[MoP] Protection Paladin Guide

[Elathi]

Put an edit on my last post 'cause I was thinking about it wrong. It'd just take however much haste it is to bring Judgment to a 2 second cooldown.

[Splosion]

Er, what do you do after the 3rd gcd when cs and j are both on cd (cs->j->cs ->gap) ?
Do you rely on the two cs having given you a proc ? 20% chance of proc from each CS? When you get to the gap you have a 64% chance of not having had a proc form either CS.
Do you rely on DP procing off SoR too ? 30% chance of proc, 70% of not proc'ing. At the gap you'd still have a 44.8% chance of having had no GC procs from either CS nor a DP proc.

Nevermind, I'd forgotten SotR was off-gcd. If we bump the value of haste up to 200%, we have a 1.5sec CS cd (pointless, since we either use it every 2 or every 1 second, but it does give us a 2sec cd on judgement. It's still an unrealistic amount of haste, 25.6k rating.

I think that changing the cycle will break the previous formulas, or rules on HPgen=SoR uptime and the likes.
For exemple, your cycle does not use J on cd, but only every 4s which is a terrible loss of HPgeneration.

It's not a loss if you literally cannot benefit from it (1 HP per second, SotR buff uses 3 HP. DP would just add stored HP, but the proc chance isn't high enough to make it reliable. Any increase in haste would waste HP from CS for exactly the same reason (as I have just demonstrated).

[Deleted]

Oh yeah i forgot the two charged hp thing. Theck said he though a bit on it and found something like ~250%haste was needed without DP to get a 100% SoR which isn't a 2s J, but pretty damn close to it.
Anyway, unrealistic mastery soft-cap is unrealistic ^_^ Heck, a leather tank hitting dodge cap is probably more likely lol

More on topic, seems like Lust/heroism will actually make a significant difference for us now.
+30%haste, assuming we aren't gearing for haste in the first place and are hit/exp capped:
4.5 -> 3.46s for CS and 6 -> 4.6s for J (reducing our 5.6hp cycle (9GCD) from 13.5 to 10.4s)
increasing our HPgeneration/SoRuptime to from 41% up to 53% (51%->67% with DP).

+10% SoR goodness is pretty sweet considering we never really gained anything from it before.
Assuming a 50% dmg reduction SoR (20mastery) buff that'd mean (very) roughly speaking a reduction in physical damage intake around 8-10% (subject to how much avoidance we have)

[worcester]

i have a question about PoJ. i dont have beta so i cant check, but does minor speed boost from boot enchant not stack with PoJ or is it an assumed cause thats how it works now. Since the druid talent Feral swiftness stacks with boot enchants, and cat form (so i read in the druid forum). i was thinking the case was similar to poj. also i cant find the +mastery only boot enchants, only the +mastery and minor speed.

[MerinPally]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't stack. Even then, the 15% movement from PoJ at all times is double what the boot enchant gives. As someone said earlier in the thread, when we have a 3stack of PoJ we'll be wondering how we ever managed with merely the boot enchant/old PoJ before.

Even if it doesn't stack though, once you're hit capped (therefore maxing your mastery stat weight as far as boot enchants are concerned) then Pandarens Step beats Precision because although you only get half the effect, it's better than nothing. That's of course assuming you didn't reforge parry/dodge to hit as that would be stupid.

[Splosion]

Oh yeah i forgot the two charged hp thing. Theck said he though a bit on it and found something like ~250%haste was needed without DP to get a 100% SoR which isn't a 2s J, but pretty damn close to it.
Anyway, unrealistic mastery soft-cap is unrealistic ^_^ Heck, a leather tank hitting dodge cap is probably more likely lol

More on topic, seems like Lust/heroism will actually make a significant difference for us now.
+30%haste, assuming we aren't gearing for haste in the first place and are hit/exp capped:
4.5 -> 3.46s for CS and 6 -> 4.6s for J (reducing our 5.6hp cycle (9GCD) from 13.5 to 10.4s)
increasing our HPgeneration/SoRuptime to from 41% up to 53% (51%->67% with DP).

