat Stats for Tankadins

For myself I dont take an "Warriortankitem" above an "Tankadinitem". Only exceptions are items I dont have spell damage on it, for example [Crimson Paragon's Cover] or [Collar of the Pit Lord]. In SWP you dont find many upgrades in spelldamage, so you have to switch to the second best threat stat and that's expertise rating in order to keep up with the DPS gain of the caster / melees.

That's what i was looking for hug, thanks.

This was hashed out quite a few pages back, so I won't go into much detail here, but it's really not as simple as "pick up expertise above X value spelldamage." There are a few reasons for this:

• Expertise only affects auto-attack and seal effectiveness. Consecration, Righteous Defense, Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield, and Judgement all gain nothing from it.
• The value of Expertise is cut roughly in half when attacking from behind your target.
• When tanking more than one target (a.k.a. what paladins do best) the value of Expertise plummets.

We're not like warriors who typically tank one thing at a time, and all their threat-building moves benefit from Expertise. In their case, it's fairly easy to calculate the value of this stat since the conditions are so consistent from one encounter to the next. For paladins though, there are simply too many variables at hand to make a blanket statement about how good the stat is without breaking down the situational benefits.

Personally, I shoot for as much spelldmg (for sustained threat generation) and melee hit (for "need to grab aggro NOW" moments) as I can without sacrificing too much survivability. Everything else is gravy.

True, but when a paladin is tanking more than one thing the overall threat doesn't hugely matter; you're not going to be having that 2200 DPS warlock breathing down your neck when tanking trash waves in Hyjal or dealing with Felmyst's skeletons. And as stated above, it's not like the gear with expertise on it is somehow competing with the gear that has spelldamage. It's competing with the gear that has more mitigation/avoidance.

For single target threat, Expertise is not quite as good - by a small margin - as spelldamage. It's still quite good and is the best way to avoid parry gib. For AoE multitanking the only threat stat that matters is spelldamage.

Good point. And that's exactly why I feel every tank, not just paladins, should have both a survival set and a threat set for gear, at the very least. Yes, this chews up bag slots like there's no tomorrow, but the versatility is well worth it.

I'm having threat issues with my pally. With buffs I'm over 500 spelldamage, which I thought was pretty good. We have a warrior tank in the guild who is our main tank. Last night I was helping tank in ZA since our druid tank was gone. I figured I could hold my own on threat compared to him, but on the bear boss he had to hold back a lot to keep from stealing aggro after the transitions. So my question is, what can I do to get more threat? I'm using seal/judgement of righteousness, keeping up consecrate as much as possible while not letting holy shield drop while I'm being hit, and it's just not enough. Here are the armory links:

Warrior
Pally

I know I'm lacking in hit rating and expertise; he has quite a bit of that, but it's harder for me to stay uncrushable and get those stats. My question is, should he be so far ahead of me in terms of threat generation? Is it a learn-to-play issue on my end to squeeze out more threat, or is it just a gear gap? One thing of note: I judge wisdom instead of crusader, and even so I had to drink a mana pot (despite having blessing of wisdom from a pally healer in addition to kings). Do most pally main tanks judge crusader, and if so how do you avoid mana issues? I know for 5-mans you just downrank your gear if you have mana shortages, but I can't imagine I'm overgeared for ZA...

You know, I hadn't considered that. Pally taunt sets my aggro to the top aggro target the same as a warrior taunt doesn't it? So I can just autoattack and regen mana for the next transition. I'm relatively new to tanking, just geared up from running lots and lots of heroics, and usually raid on my rogue.

Yeah, he was almost stealing the boss back after the my first taunt and just autoattacked to let me get ahead. He told me after he was only going at about 50% to stay behind me. So warriors have better single-target aggro generation than pallys I guess...just figured I'd be closer to him, but his gear is better than mine as well and more slanted towards threat generation.

Hi Katria, Your gears about the same as my own and you haven't stipulated what your TPS is but maybe the issue could be your rotation?
Do you consecrate, then shield then judge? If threat is an issue i won't break my consecrate, judgement cycle for HS, at our lvl of avoidance HS should have fallen to something like 20% of your overall threat considering how poorly it scales with gear (i should probably redo the math i did for this because it was a long time ago, and i've lost it).
While I haven't really done any testing on the T4 2 set bonus (this reminds me to do so ;p) I wonder if it is as good as the Holy talent tree version. If so getting a 2nd piece of T4 would be king for your threat too.
My TPS sits at 1.1-1.2k for this fight if your after a comparison.

Our taunt lasts only 2 secs and the other tank should stop and just stand there for a few secs after the transition. I don't cast consecrate when the bear transition approaches to assist whoever is tanking with me getting him and hold him.

With regards to the Bear boss, I usually tank his Troll form, and I don't cast anything at all when he's a Bear. No Holy Shields, no Consecrates, no autoattacks, no nothing.

At my gear level, he still hits hard enough that I never have any issues with mana, and auto-attacking him just isn't worth the risk of causing a bad Parry.

