The Protection Paladin Field Manual (WoW-3.0/WotLK) - Page 36

Academic · 01/30/09, 5:12 PM

Originally Posted by thedopefishlives

There seem to be two schools of thought here. One school of thought says, "We have enough buttons to push, if X misses we can hit Y, or Z, or some combination of the above and get aggro back." The other school of thought says, "There are/may be situations where if X misses, I won't have time to hit Y or Z before something bad happens." I guess it really comes down to your tanking style and the role you expect to play. If you play aggressively as a tank with fast aggro-building and allowing your DPS to open fire immediately, obviously Accuracy or the weapon chain are going to be very appealing because one missed attack means someone's going to get eaten. If you play more conservatively and anticipate having the luxury of time to build adequate aggro, you would be more oriented toward Agility.

Paladins by nature have one of the highest initial burst threat. I play aggressivly, I gem for hp whenever I can, I enchant for avoidance whenever I can, and I know we have enough tools at our disposal to be able to recover quickly enough. If they aren't tauntable, you still have more tools on your table to help yourself restablish threat/aggro. Don't be worried about our taunts failing, we have Glyph of Righteous Defense.

I play aggressively, even more so since 3.0.8 came out. I can pop wings without fear of needing shield wall before foreberance wears out.

Originally Posted by Left

A bit of a digression, but…
….
The Fallen Crusader rune isn't just about the healing; Strength for DKs also increases their parry rating on a 4:1 ratio. So a Strength proc for them adds avoidance as well as damage output.

Creating static value type enchants along these lines for all tanks would be neat. How about a static strength + agility proc enchant? Or an static armor + strength proc? Etc.

Definitely a neat idea, I was actually thinking of something along the lines of static static agility + agility proc enchant. Much like a newer version of Mongose. I would though, be totally in for something like a static strength + agility proc enchant as well.

Prinsesa · 01/30/09, 11:43 PM

Originally Posted by Left

A bit of a digression, but...

Apart from anti-magic or just pure damage output runes, DKs get three options for tanking type runes:
Rune of Swordshattering
Rune of the Fallen Crusader
Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle

The Fallen Crusader rune isn't just about the healing; Strength for DKs also increases their parry rating on a 4:1 ratio. So a Strength proc for them adds avoidance as well as damage output.

Creating static value type enchants along these lines for all tanks would be neat. How about a static strength + agility proc enchant? Or an static armor + strength proc? Etc.

Not that I've ever played a DK at an endgame level, but I'm pretty sure there's no way the Fallen Crusader's STR proc is going to add anywhere near enough avoidance via Parry-conversion to even compare with the Swordshattering or Gargoyle forges.

EDIT: The newest version of TankPoints allows you to simulate 100% Holy Shield uptime, so you can make gearing decisions based on the extra 30% block.

To enable this, set the "Shield Block Key Press Delay" under Player Options to 2 or less, to simulate pressing Holy Shield 2 seconds after it comes off cooldown.

Left · 02/02/09, 9:11 AM

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

Not that I've ever played a DK at an endgame level, but I'm pretty sure there's no way the Fallen Crusader's STR proc is going to add anywhere near enough avoidance via Parry-conversion to even compare with the Swordshattering or Gargoyle forges.

Oh, I agree. I don't raid anymore, but going off the early raid/preraid numbers of one of the DKs in my guild, it looks like 700-800 is a good guess for base strength. Thus, the proc would add 210-240 strength, which is 53-60 parry rating. That's only around 1% avoidance; certainly not as good as the others. Even scaling up as gear improves isn't going to help it that much. Seems like it could be a decent threat enchant, however, since it isn't completely devoid of avoidance or mitigation (counting the self-heals as mitigation).

Saltycracker · 02/05/09, 11:55 AM

I think I am going to switch my glyphs.

There are very few fights where a 969 is sustainable with you standing in one place to limit us to the same 5 GCDs. Paladins have a LOT of abilities that should be used while tanking (Sacred Shield, Hands of XYZ, Cleanse, Avenging Wrath) that I think that tanks should have their eyes open a little wider than perfecting their rotation. 969 is a great place to start, but it's hard to do other things if you are locked in it.

I am going to switch my Glyph of Judgement to Glyph of Consecration. Judgment has the same DPS/TPS about as consecration (I have the libram but its garbage to use): Wow Web Stats

Consecration is an expensive spell to use, and I think glyphing it would free up some mana, and give you some extra time to use other abilities.

Usually I am putting out double the TPS as the closest DPS on a boss, so I can spare some threat to do this. It would also help tremendously on tanking Sarth blazes/whelps.

Thoughts?

Left · 02/05/09, 12:40 PM

Too often I find that when using Consecration I want to reapply it sooner, not later, because I want to reposition. I often use only 2-3 ticks worth to pick up adds as they run through a strategically placed consecration. In movement fights, I would feel like the Consecration glyph would hurt my utility, as a result.

• promdates · 02/05/09, 12:54 PM

It's a terrible glyph. When you're tanking a raid boss, if you ever have to say "Man, my mana is really low" you're either not taking enough damage or you're doing something wrong. There's only one fight through all of the current content that I have ANY issues with mana, and it's only in the first minute or so. That fight would be Kel'thuzad.

