I haven't really been keeping up with Ulduar bosses so far besides cursory glances at the newsing posts, so I wouldn't know anything about it.

I admit though that the HOTR Glyph is primarily a personal choice, since I raid with a fairly casual group and expect to do a lot of Heroics yet. If I ever dropped it for a "serious MT" Glyph, I'd probably take the SOV Glyph.

That being said, I was under the impression that parry-gibbing isn't nearly as dangerous as it was made out to be in TBC, since the removal of Crushing Blows.

Parry gibbing is a real threat but it's based on the mob's normal swing damage now instead of CBs. I think Felmyst was a good example back in the day that didn't crush but could melee you for up to 14k during corrosion (with health pools at 20-22k). You REALLY did not want to parry haste her.

On the other hand, Paladins' chance to get parry-gibbed is laughably low compared to what the other 3 tank classes have to deal with, with the added bonus that you will at least block every single attack.
I use glyph of SoV purely as a threat tool, with the added bonus that it reduces damage taken slightly. I won't swap to HoTR glyph: it would be a nice bonus in heroics maybe, but it's not exactly as if i've ever had issues tanking them.

Yeah sure, obviously a Warrior is going to have more attacks/sec that are parryable so it's more important to us but the question is more like if you can avoid the worst case of dying to a swing + parry hasted swing, why would you not?

EDIT: Also did you guys catch how Blizzard appears to solve the issue of Warriors needing more Expertise to do competitive threat while Paladins can mostly ignore it? They just load up Ulduar gear with Expertise so Paladins have to take it while other tanks get more out of it to even out the TPS. It's quite a silly way to handle it because Expertise is mostly regarded a junk stat by Palas.

hum i dunno, a lot of plate has hit, which isnt bad for us. we r loosing a lot of thread of partial resists and i really like the idea, we get "free" hit, so we hadn't to gem for it.

And that's, what expertise is for warriors is. another tool to get equivalent thread. Yes it has side-effekts, but for a class, that deals 100% as physical dmg, it's a first TPS and then TTL stat.

"free" hit? There is no "free" stat on a piece of gear. Where there is hit, it could have been block rating or dodge. So everytime you see hit on a piece of armor, don't think of it as "free", think of it as a bad stat compared to dodge or block rating.

I'm not saying that hit is not good, I'm just saying that if I had the choice to replace all the +hit I have on my gear for +dodge or +block rating I would do it! The only time hit would be important is for your taunt, and we have a glyph for that.

Last but not least, based on the bold part of the quote, you actually gemmed for hit?

Edit: all of this may change when we have trouble with threat. But unless our threat scales horribly in Ulduar (which is not the case on PTR at least) even the top DPSers won't be a big problem. If threat becomes a problem, then you might consider gemming for threat and in that case the best DPS stat would be either strength or hit (don't know because I have not seen a good prot threat spreadsheet). Strength being a mitigation/threat stat and hit an avoidance/threat stat.

Well, to remove dodge from a boss requires 26, so a few more items with exp would be useful.


Regarding the question on Plea 3% damage with Sanc 3% damage, if they didn't stack then the major glyph would be useless. I don't know if the new glyphs were added to the inscription discovery system to test it.

I found the post on maintankadin. If you want to read it : Maintankadin :: View topic - Hit so bad?

If not then the summary is : "Conclusion: The take-home message from this graph is that at Naxx25 gearing and higher, the order of the stats for maximum TPS gain is STR>Hit>BV>AP>Expertise>Crit>AGI>SP>Haste>STA, and is unlikely to change this expansion."

It requires 3500 strength for hit to become better than strength for TPS on a point per point basis.

So if you have the RD glyph for fights where a reliable taunt is important, you don't need to gem for hit, ever.

Indeed. And since they are going to shove Hit/Exp down your throats you might as well go the whole way to remove parries when you are close to the cap (and on some bosses it just removes some RNG gib scenarios, see my examples above).

Also, just as a friendly hint in general: Don't whine about Expertise on gear being useless or how you would like to be able to tank everything and hold aggro with no threat stats at all; the only way to make Hit and Exp required for Paladins would be to nerf their TPS and make everything parryable. I am sure you get where I am going with that. :P

You would need 56 expertise to be parry capped at 14%. Don't actually think that's currently possible to achieve. Either way paladins only have 2 abilities that can be parried, while warriors have everything? The need for exp for us isn't as important than for warriors. We get it because you need it on the gear.

