[Prot] WoD/Legion Alpha Discussion

[Candlemaster]

Stamina will always be better for TMI than any other stat until the damage incoming is so low such that the extra stamina doesn't really proportionally affect the spikes. The Stamina trinkets will always be best for survivability provided your healers can heal the damage. They just won't be useful for DTPS

You literally just said "they're only technically best for survival if you need to survive."

Stam is one of your best survival stats, bar none, and has been for years, despite ill-informed people shouting that it turns you into a mana sponge (it doesn't). It just sucks that it gives you no DPS, unlike pretty much every other stat nowadays. If a tank is worried about survival, then stam is relevant. If they aren't, then they're probably trying to determine the most efficient trades of stamina for other DPS stats. Either way the stam rankings are relevant.

I mean sure, if you're stacking stamina in 690+ gear for like, heroic dungeons, you're doing it wrong. But that has nothing to do with the sim results and everything to do with a tank that doesn't really understand what they're doing.

So let me rephrase because I meant more along the lines of what Astur said. Clearly stam is the best survival stat for tanks. I was just more stating that I'm sure someone out there was going to say hey looks its still wrath and we need all the hp we can get no matter what the situation is. While hp will give us the ability to survive larger damage pools, I was just basically pointing out that if you don't need the extra stam (like in thecks example) it is safe to change out trinkets. I was by no means saying stam is by no means a bad stat, just that saying it is perfectly acceptable to change out if youre not worried about dying on a low damage fight like say heroic beastlord and you're mythic/full heroic geared etc. Obviously yes you'd have a higher TMI due to not having the extra stam, but you're still probably not in any real danger of dying bar incompetent play overall. I blame posting at 3 am and not being able to make a concise point (which is odd because thats when I do my best essay writing).

[Deleted]

I always remember the 2.5 melee hits rule. Feels like a nice amount of hp to have so that you and your healers aren't constantly panicking, but it's also definitely not too much hp for anything. Of course, when you get to Blackhand (Mythic) it's simply not possible to have 2.5 times the hp of a melee hit. Then it's a lot more difficult to make a good decision and depends on how you set up the raid.

[Deleted]

Got a few questions similar to what someone asked a while ago. From what I've read about the final tier talents, is it generally the case that either sera or HS cones out on top depending on the fight, and that emp seals, whilst better now, still isn't optimal since you either lose a lot of survivability or DPS?

Got a question about sera too. Generally I've sat in HS for most fights since I didn't like the playstyle of sera, but if it's better for some fights then I'm willing to learn. How do you handle not having the DP CD available for certain mechanics? e.g. on Blackhand I use DP and SotR when he's going to smash in p1 in order to survive. If I use DP as part of a rotation I won't have that available. Should I just use my long CDs instead, or do you break the rotation and have a period of less mitigation in order to keep DP/SotR ready?

[Theck]

I always remember the 2.5 melee hits rule. Feels like a nice amount of hp to have so that you and your healers aren't constantly panicking, but it's also definitely not too much hp for anything. Of course, when you get to Blackhand (Mythic) it's simply not possible to have 2.5 times the hp of a melee hit. Then it's a lot more difficult to make a good decision and depends on how you set up the raid.

This is good advice. To add to it, I want to remind people that they need to consider the worst part of the fight. As an example/anecdote, my co-tank was dying a lot on mythic Hans & Franz, even though he had what seemed like a reasonable amount of hit points. He swapped to dual stam trinkets and suddenly stopped dying. He had enough health for normal melee swings, but he would die during a period when he had several stacks of the damage-increasing debuff (Shattered Vertebrae I think?).

That's a situation where you're subject to 300k+ melees if you don't mitigate with SotR or something else. And it's worse because that fight has a lot of movement, meaning you can't always be in range for SotR. It's a perfect example of a fight where stamina is one of your best defenses against simple (albeit unreasonably large) melee attacks.

I suspect in a more organized/serious guild, you'd have an external CD chain set up for all of those situations. But even with a cooldown, a few melees in a row while healers are moving can kill you.

- - - Updated - - -

Got a question about sera too. Generally I've sat in HS for most fights since I didn't like the playstyle of sera, but if it's better for some fights then I'm willing to learn. How do you handle not having the DP CD available for certain mechanics? e.g. on Blackhand I use DP and SotR when he's going to smash in p1 in order to survive. If I use DP as part of a rotation I won't have that available. Should I just use my long CDs instead, or do you break the rotation and have a period of less mitigation in order to keep DP/SotR ready?

