[MoP] Protection Paladin Guide

[Elathi]

You're right, it's spikey. I suppose I was a bit focused on not feeling near defenseless when not under the SotR buff, and even with its spikiness, it seemed a better option than haste or the passive block chance on mastery.

[Deleted]

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.

Damn it, i knew it I screwed up somewhere in my post. I tried re-reading my post and ended up editing the whole point i was trying to make.
I edited out the part were i was arguing that we will probably not hit the "mastery is better than dodge" point very fast as you presume, which btw i see at 16% from Theck's 1st picture. That point is where D_d ( the dark blue line) crosses D_m (the light blue line) assuming i'm reading the graph correctly of course.
Now 16% dodge is actually a lot of dodge rating.one of Theck's earlier posts gives us the DR formula for dodge, but even before DR we'd need 10k dodge rating to get 16% dodge (5% naked + 11% from rating).
So yeah, we do have the same stat priority (the extra layer is so far to the right it's meaningless), but i would disagree that we will spend any time going after mastery in a avoidance spec, let alone have any room from hit/exp rating.
So avoidance spec ? not going to be hitcapped as doing so would reduce your survivability even accounting for the increased HPGeneration and SoRuptime.

I guess one could argue that trading pure raw survivability for confort, or whatever other reason, is utlimately every tank's choice, but it seem strange that one would accept top survival for avoidance RNG, but not hit RNG.

Lastly, Theck's made an important point (... again lol) in a previous blog post on the parry:dodge ratio. I'll say the points I personnally see on the graph:
5% dodge/1,5ratio (so 7.5%parry)
10%dodge/2,0ratio (so 20%parry)
15%dodge/2,5ratio (so 37.5%parry)
20%dodge/2,8ratio (so 56%parry)
25%dodge/2,9ratio (so 72.5%parry)
[note]As seen, getting 16% dodge means getting a 2,5 ratio and a bit over 40%parry. 56% avoidance ? Not doable in my opinion. (heck probably not even in t16... there's something suspect here)
I think i forgot to account for base dodge/parry (respectively 5% and 3%), which would mean 11% dodge (from rating) given a ~2.2 ratio hence a 24.2%parry(from rating), for a end result of 16% dodge and ~27% parry. ~43% avoidance is more credible. Probably a very hard point to reach in t14 gear even if reforging/gemming for full avoidance.

[MerinPally]

Hmm, I should probably clarify my point further as having re-read it myself, it was a disastrous description.

I added the hit and expertise bit because whilst we won't be actively going after them (and will be reforging out of them until our healers are feeling comfortable) it will still appear on our gear and it's important that people know that hit > expertise in terms of a stat. I don't see huge amounts of mastery grabbing for the avoidance spec but I do see some however - an example being reforging hit/exp/haste into mastery to smooth out damage, because avoidance stacking is inherently spiky and it also improves our active mitigation system and self healing due to Bastion. Another example would be that because we won't need to stamina stack past "healers feeling comfortable" as we have different methods of surviving spell damage now, we can use a Fine Lava Coral but the pandaland equivalent of course. Parry and Mastery, because in a red socket it's that or Parry and Stamina and if you don't need the health, it's more beneficial. Mastery will smooth out our damage and make it less spiky hence my "it's pretty important but dodge/parry are better".

As Splosion said, stacking avoidance further once you're at "healers feeling more than comfortable" stage is pointless, because there is no CTC any more you may as well begin getting hit and expertise to make your life easier and get a bit of stamina as well maybe. As long as you have the general stat idea sorted then once your healers find it not too bad to heal you then it's pretty subjective as to what you want to do as far as I can work out - make your life easier or make it so healers can afk although in the early tiers it won't let them afk much.

So I agree that we'll have very little room for hit/expertise but I disagree we'll have no room for mastery because once we begin exceeding the value where mastery becomes better than dodge (I said 12% not sure why, you say 16% so we'll call it 15%) you'll begin reforging dodge to mastery but staying over that 15% dodge level because that way we're getting the best value out of all our stats. Then if we get a piece of gear that's Parry+Hit and we're over 15% dodge, we'd reforge the hit to Mastery. Then if we had Parry+Dodge on gear and are over 15% we'd reforge dodge to mastery. Then if we got Parry+Mastery as long as we were over 15% dodge we'd leave it alone.

