[MoP] Protection Paladin Guide

[Xothic]

Going into a new expansion with not one, but two, unproven and unknown tanks? Lol

They arn't unproven, they tank for raid team 1. I tank for raid team two.

We need 20 people for mythic, but have an imbalance of roles, so people have to switch.

EDIT: Ok apparently I'm now a lead candidate for Main tank and raid leader of the Mythic team; that was a quick fucking turn around.

I may as well give some context and explanation so my guild doesn't sound like too much of a retarded clusterfuck.

There are a total of six tanks in my guild. We come in pairs.

Me and Warrior, we led the original raid team but both eventually ended up leaving WoW for a while, only to recently return. Neither of us really raid too seriously at the moment, though I've recently become the "standby" tank for the only currently active raid team, a position I'm pretty happy with.

Druid and Warrior2, the package deal; Druid recently had a kid and there is word that he might not raid in WoD in order to devote more time to the whole kid thing. As a result, if he stops raiding seriously Warrior2 tank is likely to stop as well (they're close friends IRL).

Paladin2 and DK; almost everyone hates Paladin2, he is generally an unlikable guy, and while I don't personally have a problem with him, I know alot of the people in his raid team think his poor ability is dragging the team down and pissing everyone off while doing so. DK is the current guild leader. Doesn't play too much nowadays. Openly hates Paladin2.

So yeah. That's the clusterfuck. I was chatting with one of the officers over facebook tonight, and he proposed that they might need me back to Main tank for Warlords. So yeah, get happy everyone, conflict resolved I can keep tanking.

[Yiggles]

Thanks for this guide. Although it is late in the expansion I just started trying out Prot Pally and it has been helpful.

[hyperlance]

I started playing my 90 pally again after a long break, and his item level is around 485. When to timeless isle as you know that's the place to get items, and couldn't kill anything for the life of me, or took forever to take something down.

So is that the norm of protection pallies now or am I doing something wrong?

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Solo out-in-the-world damage is really low, just equip a 2h and run around as ret. It's pretty much the same gear other than the weapon.

[Kethmil]

Just open all the chests, kill Ordos and Celestials and tag along on rare mobs kills.

Dont bother killing normal mobs other than for introductory missions.

[Deleted]

What Kethmil and Butler Log said.

Also, you don't need to spend more than a couple of hours in Timeless Isle. And those can be largely combat free (looting chests; intro quests). I confess, I don't like TI so I am biased. But those people who farm burdens of eternity just make me feel sad: it seems so grindy.

Do keep in mind PVP gear; it's how I've been gearing my recent fresh L90s. There's an old stigma against PVP gear for tanks but it is now baseless (itemlevel does not include pvp stats; dodge and parry are not good stats for prot and are going away anyway). It looks like we'll be getting 550 pvp gear for honour after 14th October. And there are lots of ways to get honour that don't involve actual PVP (e.g. Tol Barad, Wintergrasp, Thunder Isle dailies and a daily Shieldwall rare etc). I'd probably still spec ret though (although prot is supposed to be being made viable for pvp with WoD).

[Deleted]

I checked the icy-veins guide but I want still want to clarify a couple of things. So for the couple of weeks of WoD pre-patch SoO farming, do I still go with haste to 50% and then mastery, I'd assume so but icy-veins is listing haste to 50% only as the 4th priority? How does the whole mastery vs. crit work now, as people have now been having fun with crit in the higher gear levels? Is that still a matter of personal preference or is mastery going to be much better than crit? Or crit better than mastery with riposte?

It doesn't look like a lot has changed, but numbers probably have. So what are the best glyphs for st/aoe DPS now if some survival glyphs aren't needed? Do we still use EF or Sacred Shield? Any really major changes to know about in playstyle/other stuff or does it mostly remain the same?

Thank you for your time.

[Jellospally]

EF ticks for 300 and sacred shield absorbs 2500 every 4 sec at 587... looool so dumb

[Deleted]

EF ticks for 300 and sacred shield absorbs 2500 every 4 sec at 587... looool so dumb

Were you expecting differently? With BoG scaling removed, EF is a dead talent. No paladin in their right mind should be taking it.

[Jellospally]

No I expected EF to suck but not literally do 1/9th of sacred shield per 4 seconds. Maybe like 1/2 or something. Either way its pretty nice to just cast SS and forget for a while.

Only thing that sucks atm in Mythic SoO is Shredders on Siege. Its basically impossible with Holy Avenger, ES, Shredder inside Sawblade and fire at the same time before it does even overload 5. Only once did I kill it after 4 which is still like 15+ seconds slower than previously even with just 3 stacks before 6.0. 5 stacks atm in 6.0 is still weaker than 3 in 5.4

[Zabuzan]

How are people finding the changes so far?

