[Prot] Fix my Tanking!

[Weightlifter]

How important is main hand weapon for prot palas? I recently changed my offspec to prot, and while all my other gear is at least normal ToT quality, my weapon is some 476 crap that dropped from a random mob in IoT.

[Nairobi]

About as important as the melee weapon to hunters through Cata.

It's a stat stick.

[Deleted]

How important is main hand weapon for prot palas? I recently changed my offspec to prot, and while all my other gear is at least normal ToT quality, my weapon is some 476 crap that dropped from a random mob in IoT.

Not important at all, I sometimes equip a level 16 weapon with item level 20 for the lulz during raids.

[Nairobi]

Not important at all, I sometimes equip a level 16 weapon with item level 20 for the lulz during raids.

Yeah....I wouldn't do THAT.

Putting on a TF, or anything pre-MOP will obviously be a tangible loss. But you can easily use a 463+ weapon without really suffering too much, since so much of our damage is from spells and V-scaling.

That said, melee is ~#3-4 on my damage breakdown on ST fights, so it's not inconsequential (see opening line of this post). Weapons are primarily stat-sticks, but they adhere to the same rules about stat allocation priorities as the rest of our gear. Haste/Accuracy is great/BiS, but if you've got a 476 Haste/Exp sword and a 522 D/P mace drops, I'd use the 522. Anything above 26ilvl delta starts being too many stats to give up.

[Deleted]

Yeah....I wouldn't do THAT

Well, not adviseable during progress, but equipping a trollish weapon can get some nice reactions for a stat loss that is about the same as replacing a ring.
I got a ton of top 20 ranks with that weapon, it really does not affect your dps that much as all spells that scale with weapon damage (CS/HotR, melee swings) still scale with AP, so even if you have almost 0 weapon damage the difference in damage is not so different.

But well, in conclusion weightlifter, dont worry that much about your weapon. I went from 496+8 weapon to 543+8 weapon, not a single weapon dropped from T14H or T15N, then suddenly H TF dropped, I did not even notice the difference.

[Nairobi]

Do you have any Top-20 logs of these? I'm assuming you mean normal modes, but I thought you didn't or don't raid anymore?

Considering you've got ~18k Weapon dmg on a heroic 1H, which is baseline'd into every melee swing @ ~1.5 sec, it only takes a shade over 1 minute to add up an extra 1mil damage with a real weapon versus the "troll" weapon, from autoattack alone. On a given 5min fight, you're looking at 5+mil damage extra from autoattack, not even counting CS scaling.

Sure you can still kill a boss without a real weapon, or ring, or pants....but do we really need to suggest that in the Fix my Tanking thread?

[Deleted]

Do you have any Top-20 logs of these? I'm assuming you mean normal modes, but I thought you didn't or don't raid anymore

Oh it was back in T14, havent done it in T15, some of them was normals some heroic.

I actually joined a raid team last week again, got some experience again but, I dont know, feels kinda /meh to raid.

Kinda hard to check since those logs are deleted know, there is only 1 date that I really know that I used a low level weapon, looks like it was about a 5k dps loss (Gara'Jal Heroic).

[Nairobi]

Given that weapon dmg ranges from entry t14 to HTF t15 have almost doubled, as well as the increase in overall DPS-throughput, that seems believable (if a bit low), but that encounter isn't the most reliable for testing what was being discussed anyway.

REGARDLESS, moving on.

No blue confirmation, but LH, ES and SS all now have haste-scaled GCDs on PTR. Not sure if that's been reported here, or the Prot sticky, but that's good news for us all (in the midst of the SS nerf).

[Deleted]

Gotta say though, raiding again I really understand the vengeance changes with DR on multiple adds. When I went on break my progress was far from great, and still isnt. Now getting being and doing fights like twins HC/primo HC, I really really understand those vengeance changes. (and dark animus ofc)

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Given that weapon dmg ranges from entry t14 to HTF t15 have almost doubled, as well as the increase in overall DPS-throughput, that seems believable (if a bit low), but that encounter isn't the most reliable for testing what was being discussed anyway.

