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

NOTE: This guide has become too large for a single post; it takes too long to load/save edits, causing the webserver to timeout. Currently I'm in the process of revising it for inclusion in the Theorycrafting Think Tank. This post is only the first section of the guide; other sections will be temporarily posted in separate posts in this thread until the entire guide is moved to the TTT.

• 2: http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t37172-p...8/#post1336981
• 3: http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t37172-p...8/#post1336984
• 4: http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t37172-p...8/#post1337037
• 5: http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t37172-p...8/#post1337042

As always, fact-checking or proofreading is welcome.


Text in dark green is quoted information provided by others in this thread or elsewhere. The name of the poster will be hotlinked to the original source of the quote.



Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Frequently asked Questions
• Technique
  • Ability rotations
  • Abilities and Spells
    • Offensive
    • Defensive/Utility
• Preparation
  • Talents
    • Protection
    • Retribution
    • Holy
  • Gear
    • Gearing for Survival
    • Gearing for Threat
    • Enchants
    • Gems
    • Slot-Specific Notes and "Interesting" Items
    • Glyphs
  • Consumables
• Long-term Considerations
  • The Tanking Ethos
  • Professions
• Reference
  • Stats and other Numbers
  • The Hit Table
  • Diminishing Returns
  • Quick and Dirty Level 80 Gear Set

Introduction

This guide, and the discussion thread accompanying it, is intended to be a compendium of collected community wisdom regarding Protection Paladins and tanking. This is, however, a field of ongoing discovery and development, so this guide should be considered a work in progress.

The primary audience for this guide is Protection-specced Paladins (generally meaning at least 51 talent points in Protection including Hammer of the Righteous) who tank (or are interested in tanking) in PvE progression content, primarily heroic 5-mans and 10- and 25-man raids. Some of what's contained herein may touch on leveling 5-mans, soloing, farming, and PvP, but the primary focus will be "serious" tanking.

Much of tanking is art rather than science, and as a result a lot of the information contained herein will be based on opinion -- sometimes the "conventional wisdom" of the Prot paladin community, sometimes my own more personal opinions. I will try to be as fair as possible in relating the opinions of others. Nonetheless, if you disagree with me, post in this thread and I'll try to quote and include as many sensible viewpoints as possible.



Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to the development of paladin tanking wisdom, both on this forum and in other venues; far too many for me to thank them all personally.

Regarding this guide, I am indebted to:

• Quigon for his excellent Protection Warrior Guide whose format I have loosely copied and adapted. In particular, reading his guide helped me mentally catalog the important topics to cover.
• Chicken, who maintained the Protection and You thread for TBC. Similarly, Chicken's guide helped me remember what's important and what isn't.
• All prot paladin posters on this forum, far too many to name without missing someone.
• The Elitist Jerks for hosting and maintaining the premier WoW raiding discussion forum for the last several years.
• My guild, The Eleventh Hour, for not complaining when I decided I was going to try the unproven Prot Paladin spec at the beginning of The Burning Crusade; to "Vish" and "Indi" for treating me as an equal; and perhaps most of all to our healers, for being cool about me yelling at them when I died because I forgot to switch out of healing gear.

Abbreviations

(coming)



Frequently Asked Questions

Simple questions that you expect to have simple answers, especially questions relating to paladins generally moreso than protection specifically, should be asked in the Simple Questions/Simple Answers thread.

What's the best race for a prot paladin?

For Alliance, all three have their upsides. Dwarves potentially get the most expertise, with +5 expertise when using a mace, compared to +3 for a human with a sword or mace, and nothing for Draenei -- but this does require a certain weapon type. Dwarves also get Stoneform, which is potentially useful as a gimmick on certain fights.

The major buff for Draenei is Heroic Presence; since this affects an entire group, a tank of another race can get it from another Draenei, but generally only a Draenei can assume that it will always be there.

Humans get +3 expertise buffs for both maces and swords, and the Every Man For Himself ability, which can be useful for breaking fears and other disorient/stun type effects without having to use Divine Shield and remove all threat. Other races can get this ability by wearing a PvP trinket, so the real benefit for humans is having it available all the time regardless of the gear they're wearing.

If you're going to roll Horde, then obviously Blood Elf is your only option. The big perk for Blood Elves is Arcane Torrent, which neatly reinforces a natural weak point for paladins: scarcity of spell-interrupts.