Sacred Shield can be put on you from the holy paladins, who will receive a better benefit from it with the increased FoL crit proc. It's rare that I have to cast any "Hands of xxx" spells other than potentially Reckoning to pick up a spawn on trash, never anything on bosses. And Avenging Wrath will only delay your rotation by a slight margin, since you can use it and still continue the rotation right away.

As far as putting out "double the tps", that's not unheard of. Being able to pull 8-10k TPS consistently between bosses is pretty much what we should be able to do. It maybe boring, but it's the best rotation that we have currently. If you're having issues tanking whelps/blazes, get a warrior to do it. Between shockwave, thunderclap, isntant refresh on taunt, intervene, charge, cleave, and whatever else they have... they make the better option for a tank to quickly pick up mobs. We just hold them better over the long run.

If it's really dps that you're worried about, then perhaps changing other things would benefit you the most. You seem to be low on the mitigation side of things (taking a little over 1 million damage compared to my 700k on PW on a 3 sec difference fight), while still being able to consistently do 3k+ dps on the same fight. Actually, looking back on it, it seems you were probably offtanking. Either that or you avoided a lot of hits. I would suggest putting you in the MT spot with your feral and a warrior in the OT spot. Or just dropping the warrior OT all together and going with you+feral as the 2 tanks. Just be sure to have the healers keep up the feral at all times.

Saltycracker · 02/05/09, 1:23 PM

Originally Posted by stabbymcgee

If it's really dps that you're worried about, then perhaps changing other things would benefit you the most. You seem to be low on the mitigation side of things (taking a little over 1 million damage compared to my 700k on PW on a 3 sec difference fight), while still being able to consistently do 3k+ dps on the same fight. Actually, looking back on it, it seems you were probably offtanking. Either that or you avoided a lot of hits. I would suggest putting you in the MT spot with your feral and a warrior in the OT spot. Or just dropping the warrior OT all together and going with you+feral as the 2 tanks. Just be sure to have the healers keep up the feral at all times.

I'm not worried about DPS, I'm concerned about being locked into a rotation of watching cooldowns rather than being more spatially aware of whats going on. Hand of Sacrifice is perfect for Ice Tombs, casting other spells etc.

Are you sure the Sacred Shield's dont stack? If not you could have every paladin cast one on you have shields proc more often. I haven't tested it but it would screw all but one holy pally in a raid if SS did not stack.

Dont look at that Patchwerk parse, I was MTing until 30 seconds in and realized that I had my BlockDPS gear on from Maexxna, and well below the defense cap. I popped an Elixir of Defense and had the feral druid overtake me on threat. Thank god that hatefuls cant crit. I am playing with an avoidance set that I use for soaking hatefuls since technically paladins have bigger health pools than warriors; In general yea, Paladins are more ideal for MTing that fight.

In my eyes, the main benefit of the consecration glyph is that it fights like Sarth it stays down longer when picking up the drakes, leaving you more time to taunt blazes. I dont pick up adds/trash with consecration; I am usually using Plonghammer, Avenger's Shield and Righteous Defense, and when I have time to stand still I use consecration. Its not a critical spell in our rotation so it seems like the best candidate to play with, and there are a lot of extra spells we can use in that consecration gap that would help (I forgot to mention AvgShield in the OP)

/tangent: This may just be my personal view or how Blizzard has decided to gear us, but I don't see paladins as avoidance tanks period. Our strengths lie in being able to block every attack for a good chunk of damage. We can put on avoidance gear for certain fights to compensate, but we are made to be rocks that hunker down, and get sh*t on by bosses and take very little physical damage.
/tangent

Nobbynob Littlun · 02/05/09, 2:02 PM

I believe we had this glyph argument already

I think the consensus came out as follows.

No glyph - and the 969 rotation - for optimal personal DPS, if that matters to you.

As threat is only a problem when you're up against a fresh aggro list, the consecration glyph is desirable if you cannot spare the attention to maintain rotations, or if you have some other reason (i.e. I opted for 2/2 improved judgements to maximize Libram of Obstruction uptime, and to hell with the rotation; the glyph was useful then).

Taking it for mana purposes is not considered as wise as using Seal of Wisdom. Get it, wise, Wisdom? *frumple*

In the general case it's just as likely you'll find yourself wishing for a shorter consecration cooldown, especially as your guildies get more and more aggressive with the AoEs and chaining pulls. (the glyph was not so useful then)

• promdates · 02/05/09, 2:03 PM

It honestly isn't hard to do the rotation. If you have to weave something in, just delay the rotation slightly. I'm more worried about keeping mitigation and threat up and don't the most damage while tanking. Perhaps it can be an issue in Ulduar, but right now there are only a few fights that require you to be super situationally aware. Look at warriors in TBC, they were pretty gcd locked if dong it right, not much different. It's rare that I'll use shield throw while one on one tanking a boss unless there's movement and I can't reliably hit it, or on sarth drakes to pick up random add on x person.