+10% SoR goodness is pretty sweet considering we never really gained anything from it before.
Assuming a 50% dmg reduction SoR (20mastery) buff that'd mean (very) roughly speaking a reduction in physical damage intake around 8-10% (subject to how much avoidance we have)

http://chardev.org/profile/350041-Avoidance-rogue.html

As for the haste thing, indeed. It's nice to finally benefit from raid buffs, bloodlust, and encounter specific stuff like Sinestra/Madness.

And with the SotR change (from on-hit to on-cast), we're looking at leaning on avoidances rather than hit/exp, unless we want better HP generation.

Or dps of course.

[Deleted]

Weeeell... mastery is better than avoidance, specially if you take DP talent so we probably will not want to reforge out of it, which only leaves whatever little haste we'll get on our gear if we get some pieces of shared loot with mastery/haste on it... and even that is debatable since it potentially "remplaces" a piece with dodge/mastery for exemple.
How else are we going to get hit/exp capped other than reforging parry/dodge into it ?

[note] i though a bit on gemming, we might want to gem for strait Strengh instead of parry : STR gives almost the same avoidance as parry but also DPS increase AND a token amount of survival via ap -> sp conversion on our WoG/SS abilities.

At the very very least, having some armor pieces like Shannox or Hagara's belts gemmed with STR from you Ret spec will be perfectly viable.

@Splosion:LoL @ tank rogue ! Take only hunters as dps(for agro dump) and you're golden for anything.
the thing is the amount of rating needed. I would argue that the 5100 rating are better spent on hit/exp than dodge/parry
5100dodge is 5.7% avoidance, before DR. Probably not much more than 5% if that in reality.
missing on +7.5hit/7.5exp on the other hand makes our 9GCD cycle go from 5.6 HP down to 4.8 (i think, 15% miss on 3CS worth 1.2hp each=.54hp, .15% miss on 2 J worth .30hp so a total of .84 "missed" HP), so a decrease of SoR uptime down to 35.6%.

[MerinPally]

Right so... Theck and Splosion say avoidance but Ayashi says mastery may edge avoidances when it comes to being hit capped. Is there anyway to run the thingy Theck does, by us mere mortals? Matlab is it called? Whatever the hell that thing is? Then to run it with being hit and expertise capped to derive some new values? If masterys value increases as much as it sounds then prioritizing hit/expertise and mastery stacking could be more beneficial.

If Theck was running with 66% of the hit/exp that is required for cap then we can take that as an average/badly geared tank so if we go down the route that a raid tank will be running hit/exp cap then mastery becomes best stat, but then that would require reforging from Dodge/Parry/Mastery which unless we got a big bonus from hitting the caps then restacking/gemming mastery then it may be potentially harmful as we've already had to give up a lot to reach that point unless we have a lot of hit/expertise on our gear (hit enchants here may be an example of the usefulness) - it's more expertise I'm worried about as the large stat weight drop per point.

So with regards to reforging priorities, what the top dog is will come down to both how easy it is to be hit/expertise capped and whether the stat loss is worth it, and how much mastery grows from those extra 2.5%. Holy Power generation is our survival mechanism so despite the stat loss I can see them being useful stats to have around, but I probably wouldn't recommend reforging specifically into or out of them.

I'm still confusing myself, it's late and I was wasted yesterday so I'm still not with it and I'm really sleepy. From what I can tell, we're going to want to rush hit up as fast as possible as some generators like Judgement can't be dodged/parried so expertise is not required for that one, and being hit/exp capped = holy power generation = survival where mastery comes in as valuable. Dependent on how valuable expertise then appears to be, it makes stat priority look like so:

Dodge = Parry > Hit > Expertise > Mastery > Haste

However, as hit rises in value more than expertise, would that push mastery above expertise? Is my first major question. The difficult bit comes as then for reforging because we want to max dodge/parry but don't want to lose hit, and equally, mastery is pretty ballin'. Could we potentially be seeing 2 builds emerging? The dodge/parry stacking paladin with no hit/expertise, and the mastery stacking hit/expertise capped ones? The former would have less SHOTR uptime but dodge/parry are more powerful survival stats - the latter will have more SHOTR uptime and more dps but will have sacrificed a lot of stats (at least in earlier tiers) to get to that level? It will also have to rely on DP rather than HA whereas the former could use either.

