Prot Paladin, Need Help

[DivineXris]

Hi, I have a prot paladin eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/frostmane/divinexris/simple

I have a few questions since there seems to be so much controversy on how to gem gear, whether avoidance is better than mastery and vice versa. Also with the different specs.

I have specced into a self healing 31/10 build. But i'm getting alot of complaints , especially from our 360 ilvl priest saying that i'm taking too much damage. Now to say the least, i am busy getting very annoyed with taking the criticism and listening to how bad paladins tanks are etc. For me, i believe tankadins are the most balanced tanks in the game with the most diversity and survivability in terms of CD's as well as self healing.

Now, i've read up on prot paladins on EJ and to be fair, taking my current gear into consideration, is there really alot more i can do in terms of taking less damage etc. Or is this just a case of a healer being lazy, i must also mention that the priest has an obsession with DK tanks since their self healing imo is OP.

Any comments and help would be appreciated. Please note, i have tanked 3 drakes on halfus HC and was healed through it. So is the problem with my mitigation, reduction, avoidance, gemming or the healers being lazy and incapable?

Thanks for reading.

[Deminthus]

reforge to mastery if there isnt mastery on the gear...then if there threat stats reforge them into dodge/parry
for gems Blue:20masty 30 stamy.....yellow;40 mast.....red:20parry 20mastery OR 20 parry 30 stammy
enchants: change bracers -> dodge ...and you specced into Pursuit of justice so Boots -> mastery
for your talents id take one point of reckoning and put it back into Sacred Duty just b/c one point should really be enough b/c we already block more than enough from our mastery lol

after all that you damage income should go down tremendously compared to what you are now

[DivineXris]

Thank you for the advice mate. The reason why i only have 1 point in sacred duty is because with this specific build i hardly ever use SoR. Ill maybe use it once at the max when engaging the boss for initial tps but after that i strictly use WoG after every 2 or 3 holy powers hence the healing build i picked up from EJ.

I have reforged most of my gear into mastery but im concerned about my hit if i do anymore, not because of possible lack of tps but due to my build i cannot afford to miss with spells since not using hor and improved concecration, keeping threat can be tricky at time, especially if you have a hunter or a mage doing 25K burst dps.

I will look into changing a few things to see if it goes better. Anymore suggestions would be more than appreciated.

[Linkie]

It should be fairly obvious what you can do to take less damage.

Get more mastery or avoidance and less stamina, hit and expertise.

Here is some general advice, that seem to be the general consensus these days:

Hit and expertise is useless. Threat is not a limiting factor. The only reason you would need hit is if your guild is relying on you to interrupt. But it's a bad idea to roll that way.

Mastery is your favorite stat. Pally tanks love mastery. Love it, love it, love it. While 1% avoidance is of course better than 1% block, as taking no damage is better than taking 60% damage, the avoidance stats suffer from diminishing returns, while mastery does not. Mastery is also more efficient per rating. and reaching the 102.4% combat table coverage cap is priority. This will smooth your damage income much more.

Now, that means we have these general gear rules:
Gear with mastery + avoidance is awesome.
Gear with mastery + other stat is great. Reforge other stat to avoidance.
Gear with avoidance + other stat is ok. Reforge other stat to mastery. Unless the avoidance is something like 160% of the other stat, in which case you want to reforge the avoidance to mastery, but this is very very rarely the case.
Gear with neither is sub-par. Reforge highest stat to mastery.

Gem rules:
Blue: Mastery + stamina (green), or in some cases straight stamina. I wouldn't recommend it personally, but some people prefer it.
Yellow: Mastery. Some people do the mastery + stamina here. Again, I wouldn't recommend it.
Red: Parry + stamina (purple) or Parry + mastery (orange). I prefer the orange one.

