If [Platinum Band of the Aesir] is available to you, then you might want to consider [The Leviathan's Coil] as a better option. I have to agree with fmorrison here, I'm also a fan of armor (with the consideration that it's more or less useful depending on the fight).
Formally Xyrm/Zurm, the Ret Pally. Now playing my rogue, Zyrm, more casually with RL friends.
A few seconds before the pull, hit holy shield to put up the +450bv buff (it lasts 20sec, normally I will put up DP now as well)
When the boss becomes targettable, use a macro to cast HoR+AS together (below)
Open up with ShoR and go into 969
Generally that gives me plenty of threat to deal with initial burst, and then misdirect/tricks will help me build a healthy lead going into the rest of the fight. At this point I switch back to my normal tanking trinket ([Libram of Defiance]).
My pull macro is:
#showtooltip Avenger's Shield
/cast Hand of Reckoning
/cast Avenger's Shield
Is there any consensus yet on blade ward vs. blood draining vs. another weapon enchant? I'm mostly looking at the future, and the 2k health from blood seems to have less and less value as the bosses will be hitting harder and harder in Citadel. However, effective health seems to still be king for the foreseeable future as far as I know, and that's pretty much what blood draining is.
Is there any consensus yet on blade ward vs. blood draining vs. another weapon enchant? I'm mostly looking at the future, and the 2k health from blood seems to have less and less value as the bosses will be hitting harder and harder in Citadel. However, effective health seems to still be king for the foreseeable future as far as I know, and that's pretty much what blood draining is.
Blood draining is the best if you want that 2k heal when you drop below 35% health (it has 90% or more uptime).
Mongoose if best if you like avoidance/mitigation and Blade Ward is 2nd best for avoidance (due to Mongoose being up more often).
The Hit enchants are good if you want threat the most and aren't hit capped yet.
Mongoose gives the best bang for your buck, since you get a little of each area of tanking (the agility gives armor which is effective health) with the 50% uptime.
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.'
The last direct comparison I saw on maintankadin was this.
Summary:
Mongoose will give you less avoidance (~50 dodge rating compared to 73 parry rating), but gives you 134.4 armor (~12 stam worth of EH) and 58.2 crit rating.
Regarding reaching unhittable for solo Anub25 HM add tanking:
1. First of all, is it worth for a paladin to go for an 'unhitable gear-set for this encounter?
More precise: Currently my guild is whiping on Anub25 HM and we are running Pala/Druid/Warrior as tanks and we are lacking dps. Both me and the warrior have been disussing going for an unhittable set so we can try the more popular 2 tank strat instead to free up a dps spot. My question is if it's equally worth for me as a paladin to go for such a set or does the raid benifit more if we quickly gear the warrior instead?
The pros of having a warrior tanking the adds, that come to my mind, is that they seem to be able to reach higher block value easier than a paladin (meaning better mitigation, plus a fast and smooth way to make sure everything is demo shouted/t-clapped). They also seem to be able to reach unhittable easier with their shield specialisation talent (5% chance to block).
2. Secondly, I have been playing around with Rawr and came up with the following stats (self buffed meaning 45 defense rating/45agility elixirs, 40agi food and BoSanc):
According to Rawr this is 100% avoidance+block versus lvl 82 target. As I have understood it the add tanking requires 101,6% a+b, but I can't really add any item to gain more avoidance or block % without loosing the other.
What am i getting wrong in my calculations? (I have taken into account that raid buffs do give more avoidance but i've understood it is recommended to be unhittable before buffs).
Regarding reaching unhittable for solo Anub25 HM add tanking:
The pros of having a warrior tanking the adds, that come to my mind, is that they seem to be able to reach higher block value easier than a paladin (meaning better mitigation, plus a fast and smooth way to make sure everything is demo shouted/t-clapped). They also seem to be able to reach unhittable easier with their shield specialisation talent (5% chance to block).
According to Rawr this is 100% avoidance+block versus lvl 82 target. As I have understood it the add tanking requires 101,6% a+b, but I can't really add any item to gain more avoidance or block % without loosing the other.
What am i getting wrong in my calculations? (I have taken into account that raid buffs do give more avoidance but i've understood it is recommended to be unhittable before buffs).
Are you taking Holy Shield into account? It sounds like you're not based on these two comments - Paladins should have a much easier time reaching unhittable than Warriors do.
For Warriors to reach unhittable, they will have to sacrifice more stam/avoidance than a Paladin would, because Paladins have 30% chance to block from Holy Shield in most situations.
Regarding reaching unhittable for solo Anub25 HM add tanking
I'll go ahead and say that a warrior is a superior option for surviving the add tanking on this fight, for the reasons you've stated. Critical block will greatly decrease the damage they take, while 5% block chance from talents will allow them to spend less itemisation on avoidance, and so stack more block value in the first place, and having guaranteed tclap + demo on every mob is more reliable than bugging a dps warrior for it.
