Paladin tank taking too much damage?

[hayvanadam]

Hello everyone, long time reader, first time poster here. I felt like I needed some help for my raid group since I have been spoting some issues with our raid group.

Yesterday night, while we had a good group progress with downing 2 bosses in a row we have been having trouble with, namely Horridon 10N and Council 10N. While I am aware we are not entirely composed of strong players, I have spotted an issue thanks to logging our raid for the first time

There has been an issue where our paladin tank would take huge damage spikes and this has been partly an ongoing issue, we had him dying at random times to stuff. I recall him dying to Empress p2 (When adds spawn), and this has been happening in Horridon when he is tanking Jalak and he would suddenly die from 65%+ (Melee + Bestial cry). Yesterday, we swtiched tanking roles and have our Guardian druid tanking Jalak which magically solved our problems. I believe our paladin tank is overally a good player. Here are my questions:

Q1) The issue is that the paladin takes enormous damage from Jalak's melee. According to the logs, his average damage taken from melee is over 400k+ while I guardian tank took about the half of it. Is this normal?

A similar issue we encountered last week, on Council (This wasnt logged), where he would take Frost King Malakk to help our Guardian (who is tanking both Sul and Malakk) to avoid getting stunned. He would take Malakk and take again absurd amounts of damage. We solved this issue by having our Guardian tank getting stunned. He was still easier to heal than our pala tank.

Q2) Then I started questioning and found out that our Guardian tank has almost the double amount of armor than our paladin tank, 107k armor vs 57k armor. This roughly translates to 40% less damage taken, which partly explains the problem. Is this amount of armor difference normal? If yes, how is it possible that paladins are considered the best survival tank considered nowadays? I honestly cannot comprehend this.

Q3) Our range dps (2x hunter + Mage) is kind of having low dps on Council 10N, random tips on how they can improve is appreciated. Is this expected since they are target swapping most of the time? For instance, I realized our mage was using frost bomb, would nether tempest be better for this fight?

Q4) I would appreciate some tips, how can I perform better. I realize I am not using Ironbark as much as I should and am trying to improve on it.

Miscellaneous information:

Raid composition:

Tanks:
Uff - Paladin Tank
Ukemi - Druid Tank

Healers:
Hayvanadamn - Resto druid
Pugno - Disc priest
Aweli - Disc priest

DPS:
Têquila - Frost DK
Silentshade - Assasination Rogue
Embalmic - Surv hunter
Shêytan - Surv hunter
Frostcore - Frost mage

Log:
22.04.2013 - www worldoflogs.com/reports/goecs1ss8zmyv9xc/

Armories:
Hayvanadamn - www eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/twisting-nether/Hayvanadamn/simple
Our guild - www eu.battle.net/wow/en/guild/twisting-nether/Anguista/roster

P.S: If anyone can get the links operating, I would be grateful.

[Deleted]

Hello everyone, long time reader, first time poster here. I felt like I needed some help for my raid group since I have been spoting some issues with our raid group.

Yesterday night, while we had a good group progress with downing 2 bosses in a row we have been having trouble with, namely Horridon 10N and Council 10N. While I am aware we are not entirely composed of strong players, I have spotted an issue thanks to logging our raid for the first time

There has been an issue where our paladin tank would take huge damage spikes and this has been partly an ongoing issue, we had him dying at random times to stuff. I recall him dying to Empress p2 (When adds spawn), and this has been happening in Horridon when he is tanking Jalak and he would suddenly die from 65%+ (Melee + Bestial cry). Yesterday, we swtiched tanking roles and have our Guardian druid tanking Jalak which magically solved our problems. I believe our paladin tank is overally a good player. Here are my questions:

Q1) The issue is that the paladin takes enormous damage from Jalak's melee. According to the logs, his average damage taken from melee is over 400k+ while I guardian tank took about the half of it. Is this normal?

A similar issue we encountered last week, on Council (This wasnt logged), where he would take Frost King Malakk to help our Guardian (who is tanking both Sul and Malakk) to avoid getting stunned. He would take Malakk and take again absurd amounts of damage. We solved this issue by having our Guardian tank getting stunned. He was still easier to heal than our pala tank.

Q2) Then I started questioning and found out that our Guardian tank has almost the double amount of armor than our paladin tank, 107k armor vs 57k armor. This roughly translates to 40% less damage taken, which partly explains the problem. Is this amount of armor difference normal? If yes, how is it possible that paladins are considered the best survival tank considered nowadays? I honestly cannot comprehend this.

Q3) Our range dps (2x hunter + Mage) is kind of having low dps on Council 10N, random tips on how they can improve is appreciated. Is this expected since they are target swapping most of the time? For instance, I realized our mage was using frost bomb, would nether tempest be better for this fight?

Q4) I would appreciate some tips, how can I perform better. I realize I am not using Ironbark as much as I should and am trying to improve on it.