However, all this is speculation until we can run a whatever to find out stat weights in terms of mastery dodge and parry for a hit/expertise capped tanked, to see whether it's a viable method to mastery stack at that point or whether dodge/parry remains on top. If hit/expertise is happening it means more finishers meaning DP is awesome as a talent making this even more valuable.

As SHOTR is getting the DS treatment then hit/exp are obviously devalued as Splosion says but do Thecks numbers reflect that? I'm going to guess not, hence with hit/expertise devaluing, that also must devalue mastery because at first it rose well as hit/exp increased but with their values reducing, it should have a knock on effect albeit not as severe as the damage reduction portion of the spell is there - also, because we'll be able to cast it again due to said miss and we'll STILL get the buff, could avoiding hit/expertise be the way forward for maximum survival? Does the fact that occasionally those misses will grant more SHOTR uptime for those brief seconds, outweigh the extra holy power generation from hit/expertise? If yes, we end up in a:

Dodge = Parry > Mastery > Hit > Exp > Haste

situation which is fantastic because those are the stats we get on tank gear. I don't really buy the whole "we need more dps" argument unless we're having threat issues and I've not heard a thing about threat all Beta so I'm going to assume we're doing pretty well. Same goes with gemming strength really - it's still less parry than we'd have otherwise and that survival contribution is tiny. Personally by the sounds of everything I'm still leaning on my initial Avoidance+Stamina hybrid gems, up until we have enough health to take a decent few hits from a boss without the healers bricking it. Our damage will be more spiky through this method than with Mastery but it shouldn't be anything unmanagable. The question then comes down to whether we reforge our mastery into hit to buff its stat value or whether leave it the hell alone as it's value is hugely diminished.


God you can tell I've got a bit to say, been days since I could concentrate on paladins due to A level results. I have more but I'll leave it until tomorrow. Hopefully the changes will end soon so we don't have to adapt things and we can get a definitive answer before the 28th so this guide can be all perfectly written up for people to feel the benefit of ^^

[Deleted]

Actually SotR was finally adjusted to grant the mitigation buff on-cast rather than on-hit on beta as of last build. But don't worry, SoR consumes HP upon cast as well, just like DS consumes runes on cast otherwise hit/exp would actually be "Bad" stats that would reduce our survivability.
And, as a bonus, new Theck blog post, which is incredibly on topic and has nice pictures and stuff... Theck, are you reading this ?

For my part that pretty much finished solidifing my gearing planing : minimum amount of dodge/parry ->Hit cap -> mastery stacking -> as much haste gear as possible, but still reforging out of it -> expertise from whatever leftover there is. (exp not double diping really killed it's scaling (T_T) )
I play my paladin tank in a ... less than stellar group so i like having as much of my own survival in my hands is possible.
Oh, and seeing how STR is pretty much never more than a mere relative 3% behind parry rating, i'll be gemming raw STR in red slots, if i can get even just a 5% increase on WoG and Seal of insight i'd consider that a good trade.

[MerinPally]

Thanks for the new Theck link, my sister is going to the V festival today and I sold my ticket to her best friend so they can go together and I can spend a few days at the pub in relative peace This means that I have quiet at home and I can read this stuff and join in the differentiation and actual maths (Got a really strong A, just off an A* in my A level maths result on thursday! )

And yeah I was aware of the DS treatment for SHOTR as I wrote a little paragraph on it, but I was not aware that it still cost the Holy Power as I've only been playing with the hit/exp cap on the PTR. This therefore makes that paragraph about more buff uptime, completely null and void.

Seeing as you'll be going for mastery/survival, if your method is the best for that then it would by default be the best for all tanks because whilst they won't be mashing out as many WoGs, they'll be aiming to reduce all incoming damage to the minimum possible extent. Therefore the strength for extra WoG's may be a bit overkill and for general tanks, completely unnecessary, but the rest is still interesting. Problem is that we need to arrive at a conclusion for what is best for survival so we can update this guide - whether there is more than 1 option and they're both close, could be the case and in which case I can write up both (in detail if desired) and then why they're both fantastic.