I know we're calling it the "avoidance build" but the more you look at Thecks graphs and the stat weights, its more the "parry build" which gets some dodge then begins piling it into mastery to smooth out damage as it becomes a better stat than dodge after not very long. It's more of a mix of what we call the avoidance build, and your mastery build, which according to the numbers is the ideal.

[MerinPally]

We're not allowed to bump so I'm going to have to disguise this very well.

However, this has gone quiet. I want to update this very soon because I won't be around the night before the patch so making any last minute updates isn't really going to happen so I want to crack on Anyone got anything else to add with regards to stats let me know but TOMORROW, FRIDAY 24TH AUGUST I will update the stat priorty section and do gems/rotations etc etc and we can edit the last 2 more easily than the rest.

[Malthanis]

ZOMG STEALTH BUMP!!

* Malthanis readies his ban-hammer.

But seriously, update notices don't really count as bumps, and since I was already going to sticky this thread, it's really no big deal (not that I'm condoning posts that are blatant bumps anywhere, that is). I'm honestly just happy we've got someone who's willing to stay on top of a spec thread.

[MerinPally]

I think I might be done. I'm going to continuously read this now and I'll get my guild to do the same, see if they can find any errors or typos or things that need clarification. Same goes for you guys, please do the same.

Apart from that... I guess it's all finished. It could do with a rotation section but I was planning to do that on Wednesday after I play a bit more because although I know it now, I'd rather just practice it on something I can bear to play for more than 30minutes Any other sections people feel need included, let me know. I'm not happy with the "Glyphs" section and was considering doing away with it completely but that needs changing - any suggestions are welcome.

---------- Post added 2012-08-24 at 06:51 PM ----------

Oh, and also something I've shamelessly stolen from other guides, I'm going to learn how to use photoshop/paint and make some nice graphics for titles and shizzle rather than just TEXT TEXT TEXT and insert those to make it easier on the eye. If anyone wants to volunteer and beat me to it, please do so You'll do a better job anyway.

[Deleted]

For the sake of consistency, acronymes should have the following basic rule : all particules ("of", "the", "on" ect...) are abreviated as minuscules while other more "important" words get majuscules.
So Hammer of Justice is HoJ, Hammer of the Righteous is HotR, Word of Glory is WoG, Shield of the Righteous is SotR, Guardian of Ancient Kings (GoAK), Lay on Hands (LoH), Hand of Protection (HoP), ect ect.
I also noticed you are missing a Holy Power abreviation, is there a commonly accepted one yet ?

Vengeance - each time you take damage, you gain 5% of the damage taken as additional attackpower, up to a maximum of 10% of your health.

Vengence has changed, it's now 2% of un-mitigated (before armor and CD damage reduction, but after debuffs like the -10%dmg weakened blow debuff) damage taken, with no cap.

A link towards a Talent calculator at the start of the part regarding talents might be a good idea ?

Eternal Flame replaces WoG, and heals for as much but due to the HoT effect, it heals for a bit more and any there is less overheal. With the loss of the shield from the overheal, this HoT seems very appealing

I'm not sure how EF has any effect on overheal. If anything EF direct heal is a tiny bit more powerful than WoG (like maybe and extra 500hp).
Also, regarding the whole tier, i belive we talked about how SS was pretty much the only choice in the tier as far as prot paladins were concerned? All the more so now that you don't have to worry about some other paladin taking the same talent anymore.

On the following tier (f4) you might want some numbers for Unbreakable Spirit : assuming on cd usage, divine protecting will lose 15~20s off it's 1min cd. Higher HPGen(hit/exp/haste) and DP talent have a small but non-negligible effect. LoH and divine shield both get down to 5min.

[MerinPally]

Thanks for those points Ayashi, I knew I'd missed some things. Will update in the morning ^^

[Deleted]

Just wanted to point out a few images from Blizz you can recycle into your post:
Glyphs
http://us.media1.battle.net/cms/gall...776490.jpg?v=1
Talents
http://us.media1.battle.net/cms/gall...303372.jpg?v=1

perfectionism might force you to edit those with paladin glyphs/talent-tree and/or write on the image

Lastly: as I did a heavy mastery BiS profile, you might want to include a avoidance focused profile and/or a general purpose profile with the expected MoP raid or pre-raid gear ?

[MerinPally]

Ok done all the updates but the BiS profile which I'll get to in a bit, just need to prepare the house for guests now If you see any others, shout!

