Tsarin

Currently, the Hammer of Judgement that your paladin is wielding is one of the best weapons he can get in TBC. His only real upgrades at this point are Tempest of Chaos and Reign of Misery. His decision to give up the Mallet of the Tides to another tank was probably a good decision on his part.

 

Denogran

Personally I have trouble passing on any defensive weapon upgrade unless a warrior actually wants it.

While ya, the [Mallet of the Tides] is far worse than [Hammer of Judgement] in most every situation, there still might be a non-threat-sensitive fight where the expertise and defense on the Mallet makes it a better option.

In my opinion, tanks should be loot whores as much as possible without hurting their fellow tanks, as you never know what situation Blizzard might throw at you. Weapons are one of the better things to collect as well, with their ability to be switched in combat. Personally, I have [Hammer of Judgement]x2, [Cleaver of the Unforgiving], [The Brutalizer], [The Unbreakable Will], [The Decapitator] in my bags, enchanted differently and ready to go in a situation that calls for them.

 

pope master

Mother Sharaz offtanking. The extra avoidance is nice...expertise and the spell damage will mostly cancel eachother out for whatever marginal DPS you might spit out I suppose.

 

Denogran

Yup, third tank of Kalecgos, last add on Fathom Lord, etc. I even usually start the RoS fight with my avoidance weapon equipped and switch before Phase 3 to my threat weapon.

But, if any other tank needs a weapon I'll only be using for 3-4 fights, I'll always pass to them first. But if it's between taking up bag-space or being sharded? Pass it on over.

And for random weapons being useful in unimagined ways on later fights, pretty much nothing beats [The Decapitator]. That weapon (an example of a weapon I grabbed instead of it just being sharded) has been all kinds of leet.

 

Krick

Speaking of nerfed items...

Has anyone EVER seen [Girdle of Reprisal] Proc?

 

◊ Cathela

That's a wipe-saver for Illidari Council if the rogue reappears with the anti-magic blessing on and you can't reach him to melee.

One very nice feature is that it never misses.

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

 

Gunn

I never use it perhaps I should get it out for IC. I already have so much gear in my bags. Sorta fun chasing Veras down spaming Righteous Defense. Go-Go PoJ!

 

PsiVen

I always use the Decapitator, when it's on CD I pester the hunters for MDs Used to anyway, it's been a long time since I've seen him reappear with BoSW up.

 

• Chicken

On the subject of Deathfrost again. Found someone that could enchant it so I had one of my weapons enchanted with it. I haven't tried it out in a raid yet, but have tested which of our abilities it can proc from.

But to start off with, the basic mechanics of the enchant. Deathfrost actually gives you two separate chances to proc. One is the melee-based part of the enchant, this part has a PPM based proc rate, and no internal cooldown. The other is the spell-based part of the enchant, this has a fixed ~50% proc chance, but also an ~20 second internal cooldown; the cooldown of this part of the enchant does not prevent the melee part from proccing. The enchant can also only proc from damaging attacks and abilities.

So without further ado, our abilities and whether or not they can proc Deathfrost. Note that outside of auto-attacking and possibly Seal of Blood we can not proc the melee-based part of the enchant. I did 20 casts of an ability before deciding that it couldn't proc Deathfrost. This doesn't completely rule out getting unlucky, but seems reliable enough.

Auto-Attack	Yes
Avenger's Shield	No
Blessing of Sanctuary	No
Consecration	No
Exorcism	Yes
Hammer of Wrath	No
Holy Shield	No
Holy Wrath	Yes, but still at most a single proc per cast
Judgement of Blood	No
Judgement of Righteousness	Yes
Judgement of Vengeance	Unknown, I can't test this one
Seal of Blood	Unsure, Proc rate seemed slightly higher than just standard melee
Seal of Righteousness	No
Seal of Vengeance	Unknown, I can't test this one

Specifically to clarify Seal of Blood, I found the debuff would stay up more reliably when meleeing with Seal of Blood, something it doesn't do when meleeing with Seal of Righteousness. This is just based on a simple check of what I saw though, not proper data gathering.

Deathfrost does not seem to proc from proc-based direct damage, like the damage proc from [Darkmoon Card: Vengeance].

