This is my point exactly... to sit on it when needed. I was trying it out last night and ultimately my approach was to have something to help the healers late in fights when mana is low and at a major premium. On more than a few occasions I was able to return +50k heals on myself with VR. W/ it glyphed and extended it really may have it's use in raids. Threat wise, at the end of the fight threat is a non-issue so I'm not necessarily worried about the rotation at that point. In most situations that late in a fight my goal is just survival... multiple VR heals replaces HP which definitely helps get the job done.

All of this may be moot in the future with upgraded gear and stronger healers however right now it's an interesting spec. Although a bit foreign to warriors I'm going to keep working it and also see how it plays out in my raids this weekend.

From my limited experience in only 2 nights of cataclysm raiding, one thing I did notice was how large a portion of total raid damage tanks can contribute, especially in the 10 man bracket. I still support maxxing survivability over all as tank, but a 3% damage loss over the duration of the fight is a lot more significant than a 3% threat loss. Its possible that the extra damage ending the fight a few seconds sooner makes up for any extra mana the healers had to spend during the 20% range.

On another note, is it normal to be maintaining more than 50% up time on Inner Rage without sacrificing heroic strike?

Technically not a pre-raid item, but Crossfire Carbine is quite easy to get. It drops from Bastion of Twilight trash (even in 10 man normal mode, ignore the heroic tag) which can be farmed with ease by a team of people in mostly 5 man hc gear.



Regarding Impending Victory, I feel like raid tanks should spec for it. Even if it's a poor talent, it's still something that increases our survivability.

In a 5 minute fight, in practice you tend to get about a minute window of Impending Victory. That's 13 uses or so on average, which is 117% of your health in healing. I'm using a 9% heal here. If it's actually 9.54% then the total amount healed becomes 124%.

Yes, I raided in the first week of Cata. Not to the extent of people like Xav, but I'm still finding it's usefulness limited not only by the fact that it's not a 100% chance on Devastating a target below 20% (and therefore may never even proc, even if that chance is extremely low) but also because I prefer most of my other talents over it. When/if I get to a fight where keeping the offtank (thats me!) alive is a real concern and the 5-10%% health every 2 GCD's (if it were to be THAT good, which I doubt it is, but then again, it could proc every single Devastate) is needed, then I may spend the points for it. But in the 3 BoT, 5 BWD and 1 TotFW bosses I've attempted, I can't see the 5-10% being a massive difference. But it's mainly because I can't guarantee it'll proc.

...

Pinnick you have seen a few heals around 55k is this from the Victory Rush heal criting?

Based off of Myul's 160k hp total from raid buffs (this total could vary from tank to tank), Im only seeing the total heal from a spec'd and glyph'd Impending Victory build which includes field dressing being around 19k (non-crit of course) if it does crit then we are looking at a 38k heal, which as you stated is "pretty significant"

Which would make and Impending Victory build a viable spec at least early on to improve survivability.

I'm seeing 55k heals as well with Victory Rush, but only the regular one after you kil a mob that gives exp (Victory Rush is glyphed). I think Pinnick was talking about regular VR, there's no way you can heal 1/3 of your life with Impending Victory.

My brief experience in raids suggests that Impending Victory is a no brainer for now, especially since they fixed paladin mana regen. When you glyph Victory Rush, it heals for around 10%. I have roughly 160k health, I'm seeing between 15k and 18k heals. Haven't seen a crit yet though.

On a side note, I'm feeling Vigilance is pretty useless. Vengeance goes up really fast without it, it doesn't offer 3% dmg reduction to the other tank, and I haven't see fights where you need to taunt all the time. I'm probably keeping it in the back of my head for adds heavy fights, but for now it seems like a wasted point, even in a raiding situation.

Pretty new here, but I figured I'd add a little.

I just tried out spec'ing for Impending Victory prior to our raid tonight, and I seemed to like it. I decided to give up 1 point in Thunderstruck and Vigilance for it... I haven't yet found Vigilance to be terribly useful. During our 9 minute long Omnitron kill, our priest healer died towards the end, leaving the 2 paladins to finish the fight. In this case, the heals I got from Victory Rush were quite useful, and probably helped secure the kill.

Here's the log from our kill, if people wish to dig further: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Note: I forgot to pick up the 50% bonus glyph, so the heals are significantly less than they should have been. But still strong.

Anyway, after tonight, I would believe that the point loss in Thunderstruck and Vigilance is worth it. Even in heroics... my healer got killed by Corborus's burrow but i managed to finish the fight alive with Impending Victory. If you wanted to min/max for single target, you could probably get rid of piercing howl and put the point back in Thunderstruck, but I get so much use out of the ability that I would hate to give it up.

I gave Impending Victory a shot last night when we did Maloriak, Council, and Atramedes. I found it somewhat useful at the end of Council as we were kiting around in Phase 3 and healing is very intensive, but it did not proc nearly as much as I would have liked and I did not want my person DPS to suffer so greatly trying to proc it, as it is a very DPS intensive phase.

During Maloriak I was the kiter and at the end had the two Prime Subjects, which never go down in health, so the talent was ultimately useless for me there. On Atramedes it was somewhat beneficial, but not a, "can't live without it" talent.

Ultimately I believe it needs to be changed to a proc or a long cooldown or something else, as it is currently "OK at best" and perhaps worth using, but not a "must have" by any means.

Which is exactly what Blizzard wants. The whole reason for these new talent trees was so that there are more optional talents and less "you must go this build."

I personally refuse to take Impending Victory mainly because of the 50% chance for it to proc. If it was 100% after a Devastate then it would be interesting, but it currently is too unreliable for my taste.

I am loving Safeguard though. With the 30% damage reduction it is basically a mini shield wall on a 20 second cooldown for any player in your raid. The fact that the distance requirement was removed from Intervene makes it all the more appealing.

I´m also new here so forgive me if you guys consider the "which avoidance to take"-issue resolved, but as far as i can tell, by now it is no longer about how much damage we can reduce, but more about how much mana we use up per hitpoint lost, isn´t it?

seeing as how my healers have either casts that give me a regular decent amount of life for ca.2k mana or a big fat amount for 6k mana (ca threefold increase in costs but only 1.5-2 times increase in healing put out) the whole issue becomes a question of taking out spikes rather than going for pure avoidance and forcing healers to use a big fat chunk of mana at times, while at other times they still cannot will-regen because they have to heal the raid.

As far as i can remember during BC there where two theories or rather tank-concepts on how to build a tank:
EH (Effective Health) and pure avoidance (dodge/parry) - seeing as how pure avoidance gains better/more stats (as was discussed earlier in this thread), this would seems the choice to make, but I have to disagree: with the new deminishing returns on the dodge and parry stats it seems that once again we are pushed to EH in order to be most effective in a raidsetting, since we eg. lack the massive armor and shield of a druid, which allows him to go for dodge only (the OT in my guild has about 10k more armor than me and i guess I´m not the worst equipped tank out there with average ilvl of 351)

anyhow those are just my 2 cents on the matter...