Prot pally question

[Wtflock]

My guild's Prot Pally is better geared than our Prot Warrior but takes 2x as much damage, and the healers say he goes from 100% health to 40% in 1 second. I can say for sure that when VooDoo Dolls is on him, and not the Prot Warrior, the healers have a hell of a time keeping the other 2 people up and personal CDs are used like crazy, and he's our "one dog tank" on Stone Guard and takes just as much damage as the Warrior tanking 2. He also has trouble holding aggro and does about half the damage of the warrior, even though he says he's reforged and gemmed for threat (which we figured would explain some of his damage taken increase). He says that pallies are just in a horrible spot right now, and that he's doing everything right. He's extremely averse to suggestions from anyone, but we're stuck and he's holding us back from progressing so we need to change something, and can't really get a new tank since we're on a dead server.

The question is, is he right that pallies are just taking a ton more damage than other tanks right now (that healers should be spamming fast heals on him the whole time he's tanking), and that his threat and damage should also be low? I hadn't heard anything about pallies lagging behind, but he insists they are. In addition, any other tips would be much appreciated.

When we first started raiding in MSV he wasn't using SotR because he said he needed to use the holy power to heal. We explained that he needed to use it on both single target and multi target fights, and that he needed to focus on keeping the buff up, so he's started using it more (although it still seems low).

I realize this will make it hard but I don't have logs to post and feel uncomfortable posting his profile since he gets so angry anytime someone questions him. Unbuffed he has over 480k health, 16% mastery, 7.78% hit, 7.23% expertise, 51k armor, 13% parry, almost 5% dodge.

[Fhi]

I don't raid, so someone else will be able to be help you with more fight-specific issues, but there are two things I want to mention. Firstly, pally tanks are not taking a ton more damage. If they are, it's either gear or execution issues or both. Secondly, if

he gets so angry anytime someone questions him

I'm not sure he will be willing to improve with any kind of help. If he is holding you back, you have to speak to him about being open to criticism. Posters here will be able to help more if we at least have his armory link. Reforging and gemming for threat is actually good because threat now is parallel to survivability.

At a glace I would say that he needs more expertise - again, if you have a World of Logs log, others will be able to pinpoint exactly what the issue is.

[Manstallion]

For someone gemming/reforging for threats, his expertise is very low. His mastery is pretty low as well. His avoidance also seems low though, so it doesn't seem like he is stacking avoidance. Without looking at his gear I'm not really sure what to think. What's his ilvl?

The question is, is he right that pallies are just taking a ton more damage than other tanks right now (that healers should be spamming fast heals on him the whole time he's tanking), and that his threat and damage should also be low? I hadn't heard anything about pallies lagging behind, but he insists they are. In addition, any other tips would be much appreciated.

This is false. Paladins are in a pretty good place now, in both terms of survivability and threat. Just chalking up his ineffectiveness to "class is broken, sorry" is a complete cop out and shows he's not willing to research what he's doing wrong, or put any effort into bettering his character. I'd look for a new tank.

[Wtflock]

Thanks for confirming that pally tanks are not in a "high damage taken" place right now, it's what I really wanted to know. I know reforging/gemming for threat is good so that's all well and fine, my concern is that he's still losing aggro even without DPS using CDs so he must be doing something wrong with that tanking strategy.

You cheered me up just with your avatar, so thanks!

For someone gemming/reforging for threats, his expertise is very low. His mastery is pretty low as well. His avoidance also seems low though, so it doesn't seem like he is stacking avoidance. Without looking at his gear I'm not really sure what to think. What's his ilvl?

He's at 472, with a piece of tier (legs), mostly other purples, but some really bad blues too. Seems to be gemming mostly for mastery and reforged all into hit/expertise. And that was my suspicion in terms of his reaction, but I wanted to seek confirmation (in a more specific fashion than just reading the forums) since I haven't done more than tank two dungeons on my pally yet. Thanks.

[Rivin]

If his ShoR usage is low, as you say, that's probably the crux of the issue. That damage reduction buff is massive.

[Ruzhyo]

Unbuffed he has over 480k health, 16% mastery, 7.78% hit, 7.23% expertise, 51k armor, 13% parry, almost 5% dodge.

