If you're getting hit 8 times in 8 seconds, you're in trouble anyway - Holy Shield just dropped and if the boss keeps attacking at that speed, you'll take one more hit for sure without crushing immunity, and probably a second due to lag.

Reckoning doesn't proc if you don't take damage, remember. Against the same boss, a paladin with an absurdly low 50% combined miss/dodge/parry chance has a (0.9)^4 = 66% chance of no procs. It'll be higher for a paladin with better avoidance.

So it's more like 34% more autoswing damage (and 34% more boss parries) versus 5% to all threat.

Is a 34% boost to white damage and SoR more than 5% of total threat? What about when tanking more than one mob?

Is this actually true?

I am certain that we get buff aggro of a nontrivial amount. I'm also certain I can rip aggro by abusing that fact and sealing/resealing repeatedly as they spawn, with everyone standing on top of me into my Cons. So if people are standing on top of me and not doing much of anything till I call aoe on, I can reliably get very good aggro on every mob.

And not to play backseat mod, and this isn't my thread- but shouldn't we do most Q&A in the MT thread and save this for stuff directly relivant to the OP? This thread is more of an abstract, we should probably do specific boss/encounter stuff over there.

I think it's quite fine to do Q&A in this thread -- the whole point of making threads like this is the OP is the summary of the knowledge gleaned within the thread. That way there can be 2000 posts, but you just have to look at the first one and maybe read the last page or two for what you need to know.

Having said that, Solarian's adds definitely spawn with aggro on randomly assigned targets, and it's a non-trivial amount. At least 1k at the minimum I'd say.

They're the same as Curator's adds, then.

I tank Solarian Adds with the raid standing just on my spot (I run over to Solarian in the non-add phase to hold up JoW). We have our mages spec arcane so they get nice aggro reduce on their spells and they start up firing them when the mobs stood 2 seconds in my consecrate (which they have to do because everyone (except tanks) stands in my position...).

Has not produced any problems for my raid at all. We only wipe, when someone fells asleep and misses the bomb...

When solarian is disapearing get the whole raid to bunch in the centre.

Then watch the portals spawn 9/10 times ive found there are 2 close together and 1 further away.
Plant a consecration between the raid and the 2 close together portals, target a mob in the 3rd portral and throw AS. Once Consecration is back plant one dead centre of the raid, by this stage the raid spreads back out and starts to aoe.

This almost always works for 90% of the adds and the few that run off can be easily dealed with by mages and a fireblast/icelance etc

Pardon the mega-post; I went a couple days without keeping up with the thread.

Hang on; I'm not sure I buy this effect being quite so large unless there's a pretty significant gear gap. The raw difference before shield blocking is applied should have the paladin taking a bit more than 4% more damage than the warrior. Shield block value will tend to widen the difference, but you'd need something like 10k block value to turn a 9k hit into an 8k hit.

If we assume a largish block value of 1k, then a blocked blow that does 9k damage to a paladin should do (9000+1000)*(0.90/0.94) - 1000 = 8574 damage to the warrior. That's not a negligible difference, but it's less than half of 1k. The 5k hit on the paladin is going to hit for 4744 on the warrior, so your total difference for the 9k+5k+9k chain is going to be around 1.1k, not 3k.

And on a fight like Illidan (as I understand he dual-wields and you need to save SB/HS for Shear) I would expect a paladin to be blocking a decent bit more often than a warrior, which would make up most of the gap.

Have you observed a warrior geared comparably to yourself under the same conditions? I'm guessing you haven't (since if you had, and you'd seen these differences, I'd think you would have had the warrior do it) so... I mean, I believe that you were getting hit really hard, but it might just be that he was hitting you really hard because that's what he does.

Disclaimer: Haven't seen the fight myself, so I may be misunderstanding the mechanics, and I certainly agree with your other points re: Shield Wall/Last Stand and the hp gap.

Yes. This actually became an issue on Twin Emps, which was the first fight that really required you to fully optimize your tanks. It was worse at the time because many equip bonuses on items actually functioned by adding invisible buffs to your character, which counted against your buff limit (this has been corrected since) and so at some point in the fight an MT's buff bar would occasionally overflow and the tank would lose Defensive Stance and go into a stance-less state, during which he would take 10% more damage and be unable to shield block, and hence basically die.

I think Beef said in his "make a thread" sticky that he was going to lock some of the old threads (i.e., our MT thread) once the new threads (i.e., this one) got well underway, so I'd imagine the intent is for discussion going forward to happen here.

This is what I do and it basically lets the AoE open up immediately, which means the adds are pretty much dead once the priests spawn. There's really no need to get solid aggro on all of them; any random clothie should be fine with 1-2 adds beating on him so long as the healers aren't asleep. You just need to get them locked down well enough to prevent all the adds going after your highest-threat AoEer.

Strictly speaking, this isn't entirely true. Judgement of Blood is unaffected by spell hit insofar as currently on live it never misses. Judgment of Blood is guaranteed to do some damage (you can get a level difference based partial resist I believe).

You can imagine situations where that might prove useful, so perhaps this fact should also be noted in the tips section as well. It's usually the seal I have up at the start of pulls (or when I know I need to pick a target up) for this very reason.

I seem to remember seeing Judgement of Blood get fully resisted (And thus effectively miss) when I last tested it, but then again that was well over half a year ago now.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Also thanks for the Solarian advice above. It's one of the few fights where I don't really have experience tanking the adds, because I was usually either a Wrath of the Astromancer soak (Pre-2.2 version) or in healing gear (We had more trouble with people getting killed by her arcane missiles than people getting killed by her adds).

I'll also add a note about the Free Action Potions for Hyjal.

Edit:

Reckoning and Redoubt both only proc when you actually take damage. Also the increase in parry chance is fairly meaningless; though as far as tanking go we're still the tank capable of taking the lowest burst, reckoning doesn't even come close to the amount of extra parries warriors get through their instants; I'm not too familiar with druid tanks in regards to instants, but I'm certain they'll also use more attacks than us that are likely to get parried. Using Seal of Blood is probably a worse thing to do if you're worried about getting parried more than speccing reckoning is.

I did a few quick tests.

I bodypull Timber Worg near Shattrah, turn my back to him, then push Seal of Righteous until oom every global cooldown (~25 seals in total). Fire mage uses rank 1 frostbolts, and does around ~4k damage before drawing aggro.
4000 / ( 1.3 [ranged aggro] * 25 [number of seals] ) = ~120 threat

It looks like sealing R9 SoR generates around 110-130 threat... either that or mana loss generates threat too.

Yeah, that is correct, buffing a Seal does generate some threat. I wasn't sure on the exact amount though, so thanks for testing. Will add a note on that as well.

Speaking of, I've added a few more updates, including the addition of a section with some (very rough) ideas of what you can expect to do on each encounter.