Before I can do that however, I need to read through Thecks blogs and find out just exactly how much mastery will increase for once you are at the hit cap, and then take a quick peek at the gear that's easy to obtain to work out how much of that hit we'll have. Having had a very brief look before I go and hide in the shower as my sisters friend is coming over in a minute, even Theck seems to say that you could go down either route of dodge/parry stacking and mastery stacking. However, if you're going down the former then you'll want Mastery after Dodge and Parry, and for the latter, you'll want to get your hit up but haste and expertise are a way behind. This leaves us with the 2 interesting priorities as below:

Parry > Dodge > Mastery > Hit > Expertise > Haste

and

Hit > Mastery > Parry > Dodge > Expertise > Haste

Now the bottom one isn't quite what the graph says but the value of mastery won't be up to the required level until the hit stat is increased sufficiently close to cap. Also, mastery is easier to increase than dodge/parry so we can get more mastery % in lower gear levels.

The more I look at this, the more and more it looks like a situation that Death Knights had for about 70% of Cata, with how there is both an avoidance and mastery build, both of which are good but there is no clear winner. I'm still edging on the side of Avoidance eventually winning out because Mastery suffers from diminishing returns simply because it's increasing, in the same way as dodge and parry, and may eventually in later tiers, dodge and parry will become superior. Unless there's a bit of a breakthrough in the next week and a half then seeing as it's close enough for Theck to write extensively on the matter then it may be worth including both builds into this guide, along with their appropriate gemming strategies - all that would be required then is to work out how much stamina we would like to have and whether any hybrids - how many boss hits we feel comfortable with our healers being able to mop up.

[Deleted]

I strongly suspect "my" method will give subpar average physical damage mitigation compared to avoidance focused. Higher chance of avoiding 100% of the damage is better than having the same number of hits being just blocked or reduced by SoR afterall.
Amusing thing, is that i see mastery build overcoming avoidance spec in later tiers: more ratings avaliable means higher DR on avoidance with inturn makes the rating echange towards hit/exp/haste more favorable.
Against magical damage avoidance is void, and only higher HPG via hit/exp/haste and higher mastery will have any effect, so there's always that.

I have no access to beta (and seriously no motivation to go through tens of WOLs!) no see the "average" physical damage and special skills of each boss. We will however need someone to go through it and come with a rough hp number to be able to survive most boss spike damage (with decent CD management).
As far as i know, there's two kind of spikes that kills :
-white hit + medium yellow skill + white hit: (zonoz: high stacks white hit+ ray attack) SoR will at the very least affect white hits, and seeing how powerful it is, we will hardly ever be in real danger from those. And those are the most frequent. I definitively see the mastery build shine here: higher HPG means easier to get enough SoR to align with those dangerous white hits
-high yellow skill: (madness empale killing you on it's own) versus every tank is roughtly equal and totally depends on his CDs. I'd see both builds being equal here (since avoidance is "never" considered on those skills. See how druids were OP against balerog's decimation blade!)
So yeah ... mastery builds for me, thank you very much

how many boss hits we feel comfortable with our healers being able to mop up.

First thing that came to mind : "how about the amount of time between two SoR assuming no saved HP ?"

[MerinPally]

Well, the mastery option only has a higher Holy Power Gain (I assumed that's what HPG stood for) if the avoidance one is not hit/expertise capped. Looking at stat values, it's low down our list but due to the abundance of hit/exp on gear and some of the enchants, we're going to get some so we're not going to be at the bare minimum, and each bit of hit/exp increases Masterys value, and at the moment, according to Thecks graphs, you're looking at:

Parry > Dodge to 12% > Mastery > More dodge > Hit > Expertise

However at the same time we know we don't want to completely avoid hit and expertise so whilst according to stat weights we'd reforge out of them into parry/mastery/dodge. This increases masterys value and may make it more valuable than dodge@12% but it's probably not something worth mapping as I guess you'll hit 12% dodge pretty easily. On later tiers (or maybe even in full raid gear from the first tier) then it may not be too obscene to consider going the avoidance stacking route whilst also getting hit/exp capped, because this nets you the HPG you want and makes one of your top stats stronger.