Miscellaneous information:

Raid composition:

Tanks:
Uff - Paladin Tank
Ukemi - Druid Tank

Healers:
Hayvanadamn - Resto druid
Pugno - Disc priest
Aweli - Disc priest

DPS:
Têquila - Frost DK
Silentshade - Assasination Rogue
Embalmic - Surv hunter
Shêytan - Surv hunter
Frostcore - Frost mage

Log:
22.04.2013 - www worldoflogs.com/reports/goecs1ss8zmyv9xc/

Armories:
Hayvanadamn - www eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/twisting-nether/Hayvanadamn/simple
Our guild - www eu.battle.net/wow/en/guild/twisting-nether/Anguista/roster

P.S: If anyone can get the links operating, I would be grateful.

Quickly going trough the Horridon logs you paladin tank has really really low uptime on Shield of the Righteous buff. It reduces his physical damage taken by around 50%. His uptime on the buff was 26%, when I had about 51% last time I tanked Horridon.

It has something to do with his gearing, but not entirely by that. That uptime has to be much higher to reduce damage spikes.

I would recommend him to buy DPS version of the Shado-Pan Assault trinket. It gives lots of expertise, so he could change his expertise JC gems to haste (or mastery if wanted) to reduce damage taken.

But I think the problem is two-folded.

1) Shield of the Righteous buff uptime should be 40-50% at least.
2) Shield has to be timed right (before large hit).

EDIT: I looked to his talents and while Divine Purpose is arguably really good (I use it myself usually) there are fights (and situations on almost every fight) that Holy Avenger is better. For Horridon for example he could pop holy avenger and keep Shield buff up for 25 sec without dropping it once. So it's around 50% less physical damage for the whole time Jalak is alive. It makes it lot easier.

EDIT2: And to conclude you said that paladin tank is considered the best survival tank overall. I can't say for sure, but I can say it is not as easy to play as many people tend to think. In this case I would say your paladin tank just has to improve and get his rotation under control to improve his shield uptime.

[BergErr]

Haven't played pala/guardian tank so can't say much on that.
But our pala tank is close to immortal and have done far better than others we have used (dk, war, druid, monk).

[Deleted]

Haven't played pala/guardian tank so can't say much on that.
But our pala tank is close to immortal and have done far better than others we have used (dk, war, druid, monk).

Yeah good example is Tortos Heroic. At least what I've heard many tanks struggle with keeping the shell buff all the time. With paladin just time Shields for every snapping bite and Stomp and you never lose the buff. Paladin is really really good when played properly (well it goes to almost every tank, paladins strength comes mainly from assisting more in DPS and being able to solo tank so much in this tier).

[hayvanadam]

Doctorant, thank you for your comments.

So it is ok for paladins to normally take much more damage from physical attacks? Then it is off-set by SotR? He says he is literally spamming his Holy power generating abilities along with SotR, combining with his 90+% activity. So is it a problem of wasting holy power? Not enough haste?

Timing it I understand while I feel it is kind of invalid for Jalak, as he melees in quick succession. Uptime on the buff however I think is definately relevant.

EDIT: Just saw your edits. The suggestions just sound really spot on. Thanks again.

[Deleted]

Doctorant, thank you for your comments.

So it is ok for paladins to normally take much more damage from physical attacks? Then it is off-set by SotR? He says he is literally spamming his Holy power generating abilities along with SotR, combining with his 90+% activity. So is it a problem of wasting holy power? Not enough haste?

Timing it I understand while I feel it is kind of invalid for Jalak, as he melees in quick succession. Uptime on the buff however I think is definately relevant.

EDIT: Just saw your edits. The suggestions just sound really spot on. Thanks again.

Yeah basically paladin takes more damage due to somewhat lower armor (however, at least earlier druids used to have much more armor than anyone else, so comparing them is not maybe the best. Paladin also has block which druid doesn't).

It was hard to compare the amount of HP gained because your fight was much longer than ours and I don't have time to do the math atm. Maybe someone has time to do the math. All I saw was that Shield uptime was about half of mine which is really low. Even with full mastery build (I have haste build which increases uptime by around 10 %) shield uptime should be around 40%.

EDIT: One more advice. If survivability is problem he should never ever delay Crusader Strike or Judgment in favor or Consecration or Avenger's Shield. Even with Grand Crusader procs always Judgment and Crusader strike comes first to get them to CD as fast as possible. Grand Crusadeer proc should be used as a priority when both are on CD: Fillers come after that. That way HP generation is maximised.

[Deleted]

I maintank as a Prot Paladin so I'll try and look at this and rant a bit!

First, your Paladin seems to be be reforging and gemming decently BUT he picked the wrong valor trinket. That dodge use is crap for a Prot Paladin. The other trinket isn't that great either. He should switch that valor trinket for the DPS one (some parry and, more importantly, extra attack power) and then switch the LFR trinket for WoE, Lei Shi, Horridon or Ji-kun's trinket.

