About glyph, have a look on glyph of divinity and Lay on hands. Combined on yourself it gives around 4,5k mana. Try the math, but i think it is better than SA.
I did consider the LoH glyph, but since I would likley need to cast LoH on someone else (not myslef) I wasn't sure if the mana would be more or less, especially considering it could be the warrior drake tank, which wouldn't gain any mana. My fault for not looking into it earlier >.< Infact, I think I'll check it out now
Thanks!!!
Oh yeah, it definitely scales, but holy light scales with ~188% of your SP, and FoL with ~113%. So SS scales much less efficiently with SP. It doesn't scale with crit or haste beyond the softcap.
It is a nice spell, and I use it a fair amount, but I think it needs something else if it's going to last for Icecrown's raid.
It's 75% per shielding, you'd expect to get 5 shields from the ~1s gcd you're expending, so that's 375% SP scaling, only getting 4 shields is a possibility, but then it's still 300%. And as pointed out, it's absorb, which increases effective tank HP, so it has the potential to save the the tank in the case of spike damage, it's effectively 6% more tank HP if it procs at the right time (big if though).
I definitely wouldn't use it unless I'd just topped off the tank though, it's ~2.5s from casting SS to finishing the subsequent HL, you can easily get 2 melee hits in there, potentially 3 if you're really unlucky with parries. Holy shock can help to some extent, but imo popping SS on a tank whose far below 100% HP is taking a gamble, a small one maybe, but you don't play dice with your MT's life.
Also, would I maintain 100% uptime on sacred shield? Most likely not, it's wasteful. There'll be a period of 0-6s after the 30s buff fades in which refreshing it will achieve nothing, since the internal cooldown will be running. You're pretty much always better off waiting for the buff to drop off then finding a convenient time to renew it.
Last edited by ElginRoko : 02/18/09 at 7:52 AM.
For insurance reasons. Yes. That, and for freedom.
First, you obviously havn't done the 3 drake sarth 10-man yet, I checked your profile, just to make sure, and you haven't, this is why you would say something silly like this. Without a ret pally for replenishment, you go oom very quickly. I was not neglecting anything. I was not expecting this, obviously, as I ran oom at a crucial point and wiped the raid hence my need for help. This is why I felt like I needed to to re-optimize my gear for mana regen.
Statements like this really irritate me. I haven't killed 10 Sarth 3D, but I have had several attempts (although not in recent weeks), and honestly it's a pretty low way to try and attack someone's argument, by telling them that their opinion is invalid because they haven't done a certain fight. I don't feel that the fact that I haven't healed the fight past Shadron's death to be any sort of reflection on my understanding of it.
That said, Creid's statements were quite valid. Glyph of SoW is huge here, as is the libram of renewal. Still, SA glyph can potentially be a valid option, but it all comes down to how much damage you take. Glyph of Divinity is 2340 mana during the fight. In order to replicate that with glyph of SA, you'd need to take ~117k damage. That's a fairly large amount, but quite doable. This is assuming that that damage is always healed by other healers, not yourself. The biggest difference really is that the glyph of divinity gives you mana on demand. Glyph of SA will give you a steady stream throughout the fight, but that won't matter if Shadron's on 10%, you're oom, and with 20 seconds on DP CD. I'd say that both are solid options. I'll also say that both lose out to Glyph of SoW, which "gives you" more than 2340 mana after your 40th holy light.
Glyph of Holy Light is also very good, even for MT healing. It procs on the target of the HL, so it's effectively 10% extra healing on HL in a situation where you're healing a solitary tank.
Originally Posted by ElginRoko
It's 75% per shielding, you'd expect to get 5 shields from the ~1s gcd you're expending, so that's 375% SP scaling, only getting 4 shields is a possibility, but then it's still 300%. And as pointed out, it's absorb, which increases effective tank HP, so it has the potential to save the the tank in the case of spike damage, it's effectively 6% more tank HP if it procs at the right time (big if though).
I'm not quite sure how I neglected to factor that in, but thanks for pointing it out. This does make it even better than I imagined, which is good to know going in to future content.
Regarding the internal CD, I'm assuming that it starts when the shield is procced, not consumed, correct? In which case it's possible to get 6 procs if your tank is taking very steady damage (eg, at 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, 27 seconds) from stuff like Saph's aura. Swing timers / avoidance will slow this down much more on melee only bosses though. I just wish the proc were more controllable. Maybe have it proc on FoL hit, with the same CD or something. Although that'd make it less good in PvP I suspect.