I would say that paladins probably bring superior, evenly spread threat to the table, but depending on your pick-up strategy this may not be important. As far as Rawr, 100% vs level 82 is the same as character sheet avoidance of 101.6%, so as long as Rawr reads 100% then you're fine (I think you got that already, but your wording was a bit unclear). I don't particularly see the benefit of being unhittable pre-raid buffs; you're not really expecting kings or gift of the wild to go anywhere, nor your shaman or dk to suddenly forget HoW/Str of Earth, and by aiming for unhittable without them you're wasting a significant chunk of itemisation that could otherwise be used to increase your block value.
Don't under-estimate how important keeping a high BV is on this; with the 3.25x multiplier from the 9 stack of the debuff, 100 BV will in effect reduce each blocked hit by 325 damage. When you're getting hit 8-10 times a second, this is a significant reduction in your damage intake, and your proposed stats feature dubiously low block value. For last week's tries, which were our first look at the fight, I was running unhittable raid buffed, plus 2890 or so unbuffed BV, and some of the bursts were still pretty worrying. After changing some gear around this week I'm just unhittable with raid buffs, but 3106 unbuffed BV, and so expect the damage intake to be significantly less threatening.
Edit: in response to Fenix500 - Holy shield is irrelevant on this encounter, you're taking in the region of 16 attacks per second if you're solo tanking four adds due to their haste buff, so holy shield will last a fraction of a second.
Edit: in response to Fenix500 - Holy shield is irrelevant on this encounter, you're taking in the region of 16 attacks per second if you're solo tanking four adds due to their haste buff, so holy shield will last a fraction of a second.
Ah, I wasn't thinking straight - I forgot the number of adds that can add up in Hard
The adds have a damage modifier that can turn even a single hit into a killer. Every bit of damage you can avoid entirely or reduce significantly through block and/or armor makes a BIG difference because of the damage modifier on the adds only kicks in on what actually hits you after mitigation.
Being unhittable in a guaranteed way (so don't count holy shield, and other procs that aren't up 100% of the time) and having a good amount of armor and block value turns this from an 'almost unhealable' situation into 'relatively easy'. Yes, this is one of those occasions where you use every single bit of armor with block value on it (while remaining unhittable) even if it means wearing lvl 70 items. Block is definately king when tanking the adds.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I was trying to figure out how much BR you can drop to account for Redoubt procs so you can stack more BV. I know it's not a perfect solution but since block is last to be rollled on the attack table, if you have enough avoidance, on average you can drop a little BR to stack other stats.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I was trying to figure out how much BR you can drop to account for Redoubt procs so you can stack more BV. I know it's not a perfect solution but since block is last to be rollled on the attack table, if you have enough avoidance, on average you can drop a little BR to stack other stats.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the redoubt buff, it's only up for about 40% of hits (1 - .9^5). I doubt dropping block rating below the avoidance cap (but above the soft redoubt cap) for BV would be profitable, but I suppose you'd have to sim it to really know..
Has anyone done that math yet? I won't have time to sim it till Tuesday.
Originally Posted by Dulak
As far as I know mobs autoattacks follow the same one roll system as player autoattacks, so block is determined in the same roll with everything else.
He was talking about the *ordering* in that one roll - if you have 50% avoidance and 60% block, for example, only ~52% of that block rating actually does anything.
- Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (Up from 6 sec)
- Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.
- Infusion of Light now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 sec.
- Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)
and
- Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
So, aside from the unfortunate LoH nerf, i guess this means our holy breathren will be more inclined to go down the prot tree for the SS. I'm not up to date on current healading preferences, but should they still prefer the ret tree for the crit, then i guess we need to start SSing ourselves again.
- Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
So, aside from the unfortunate LoH nerf, i guess this means our holy breathren will be more inclined to go down the prot tree for the SS. I'm not up to date on current healading preferences, but should they still prefer the ret tree for the crit, then i guess we need to start SSing ourselves again.
The LoH change was reverted, you will still be able to cast on yourself in 3.3.
DG change be nice for the tank to possibly give a raid a safe 20% save if you combine with Shield Wall (I know it doesn't affect the Sac damage, but it still affects normal damage so that the extra Sac damage isn't so bad).
Smart Holy pallies have been using the Prot tree for a while now.
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.'
I wonder if Blizzard has considered what this new DG change will mean. It will give Prot paladins a new 2 minute cooldown with no downside. You can simply cast DSac, cancelaura it and retain the 6 second raidwide 20% redux. Granted a 6 second 20% cooldown on yourself only isn't as good as most cooldowns, but it sure would be nice to have, and the fact that it saves the raid a ton of damage too is fantastic. Of course if you do happen to not be tanking at the time you have the option to bubble and prevent 200k to your party to boot.