Yeah, it would probably have a larger effect now than before Gara'jal was pretty reliable though, you had low vengeance and nothing that really increased it by standing in shit.

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No blue confirmation, but LH, ES and SS all now have haste-scaled GCDs on PTR. Not sure if that's been reported here, or the Prot sticky, but that's good news for us all (in the midst of the SS nerf).

Yeah, just a few patches to late, even though we spammed them with tweets and forum posts they did not change this in the last 2 PTRs.

Great that they fix it... but feels like they could have done it before.

[Deleted]

Hi.

Switched to paladin for heroic maggy progress to help with healing.
Got complaints that my damage was half of what it should be, is it really that bad ?

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/g...?s=4760&e=5121
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...santa/advanced
Can ignore my pathetic SS uptime, i know, i know...

[Deleted]

Hi.

Switched to paladin for heroic maggy progress to help with healing.
Got complaints that my damage was half of what it should be, is it really that bad ?

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/g...?s=4760&e=5121
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...santa/advanced
Can ignore my pathetic SS uptime, i know, i know...

It depends on how you define "should be", it is significantly lower than it could be, but by far not the worst we have seen. I am mostly looking at your Durumu and Ji-Kun logs since I feel like those fights are better at checking damage, and you are fairly low on both.

If you look at Ji-Kun your damage was 45% of the rank limit, that means that even if you doubled your damage you would still not be among the top 200. Now, your gear is not that great, so that is of course a factor, and how you do the boss also matters. Sadly I dont have any heroic logs that are not deleted already due to inactivity and my new raid team do not keep logs *grunts*.

So yes, there is definately a lot of room for improvement for you in your raid team, but for them to tell you should be doing double damage is kinda overkill, it is not like the rest of your raid team is performing at 110% either. You should probably be able to push out a good 50% more though.

If you look at megaera you were at 64% of the limit whereas the rest of your raid was at 77-103%, so you doing about 20% more damage on Megaera would put you at the same level as the bottom part of the rest of your team, far from the 100% that your raid team suggested. If you would do 50% more damage you would be at the top part of your raid team.
Feels like your team keeps higher expectations on you than the rest of your team.

[Nairobi]

Hi.

Switched to paladin for heroic maggy progress to help with healing.
Got complaints that my damage was half of what it should be, is it really that bad ?

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/g...?s=4760&e=5121
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...santa/advanced
Can ignore my pathetic SS uptime, i know, i know...

Your shoulders aren't enchanted (though, I don't know that I'd waste a good enchant on those anyway).

FF covered your rank limits, and I'd agree that there aren't that many people who can really point fingers in your guild to begin with. BUT, your damage is really quite low. Your CS:J breakdown looks good, and gearing looks good, so it's got to be something mechanical and/or V-related.

Looking at JiKun here, you're bringing up the rear, hard. I didn't dissect your strat really, but how many TRs are you taking? Are you soaking pools with HoPur to get up/keep up V? What glyphs are you using? Looks like you're not bothering to get any Feed Young buffs either. And your SS time is poop Using BH/FS/FW will allow you to use HoPur and unglyphed DivProt to soak pools for extra V (and stack up Infected Talons debuff), which should help boost your damage a bit. Not sure how fast you burn him, but we do it after 2 nests. Make sure to use your remaining 2 feather charges to grab Feed Young, as it will incerdibly boost your DPS. If you can only get 1, that's fine, just make sure it's one that overlaps Lust.

CS:J is a little off on the Meg kills (J is also higher on DPS than AS, which is odd), so that may be part of it. Not much you can do to boost V here, just smart use of CDs. I take HA for H Meg, just for the extra burn when my head is the kill target. YMMV.

At any rate, don't get down about it. Not sure what the other member's ilvl's are, but you're still in TOT-N level, so it's not that bad. Just a few things to pick up on. Namely glyph choice, SS uptime (!) and using the encounter mechanics to your advantage.