There are other perks for the different races that can be useful for leveling or grinding, but generally don't come into play in endgame raiding. Diplomacy allows humans to finish reputation grinds 10% faster. Draenei and Blood Elves get bonuses to Jewelcrafting and Enchanting respectively -- if you take these professions, these bonuses are actually quite useful for "leapfrogging" over some of the more expensive/annoying parts of the leveling grind. The Draenei racial healing spell, Gift of the Naaru, can be handy for reducing downtime while soloing (since it uses no mana) and the mana-restoring effect of the Blood Elf Arcane Torrent is similarly helpful.

In my opinion, however, enjoying the appearance of your character is worth more in the long run than any of the racial abilities. You're going to spend an awful lot of time with this character in the middle of your monitor, and it's worth it to make sure your in-game persona is something you're happy with. If you don't want to play a human, then you shouldn't let Every Man for Himself change your mind.

I've got 540 defense skill so I should be uncrittable, but some mobs in instances or outdoors are still critting me. What's going on with that?

Some mobs have higher than normal crit rates, or have buffs that raise their crit rate. These are the exception rather than the rule, so this shouldn't be an issue very often, and no known raid bosses have more than a 5.6% base crit rate against a level 80 player.

Which is better, Blessing of Sanctuary or Blessing of Kings?

As of the 3.2 patch, probably Sanctuary. Both blessings give the same stamina/hp bonus, and Sanctuary's damage reduction and mana return will almost always make it better for both survival and threat than Kings. Even for non-paladin tanks, Sanctuary is better unless the incoming damage is very small, in which case the higher threat and dps of Kings might be more useful.

As I understand the formula from the Combat Ratings thread, this is actually a bit more complicated than it looks at first, though it's probably still accurate. The dodge from defense counts as part of your total dodge for diminishing returns from dodge (as does agility) and the parry from defense counts as part of your total parry for diminishing returns from parry (and the miss from defense of course counts towards the diminishing returns on miss rate).

So, you don't get a free ride by picking up defense or agility instead of dodge, but defense may get relatively better so long as you're still a long way from diminishing returns on parry or miss. Parry (and miss?) seems to have a lower cap than dodge, though, if I'm reading it right.

Because defense interacts with all three diminishing return stats, it's harder to come up with relatively simple rules of thumb for deciding when to get more defense rather than another stat. It should be easier to figure out at what point parry rating will provide more avoidance than dodge while holding defense constant.

Divine spirit - according to wowhead no longer depends on your actual spirit, but rather is a fixed spell damage increase based on how much is granted by divine spirit iteself (80 at max level).

What I got from Cathela's post was that the dodge/parry/miss from Defense was not actually subject to diminishing returns. That can't be right, can it? Even so, it seems like the even advances in those stats with Defense would minimize the impact of DR on avoidance stats, making it relatively stronger in any case.

Okay, so my understanding of Lunk's post is that defense rating itself does not suffer diminshing returns, but dodge and parry gained from DR will diminish the value of dodge rating and parry rating. Is that accurate?

I guess it still means defense is generally better, but it's definitely hard to put a rule on.

You forgot to add that 1 Agility = 2 armor (dodge rating is still better, but worth noting).


Also, you could add that Judgement with 9% hit will never miss, since it cannot be dodged or parried nor blocked.

As far as I understand it the formulla is something like this:

Base agility + base dodge + [extra agility from gear/buffs + dodge rating + dodge gained from defense]* diminishing returns.

So basically everything but the base agility/dodge is affected by diminishing returns. Paladins also have a higher agility->dodge conversion than warriors, which is why the difference in avoidance between both of the classes isn't as substantial as you'd think when just taking the tier sets in account.

I don't have quite enough data or armor pieces to really verify this, but it seems like dodge/parry diminish at the rate they improve in value, so x dodge rating is always worth the same amount of incoming damage. Aka, like armor, avoidance stats can now be measured at a constant value for time-to-live.

Can anyone else help test this? Seems somewhat logical but I just don't have enough swap gear yet to really do anything definitive in terms of testing.

The real question is whether the diminishing returns are actually separated between dodge, parry and miss (which would make it impossible for the above post to be correct), or whether they're working on the sum of all your avoidance stats, in which case it would be interesting whether or not blocking counts for it.