I don't currently play my prot pally, but I've been keeping an eye on the spec since it was my main in cata, and I liked it back then. In cata you went 0% hit/expertise if possible to maximize your defense, in MoP the opposite is true, and you go all out hit/expertise (to 15% hard cap)/haste... in order to maximize your defense.

See in cata, your defense was a passive thing. You blocked/dodged/parried a lot, and that was how you took less damage. In MoP you need to actively be using SotR every 3 seconds or so in order to keep your damage reduction buff up. The point of the haste is so that you can get your global cooldowns down to the minimum and crank out as much holy power as possible so that you can SotR as often as possible. SotR is also a hard hitting spell (especially with the alabaster shield glyph) which is a big aggro-holder. In addition, with the haste, he should be using Seal of Insight so that his self-heals contribute to his survivability.

If your pally is putting all his points into mastery, he's got a ton of diminished usefulness since his mastery's main function is to make his SotR damage preventer more potent, and if he isn't using SotR then he doesn't have a bastion of glory.

Again, haven't prot pallied as a main since Cata, so if anyone has any problems with my post please let me know, I'd be curious to hear what other pallies have to say.

[Rivin]

In MoP you need to actively be using SotR every 3 seconds or so in order to keep your bastion of glory (I think thats what it was called) buff up.

The damage reduction buff is actually called "Shield of the Righteous". Bastion of Glory is a separate buff that increases Word of Glory's healing.

[Fhi]

If your pally is putting all his points into mastery, he's got a ton of diminished usefulness since his mastery's main function is to make his bastion of glory more potent, and if he isn't using SotR then he doesn't have a bastion of glory.

Mastery also increases the damage reduction granted by SoR, so it's not that diminished. It's about as good as haste is for the time being.

[Aerai]

Bastion of Glory is only useful in emergencies and during high magic damage periods where SotR doesn't help you. Expertise hard capping (15%) and hit (8%) is the utmost priority followed by haste for almost all situations outside of magic based fights.

If you cannot reliably generate holy power because you're getting misses or parries, then your SotR uptime is that much lower meaning you're taking that much more damage. With capped expertise/hit your average uptime of SotR is approx 30-40% without crazy amounts of haste. On physical based fights prot pally have some of the highest mitigation potential and smoothest damage curves.

It sounds like a gear problem and not managing active mitigation properly.

[ZeroEdgeir]

Your guildie is stacking Mastery, but not using all elements of what Mastery provides.

Mastery: Divine Bulwark - Increases damage reduction of your Shield of Righteousness by 16%, adds 16% to your Bastion of Glory, and increases your chance to block melee attacks by 16%. (16% is baseline with the stock 8 Mastery provided).

So, if he isn't using SotR (much), he is not utilizing 2/3 of his Mastery he is stacking. Using Word of Glory without at least a 3-stack of Bastion of Glory is just weak. It gets progressively stronger with every SotR use. It seems like your guildie has had trouble adapting to the active mitigation tanking style.

[Ruzhyo]

The damage reduction buff is actually called "Shield of the Righteous". Bastion of Glory is a separate buff that increases Word of Glory's healing.

Ah thank you. I edited my post to be a bit more clear.

Mastery also increases the damage reduction granted by SoR, so it's not that diminished. It's about as good as haste is for the time being.

That's what I mean... if this tank isn't using his shield of the righteous, then the only thing his mastery is doing for him is giving him a tiny block%

[Wtflock]

Thanks all for the help, you're wonderful for helping so much within the limitations of the details I felt comfortable providing without compromising the anonymity! I will see if the warrior or a healer can come up with a way to kindly suggest his SotR use is low. It's far below once every 3 seconds, I think he's been in the 20s for usage on recount on a 2 or 3 minute fight the other night, but I can't be sure while I'm not at that computer.

...

I'd be surprised looking at those numbers, if he hasn't gotten a decent percentage of haste that you have omitted. To say he's set up for threat would mean he's using the haste set up most likely.

According to both askmrrobot and his battle.net, he has 0.00% melee or spell haste. I'm not sure I entirely trust that, but he'd have at least 5% with our spriest anyway.

