vorda

Why? If kiting him is an issue, just make sure you're at max hit box range when tanking him. Even in 10 man (where he seemed to bug sometimes and not get slowed) this gave me enough time to kite him.

 

• frmorrison

Not kiting the General means the healers do not get a chance to fail by not moving. It also helps melee do more damage.

The devs wanted people to kite, but stacking cooldowns you can avoid it (of course DKs are better at that, but with Hand of Salv + trinket and then next time using shield wall it seems that poster was able to live).

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

path411

Just watch your threat, and macro a /cancelaura Hand of Salvation if you are dropping too low. For example, on mimiron p1. I pop it during a plasma blast and quickly cancel it after so I only lose ~12% threat instead of 20%. Though not always available, it has plenty of times it will be, just keep your eye on Omen, and try to decide the best times to use it. (Remember the earlier in a fight you use it, the less overall threat will be reduced and so the better.)

Yes, it stacks with all other mitigation talents, etc. (Basically just a 10s Barkskin).

 

Malarkey

We had a Shadow Priest respec holy with Body and Soul and one of the healers switch to DPS. If that is available to you (or if you raid with a Disc Priest and they can respec holy) the run speed helps a lot with kiting as well. We tried the "tank him and blow a cooldown" and while it can work it is somewhat RNG and it is significantly more helpful if you can kite him. The less damage you take the less you need to be healed and since mana is at a premium during Vezax I'd suggest doing everything possible to minimize the amount of damage you take at all times.

 

path411

At minimum you should be able to tank every other surge as he only does it once per minute. With Divine Protection up, he will be hitting no harder than without a crash.

Depending on what gear you have, what on use trinkets you have, and what outside cooldowns you have access to, you can likely sit through all of them. Salvation will actually reduce a lot more than you think. Instead of the boss hitting you for 200%, salv will drop it down to 160%.

 

Sansa

We downed Vezax with a DK tank who had Icebound Fortitude up for each Surge of Darkness. I tanked the week before, and found that it was very frustrating with 1/2 Spiritual Attunement, and had to respec, and even so.. it was a lot easier with the DK tank. Not kiting helped a lot because often the kiting resulted in healers being left behind, loss of dps, etc.

 

Saltycracker

Reposting this from my guild forums where I am arguing for a [Northern Barrier] (omfg defense sink) over an offtank Warrior:

Expertise is typically a weaker avoidance stat for paladins as only our white hits against a boss can be parried. Judgement, HoTR, Holy Shield, Consecrate, and SotR cannot be parried unlike a warrior where their special attacks can be parried by bosses. My attack table usually consists of half my attacks as white hits and half as special attacks. So on average half of my attacks are eligible to be parried, or I have half as many attacks that can be parried than a warrior.

Wow Web Stats

Back in T7 content, expertise was not as good for paladins because we geared ourselves much different than we do in Ulduar. T7 bosses hit you 6-10k depending on the fight, and the best way to mitigate that damage was to stack block value/strength. Paladins have the luxury of being able to block relatively every incoming attack from a boss thanks to Holy Shield. If you block ~2k damage from every swing you are mitigating a substantial chunk of damage from a boss not to mention running about 50% avoidance. Given this, it truly did not matter in the grand scheme of things if your white hits made the boss parry, as the fair bit of the attack would be soaked up by your shield anyways.

Now in Ulduar, block value and block rating have gone to shit. This is due to bosses that hit for ~20k on average. This is about 2-3 times harder than T7 bosses could hit you for. Your blocks that were soaking up 1/3 to 1/5 of the damage of each attack are now mitigating 1/10, a much smaller portion of each hit. Gearing for avoidance entirely is the better option as even though you are blocking every attack, you are still going to get trucked for at least 18k. I run with about 10% more avoidance and cut way back on block value now because Ulduar bosses are monsters.

Here is where expertise enters the picture. In T7 parrys were trivial, as a parried attack was negligible. In Ulduar, a parried attack can hit you much harder and kill you quicker.

