Prot Pally Hit Rating

[aazzgard]

Hi All,

I'm looking for some advice on my char regarding hit rate.

Armoury here: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...os&cn=Aazzgard

I am aware that the hit cap is 8.0~% and I was comfortably at or near the limit until the last week or so. I have been pretty lucky and picked up 3-4 pieces of tank gear from a mix of ICC 10 hardmodes and ICC25.

Having read a lot of advice from here I have re-gemmed the few hybrid gems I had (for +9 stam bonuses) to pure stam as per the requirement for EH when tanking hardmodes.

With my new gear I am now at around 5.5% for hit and testing with hit/stam food gets me up to around 6.3% only.

My guild raid members all have pretty high end DPS - 13k+ is fairly common and this is why I am using heroic Victors Call to generate a threat lead over them when picking up a boss at the start of a fight or from a transition. It also helps with ensuring I am capped for expertise and avoids me having to gem for expertise cap. Also I figure that with the ICC buff now at 20% I can afford to drop a little stamina.

My question is this - do I go back to some of my old gear and lose nearly 1k hp unbuffed, but be near or over hit cap to enable maximum threat generation, or do I continue using the new gear and not worry so much about hit?

I am confident my rotation is fine and I am glyphed correctly.

I have had to gem for hit in one spot which I don't really want to do but can't see what else is possible right now.

We are going in for a 10 Man Heroic LK kill (which will be server 1st!) on Thursday 3rd so any quick responses would be really appreciated.

[Dreador]

I wouldn't worry about hit at all. You can glyph taunt if needed and if you are hellbent on being capped for taunt fights, switch in another piece of gear with hit on it. Hit is the last thing on the list to check for threat. Rotation and spec are everything.

[BlazeDale]

Paladin threat works like this Expertise > Strength > Hit untill you reach around 2k Strength. Then Hit is valued over strength.
The Expertise Soft Cap is 26. After that, Hit and Strength will give you more threat.

If you are wondering how much hit you need to reach the cap you can check it out on this website:

http://wow-heroes.com/hitcalculator.php

This awesome yet simple tool lets you put in racials, food buffs, flasks, and class talents to let you determine just how much hit you need to be capped.
If you would like more details on Paladin threat please check out this website:

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.c...pic&start=1239

Thanks

[Bodasafa]

I wish someone would sticky this already.

The facts about Expertise and Hit in the current game.

Look its not that Expertise and Hit do not increase your threat, they do. However they do so on a much smaller scale than people realize.

How all tanks generate threat (Listed from the highest source to the lowest):
1) Using your abilities properly. This is paramount, nothing increase your threat more than this.
2) Spec and Glyphs.
3) Proper use of external abilities such as TotT and MD.
4) 26 Expertise Skill.
5) Hit rating.

So I should just mindlessly stack stamina?
Stacking stamina is not mindless unless you do not understand why you should be doing it. Tanks that do not min/max their survival by stacking stamina (or armor where available) through gems and enchants are only doing their raid a disservice. There have been numerous reports from highly respected community members here on tankspot, in world ranked guilds that tanked Heroic ToGC 25 with as little as 40 hit rating and are now also in Heroic ICC 25 with as little as 16 expertise rating. These tanks are working with DPS that are pulling 10k+ on most fights and doing just fine without reaching the hit cap or the expertise soft cap.

If a tank is having threat issues no amount of expertise or hit is going to correct that, see #1 & 2.

[sifuedition]

^^^^^^/thread^^^^^^^^^^

[Mert]

Yeah, for strictly threat purposes I wouldn't worry about your Hit Rating, especially not to the point of using a DPS trinket (Victor's Call) in place of an Armor or Stam one.

However, Hit will serve a purpose on the Heroic Lich King fight in terms of your taunts, especially if you are on the adds. During Phase 1, both my taunts or on cooldown pretty much the whole time from picking up the Ghouls - if they stay on the melee they'll eat through their PW:S or, even worse, daze them in Remorseless Winter or a Shadow Trap or when they have the Disease - plus, you need Ghouls on you to get the stacks of the Disease high enough to kill off the Shambling Horrors. On Phase 2 you'll be taunting the boss for Soul Repaer and the Val'kyr and on Phase 3 you'll continue Soul Reaper duty and possibly also will need to taunt any rogue Vile Spirits.