This would be extremely clutch in situations like Vezax because we would have a (admittedly weaker) cooldown to pop each minute.
I am however feeling like none of these implementations really work all that well. Given my statements above I don't see how this is what the DivSac talent is supposed to be doing, and the talent ended up complicated and extremely long. I think they need to start from scratch and find a better way for a 'save the raid but the paladin gets hurt' mechanic to work.
From GC:
For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.
I guess this helps you want to use that dodge libram, since the dodge wouldn't be "wasted" like it is now. However, I think this just makes you want to use more Stamina gems than before, since reaching unhittable will be challenging.
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.'
The dodge on the current libram isn't wasted. This change will mean that people will have to stop doing balanced gemming and gem all stam. This does make the new tanking libram and the Tier 10 bonuses look awful.
Unless this Icecrown Radiance mechanic also lessens the severity of DR, I don't see avoidance being worth anything at all any longer.
If, one, Blizzard follows through and really does decrease the damage per hit that bosses can throw out, and two, they itemize gear with high iLvls of Block Rating and Block Value, then this may finally be the patch for the full block tank. Icecrown Radiance puts us back at Naxxramas levels of avoidance, and god knows B.V. was pretty awesome back then, before it was even doubled. Granted we're obviously going to be hit harder than Patchwerk used to no doubt, but I foresee the value of B.R. and B.V. being at least equal to Parry and Dodge.
I doubt we'll see Block Rating on much, if any gear in ICC. Blizz could surprise us of course, but they wanted to push Warriors and Paladins towards thinking Dodge and Parry were our main tanking stats to equalize us more with DK's and Druids. If the bosses really are hitting for less though, I'd go with more armor and Block Value if available then let our 4p do its thing if we're taking too many small hits to fast.
I doubt we'll see Block Rating on much, if any gear in ICC. Blizz could surprise us of course, but they wanted to push Warriors and Paladins towards thinking Dodge and Parry were our main tanking stats to equalize us more with DK's and Druids. If the bosses really are hitting for less though, I'd go with more armor and Block Value if available then let our 4p do its thing if we're taking too many small hits to fast.
I agree we'll probably not see the gear, but I believe that if we do see the gear it'll likely be BiS. Dodge, Parry, and Defense are taking a 40% nerf with this Icecrown Radiance mechanic. If boss damage output simply stays where it is (and doesn't scale up much if any) like GC is implying it will then I'd be utterly amazed if SBR and SBV didn't outstrip those three stats in terms of total damage reduction.
Of course, GC is most likely lying to us in that part and we're going to see yet another massive jump in boss damage. At which point BiS will include 30 stam gems in every single socket, socket bonuses be damned, with double satrina's being permanent BiS, and it won't matter what stats we have on gear because nothing mitigates the Brutallus levels of damage we'll be taking -- we just need enough stamina so our nonstop spam healers have a hope of possibly healing through it.
Edit: To clarify what I mean about the 40% nerf, in my full 258 BiS gear (a far cry from my current gear I admit) I would have almost exactly 70% avoidance fully buffed. The 20% reduction from Icecrown Radiance is post DR, so it would take the same amount of rating for me to go from 70% to 70.5% now as it will be to go from 50% to 50.5% in Icecrown. 70% to 70.5% is a 1.66% reduction in melee damage taken, while 50% to 50.5% is a 0.99% reduction in melee damage taken, meaning each point is mitigating roughly 60% as much damage with Icecrown Radiance as it would without it. Thus, 40% nerf.
The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.
The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.
It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard.
I don't have any clue what that means :/
Does that mean 122,4% miss,dodge,parry,block will be the new "unhittable" cap?
Basically, yes.
One of the questions I (and I assume others) was wondering about was whether that 20% would come out before or after diminishing returns was applied - if it had been *before* dr, the value of dodge rating would have jumped relatively speaking, since dr wouldn't be hitting it as hard. 'After' was the best decision in my opinion, since it won't change the relative values of doge and parry, and won't affect the different tanking classes as differently.
Edit: Sorry, I think I was unclear - frmorrison said it better below.
One of the questions I (and I assume others) was wondering about was whether that 20% would come out before or after diminishing returns was applied - if it had been *before* dr, the value of dodge rating would have jumped relatively speaking, since dr wouldn't be hitting it as hard. 'After' was the best decision in my opinion, since it won't change the relative values of doge and parry, and won't affect the different tanking classes as differently.
122.4 would be unhittable, so that makes Redoubt a little better (chance to get 10% shield block).
GC answered that question, the -20% dodge is after DR, so stat weights don't change.
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.'
so let's say a boss attacks faster but with less damage now, does that mean we can not count on our Holy Shield during a fight because it could run out of stacks before its cooldown is ready?
that would mean our avoidance suffers again from those "new" bosses.
on the other hand it's easier to heal a 10k blocked heal than a 20k blocked one
10/20/09, 10:42 AM
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