On later tiers, should 50% mastery become possible (you never know) then we can change hugely but lets make it clear that the chances of us reaching that whilst being hit/exp capped, to make it better than avoidance, is low. Hence maybe for the first tier this may not be the grandest idea. Viable? (Oh that horrible word) of course it is, it will probably be inferior to the avoidance build but I still think that you won't have too much trouble with it. You'll take more damage but it won't be raid-breaking levels as long as your healers are on the ball.

First thing that came to mind : "how about the amount of time between two SoR assuming no saved HP ?"

My thoughts too, and if things are off cooldown and you get no AS procs then this is every 9 seconds then it lasts for 3 seconds so there is very roughly a 6second window of you-getting-your-ass-kicked-oppurtunity. So if you wanted to be ultra safe you'd take as much health +10% to survive 6 seconds worth of completely unmitigated boss attacks plus a little extra on top of the 10%. How hard and often do bosses hit? No idea. Work it out at the time I guess



Anyways, seeing as the patch is 9 days away (*gasp*) it fortunately sounds like we're getting somewhere with this, almost to the point we can hit some agreement over it? This would be ideal so it's almost 100% finished (preferably 100%) ready for the magical day. All we need to do is "Stat Priority" which we're doing now which we can hopefully finish shortly, then as a result of working out that one, reforging can be done quickly, and same goes for gemming. After that all we need is a rudimentary rotation/priority list. I'm prepared to write up both the mastery and avoidance builds if required but we all seem to be in agreement that avoidance is superior and I roughly know Splosions idea on this so could we ge that re-iterated and then Ayashi, a list from an avoidance perspective from you and then we can see what we have and finalise this? Hopefully nothing will change in those 9 days that will affect this list but... you never know - once we get the bones set in place, any small breaks we can just glue back together.

[Elathi]

Only relevant for a few weeks, I guess, but are Cata and below gems not changing to match the stat budget style of MoP's gems? (that being double secondary stats)

[Splosion]

Only relevant for a few weeks, I guess, but are Cata and below gems not changing to match the stat budget style of MoP's gems? (that being double secondary stats)

They've not been balanced around that, so I doubt it. Would be awesome though.

[Deleted]

I belive you are a bit mistaken on the avoidance build Merin.
Theck's stat weights show that if you go for avoidance, as it's clearly the "best" choice in TDR, then you should go and dump everything you can in it.
-See the first image the TDR dodge scaling:
dodge is better than parry (before DR) until ~10% dodge,
better than mastery until ~15% dodge,
and beats hit until well over 30% dodge.
Any stat point I put in hit(exp and haste are worse than hit) would reduce my damage intake better if i had put it in dodge. That does factor SoR uptime and the likes.
-see the second image the TDR parry scaling:
Parry is better than dodge (before DR) until ~ 20% parry
Is virtually always better than mastery
and i actually can't tell from the image how far to the right the crossing point between parry and hit would be. Way more than 50% parry at the very least
Meaning any point I have in mastery would be better spent in parry always, and any point in hit would be much better in parry up until i get a ridiculous parry rate way over 50%.

A build that goes for both pure avoidance and get's hit/exp cap will be less effective than one that forgoes the touch stats and spends those stats into more avoidance. In other words from a TDR point of view:
Pure avoidance build > bastard avoidance hit/exp capped build > mastery build
Also: note how STR line closely follows parry. Saddly there's only one case where we could change a rating stat into STR but not into parry: Wrist enchant. +170STR bracer enchant is superior to 170 dodge enchant if dodge is low enough in DR (partically always since we'll have significant dodge on our gear).
"STR is the second "best" stat for paladin tanks at the moment."

The pure avoidance stat weight would be something like this:
Parry -> STR -> dodge 12% -> mastery -> dodge 30% -> hit -> still more dodge as exp/haste are significantly worse than hit, can't really tell where the crossing point, maybe 40% ? -> exp -> haste


For my mastery build it'd be
Mastery -> hit (cap) -> exp(hardcap there is not soft cap anymore) -> parry -> dodge ->haste
Saddly i can't back up this with Theck's numbers since avoidance is better than mastery and we purposefully go stack the lesser stat. The logic would be that since we are stacking mastery we will also want to go for the hit cap as that significantly increases the value of the stat that we are stacking in the first place.
Theoricaly we would only start taking some hit ratings once mastery reaches a bit over 45 as we clearly see the value of mastery crossing the value of hit at around that point on the mastery graphic (the crossing point with exp is probably around 60mastery).