If it's time for a transition, I just hit my Taunt macro and start building threat normally again, and I've never gotten a resist. It's long been speculated that Nalorakk has some kind of special mechanic such that Taunts are never resisted, given how important it is to the fight.

That being said, our T6 MT is probably more than well-geared enough to survive a bad Parry, but I still don't touch Nalorakk as a Bear out of precaution. I don't need the mana, I won't add any meaningful DPS, and the guaranteed Taunt eliminates the need to build threat anyway.

Unlike most bosses, Nalorakk does not gain a hasted attack if he Parries.

You learn something new every day. Thanks Theras, I did not know that - while this hardly changes the need for threat (again invalidated by taunt during a transition) and whatever small DPS I can add, I bet our casters would appreciate me being able to keep JoW up.

What about Halazzi though? I'm a Saber Lash soak and Lynx spirit tank and also do not auto-attack Halazzi while waiting for the Lynx to pop.

I have had a taunt resist on Bear with my paladin. Fortunately, it's easy to get around: I BoPed the druid offtank. The one problem with this is, though, that BoP is only 10 seconds, and the taunt isn't back off CD for 15 seconds. So unless you have some insane threat generation in there, the boss is likely to go back to the other tank for a few seconds following the BoP until you can get a second taunt off.

I also don't have enough avoidance to have mana issues on Bear, so I just run a full threat rotation (minus Holy Shield) for the entire off-tanking portion of the fight. (Ok, so I downrank consecrate and judge wisdom, but I'm still using consecrate, seal, autoattack, and judgement.)

EDIT: For reference, Palladium. He's in his "grinding" gear at the moment, so it's not much help...

Since you are an alliance paladin, here is a pro tip for the bear boss:

During the phases where you are offtanking, put up a stack of SoV on the bear boss. At the transistion, taunt, JoV, SoR, and continue. Doing that will let you have both SoR and Holy Vengeance going at the same time right after your taunt. It will help strengthen your lead at phase transitions. This also works for other bosses, like Hydross and Leo (demon->human transition) for example.

For bear tanking our taunt is best on the bear form (wait for him to transform, attack once, then taunt, never seen that fail, on the troll he can lose target after the first attack meaning your taunt can fail). If tanking troll, make threat, then go to auto attack on bear, stay close to the other tank in case you need to bop pull him due to the taunt issue.

Tanking the bear is more interesting, let the first tank get aggro, then generally catch up to them, and pass them for the transition (no need to taunt), saves any taunt issues on this, and lets you be in position to bop them if needed, bear hits like a truck, but not often enough, its a bit yo-yoey, so try and save pots for this part of the fight rather than blowing them while making threat. Ideal situation I have found is ideally dual avoidance trinkets for this guy, blowing 1 in each phase (or 2 if needed) to get past his massive damage potential, of course you still want about 16K+ buffed hits, else his damage can be horrible (2 bleeds + melee at the same time... ouch).

On Nalorakk, just hit the sucker, most other tanks don't generate enough threat on the troll form to out threat you attacking if you want to, and the bear is short enough to blow through (its not a threat gain phase really, its survival, the main threat boost is the troll phase). Being parried is less of an issue than the bleeds and suchlike (and as people said he seems parry gib immune), so just go for it.

Nalorakk does appear to non-resist taunts, however he does bug (or rather he doesn't the mechanics of our taunt requiring a target mean we simply fail, and then the taunt fails for the rest of that phase for some reason). Watch your taunt times (some people never see this effect, when you do you will get really annoyed by it... :P I love tanking troll, but my taunt timing sucks for it). Always try and be 2nd on the aggro list for this reason, its possible to do this fight with 2 dead tanks (our record is 3 tank deaths in the fight, I died on bear due to a silence + mangle [we messed up and changed tanks part way through], warrior taunts, I got ressed, warrior dies to mangle + bear on a failed taunt, I tank, die to mangle + bear, dpsers kill him :P).

On Halazzi, you might as well attack to keep up wisdom on the boss (don't bother loldps if you can, just keep wisdom up, then pull the lynx). One key is to this is take the first lash of each phase to ensure you are in the right position, then blow an avoidance trinket, this severely reduces the amount of healing you need, in the final phase, take the first lash (for positioning) then blow divine shield, will keep you standing with no healing, again make it easy on your healers.

If you've got a good feral druid around to bring instead of the warrior, having them take bear boss in troll phase and you in bear phase works really well, as they can use HoTs while it's your turn to help healers get through the silence. This in turn opens up more possibilities in raid composition. Feral has another advantage over the warrior tanking troll phase as well, in that whenever the boss charges players he can shift out and get a couple HoTs on himself. The less healing is an issue, the more viable it is to replace one with an extra dpser next time!

In any case, tanking bear phase, the bleeds cause a great deal of damage, giving your mana a full refill. Then when it switches to troll phase, you can spam flash heals, occasionally poking the boss to refresh your judgement. If you heal with a macro like /cast [help,target=targettarget][help]Flash of Light, this is no trouble, no trouble at all...