Glyph of Holy Light is also very good, even for MT healing. It procs on the target of the HL, so it's effectively 10% extra healing on HL in a situation where you're healing a solitary tank.
Regarding the internal CD, I'm assuming that it starts when the shield is procced, not consumed, correct? In which case it's possible to get 6 procs if your tank is taking very steady damage (eg, at 1, 7, 13, 19, 25 seconds).
The glyph worked that way months ago, but since that time the heal only procs if there are people within 8 yards, otherwise it does nothing.
Yes, SS has a six second cooldown on proc, not consume. 5 would be the max, but 4 procs on steady damage is more normal.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
Glyph of Spiritual Attunement is definately not worth it, even for long fights with lots of AoE damage. Last night on our Sarth 3D 25, everyone had a brain fart and we ended up going for a 15min 42sec kill (we actually hit his enrage timer, lol). I got 13,920 mana back and our other paladin got back 14,855 mana from spiritual attunement. Looking at the bigger number, the glyph would give an additional 2,971 mana. That's only slightly higher than the mana you get if you Lay on Hands another caster in the raid, and much less than what you get if you LoH yourself. Overall in that fight, the Spiritual Attunement Glyph would be 15mp5 for our paladin.
On a normal Sarth 3D 25 man that lasted 9.5 minutes, I only get back about 8,500 mana from SA. The glyph would then only give an additional 1,700 mana. That works out to 15 mp5 again. So when thinking about the Glyph for current content, think of it as a 15mp5 glyph.
I could see a glyph enhancing the capabilities of the Sacred Shield to a usable state for post-naxx encounters.
It could either double the amount shielded (increasing the coefficient effectively), increase the length of the buff allowing for healers to not constantly have to refresh it, or even increasing the likelihood of it proc'ing the actual shield by a % basis. It would of course have to be a sizable increase in effectiveness for it to bump off the other major glyphs currently used in high end raiding. A major and a minor glyph around this spell might make it a useful tool in our arsenal for Ulduar though.
Another thing im wondering is how common it'll be to see a holy/prot specd paladin to get the benefits of Divine Guardian for progression attempts in Ulduar. It seems an incredible raid saving utility that might just be worth losing the 7% or so crit from the ret tree. My guild runs 2, but minimum 1 ret spec'd pally now in our main raids due to the amazing dps/utility they bring. I don't know that side of the talent specing, but how much more likely/easier is it for Ret paladins to spec into Divine Guardian then Holy Paladins?
As it stands now, It'll be much easier for Holy Paladins to get DG; the Retribution tree is rather bloated as it is. Of course, this could change with 3.1.
While speaking of DG, I'd like to get some feedback from others about the use of this talent for certain encounters like 3D and 3-healing Patchwerk in order to stack DPS. My guild-leader thinks it's just about the best thing since sliced bread; I think that it is certainly nice, but by no means necessary. For example, on Patchwerk with such little healing, I would think constant Winged-HL Spam during the enrage is better than the two GCDs + the cast time on the next HL it will take for the tank to get the benefits of the damage reduction due to DG and HoSac. Any experience/thoughts on this would be helpful.
I also think we go a little healer heavy. For example, our last 3D kill we had two holy paladins DG specced (myself included) and a Disc Priest on the MT. For each breath (whenever they hit really hard, when the last drake is down?) the healer would pop his respective cooldown. I've heard of Paladins solo healing the MT for 3D and I would think that tank cooldowns + a bubbled sacrifice would be enough to outlast the breaths if we had more DPS due to less healers. How does your guild handle the healing on 3D and do your paladins go DG?
if our DPS is having a good night, we've had no deadly breaths or sometimes just one. On an average night, we'll take one or two deadly breaths. Ever since we killed 3D, we've never had more than 2 deadly breaths. That being said, your tank will have 2-3 cooldowns they can use to get them through it. After that, priests have Guardian Spirit and we always have bubble + HoS. So, in regards to flame breaths DG is not really necessary. The benefit to DG is the 12 seconds of mitigation from Twilight Torment to keep the raid up. You'd probably pop as soon as Twilight Torment comes up to give the raid 12 seconds to burn Shadron asap. I think it has more use in that situation over saving it for a big breath.