Good luck with that. The expertise cap to remove dodge is 26, and it is 55 to remove parry. No way you can reach the parry cap without gimping yourself severely. So short answer is : do not aim for expertise on your gear, take it when you can have it for free (SoV glyph). If you want to gear for pure threat, gem for strength.

The thing is, hit and expertise are not the best TPS stats. Strength is by far better. So I'm not saying that hit and exp are bad stats, just that you should not choose your gear based on that, and certainly not gem for it. If you want to gem/enchant for threat, just take as much strength as possible.

Really? I'd love to see a WWS and an armory link with 56 expertise. I had no idea you could reach 56 expertise in current content without gimping your other more important stats. Or maybe you mean only expertise soft cap of 26 (only dodge)?

Anyway, this is the prot paladin thread, and we have less abilities than warriors that can be parried. So I think we pretty much nailed the discussion on the value of expertise. Yes expertise is a good stat (ie if you have to choose between 1 expertise and 0 expertise) but no you shouldn't focus on it (ie 1 strength is better than 1 expertise rating for threat AND mitigation/avoidance, see the link in my post above for the math) and definitely not gem for it.

Can I ask which food buff is better for us, you suggest?

I am thinking of the Dragonfin Filet (+40Str) or the Fishing feast (+80 AP, 46 Spell power)?

For threat I am wondering if the Spell Power bonus is still useful for us?

Check my armory when it updates, I logged out in my Exp/Hit set. You can shuffle some gear around (like using an ilvl 213 cloak instead if you don't need the hit or using Helm of Vitral Protection for the same reasoning) and I made a point of using Last Laugh although I have a Broken Promise which is worth 8 Expertise to me. Add food for another 5 expertise and it's not all that hard to get there before Ulduar loot which shoves it down our throats anyway.

Yes, I realize this is a Prot Paladin threat but the basics are the same: If you are tanking a boss that melees for 25-30k (any boss that you won't survive two hits against) then it is a smart move to make sure you NEVER parry haste him so you don't die from that. Strength may be a better TPS stat for you but I don't believe that the BV it offers is going to outweigh removing the chance to die in 2 hits on a boss within 3 secs because you parry hasted him.

My point is, if you can already get Expertise capped reasonably easy now, then why is it so hard to believe that the tanks will be close to the parry cap with Ulduar loot before gems? Get the Expertise gear from Ulduar (not that you have a choice from the few screenshots I saw) and fill up the last % with gems and voila: You just elimitated one source of deaths on boss fights.

You used 4 normal +16 expertise gems and 2 JC +27 expertise gems. That's a bit extreme I think. You're actually gearing yourself for 20% of the fights where it will be somewhat useful and gimping yourself for the last 80% fights.

Unless you can have 2 distincts sets (one for expertise the other for normal use) I think it's too extreme.

If you had gemmed for stam for example, it would give you 2000 more health (with kings), which is more useful than being expertise capped in most fights.

Yes, I have two sets. And yes, I could shuffle around the gear and probably gain another 1000 health and still stay expertise capped (Broken Promise, different cloak, KT neck, Helm of Vital Protection and then swap out a few pieces with expertise for non-expertise gear). The point is, it's not hard. 1000 health in Tier 7 gear is not much and is alot less useful than not parry hasting hard hitters.

Are we seriously going to argue that 1000 health is a big sacrifice to get parry capped in a gear environment that doesn't have as many expertise itemized items as Ulduar will have?

How again is this discussion on topic for paladins? Expertise is a pretty bad stat for us, TPS wise. How it does survival wise, we'll see in Ulduar by the amount of deaths caused by parry haste. (remember: they might as well turn it off for the most heavy hitters)

Considering we went from "Expertise is useless!" to "There are better threat stats than Expertise!" to "You can't get Expertise capped anyway!" to "Expertise doesn't offer much mitigation anyway!" to "Even if it does, Blizzard can just turn off parry gibs!" I feel as if you just don't want to see that yes, Expertise is useful. And that yes, not every hard hitter gets it's parry haste turned off (Enraged Faerlina, Sarth with triple damage stack caused by drakes being dead, Malygos etc).

I was offering realistic ways how to get the best out of the superflous Expertise but it seems you just don't care. Whatever.

