Paladin tank, im squishy please help

[Varric]

Hello, I just picked up tanking through a few pieces of gear that I have collected over time. I did a Heroic dungeon (not za or zg) and did good threat overall. However my healer would drop quite a bit of mana trying to heal me in 2-3 pulls. Im not sure if im gemming wrong or what but could someone please help me out, my name is Varric on the sentinals server.

[4KhazModan]

More mastery. Gem, and reforge for as much mastery as you can. You'll get more avoidance and thus take less damage. Making you less squishy. Get rid of those Hit rating reforges too.


If it helps, you can check out my char if you want to know how to gem/reforge. Names in my sig.
Edit: Didn't see you gave the name.

[beastmorph]

Looking at the little effort you actually put into your gear I am unsure if this is a troll or not, but here it goes. For starters reforge all that hit/expertise to mastery or dodge/parry, vengeance takes cares of your threat issues. Dont gem dodge or parry, gem mastery, mastery, and more mastery. Find a better alternative for the magnetite mirror as well, something with actual survival stats. You are a jc, make the jc tank trinket and use that. 7 unenchant pieces of gear needs fixing too, along with leg armor on your tanking pants.

[roguetank]

I couldn't look over everything i dont have time, but unless somethings changed recently, mastery > all for paladin tanks, and you should never reforge or gem for hit.

Stamina is okay to some extent, but all that does is make the damage you take spikey and difficult to predict.

Also, you should have enough cooldowns to be able to use one almost every pull. Make sure to do that.

[Varric]

Ok tyvm for the help

[4KhazModan]

Also, use your CD's often. Espicially in ZA and ZG. In the first ZA I did, I found myself using my CD's almost every pull.

[DomBomb1]

Lots of tank damage is avoidable. The addon GTFO is EXTREMELY helpful for notifying you when you're standing in a puddle of gooey death. Also make sure you're keeping all enemies in front of you so you can dodge/parry/block, interrupts casts when you can with rebuke, avenger's shield and HoJ, and make liberal use of your cooldowns, particularly divine protection (the cooldown is SOOOOO short you can use it almost every pull).

[Varric]

Would I use pure mastery gems, or master/something else gems

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

You obviouslly are stuck in WotLK time, stack mastery over stamina and dodge. reforge everything you can into mastery, only take blue gem sockets if the socket bonus gives you more mastery than a pure mastery gem would give you.

Also you have reforged hit, there is NO REASON AT ALL for you to be hitcapped. Like i said above, reforge everything you got into mastery.

You really need to read up on your class/spec since you're gemming for dodge and parry along with a few stamina gems. To top it off you have reforged alot into getting hitcapped it seems which is bad. Change all your gems to 40+ mastery unless the socket bonus gives you +15 stamina or + 10 mastery, if that's the socket bonus go for 30stam + 20mastery rating. make sure to have enough of theese gems to activate your meta socket.

in short, without being rude, it seems like you have no idea what you're doing and now you're wondering why. I'll try no to be a prick here but google "protection paladin in cataclysm" and chances are you'll get all the information you need.

[4KhazModan]

Would I use pure mastery gems, or master/something else gems

Yellow slot = Mastery
Red = Mastery + parry(orange)
Blue = Mastery + Stamina(green)

[Randelph]

hey i see your still a little mixed up in your geming and enchanting. my guy is Randelph from Turalyon if you need a compairison. i do agree mastery is key for prot pallys. STR is never good thing to gem. neither is dodge or parry.. i gave about 4% hit simply for those opening rotations.. hope this helps. ill send real id if ya need to talk more.

[ursinite101]

Yellow slot = Mastery
Red = Mastery + parry(orange)
Blue = Mastery + Stamina(green)

^^^This

If you dont have mastery on your items, reforge into it. Even if it is a Parry/Dodge item, reforge which ever stat has the higher rating (Most likely parry at the higher gear level atleast )

Never gem or reforge for hit/expertise, if you are having threat issues look into your rotation, dont forget to Divine plea for 3 free instant HP, judge hoping for the buff to SotR then shield, thats how I open for every boss and ever pull that DP is on CD, For boss pulls I also pop wings right after DP and before my first Judge. Instant threat boost and should keep you comfortable until your vengeance builds up. I have .5% hit and 20expertise and I rarely have threat issues, even in the beginning of the pull, only if I have very bad rng and I have 20k+ dpsers in my group. But still, if they pull I taunt and smash the mobs face in and then I have threat again never to be stripped off me again.

Now another thing is that due to diminishing returns you want to try and keep your Parry and Dodge rating as close as possible when you can. Let me give you an example of one way to do this:

Your Parry rating is 1300 and your dodge rating is 1100 and you have an Item that has Mastery/Parry, obviously you don't need to reforge into mastery since it already has it, but it does present you with an opportunity to balance out your parry/dodge, so you will reforge that parry into dodge. I hope that makes sense. Also if you have an Item that is Mastery/Hit, you want to reforge that hit into dodge or parry, which ever has the lowest rating.

looking at your rating you are pretty damn even, but once you get into epics you will see that parry is on freaking everything, so anywhere you cant reforge something into Mastery and there isnt a worthless threat stat to be reforged into a defense stat then balance out your parry/dodge

This is the order of stats Mastery> Dodge/Parry> expertise(softcap)> Hit

I hope this helps.

[capnmorgan]

Don't totally abandon hit rating. You need it to at least gain holy power. and if you miss with hammer of the righteous, then you miss its aoe effect thus loosing threat. You doing good on threat b/c your hit is great, but try to keep at least a baseline of 5% at the most. After that percentage, reforge everything to mastery.

