1. #221
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Manatwar View Post
    Thanks for the guide has made setting up my Paladin cake!
    Thanks

    Now, food for thought guys.

    We currently can't play with our level 90 talents for some rather obvious reasons. We've had long chats about them. Because I'm stupid, it only just occured to me last night that warriors already have to make this kind of choice on their level 60 talents, because they have to choose between Shockwave (20s) and Dragons Roar (1m) and then Bladestorm which is kind of the outlier here but the main argument for the prot paladin choice was between Holy Prism and Lights Hammer.

    It occured to me that the spells are kind of similar - Dragons Roar and Lights Hammer do a massive AOE of BOOOOOOOOOOOM and then Shockwave and Holy Prism do a smaller one of "pew" but at a much more regular CD. Having talked to multiple prot warriors, their opinion is that as nice as Dragons Roar is for the occasional fight and a massive spike, the length of the CD is heavily against it in comparison to Shockwave which whilst it doesn't hit for half as much, the more regular usage and the better control over who you hit with it, is more highly desired.

    Could we potentially read into this? I know Holy Prism and Lights Hammer have more to them than the warrior equivalents in the way that they do healing, but could the warrior equivalents help cut out a large chunk of the testing time before we even get there? Holy Prism is just an instant healing/damage effect but Lights Hammer is a pulsing thing so should we have to move then we're screwed, hence we get more control with Holy Prism about what happens, in the same way that Shockwave is controlled by direction rather than Dragon Roar which is just everything within range.

    Opinions or am I thinking into this way too much?
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  2. #222
    Moderator Malthanis's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MerinPally View Post
    Opinions or am I thinking into this way too much?
    I'm going to pick up Holy Prism for my go-to level 90 talent. It's just too versatile to ignore. If you use it for threat on the boss, you're healing yourself and the melee attacking the boss. If you need it for AoE, you can macro it for a self-cast to hit everything around you. It can help pull things off of a healer and heal the damage that the adds did to that healer at the same time.

    Technically, Light's Hammer fills the same criteria, but that's kind of inhibited by it's cooldown.

    I'll probably only pick up Execution Sentence if a fight is a DPS race and has one target.
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  3. #223
    The Insane Rivin's Avatar
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    Note that Dragon's Roar causes no threat, so warriors really won't want it much for tanking even if its damage is good. I haven't heard the same thing about Light's Hammer, so I think that will be a more viable choice for paladins than Dragon's Roar is for warriors.

  4. #224
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    Quote Originally Posted by Manatwar View Post
    Thanks for the guide has made setting up my Paladin cake!
    I had to read that a couple of times, but I was so sure you were talking about a Paladin cake.



    ---------- Post added 2012-09-06 at 02:24 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Malthanis View Post
    I'm going to pick up Holy Prism for my go-to level 90 talent. It's just too versatile to ignore. If you use it for threat on the boss, you're healing yourself and the melee attacking the boss. If you need it for AoE, you can macro it for a self-cast to hit everything around you. It can help pull things off of a healer and heal the damage that the adds did to that healer at the same time.

    Technically, Light's Hammer fills the same criteria, but that's kind of inhibited by it's cooldown.

    I'll probably only pick up Execution Sentence if a fight is a DPS race and has one target.
    This is about what I was thinking too. Prism heals the melee group and has a nice short cooldown. Add to that, Light's Hammer only works if the adds aren't moving, while Prism follows me as I run around picking things up.

  5. #225
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    That's a nice guide thanks - the discussion of glyphs and talents is particularly strong. I think it would be good to be similarly nuanced and eclectic about stats. When you give the priority for which stats are "best", I think you are using melee damage reduction as your metric. That's a useful metric and informative, but not the be all and end all. Many tankadins are placing more emphasis on controlling damage - i.e. on being able to smooth out bursts through active mitigation. Here, the stat priority is probably:

    hit/exp to soft cap > stamina=mastery > dodge=parry (reforge to balance)

    Hit and expertise capping become attractive to maximise the generation of holy power to be able to use your active mitigation. Mastery is the best secondary stat to stack in order to reduce damage when you do have shotr up and is what you'll reforge for after capping hit/expertise. Stamina helps give you a bigger pool to survive the bursts and might be what you gem for. There might be other gearing philosophies (stamina stacking for magic damage; maximising dps) but they are more situational.