As for who picks it up, with Kings becoming baseline I don't see Ret losing much to pick it up IF it's deemed necessary for a fight. The base ret PvE spec leaves 9 points available, and they need 12 more in the prot tree for DG. That means they have to move 2 points around from their core ret tree to get it. Some options:
- if you consistently have an Unholy DK in the raid, they give Unholy Aura to replace Pursuit of Justice. Only can lose 1 point here, though, because of the requirements for the upper tier talents.
- with a boomkin in the raid, they give the same buff as Swift Retribution (3% haste). They could lose 1 point there and not hurt the raid. If the boomkin dies, then the raid is still getting 2% haste.
- Sanctified Retribution - a consistent BM hunter will provide the same buff, but it's proc based and depends on their pet staying alive.
- Sanctified Wrath - this doesn't affect the raid at all, and means Avenging Wrath has more downtime. Should be less than a 1% dps decrease for ret paladins. Not to mention it means that Divine Shied is available more often. The way I see it is fully talented, 20% more damage with 16.7% uptime is a net 3.3% dps increase compared to 20% more damage with 13.3% uptime is a net 2.7% dps increase.
The biggest issue with ret picking it up, imo, is that using Avenging Wrath on cooldown means that there's a good chance they will not have bubble available when the raid needs it.
Three healers is a bit excessive for MT Sarth. And so is having two Holy Pallies specced into DG. My guild puts a Priest and a Pally (me) on the MT and, to be honest, I feel I could probably do it alone. There may be an occasional MT healing related death though. It seems like Sarth MT needs about 1.3 healers. It's a pity that the positioning doesn't allow our other Pally to Beacon the MT. Nonetheless, having two healers on the MT makes it safe and allows us to feel comfortable tossing out the occasional heal to one of the other tanks from time to time. I can't see that three would make any sense at all. And rotating protections seems way over the top.
Don't get me wrong, DG is a great ability. I spent some time with it back when our guild had no Resto Druid. But, at the moment, that's the only time I can see it being worthwhile. Especially once everyone is geared up. DG's benefit is in "oh shit" moments and times when you know some one will be taking more damage than you can heal through. Both of these situations become less and less common as people become geared and accustomed to the fights.
On its own, it isn't worth the loss of crit. But DG plus the 6% raid healing probably is if you're not getting it from a tree. It will definitely be worth taking another look at come Uldar though.
You do seem to need a priest shield on flame breaths when they hit hard, even with 30% damage reduction or increased HP from whatever cooldown you're currently using the tank still has a chance to get 1-shotted if he's not shielded by a priest.
Glyph of Spiritual Attunement is definately not worth it, even for long fights with lots of AoE damage. ... That's only slightly higher than the mana you get if you Lay on Hands another caster in the raid, and much less than what you get if you LoH yourself. Overall in that fight, the Spiritual Attunement Glyph would be 15mp5 for our paladin.
I completely agree, except in the case of 10-man Sarth 3D, since it is likey that during Twilight Torment, a DPS'er may need a lay on hands, or even the MT. Loosing a single member in that fight is likely a wipe. It seems like LoH would be needed as an emergency back-up to save someone instead of a mana generator. In that case, Glyph of SA would be a superior choice. All the rest of the fights glyph of LoH would definately be infinately better.
I've actually ran as retribution with DG for a bit awhile ago. It's extra utility and only really costs you a few PvP centric talents (Divine Purpose/Vindication or Eye for an Eye), picked up Kings, guaridan's favor, improved righteous fury and DG. It's not a bad all around build assuming you run with a moonkin to cover the lost of swift retribution. You gain a raid wide shield wall, shorter HoP cooldown for saving other players and a decent offtanking talent (not that that utility is required in anything currently, but you never know, maybe for kiting chows?)
I completely agree, except in the case of 10-man Sarth 3D, since it is likey that during Twilight Torment, a DPS'er may need a lay on hands, or even the MT. Loosing a single member in that fight is likely a wipe. It seems like LoH would be needed as an emergency back-up to save someone instead of a mana generator. In that case, Glyph of SA would be a superior choice. All the rest of the fights glyph of LoH would definately be infinately better.
