WoD is prolly gonna kill haste tanking, and im okay with this.

[Jerethepaladin]

I've been playing this game since the very tail end of BC, and regrettably I went from 1 to 80 in prot spec. In that time though, I did learn the ins and outs of Paladin tanking. The feeling of, as i'm sure most people have said, "Rounding them up and concencrating" was a great feeling that never ceased to invigorate. Now I remember when there was diversity in the tanks. Warriors ruined armor on their single targets, and could put out stupid amounts of DPS, Paladins, as I have said, were AOE powerhouses, bears had ridiculously high health and armor, and the D.K.s had their active regeneration. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the D.K. active regen came from a combination of lifesteal attacks, blood tap, and sacrificing your ghoul.

Then Cataclysm, and for the same part Mists, comes along and turns everything up onto its ear. All of the tanks kinda got squished together and turned us into detuid warridins. I myself felt as though part of what made me enjoy Paladins was kinda taken away, mostly the numerous cool-downs I had that would help blocking. Sure, things were still good though. I cleared every raid up to Dragonsoul, where I got most of the encounters down.


Mists, for the lack of better words, was the trainstopper. I had not heard of this "haste build" that had been so popular, and when I was searching for a new guild ((old one imploded due to pandas)), I had found what must of been one of the best on my server, Wyrmrest Accord. When I had joined up and started clearing Throne of Thunder when the G.M. noticed I was using an avoidance build. He said that I should be using the haste build. At the time, I had no idea what it was, so with the help of the guild, I re-outfitted my character for haste tanking. While it worked good on paper, there were multiple problems with it. The guild wanted me to have like...20k HPS I think it was. They also wanted me dealing at leat 50K DPS

Now, It's already a fact people are going to start calling me a whiner over this, but last I checked, I'm a tank. I poke the dragon in the eye so it doesn't eat the mage for breakfast. My job is to keep stuff attacking me so that others don't get slurped, not to heal or deal damage. With the haste build it made tanking more spotty, and it lead to me getting killed by stuff I could of normally took on the chin with the avoidance build. I can see why the active regeneration would work for some people, but there's a difference between hitting auto attacks and procing seal of insight with battlehealer, and hitting two buttons with a relatively low CD and healing practically up to full as a D.K.


Which leads me to to WoD. We already know that item drops now will be optimized for the player, rather then having stuff drop everywhere. Not only does this mean that gear grinding wont take as long, but it also means that there will be set stats for Paladin tanks. The battlehealer nerf from last patch made it useless for me to solo anything, since it doesn't proc on me anymore; and correct me if I'm wrong, but they did nerf Sacred Shield so it was significantly less effective for Prot Paladins.

In the current state of things though, there's no way to determine where Pally tanking will go. We already know that Hit, expertise, dodge and parry are out. I would take a wild guess and assume that some other passive bonus will be acquired when the player hits a specific level, like how paladins now become uncrittable by enemies within the boss level rage once they acquire Sanctuary. With the removal of Reforging as well, I would warrant pretty good speculation that Haste Tanking is dead come 6.0.

Thoughts?

[Lunavale]

I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion haste tanking is dead(btw you seem to have some misconceptions about it that I don't want to get into), when they are removing avoidance and leaving you with, you guessed it, haste.

[Nalloa]

First off, no offense, but the first part of your post was far too long and completely unnecessary to get your point/question across.

OT: Only the primary stats and set bonuses on gear are tailored to spec. Here's an example. Let say BossA drops 'Plate Chest of the Awesome.' While in prot spec, the stats on this piece will be: +10 Stamina / +10 STR / +10 Mastery. Let's say you get really, really lucky and this chest piece also happens to drop with a Socket affix and a Cleave affix. When you switch to your Holy off-spec, it will now switch to +10 Stamina / +10 INT / +10 Mastery / Affixes.

In other words, 'Plate Chest of the Awesome' is a "plate mastery" piece that is useful for any class that can wear plate but is especially useful to specs that favor mastery. In the current game, the presence of say Dodge on this piece instead of Mastery would have made it strictly a "plate tanking" chest or enchanting mats. Now it could be useful (though not optimized) for any plate wearer.

As such, given that Dodge and Parry are gone, I'd say that - all else being equal - it is MORE likely paladins will have the option to run with a haste build. With 5.4, Blizzard tried to make traditional tanking stats more attractive to WAR's and DK's with Reposte et al. but as I said, they are going away with 6.0. As it stands now, there are more or less 4 gearing strats for tanks: Avoidance (mostly WAR's), Mastery (was PALA's and WAR's in early MoP), Crit (10M BrM's), or Haste (PALA's). Now there will be 3 strats. Unless they decide to have all tanks favor Mastery or Crit, Haste seems to be more likely to stick around.