    On the issue of parry vs dodge, Theckhd has a nice macro on his Sacred Duty blog to help reforge the two to minimise diminishing returns.

  6. #226
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
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    There are 2 builds, the avoidance and the mitigation. The avoidance build will take the least damage on a boss fight - that one's a fact You can go for the "mitigation" build but it is inferior hence why I haven't put it up but I could put it up if demand is high enough or if we get a boss fight that says it is better for that particular one.

    However, with regards to spell damage, I don't feel I need to alter it because the SHOTR buff only does physical damage - the underlying principle is that you stack enough stamina to survive and then get the avoidances, I'm not sure if I've got that line in there so I'll check and add it if not. For the mitigation build, as you posted, hit and expertise are top but seeing as the mitigation is inferior to the avoidance build for all we know of so far, it's not been added.

    I will add in Thecks macro when MOP hits because only then does it become relevent, as things are broken at the moment (I myself know I have 11% dodge and 29% parry albeit I have stacked stamina like an idiot for lols)

    Thank you for your input to the thread Anyone commenting or adding to the discussion is much appreciated ^^
    Last edited by MerinPally; 2012-09-07 at 10:44 AM.
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  7. #227
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    Quote Originally Posted by MerinPally View Post
    There are 2 builds, the avoidance and the mitigation. The avoidance build will take the least damage on a boss fight - that one's a fact You can go for the "mitigation" build but it is inferior but I could put it up if demand is high enough or if we get a boss fight that says it is better for that particular one.
    Well, it's inferior according to your point of view but it's a non sequitur to say that just because one build makes you take more damage on a boss fight, it is inferior. The logic would be fine if there was no healer, but with heals incoming, what kills you is typically not the total amount of damage - death by a thousand cuts - but particularly nasty bursts. The mitigation build tries to reduce the chance of taking big unblocked bursts. The avoidance build gives you a greater chance of escaping the burst completely but conversely gives you more of a chance of getting the whole thing in your face. Theckhd's written about this in his blog at various times, for example, the last part of this blog discusses it and gives further links:

    http://sacredduty.net/2012/08/29/tan...-5-0-4-update/

    Everyone understands avoidance is spikey. I suspect most of us would trade off some total damage reduction for a lower variance of damage received (the logic of which might imply that neither build was best, but something imbetween). Smoothing damage is why we fixated on block capping, it's just that the trade-off was obscured because mastery used to be best for both total damage reduction and smoothing damage. Now, we have to choose.

  8. #228
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
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    It's actually not an opinion, even the guys over at elitist jerks agree with me and I'm pretty sure I remember reading on one of thecks posts, that the mitigation build takes more damage. Sure it's smoother with mastery because that's inherently what happens when you stack avoidance, you get spikes - but for proper bursts you use cooldowns, for smaller bursts you use SHOTR for the damage reduction.

    It'll be interesting to see how much mastery we have as we go into T14 but at the moment with full stamina gems for fun and reforging out of mastery, I still get 52% damage reduction with SHOTR - this buff is what helps us on spike damage. But as said, things may change when we hit 90 and begin playing properly with everything balanced, we just don't know yet. But at the moment, the maths says that avoidance will be better in terms of how much damage we take but until thousands of protadins can fling themselves at bosses on a daily basis then we can't say "this is DEFINITELY better than the other" but equally we can't just take guesses when the maths says otherwise.

    Although going by stat weights, mastery > dodge at 16% dodge, if the avoidance build wanted to completely forsake mastery then it wouldn't have it that high up anyway - we're still going to get quite a lot of mastery going by the avoidance build as we won't be hit/exp capping any time soon.
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    Quote Originally Posted by goblinpaladin View Post
    Also a vegetable is a person.
    Quote Originally Posted by Orlong View Post
    I dont care if they [gays] are allowed to donate [blood], but I think we should have an option to refuse gay blood if we need to receive blood.