[Aemi]

Thanks all for the help, you're wonderful for helping so much within the limitations of the details I felt comfortable providing without compromising the anonymity! I will see if the warrior or a healer can come up with a way to kindly suggest his SotR use is low. It's far below once every 3 seconds, I think he's been in the 20s for usage on recount on a 2 or 3 minute fight the other night, but I can't be sure while I'm not at that computer.

Its not possible to have the SotR buff up 100% atm.

Also his rotation could be an issue, meaning he isnt maximising his HoPo generation.

His rotation should be, CS, J, X, CS, X, J, CS, X, X repeat.

Im currently sitting at 468ilvl, 7.53% Hit, 9.23% expertise and 12% Mastery. I have never had issues with my guild calling me squishy :s

[Deleted]

Its not possible to have the SotR buff up 100% atm.

Also his rotation could be an issue, meaning he isnt maximising his HoPo generation.

His rotation should be, CS, J, X, CS, X, J, CS, X, X repeat.

Im currently sitting at 468ilvl, 7.53% Hit, 9.23% expertise and 12% Mastery. I have never had issues with my guild calling me squishy :s

It is if you have dat yummy Holy Avenger buff... :3

You should get 15% Expertise by the way.

[lakhesis]

Thanks all for the help, you're wonderful for helping so much within the limitations of the details I felt comfortable providing without compromising the anonymity! I will see if the warrior or a healer can come up with a way to kindly suggest his SotR use is low. It's far below once every 3 seconds, I think he's been in the 20s for usage on recount on a 2 or 3 minute fight the other night, but I can't be sure while I'm not at that computer.

According to both askmrrobot and his battle.net, he has 0.00% melee or spell haste. I'm not sure I entirely trust that, but he'd have at least 5% with our spriest anyway.

Without haste & without taking into account the bonus holy power talent, it's more like 1 SotR every 6-7 seconds. That said, it sounds like it's just really low. The rotation Aemi gave is accurate. If he's having issues he's got two possible gearing approaches:

1) Just stack avoidance. It'll make him spikey, but it's the most idiot proof approach to reducing damage & basically just shifts all the concerns over to the healers.

2) Hit (to cap), Expertise (to 15%) & Mastery. Using a couple of SotR's to establish threat in the first place. After that, pool Holy Power to 5 and use SotR when (a) you're getting a little low on health (e.g. sub 60-70%) or (b) when you've got 5 Holy Power and are about to use a builder that will give you an extra holy power.

Irrespective of which gearing approach he uses, his rotation is the one Aemi gave & his SotR use should be modelled off what I described. If he needs a simplified version of that, then "use SotR whenever you have 3+ holy power" will still be better mitigation than using it less frequently. You save up GotAK, not SotR - spend that holy power.

WoG is not used as a finisher unless you'll die otherwise, or you're taking absurdly high percentages of magic damage rather than physical damage (which occurs so rarely that you could probably just generalise & say 'never use WoG by default').

[casually]

hes proly not hit/expertise capped or just not using his rotation correctly... always keep judgement and CS on cd.. and shor every time u can.. also use SoI and id use the Diving purpose talent.. it may seem random at first but just smashing the shield of righteous button every time it lights up tends to work fine. ive had DP proc 7 or 8 times in a row and had the buff stack up for 18 seconds.
Dp also adds threat cause well.. shield is a huge hitter.

[Deleted]

Prot pal at the moment consist of 1 abilitie(lets forget about KDs now): SotR. It reduse the incoming damage(physical) for 3 seconds(buffed by mastery) and each time we use it, we get an aditional buff to heal(wog). His problem is in using to less SotR. Tell him to do 7.5hit+7.5exp.+all mastery.
Do not blame him, because prot paladins had allways more to calculate then other tanks(cata mastery cap oposed to mindlessly mastery staking of other tanks just come to my mind).
Prot paladins are ok...

[Navoan]

Is he spec'd into Sacred Shield and using it correctly? Our prot pally was complaining for our first raid that he was getting trucked whereas I (Guardian tank) was taking relatively little dmg in comparison (he took more dmg than me when he was tanking 1 dog on Stone Guard for example, healers were having a tough time when he was voodoo dolled etc).