On our 3D first kill last week, I ended up gaining about 3k mana from SA. With the glyph it would give me an extra 600 mana which is really nothing. It was a 11min 20sec fight, so that's not even 5 mp5 averaged out over the fight. I did go OOM that fight, which really stretched me to the limit. The other thing with that fight is that it's only intense for about 5 minutes of the 10-11 minute duration. The first minute and a half (until the whelp spawn) is easy healing. Then it's very intense until Vesperon is dead, which for us lasted just over 5 minutes.
Once Vesperon is dead, i feel comfortable enough to use Divine Plea on every cooldown to get back to full. At that point, it's cleaning up adds and other healers can make up for my nerfed heals for 15 seconds. With Vesperon dead, the portal cleared, me with decent mana again, and everyone back to sarth, our other two healers were able to wand/melee a little bit on Sarth to get back some more mana while I backed them up.
One thing people in this thread really need to do is specify if their Sarth 3D tank is a Feral Druid or a DK. The difference between the 2 tanks is big enough that a raid will have to accommodate itself around which class is tanking Sarth.
From personal experience, a single Holy Paladin can solo heal a DK MT in both 10 and 25 man without using any kind of cooldowns from other players except the Paladin himself and the DK tanking. That's with being spec'd Diving Guardian, of course.
However, I'm not sure how feasible solo healing a Druid tank would be without PW:S and HoTs from other classes. I haven't healed a Feral tank on Sarth since late November, but I'm going off on an educated guess saying that they should end up taking more damage than a DK - surviving breaths through sheer HP pool and high FR and probably taking a wee bit more melee damage.
And concerning Sacred Shield: the only reasons not to try to get 100% uptime on it are because your tank is rage starved or because there is so much of a flat incoming of damage that stopping the Holy Light spam would mean death for the tank (only time that becomes an issue is when you're bringing 2-3 healers to Patchwerk, and even then it's possible to put it up every now and then).
The idea is to refresh it reactively based on the tank's current health, incoming damage and burst potential: you don't cast Sacred Shield when Malygos takes his breath, instead you cast it after he breathes and the tank has been topped off and you refresh it 15-20 seconds later when your tank is at full health and your Holy Shock is up to make up for any tank damage taken while SS is being refreshed.
Theorycrafting procedures per role:
DPS = Theory -> Spreadsheet -> Practice
Healing = Theory -> Practice -> Logs
Tanking = Theory -> Theory -> Theory
We have a druid MT on sarth who is "solo" healed by a holy paladin. I say "solo" because other healers, when in range, will pop a hot on him or cast a quick heal if he dips. Our druid wears frost resist gear and is gemmed for stamina though. For us, though, dps is strong enough that we never have to survive more than 1-2 flame breaths. Lately, even on poor attempts, we've only had to survive one deadly breath before Shadron dies.
Our druid's HP is high enough that he can use his two cooldowns by themselves and survive. He also is using a flask of chromatic wonder with his paladin healer keeping up Fire Res Aura. I think he's around 39k HP during the fight and partially resists nearly every fire attack.
On our kill last night (a majorly f'ed up one that took forever), the healing taken by our Druid MT was:
so even though that includes overheals, you can see the paladin basically handled healing on the druid MT. Also, once the 3rd drake died, all the healers were mostly focused on the MT and add tank equally.
As for 10-Man 3D:
We did it for our first time last week with our same druid MT. I was solo healing him with a priest and shaman as the other tank healers. I had 4x more healing on the MT than the other healers. They definitely helped as backup in a pinch or two, but I basically solo healed it. Here's the wws link if you want to check it out: Wow Web Stats
Ya, druid is in frost resist gear, fully gemmed and enchanted for stamina. Our goal was for him to get a high enough HP base to be able to survive a breath by using either 1 of his cooldowns. In our weeks of attempts, the maximum breaths he was taking were around 46k-47k. That meant he need roughly 38k health during the fight to survive with Barkskin, and about 37k to live using Survival Instincts. The Frost Resist gear got him up to 51k unbuffed, which is where we needed to be.
Timing with Guardian Spirit was tricky because it was during the most hectic part of the fight (raid taking tons of aoe damage), so if the druid could use his own cooldowns for the first two breaths, healers could just focus on healing. Our DPS was strong enough that we never took more than 2 deadly breaths, and it was almost always 1 deadly breath.