Is this argument logical or am I overlooking something? Just based off WWS data, paladins have half as many parry eligible attacks per minute depending on your time on the target.

 

Frozenn

We got our first vezax 10 man kill recently. I simply ran with him between 2 set spots, was never even close to me. 2/2 PoJ helps quite a bit here I imagine though. He ran about as fast as me, but spent a lot of time casting searing flames or shadow crashes. Wiped once to my healers getting out of range the first pull, but after that we just had one following me to the other spot when he cast surge.

I did spec 2/2 spiritual attunement though, and mana dropped below 30% a few times. Was never oom, but imagine 1/2 which I will run later on might be a problem once I gear up.

 

VorenusKJ

This doesn't mean that the warrior in your guild wouldn't benefit more from the Northern Barrier than you. Even if both of you have the Wall of Terror, the warrior would benefit from it more than you. That is not to say that you shouldn't get it. But the reason to get it is for maximizing threat. The shield has hit and expertise, both insure that more of your attacks land, and up your dps and threat.
The expertise on this shield really isn't going to help you with what you want. If you really want expertise, you could get the SoV Glyph which gives 10 expertise, with that it would be easy to hit the soft-cap of 26 and avoid boss dodge. Thing is, you're talking about how expertise will help you with parry-gibs, and it will, sure, but you would need over 50 to make sure it never happens. Unless you decide to gimp you other stats, having that much expertise is impossible and unnecessary.

TLDR: Better shield for a warrior, great shield for a pally for threat, you should still try to get it.

 

path411

As a side note: Blessing of Sanctuary returns mana on General. (I haven't seen it stated anywhere yet).
I was fine on mana and could easily still keep enough threat simply by ditching consecrate out of my rotation, usually with exorcism subbed in for it.

 

Kikiobi

Was wondering if Divinity stacked with Devo aura as far as the amount of healing done TO YOU.

 

• Mex

Yes.

Regarding expertise and the Northern Barrier, if you're maintanking and the warrior is offtanking, then you'll see more benefit from it simply because you're the one taking those 20k+ hits while he's tanking things like robots or Freya's adds or Ignis golems, etc. Sure, there are fights where the offtank takes hits just as big as the MT (Kologarn if debuffs stack too high, IC with SB last, Thorim, Yogg P3) but throughout a full clear of the instance, the MT will be taking more of the big hits than the OT, so it's better used there.

As far as expertise as a mitigation stat goes though, imo it's best to just ignore it. Avoidance will generally have just as much effect on how likely you are to be parry gibbed, and of course it mitigates damage when you're not being parried as well. Expertise is quite decent for threat still, and you should consider using it there (until hitting the softcap anyhow), but if you're worried about parry gibs, it won't make a noticable, day-to-day increase in your survivability.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. ... this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

 

Mordekhuul

For those using Rawr to evaluate gear in Ulduar, how are you configuring it to compare items for main tanking?

The levers to pull in Rawr of interest include:
- Boss Attack: defaults to 30k
- Mitigation Scale: defaults to 100%
- Threat Scale: defaults to 10

Perhaps most critical would be to determine the average boss attack (pre-mitigation) damage amount. I'm guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000? If someone has some analysis they might link, that would be huge.

Mitigation Scale - does anyone know what Rawr means by Mitigation vs. Survival, exactly? I notice there is no survival scale lever to pull.

I note that the asterisk on the Stats tab for Mitigation says "How much you reduced damage taken when hit.", so perhaps that is exactly what the Mitigation scale measures on the gear comparison window, and if so I'm curious how anyone modifies the Mitigation scale if at all.

Threat Scale - in tier 7 I would just dial this down to zero so I could compare gear solely based on mitigation/survival. In tier 8 perhaps threat will become an issue and deserves some weight. Any thoughts?

