Gearing Prot

[Deleted]

In it's first implementation (GC proccing from dodge/parry only) it was ridiculous tanking bats on Tortos as an example. Would spike up to 500k DPS with 40% of this being Avenger's Shields. I don't agree with crit being preferable over dodge and parry in the long run with the second implementation though. But that's nothing more than a hunch.

Dodge and parry will have the niche of being good for dps on AoE situations, but for single target fights I believe that crit will still be superior.

Still think they are kinda breaking the proc this way, it becomes way to strong on AoE, but hey, if that is what they want then fine.

[Deleted]

I don't think it dropped the value of haste - it dropped the relative value because it increased dodge and parry but it was discussed here and on other places, saying that whilst it made dodge and parry "less bad" it still wasn't enough to make them good enough to look at seriously.

I apologize if my post came across as offensive, that was definitely not the intention and really it wasn't an attempt to jump down your throat for not knowing something, it was simply to highlight how especially in MOP, due to how different we are now compared to before (and other tanks) this spreading of misinformation has to be reverted, so if you know the people who're arguing otherwise then (I at least) would be happy to discuss with them and sort it out, because having 2 conflicting sources just ends up in confusion - like this.

---------- Post added 2013-02-28 at 11:26 AM ----------



First line - yeah, if you're hit and exp capped.

Second line - more than fine to have the 2 haste trinkets. You'll maybe want to keep a stamina trinket lurking for high spell damage fights but you should be ok other than that.

I understand completly and sorry for confusion and thanks for the help

The thing is that we have been over and over this change on the forums in the last couple of weeks.

To say that the value of haste dropped is a far stretch, that implies that the value of haste was in the GC procs which it was far from. The original change would actually have increased the relative value of haste in comparison to the other stats for 10 man tanks. Overall, yes, it makes haste "less valuable" but that is like saying "I lost 1 hair on my head the other day, am I bold now?".

Same goes for dodge and parry, all the change did was make the dodge and parry currently on our gear less shitty. It is still by far the worst stat and in no way desirable.

The change did not really accomlish anything except giving us broken amount of procs on multi target tanking. But lets not tell blizzard this.




From a 10 man PoV I will still probably prefer crit over dodge and parry except maybe on animus or something.
Will have to wait and see what the actual dps increase is for dodge and parry on multiple targets before making an accurate statement.

Well if you only had one hair on your head then you would indeed be bald if it fell out

I took from the blue posts that blizzard weren't happy with paladin tanks using dps gear, don't see why when leather wearing tanks have to do the same thing ( I changed from a monk who has to roll against a WW and a rogue every drop).

Sorry if this has been mentioned in the paladin tanking thread in one of the comments or discussions there ( I havent had time to read through the numerous pages) but is there a haste breakpoint like there is for other classes?

I also assume that T15 set bonuses would be better than ignoring it and going for dps gear with haste on? Perhaps not if you can get your hands on some thunderforged gear?

[Deleted]

Sorry if this has been mentioned in the paladin tanking thread in one of the comments or discussions there ( I havent had time to read through the numerous pages) but is there a haste breakpoint like there is for other classes?

I also assume that T15 set bonuses would be better than ignoring it and going for dps gear with haste on? Perhaps not if you can get your hands on some thunderforged gear?

Haste breakpoints... yes and no... There are breakpoints where SS will add an additional tick if it is not reapplied, but if you reapply SS this does not matter at all.
You also reach a soft cap at 50% where your GCD stops at 1s, so you could consider 50% kinda haste cap.


@T15 set bonuses, if you can get your hands on them, fine, but I would pass them for my guild mates first and let them get theirs first since while ours has some uses, they are fairly week in comparison to some other specs set bonuses.

[Nairobi]

Set bonuses for us this tier and t15 are essentially perks that are given for taking/having sub-optimal gear. Think of the 2/4pc as the "new" dodge/parry in terms of stat priority; they're just less bad. T15 2pc is a nice consolation for when you use WOG while you rebuild BOG stacks. There was talk of gaming the bonus to keep maximal uptime, but it was ultimately decided to be not worth the ShotR loss and BOG downtime (aside from specific encounters/times that block supercedes passive mit). Likewise T15 4pc is a moderate amount of HoPo if you use DivProt accordingly, but it's applied after dmg redux is filtered so you'd likely only see 3-4 HoPo/min, hardly gamebreaking.

As Firefly said, pass those ever elusive conq tokens to your DPS and/or healers; you'll be doing yourself and your raid a favor. The stats on tier are pretty lackluster (no haste, but moderate amounts of accuracy stats), and you'd be better off picking up Haste/Mastery off pieces instead.

[MerinPally]

You also reach a soft cap at 50% where your GCD stops at 1s, so you could consider 50% kinda haste cap.

