pally tank, need help

**Dharokan** · 2009-04-06, 05:42 PM

im a pally tank and i would like someone to recommend me a talent tree that would be best for ulduar, this is the one ive come up with so far

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757

im no wow genius but no one can steal aggro from me in naxx, i would love recommendations for changes, or if you can show me a tree that you think is good.

i also was wondering what kind of addons i should use (besides DBM, omen), anything that will change my interface to help me be a better tank, things like that.

TY for your replies!

**Plaguedog519** · 2009-04-06, 05:56 PM

Why no points into Sacred Duty? Just want to miss out on 8% stamina?

Personally, I hate Divine Sacrifice and would leave it out of my builds...but some people seem to think its great. Also the one point into Stoicism doesn't make any sense to me. To be perfectly honest your proposed talent tree isn't that great and the glyph choices are rather meh unless AW glyph is different that whats shown there.

**Draco cracona** · 2009-04-06, 06:36 PM

DBM, decursive, omen and ORa2 are the main addons I use, and I'd recommend :http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757 or similar, if you look at what TbtL gives you, it's what, 700 or so sp at 30k hp (numbers taken from armoury)? That's ~8 DPS on consecrate, it's ~61 dam/15s on SoV, making that ~4 DPS, and ~154 dam/judge, which is ~17 DPS. This totals a mighty ~30 DPS and ~60 TPS gain for three talents. I think you'd be better off with those three talents in ret tbh, for +3% Threat, which , assuming ~5k TPS (easily maintainable) gives 150 TPS for the same amount of points - you'd have to be doing ~2k TPS to get the same out of TbtL. Screw the 'but it's scaling +threat' argument for TbtL, it just doesn't hold up when so little TPS is from seals/judgement/consec, and they scale so poorly (well, other than judge). While this did exclude glyph of judgement/sotp, they're not going to sway the numbers enough in the favour of TbtL tbh.

As for glyphs, SoV, DP and HoSalv are the ones I'll probably go for, assuming that reports of DP glyph stacking are correct.

**Liquid_Beaver** · 2009-04-06, 07:44 PM

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757

If you are gonna be an OT, take Divine Sacrifice if you like, and it will help on fights where you don't do much, like Saph, and I am sure there will be similar fights in Ulduar.

I took Benediction over Heart of the Crusader only because I always raid with a ret pally. If you only do 10 mans I might switch that around.

Personally, I love Pursuit of Justice, it helps quite a bit when you can run faster than the mobs chasing you, and makes it much easier to run them around in circles until they are compact and then you blow them up. If you run with an Unholy DK though, this isnt as necessary.

Touched by the Light is good for many reasons. First of all, you should be using Seal of Corruption/Vengeance, and you most likely will be judging Light on mobs. With TbtL you get a MUCH higher healing coefficient returned to you, resulting in much higher heals, on top of those Seal of Lights doing 30% more healing when they crit you, and whoever else is hitting your target. Secondly, AP and SP factor in to our attacks with the same coefficient or higher, and are followed with the exact same holy damage modifier. Every point of SP is worth just as much as AP, if not more.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Spell_power_coefficient

Follow that link and look at the Pally table, and the overwhelming majority of the spells get a higher coefficient from SP than they do from AP, but they all get both except for Holy Shock, and Shield of Righteousness, which gets neither.

So, would you pass up something that gives you 800 AP? Then why pass it up when it gives 800 SP?

Sheath of Light wouldn't be nearly as potent without the conversion of 30% of your AP into SP, so why shouldn't Prot pallies take a similar talent?

Fill out Crusade, if at all possible. 3%/6% more damage is a HUGE increase, and assuming we won't have threat issues still when Ulduar comes out is a gross assumption.

As for mods, there are a select few that make it easier to tank. Omen3 of course, the UI is great, and is very accurate, as it takes numbers directly from WoW, and isn't an estimation. Scrolling Combat Text is a nice alternative for the one that comes with WoW now, as its more customizable and inobtrusive. Pallypower is a toss up. I like it a lot, some people don't care for it. It just makes it easier to keep track of buff durations on everyone, and it cuts down on the "AMG I NED MIGHT NAUW", and you can tell people they already have it. Tankadin2 mod with the Ardent Defender tracker is also a nice thing to have. One of its windows shows you whatever stats you like, and can make evaluating the differences between gearsets a lot easier, and it comes with an announcer for when Avengers Shield and your taunt miss or the target is immune. Decursive is nice as well.

