Recently Duel Spec'd to Prot Pally. Need some advice...

[Kedehyrn]

Hi all,

I’ve fairly recently (a month or so ago) hit 80 with my Blood Elf Ret Pally which I’ve now geared with a Tier 9 set. I’ve within the past couple of weeks duel spec’d to Prot and currently using my ret spec to run heroics to get emblems for my tank gear set.

I’m quickly realizing I need to do some studying up on all the ICC raids, instances and other lvl 80 heroics. ICC is an important one as I’m starting to do raids with the guild I’m in but I need to really study up on all of them. The TankSpot vids are great and I’ve looked a few but not sure really where to begin!?!

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. Spell rotation info would also help!

Thx

[Shieldie]

Im not sure I quite understand what you are asking, where to begin? as in which bosses? Icc works this way:

Marrowgar
Lady Death Whisper
Gunship Battle
Saurfang

then there are 3 choices

Left:
Festergut Rotface
Putricide

Forward:
Blood Prince Council
Blood Queen Lanethel

Right:
Valitria Dreamwalker
Sindragosa

once all the bosses are clear, the port to Lich King opens in the middle.
basically, learn the first wing, alot of groups decide to do the left wing after that, with Rotface, Festergut, and Putricide. start by learning those, besides putricide, they are the simplest for a tank.

The prot paladin spell rotation is called the 969 rotation, made with the idea of keeping Holy Shield active as often as possible, and never wasting any time. doing the rotation correctly with the proper spec allows you to never have to just stand and auto attack while waiting for an ability on CD. you wanna alternate your 8 second spells and your 6 second spells. it ends up with you casting an 8 second spell every 9 seconds and a 6 second spell every 6 seconds

the rotation itself is something like:

Judgement, Hammer of the Righteous, Holy Shield, Shield of righteousness, consecration.

it can be used in any order aslong as you alternate 8s and 6s
there are some macros you can pick up that simplify the rotation into 2 buttons, Its not the best thing to use, since it kinda takes away your freedom to cast whatever you want, but it does the rotation perfectly and ive found it works very well to help you learn, you can find it by searching 969 rotation macro on google

[Kedehyrn]

Thanks. That's pretty much exactly the info I was after!

Yes, I understand the mechanics of the 9696 (8686) rotation just not enirely sure what to hit them with first.

Thanks for your help and info

[Drmarten]

Well, there are a couple of things to consider as openers. If you are the OT, which i assume you're gonna be at first, the best thing to do is just follow the MT in and use the judgement first, then just use your rotation as you see fit. Just exclude the taunt (think it's called hand of reckoning, but not sure) since that's ptobably gonna piss off the MT and healers

On fights where you have to MT something just open with avenger's shield, or the taunt. I find that the taunt works best, because then you have your avenger's shield and hammer of the righteous in case you have to build aggro on multiple targets faster than consecrate does.

That said, I want to make it clear. I don't follow the 9696 rotation. I just kinda press what i feel like, and that has always worked for me

Hope this helps

/drmarten

[Exiledknight]

If you are not using the 969 rotation you are doing it wrong, yes you can get by with casuals or with bad pugs. Do not expect to hold threat with players who actually follow their rotations correctly and who keybind.

On the pull you want to use Divine Plea and Avenging Wrath, then Hand of reckoning, avenger's shield, and judge, at this point you will be in melee range and able to settle into your rotation.

[Shieldie]

If you are not using the 969 rotation you are doing it wrong, yes you can get by with casuals or with bad pugs. Do not expect to hold threat with players who actually follow their rotations correctly and who keybind.

On the pull you want to use Divine Plea and Avenging Wrath, then Hand of reckoning, avenger's shield, and judge, at this point you will be in melee range and able to settle into your rotation.