For you, this means doing this:
Head: Reforge to mastery instead. Consider changing the gem to parry + mastery.
Amulet: Reforge to mastery.
Shoulders: Reforge to mastery instead.
Back: Get rid of reforge. (Seriously, mastery TO expertise?)
Chest: Reforge expertise to mastery. Consider changing gem to mastery + stamina.
Wrist: Consider changing gem to mastery.
Hands: Consider changing gems to mastery and mastery + stamina.
Waist: Consider changing gems to parry + mastery and mastery.
Legs: Consider changing gems to parry + mastery and mastery.
Boots: Change enchant to mastery, the run speed doesn't even stack with Pursuit of Justice. Consider changing gem to mastery or at least to mastery + stamina.
Rings: Change your second ring to Signet of the Elder Council. You can get it from the Earthen Ring quartermaster at exalted.
Trinkets: There's a bunch of discussion about this. Generally you want a pair of stamina trinkets (the ones you have, and change the Leaden Despair for the Theralion & Valiona one when you get it) for magical fights. Also, get the Tol Barad trinket Mirror of Broken Images. It has a shit ton of mastery, and if you have been reading all of this you know we love that. The cooldown is also great for magical & magical/physical fights where you know you will get a large predictable magic damage (Nefarian crackles, Cho'gall pulses, etc). I personally run with Tia's Grace (last boss Lost City heroic) as it has a lot of mastery and a nice almost-permanent dodge. The Porcelain Crab from 2nd last boss in Throne of the Tides is also gear though.
Weapon: Reforge hit to avoidance.
Shield: Reforge hit to avoidance.
Relic: Get rid of reforge, change gem to mastery.

Regarding avoidance:
You want to keep rating of parry and dodge as equal as possible to minimize diminishing returns. Which in your case means get more dodge.

Here's a link to my own armory, if you want to see how I have done it: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...nkiie/advanced

Also, this is where I get most of my info regarding paladin tanking from: http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/
It's a great forum, with a lot of smart, great and helpful people. Unfortunately the main page is outdated. But the forum is still great.

[DivineXris]

Hmm, thats a nice post. Like i said, there is just so much controversy regarding paladin tanks. One pro would say we should never push aside a high stamina build, the next would say avoidance is better than mastery, the next would say go full out mastery.

We are raiding HC content now, so i figured i would fish around a bit and see where i could improve. Your post has been a great help and i will gem \ reforge accordingly and get feedback from my healers whether there is a difference. Ever since i changed to the 31/10 build it's been alot easier since my WoG's crit for 40K+ sometimes, naturally i don't count on that for my survivability. The less dmg the better regardless of WoG.

So i suppose at the end of the day, this means giving up quite a bit of my health pool for more avoidance \ mastery.

I will do so and let you know once i am done.

Thank you again for the help.

---------- Post added 2011-03-07 at 01:26 PM ----------

Ok, so i followed the instructions, did exactly as you said. The only problem is, i've been slacking with TB daily's on my paladin since i never really saw the need for the 2 mastery trinkets =/ I have exalted BW on my mage. So ill have to spend some time doing TB daily's on my pala . But my block is now almost 50% which i suppose is a big help. Dodge and Parry is pretty much equal. I truly hope this will help with my inc dmg.

I will keep everyone posted, we are going conclave HC tonight. Let's see what the healers say.

[Elessa]

You mentioned you don't use SoR alot. Taking WoG glyph over SoR would be the obvious choice then. 10% Healing on pretty much 100% of your healing is great. I also recommend getting the Tol Barad mastery trinket that increases resistances on use. That or level Alchemy to get the amazing Mastery/stamina trinket.

[Licarius]

You also have to remember that SotR provides you with a block buff........ you need to keep that up as well......

or am i missing something?

[Atrea]

There's some really bad advice being given in this thread.

You shouldn't make blanket statements about which gems to put in which sockets, because there is no universal answer.
What you need to do is evaluate the socket bonus you're aiming for. If it's something like '10 parry rating', you can safely ignore it, provided it's a colour that is not particularly useful to you (read: red).