However, I would strongly urge you to use a tanking trinket in place of Victor's Call for this fight simply because the amount of damage you'll be taking is considerable. In my current gear I have 192 Hit Rating which is 5.86% Melee Hit and 7.32% Spell Hit. I very rarely have threat issues, especially with Misdirects and Tricks and all that lovely stuff so the only thing for the Lich King fight you need to worry about is Spell Hit for the taunts. If you have 5.5% Melee Hit you'll have around 7% Spell Hit. If you use Glyph of Righteous Defense, that'll add another effective 8% Spell Hit to your taunt, bringing you to 15%. See if you can get a Draenei in your group as well as this will add a further 1% meaning you're only 1% short of guaranteeing your taunts will always land on the Lich King. If you have a Shadow Priest or Boomkin in your raid, that'll add a further 3% on to their target, which will usually be the boss so you'll be fine.

A couple of final notes pertaining specifically to you attempting Lich King Heroic which I've noticed on your Armory. Firstly, in order to have Hammer of Justice up for every Val'kyr, you only need one point in Improved HoJ so you could afford to drop a point from there into Crusade for a threat boost. I'd also recommend moving two points from Conviction and putting them into Vindication instead. Even if you have a Warrior keeping up Improved Demo Shout the whole time, it's always nice to be self sufficient in that regard and if you're on the adds it's far more likely his Demo Shout will be going to the Lich King so it'll also help survive those nasty Enraged Shockwaves.

Anyway best of luck on the Lich King - tl;dr version of this post is stop worrying about Hit and stop using the DPS trinket because the only reason Hit matters for the fight is taunts and there are already plenty of ways to make sure your taunts always land without having to use sub-optimal gear.

[Harmacy]

Your spec is very screwy. Lose either Conviction or Seal of Command for Vindication, which is a mandatory talent for Prot Paladins (fully buffed Demo Shout FTW). I'd also look into 3/3 Crusade, or at least 2/3 (don't you only need 1 point in Imp HoJ for H LK?) for some more threat. [edit: read the post above me, this was already addressed but bears repeating]

I think that a lot of the information about Hit and Expertise is outdated - it is possible to have threat issues even if you're doing the rotation and everything properly. Wrathy (from Maintankadin) has several posts on his blog about his own threat issues and how he worked to solve them - by swapping in some +armor gear for +hit. When more of his attacks connected, his threat issues were solved.

But certainly look to other solutions before you go about losing EH. Taunt glyph will help a lot as noted, as will changing your spec a bit for more points in Crusade. Using a DPS trinket is a bad idea.

Consider replacing your Tier chest with Cataclysmic Chestguard, which will put you over the expertise soft cap, and then replace your legs with Pillars of Might. This depends on how many badges and gold you have, but would be a superior setup for serious tanking. The T10 4 piece for Paladin tanks is hardly worth taking into account.

double edit: Another thing that can help out your threat, is replacing your libram with the 245 Strength one. Trading avoidance for threat is not a bad deal at all, especially if the alternative is losing EH for threat.

[aazzgard]

Hey Folks thanks for all your helpful and comprehensive advice. We did 25 man normal continuation tonight and I had no threat issues at all - I guess I was worrying about hit needlessly. In 10 man it might be a little different, who knows.

Mert: I normally tank the adds as I was continuously on them during our first normal LK10 run and my guild want someone reliable there in the 1st phase - tanking LK at that point needs nothing outstanding done. And yes you are correct I normally HoJ each Valk. I will look over my talent tree again in preparation for it, same as Harmacy suggested. Does vindication work that well? I am no expert but it looks like 50 attack power reduction is not a lot - I mean I have 1000's in tank spec. Or do I have that wrong?

Also I only have "The Black Heart" for stam and that is it and I haven't got any armour trinks.

I have badges for Cata Chest but not the Pillars.

[Harmacy]

The AP debuff on the talent tooltip is wrong, it's actually 670 or so attack power. And because bosses scale with AP significantly more than players do, that AP reduction will prevent a lot of incoming damage from melees and melee special abilities.

[Mert]

Yeah Vindication's tooltip on sites like Wowhead or the Armory shows the debuff as though you were a Level 1 character. At 80 it reduces boss Attack Power by 574. Also don't make the mistake of comparing that to your own Attack Power as boss Attack Power and its corresponding damage is calculated in an entirely different way. It's a big boost to your survivability to have Vindication on your target wherever possible and, because it's automatically applied, you needn't step out of your rotation or have to give up a global for it. For times when you have more than one Shambling Horror up, however, you may want to tab-target between them periodically to try and keep it up on both as much as possible which is its main downside compared to Demo Shout.