Our pally wasn't refreshing Sacred Shield with high vengeance (it absorbs much MUCH more with higher vengance) So if he only buffs himself at the start of the fight he is loosing a ton of mitigation. We have had 0 problems since he fixed his refreshing (helps with a vengence tracker) and definately use Seal of Insight. Any way you would feel comfortable linking WoL/Armoury to me in a PM? Ain't worth my time to log on and confront someone who doesn't seem to care enough to fix himself (Choice won the internet when saying he: is just convinced he's made of swag), anyone with the attitude of "I'm doing everything 100% correct it's not me failing" will almost always be doing something wrong and actually is the cause of the problems. Having 20secs uptime on SotR over 2-3mins is like wtf?

[Barnabas]

My guild's Prot Pally is better geared than our Prot Warrior but takes 2x as much damage, and the healers say he goes from 100% health to 40% in 1 second. I can say for sure that when VooDoo Dolls is on him, and not the Prot Warrior, the healers have a hell of a time keeping the other 2 people up and personal CDs are used like crazy, and he's our "one dog tank" on Stone Guard and takes just as much damage as the Warrior tanking 2. He also has trouble holding aggro and does about half the damage of the warrior, even though he says he's reforged and gemmed for threat (which we figured would explain some of his damage taken increase). He says that pallies are just in a horrible spot right now, and that he's doing everything right. He's extremely averse to suggestions from anyone, but we're stuck and he's holding us back from progressing so we need to change something, and can't really get a new tank since we're on a dead server.

The question is, is he right that pallies are just taking a ton more damage than other tanks right now (that healers should be spamming fast heals on him the whole time he's tanking), and that his threat and damage should also be low? I hadn't heard anything about pallies lagging behind, but he insists they are. In addition, any other tips would be much appreciated.

When we first started raiding in MSV he wasn't using SotR because he said he needed to use the holy power to heal. We explained that he needed to use it on both single target and multi target fights, and that he needed to focus on keeping the buff up, so he's started using it more (although it still seems low).

I realize this will make it hard but I don't have logs to post and feel uncomfortable posting his profile since he gets so angry anytime someone questions him. Unbuffed he has over 480k health, 16% mastery, 7.78% hit, 7.23% expertise, 51k armor, 13% parry, almost 5% dodge.

I don't see the point in stacking that much mastery. It's a wasted stat when there are other areas that have much more needed attention. Your friend needs to get get rid of the mastery shit and get expertise to 15% as a first priority. The parry to dodge ratio seems off as well. Should get a little more dodge to not get into dr territory which is another thing I can see happening that you aren't mentioning. Fix those 2 things and miracles can happen for your raid. It'll fix the damage/threat issues. If this guy isn't even using his skills properly that would explain why he is taking more damage than the warrior tank. Paladins are the easiest tank you can play in the game. Not to mention the million healing your raid gets from the battle healer glyph. The million cd's to surive you get that are instant. Based on your last sentence though I'd just find a new tank if this guy isn't willing to improve.

[Deleted]

I don't see the point in stacking that much mastery. It's a wasted stat when there are other areas that have much more needed attention. Your friend needs to get get rid of the mastery shit and get expertise to 15% as a first priority. The parry to dodge ratio seems off as well. Should get a little more dodge to not get into dr territory which is another thing I can see happening that you aren't mentioning. Fix those 2 things and miracles can happen for your raid. It'll fix the damage/threat issues. If this guy isn't even using his skills properly that would explain why he is taking more damage than the warrior tank. Paladins are the easiest tank you can play in the game. Not to mention the million healing your raid gets from the battle healer glyph. The million cd's to surive you get that are instant. Based on your last sentence though I'd just find a new tank if this guy isn't willing to improve.

Parry and dodge don't have the same diminishing returns. Since strength now gives you parry you will likely always have more parry than dodge unless you go nuts gemming and reforging for dodge.

Regardless most Prot Pala's aren't too interested in avoidance at the moment. There's basically two gearing strategies, mitigation via haste/mastery or avoidance via dodge/parry. Trying to mix the two will provide the benefits of neither. Generally the haste/mastery route is preferred because it provides smoother damage mitigation and increased DPS as a bonus.