[MoP] Protection Paladin Guide

[lakhesis]

So we should only really be going to the expertise soft cap?

I assume being at the expertise hard cap is a dps increase but you gain more survivabilty from being at the soft cap?

Actually it's the other way around.

Being at the expertise hard cap is a major survivability increase, whereas if you were optimising for DPS the value of expertise as a DPS stat drops significantly after the soft cap.

The reasoning is that going from 7.5% to 15% guarantees that your holy point builders will hit, which guarantees that you'll get to use your SotR as much as possible. Whereas the holy point builders are actually pretty poor DPS abilities, with effects like AS, HW, HoW & Cons all beating them in the damage-per-cast stakes.

You can find the explanation on the stat values for DPS by fully reading the Stat Comparison section of the Matlab thread. The value of expertise hardcap versus softcap for mitigation is covered in some of Theck's posts on Sacredduty.net, but I can't for the life of me remember which ones atm.. they'd have been in september/december 2012 at the latest, but quite possibly back in the MoP beta.

Most of the advice you see coming from Theck & Sacredduty.net is survivability-related (e.g. hardcap expertise, gear heavily into stamina). Advice like "gem haste instead of stam" is deliberately sacrificing survivability for DPS/HPS, which may well be advantageous for your raid (more dps is always good, shorter fights mean you have to survive less time) but isn't strictly speaking a survival boost at a personal level. Because the askmrrobot & icy-veins approaches are the result of consulting with Theck, they have a heavier bias towards survival stats than much of the community (especially the top end raiders).

And in the case of noxxic, I got no idea what they're smoking. Some of their advice is flat out rubbish (e.g. their "survival" stat weights)

[Deleted]

And in the case of noxxic, I got no idea what they're smoking. Some of their advice is flat out rubbish (e.g. their "survival" stat weights)

This may be a stupid pet peeve but what bothers me the most about noxxic's guide is that it recommends ES as the "to-go" talent without any consideration for the other two. Maybe I just care too much about helping with raid healing but I don't ever remember doing progression using ES.

[Deleted]

Please ellaborate why expertise hard cap is a bigger survival increase than haste when the raw hopo regen of haste is significantly more, which in the end is the point of exp/haste, hopo regen.

Proper Hopo management nullifies the reliability issues of being below exp soft cap.

Not to mention added SS speed.

Also remember that theck has not revisited exp hard vs soft cap since his simulations was very crude. Now with SS and shify queue i wouldnt be suprised if haste pulled ahead if exp soft cap even in thecks simple patchwerksimulation.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

This may be a stupid pet peeve but what bothers me the most about noxxic's guide is that it recommends ES as the "to-go" talent without any consideration for the other two. Maybe I just care too much about helping with raid healing but I don't ever remember doing progression using ES.

It is the highest DPS choice in that tier. You can see a lot of tanks taking it for Ra'den, as that appears to be primarily a dps race with an extremely tight enrage timer.

Doesn't make it "better" in every case though; Holy Prism and Hammer of Light are arguably "better" on pretty much all of the other ToT fights as the raid damage is a significant part of the challenge of the encounter.

[celinamuna]

It is the highest DPS choice in that tier. You can see a lot of tanks taking it for Ra'den, as that appears to be primarily a dps race with an extremely tight enrage timer.

Doesn't make it "better" in every case though; Holy Prism and Hammer of Light are arguably "better" on pretty much all of the other ToT fights as the raid damage is a significant part of the challenge of the encounter.

Agreed, but.... i a) don't see a lot of tanks on ra-den b) don't see a reason why it would be advocated as such when it is marginally better on 1 out of 25 fights.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Hmm, it appears that I would only gain about 300 haste rating by reforging away all that expertise (. It would all end up being stuck into Mastery (which doesn't increase uptime). While it would be nice to get another 3.5% more ShoR reduction and a bigger WoG, I'm not sure it is worth the trade-in of the reliability of 7.5/15%.

[britishbubba]

Agreed, but.... i a) don't see a lot of tanks on ra-den b) don't see a reason why it would be advocated as such when it is marginally better on 1 out of 25 fights.

Most likely because all noxxic is attempting to do is give people a very very very brief overview of the class/spec, and in the case of playing a protadin at a basic level ES is probably the "best" talent just for the extra threat it can give through damage, or extra burst heal on yourself. And since it's a general guide, they can't really say HP or LH is best because fights with no raid AoE do occasionally happen and HP and LH would be pretty meh for those.

At least that's why I think noxxic lists that talent as best. None of their guides are really in depth enough to get anything other than the names of gems from.