  9. #229
    Quote Originally Posted by MerinPally View Post
    There are 2 builds, the avoidance and the mitigation. The avoidance build will take the least damage on a boss fight - that one's a fact You can go for the "mitigation" build but it is inferior hence why I haven't put it up but I could put it up if demand is high enough or if we get a boss fight that says it is better for that particular one.

    However, with regards to spell damage, I don't feel I need to alter it because the SHOTR buff only does physical damage - the underlying principle is that you stack enough stamina to survive and then get the avoidances, I'm not sure if I've got that line in there so I'll check and add it if not. For the mitigation build, as you posted, hit and expertise are top but seeing as the mitigation is inferior to the avoidance build for all we know of so far, it's not been added.

    I will add in Thecks macro when MOP hits because only then does it become relevent, as things are broken at the moment (I myself know I have 11% dodge and 29% parry albeit I have stacked stamina like an idiot for lols)

    Thank you for your input to the thread Anyone commenting or adding to the discussion is much appreciated ^^
    SotR isn't our only active mitigation tool. If I understand the philosophy correctly (and I might not) the idea is we need to make a decision.

    Is the incoming damage physical, if yes then SotR

    Is the incoming damage magical, if yes then WoG

    I think this is more prevalent in Guardian Tanks, but they are essentially set up the same way. SotR = Savage Defense and WoG = Frenzied Regeneration. With a Hit/Expertise build you have the resources available to handle both situations were as physical mitigation Dodge/Parry are on a roll system. The damage mitigation from SotR is static meaning so long as you have the resources available (Holy Power) then you can activate the ability or in the case of magical damage heal through it with WoG.

    Also keep in mind one of main reasons for our previous build was to make it so only one of 4 things could happen when a melee attack came in. We would either 1. Dodge, 2. Parry, 3. Be missed, or 4. Block to absorb 40% of the damage. Paladins were able to push a full melee attack off the table. Because all of this was "passive" hit/expertise wasn't important. Now it's up to us to make the correct decision and activate an ability. Those abilities require resources and those resources are gathered through our generators landing. Only SotR receives the buff regardless of hit or miss, but you can't use the ability without the resource.
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  10. #230
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    Quote Originally Posted by MerinPally View Post
    It's actually not an opinion, even the guys over at elitist jerks agree with me and I'm pretty sure I remember reading on one of thecks posts, that the mitigation build takes more damage.
    Sorry, you are not understanding my point. What I said was an opinion is that the mitigation build is inferior overall, i.e. for overall survival. There's no disagreement that it takes more damage. Whether it's inferior for survival is not a matter of simple maths, but is more complex and will depend - as you say - on the nature of the boss fights.

    I think in practice the big difference is going to be over whether you (soft) cap hit and expertise. That's what the mitigation/control approach advocates to give the greatest chance of having power for our active mitigation tools[1]. The mastery vs dodge/parry choice is probably secondary.

    There's room for disagreement. Noxxic and Icy Veins share your opinion. Conversely, some other guide writers like theckhd on maintankadin and Fetzie on tankspot are currently are advocating the mitigation route. But they are not being overly emphatic about it because, as you say, it's early days.

    The issue probably doesn't matter much now, at level 85, when we are swimming in ratings from end of expansion gear. But it will be acute as we level and gear up in MoP, when capping hit/expertise will once again be non-trivial.




    [1]Capping hit/expertise as tanks may be unique to paladins. Crit is better than hit/expertise for rage per second for bears; mastery is better than hit/expertise for warriors.

  11. #231
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by econ21 View Post
    The issue probably doesn't matter much now, at level 85, when we are swimming in ratings from end of expansion gear. But it will be acute as we level and gear up in MoP, when capping hit/expertise will once again be non-trivial.
    This is probably the most important part of your post, just because some others might skip over it.

    For those that don't know, as hit/expertise increase, the value of mastery increases, which will push that point where dodge and mastery are equal, to dodge being <16% for the boundary. At the moment, due to being covered in stats (even with stacking full stamina gems...) I have like 29% parry and 11% dodge with over 31% block and 52% damage reduction through SHOTR. At 90, that's not going to happen any time soon.

