A few Prot Questions

[JustintimeSS]

I'm still trying to understand everything about prot pallys since they are not really like my prot warrior.

1. If I am exp soft capped without the glyph of SoV should I use another one for giggles or is the monetary gain towards the hard cap worth it? I'm torn here because I know it doesn't hurt but it just feels like there could be something better to use.

2. I know heroic 5 mans are lawls but I'm just curious about weapon usage. Is it cool for a prot paladin to use a slow dps weapon to tank heroics (or raids for that matter) if they don't loose much avoidance? For example I lose .5% parry and 30 stam if I switch out of peacekeeper blade but I gain like 200ish top end damage and some other stats and the weapon dps stays the same. Do other pallys do that or am I douching it up?

These questions are common sense questions for a tank I suppose (survive>dps) and I know the "right" answer to both as a raiding warrior, but I was just wondering what other pallies do since I'm new to your class. Thanks in advance.

[Eurytos]

First, paladins generate threat completely different from warriors.

Second, an armory link would help greatly.

Third, to answer one of your questions directly, your weapon is of little importance. If you don't need a weapon with defense on it to stay at the crit immune minimum(540 def) then you can use whatever you feel like. It won't make any noticeable difference in dmg. Ideally, the higher stam weapon is best, for a number of reasons that I wont list here. There are a lot of other things for you to know, but I'll leave that to some others to post about or for you to research.

Good Luck.

[JustintimeSS]

Thanks for the reply and yes Ive been searching around a bit on tankspot and whatnot but I just wanted to see if I could get straight info from some good people.

Here is my armory. The disclaimer is that I just hit 80 two weeks ago and I have not raided yet.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Silvermoon&n=Morningtide

[Eurytos]

Ok, well the biggest thing I saw that was wrong was that you didnt spec into Touched by the Light and you did spec into Reckoning. Much of our threat comes from Spellpower. Without Touched by the Light, you missing a huge chunk of threat and probably couldnt hold threat against a mage of your same gear level that knows what hes doing. the other 2 points from Reckoning not put into TbtL are better spent in the ret tree in Pursuit of Justice or getting down to Crusade for some more threat talents. My sig has a link to my armory and you can copy my spec if you like. Its pretty much the standard.

As far as glyphs go, Divine Plea is commonly considered the only one that is mandatory. Hammer of the Righteous is a great one for heroics, and the 3rd one is a personal choice really. There are some that are better for certain hardmode fights, but your clearly not doing that yet.

Just a note: Hit and Expertise are not nearly as important for Pally tanks compared to our counterparts. Keep that in mind when gemming and gearing and enchanting. Stam is your best friend. Stay at or above 540 defense, foremost, and contiue gearing from there.

[JustintimeSS]

Thanks for that info. Im speccing into Touch of the Light. For some reason I thought reckoning was cool, maybe I was still thinking old reckoning.

Anyways, thanks again, all great info.

[amgor]

Looking at the armory link you linked, the gear and spec/glyphs look solid, but could use some tweaking. Looking at the gear first, I would use a tanking sword as oppose to a dps sword, for tanking stats. For gems, if you have enough defense I would match socket colors, by itemizing stam on each gem. So red sockets would be agi/stam, yellow sockets would be defense/stam and blue sockets would be pure stam. For the spec the basics are there but I would switch a couple points around. I would go with something more along the lines of this http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...Tlu4bz7,,10958. For glyphs, I would go with the divine plea glyph and the righteous defense glyph since missing a taunt is never fun and only go for the vengeance glyph if your lacking on expertise, which is highly unlikely with how blizz itemizes tank gear.

Once you have enough gear to cover for defense alone, I would just gem/enchant stam the whole way.
You said you play a warrior tank so it shouldn't be to hard for you to gear a prot pally since the stats are fairly similar, and yes we still need hit and expertise since expertise affects our white attacks and HotR and hit affects all of our attacks and the first tick of cons. They are not useless stats for a prot pally.

[Cryblood]

attk speed on a wep really dose not have much to do with our threat, sure it raises your Seal dmg a bit but thats about it, the dps stat we care for the most on weps is dps, soon as more dps = more hammer of right dmg which equals more threat.

getting 18 points into the ret tree for crusade is still the highest path to take for threat but this means you need to drop 1 point in something, (normally SA).

hit is a garbage stat for us, and i would recommend using the taunt glyph so you wont miss a taunt and get sum1 killed.
expertise is a decent stat soon as it actually reduces the amount of incoming dmg to a certain degree (parry hasting) and buffing tps. but its not something you should gem or enchant for. for glyphs divine plea is mandatory, taunt glyph is good if your in high end raids, hammer of right for trash, salvation for another cd, and SoV for more exp, really dosent matter what you take as long as you have dp.

also i noticed from your armory that you are using the wrong shoulder enchant, i would recommend farming up 10k honor and buying the 30stam 15 rescil enchant, more hp and it lowers the def cap.
you are way over defense cap, try enchanting for shield for 18, and or your chest for 225+ hp

[Oneris]

I'm gonna have to disagree with Toku, don't waste your time on a resilience enchant. If you're over 540 defense anyway, you can't get crit, if you can't get crit, resilience does nothing for you. Defense, while removing your chance to get crit, will always increase your chance to dodge, block and parry, well beyond the minimum of 540.