Maybe justification to have a exp/hit-less mastery build too ? I'd go on a leg an guess it would stand between avoidance hitcapped and mastery hitcapped builds from a TDR point of view.

About haste, we see on the haste scaling graphic that haste also significantly increases mastery and hit value, but haste itself is crappy. I really don't know if adding haste on your gear to that the mastery and hit you already have get an increased value is beneficial enough to justify haste low interest. Strange, i know.

[MerinPally]

Your build is identical to mine except you're adding in strength and an extra level of dodge between hit and expertise

I chose not to include primary stats because I was also looking at a reforging thing and you can't factor strength into that. Mine was a "this beats that" rather than an arrow of "do this, then that, then that" I didn't bother adding haste as it's so unlikely to be on our tank gear, only there are few exceptions like Runescriven Demon Collar and the spine shoulders. So my build was saying "prioritize this over that" rather than "stack this to x level then make sure you get hit cap" like you seem to think I was So in all seriousness, our builds are pretty much the same.

I was just attempting to make it the case that we would not necessarily hide from hit/exp, it's still a useful stat in terms of survival (which it isn't considered now) hence it appears on there.

[Splosion]

Spine shoulders have haste?

Kidding, my view on a lot of this stuff is that we cannot be sure until metrics for actual MoP bosses are in action. Sure maximising TDR might be cool, but if that were the best way in cataclysm, we'd still be gemming dodge and parry after CTC cap. We're not, so we can likely assume that TDR is infact not the best method of simply staying alive.

I've no idea how healer mana is going to work in MoP. I'm expecting it to scale slightly faster earlier on like it did with Wrath (a fast exponential curve), but then get to the stage where healers might care for a huge amount of throughput, sacrificing regen to do so. (Although someone will probably tell me I'm wrong, as people on these forums love to do).

Chances are the mastery>dodge=parry metric will emerge, or at least mastery>hitcap>parry=dodge>exp will be a reasonable option. It's tricky to weight, especially when 4/5 of our t14 pieces have inherently weird stats, from a cataclysm point of view. It'll also depend on talents (if a boss has a mechanic that makes avoidance strong, like saurfang/baleroc, or a boss has an active mitigation leap like chimaeron/hagara. Stats will be a lot more fluid.

That said, Merin's last post makes the most sense, at least from a 5.X til MoP release point of view. We're much higher up the DR curves than we will be at the start of MoP, even in 5man gear.

[MerinPally]

Gah I'm too tired, and still in elation that the Hagara belt finally dropped for me tonight

If we can't decide I'm prepared to edit and update this post fairly regularly, and provide both builds. Was just wondering if anyone felt so strongly that they'd disown their paladin and this forum in response.

[Elathi]

I'd be tempted to with something like:

dodge/parry > hit > exp > mastery > haste
edit: messed with the order a bit

Just to smoothen damage intake. I've no data to back it up, and I know it makes no sense according to the TDR calculations.

Sure maximising TDR might be cool, but if that were the best way in cataclysm, we'd still be gemming dodge and parry after CTC cap. We're not, so we can likely assume that TDR is infact not the best method of simply staying alive.

This would be my reasoning for it. We've quite rarely geared for max TDR. Even in a time we were pushing about everything we had into mastery and still not maxing CTC (tier 11), up to a point (due to diminishing returns) avoidance still would've been better for TDR, it's just that mastery was much better at smoothing out the damage.

Or am I totally wrong?

[Splosion]

Mastery likely smoothes damage intake, traditionally avoidances are extremely spikey, especially early expansion, despite the change to str (before we had agility -> dodge)

TDR only matters if healer mana matters, like I said earlier. It's pointless pushing for more damage reduction if your healers manage with what you have, may as well just push for a smoother damage taken curve (which in the past was stamina) just to improve efficiency.

Although, you could just about cap ctc in t11, with access to all of the gear of course.

You're completely right of course, mastery was more smoothing damage, especially "past CTC cap" where we were shifting mastery into stamina and avoidance into mastery (to get us more stamina overall).