Read the Combat Ratings at level 80 thread, it explains exactly how it works. Dodge, Parry, and Miss are all diminished separately at a rate that varies per class. The exact formula for DR on dodge/parry are known, but miss is not since there is nowhere the UI tells us what our miss chance after DR is. Also, block chance is totally unaffected by DR.

Thanks for putting in the time on the new thread. For myself and possibly others it would be helpful if new changes were highlighted. It's definitely not a necessary change, but is small and could be very helpful.

Dwarf paladins face an interesting problem in that there are currently no known epic tanking maces, which means that you can either forfeit your 5 expertise (~40 rating) racial bonus or use the melee dps [Titansteel Bonecrusher] or spellpower [Titansteel Guardian] weapons.

Given the general abundance of expertise, and the (relative) difficulty in getting defense capped, I suspect the sensible choice is to get a traditional tanking sword/axe and eschew the bonus, but it does seem a shame to miss out on that free expertise :(

With regards to hit rating:

The 9% melee hit cap requires 296 hit rating, not 295, since you want to round up. Similarly, the cap is 263 hit rating if you have a Draenei with you.

It may be worth mentioning that only auto-attacks, Hammer of the Righteous, Judgements, Shield of Righteousness, Avenger's Shield and Hammer of Wrath use melee hit mechanics.

Our other spells: Consecration (confirm if this gets resisted, I've seen many conflicting reports), Exorcism, Holy Wrath and Holy Shield use the spell hit mechanic. Spell hit is different in that instead of 1% per 32.78 rating, for spells, it is 1% per 26.23 rating, and there is a 17% miss rate. It is generally not worth pursuing the spell hit cap with the possible exception of Righteous Defense, which you already covered, but for the sake of completeness:

* You would need 446 hit rating to reach the 17% spell hit cap
* If you have a Draenei in your party, this cap is reduced to 420 hit rating
* If you are already at the melee hit cap, then your spells will have a 5.72% chance to miss. Subtract 1% if a Draenei is present, subtract 3% if a Shadow Priest or Balance Druid is present to provide Misery or Improved Faerie Fire.

With regards to expertise:

* The estimated dodge cap is at 6.5%, which would require 26 expertise or 214 expertise rating to achieve. Removing all parries would almost certainly require much more than this, as boss parry rates ranged from 11% - 15%, but the dodge cap could serve as a decent point of reference until we get more WWSes and such for confirmation of the parry cap.
* Each point of expertise (6 from Combat Expertise, 3 for Humans, 5 for Dwarves) is worth 8 expertise rating, assuming you're trying to tailor your expertise around a given goal.

With regards to avoidance:

The amount of dodge you gain from AGI, defense skill and dodge rating is summed before diminishing returns are applied. The parry you get from defense skill and parry rating is summed before diminishing returns are applied.

Since you need more rating to get 1% parry than you need for 1% dodge even before diminishing returns, dodge is still a better avoidance stat than parry. It is theoretically possible to diminish the value of dodge so much that parry will catch up to its item value deficit, but in reality, this will never happen unless your stats are extremely skewed. You'd basically require just plain dodge rating and AGI with no defense for that to happen.

Oggie is correct in that you can basically consider avoidance as a constant increase to your TTL with these diminishing return mechanics. Technically, the fact that miss, parry and dodge are on different DRs can mean that it may be possible to reach unhittable (as galzhohar pointed out), but there is nothing to suggest that the itemization exists to support this.

Paladins can aim for unhittable-with-blocks, but the only two classes that ever reached complete avoidance in TBC, Druids and Rogues, have had their Dodge gains from AGI and Dodge Rating reduced so much that it is unlikely that they will come close to repeating this mark in WOTLK.

This is more or less what I gathered from it as well. The true strength of Def rating is that it increases both parry and dodge, effectively having a slower decay on returns, and miss and block aren't diminished at all.

Also, when you say "Like dodge rating, parry rating is subject to diminishing returns, but it's already inferior to defense and dodge for adding avoidance." you're implying that "even with DR, it's not worth it to get parry rating", when it's more or less obvious that for certain values of dodge and parry, parry rating will give you better returns than dodge rating will.

What I've always read, and my own personal anecdotal evidence supports, is that only the first tick may be resisted