It depends on the fight. In some cases, you don't need DP for the Sera downtime due to taunt swaps, so you can skip it entirely. Or the boss is only dangerous in a small window (which you make sure Sera is up for), so you can skip it and rely on a healing tonic or LoH if you get unlucky. If you won't need your long cooldowns for something else, you could just use the long cooldown instead.

For a lot of things that are exact bursts (like Smash), you can just make sure SotR is up and that's sufficient. I don't know what difficulty of Blackhand you're attempting, but on N and H SotR alone is definitely enough to survive that.

That said, the smashes in P1 Blackhand are trivially easy to deal with for a paladin by using Divine Shield. You'll still get stunned and knocked back, but you won't take any damage from either the smash or the fire (we aim him so that we get knocked into the wall so we have less distance to run). I don't know if that works on Mythic, but I suspect it does. Also note that you can bubble as soon as he starts the cast - as long as the circle indicating where it will hit is already on the ground, he won't change it.

[OrcsRLame]

Would it be easier if I just simmed all the trinkets together (i.e. separate M and H versions all in one run)? That way you could just compare directly across everything.

(Also lol @ my note earlier about how someone always asks for more info about a specific edge case!)

Petrified Flesheating Spore is in the game data and on wowhead, which is why it's included. I made the list early on, before raids opened up. It apparently doesn't drop or something, though, so *shrug*?

Before I go to the trouble of re-tooling and rerunning the sims (which I can do today, since it's easy to rewrite and just takes lots of unattended sim time), let's make a list of all the changes we may be making here.

1) Remove Petrified Flesheating Spore (might not exist?) and Ironspike Chew Toy (Int/Spi).
2) Rerun single-trinket sim with all M and H trinkets together in the same sim.
3) Run double-trinket sim with only relevant combos (only M, cut out any irrelevant / off-spec ones to minimize combinatorics)

If anyone has other suggestions for which trinkets to remove from #1 (all sims) or #3 (just the combos), please contribute.

Sure, sounds good to me. I would definitely make use of a chart like that. I can't think of anything else to add to it. You're the best Theck.

[Candlemaster]

How do you calculate giving an ilvl +5 to an item? Is there an exact formula somehow determining how much stats will be changed if you +/- ilvls to it? Or is it possible to already be datamined etc? Also I know several people stated for M absalom > M kromogs protection palm due to absalom having haste on it, but now that M kromogs palm is getting another +5 ilvls on it, would that become our new BiS? I have the same question about legs as well.

[Theck]

How do you calculate giving an ilvl +5 to an item?

Every item's stats are directly calculated from the ilvl. If you know the ilvl and what stats it has (e.g. str/stam/haste/crit), you can directly calculate what that item's stats are. That's how the game scales items down for challenge modes and down or up for PTR testing.

That formula is programmed into SimC, so you can easily scale the item level to whatever you want by appending "ilevel=X" to the item definition. In fact, that's how all of our item stats work, apart from weird special cases. In the game's data files, items are simply stored based on their ilvl and which stats they have. We just reconstruct the stats directly from that data.

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Single-trinket sims are done. I forgot to switch from LH to ES, but oh well.


Single Trinket HA+Sera


Single Trinket DP+HS


Single Trinket DP+EmpS


I'm going to run the dual-trinket sims overnight, but I probably won't get a chance to post them until tomorrow. There's also the small issue that there are 85 combinations of the mythic trinkets (plus Knight's Badge, Scabbard, and Stone of Fire). I'm considering categorizing them into "on use" and "not on use" categories and excluding any combination of two on-use trinkets, which should cut down on the number of combinations fairly significantly and get us beneath the cap of 64 for a single simulation. Any objection to that?

[Deleted]

That sounds best, double on-use is really not a good way to go anyway in my opinion, then again I already know which trinkets I would use when I suppose.

[Theck]

I actually opted to just run all 91 combinations (i miscounted, it was 85 after ignoring dual on-use) and splitting them into "high-dps" sets (no stam trinkets, no double on-use) and "low dps" sets (the rest). They're queued up and running now, but won't be ready until tomorrow since I'm headed to bed.

[Deleted]

Also as pointed out by our local paragon fanboy, fragi went dps instead of prot paladin. I know he stops by here every once in a while, and some of you might know him so what's his reasoning behind that ?

I know that at the end of SoO i personally main switched from tank to dps, simply because (in my opinion) DPS had a much larger potential to "carry" raid teams with the neutering of tank mechanics and removal of vengeance, which resulted in exceptional dps becoming a lot more valuable than exceptional tanks (at least in my opinion) esp on early progression where DPS checks exist.