Gemming for parry should be avoided if at all possible, since we innately have a great deal more parry than dodge, due to 25% of our STR being converted to parry rating. That being said, if the socket bonus is good - mastery or STA - you can still pick it up, usually to a net loss of zero stats. (For instance, if you were to use a stam/parry gem in an item with a 30 stam socket bonus. You would not be losing any stamina by going stam/parry instead of straight stamina. The same can be said for an item with a 20 mastery socket bonus.)

I advise a balanced approach to gemming, never going 'all out' on any one stat over others, because while avoidance is good, stamina is important as well. Remember, stamina can grow to be equal to attack power during heavy-hitting boss encounters that keep your Vengeance stacked high. Once again, analyze a socket bonus, and see what it works out to really give you. And if it's worthless, ignore it. I tend to put stamina gems in sockets that I've ignored the bonus for, and hybrid stamina/other stat in sockets in which I've gone after the bonus.

In practice, there's really only one or two items like I've skipped the bonus for. This helps keep a balance between effective health/threat, and avoidance. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the underlying idea here is balance.

In regards to your spec, I would advise against the point you've taken out of Sacred Duty in favour of Divine Guardian.
Divine Guardian is a very situational spell, that has very little practical use. The only encounter I've seen thus far that has a raid-wide massive damage burst that happens on any sort of regular basis is the Nefarian encounter. Any other encounters are limited damage, or limited to a few raid members, to say nothing of irregularity. (An exception is Chimaeron, but for obvious reasons, DG would be nearly useless there. Even during Feud, due to the slow speed of his attacks.)
For encounters that you would use Divine Guardian, I would still advise against removing that point from Sacred Duty, and instead, take it from Grand Crusader (at least until 4.1), as at present, Grand Crusader is our worst threat talent, whereas Sacred Duty is among our best (second only to Wrath of the Lightbringer, which is by far, our best threat talent) - to the point that if your rotation has Judgement available after reaching 3 HoPo, it is often best to 'fish' for a Sacred Duty proc before releasing a ShoR.

While on the subject; I understand that the 2 points in Eternal Glory make for better burst self-heals, but I've found that in clutch situations, it is unreliable at best, and more often than not tends to lead to overhealing anyway. That being said, it's really a personal choice, but you ought to consider that some threat talents are still worth taking. Threat is only 'not an issue' after an encounter is in full swing, but several encounters have aggro drops or tank switches that necessitate quick threat, and if you ignore all of your threat talents, you might get yourself into trouble.

[arindam]

There's some really bad advice being given in this thread.

...

In regards to your spec, I would advise against the point you've taken out of Sacred Duty in favour of Divine Guardian.
Divine Guardian is a very situational spell, that has very little practical use.

...

While on the subject; I understand that the 2 points in Eternal Glory make for better burst self-heals, but I've found that in clutch situations, it is unreliable at best, and more often than not tends to lead to overhealing anyway. That being said, it's really a personal choice, but you ought to consider that some threat talents are still worth taking. Threat is only 'not an issue' after an encounter is in full swing, but several encounters have aggro drops or tank switches that necessitate quick threat, and if you ignore all of your threat talents, you might get yourself into trouble.

Yikes...complaining about bad advice and then saying Divine Guardian has very little practical use? It's probably the second most potent raid-wide damage reduction CD after PW:Barrier (and even that has its limitations, like requiring people to stack in a tiny area). You don't need huge raid-wide damage like Nefarian crackles for it to be a useful CD, there are plenty of cases where there is steady raid damage that can be greatly mitigated by DG. Examples:

- Ascendant Council, last phase, chain lightnings
- Cho'gall, last phase, stacking corruption damage
- Al'Akir, middle phase, acid rain debuff
- Chimaeron, feud phases - 20% off a poison bolt volley every other feud is far from trivial
- Conclave, Nezir, sleet storm

And that's before HMs, where even on a fight like Halfus, it's great for the proto-drake's abilities during the extremely healing intensive first minute or two. Even if there is no raid damage, simply reducing the damage an OT takes by 20% for 6 seconds makes it worthwhile. Of course DG may not be the difference between life and death on most of those mechanics, but it can save the healers a fair amount of mana, and is certainly superior to any alternative single point you could spend on a talent.