[Ishmarn]

Hey guys, wondering if you could help me out.

I'm currently 12/12 on my 530 prot paladin, and my guild wants to try heroics this week. I generally don't have much trouble, but I was wondering if you guys could give me some advice? I cant post links since this is my first time posting, so my toon is Ishmarn on Cho'gall and our raid logs are under the guild Recondite Society, Druidkins team.
I didn't know about haste gearing until mid patch 5.3, so I'm currently playing a lot of catch up in changing my gear around, and that's why I have the wrong valor gear.

[Nairobi]

Hey guys, wondering if you could help me out.

I'm currently 12/12 on my 530 prot paladin, and my guild wants to try heroics this week. I generally don't have much trouble, but I was wondering if you guys could give me some advice? I cant post links since this is my first time posting, so my toon is Ishmarn on Cho'gall and our raid logs are under the guild Recondite Society, Druidkins team.
I didn't know about haste gearing until mid patch 5.3, so I'm currently playing a lot of catch up in changing my gear around, and that's why I have the wrong valor gear.

Did you have an actual, specific question? We can all give a lot of advice, but I'm not exactly sure what it is you're looking for.

If you want a basic rundown of fights, there are some POV posts in a sticky.
If you want some brush-up on gearing/talents/whatever, there is the Prot sticky as a good resource.

If you have a specific question about an encounter(s), rotation, mechanic, or whatever....we'd be a bit better informed to help you out.

[Deleted]

It depends on how you define "should be", it is significantly lower than it could be, but by far not the worst we have seen. I am mostly looking at your Durumu and Ji-Kun logs since I feel like those fights are better at checking damage, and you are fairly low on both.

Feels like your team keeps higher expectations on you than the rest of your team.

The "should be" is probably due to the fact i couldnt beat my warrior on dps, even given the ilvl diff (541 on warr) should be "easy" right ?
The higher expectations is me being guild master, gotta lead by example :P

Looking at JiKun here, you're bringing up the rear, hard.

At any rate, don't get down about it. Not sure what the other member's ilvl's are, but you're still in TOT-N level, so it's not that bad. Just a few things to pick up on. Namely glyph choice, SS uptime (!) and using the encounter mechanics to your advantage.

It was a horrible night that ended up with screams and trial kicked midprogress, needless to say i stopped caring second we put maggy on normal.
We have 9/13 hc down and avg 538 raid ilvl, with the odd trial around 525.

But back to maggy, for V i was doing sit macro whenever i felt safe to keep myself above 100k.
Do you have any logs i can peek at nairobi, preferably when your not cheesing/whoring, to have as reference ?
You mention judgment above AS, is there any other obvious damage dist. errors you can see ?
Its an alt but there's no excuse for it being this bad...

[Gorfion]

Random question, but what is the highest dps glyph to use for 10H qon? Assuming I'm running battle healer and div prot in two glyph slots, what should my third glyph be? I've been using alabaster shield but maybe focused shield or final wrath would be better?

[Nairobi]

Well ilvl means a lot. I don't think you'll pass a 541 warrior without abusing V smartly and/or single-tanking.

You can browse http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/410/ at your leisure. We did Meg N last 2 weeks for the meta achivs (some other normal bosses mixed in as well), and quite a few fights are 8-9m normal/heroics, so you'd have to go back to mid July to see anything relevant probably. And I haven't cared about cheesing/whoring on anything since we killed RaDen, so they should all be "pure", even if a bit low due to laziness with swapping talents/glyphs. I don't think I've used /sit since like June.

Rest of the dmg breakdown was ok, minus melee being a tad low (but that's due to ilvl + haste mostly).

Random question, but what is the highest dps glyph to use for 10H qon? Assuming I'm running battle healer and div prot in two glyph slots, what should my third glyph be? I've been using alabaster shield but maybe focused shield or final wrath would be better?