Second, his HotR glyph is useless, you have other people in the group that apply it. For Horridon, the example you use, he should've switched that for Glyph of Divine Protection (20% dmg reduction cooldown). Also, Execution Sentence, in my experience, is the only lvl 90 talent I don't ever remember using for progression or anything but toying around. I like Holy Lasers a lot personally but Hammer isn't bad either.

Third, regarding SotR, his uptime is a tad low but, since the issue is the final phase, what matters is that he ALWAYS times it to mitigate the shout on War God and Triple Puncture on Horridon. Though, by checking your logs, he is taking a bit more damage than I took on our last kill of the same boss (about 7M more) though we did kill it about one minute faster so that's an extra amount of time taking damage.

[Deleted]

Sacred Shield uptime is 57%, should be 100%.

[MerinPally]

Sacred Shield uptime is 57%, should be 100%.

Should be yeah but noone is perfect and cranking out those extra SHOTR's is more important and with movement and procs and so on so forth, a ~60% SS uptime really is avtually half decent. Major problem is a 26% SHOTR uptime someone posted earlier. That's absolutely horrible and needs a huge fix.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...r/Uff/advanced

There's the armory just so it's easier to find.

[celinamuna]

He's wasting a lot of HoP.
Shows that he used WoG 7 times, at most that's 21 HoP, he gained SotR 38 times that's 114 hop. He gained divine purpose 18 times, so that's extra 54 HoP (or equivalent), in addition he generated 207 HoP from CS / Judgement. That means that during the fight when he gained 261 he only used 135 leaving 126 wasted.
Those 126 HoP's would be equivalent to 42 SotR effectively doubling his uptime (and after you account for the procs, even more than that).

[hayvanadam]

Grimord, thank you for your comments.

I have gone through two latest logs of yours. They are on 20.03.2013 and 27.03.2013. It looks like Jalak was tanked by your guardian druid. In both kills, Jalak meleed him for an average of 260k-270k. Which is pretty consistent with what we had when we had our Guardian druid tank him.

This somewhat strengthens what I was suspicious of at the start. Guardian tanks are much better for heavy melee hitters. They can tank with ease without having to time any active mitigation CDs. This is also intriguing for me and is kind of contradictory of all the sayings about paladin tanks being gods in these forums. My experience have been the exact opposite :/

Anyway, I want to ask another question, in regards to what Doctorant have also mentioned; Prot pala dps capabilities. In all our raids, the dps output of our guardian has been much much higher, similar to your case Grimord (While your difference is smaller). Does this dps capabilities come out when paladins are solo tanking due to much higher vengeance? I feel like I need a bit of explanation in here too.

[Tomhvk]

Okay so this might sound weird. But uptime on SotR is not the most important thing. This is how i play my prot paladin, ill give some examples of Bosses:

Horridon : I make sure i have SotR up for every debuff. I only use SotR as a filler if im 100% sure i will have 3hp for the next debuff, I make sure i pool 5hp (even if i waste some) before a direcall on heroic.

Tortos : I only ever use SotR on snapjaw or whatever it is called, unless i get a proc, which means my uptime is abit lower, but the healers already have me covered for melee hits

Maegra : I use filler SotR inbetween breaths, but you need a SotR for every breath no matter what.

My playstyle at the moment is due to my healers, we had a good chat about what was going on, and they know that I may take abit more damage from the melee hits on progression, but you need to make sure you hit every single ability you can.

Its really upto your healers on how they play imo.

[hayvanadam]

Thanje, Merinpally. Thank you for your comments.

celinamuna, thanks for the calculation. That explains my concern of wasted Holy power.

All these points show that there is indeed much room for improvement.

[celinamuna]

Grimord, thank you for your comments.

I have gone through two latest logs of yours. They are on 20.03.2013 and 27.03.2013. It looks like Jalak was tanked by your guardian druid. In both kills, Jalak meleed him for an average of 260k-270k. Which is pretty consistent with what we had when we had our Guardian druid tank him.

This somewhat strengthens what I was suspicious of at the start. Guardian tanks are much better for heavy melee hitters. They can tank with ease without having to time any active mitigation CDs. This is also intriguing for me and is kind of contradictory of all the sayings about paladin tanks being gods in these forums. My experience have been the exact opposite :/

Anyway, I want to ask another question, in regards to what Doctorant have also mentioned; Prot pala dps capabilities. In all our raids, the dps output of our guardian has been much much higher, similar to your case Grimord (While your difference is smaller). Does this dps capabilities come out when paladins are solo tanking due to much higher vengeance? I feel like I need a bit of explanation in here too.