Thanks for all the advice guys; since SoR is generally better threat I hadn't used SoV at all in ages. Cool that there are situations where it is useful...I love finding uses for different paladin abilities we don't use very often. I've been using divine shield a lot for pulling ranged mobs together, clearing nasty debuffs...more than once I've been the last one standing on vexallus when he overloads in heroic MgT.

I haven't been tanking bear, I've been tanking the troll phase, so the damage I take isn't as high. But just waiting out the bear phase to regen mana instead of continuing going for threat is going to solve my mana problems.

SoV is highly situational, and generally takes a back seat to SoR for single-target threat generation, but don't forget about it in situations where you can safely stack it up to 5 then judge-switch to SoR for 10-15 seconds of massive burst threat. Most fights with aggro drops are good candidates for this trick, as it essentially takes a layer of complexity out of the fight by trivializing the transitions (i.e. Leo).

If your DPS has any issue at all with the threat ceiling on the bear boss, I highly recommend that you tank the troll phase. He attacks crazy fast, so your HS threat generation will be through the roof. As an added bonus, this gives your healers a break given how much damage your block value mitigates, so they can catch up with the bleed damage on the other tank. The bear phase does deal far more damage, mostly from bleeds, so your higher-health tank should pick up that phase if survivability is a concern. Every time I've been in on a bear boss kill, I've tanked the troll phase and it's worked great.

Also, your warrior should use his non-tanking phase to build his rage bar to 100 so he can dump threat after the taunt. If he's unloading enough to pull aggro while you build threat then he's the one doing something wrong, not you. Dual-tanking isn't an e-peen contest to see who can generate the most threat -- it's an exercise in teamwork, and it should be treated as such.

While we're on the subject, has anyone run into any problems recently with Righteous Defense not working on warriors? I've had a number of issues lately where I hit the button, it eats my cooldown and mana, but does nothing. I'm not talking about a resist, I'm talking about the spell literally doing nothing. It's hit and miss; sometimes it works fine and others I can't taunt off a warrior to save my life (ok, his life). And for some reason, it's only when I try to use Righteous Defense on a warrior -- on every other class it works fine. This is obviously a problem for the bear boss in ZA, but even moreso it's an issue in Hyjal with all the AoE waves and Fury warriors going on crit streaks and pulling aggro on 2-4 mobs at once. I've ruled out my macro as the source of the problem, because the same thing happens when casting directly from my spellbook. I've tried taunting the target I want to pull as well as taunting the warrior himself, and still it fails. I can't tell if it's a mod issue or just Blizzard having a buggy game. Has anyone else seen this?

The worst thing in the world (of prot pally tanking) has happened to me a few times recently. I solo tank the void sentinels and void spawns in our M'uru strategy using exorcism for the pick-up. The problem I have is when I have a resist with a full pack of spawns latched on to me. If I hit a resist, it's usually charge in and pick it up by judging righteousness (hoping the shadow pulse and shadow bolt volleys don't wipe anyone in the path.). Basically an exorcism resist makes it a coin flip on that attempt being a wipe. Other than misdirects; which we use for the other side of the room, has anyone found a better way to pick them up?

Hmm, I just thought I was on the wrong side of the RNG streak when it came to warriors. It doesn't happen all the time to me, nearly every single-target boss works just fine for example, but on trash and other random mobs (Fire elementals on Anatheron, the Demons on Azgalore), I certainly have notice more trouble taunting off warriors than any other class. I'm still chalking this one up to Ony Deep Breathing more, but _my_ anecdotal evidence would certainly support your observations.

That's a gutsy strategy there tek, a /salute to your healers and grounding totem shaman for keeping you up.

It sucks that sentinels are taunt immune or that would negate the problem pretty much entirely... if the sentinels are spawning on your side of the room, wouldn't it be possible to just slowly move towards the new spawn point without killing your healers? Consecrate is a fairly big 8 yards if you know what i mean, the only place i can see running into a problem is when they spawn by KJ's side right next to the tank (11 / 1 oclock positions if you view the room as a clock, kj's hall is 12). Sentinel spawn points are fairly obvious and give a good 5 second warning where they are going if you watch the black lightning, and then don't become 'active' until about 2 seconds after they are spawned on the ground...

I can't recall if they are level 70 mobs or level 72 - you are capped for spellhit if they are 70, and very close to capped if they are 72; if they are 72, pick up either a spellhit+stam gem or spellhit+spelldamage gem and you will be capped, and resists will just be attributed to bad luck.

While im on the topic of gems, if you decide to regem something i'd consider picking up one of those new def/sbv meta gems as well ;p

I haven't done the fight, and have no idea how critical threat is, but if it's not very, you could try using [The Decapitator]. 3 minute cooldown, but it never misses.

Looking at our recent WWS’s, with only the 3% hit from talents I cast exorcism 400 times for 3 resists. The sentinels are lvl 70 mobs so you don’t need to worry about being crushed, and if you’re wiping from constant resists I’d say you’re being very unlucky. We tank them directly in the middle on whatever side the first one sporns so there’s only 1 position each side where you’re not safely in range to get a judgement off as backup.