I've got a couple of questions about protadin talents and I'm hoping you guys might be able to provide a little clarity. These questions are all about progression tanking in ToGC.
Divinity - I've been led to believe that the talent Divinity contributes alot to overhealing rather than making a significant contribution to keeping a paladin alive. Is this correct?
3/3 Crusader is better than 5/5 Seal of the Just in ToGC due to the fact that everything is A. Undead, B. Humanoid or C. Demonic. Also, the fact that Crusader applies to everything rather than the three seals that SoTJ applies to. Is this conclusion valid?
Divine Guardian: 'Must have' or 'can live without?'
Divinity is pretty useless for just the reason you mentioned.
Crusader has math supporting it as better than 5/5 Seals even with 2piece T8.5.
Divine Guardian probably isn't worth it if you're doing TotGC since, if you die, losing a tank means a wipe anyway.
Yes,Yes, and Yes.
Divine Guardian is not useful if you are tanking ToC, but otherwise it'll see it's share of use. Extra tasty for swarms and vortexes, but that's rarely in the tank's range of choice.
Thanks for the response!
I personally use Divine Guardian for the improved Sacred Shield and the ability to provide another tank with a cooldown on single boss fights. Jaraxxus between adds and Icehowl headbutts come to mind as places where it can be useful, especially if I'm burning through mana doing my prot dps thing.
To be clear, Divinity helps as much as any other healing buff. It will not exclusively apply to overhealing, or make overhealing worse necessarily. It is usually passed up for other talents that are more focused on the tank himself for threat or survival. It's easy to miss because of tools you want to get in Ret, but it is anything but a waste.
Divine Sacrifice/Guardian is handy, but you don't get it for your own tanking so much as you can get it to support your raid. If you're frequently an off-tank or secondary target, you can use it to help your healers. Usually I see it passed up for the same reasons as Divinity. You can get nicer buffs for yourself and be a stronger tank.
The (Old) Book on Death Knight Tanking
The New Testament on Death Knight Tanking
-----------------------------------------
Originally Posted by Horacio
Divine Sacrifice can be quite nice for Faction Champions when they Bloodlust as it gives your guys a little bit of time to Purge/Spellsteal without worrying about being gibbed. Also for Heroic Anub Phase 3 if you find yourself lucky enough to get breathing space where there are no adds up (not something I've personally had the benefit of, unfortunately).
I personally go {1/1 Divine Sacrifice; 2/2 Improved Hammer of Justice} but really, any one of:
- 1/1 Divine Sacrifice; 2/2 Divine Guardian
- 1/1 Divine Sacrifice; 2/2 Improved Hammer of Justice
- 3/5 Divinity
- 3/5 Reckoning
Or some hybrid of the above can be quite viable depending on your playstyle, stats, etc. The main aim is to get down to 3/3 Crusade, so you'll want 53 points in Prot, giving you three "utility" points, assuming 1/2 Spiritual Attunement.
Crusader is better than Seals of the Just anywhere, not just in ToC, because the amount of our damage done by judgment is very small, it's more for the effects we get from the judgment.
Divinity has its uses, and maybe as the MT I would consider it, but I don't prefer it over Divine Sacrifice and Guardian, simply because generally speaking, you are going to have a good healer on the MT, who won't ahve much problem keeping you up. Divine Guardian is useful a lot, for taking tension off of the raid healers, and can be used anytime both tanks are on one boss, for example, Gormok the Impaler, a pally tank is going to use a bubble in that fight anyway to clear his Impale stacks, and D Sac helps the healers conserve mana for the other two fights with no breaks. I find that there are a ton of uses for it, anytime you specifically don't need to hold aggro, you can bubble and pop D sac to help out.
With the improved judgments, it is sort of helpful for interrupts, but I would only take it if you don't have many melee dps around to interrupt for you.
Mert mentioned Reckoning, I think you get more threat from putting those talent points into ret tree, then into reckoning, unless you're just using it to get the minimum to move to the next tier, and want the one with the highest threat.
So I would get Divine Guardian, don't know if I would bother with improved judgments or reckoning though.
This statement leads me to think you had a 10-seconds hallucination. Seals of the Just doesn't exist, you may be talking about seals of the pure. There's some(a lot) math in maintankadin about it's value and for non DUH mobs, 5/5 Seals of the Pure outperforms 3/3 crusade + 2/5 conviction. Reckoning also increases Seals' gap over Crusade.