We have our tank call out the CD by assigning us (priest/pally) with numbers and he just has to say: 1, 2, etc and it definitely helps because there are so many things going on/people needed to be heal during the dangerous phase of the fight and the MT only has to worry about the breath and avoiding flame wall anyway.
Hi all, I've been looking at the suggested stats for a raiding paladin, and I seem to come up short in most of the categories (SP, crit, etc). Having downed 3D, this is not really an issue right now, but looking to future harder encounters I want to make myself the best I can be. Is there anything drastically wrong that I am doing with my gear/gemming/enchanting?
p.s. I may be in my Sarth 3D spec, I would normally be either 51/5/15 or 53/0/18. Also I have a full Deck of Nobles ready to hand in when the Faire comes to town.
Hi all, I've been looking at the suggested stats for a raiding paladin, and I seem to come up short in most of the categories (SP, crit, etc). Having downed 3D, this is not really an issue right now, but looking to future harder encounters I want to make myself the best I can be. Is there anything drastically wrong that I am doing with my gear/gemming/enchanting?
p.s. I may be in my Sarth 3D spec, I would normally be either 51/5/15 or 53/0/18. Also I have a full Deck of Nobles ready to hand in when the Faire comes to town.
Thanks!
Your crit is quite low. Your haste is good. Your mp5 is fine. Your int is a little bit low. Your spell power is pretty good. Change the glyph on your helm to the Kirin Tor one (crit). Put a +16 int gem in your bracer, i'd ignore the socket bonus. Upgrade your leg enchant. I'd put intellect on your bracer instead of spell power. Everything else looks good. You just need to focus on some more gear with crit. The darkmoon card would be a nice replacement for your badge trinket (when you do that, don't worry about the intellect enchant on bracers since you lose about 75 SP)
I'm curious as to why you would put 53 points into holy, since the last two don't really provide much of a bonus. Pursuit of Justice, however, is a huge boost if you either don't have an Unholy DK or are out of range of one. On highly mobile fights it means you might get an extra cast off before moving, and then you can start casting again sooner after moving. And if you are doing sarth 3D (25 man?), I can't imagine you not having a ret paladin in the raid. Don't pick up kings.
Edit:
noticed your crit is very low because you are picking up DG in the prot tree. Otherwise you'd be at 36% holy crit unbuffed which is just fine. With the 51/0/20 spec your stats all look great. You don't need DG for sarth 3D. it's helpful but we've been killing it weekly without ever using it. you are giving up a lot of mana regen and burst healing by losing 8% crit and 4% mana reduction on instants.
Thanks for the input, i need to keep the blue gem in my bracers to fufill my meta (not a JC, may pick it up in place of skinning in between now and Ulduar). We do not normally raid with an Unholy DK, so I will definitely look into PoJ, and we usually have either a ret pally in the raid, so I will drop BoK.
Hi all, I've been looking at the suggested stats for a raiding paladin, and I seem to come up short in most of the categories (SP, crit, etc). Having downed 3D, this is not really an issue right now, but looking to future harder encounters I want to make myself the best I can be. Is there anything drastically wrong that I am doing with my gear/gemming/enchanting?
p.s. I may be in my Sarth 3D spec, I would normally be either 51/5/15 or 53/0/18. Also I have a full Deck of Nobles ready to hand in when the Faire comes to town.
Thanks!
I don't think anyone can gear for future hard encounters. It just may turn out that mp5 becomes a more valuable stat or things might just stay the same as they are now. In which case I would recommend swapping a lot of that mp5 for haste/crit stats on gear. I also wouldn't worry about having more than 2K unbuffed SP either, unless you are one of those flash of light paladins.....
The problem with trying to gear for future hard encounters.
Is that not only does no one have a clue what the encounters will be like (as stated above)
But also we do not know what the new and changed game mechanics the designers have in store for us.
The only thing for certain is that they have stated that they want to change the ability to relatively ignore Mana usage and thus be able to spam HL on most fights.
Whether they are successful in doing that without breaking other things is the question. Either way it could and probably will change relative stat weightings.
To be honest about the only change (without adding a new spell) that would change my current play style is to remove the CD on HS. But I do not believe that even this would overcome the great advantage of HL with Glyph.
02/18/09, 4:03 AM
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