 

Saltycracker

For Ulduar bosses, I have the attack set to 80k which brings every hit down to about 20k with gear
I have it set on tankpoints, just less headache that way
Threat = 0.2

 

Mordekhuul

Amusingly, Rawr doesn't let you scale a boss hit above 50k. I have tankpoints installed, which is great for comparing gear in brief, but compiling lists of potential upgrades is so much smoother with Rawr, where you can see all the gear sorted in a list and easily make swaps.

 

vorda

The slider goes till 100k here. Rawr v2.2.2

 

SeanDamnit

I honestly don't know the difference between all the ranking systems in Rawr, so I did a test where I set the optimizer to optimize for Overall, with >=540 defense, and avoidance + block >= 100%. I then ran it for each ranking system using the same gear set, and wrote down the important results (HP, Armor, Avoidance, Guaranteed Reduction, Total Mitigation, Damage Taken, Damage per blocked attack). If there was an option to give threat weight, I set it to .1.

Overall, I found that Damage Taken give the best results, and ProtWarr gives the worst. By "best" I mean that compared side to side against the results from other rankings, each stat was almost always higher, and if anything was lower it wasn't by much. Mitigation (set 1 to 1 ratio) and TankPoints are virtually identical.

I don't know if it was the most scientific experiment, but that's the results. I'd suggest you do the same if you're not sure what ranking to use.

On another note, I think Rawr is valueing Armor too high. I think it's double dipping in both Mitigation and Survival.

Card carrying member of the Inapropriately in Love with Hilary Duff Society.

"Yeah, well, if we could all get what we want I would be eating dinner out of Hilary Duff's skull right now" - Salabesh

 

Mordekhuul

Wow. Fair warning - do NOT update to new versions of Rawr the way I have been. I've been just copying the Rawr files over the old ones in the same directory, but at some point the prot paladin module changed from Tankadin.dll to ProtPaladin.dll and I've been using the old one unwittingly.

Cautionary tale summary: Delete the old rawr files completely before copying in the new ones. The new ProtPaladin module isn't even compatable with my old saved XML file - crashes.

 

IronMonkeyL255

I was noticing that as well. Rawr seems to LOVE armor. Personally, I just do a reality check, and usually end up going for whatever gives me the most avoidance...... :P

 

Kikiobi

OK, Well for the most part ive been offtanking, so are you saying if im not a main tank dont bother?

 

VorenusKJ

No, re-read the quote. You should get the shield, but don't think it will benefit you more than the warrior.

Also, I'm tired of people sticking to BC terms like MT and OT. You can switch it up week to week now, tanking bosses and then going to adds. Vezax is the only fight that I can think of that a specific person should be used, and even then it is still possible as a prot pally.

 

Dekkar

As a side note, has anyone worked out what effect having Reckoning in your spec might affect the proc rates of Blood Draining and Blade Ward?

 

• frmorrison

I am sure Reckoning would increase the proc rate, however getting a possible parry-haste from that extra attack out-weights the gain.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

UVCatastrophe

As others have already mentioned, not kiting Vezax ensures that the healers won't go OOR and allows the melee to DPS him more consistently. However, my guild encountered another issue with kiting when we took him down last night.

If Vezax casts Shadow Crash on you while you're kiting, you have little choice but to keep running from him. If he does this near the end of his Surge, that means that you'll be a fair distance from him when Surge falls off. When Surge falls off, his speed increases substantially - enough that he can outrun the melee. If he gets too far away from the melee, there's a chance that he can cast Searing Flames before they catch up and interrupt it.

I wouldn't expect this to happen very often, but it did wipe us last night. Of course, one of our ranged DPS could have interrupted the cast, but they weren't aware that there was a problem. It comes down to this - why accept the unpredictable risks of kiting when you can trivialize the fight with carefully applied cooldowns?

 

Jebraltar

That also has the (not) awesome side effect of allowing your melee to be targeted by Mark of the Faceless, which is one of those scenarios that can lead very quickly to a few million HP healed.