Hmm, it appears that I would only gain about 300 haste rating by reforging away all that expertise

I gained more than that swapping from dwarf to human o.O. Kinda wanna go play around with my gear now to see what I get.

EDIT: Went and played with it a bit. Forged out of 1818 exp into haste and yeah knocked 0.12 secs off my CS cd, but went and beat on a training dummy for a few minutes and the entire being parried on like half of my SoTR really kinda makes me believe this is a dps loss...

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I gained more than that swapping from dwarf to human o.O. Kinda wanna go play around with my gear now to see what I get.

EDIT: Went and played with it a bit. Forged out of 1818 exp into haste and yeah knocked 0.12 secs off my CS cd, but went and beat on a training dummy for a few minutes and the entire being parried on like half of my SoTR really kinda makes me believe this is a dps loss...

My trouble is, I already have haste on all but two items that are reforgeable, and of those items I have not one where I have had to reforge haste into expertise. I could replace some of the expertise/stamina gems with haste/stamina, that would be about 1300 haste rating. But I still don't think that trade-off is worth it.

[celinamuna]

My trouble is, I already have haste on all but two items that are reforgeable, and of those items I have not one where I have had to reforge haste into expertise. I could replace some of the expertise/stamina gems with haste/stamina, that would be about 1300 haste rating. But I still don't think that trade-off is worth it.

You could also replace it with pure haste gems, but again, i don't think that hard cap vs soft cap is as holywar worthy as haste/mastery vs parry/dodge and i'd just leave it to personal preferences.

[Deleted]

It is the highest DPS choice in that tier. You can see a lot of tanks taking it for Ra'den, as that appears to be primarily a dps race with an extremely tight enrage timer.

Doesn't make it "better" in every case though; Holy Prism and Hammer of Light are arguably "better" on pretty much all of the other ToT fights as the raid damage is a significant part of the challenge of the encounter.

Yea, but I'd guess that if you're progressing on Ra'den you probably ain't taking that much advice from noxxic. :P

ES is best for DPS but in most progression fights one will probably be better off helping the healers, imo.

Plus, maybe that's just me, but I picked my Prot as my favorite tank (and main character) due to his ability to aid the raid via healing and buffs. When off during tankswaps I often spend my time throwing Sacs and WoGs at people. Holy Lasers are also fun when they heal a bunch of people for over 180k (that plus our disc's atonement makes Static Shock damage on HC Jin'rokh barely noticeable).

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

You could also replace it with pure haste gems, but again, i don't think that hard cap vs soft cap is as holywar worthy as haste/mastery vs parry/dodge and i'd just leave it to personal preferences.

I'm not too happy about putting my health so low. Remember, 25 man bosses swing for roughly twice as much as a 10 man boss.

[celinamuna]

I'm not too happy about putting my health so low. Remember, 25 man bosses swing for roughly twice as much as a 10 man boss.

25 man raids roughly have twice as many healers as 10 man bosses.
But agreed, again personally in that case i would just bump up mastery and go for softcap > haste > mastery > hardcap.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

25 man raids roughly have twice as many healers as 10 man bosses.
But agreed, again personally in that case i would just bump up mastery and go for softcap > haste > mastery > hardcap.

Doesn't matter how many healers you have if the damage is too high in relation to your Effective Health, and your health pool is a large contributor to that.

How I see things: If you have a reduction up for the swing, you won't die to it. If you are guaranteed not to die from it, then the size of the reduction is irrelevant. If you can guarantee that the reduction will be available at x time stamp so that you don't die to it, then that is even better. Hit and Expertise give you that guarantee, haste makes the reduction available more often, and stamina makes the swings you cannot cover (because you would need 10-20x the haste we currently have to ensure 100% uptime of ShoR) less likely to kill you.

If I were raiding ten mans, I wouldn't care about the damage intake either. But the damage spikes that do turn up in 25 man are sufficiently dangerous to my health pool that I prefer the extra stamina. At the end of the day, your job is to stay alive. If you aren't staying alive, you're not doing your job.

[celinamuna]

Doesn't matter how many healers you have if the damage is too high in relation to your Effective Health.

Which is why i would personally invest much more into mastery.
Again, seeing how i haven't tanked 25 man raids (outside of world and joke BH) since probably... icc, i wouldn't be able to defend my opinion, however i did notice that on most of the fights where you can gibbed quickly, the extra mastery goes a long way.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Which is why i would personally invest much more into mastery.
Again, seeing how i haven't tanked 25 man raids (outside of world and joke BH) since probably... icc, i wouldn't be able to defend my opinion, however i did notice that on most of the fights where you can gibbed quickly, the extra mastery goes a long way.