Edit: I estimate it being up ~50% of the time on a demon or undead target, and ~40% of the time on other targets. This is with Seal and Judgement of Righteousness, and when using the abilities on their cooldowns (As you'd normally be likely to do). You can probably slightly optimize it's uptime by saving your Exorcism and Judgements for usage only while the proc isn't up, and when the internal cooldown for the spell proc rate is ready. Those uptime estimates are based on ~10 minutes of testing with rank 1 spells. Mobs used for testing the uptime were the Gordok Spirits within Dire Maul.

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

 

Aeverius

The interesting thing is that when I think about what I want in WotLK, I realize that I actually don't have too many issues with the class right now. Besides the obvious (a solid single-target threat ability, and maybe a better oh-shit button), most of what I want is just refinement and fun stuff. The fact that most other classes ended up with 51-point talents that either a) give them AoE abilities or b) appear to be PvP-oriented makes me tremendously curious about what we're going to see (given that both of those don't make much sense for us). At least the AoE trend points strongly towards a surfeit of AoE-tanking situations, which I can't be mad about. Anyway, things I'd like:

If warriors actually get the "rage from dodge/parry" talent, I want one too. Something like 2/4% of base mana, say.

Blessing of Sanctuary changed to a percentage-based damage reduction, rather than a flat amount.

A 3-second Silence added to Avenger's Shield.

A spell interrupt would also be fantastic, possibly bound to the afore-mentioned single-target threat ability. Something like Pummel, but with a decent spelldamage coefficient, maybe. Although perhaps a spell interrupt with a cooldown short enough to be part of a standard threat rotation as well is overpowered.

Something that gives us a synergy between threat stats and defensive stats, much like warriors have with block value. Converting a portion of BV into spellpower wouldn't be a bad start, but if the idea of gear homogenization is correct (ie, tank gear drops becoming less class-specific), we might not be seeing spellpower on anything but Tier pieces. A talent to convert a percentage of a defensive stat (defense itself?) into spellpower might well be applicable.

I certainly agree with Cath's idea to clean up some of the 5-point talents by turning them into 3-point ones; other Alpha trees have been altered thusly, so that may well come to pass.

Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:

 

• frmorrison

I thought all Judgements and Seals (except SoB) were coded as melee attacks, however they are affected by spell hit/melee hit in different ways.

Seal of Blood nor Judgement of Blood don't count as a melee attacks (can't proc Windfury or JoL/JoW), and JoB cannot be resisted.

Exorcism/Holy Shock/Holy Wrath are spell attacks.

My thought was since SoR is a bonus melee attack (so you only get the auto-attack to proc Deathfrost, not the Seal), Pallies would get pretty low uptime of Deathfrost compared to other "melee" classes and the lack of spell attacks.

 

• Chicken

The mechanic of Seal of Blood is more comparable to Seal of Command though. Seal of Righteousness is like Judgement of Blood, a completely guaranteed hit. Seal of Blood on the other hand suffers from misses/dodges/parries, and while it doesn't proc some things, it definitely procs more possible abilities than Seal of Righteousness does.

But as I said, my testing was really only sufficient to find out if Deathfrost could proc from it for most abilities. I (Or someone else) would need to spend some proper time trying it out with and without Seal of Blood and then compare the combat logs. That or you could get lucky and get a double proc of Deathfrost while using Seal of Blood, but as it doesn't proc that much the chance of that happening is pretty slim.

I'll try and set some time aside for proper testing next weekend.

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

 

◊ Cathela

On the subject of Brutallus:

Has anyone tried using [Ancient Aqir Artifact] as a second clicky trinket (along with Moroes) for handling stomps? It would certainly be better than a Nightmare Seed as a clickable effect, and I believe since the 2500 armor is a magic buff it wouldn't be affected by the Stomp armor reduction. But is it worth losing the stam and the dodge proc from [Commendation of Kael'thas]?

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

 

Joasuf

My guild has just started on Mu'ru and after a few goes we decided to adopt a 3 tank strat with me taking both the Void Sentinels and the adds. Ive decided to go for about 160 SR for the adds to try and keep a respectable amount of HP and avoidance for the sentinel. Other than using a grounding totem to absorb void blast has anyone come up with some handy tactics for this scenario as I can quite easily take 15-20k damage in less than 2 seconds at present.

 

Denogran

Just killed this guy for the first time with me tanking last night - 7 1/2 hours of getting wtfpwn'd later... I swear there are times where Brutallus decides that he doesn't want the current tank to live, and just annihilates them.