Other than that, I would only recommend CTMod, but just because I prefer their buffmod more than blizzards. It's easier to read, albeit takes up more space.

Originally Posted by Draco cracona

I think you'd be better off with those three talents in ret tbh, for +3% Threat, which , assuming ~5k TPS (easily maintainable) gives 150 TPS for the same amount of points - you'd have to be doing ~2k TPS to get the same out of TbtL. Screw the 'but it's scaling +threat' argument for TbtL, it just doesn't hold up when so little TPS is from seals/judgement/consec, and they scale so poorly (well, other than judge).

What I don't understand about what you are saying, other than that 5k TPS is easy to maintain, which is a ridiculous statement because it's so much more complicated than that, is that with TbtL you have to keep up 2k TPS, while with the "alternative" Ret talents you have to keep up 5k TPS to get the same extra damage to wriggle its way out? The way you said it, whether you intended to or not, implies that if they are equal at TbtL 2k + Ret 5k, then TbtL 4k TPS would be doing double the amount that Ret 5k would. It doesn't make sense.

5k TPS is only "easily maintainable" on multiple mobs, and only if you are getting hit with Holyshield up, as well as getting Corruption to stack all over the place and are hammering the bajeesus out of everything. You can find a HUGE difference in TPS just while Ret aura is up, when the only difference is do the mobs swing fast or slow. Everyone can spike into 8k TPS or higher, but that doesn't mean it's maintainable, or has any sway on the numbers evaluated for Tank vs single target tanking.

Spec'ing like that is more like spec'ing for a single encounter, rather than spec'ing for the majority of game mechanics, and in the majority of game mechanics, TbtL makes a significant difference over the span of an entire fight.

**Draco cracona** · 2009-04-06, 08:04 PM

Originally Posted by Liquid_Beaver

Touched by the Light is good for many reasons. First of all, you should be using Seal of Corruption/Vengeance, and you most likely will be judging Light on mobs. With TbtL you get a MUCH higher healing coefficient returned to you, resulting in much higher heals, on top of those Seal of Lights doing 30% more healing when they crit. Secondly, AP and SP factor in to our attacks with the same coefficient, and are followed with the exact same damage modifier. Every point of SP is worth just as much as AP. Would you pass up something that gives you 800 AP? Then why pass it up when it gives 800 SP?

Wrong there, AP and Sp factor in differently on seals and judgements (http://www.wowwiki.com/Seal_of_Corruption, not to mention that this is probably using the old spellpower coefficients, as the wiki is slow at getting updated, which are higher), not to mention the HotR damage that's AP only, and scales a lot better than other attacks - those numbers I threw out were based on the coefficients of the spells; you will only gain ~60 TPS from 3/3 TbtL, mainly due to consecrate and SoV scaling very poorly, and judgement scaling quite badly compared to the amounts of TPS generated.

**Liquid_Beaver** · 2009-04-06, 08:19 PM

I modified my post a few times, please reread.

Okay let's isolate Seal of Corruption in specific since you linked it. I will use my stats. So in your opinion, rather than having a modifier like: [.15 AP(~2500) + .088 SP(~800)] it is much more prudent to have: [.15 AP(~2500)+ .088( 0.0 )]?!?!

If you don't spec into that talent, with current gear itemization you will have 0 SP, and therefore all of the modifiers, whether AP is higher or SP is, will have NO contribution to ANY modifier by SP, because you won't have any.

I could understand if this was a discussion about taking a talent that gives ~800 AP over one that gives ~800 SP, but it isn't. You are talking taking crit over ~800 SP, rather than both.

Also, if the threat is your concern, why not 3/3 Crusade instead of 2/3 Crusade and 1/3 Sanctity of Battle?