I wouldn't really agree with most of those points.
Looking at my own logs while my kills are somewhat faster it seems that i'm taking less dmg (dps) while doing more healing and dps. While some of it is because of gear i would still disagree that druids are better on a heavy physical dmg fight. What i would say is that they are better at mitigating auto-attack dmg, sadly i wouldn't count it as very valuable due to the fact that at no point (outside of enrage at the end horridon) should tanks ever risk dying from auto attacks.

(Log for comparison : http://bit.ly/ZgCuAv )

[Deleted]

Okay so this might sound weird. But uptime on SotR is not the most important thing. This is how i play my prot paladin, ill give some examples of Bosses:

Horridon : I make sure i have SotR up for every debuff. I only use SotR as a filler if im 100% sure i will have 3hp for the next debuff, I make sure i pool 5hp (even if i waste some) before a direcall on heroic.

Tortos : I only ever use SotR on snapjaw or whatever it is called, unless i get a proc, which means my uptime is abit lower, but the healers already have me covered for melee hits

Maegra : I use filler SotR inbetween breaths, but you need a SotR for every breath no matter what.

My playstyle at the moment is due to my healers, we had a good chat about what was going on, and they know that I may take abit more damage from the melee hits on progression, but you need to make sure you hit every single ability you can.

Its really upto your healers on how they play imo.

Why you need SotR for every breath no matter what? Am I mistaken or is breath only magical damage, to which SotR doesn't help at all?

[Deja Thoris]

His overall damage taken isnt that bad.

I checked the 9 minute attempt.
Pala took 26mill dmg, self healed 7, net 19mill
Dru took 22.6mill, net about 20mill after self heals

So the damage taken is about the same (tho theres room for improvement on the pala - more on that in a sec). Now you need to check the nature of the damage, hes spiky. That means hes not using his active mitigation appropriately. He needs to watch his boss mod and when a big ability is coming up he needs to use sotr for 50% dmg reduction. Especially for when wargod lands or Horridon gets buffed and does his triple puncture.

- I personally prefer holy avenger for this fight. It's basically 30 seconds of 50% physical damage reduction for that phase of the fight with sotr spam. He has talented divine purpose which gives his a lot of proc holy power to play with but holy avenger gives predictibilty ie the ability to mitigate when you know you will need it.
- He needs to glyph divine protection here. It's 20% phys dmg reduction on a 1 min cooldown. Glyphs are situational (and talents) and he should be looking at the most appropriate ones for each encounter.
- His sacred shield uptime (his absorb) is low at about 50%, it should be up over 80%. He should also look to refresh it smartly, it scales with vengeance so using it just after a triple puncture will mean bigger absorbs.
- Execution sentence is shit. It's a long cooldown and doesn't really do much for the prot tree. Holy prism will work better for this fight. It does nice hits every 20 sec and will heal him and half the raid with a nice big smartheal. It's a fantastic talent for burst heals when timed right. Lights hammer is the winner for stacking sustained heals like in megaras ramapages. I just don't see a use for execution sentence as prot.

I think if he focusses on the tweaks above it will make him less prone to "spikey" deaths. Good luck.

[Deleted]

Should be yeah but noone is perfect and cranking out those extra SHOTR's is more important and with movement and procs and so on so forth, a ~60% SS uptime really is avtually half decent. Major problem is a 26% SHOTR uptime someone posted earlier. That's absolutely horrible and needs a huge fix.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...r/Uff/advanced

There's the armory just so it's easier to find.

Yeah you are right. I missed the Sacred Shield part.

For reference on last Horridon I had 51% SotR uptime and 91 % Sacred Shield uptime.

[celinamuna]

Why you need SotR for every breath no matter what? Am I mistaken or is breath only magical damage, to which SotR doesn't help at all?

While i don't see a point in using it for the breath, but you would want to use it right as it ended to ensure that the next boss swings are being mitigated thus softening the dmg spike.

[Deleted]

Anyway, I want to ask another question, in regards to what Doctorant have also mentioned; Prot pala dps capabilities. In all our raids, the dps output of our guardian has been much much higher, similar to your case Grimord (While your difference is smaller). Does this dps capabilities come out when paladins are solo tanking due to much higher vengeance? I feel like I need a bit of explanation in here too.

Yes exactly. Vengeance ramps up when solo tanking, and many guilds use paladin to tank majority of the fight, and let other tank taunt onyl when necessary. For example at Horridon your paladin can tank Horridon the whole fight and your other tank adds to increase dps on Horridon with huge vengeance (You can reset Triple Puncture with HoP and Divine Shield).

Same applies to many encounters in this tier.

[hayvanadam]

Why you need SotR for every breath no matter what? Am I mistaken or is breath only magical damage, to which SotR doesn't help at all?

The only relevant point is that the poison head applies a debuff that reduces armor which increases physical damage taken. Otherwise SotR should have no effect on the actual breath damage.