I'm pretty sure the math was gone over through beta on the consecrate glyph, sure it can be found somewhere.

Cathela · 02/05/09, 5:47 PM

Originally Posted by Left

A minor note: the above line in the first post (underneath the Shield of Righteousness discussion) is no longer accurate given the introduction of Hand of Reckoning. Probably should be updated at some point.

Yeah. Been away from the forum for a week and a half or so. Update coming soon. I'll try to clean up the 3.08 loose ends ASAP.

Originally Posted by Academic

Single target: Judgement, ShoTR, Excorcism

Multi Target: AS, HoR, Consecrate, Holy Shield, Holy Wrath

We have multiple spells at our disposal, especially in zones such as Nax.

Holy Shield isn't relevant to a discussion of picking up mobs, and Exo and HW are target-limited.

Aside from that, each of the abilities you list there has a cooldown and uses a GCD, and AS is the only one with significant range to it. If something misses, you're either letting those mobs go, or you're spending the next GCD still picking them up and not getting on to the next thing you need to do.

It's not necessary to hit-cap all the time; as Knightly pointed out a few pages back, in a single-target situation you can get raid buffs and debuffs that'll bring you at least very close to the cap even with just "incidental" +hit on your gear, and missing one slam or whatever in a sustained-threat situation isn't a big deal.

For multi-mob AoE type situations like Sarth+3 though, I really like hit-capping. You shouldn't be in serious danger as long as your healers are alive, and I'd rather trade a tiny bit of my survivability to increase the reliability with which I can get aggro and save other people.

Originally Posted by stabbymcgee

It honestly isn't hard to do the rotation. If you have to weave something in, just delay the rotation slightly.

This.

The rotation shouldn't be thought of as something rigid, but more like a default routine to use when you don't need to do anything else specifically. Really, if you're comfortable on threat, the only part of the rotation you have to do is 9xxxxx9xxxxx... to keep Holy Shield up. Technically the HS isn't even required if can take a few unblocked hits without worry. If you have to do something, then do it and worry about the rotation afterwards.

Agreed that the Consecration glyph has way way too many downsides.

Also, just in general (not specifically with reference to the posts I'm quoting) I see a lot of people saying things like "Well, I don't need this in the current content, so what's the point?" And that's true as far as it goes, but there are a lot of things you can play without currently and be able to do everything in the game. Granted with a higher level of difficulty in some cases, and perhaps dependent on the gear/skill of your raidmates, but fundamentally you can do anything in the game right now with substantially non-optimal gear, talents, etc.

So, when we're discussing things like hit-capping, block versus avoidance, and that kind of thing, a lot of the discussion is at least semi-hypothetical and based on speculations and assumptions about the nature of upcoming content. But we don't actually know what the encounters in Ulduar are going to be like. It's possible that hit-capping will be critical; it's possible that hit-capping will be useless.

Anyway, I think a lot of the disagreements we've seen in this thread, and especially in the last few pages, are due to people making different guesses about what's going to be important in future content. Not to say that these things aren't worth discussing, but in a lot of cases there's really no final conclusion to be reached beyond "Well, we'll have to wait and see." Just saying.

Abryn · 02/05/09, 8:20 PM

Originally Posted by stabbymcgee

...And Avenging Wrath will only delay your rotation by a slight margin, since you can use it and still continue the rotation right away...

Forgive me for nitpicking, but there is no GCD delay on Avenging Wrath anymore. If that is what you meant all along, I apologize.

• promdates · 02/05/09, 8:32 PM

I know that pressing AW doesn't trigger the GCD anymore, but I did notice the "cooldown cycle" spin around the icon while I was pressing other buttons.

About to land in Dalaran, will test this out promptly on landing.

[edit] Tested this out, clearly while you're spamming buttons you can NOT cast Avenging Wrath. If you are NOT on the Global Cooldown, you can press Avenging Wrath without fear of putting yourself on the GCD. Hence the "delay it slightly to cast it", the slightly being ~.5-1 second which should be the time if you're fast enough to press one button and continue on.

Yelp · 02/06/09, 12:34 AM

Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.
Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.
Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.
Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.
Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

Good stuff...but wondering if the GBTL change is due to an impending SA change, as alluded to in the mana regen post. That could be an interesting mechanic, if we have to pop DP before the pull, then keep it up throughout the fight via our shield spells.

Tharia · 02/06/09, 12:56 AM

The changes will certainly make some flaws of the prot paladin less severe, like tanking casters and offtanking on bosses (and BGs as a side effect). Nice to see they are still working on things.

PS:

Shield of the Righteousness.

Blizz getting confused about their own naming made me laugh irl ^^

Russta · 02/06/09, 1:00 AM

So judging by that, we're looking at getting back 8-10 talent points in the Protection tree. Makes me wonder what we'll end up having to put them in if they have no plans to add more stuff. Will be pretty funny if they don't replace Kings with anything considering they still haven't replaced the old 11 point Kings with anything yet.

The only problem I see with the Guarded by the Light change is that we're already GCD locked in a 969 rotation.

Oh, and I'm really hoping Holy Wrath gets the same treatment as Exorcism.