From here on out you probably won't have to worry about gemming/chanting for defense. Stam on the shield, +10 stats on the chest, I gem with stam, stam+parry for red, stam+hit for yellow, or you could go stam+str red for threat/block value, but with the new ICC instances, you're going to want a good balance of stam and avoidance/mitigation.

As for your initial questions, expertise is one of our most least weighted stats, so don't worry about it unless you've got all your other bases covered. Hit is more useful. You can switch out your weapon if you want, but I don't think it'll make too much difference; most of your threat and dps will come from abilities, which grow with your stats. If I'm grouped with a bunch of scrubs, it's not uncommon for me to lead the meters when tanking.

[Nillo]

From here on out you probably won't have to worry about gemming/chanting for defense. Stam on the shield, +10 stats on the chest, I gem with stam, stam+parry for red, stam+hit for yellow, or you could go stam+str red for threat/block value, but with the new ICC instances, you're going to want a good balance of stam and avoidance/mitigation.

Why would anyone use parry+stam gems? Agi+stam is superior in any way.

[JustintimeSS]

Oh wow lots of responses. First, I got a few upgrades changed a glyph out (was already curious about Hand of Salv) and switched my spec around to get crusade and tbtl. I traded gems about a bit to gain more stam in place of some def. As for gemming to match colors, I'm just not going to do that in every piece. Gaining 4 dodge or 3 parry extra but having to put a red gem in the socket to do so isn't always the smartest course of action. I can't take everyone's advice here, and though I play a prot warrior as well, I know color matching is just not always the best thing to do.


Thanks for the advice, none the less, a lot of it here helped me along which was the idea, I suppose. <3


Edit: So, not gemming over the defense "cap" isn't cool anymore? I thought going well over the cap was the thing to do now since stam is so abundant to begin with.

[Nillo]

Edit: So, not gemming over the defense "cap" isn't cool anymore? I thought going well over the cap was the thing to do now since stam is so abundant to begin with.

To keep it short:

Priority is something like: Stamina > (Armor) >>> Def > Agi > Dodge > Parry. This for any boss, that hits very hard and uses unavoidable attacks (Like Northrend Beasts and An00b) and by that forces you to have a lot of Effective Health. (Avoidance won't help you if you get one-shot)

Dunno about Icecrown, but I guess it'll remain as it is.

[Harmacy]

To keep it short:

Priority is something like: Stamina > (Armor) >>> Def > Agi > Dodge > Parry. This for any boss, that hits very hard and uses unavoidable attacks (Like Northrend Beasts and An00b) and by that forces you to have a lot of Effective Health. (Avoidance won't help you if you get one-shot)

Dunno about Icecrown, but I guess it'll remain as it is.

QFT. Use the spec that was linked by amgor, as well.

To answer your original question, the Seal of Vengeance glyph is fantastic even over 26 expertise from gear. Sure we get less from expertise than warriors or bears (bears especially) or even DK's, but it is still a great threat stat because of Hammer of the Righteous and our auto-attacks (especially since our auto-attacks deal 33% more damage once our seal is stacked to 5).

I don't think it much matters what weapon you use, however I'd recommend since you have a lot of defense gems and enchants, to use a weapon with +def to help you meet 540 and then losing some of the gems for stamina. It won't make much of a difference in 5-mans of course, but for raiding it will mean the world.

[JustintimeSS]

Since so many people helped me (which is why I came here instead of wows forums) I just wanted to thank everyone.

The final results for those of you who would like to know how much they actually helped:

I ended up switching specs to almost the one recommended to me. The only difference being I kept SoC because I like to tank trash with it over SoV. I changed out of SoV glyph for the Salv glyph because I always thought it was cool to have yet another CD to use (not on the freaking forberance timer) and so far it has worked just fine in every single heroic I've done.

I swapped some gems and, despite what armory shows, I resorted back to the tanking weapon so I could pull another def gem out and get my stam up. I haven't enchanted my chest or shield with stam yet because I'm waiting on upgrades there first but I will do that in the end.

As for all the other suggestions, again, I thank you tremendously. I will raid something, probably even get into ICC since it's a cake walk so far, and when I do I will take all of the raiding advice and suggestions to heart and use them up.

<3