For a long portion of that fight I was using the [Commendation of Kael'thas], figuring that the stamina and awesomesauce proc were worth it. Then I noticed that I was _never_ dying during a non-stomp time, and switched to my [Shadowmoon Insignia], as being able to control the timing of the procs is crucial to surviving stomps ( Yay stoneform ).

I don't have the Artifact, but I do believe that stacking avoidance is really key for this fight, and the guaranteed avoidance is actually worth more than the stamina here. I swear getting insta-gibbed 4 minutes in while having done everything you could to stay alive is really, really, really frustrating. Especially when you kill him right before the reset so we get to do it all again next week. The only consolation was that our warrior MT was getting gibbed nearly as often, if not more so, than I was, so couldn't blame it on a pally. Druids are clearly the best choice for this fight though.

 

Bubblemasta

I’m logged out in the kit I use for tanking sentinels, just swapping neck/cloak slots for SR. Personally I use flask of light and we try to blow them up as quickly as possible to get damage down. End up with around 20.6k HP/170SR buffed. We’ve had best success with a pally/shaman healing me with a druid adding LBs in if we run 6 healers.

It’s very important to make sure a lock is putting CoW up and my damage/deaths have never been too big an issue. We also only had 2 hunters for our first kill and managed to live through bad sporns, though it’s obviously not optimal.
WWS from first kill: Wow Web Stats

Guild Master Khazuals - 5/6 Sunwell

 

◊ Cathela

Yeah, that's what I noticed too, which is why I was considering dropping Commendation for the Artifact (actually I'd have to farm up the Artifact first).

I ended up doing what you did (switching Commedation -> Shadowmoon Insignia) and we got our first kill last night. I got gibbed at 50 seconds to Enrage when I took 25k damage in 1.5 seconds during a stomp. Looking at the WWS I didn't have any survival clickies up at that time; I'm not sure if they were all on cooldown or if I just screwed up. Anyway, it's that kind of massive burst gib that makes me think a 2.5k armor buff that doesn't suffer the stomp penalty would be a nice thing to have. (Our prot warrior smartly pivoted Brut away from his soak group to face mine and tanked him to the kill. Exciting stuff!)

Regardless of which trinkets are exactly best, it's clear that tank gearing on Brutallus is all about surviving stomps, so I'm definitely a believer in two clicky trinkets for this fight.

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

 

• frmorrison

www.retpaladin.com • View topic - Theorycraft on Deathfrost;

Has pretty good testing how Deathfrost affects Paladins.

The conclusion is it is worth about 17 dps for a Ret Paladin, which is lower than enchants like Mongoose and is a little better than Savagery.


However, I think for niches (PvP and boss tanking without a Warrior doing TC) it is an excellent enchant, and if the mechanics change (if it procs from Concentration), it would change things.

 

Iluminati

Epic paladin maneuver :O!!

 

Russta

Is it possible to have some system set up so that the Libram you currently have equipped is highlighted somehow on your bars?

Let me try and explain what I mean.

If you think of a Warrior that has three stances, the one he is currently in is "selected" on the bars and highlighted as such. What I was wanting to do was make three separate macros (Lightbringer, Divine Purpose, Repentance) and put one on each of it's own slots on a bar. Whenever I have that Libram equipped, it's highlighted somehow.

 

◊ Cathela

Items that you have on your hotbar are highlighted with a green border when equipped, so you could just put the librams themselves on the hotbar.

Unfortunately, basically all the libram icons have green backgrounds, so it doesn't stand out too well.

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

 

Russta

That's the problem I found. I was hoping that if it was at least possible with macros that I could stick some text on them to differentiate between them.

 

Thessaly

Make a macro with the ? icon:

It'll show whatever is in your relic slot. I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for.

 

Nobbynob Littlun

Yeah, #showtooltip will display the icon and appropriate highlight for whatever is being /used, be it item slot 18, or be it Libram of Blablabla. You can also select a custom icon to distinguish the librams, and the buttons will still highlight appropriately.

 

Anatola

On a slightly different note, currently I have been running the good old trusty 0/49/12 spec. I have been reading good things about using a 0/40/21 spec however I shall soon be tanking Brutallus who we all know can simply do an insane about of damage.

My question is, has anyone had experiance of tanking Brutallus as 0/40/21 and did they feel it went? (I understand that Brutallus can use all charges of holyshield so even without Sanctity Aura paladin tps can be 'on par' with druid tps) Part of me thinks Ardent Defender is a bit useless since he does have the tendancy to hit for more than the amount of health Ardenet Defender covers