Was interested if we could get to comment on it, or if other people considered something similar.

Hey, sorry for the late response but I don't really read these paladin forums that much nowadays for obvious reasons. You pretty much hit the nail right on the head there. I/we felt like I'd make more of an impact as a (ranged) dps, helping in figuring out optimal strategies and calling out stuff in the fights seems most natural from this role and we had problems with those two in BRF so I made the change.

With the dps gap between expectionally played tank/dps getting bigger and bigger(BoS DKs mainly being the outliers here (nerf pls)) I can also contribute more in that area. Survivability isn't impossibly tight either as evidenced by people actually killing the harder bosses running other tanks than BrMs this tier^^

PS. god I hate writing on forums, feels too formal to me. When are you guys putting up an IRC channel or something so I can lurk there and join up in the discussion more often

[celinamuna]

PS. god I hate writing on forums, feels too formal to me. When are you guys putting up an IRC channel or something so I can lurk there and join up in the discussion more often

We have #tankchat on quakenet, but it's been semi dead/empty.

[Ferbian]

Question, which talent choice from the first tier do you guys use for Orgorger? Whenever I play ret I always seem to get hit by him towards the end after there's no more Stampeding roar and no more Speed of Light, and it's always by like mere centimeters that I get hit. Or if I just barely miss it and he turns to my side I have little to no time to get out of the way. I'd rather want to avoid that situation if I'm gonna be tanking him this reset.

[Xfighter]

We have #tankchat on quakenet, but it's been semi dead/empty.

Should try and get that rolling again, never knew it existed before (or I read it once randomly and forgot about it ages ago..)

Miss being in IRC, used to use it for numerous other games daily ^_^

[celinamuna]

This was the PBE vs TTT thing, right? I have to look and see if I still have that setup lying around. Although another option is just to prune the irrelevant/subpar trinkets from the list and sim all of the 2-trinket combos.

Yes, since single trinket sims sort of break down, esp with double on use and etc.

[Jellospally]

with the dps gap between expectionally played tank/dps getting bigger and bigger(bos dks mainly being the outliers here (nerf pls))

friend don't nerf me!

[Accurate]

friend don't nerf me!

It's gonna happen eventually unfortunately.

[Accurate]

I really love blizzard's mindset on this, they nerf seraphim to ground because they want us to play with other talents too. Then every dk and his mother uses bos because its op with MS gear , op enough that I was doing more dps on gruul with my dk than my main >. >

But that's okay ofc , fun isn't allowed if you're playing prot pally , atleast I'm kiting siegemakers on blackhand which is fun, holy shield does the rest anyway ( GREAT CLASS )

A lot of decisions they've made regarding tanks or just class design this xpac are frustrating. No idea what they're thinking honestly half the time.

[Deleted]

atleast I'm kiting siegemakers on blackhand which is fun

I'm not so sure, I could have done it, but it's much better with a hunter kiting

[Kortiah]

A lot of decisions they've made regarding tanks or just class design this xpac are frustrating. No idea what they're thinking honestly half the time.

Pretty sure they don't and make their decision based on general feedback up until now. Just look at the Seraphim (and SoT to an extent) nerfs "lolol pals are doing 110k pulls pls nerf" which hurts tanking capability but they don't give a shit, and then they try to bring up EmpS while failing on the SoI part (like the rest of the use of this Seal tbh) when everyone was yelling that it would still suck as a talent mechanically-wise.

They just quickly nerf classes when people banter on the forums and then you can wait 3 months before getting a fix for their stupid hotfixes threw overnight that nerf your class into the ground (see WW Monks).


Prot war ? Barrier is shit since beta. A stupid fix that makes the max get from 90k to 110k absorb, yay when a guard gives 500k AND +30% self healing.
DK ? Took them 3 months to get them on-par with other tanks DPS-wise. Still are unbeatable on AoE scenarii.
Warlocks ? Fine, middle of the pack for Highmaul. They cried and cried and cried like they were bottoming every sims. Godmode for a month before they realize you don't have to listen to whiners to balance a class.
WW Monk ? OP in early WoD. Got shat on and did as much DPS as a tank for 2 months before they realized that MAYBE they overdid it (duh).
Moonkins during SoO ? Shit? Ho hey take a +75% dmg buff. Ho shit looks like they're 20% ahead of everyone, who would have guessed.


I'm telling you, they don't even try their own balancing fixes or think them through.

[Deleted]

Their balancing isn't actually as bad as people think, the issue is that some fights just suit certain things better, when they do then the community complains. Then if they change something, they are wrong if they do or don't.