**Draco cracona** · 2009-04-06, 08:53 PM

But if you look at it, the gains from SoV and consecration's scaling are so slight that they're basically useless - hence why the consecration libram is practically no threat. SoV gives you a whopping 0.0058666 DPS for every spellpower you have; JoV gives 0.024444 DPS per spellpower before modifiers. Assuming glyph of judge, 1h spec, RF and 800 sp, that gives 54.759 TPS. Then factor in consec (0.04 SP coeff per tick, up 8/9th of the time) we get another 59 TPS, for a total of 114 TPS (apologies about the earlier numbers, misread the consec formula). This is more TPS than crusade if you do under 3807 TPS, which you should be easily outstripping. Crusade>>touched by the light in single target. Now, AoEing, it varies vastly depending on how many mobs you have, although a lot of your snap aggro, which is pretty key in AoE situations like Sarth, is going to come from HotR, shich has no spellpower coeff. I just can't see much use for TbtL tbh, especially post 3.1, when we could be spending those talents much better to gain more threat than TbtL gives by going deeper ret. Only Thorim and Freya in Ulduar afaik have heavy AoE sitiations; I think that the TPS drop for single target will be too much to give for the slight gain in AoE TPS for those two fights, esecially as the extra threat can probably be converted to mitigation via HoSalv. Now, for 5-mans, you might well be better off with touched, but you'll often be fighting ~3-4 mobs, and then HotR's gain is going to outstrip the loss on consec if you drop touched IMO.

And as for the crusade/sanctity thing, that was a misclick, was supposed to be 3/3 crusade, sorry. And the 5k TPS figure was a rough estimate of single target threat; with the fixed numbers you only gain more single taregt TPS with touched below 3807 TPS assuming 800 SP.

**Liquid_Beaver** · 2009-04-06, 09:05 PM

The only thing I really don't understand is why you can't have both, or why it's bad to do so. My issue was not with spec'ing into Crusade, as I myself am going to be taking it, but that you were spec'ing out of Touched to do so.

Speaking of Touched, you didn't touch on the healing aspects of this. Judgement of Light in particular.

I agree with what you are saying about HoSalv, and the more threat you have the bigger the window you have to significantly up your mitigation. But all these spells are used in conjuction with each other. If you take away all of your SP, you are diminishing the extra damage of everything that uses SP, no matter how small, to boost the damage of a few other abilities. Especially in regards to HotR and ShotR, that have CD's but no durations, unlike Consecration and Holy Shield, that benefit from SP just as much if not more than AP, but tick off until their CD is up again, rather than a 1-time modifier application like HotR.

As my guilds MT, I still do not have a singular purpose. If my guild wants me on Sarth I can do that, or if they want me doing trash pulls in Naxx in between tanking the bosses because I can keep up aggro on 15+ mobs I can do that too. No need to respec, and I haven't pigeonholed myself, in a sense, into being better at Single Target vs. Multi Target tanking.

This is akin to caster's arguments about whether SP or Crit is more important for overall damage output, and the victor is SP in almost every case, because that damage is applied every time, rather than only seeing the significance when you crit, which is my gear is 14% base.

**Draco cracona** · 2009-04-06, 09:43 PM

For JoL - even with touched, you're going to have the ret (if possible ofc) do that, and in a lot of cases JoL is mainly overhealing tbh - if there's no ret we tand to get the prot to do wisdom though, for the higher uptime relative to a healer using it.

It is effectively crusade or touched though, as you want divinity and either imp. devo or DS+DG for survivability IMO, along with JotJ for those many situations where the offtanks are tanking other things (which is the main reason why they're there), which doesn not leave enough points to get touched and crusade. You could grab DS without DG, but then you're losing out on a slightly more effective raid damage absorbtion CD, for 2/3 touched - that's ~80 TPS on single target, although more on AoE, it's good utility and raid damage absorbtion on many fights where you can't tank some of the time.

To be fair, Touched is better than I thought earlier as I'd made a mistake on consec, but it still loses out against crusade assuming you're getting all of the mitigation and survivability talents - and with threat as it is now, the only gain from more threat is a small amount of survivability due to HoSalv - it's not likely IMO that any DPS will be catching us in ulduar, considering that our threat does scale quite a lot with mitigational gear.

Might well be worth grabbing two points in Touched if you're not grabbing imp. devo though tbh, which you'd skip due to trees, and just grabbing the one in DS, something like http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757. Could always nab one from SA too, as many are saying it's not needed to have 2/2 in that, and drop that one in for 3/3 Touched.