And just to state the obvious because I know someone will ask - "What do I then go for if I hit that level?" Well the answer depends on at what point after that, mastery overtakes haste in terms of preventing damage taken - at which point you'd move onto that. Probably won't be far because the difference is really tiny even now. God forbid at that point which is a bit off, it could be worth relooking at dodge and parry a little more favourably due to having great damage smoothing so a bit more total damage reduction wouldn't be too astray, long as you didn't get it too high that it counteracted the smoothing effect.

[Deleted]

At the point of haste cap I wouldn't say that dodge and parry would be worth relooking.

The more haste we get, the less valuable are dodge and parry
The more haste we get, the more valuable mastery is.

If you are talking survivability mastery is a no-brainer. If you want more dps, crit will do a good job.

[Rivin]

Also keep in mind that if you're trying to calculate your current haste compared to the 50% soft cap then don't do it with the 10% attack speed buff on you (or mentally reduce the haste you see in the character sheet by 10%). The attack speed buff isn't actually haste and doesn't affect Sanctity of Battle, but the character sheet adds it to your "haste" anyway.

[Nairobi]

At the point of haste cap I wouldn't say that dodge and parry would be worth relooking.

The more haste we get, the less valuable are dodge and parry
The more haste we get, the more valuable mastery is.

If you are talking survivability mastery is a no-brainer. If you want more dps, crit will do a good job.

Just to add to this, ideally (as in, likely NOT obtainable this expansion), the "caps" would be:
1) Hit (7.5%)
2) Expertise (15%)
3) Haste (50%)
4) Mastery (80%)

After ALL of those have been met, extra points (via reforging*, via gems+) could go to:
1) Stam+
2) Str+
3) Crit*
4) Dodge*
5) Parry*

But, youre looking at 2550(hit)+5110(exp)+17000(40% haste)+shitload(mastery) before those caps are met (racials and raid buffs notwithstanding). Only after that would dodge and parry be worth forging INTO.

Also keep in mind that if you're trying to calculate your current haste compared to the 50% soft cap then don't do it with the 10% attack speed buff on you (or mentally reduce the haste you see in the character sheet by 10%). The attack speed buff isn't actually haste and doesn't affect Sanctity of Battle, but the character sheet adds it to your "haste" anyway.

A good point, but also recall that SOI is 10% spell haste!

[Meanor]

Dodge and parry will have the niche of being good for dps on AoE situations, but for single target fights I believe that crit will still be superior.

Still think they are kinda breaking the proc this way, it becomes way to strong on AoE, but hey, if that is what they want then fine.

I wanted to ask about that. I am currently tanking when needed with my ret set (10K+ haste). I hit and exp hard cap and then go for mastery. Seeing last night will hc wasn't an issue at least for our healers, would a haste then crit build work? Would it increase dramatically the damage taken if i reforge off mastery and into crit for more deeps?

[Rivin]

A good point, but also recall that SOI is 10% spell haste!

If you're checking for Sacred Shield breakpoints (or Censure, for some reason), yeah, you'd want to include that and the 5% spell haste raid buff. They don't affect Sanctity of Battle either though.

[Deleted]

I wanted to ask about that. I am currently tanking when needed with my ret set (10K+ haste). I hit and exp hard cap and then go for mastery. Seeing last night will hc wasn't an issue at least for our healers, would a haste then crit build work? Would it increase dramatically the damage taken if i reforge off mastery and into crit for more deeps?

No, simply switching crit and mastery around in your stat priorities won't be a worthwile DPS increase. If you feel comfortable with damage taken you could instead switch glyph of DP with Final Wrath or Focused Shield depending on what you're not using. Don't be mistaken, crit isn't an effective stat even for DPS unless you've got a significant amount of it through crit itemized gear or a trinket maybe.

[Meanor]

For will hc i dropped battle healer (since usually no one is around long enough to make it worth it) for focused shield. So i run with alabaster, dp and focused shield. Not sure if i want to drop the glyph of divine protection since if you spec into unbreakable spirit you have a cd for every time the boss stops to dance (even if minor).

The other tank was a warrior fully mitigation / avoidance geared. At the end of the fight i had like 10-15% less damage taken and a lot of self healing done (17k hps all self healing ~ around 9mils if i recall correctly). And thus why i am thinking i have some margin to drop some avoidance for extra dps stats. (yes i know its not a proper tanking method, but the ret inside tells me otherwise =) ).

[Deleted]

I wanted to ask about that. I am currently tanking when needed with my ret set (10K+ haste). I hit and exp hard cap and then go for mastery. Seeing last night will hc wasn't an issue at least for our healers, would a haste then crit build work? Would it increase dramatically the damage taken if i reforge off mastery and into crit for more deeps?