[Seani]

hmmm I think Wog of glyph is deffinately more useful than you give it credit for. You will use wog for aoe threat anyway (as opposed to sotr for single target threat) The 9% damage for 6 seconds stacks with the burst threat from the heal. Also parry being the most useful stat I will have to disagree with again. It might look good on paper for pure avoidance/mitigation when main tanking, however, dodge will give you the versaitility for high survivability in group fights, and mastery will give you the added cd strength to survive in those tough situations. Personally I will be stacking dodge and mastery.

[Elathi]

Forgive me, Seani, am i missing something? What are you under the impression dodge does that parry doesn't?

As well, does WoG generate threat in MoP? I know it doesn't, or barely does, on live. The 9% additional damage is well and good, but a significant heal seems like an interesting choice for burst threat. Burst threat I assume referring to something you use at the start of a pull, when you've barely taken damage yet.

[Seani]

Forgive me, Seani, am i missing something? What are you under the impression dodge does that parry doesn't?

As well, does WoG generate threat in MoP? I know it doesn't, or barely does, on live. The 9% additional damage is well and good, but a significant heal seems like an interesting choice for burst threat. Burst threat I assume referring to something you use at the start of a pull, when you've barely taken damage yet.

Dodge allows you avoidance from multiple enemies. When I say burst threat I mean instant or sudden threat without having to build up to it. Yes on live wog doesen't cause threat. In mop, as far as I know, wog will generate threat. If I am wrong please dont hold me to that.

[MerinPally]

Dodge allows you avoidance from multiple enemies.

And parry doesn't?

Either way, Parry will not suffer noticeably from diminishing returns. Dodge will. Therefore, even under your wanting to stack dodge, you'd take more damage than if you stacked parry by default because you'd have less of it.

Lastly, check Theck's numbers - even he says that parry is clearly king. So not only do we have quantitative evidence but we also have qualitative through testing.

But I'm happy to listen to your reasoning anyway if you have any more than what I quoted, which makes no sense whatsoever. Could you please elaborate because so far your point about dodge>parry makes no sense on any level and also, we have both graph and beta evidence that mastery stacking is inferior to avoidance. If you want to be inferior and take more damage then power to you, stick it to the healers But if you're going to tell a guide which is taking evidence from a large number of sources that it is wrong without providing any evidence yourself... hopefully you can understand the frosty response myself and Elathi have given.

True I may not have given WoG glyph the credit it deserved but... there are better glyphs anyway. It may get some use but it will still be small.

[Deleted]

Seems like people have already bitten on the "parry is mecanically identical to dodge, on single and multi target" part, so i'll go on on the other tidbit

While WoG glyph can indeed appear useful for extra tank DPS you have to remember that using WoG instead of SoR is a significant dps loss due to the damage SoR deals directly. Sadly there is rarely a time when the following four GCD deal an average of 277% the damage of SoR, which would be required for the four gcd to equal +100% SoR damage dealt. And by rarely i mean effectively "never".
Now, IF you pair it with the other wog glyph (harsh words) that WILL end up as an increase dps. A small increase but an increase nevertheless. You do however sacrifie not only the WoG heal, which with 50-60k ap (or more!) is quite far from insignificant, but you also lose two major glyphs.
I have a hard time seeing that as a workable trade as if you can deal with that, you could just as well go with one less healer, or equipt some dps gear directly and gain much much more overall dps.


btw threat is a non issue, if the wog glyph +9% dmg is anywhere near noticable to your threat, in any situation, you have much deeper problems than just glyph choices.

[momaek]

wow， it sounds interesting XD

[MerinPally]

Read through it all again, couldn't see any mistakes so I guess this is ready. I shall keep checking and will get my guild to do the same. This is the advantage of being an evil overlord.

[Thallidomaniac]

Coming from a PvP perspective, did they change Vengeance to trigger from taking player damage once again?

From the PvP view, Talent-wise, it'll probably be Pursuit, Fist or Burden depending on if you glyph for slow on AS, Sacred Shield, Clemency(?), DP(?), and no idea for 6th tier.

Glyphs could go like this: Dazing Shield (which again would depend on if you take Burden or not), Alablaster if you wanted moar damage, and third one could be a freebie depending on preferences (Turn Evil probably being the best candidate)

[MerinPally]

I'm pretty sure Vengeance doesn't proc in pvp

[Malthanis]

I'm pretty sure Vengeance doesn't proc in pvp

Which is sad, because it's easy to deal with. Either stop attacking the tank, or use an Enrage dispel. Not terribly difficult.

In any case, it's patch day! That means that this thread is now the official 5.0 Protection Paladin sticky!