Well, that isn't how it has progressed. That is just a compilation of various responses to the topic, which weren't necessarily linearly derived from each other.

I personally think expertise is important. However, I do feel that other stats do outweigh it. Hit is more important, for example for various survival reasons (judgements of the just, taunts, LoO, etc.) as well as threat reasons. That isn't to say expertise isn't worth it, but that it provides a different utility (reduced parry gibs). Each of us tends to decide for ourselves which utility is more important. I personally make every effort to be at least soft capped in expertise (I would love to be more, but my prioritization scheme doesn't allow that yet).

Remember, everyone, that parrying doesn't automatically mean the boss/opponent will be getting off two attacks after a parry. While the original calculation escapes me at this time, parrying only affects a swing if it occurs during the first part of a swing timer, but has close to no effect after a certain point. Parry insta-gib also referred to crushing blows being "snuck" in around warrior shield block. With crushing blows removed, and thus far no fast-hitting challenging endgame bosses, parry insta-gib is rather a moot point. Even in ulduar, there should be very little cause for insta-gibbing, for all classes.

At a rough guess:

The rule-of-thumb equivalence for Str/BlkVal/AP effect on threat is: 1 str ~= 2 blkval ~= 3-4 AP. I don't know the precise value of SP (never seemed worth calculating since we never gear for it anymore anyway) but it's certain that 1 AP > 1 SP for threat by a good margin. (Every threat ability that scales with SP scales at least as well with AP, in addition to at least one ability (HotR) that scales with AP but not SP.)

Hence, (80 AP + 46 SP) < 120AP <= 40 str, so from a threat point of view the filet is better, in addition to obviously giving better mitigation (through str->blkval) and equal stamina.




Regarding hit: Whether +hit is better or worse than +str for sustained threat generation, the fact remains that hit is vitally important to reliable generation of snap threat, which tends to be the more important issue. If you're picking up a mob that needs to be killed ASAP, it's tremendously useful to be able to guarantee that your opening AS and/or ShR will hit, because it gives your dps a much greater comfort margin. This can be especially important if you're doing things like the two-potion trick (every dps'er chugs a dps-boosting potion right before the pull so they get the cooldown running before entering combat) where forcing the dps to hold back even for a few seconds can cost you quite a bit.

Obviously you don't need to be hit-capped on every fight, but I've found it more useful than not. It's situational of course, but thus far in WotLK I've never had a problem with sustained threat generation, but I have had some annoying incidents where my first threat move has missed.



Regarding expertise and glyph selection: This is highly dependent on your particular situation. My guild has a number of very good tanks covering all the different classes; because of this and because of the particular quirks each of us has it's unlikely that I would be the one asked to tank a boss that can 2-shot me with white damage. We'd get one of our ferals to do it first, followed by our DK, and probably then followed by our two prot warriors and our other prot paladin, before getting down to me. On the other hand, I'm probably the first one on deck for fast-hitting bosses or AoE/add-tanking. So it makes sense for me to glyph for those situations rather than for tanking the Big Boss That Hits Slow And Hard.

There's a huge amount of variety in situations between one prot paladin in the next, between the different group sizes (5/10/25) and the different numbers and types of other tanks in the mix. Hence I think it's important to be careful when generalizing from your personal experience.



Also, elixirs are a really wonderful way to "swap gear" without actually swapping gear. In the battle slot, you can go for 45 hit rating if you're worried about snap threat, or 45 strength if you just want raw firepower, or 45 expertise rating if you're worried about parry-gibs. That's about 60% as "powerful" as swapping out a single-stat trinket, they're really quite cheap considering the effect, and two elixirs are going to be far more powerful and stat-efficient than any tanking flask.

I basically plan my gear around always being double-elixired now. Crit-immunity for me is now 531 defense, because I always assume I'll get another +9 from a defense elixir. (If I'm doing trivial content and don't want to be bothered elixir'ing, that's when I swap in the Repelling Charge.) Then I've got a choice of strength or hit rating for the battle elixir, or even expertise or agility if I want a bit more avoidance/mitigation.

[edit] Regarding the post below, yeah, Guru's elixir is another excellent option since you get solid value from the stamina, strength, and agility.

Personally I find the Guru's Elixir to be one of the best Battle Elixir's you can use. (+20 all stats)