I guess I could give it a go. Isn't like we don't have half a dozen reforge-mounts in the raid if it doesn't work out.

When buffed with Might and nothing else:

685k life
29% melee haste (12300 rating)
42% spell haste
20.64% mastery (7852 rating)
7.5% hit
7.5% expertise

I'll give it a go and see whether I like it or not. I have replacement gems in my bags

[lakhesis]

Please ellaborate why expertise hard cap is a bigger survival increase than haste when the raw hopo regen of haste is significantly more, which in the end is the point of exp/haste, hopo regen.

When 5.2 was in the works & we got the dodge/parry addition to Grand Crusader, Theck did the 5.2 Smoothness Simulations which ran a range of gearsets that included a control/haste (i.e. hard cap'd then haste) and a pure haste (500 pts hit/exp & everything else piled into haste).

The SotR uptime in those sims is directly linked to the HoPow generation of those gearsets. Control/Haste maintained the highest SotR uptime, with Haste coming in behind it.

So if haste did provide higher holy power gen than cap-then-haste, you'd be right... but it doesn't, at least based off the data I've seen so far.

The point about SS speed is an interesting one, because SS wasn't included in those sims (and obviously enough neither was SoI, considering we haven't got any information on that yet). So you may end up being correct in the long run, but it won't be because of superior hopow generation.

[celinamuna]

When 5.2 was in the works & we got the dodge/parry addition to Grand Crusader, Theck did the 5.2 Smoothness Simulations which ran a range of gearsets that included a control/haste (i.e. hard cap'd then haste) and a pure haste (500 pts hit/exp & everything else piled into haste).

The SotR uptime in those sims is directly linked to the HoPow generation of those gearsets. Control/Haste maintained the highest SotR uptime, with Haste coming in behind it.

So if haste did provide higher holy power gen than cap-then-haste, you'd be right... but it doesn't, at least based off the data I've seen so far.

The point about SS speed is an interesting one, because SS wasn't included in those sims (and obviously enough neither was SoI, considering we haven't got any information on that yet). So you may end up being correct in the long run, but it won't be because of superior hopow generation.

One problem being is that his tests were on 500 hit/exp. I haven't seen anyone here arguing that it's better than hit/exp. What i do see is people arguing that it's better then exp post soft cap. Since his simulations didn't test that, the link is meaningless.

[lakhesis]

One problem being is that his tests were on 500 hit/exp. I haven't seen anyone here arguing that it's better than hit/exp. What i do see is people arguing that it's better then exp post soft cap. Since his simulations didn't test that, the link is meaningless.

Judgment is handled as a melee attack & CS/HotR are both melee attacks.

The way expertise now works, it first cancels out dodge & it then cancels out parry (i.e. you'll have 0 chance to be dodged before your chance to be parried starts reducing).

So it doesn't matter if you pick up 1 point of hit prior to its cap, or 1 point of expertise prior to softcap, or 1 point of expertise prior to its hardcap - they'll all increase your holy power generation by the same amount (if you're attacking the mob from infront).

The reason why there's a DPS boost up until expertise softcap is because some of your non-holypower generating higher dps abilities work off the spell hit table, so they're working from hit+expertise, and you spell hit cap once you're hit capped + soft expertise capped.

But none of those spell hit based abilities are holy power generators, so that shift at soft expertise cap doesn't influence your holy power generation in the slightest - only your DPS. Your holy power generation has flat scaling from none -> hardcapped expertise+hit.

[celinamuna]

Judgment is handled as a melee attack & CS/HotR are both melee attacks.

Hmm i'm not too sure, looking at my overall data
Judgement : 1216 . Miss : 4 , Parry : 0 (0.4%)
CS : 877. Miss : 2 , Parry : 28 (3%)
Melee : 2428, Miss : 6, Parry : 104 (3%)
SotR : 679 , Miss : 1 , Parry : 22 (3%)

While i understand that all of this data is anecdotal it seems odd that my judgement didn't get parried once.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Hmm i'm not too sure, looking at my overall data
Judgement : 1216 . Miss : 4 , Parry : 0 (0.4%)
CS : 877. Miss : 2 , Parry : 28 (3%)
Melee : 2428, Miss : 6, Parry : 104 (3%)
SotR : 679 , Miss : 1 , Parry : 22 (3%)

While i understand that all of this data is anecdotal it seems odd that my judgement didn't get parried once.

That would be because J cannot be parried.