As for Eternal Glory, threat is "not an issue" about 10 seconds into any fight, provided you have competent DPS who know how to watch threat meters, and especially if you have competent hunters and/or rogues. There are no 2 alternative talent points that give anywhere near the utility that eternal glory does. It is unpredictable, so you don't count on it - that's what healers are for. However, an extra 25k or 50k heal can be a lifesaver (and therefore the difference between a wipe and a kill) at low health, and any overhealing gets converted into a shield through the GbtL, so you get the full mitigation out of it no matter what. The alternative threat talents (seals of the pure, hallowed ground, arbiter of the light) provide such miniscule amounts of threat that they would accomplish next to nothing in the scenarios you described (tank swaps, aggro drops).


To the OP: most of the stuff Linkie said earlier should just about cover what you should change. Getting parry/dodge ratings closer to each other should boost your avoidance a reasonable amount, since they are miles apart at the moment. The TB trinket is also amazing, if you have time to get your hands on it - on use is basically a free glyphed DP, and 4% block is a lot of mitigation, which would open up the possibility of using more hybrids for stam, etc.

You could also consider seal-swapping as necessary - Corruption for whenever someone is close to overtaking you on threat, Insight otherwise. I always keep both keybound and switch to Insight if a healer goes down, for example. The self-healing on Insight isn't great, but any mana your healers can save is worth it. Of course since you use all your HP for WoG rather than SoTR this may not be possible, I'm not sure. Plus there's always the question of squeezing out every last bit of damage to beat enrage timers, etc.

This isn't really a spec or gem thing, but since we're talking about damage reduction, but I find a lot of tanks "hoard" their CDs when it's rather unnecessary to do so, the biggest culprit being DP. During encounters I ask myself quite frequently - is there any specific mechanic in the next minute I need to save DP specifically for? If not, I might as well use it now - it'll be up in a minute anyways, most likely won't save me from some unexpected super-spiky damage (which is what GoATK/AD are for anyways) and free mitigation is free. It's ok to save GoATK and even AD as "oh shit" buttons, but DP should be used whenever possible. I find myself even using AD in many steady damage situations since the CD is not THAT long (you can use it 3 times over a 6 minute fight like Halfus), the damage reduction is significant, and I am confident my healers will not have trouble keeping me up through predictable damage. Plus, in a worst case scenario something like "bubble + taunt + cancelaura after 3 seconds" or LoH is usually preferable to the 15% heal of AD, anyways.

Of course you're doing HMs and so you probably know how to rotate CDs properly, but I thought I would put it out there since damage reduction seems to be the complaint you are getting the most. Paladins have high block %, 40% damage reduction on block with holy shield up instead of the standard 30% (41% with meta), and 3 fixed percentage DR cooldowns, so smoothing out incoming damage should not be an issue. Of course in HMs you are going to take a lot of damage, it's on the healers at that point to figure out their CDs and whatnot to heal you through it.

[DivineXris]

Yikes...complaining about bad advice and then saying Divine Guardian has very little practical use? It's probably the second most potent raid-wide damage reduction CD after PW:Barrier (and even that has its limitations, like requiring people to stack in a tiny area). You don't need huge raid-wide damage like Nefarian crackles for it to be a useful CD, there are plenty of cases where there is steady raid damage that can be greatly mitigated by DG. Examples:

- Ascendant Council, last phase, chain lightnings
- Cho'gall, last phase, stacking corruption damage
- Al'Akir, middle phase, acid rain debuff
- Chimaeron, feud phases - 20% off a poison bolt volley every other feud is far from trivial
- Conclave, Nezir, sleet storm

And that's before HMs, where even on a fight like Halfus, it's great for the proto-drake's abilities during the extremely healing intensive first minute or two. Even if there is no raid damage, simply reducing the damage an OT takes by 20% for 6 seconds makes it worthwhile. Of course DG may not be the difference between life and death on most of those mechanics, but it can save the healers a fair amount of mana, and is certainly superior to any alternative single point you could spend on a talent.