Off-Topic:

What would be REALLY cool is if they set it up so that the most valuable stats for all specs of a given class lined up. Meaning they should aim to make IE haste the best stat for IE Prot/Ret/Holy. That way if you throw a haste gem into your shiny new 'Plate Chest of the Awesome' it will be a killer piece for all of your specs. That might be taking the concept too far, but man would it make questing, randoms more fun. You could easily and effectively switch to your second roll much better.

[Cantwingrr]

Tanking became everything but holding aggro on a mob after the patch with a 500% threat increase for tanks came out a long ass time ago. That isn't an argument and hasn't been for at least an expansion.

[Jerethepaladin]

I suppose. For me at least I have no idea what I'm doing wrong with the haste build. I stack haste like everyone says, I use seal of insight, I keep SS up at all times, and I hit with my SotR every chance I get. What more do they expect me to do?

yes yes, I realize how immature that sounds; but I honesty have no idea what im doing wrong with this build.

[Nalloa]

No worries, man.

I could be something as simple as CD management or not standing in something.

One thing I never liked or got the "hang of" was stacking mastery on my brewmaster. There are a lot of high-end raiders that love the mastery build but I always just felt that with the brewmaster's low HP pool I was constantly purifying my stagger with high mastery. /shrug Luckily for me, crit is a viable build for 10-mans.

I haven't tanked on my paladin in a long time, but one thing you might also want to consider is trying to use SotR more strategically than just hitting it when it's up. Though I guess with such high haste you sort of have to or you'll waste holy power. Hmmm.. One thing I know for sure though, you def need to memorize the basic rotation with haste levels ABOVE 9000! The base prot rotation is pretty easy so just having the muscle memory down for that will save you a lot of wasted GCD's.

Just stick with it and you'll get it figured it out! GL!

[Jackielope]

In WoD the secondary stats won't change for your spec, but the primary ones will. If a plate piece with haste/crit drops, it's going to be strength/haste/crit for ret and prot and int/haste/crit for holy. If they changed the secondary stats for your spec then there would be no point in having alternate pieces drop!

They've limited secondary stats to crit/haste/mastery, which means each one is going to have something to offer for tanks. Wait and see what they do before proclaiming the sky is falling or "I'm okay with this" because you won't know how things will end up.

As far as your own tanking right now goes, there's a thread for that at Prot - Fix My Tanking! as well as plenty of resources all over MMO-C and other places online. I'd recommend you keep the MoP and WoD discussions in separate threads just to make sure things don't get confusing.

[Xs]

I suppose. For me at least I have no idea what I'm doing wrong with the haste build. I stack haste like everyone says, I use seal of insight, I keep SS up at all times, and I hit with my SotR every chance I get. What more do they expect me to do?

yes yes, I realize how immature that sounds; but I honesty have no idea what im doing wrong with this build.

You may want to try going for a 5 HP style, where you bank it and use it either when you cap out or something big is going to hit.

[Nobleshield]

Honestly I'd like for them to just use this as the opportunity to flat out say what stats we want, and make it so we can't use any other. So if they decide that we want Mastery, then a Prot Pally should never get gear without Mastery on it. They could use this to put an end to theorycrafting and state what each class uses definitively by their intentions, sot here's no more "Well if you get X haste then you go for Mastery" because you would only ever get the stats that Blizzard determined that you should use.

That would never happen of course.

[Mormolyce]

With the removal of tanking stats I tend to think haste tanking will be more of a thing rather than less.

I do sympathise though since I've always disliked the idea of tank DPS mattering, when I play a tank I want to tank, if I wanted to DPS I'd be on one of my DPS classes. Or in Arms/Unholy/etc.

[trystero]

Honestly I'd like for them to just use this as the opportunity to flat out say what stats we want, and make it so we can't use any other. So if they decide that we want Mastery, then a Prot Pally should never get gear without Mastery on it. They could use this to put an end to theorycrafting and state what each class uses definitively by their intentions, sot here's no more "Well if you get X haste then you go for Mastery" because you would only ever get the stats that Blizzard determined that you should use.

That would never happen of course.

What kind of game do you want to play? No theorycrafting, decision making?

[Xs]

Honestly I'd like for them to just use this as the opportunity to flat out say what stats we want, and make it so we can't use any other. So if they decide that we want Mastery, then a Prot Pally should never get gear without Mastery on it. They could use this to put an end to theorycrafting and state what each class uses definitively by their intentions, sot here's no more "Well if you get X haste then you go for Mastery" because you would only ever get the stats that Blizzard determined that you should use.

That would never happen of course.

As much as its a little personal, I'm incredibly glad you have no sway over Blizzard, as this would be probably one of the worst things they'd ever done for end game content in the entire history of the game.

OT: I hope they actually do the complete opposite of this thread's intention, I'd love to see even more Haste viable tanks, as personally I find it a much more interesting play-style than the current other options of Crit, Crit, Crit or Mastery (speaking other classes, don't get the pitchforks) and I hope they add some similar mechanics to the other classes, to make Tank rotations a bit more involved.

