Clarifying Questions - Prot

[Babylonius]

I played my pally all through Wrath and Cata and shelved it for MoP in favor of my DK and later my Monk. I have recently picked up as an alt and I have some questions I could use clarified.

1. After reaching hit/exp cap do I immediately going full Haste?

2. Is there a certain level of stam or mastery that I'd like to reach, or full blown haste?

3. For using EF, should I use it as soon as I can, or wait until I have 5 stacks of Bastion first?

4. Are there any bosses in SoO where its better to loot specialize as Ret over Prot to get the optimal pieces?

5. At lower haste levels is it better to use SS over EF so that I'm not using 3 HP on EF over Shield?

6. Is there ever a point where its possible to keep Shield buff up 100% of the time? Is that a reasonable expectation to try and reach?

7. Is the trinket off of Horridon still BiS due to its high number of Haste? Should I be running that every week to try and get it?

[Lovestar]

1. Yes
2. Haste
3. See below
4. Others can better advise
5. I don't know the official answer, but I've never found EF to be a negative or a bad thing, even at low gear levels (scaled down). It's just so much healing, and you have fine-tuned control over it vs. Sacred Shield which is just blandly 'there'.
6. No, except in extreme situations where you're tanking lots of mobs and triggered Grand Crusader every GCD and/or Divine Purpose is having one of its crazy days. "As much as possible" is good enough, and if you can learn to manipulate it to keep SotR up as long as possible during high damage intake periods, then that's great. Banking 2 HP when you don't need constant SotR helps with this, so you can doublecast it when you know Serious Pain™ is starting up.
7. Others can better advise

As far as Stamina that depends a lot on what you're doing, like it does for most tanks, but as a 'generic' answer you can just focus full Haste and be fine.

EF & Bastion
This is one of those "When do I Purify?" questions. You want to keep EF up as much as possible as a self-stabilization mechanism, and you want to have as many BoG stacks as possible when you reapply it. But not at the cost of letting EF fall off (when the healing is needed) or not healing yourself when it will save your life (sudden spike of damage, etc). Common wisdom is to aim for at least 3 stacks if you can manage it before re-EF'ing (especially with 4p16, obviously :p).

Sometimes you'll emergency-EF at 1 or 2 stacks, and you'll hate it, but you'll also still be alive as a result, so there's that. Sometimes trying to stubbornly wait for 5 stacks will hurt you more than just keeping it up early. Sometimes you know you're about to have 5 and you deliberately let EF drop for 3-4 seconds, take some damage, and then punch back up with a full-power hot. This is a big gray area you just need to 'feel' out based on the situation.

[rhandric]

4. Every boss should be ret, with the exception of Nazgrim (shield), Malkorok (trinket) and possible exception of Siegecrafter (weapon, though he has some weak pieces on his loot table) and Norushen (weapon, again, but a very weak helm).

7. It depends on how much haste you're comfortable with, but until the higher tiers of gear levels (upwards of 570, at least), if you want to hit the haste cap (21250), while maintaining close to/at hit/exp caps, you'll needwant it. Depending on what trinkets you have, it'd be one that you can drop for certain fights if a different trinket is better.

[trystero]

#6, although it's not possible to have 100% SotR uptime, you should aim to maximize it when actively tanking. Skilled play, and let's face it lucky DP procs, can keep you covered for quite a while - and then you've got CDs to use during downswings. Really what I shoot for instead of 100% uptime is making sure that I do not withstand consecutive unmitigated melee swings.

[Babylonius]

Several people have mentioned DP procs. The guide says:

in its current state, Holy Avenger destroys the other 2 talents, with Divine Purpose in second and Sanctified Wrath in stone dead last. With Divine Purpose having a 25% proc chance however, it would give us a greater uptime of the SHotR buff. Divine Purpose is almost always the best choice.

If Holy Avenger "destroys the other 2 talents" then how is DP "almost always the best choice". Its very confusing.

[Perryn]

HA is good for an encounter with a limited time high damage intake, as an extra DR cd, basically. The 25% proc chance is assuming you use 3 HoPo which you generally will do anyway. At that point DP is outperforming HA overall but HA is still strong as an extra CD where the encounter mechanisms favor it.

[Lovestar]

If Holy Avenger "destroys the other 2 talents" then how is DP "almost always the best choice". Its very confusing.

It was written in MoP Beta, updated for 5.0, and then edited throughout, so that's probably an editing relic.

Given no outside circumstances modifying the situation, DA is amazing, because frequent SotR uptime is more valuable than infrequent burst SotR usually. Like any talent choice, YMMV and you need to assess your situation before deciding whether to swap around.

[Raeph]

Several people have mentioned DP procs. The guide says:


If Holy Avenger "destroys the other 2 talents" then how is DP "almost always the best choice". Its very confusing.

Holy Avenger can be used to give yourself nearly 100% shield of the righteous uptime for targeted periods for nearly 30 seconds. Divine purpose, with is 25% proc rate, which can proc off of itself, can give your greater overall uptime over the course of the fight. Fight by fight each have their benefits.

Example, on Spoils since you are going through a ton of mobs that don't hit to hard and die fairly quickly, go divine purpose and you'll see something like 10-15% increase SoTR uptime.

On the other hand with Malkorok, during his Blood Rage phase he hits like a truck for about 20 seconds. You can use Holy Avenger during this time and greatly reduce your damage taken, which is good since healers during this phase are trying to keep everyone topped off for the next Phase 1 portion of the fight.

Holy avenger if used with fight mechanics in mind, and if the fight gives you the opportunity to use it against regular high damage boss abilities *can* be stronger than DP. However if there aren't many of those types of events during a fight Divine Purpose will be stronger because of the greater overall up time.

[Soloz]

Nothing like getting 40+ seconds of SotR stacked up during H Garrosh, just to wipe to something dumb

[Deleted]

HA vs DP comes down to the encounter. Do you want all your free procs during a 20 second window every 2 minutes or do you want them spread throughout the 5-10 minute encounter. Most of the time there isn't enough downtime on a boss to make HA stronger or high fixed burst. Getting from 1 stack to 5 for AB feels much smoother with DP and it really gives you alot more time to play with, its very unlikely that between your 1 to 5 your not going to get any procs.

My personal use for HA is;

Heroic;
-Malkorok for solo tanking the blood rage
-Thok (solo tanking, theres alot of downtime when hes fixating so my HA is normally off cooldown just after the bats spawn at the second door.)
-Klaxxi (maybe if your tanking the dissector at the start to avoid injections.. Our warrior does this though :P)