    It's just so dififcult to say really. The maths says avoidance but in practice, as mastery will rise more quickly, mastery may be better in the early tiers because we can get more of it more quickly. However, we would have to sacrifice some stats for hit/exp. Alternatively, the hit/exp hit may be too severe and we'd go avoidance until the later tiers when we would stack the mastery because we can now get over the hit/exp tax and begin stacking a higher amount of damage reduction more quickly.

    Rather exciting really, can't wait until MOP So many options and whilst the maths say one thing (hence sticking with it for now as it's the only concrete we have) we may discover that in practice, taking more damage might be more beneficial (shock horror) for the sake of taking consistent damage values. Resto druids would love that, they can let their hots roll rather than have to burst out some healing. Should be good ^^
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  12. #232
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    While having the mastery build explained and noted to be inferior to avoidance from a physical point of view is interesting, I also do think that there's a point were adding more anecdotal information to a guide become "too much". There's already a lot of subjective consideration on the glyph and talent part
    For exemple: i have a tank friend that's playing with a boss swinger timer addon, so that he can try to time his SoR 3s buff to cover two of the boss melee attacks instead of a single one.
    Should that be added to the guide, even to the risk of having people focus on that swinger timer even at the expense proper skill rotation and/or CD management ?

    Bottom line : I belive this is, and should remain more of an "introduction to MoP paladin tanking".

    Perhaps adding a section with links foward EJ/theck's/whatever for people that want more indeep ?

  13. #233
    The Lightbringer Fhi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MerinPally View Post
    Thanks for your input and I'm logging off for the night because I'm probably just taking this too personally but it's really pissed me off and upset me. If you want a better one, do it your damned self. There's a difference between adding a bit here and editing this and that, and flat out hinting/telling me that it's crap.
    I have to chime in and say that you are not only taking it too personally, you completely misread him (ayashi). I read and re-read his post, and from what I can glean, he was pretty much agreeing with you and defending your writing style. Seems like he was actually replying to econ21.

    For example:
    Should that be added to the guide, even to the risk of having people focus on that swinger timer even at the expense proper skill rotation and/or CD management ?
    is a rhetorical question. He is saying adding such things risks confusing people. econ21 advocated having the differences between mitigation and avoidance explained in the guide (like EJ does). ayashi is saying (in a rhetorical question), that, and I quote him:
    there's a point were adding more anecdotal information to a guide become "too much".
    which your guide aims to simplify.

    The next line:
    Bottom line : I belive this is, and should remain more of an "introduction to MoP paladin tanking".
    He believe this (your guide) IS more of an "introduction to MoP paladin tanking", and should remain so.

    I apologize if I sound like I'm nit-picking, but I think you were being overly harsh on ayashi, and it was just baffling because he is agreeing with you and you jumped down his throat for the wrong reasons. =/

  14. #234
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
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    Meh whatever I apologize. This is what I get for being tired and stressed. Took me over 5 minutes to delete the fucking post I'm that oblivious to everything going on right now >.>
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    Quote Originally Posted by goblinpaladin View Post
    Also a vegetable is a person.
    Quote Originally Posted by Orlong View Post
    I dont care if they [gays] are allowed to donate [blood], but I think we should have an option to refuse gay blood if we need to receive blood.

  15. #235
    Why exactly you want to go for 16% dodge and the for mastery? Because of diminisning returns?
    Thanks for the guide and answer

  16. #236
    Titan MerinPally's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Grimbold of Skullcrusher View Post
    Why exactly you want to go for 16% dodge and the for mastery? Because of diminisning returns?
    Thanks for the guide and answer
    It's to do with stat values according to the graphs Theck provided. Essentially, if you plot a graph of our stat values relative to dodge all the lines have a negative gradient due to diminishing returns and various other things. For this graph you have dodge % chance on the X axis and stat weight on the Y axis. The line for dodge has a more negative gradient than that for mastery. At somewhere between 16 and 17%, the lines cross each other, creating a point where the stat weights are equal and after that point, mastery > dodge in terms of stat weights.

    It's purely mathematical reasons and the maths says that at that point, mastery is a better stat than dodge - in practice though, things may change as Ayashi said earlier - we just don't know. In practice it may be beneficial to take more damage now as long as it's smooth rather than spikey, that way healers won't shit the bed.