^

what he said. we talk about 969 for a reason, You CAN get away without following it but you will never be playing at the top of your game without it, There ARE better rotations when it comes to pure burst threat, but after the first few gcds you begin to lock yourself out of any useful abilities and have to fall into the 969 to keep a complete steady stream of activity (who likes waiting on CDs? not me)

You can also pull with even more threat than what exiled explained by adding in an exorcism. basically my activity on pulling a boss would be as follows:

Divine Plea > Avenging Wrath* > Exorcism > mid cast start pressing hand of reckoning. (theres a slight delay between when exorcism is casted and when it hits, so HoR will always hit first) > avengers shield.

* I placed a star next to Avenging Wrath, due to the fact that if you use it on the pull, you actually arent using it to its full potential to boost threat. You maximize threat output by waiting until you have 5 stacks of SoV on the target before popping it. but sometimes the initial burst is important, neither way is wrong.

I then begin moving towards the position I will be tanking the boss in, mashing my judgment button, due to its 10yard range. by the time I am within melee range of the boss, I begin my rotation:

HotR > Consecration > ShoR > Holyshield > HotR > Judgment > ShoR and so forth.

depending on what your gear level is, either HotR, or ShoR are your hardest hitting spells, and one or the other. depending on which one hits harder for you, In t10 content it will be HotR hittigng harder, and also depending on what the situation is. for an example lets say you have t7 gear which means ShoR will hit harder. You would cast that first if fighting a single target, or HotR if multiple due to the aoe.

In certain cases, such as ToC raid boss 1, Gormok, You can pre holyshield, and even pre consecrate before he activates to start off with threat right away.

Judgment is best used for picking up a stray mob at a range, if you are in melee range (and actually maintanking) Id reccomend HotR or ShoR instead. Hope this wasnt too confusing

[Shieldie]

also.

While offtanking, you wanna go about things slightly different.

If you arent tanking, you arent regening mana from spiritual attunement or blessing of sanctuary, and you arent reflecting damage.
while offtanking I dont follow the rotation as strictly as maintanking, else id risk pulling from the MT, I dont use HolyShield at all due to mana wasting, and I tend to not use HotR as often. Your priorty in this situation is to just keep judgement up at all times, while waiting for your queue to taunt.

[Exiledknight]

Damn shieldie you must have some patient dps....I see arcane barrages, shadow bolts, hunter shots flying before I have even thrown my shield lol. Yes popping AW pre pull doesnt maximize it, but the initial threat should be the only problem area and this helps with that, other than Heroic Hallion once I am about 10 seconds in threat is not an issue to where I need to pop it at any specific time....well other than when one of our shadowmourne furies get hysteria from our Blood tank, but a simple salv fixes that.

You may want to talk to your tanks....whenever our DK is tanking I can go all out, of course skipping HS and its getting to the point where I can with our 2 OTs as they are starting to catch up gear wise where other than on PP I wont pull. With those two there is a decent difference in gear though.

[Shieldie]

Nah, my dps is impatient as ever, I just countdown over vent as Im pulling and laugh at anyone who gibs themselves before that. I think it helps that I lead our raids usually and dont hesitate to point out when people do stupid things :P

My dps seems generally happy with the way i pull, it really doesnt take much longer than a normal facepull just running in, plus it has an extra kick of threat which gives our fury warriors the freedom to go all out.

Our other tanks... well...
I joined my current guild due to the fact that my computer broke so I couldnt raid in a 25man as efficiently as id like to, my previous guild being a 25man hardcore guild... I felt I was slowing them down, due to lagspikes on LK and causing unneeded wipes, so I came to my current which is a hell of a lot more casual...
The other paladin tank in my guild was fairly uneducated when I joined, not using the rotation nor a proper spec, I made it my project to teach and help him, which, unlike some people, actually followed my advice and started showing improvements. the other tanks were undergeared compared to me, due to them sitting in a casual 6/12 icc environment, and me being 6/12 in heroic icc. theyve been finally catching up on gear and whatnot, and I wouldnt call them bad but when Im doing my full rotation, and correctly (as in making sure to never ever miss a gcd) My threat output is by far above anyone else in my raids. So I really gotta tone down alot when someone else is tanking and Im just waiting to taunt.

