Prot Paladin stat priorities?

[Scott75]

Back in the day before patch 4, we all knew that, whether you were a warrior, pally or dk tank, the first goal was to get to 540 defense. Well, defense no longer exists. So has anyone come up with some tentative dodge/parry numbers or what not as a first priority? Because of the lack of defense guideline, I somehow started thinking that getting expertise to 26 and hit rating to 8% were more important, but after thinking about it, I don't think so. Any ideas welcome, just please explain why you think your stat priority numbers are the right ones.

[Fozzy]

Well as far as a solid overview of the tanking/prot paladin changes I would read up on the Elitest Jerks prot paladin field manual (currently updated for Dec 13th), but for a quick stat priority I would suggest the following till you are block capped...

Stam > Mastery > Parry/Dodge

I am currently gemming Stam (since all tanks are far off of block cap till we start getting some purples), and if I need a socket bonus I go mastery/stam or dodge/stam...


Hope this helps!

[Scott75]

Ok, thanks Nymrohd. I saw in this thread that they were aiming for 10% dodge and parry, but it's good to know that expertise and hit rating are fairly important. My Prot pally is Jd on Korialstrasz.

I'm going to start working on my glyphs, apparently SoT glyph gives 10 expertise when buff is up.

[franto]

I think it's a not good idea going for hit or expertise cap now. You can spend all your gems, reforge enchants now and don't get the cap. For now i think it's better to stack more into mastery (block).

If you will be full in heroic dungeon gear and going raids, you may start thinking more about hit & expertise, but i think healer would more appreciate the defensive stats. (the best defense stat for now is mastery).

[Scott75]

Thanks Fozzy/franto, I just went through the elitist jerk guide again and realized that mastery is indeed the thing to go for and the main goal is to get to 102 block cap. For some reason, I thought that mastery didn't really help in terms of mitigation, after reading the following part from that guide again it cleared things up:

Reforging & You
Now for a word or two about reforging. Reforging will allow you to shift stats around on gear to (hopefully) optimize your build by moving 40% of a secondary stat to another (even not present stat) on the same item. What does this mean for tanking Paladins? Now that blocks are no longer a fixed amount of mitigation but instead reduced damage by a certain percentage it is in our interest to try to block as much as possible. As such we want to reach the 102.4% total avoidance threshold that we have aimed for in the past. This pushes regular hits off the table so that any physical hit has to come through a block. Given that tanking Paladins should be reforging for Mastery as much as possible. Note though that is it unlikely you will be able to reach the 102.4% threshold early in Cataclysm. Until post 359 item level gear and epic gems are available ratings will be too low. Regardless, you want to get as close are you possibly can to the 102.4% threshold.

[Deleted]

I like gearing for balance, I use the avoidance gems when the socket bonuses are decent or when I have enough blues already for my meta requirement. Although Anecdotal I often have the guild healers comment on how I am the easiest tank they have played with to heal(cooldown usage and awareness factor massively into damage spikes to be fair)

I did have some gear reforged into hit but restored it all when it didn't really make a difference. There is a ramp up time on threat even if you are hit and expertise capped, if dps is bursty enough they are going to pull aggro off you in the first couple of seconds even if you got expertise hard capped

Edit: In regard to the "block cap" it is unclear(at least for me lol) how desirable it is since the holy shield change and overall avoidance values going down in the current tier in comparison to WotLK. I plan to experiment a bit more with reforging into mastery once I start getting some raid gear.

[Methox]

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/

On this forum are some awesome people who do lots of number crunching regarding prot pallys, I suggest you look there for more/accurate info

[Ticktac]

Things to keep in mind...

Unless you are currently raiding you will encounter nothing that is above level 87. Which means you only need around 5% hit rating. Expertise is much lower as well and more then likely you will be fine with what little you have from gear and Seal of Truth Glyph.

Mastery is your best bet right now. Point for point mastery gives us the most mitigation with no DM. Stamina is nice, but it just requires more mana to heal. The idea of achieving the block cap is to help smooth out the incoming damage making us easier to heal.

[Yoshimiko]

Theirs two mindsets when it comes to tanking; More HP, or more avoidance. I come from the avoidance mind set. Avoidance makes your healers mana last longer. I'm sure you've heard horror stories of Prot Pallys with 160k hp dropping like a rock.

I'm sitting at 130k hp, 55% block, 19% parry, 15% dodge.

For me, Mastery>Parry/dodge>Str>stamina. Nothing hits hard enough for your stamina to make a big difference from what I've seen- and I have a couple of raid bosses.

Avoidance:
Mastery>Parry/dodge>Str>Stamina
Health:
Stam>Mastery>parry/dodge>str
Threat:
Expertise>Hit>Str

Just keep these in mind, and focus on what you need. If your healers going oom, avoidance may be your concern. If you're losing threat, Expertise/hit are your primary concern. If you're getting killed before the healer can respond, stop fighting naked.

Cheers!

[Atrea]

Be aware that not only does Stamina increase your total health pool (thus, effective health), but it increases the amount of Vengeance you can have.

Vengeance maxes out at 10% of your max health pool, so if you have 180k HP with buffs, you can gain a total of 18k attack power from Vengeance. This makes Stamina not only a great stat for overall survivability, but for threat generation as well.

Gemming for something other than Stamina is ultimately a piss in the wind at this point.
The minuscule dodge and parry percentages you'll acquire from gemming for them will not help you as much as a raw health pool, coupled with the added threat from Vengeance.

As others have indicated, Mastery is a great avoidance stat, and any item with a Dodge or Parry value over 200 can and should be reforged into Mastery for an overall mitigation gain. (Do be aware that you can't reforge a stat if it already exists on the item, however.)

[Dieselpower]

Apparently, the consensus here is that if you can't have 104% damage mit, it's better to have 0%.

[Ticktac]

Apparently, the consensus here is that if you can't have 104% damage mit, it's better to have 0%.

it's 102.4% and no, it's not like ArP was in WotLK. Mitigation is beneficial period. It's just depends if you are sacrificing to many other stats in order to gain it