    Here's the graph I'm referring to - green line is parry, red line is strength (I think), dark blue is dodge, light blue is mastery, purple is hit, black is haste (I think) and yellow is expertise. Please correct me if I'm wrong someone, I only just woke up >.<



    Ayashi is better at this number crunching and reading into Theck's stuff than I am, he can probably give you a better answer as I'm pretty sure I've described this incorrectly somewhere
    Last edited by MerinPally; 2012-09-08 at 09:51 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by goblinpaladin View Post
    Also a vegetable is a person.
    Quote Originally Posted by Orlong View Post
    I dont care if they [gays] are allowed to donate [blood], but I think we should have an option to refuse gay blood if we need to receive blood.

  17. #237
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    Nah, you got it perfect merin.
    here's the link if you're interested grimbold in how the other stats values move around.



    Thinking back on how t11 went, I suspect top guilds will have their tanks go mastery + stam stacking (probably forgo hit/exp capping in favor of stam) for smother damage intake, and the highest possible damage mitigation control possible. And higher HP pools to eat up spikes with their lower-than-assumed ilvl gear. They sure have the skill required to make it (mastery hit/exp-less build in crappy gear) work. RNG based avoidance build is hardly suitable for those ppl
    "On the curve" raiders will probably go 50/50 (mastery/avoidance), perhaps the "like top raiders do" sindrome ( ) will make us see more mastery builds around, but overall avoidance builds should become quite commun at that point. Which, if I am correct, will show that blizz managed to make it a real choice... Blizz managing to do something right, a shocker !
    Weekend raiders, and others behind the curve will probably go full avoidance . Avoidance being passive and all it'd be less things to think about.

    Overall i like how paladins are offered the choice between mastery or avoidance, active mitigation or passive one, focus on taking less constant damage or having more brain-bandweight for the rest of the enconter... just as i liked the Stam vs mastery thing on my blood DK in t12/13.

  18. #238
    Quote Originally Posted by ayashi View Post
    For exemple: i have a tank friend that's playing with a boss swinger timer addon, so that he can try to time his SoR 3s buff to cover two of the boss melee attacks instead of a single one.
    Wanna ask somethin'.
    I think I remember GC trying to say once they pretty much kept boss swing timers at 1.5 seconds nowadays, and then he was promptly told that's not accurate (not including the attack speed reduction debuff). So a swing timer addon could still be relevant in DS or something. Do you know if they're doing any better with that in MoP? (keeping boss swing timers at 1.5 seconds)

    Just curious, 'cause if so, you'll get two attacks inside the buff's duration regardless (presumably, barring any encounter mechanics that delay swings).

    Edit - Decided to look up that post and it said default swing speed is 2 seconds, and is changed to 1.5 seconds "when tank spike damage is a concern". It was a post back in May, though, so...
    Last edited by Elathi; 2012-09-08 at 02:29 PM.

  19. #239
    Deleted
    Hi all

    I was wondering if somebody could help me. I used to play a prot paladin alt awhile back - and tbh quite enjoyed it - but this was a few years and I'm not too sure of the rotation for both single and aoe fights now with all the new changes (not just for MoP).

    Would somebody mind letting me know what the optimum rotations are for each and any other suggestions that might help with tanking? I took a look at the front page - which all seems very helpful, thanks - but I couldn't see anything about rotations etc (apologies if I've missed it somewhere).

    Thanks in advance.

  20. #240
    Quote Originally Posted by MerinPally View Post
    It's actually not an opinion, even the guys over at elitist jerks agree with me and I'm pretty sure I remember reading on one of thecks posts, that the mitigation build takes more damage. Sure it's smoother with mastery because that's inherently what happens when you stack avoidance, you get spikes - but for proper bursts you use cooldowns, for smaller bursts you use SHOTR for the damage reduction.
    It actually is an opinion to suggest that a total damage reduction calculation is the correct metric, which you were doing in the previous post unequivocally calling the hit/exp/mastery build "inferior".

    The theoretical work that Theck did on maintankadin with respect to the derivation forumulae and the Monte Carlo sims give us objective numbers to make decisions about stats within his TDR framework, but it does nothing whatsoever to suggest whether or not TDR is the objectively correct answer for practical play.

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