You can try focused shield, but keep in mind that you'll lose out on AS bounces when all dogs land. This doesn't sound like much, but your V level should be high as hell, and I usually go from 3-4th up to 1st during this portion+last phase. Alab is free, passive damage, but the melee is quite slow. You'd likely see better gains from Final Wrath, mostly for the same reasons of V-level when all dogs are down and low on HP.

[Brael]

@ Santa666 what strat are you using for Heroic Megaera and what raid comp? Using a 522 paladin compared to a 544 prot warrior just sounds like you're making it harder on yourselves.

[hashtags]

Thanks alot for the help earlier guys. I finally did horridon and tortos heroic on 10 man with my guild today. Horridon last phase went alot smoother then when i did it on my dk granted everyone else has gotten alot more gear.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...evahh/advanced
Logs from tonight.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=2879&e=3501

Planning to do heroic drumuru. My raid leader believes my pally is ready for it and primodious what do you guys think. Any glaring issues with my play style.

I picked up this http://us.battle.net/wow/en/item/96429
I had the vp dps neck that gave around 600 mastery. This had a socket plus reforge made it slightly better i guess. Still not sure if this is the neck i should be using. Any suggestion.
Oh and finally got rid of the stuff of nightmare trinket with Spark of Zandalar So happy.

[Deleted]

Thanks alot for the help earlier guys. I finally did horridon and tortos heroic on 10 man with my guild today. Horridon last phase went alot smoother then when i did it on my dk granted everyone else has gotten alot more gear.

Okay, so looking over your logs, Durumu seemed to be "fine", in the terms of you were surviving. Only on 1 attempt did you die 2x because you failed to use SotR on hard stare, the other attempts were okay though, but there is always room for improvement. Really make sure you are using SotR on every stare.

Otherwise, once your survival is fine, you should start working on getting more dps, but first work on your survival of course, though they are not both mutually exclusive, since more dps means you are using a better rotation which means more hps and SotR uptime which helps your survival.

So being a bit picky about your dps here (since your survival was fine on the earlier bosses), your dps is a lot lower than it could be. Then again, it is about on-par with the rest of the group.

Your dps on Jin'rokh is what stands out most to me, you could easily do 200% more dps with your gear. One thing that you could try to do is set up benchmarks for yourself during progress fights and farm fights, a dps to beat to compete with yourself, this helped me improve my game on several occations, when progressing a new fight I always try to set up these benchmarks for myself "I should have x dps when the boss does y and by the time the boss dies my dps should be z"

Take Jin'Rokh as example there, my first kill on him was about the same as your kill time now, it was about that 4.5m mark. I had about 522-526 ilvl, I cant remember, about the same as you, a bit more, and I set my benchmark to be on 260k+ by the first storm and 240k+ when the boss died, and I tried to just do better and better on every pull. I did the same on pretty much every fight, take Twins HC for example, I had 2 benchmarks on that fight, first one was to be on 400k dps by the first inferno and 260k by the time the boss was near enrage. Now, sometimes my dps was only 380k before the first inferno, then I slapped myself on the wrist and did 410k on the next pull instead.

Having those benchmarks to compete with yourself can be very helpful, I sure know it has been to me. So I would really suggest that you start making your own benchmarks to push yourself, keep them in a text document, even on farm fights. "Oh, I did 180k dps on Ji-Kun Heroic last week, I am gonna do atleast that this week and hopefully 190k dps".

Now of course, adjust your benchmarks to your gear and your tactics. Tank damage varies so much depending on what strategies you use so there is not a global benchmark for all tanks, it depends on what tactics you use (though on some fights like Jin'Rokh, I would say that every tank should be above 200k dps always regardless of strategy).

Looking over your logs, you could probably push out 50-100% more dps on most of those fights that you did, maybe even more on some fights.

As I said though, I am ranting on a lot of dps now, surviving as a tank is your most important part, always remember that. It is just that surviving is rather easy, the dps is what differentiate a good tank from a great tank. First work on surviving (which you seem to do fairly well considering your gear), after that work on pushing that dps to evolve from a good to a great tank.