As for Eternal Glory, threat is "not an issue" about 10 seconds into any fight, provided you have competent DPS who know how to watch threat meters, and especially if you have competent hunters and/or rogues. There are no 2 alternative talent points that give anywhere near the utility that eternal glory does. It is unpredictable, so you don't count on it - that's what healers are for. However, an extra 25k or 50k heal can be a lifesaver (and therefore the difference between a wipe and a kill) at low health, and any overhealing gets converted into a shield through the GbtL, so you get the full mitigation out of it no matter what. The alternative threat talents (seals of the pure, hallowed ground, arbiter of the light) provide such miniscule amounts of threat that they would accomplish next to nothing in the scenarios you described (tank swaps, aggro drops).


To the OP: most of the stuff Linkie said earlier should just about cover what you should change. Getting parry/dodge ratings closer to each other should boost your avoidance a reasonable amount, since they are miles apart at the moment. The TB trinket is also amazing, if you have time to get your hands on it - on use is basically a free glyphed DP, and 4% block is a lot of mitigation, which would open up the possibility of using more hybrids for stam, etc.

You could also consider seal-swapping as necessary - Corruption for whenever someone is close to overtaking you on threat, Insight otherwise. I always keep both keybound and switch to Insight if a healer goes down, for example. The self-healing on Insight isn't great, but any mana your healers can save is worth it. Of course since you use all your HP for WoG rather than SoTR this may not be possible, I'm not sure. Plus there's always the question of squeezing out every last bit of damage to beat enrage timers, etc.

This isn't really a spec or gem thing, but since we're talking about damage reduction, but I find a lot of tanks "hoard" their CDs when it's rather unnecessary to do so, the biggest culprit being DP. During encounters I ask myself quite frequently - is there any specific mechanic in the next minute I need to save DP specifically for? If not, I might as well use it now - it'll be up in a minute anyways, most likely won't save me from some unexpected super-spiky damage (which is what GoATK/AD are for anyways) and free mitigation is free. It's ok to save GoATK and even AD as "oh shit" buttons, but DP should be used whenever possible. I find myself even using AD in many steady damage situations since the CD is not THAT long (you can use it 3 times over a 6 minute fight like Halfus), the damage reduction is significant, and I am confident my healers will not have trouble keeping me up through predictable damage. Plus, in a worst case scenario something like "bubble + taunt + cancelaura after 3 seconds" or LoH is usually preferable to the 15% heal of AD, anyways.

Of course you're doing HMs and so you probably know how to rotate CDs properly, but I thought I would put it out there since damage reduction seems to be the complaint you are getting the most. Paladins have high block %, 40% damage reduction on block with holy shield up instead of the standard 30% (41% with meta), and 3 fixed percentage DR cooldowns, so smoothing out incoming damage should not be an issue. Of course in HMs you are going to take a lot of damage, it's on the healers at that point to figure out their CDs and whatnot to heal you through it.

Thank you for the post and yes, fully understandable where you coming from. My CD management is of course not a problem for me, i was talking about pure avoidance \ mitigation without the use of any CD's \ trinkets etc.

After re-gemming \ enchanting \ forging my gear yesterday we went on a quick BOT clear before heading to conclave HC. Our paladin (MT healer) said my damage was significantly less since my block was 52% food buffed and my dodge \ parry is relatively equal. So that definately pleased me but i do however question gemming the way i did for ex pure mastery gems.

It makes sense to chase only specific socket bonuses and gem accordingly. I suppose i need to play around with it but there is definately a difference in my dmg taken now than what there was before.

[Lyese]

Holy shit! Props to knowing the bubble taunt, Arin. His advice will serve you well.

There are tons of arguments to be made for gemming parry/stam/mastery. Honestly, if the socket bonus isn't good, I slap a Mastery gem in the red socket. What you do want is a good balance of hp to survive the undefendable spikes and mastery to smooth out defendable damage.