[announced]

reforge all hit/expertise to mastery even when u think u have enough mastery get more mastery.
u want atleast 18.00 points or 20.00 around. so 45-50% blockrate. makes u less squishy. then get more dodge/parry.

puissant dream emerals for yellow/blue sockets work well. stam is needed for some bosses regardless.

[ursinite101]

Don't totally abandon hit rating. You need it to at least gain holy power. and if you miss with hammer of the righteous, then you miss its aoe effect thus loosing threat. You doing good on threat b/c your hit is great, but try to keep at least a baseline of 5% at the most. After that percentage, reforge everything to mastery.

I have .5% and rarely ever have any issue. Never in raids, very seldom in heroics if I have a bad case of RNGitis. If you are having issue consistently with threat then it is not your lack of hit rating, it is a bad rotation.

Plus the sacrifice you make to get 5% hit... 5% hit takes approximately 600 rating. Now just to give you an idea what that costs, with 600 rating put into mastery that equals 3.33 points of mastery (at 180 rater per point) which equals almost 7.5% chance to block. Granted you wont always be sacrificing Mastery for Hit, but you will be sacrificing something, being you are directly taking away from another defensive stat or not reforging into another defensive stat. Even if it all 600 hit rating went straight to Dodge/Parry, before DR that still is about 3% total avoidance. Not worth it in my opinion, not in the slightest.

[Deleted]

Yellow slot = Mastery
Red = Mastery + parry(orange)
Blue = Mastery + Stamina(green)

This is generally the best way to gem. You get a lot of the damage reduction stats whilst still getting some stamina from both gems and socket bonuses. Especially when you are starting out raiding if you gem pure mastery it will gimp your health pool and leave you little room for error.

Also: HIT IS NOT THE BEST THREAT STAT
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.c...593315#p593315

People if you are going to give bad advice and suggest gearing for threat at least tell people to get expertise.

[Anakso]

General tips for being a good pally tank.
1. All your gear should have mastery on it. If it does not have mastery on it then reforge a stat to make it mastery. For reforging guidlines, if your item has hit or expt, or basically any stat other than dodge/parry on it. that should be your first reforge. currently, bar being in almost full heroic gear and geming mastery, I believe its nearly impossible to hit mastery cap. Now for a piece with parry and dodge but no mastery, you should check your ratings. as an example if you have 1800 parry rating and 1700 dodge, reforge parry to mastery, even if the dodge % is actually higher than the parry, you'll be losing less avoidance all together.

2. Gems. for gems you have a choice, you can gem for stam and pick up socket bonus's. so blue is pure stam, red is stam/parry i believe and yellow is stam/mastery. or you can gem for mastery going for socket bonus's, so blue is mastery/stam, red is parry/mastery and yellow is pure stam. or you can go the half half route which some tanks take so basicly yellow is stam/mastery, blue is stam/mastery and red you can choose any of mastery, stam or stam/parry or mastery/parry depending on bonus. AFAIK the actual difference in raid survivability between going full mastery route or full stam route is quite minimal (I personally started out full stam but have switched to full mastery, once i get around to grinding my tol'borad dailes and picking up the mastery trink I might switch some back)

3. Enchants are fairly self explanatory, i believe on most items you can get either a good stam enchant or a good mastery enchant, but not many have both (could be wrong, long time since i last got an upgrade, so long time since i enchanted an item....) if there is both a good stam and mastery enchant, probobly follow the same guidlines as with gemming, personal preference, though it all depends on how much stam you have, to how much mastery you have.

4. Cooldowns - you have 4, and they should all be hot-keyed. I personally have all mine on my mouse, though if you don't have a gaming mouse find something to hot key them too, and try not to save them for only emergencies, you do have 4, roll them as often as you can and use LoH anytime you go really low, and your healer will have more mana and last longer before needing to drink =)

If you have any further queeries, this is an awesome site for prot paladins
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/
Read all the stickied notes on tanking when you have time in both basic training and advanced training, helps a lot.

[ursinite101]

This is generally the best way to gem. You get a lot of the damage reduction stats whilst still getting some stamina from both gems and socket bonuses. Especially when you are starting out raiding if you gem pure mastery it will gimp your health pool and leave you little room for error.

Also: HIT IS NOT THE BEST THREAT STAT
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.c...593315#p593315

People if you are going to give bad advice and suggest gearing for threat at least tell people to get expertise.

Yep, I always put Expertise soft cap before hit rating in my order of stat priority, but you get most you need from a little gear and the glyph, no reason to go out of your way to get any threat stats. Just learn a good rotation, and know how to recover in the event of bad RNG.

[Deleted]

If you're still in doubt you can always look up the elitiskjerks forum for paladins, the guide called cataclysm tanking protection field manual (not allowed to post links yet).

As said before about gems:

Yellow slot = Mastery
Red = Mastery + parry(orange)
Blue = Mastery + Stamina(green)

and for hit/expertise you should actually only go for hit and exp when you've reached the 102,4% complete combat table coverage.
You should aim for about 140k hp unbuffed and go for as much mastery you can through reforge, and as already said again, remember you 1min 20% dmg reduction cooldown.

[Deleted]

I had a thread some time ago, with the same issues, so I'm going to give you the advices I got from them.

Screw Expertise and Hit, it's not really needed, I got 0% Hit and about 10-14 exp rating and I always remain aggro.

Don't reforge every stat into Mastery, I find myself almost only reforging the non-tank stats I've got into Mastery, since almost all pieces you pick up will have Mastery on them anyhow. I often reforge dodge <-> parry, since you want their Ratings (not the %age) to be as close to each other as possible.

You want to hit 102.4% avoidance, which should consists of Mastery/Block, Dodge and Parry + 5%. I think I'm about 84.5% atm.

If you want, you can click on my signature to get to my Armory, where you can see how I reforge, gem, etc.