Diviniy's problem is in how healing works: You get healed by a lot, all the time. The amount of hits at which divinity will do more than overheal, in raids, are all but unexistent. For as long as we are healed for full within a gcd or two(mostly because we take that much damage within a gcd or two), divinity doesn't help.
Improved Judgments? We need one point in it for our optimal rotations, and the second one is bonus for when you can't do the perfect rotation.
Correct, Reckoning is one of our last threat choices, picked up mostly because we need a 3 point filler in the prot tree.
lol.. yea, sorry.
I meant seals of the pure, and improved hammer of justice.
Divinity is a waste of 5 points. Heals will be sufficient so extra would teeter-totter between hinderance and comfort in regards to talents.
Conclusion is split on this. On one end you can talent for more damage = more holy damage = more threat built with just Crusader but to the point of certain mobs. But then your threat might suffer on other fights like Beasts and HM Ulduar if you do those. It can be marginal but it's up to speculation.
Divine Guardian is handy yet not officially needed. But being a tank, might as well have it in your utility in case of splash raid damage.
Healing is the source of life. Without it, you're left with death.
My own personal view on that is this:
The delta on non-DUH mobs where SotP is better is small
The delta on DUH mobs where Crusade is better is larger.
I went with crusade. You can also choose to spec based on the instances you are tanking if you don't want to pick one or the other.
Which is why I specifically said that you could take a maximum of 3/5 in it in order to also get 3/3 Crusade. I'd never advocate 5/5 Reckoning in its current iteration, even with a 5/5 Seals of the Pure build, simply because there's a lot of utility in the Ret tree from Vindication and Persuit of Justice that I wouldn't want to give up.
I have 5/61/5 (pally tank {halfsizetank}) and its been working fine with me without D sac only issuse I have is holding aggro off the locks so what to do to make more theart for my self?
I have been told when I have the def cap i should throw in some str gems into my gear will that work too?
You shouldn't need to do anything special to hold threat from those pesky Locks. Chances are that you just need to get higher level gear to match and pass them. If you have equivalent gear they should only pull off you if they push it at the wrong time, refuse to use their threat drops, or there's something faulty in your method of building threat (though in my experience, Protadinining is the least crucial to get just so, to maximize threat).
That said, if you do crank up your Strength it will get you more threat.
The (Old) Book on Death Knight Tanking
The New Testament on Death Knight Tanking
-----------------------------------------
Was just reading a post about the new change in avoidance and how it will affect healing on tanks .. and made me think that Divinity will be kind of worth since healing will be more steady.. as damage will be. Overhealing might not be an option anymore. So it would be a nice contribution to help healers keep tanks alive.
That's the goal of Cataclysm, yes, but it won't be reachable before that.
@Dragonpally: you can't hold aggro off locks because you're specced wrong, and your spec can't feature 1/2 Imp Judgements required to maintain the proper rotation (max threat while sustaining 100% HS uptime and JotJ). Don't use strength gems, fix your spec and rotation.
Go visit maintankadin, start in the basic training forum, and read
Divine Sac is a great talent if you are an offtank for your guild. You are in essence providing 40% damage reduction to your guild's main tank for 10 seconds. The trick is to coordinate with the other tank so there aren't cooldown overlaps with this ability. If you're a main tank than this is a terrible talent since you dont want to soak up raid damage ontop of the boss whacking you.
Divinity is a point fluffer talent. Remember we already get 6% bonus to healing with Improved Devo Aura for 3 points Divinity gives us 5% bonus to healing for 5 points. 11% bonus to healing will create a lot of overhealing than any good.
@Dragonpally: you really gimp yourself by not going into the ret tree. Vindication gives us an improved demo shout/roar as well as Pursuit of Justice which makes us less flat footed. One thing most people don't talk about but a good tank takes into consideration is how fast can move to where i need to be. Take the Anub fight for instance when the adds come they usually B-line to a healer its your job to get to them fast as possible to prevent the healer from dieing. To me Crusade is the cherry to those two awesome talents.
I think it may be useful to split this discussion between two topics:
a) the three (3) filler points to reach deep protection talents and should they be put in:
- 3/5 Divinity
- 1/1 Divine Guardian 2/2 Divine Sacrifice
- 3/5 Reckoning
- whatever
and
b) The best use for the eleven (11) points you have left when you are done with the protection tree, 5/5 deflection and 1/2 Improved Judgement.
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