I've felt comparatively squishy atm and from a DPS perspective, doing about half of what my Warrior counterpart is doing on most fights - that said, I moved to a full mastery regem and dropped ES for HP, in case the raid healing ended up being tough... which it wasn't at all at any point. I felt pretty squishy compared with before the patch (primarily on Garrosh, though aside from the DoT nothing else in the entire encounter hits harder than wet noodles so no big deal).

I avoided the shredders entirely on SC and just let our Warrior take them all. We had the entire ranged switch and help on the shredder after DFA, after the first shredder the 2nd was fine and the boss was dead before the 3rd came out anyway iirc.

Vengeance King no longer. Resolve King doesn't have the same ring to it.

Also, assuming that a fight is survivable, has anyone tried going for Sanc Wrath with Glyph of Final Wrath? Hits like a truck now and will certainly be trying it out for next week's Mythic clear for the majority of bosses... mainly to see if I can beat the hunters on damage.

[trystero]

I don't feel squishy at all, but I'm attributing that to the scaling of L90 and the tuning of SoO. No clue how L100 will be in WoD raids. I did Shredders, annoying with damage the way it is and no wings. Having ranged swap to them meant they died shortly after DFA expired. Thanks to ES we're certainly capable of doing this.

DPS is poor. That's not just our perception; Theck wrote about it a few days ago, that we're scaling poorly for damage at 90. He says it should be fine at 100.

Personally I hate the overall change. I went from feeling like the most important person in the raid, who could carry the raid on his back when the going got tough, push himself to output obscene damage, off heal, whatever, to basically an NPC who holds aggro. Whatever, this is what people want, I get it, but I don't like it.

[Zabuzan]

Don't get me wrong, I didn't feel squishy enough that survivability was a problem, but prior to the patch I felt like I was pretty much an iron wall unless I was abusing Vengeance and taking massive damage (which was instantly healed anyway by EF). Now I'm noticing my health spiking to a greater extent and with greater regularity - and that's without doing the stupid gamey stuff of the past as there's no DPS loss attributed to it.

Certainly, Prot Paladin should feel a lot better at level 100, which it most definitely did on the Beta when I last played it.

I can understand the problems that came with Vengeance; why bother having DPS when you can do more as a tank anyway? Who needs tank healing when your HPS is nearly as big as your health pool? However, it was a LOT of fun for the tanks doing it and I think with the removal of snapshotting Resolve is kind of meh because there is no way of really minmaxing it, we don't have anything to fill the void . On the plus side, there are plenty of tank swaps coming in for T17, get those taunt fingers ready, maybe that will keep our minds off it!

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Didn't notice taking a huge amount of damage from it tbh. I had the DivProt glyph in too.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I never used SoI / Tank Meta gem on any of the fights though, always went with SoT + Dps meta gem + dps cloak , absolutely no bonus armor and around 20% mastery. Also we 2 healed it with disc + resto shaman maybe that was why, but still compared to 5.4 there is a huge gap in self sustainability.

I had about 52% on ShoR, 50% haste, 30% crit and mostly used SoT. Running tank cloak and tank meta because I'm lazy. The heaviest tank damage was on Dark Shamans.

Other than Dark Shamans, I never felt in the least threatened by anything. And DS was only an issue because we were tanking them together for the first time since doing them on normal and people suddenly had to deal with the other half of the fight.

[Zabuzan]

compared to 5.4 there is a huge gap in self sustainability.

Definitely agree with this, in 585ilvl or w/e it doesn't really matter because we so drastically outgear the content anyway, but progressing MC in 550-560 would probably feel a lot sketchier than when we did it in 5.4 from a pure tank damage intake perspective... luckily the healers have barely anything else to heal with the 6.0 Mythic retune and even more luckily we will NEVER have to progress through SoO again :P

Do you have any logs from this reset Lazel? Interested in seeing how running SoT and the DPS meta/cloak works out, will try it out myself on Wednesday. Are you still in the old full haste build? I've already regemmed mastery now and probably won't bother changing that again at this point lol, but miles off the haste cap at this point.

Sacred Shield makes me sad.

[trystero]

Easy to find Lazel's logs, just look at top rankings on Siege bosses.

[Zabuzan]

Glad to hear that's still the case! I had 6 months off and only came back recently, well out of tune with everything now!

[Zabuzan]

That's awesome, thanks very much. Want to see how it compares with our Warrior tank if I can go into a more DPS centric build without dying... shame I won't be able to beat the hunters post buff now though!

Have you tried Sanc Wrath with GoFinal Wrath on anything yet?

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Yeah, Holy Wrath was critting for 26k.

http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/VJNPxzT4jQWZ27nt

And before anybody says anything about my sacred shield uptime, I get lazy when I can't die even if I try. And sometimes I even start chatting during boss fights!