**Pilto** · 2009-04-06, 10:02 PM

Dharokan to give you another opinion on a tanks talent spec in 3.1, this is what I will be running.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757

I did not take Divinity because of the amount of overhealing that will probably be occurring during boss fights. But the guild I run in usually has 3 druid healers and the increase to their HoTs could be beneficial. But for the time being, I will not be taking that.
Yes I am going to be taking Divine Sacrifice and Divine Gaurdian. Stack TbtL with SS with an additional 20% damage absorbed bonus and an increased up time of 100%. This adds a huge amount of damage mitigated. It's not ground breaking, but not worthless either. Only downside of this build is if TbtL doesn't properly scale with SS, then I'll take these 3 points and put them into Divinity.
Only 1 point in SA considering that the 100% uptime from Divine Please, I'll be having more than enough mana while using my rotation.

Also, I spec far enough into the Ret tree to pick up Crusader. I'm more than likely not going to have problems with TPS, but every 3-4 full rotations I'm going to swap Conc for a SS on myself. So the extra DPS and TPS shall help me have more lean-way with threat.
PoJ isn't necessary either, but just something I've come to love while tanking. If you don't put 2 points here, you can finish out and put 5/5 into Conviction.

**DaveTheHunter** · 2009-04-07, 12:04 AM

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757 is what i'll be going with, if i'm correct in that Spiritual Attunement won't be necessary. In my ptr testing, after my target was down and switching to dps on a secondary target, I was constantly at full mana going all out on dps without receiving damage or heals. The 100% uptime of Divine Plea as long as you're hitting a target should honestly either be nerfed if they want Spiritual Attunement to be necessary or possibly just remove SA from the game entirely.

**Evereghalo** · 2009-04-07, 12:20 AM

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757

This is my build,

yea u need the stam,

Divine Sacrafice is a waste,

Divinity is over healing,

and you want the divine plea glyph

**rillak** · 2009-04-07, 12:34 AM

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...0&version=9757

^ This!

**mitchimitch** · 2009-04-07, 12:44 AM

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...0&version=9757

this

**Korgilius** · 2009-04-07, 12:50 AM

There are a few mistakes in every build which were linked here so far. The biggest issue (90% of linked talent trees fail in this) is that you want EXACTLY 1 point on Improved Judgements, no 2, not 0, you need 1. The point is if you don't put any points there then you can't do the 96969 rotation, but the second point on that talent is a waste, since it would reduce the cooldown to 8sec. and you would want to Judge every 9 seconds to keep up the rotation.

Also many of you are missing out Divinity. Think about tank paladin mechanics a bit, since you can block each hit unlike warriors, the strongest paladin playstyle is a mitigation tank (for most encounters). You'll always have less HP then a druid or DK, less avoidance then a DK/warrior, but you'll be the tank who gets the lowest hits because you block each attack (+sacred shield + pw:shield). Therefore the Divinity talent is insanely good with the +5% healing taken.

Judgement of the Just is also a must-have talent, since you can't rely on prot. warriors or frost DKs giving you thunderclap effect in each bossfight, on some fights you're tanking a mob/boss alone without a frostDK/protWarrior also hitting it (just think about the Iron Council), you want the 20% melee dmg reduction those times. And also, because of the dual talent if boss is tankable by 1 tank, you won't have a prot. warrior hitting your target also, he'll rather switch to fury and do some DPS.

Divine Sacrifice is good if you're offtanking, but honestly a paladin is the worst choice to be an offtank, so I wouldn't put points to that.

Heart of the Crusader has the same deal, don't rely on others in the raid to put up the +3% crit taken debuff. Get it, you can't really spend your points on ret. tree better anyways.

Pursuit of Justice : if you're in a good guild with fast pulls this 2 little points will speed up your raids even more, also makes you much easier to move if you have to move during a bossfight.

About the Glyphs :
Divine Plea = MUST HAVE! You'll have Divine Plea 100% uptime during tanking a boss, that's a 3% extra mitigation, the best glyph.
Righteous Defense = useless! You have 2 taunts! If you miss with one of them use the another one! If you're that unlucky to miss both announce it on comms (vent/TS) and handle the situation, that's a rare that you even have to taunt, that's even more rare that you fail with both of your taunts.
Seal of Vengeance = good, I'd be definately using this one as my second glyph
for the third I'll go for Exorcism or ShotR or Salvation... haven't decided yet.

Here's the build I'll use for the start of Ulduar tanking :
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...1&version=9757
Ofc it can be different based on your usual raid composition, but this is the basic idea.

**DaveTheHunter** · 2009-04-07, 03:38 AM