Nah, it will not increase the damage taken that much. Masteries main use is to prevent incoming damage spikes. When you know there is a huge attack incoming, that is when mastery shines.

Mastery is for sure better for survivability, but if you have no problem surviving, then ofc crit overtakes mastery in value.

Without knowing exactly how much mastery you have, switching all out from mastery to crit would probably increase your total damage taken by about 2-6%.
Though as said, masteries biggest benefit is preventing those predictable damage spikes, not damage smoothening or tdr.

Paladin tanking always boils down to this. If you can survive easily, without remotely stressing your healers, then dps stats will always be better than "tank" stats, simple as that.

If you can survive and do 100k dps or survive and do 120k dps, I would prefer the latter.

---------- Post added 2013-02-28 at 08:05 PM ----------

No, simply switching crit and mastery around in your stat priorities won't be a worthwile DPS increase. If you feel comfortable with damage taken you could instead switch glyph of DP with Final Wrath or Focused Shield depending on what you're not using. Don't be mistaken, crit isn't an effective stat even for DPS unless you've got a significant amount of it through crit itemized gear or a trinket maybe.

Glyph of DP is worth more than the mastery on his gear tbh. About about 25% uptime on Dprot is a TDR of 5%, also it is much more predictable than mastery, + providing more tdr.

If he is in retri gear MS, he likely have a fair amount of crit.

[Nairobi]

For will hc i dropped battle healer (since usually no one is around long enough to make it worth it) for focused shield. So i run with alabaster, dp and focused shield. Not sure if i want to drop the glyph of divine protection since if you spec into unbreakable spirit you have a cd for every time the boss stops to dance (even if minor).

The other tank was a warrior fully mitigation / avoidance geared. At the end of the fight i had like 10-15% less damage taken and a lot of self healing done (17k hps all self healing ~ around 9mils if i recall correctly). And thus why i am thinking i have some margin to drop some avoidance for extra dps stats. (yes i know its not a proper tanking method, but the ret inside tells me otherwise =) ).

A good call on dropping Battle Healer depending on how you do the fight. I would suggest (for heroic, at least) not bothering with Alab Shield, since so much of that fight is spent dodging, rather than actually tanking. You'd likely see more mileage (in terms of damage output) picking up Final Wrath and Focused Shield. Would recommend keeping DivProt, since it's up pretty much every time you actually have to tank.

[Meanor]

One last thing. Seeing that i am using a ret 4 piece set bonus would it worth to be permanently specked into AW? In fights that have predictable heavy damage moments (aka will or windlord) i use ha as a defensive cd mostly and i am kinda skeptical to drop that. What do you guys think?

[Fhi]

I would suggest (for heroic, at least) not bothering with Alab Shield, since so much of that fight is spent dodging, rather than actually tanking. You'd likely see more mileage (in terms of damage output) picking up Final Wrath and Focused Shield.

Alabaster Shield is meh against single target if you have high (maybe not even as high) haste. You use up the charges too quickly relative to its buildup. It's nice against multiple enemies, but for single target, Focused Shield is probably better in terms of damage.

[Deleted]

One last thing. Seeing that i am using a ret 4 piece set bonus would it worth to be permanently specked into AW? In fights that have predictable heavy damage moments (aka will or windlord) i use ha as a defensive cd mostly and i am kinda skeptical to drop that. What do you guys think?

If you are using ret4p you should use Sw 99%of the time.
Sw is a lot better than Ha on predictable damage spikes i dont understand why people think ha is better on predictable spikes. Ha pulls ahed if the spike id longer than 30sec

[Nairobi]

Alabaster Shield is meh against single target if you have high (maybe not even as high) haste. You use up the charges too quickly relative to its buildup. It's nice against multiple enemies, but for single target, Focused Shield is probably better in terms of damage.

I'm not sure why you quoted me on this, since that was essentially the point I was making?

My glyphs for H Will: Focused Shield, Final Wrath, DivProt.

Alabster isn't really stellar outside of a few fights. Somtimes it's just better to take it for free (albeit minimal) damage AND to allow your shield to bounce. Fights where Alab > Focused: Dogs(N/H), Wind Lord (N/H), Ambershaper (if only for the cleave damage), Empress (N/H), Protectors (Hc especially, for focus-casted interrupts), Tsulong (Hc at least, for cleave on adds/darknesses).

[Fhi]

I'm not sure why you quoted me on this, since that was essentially the point I was making?

I was quoting you to say "this" and expand on your point.

[Nairobi]

I was quoting you to say "this" and expand on your point.

Ah. Well I will expand your expansion then, as clearly I support my own good ideas.

I didn't see a "this" so I thought either I was unclear or you misunderstood. Apologies for confusion.