[Jackielope]

There's no chance in hell of us only getting two of the crit/haste/mastery triad on our gear. For one, since mastery exists to give each spec its own unique kind of scaling, having that taken away is antithetical to it existing in the first place. So then if mastery must be a useful or interesting stat, that leaves either crit or haste as being put out to pasture, which severely limits the ways they can let us scale or even buff. What if holy wasn't supposed to have haste? Is the raidwide spell haste buff not going to affect them? Is it going to be useless for them?

With the way they're doing the stats come WoD, none of the crit/haste/mastery triad should ever be entirely useless to a spec because each one now has to provide some sort of interesting mechanic. There's too few of them for one not to be at least somewhat useful. If Blizz does things well there should be viable ways to stack any of the three for any spec, although there might of course be "optimal" ways to do it.

And don't fool yourself into thinking there won't be theorycrafting even with railroaded stats. People will run the numbers to see exactly how each stat benefits them, and they'll run the numbers on all three stats now. Blizzard would have to actually make it mechanically impossible for a spec not to benefit from a stat to enforce any kind of "thou shalt only have X secondary stats" kind of BS.

Nobleshield, how on earth can you justify that change seeming any kind of reasonable?

[Lethora]

Just a reminder: there was no mastery, haste or reforging in Vanilla, but there was still a lot of theorycraft around.
And people still don't understand a lot of announced changes.

Blizz stated that AM is the way to go. It is there to stay, haste tanking will continue to prevail over classic model.

[Deleted]

I dont think you understand the strength from the haste build.

The haste builds allow you to maintain your shield of the righteous buff for 100% of the time nearly because of haste affecting the cooldown of Crusader strike and the GCD. Giving you that massive reduction taken from physical attacks. That is what made the build so powerful and better mitigation than avoidance builds.

You would take every hit nearly but at reduced rates compared to either taking full damage, taking nothing or taking reduced hits with an avoidance build.

As a healer i can tell you which one is easier, the constant small hits over the random spikes.


As for battle healer, you dont need to glyph it. If you want to solo content i suggest taking a different glyph, i would also suggest using vengeance/corruption when currently raiding as its a 5% dps increase nearly. And healing is that faceroll you wont need it.

[xebtria]

I read OP as this:

well I never did think about my class at all or at least read some of the guides made by people who did think about it and even did the math, then I did everything wrong (avoidance gearing), then stuff changed and I behaved the same again (e.g. keeping battle healer glyph). now stuff will change again and I will do the same again (not listen to devs when they even confirm that, if at all, class gameplay won't change much) and because of that, haste tank paladins are gonna be doomed.

amirite?

oh and btw the "tanks are for holding threat and not for maximizing damage output". well, if it would be classic or maybe even BC, you would have a chance of being right. generally, that is your first job. if you fail at this owadays, and I would say this started during wotlk, while playing a tank, you might want to deinstall wow. threat is not an issue anymore and stuff is balanced around threat not being an issue. so you better get used to that. and for survivability vs damage done as a tank - well, currently both is more or less the case at the same time. if you gear your character "right" and if you press your buttons "right", you will basically have both at the same time.

but that's all I'm gonna say. for everything else, do your research. Do your research. Read the guides. They are made (by people who know their stuff) for a reason.

[Nobleshield]

How can I say that while being sane? Simple: It's their game. They can (and IMO should) decide what's best according to their vision of how each class/role should play, and then take steps to make sure that we adhere to their vision instead of deviate from it and play "wrong" as it were.

I never said it would be a popular opinion. I never said it would actually happen, I said they could use this revamp to have once and for a "You play the class this way" and make it happen.

[Deleted]

Tanking became everything but holding aggro on a mob after the patch with a 500% threat increase for tanks came out a long ass time ago. That isn't an argument and hasn't been for at least an expansion.

I pulled aggro once on my boomkin! In the opener, with a ridiculous string of Crits and having my legendary meta up for the better part of a minute... But still!

OT: Nobody knows, we'll see come Beta what their intentions really are. I really like the idea of no more boring stats though - however I wouldn't personally agree that avoidance is boring.

[Weightlifter]

Paladins using haste gear and not wanting actual tanking gear in any circumstances is inconsistent with other plate tanks. Either haste will be nerfed for prot, or they will make all tanks use DPS gear, which would be another step into homogenization. Which stats will be removed after that because they are "boring"?

The only winners in the current system are ret paladins with prot offspec.

[Xs]

Paladins using haste gear and not wanting actual tanking gear in any circumstances is inconsistent with other plate tanks. Either haste will be nerfed for prot, or they will make all tanks use DPS gear, which would be another step into homogenization. Which stats will be removed after that because they are "boring"?

The only winners in the current system are ret paladins with prot offspec.

Its already been said that avoidance will be removed, so I guess they're homogenizing

And I'd say the biggest winners in the current system are Prot Paladins who actually get to play a fun spec, where the other specs just became boring 1.5 sec clickers that have no real challenge to them anymore.