Im sure if the other tanks were as passionate about tanking as I am, things would be different, I remember always competing with the prot warrior in my old guild (sigh.. good times :P)

[Shieldie]

id like to point out though that i went from tanking for dps that did about 14-15k on average, to dps that do 5-6k on average.. so yeah theres abit of a difference

[Kedehyrn]

Thanks for all this info! Really useful stuff! Did some playing around with setting up action bars with rotation etc. Still need lots of gear pieces for my tank set as only really 1 Tier 9 Piece at the moment, the rest are blue apart from my shield and sword which re purple.

There’s lots to learn and I’ll probably get some of my fellow guildies to run a few heroics with me for some practice and I’ve been studying and taking notes on the ICC bosses now

With regards to raids, yeah I had a visual crashout during my first raid as DPS the other week it was a 25 man, can’t remember the boss name but you have to sit right underneath him most of the time. My screen froze have way through. Been doing some tweaking with Vista, virtual memory and ramdrive (my laptop motherboard max memory capability is 2 gig which it’s already equipped with). Turned off windows search & indexing and planning to disable QuestHelper which should improve things
- You mentioned Keybindings, any suggestions there?
P.S. Feel free to look at my talent spec (same toon name as my username on here). Currently equipped with my DPS gear at the moment but you can at least check the talent tree

[Shieldie]

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-t...dehyrn&group=2

this is your prot spec.
It needs abit of work, first of all, you are on the right path, with a 53/18 spec, but you should consider redistributing some points. I will go over certain talents.

Improved Hammer of Justice
Is a very situational pve talent, yes, it does have its uses by lowering the cd of your stun, which you could use on certain mobs more often. But the setback, is you are sacrificing points from a more beneficial talent. Its better to take the alternative I will explain later, touched by the light.

Reckoning
Reckoning isnt a bad talent, but it lacks usefulness compared to Divine sacrifice / Divine Guardian. Reckoning even ends up getting worse with better gear, due to requiring that you have recently been hit for it to proc

Divine Guardian / Divine Sacrifice
This talent is the one that paladin tanks usually pick up, It increases the duration of sacred shield, and, if used with a macro, provides your entire raid a 20% shield wall with a short cooldown and no harm to the caster

#showtooltip
/cast Divine Sacrifice
/cancelaura Divine Sacrifice

just make sure to press it twice in a row, else they will absorb more damage, but direct it back to you
I recommend taking these talents instead of reckoning, but 3 reckoning wont kill you.

Spiritual Attunement
The way you regain mana from getting heals as a prot paladin. The thing with this talent is... for tanking, the mana you recieve from heals usually ends up being overkill, while doing the proper rotation, and taking steady damage, 1 point in this talent is enough to keep you from having mana issues. there are a few exceptions to this, but in most situations, 1 point is enough.

So, removing 2 points from imp judgement of justice, and 1 from spiritual attunement, leaves you with 3 unspent points in the prot tree. the place to put them is

Touched by the Light
As a paladin, alot of our spells not only scale on attack power, but spellpower also. this talent gives you spellpower where youd originally have none. this is one of your strongest threat talents, if not the strongest one you will get (its been awhile since i read the math and how it scales compared to others, but nonetheless it outweighs conviction by far) This is an important talent to take for holding threat

The rest of your prot tree is fine, lets move on to your ret section and glyphs.

Your talents in ret are fine and dont need to be improved, however.. 3 conviction; 3% extra crit isnt a very large amount, it wont show much noticeable difference, and you are sacrificing Vindication, a very nice tanking debuff, it will reduce the special attacks bosses do by nearly 40% dmg, along with a steady AP reduction on any attack against you, plus its nearly 100% uptime.

also, id recommend dropping a point into seal of command and using that in 5mans and on trash from now on, it hits 2 additional targets with seal damage everytime you do any attack, with judgments of the just talent it even procs from judgment. This is a great way to justify replacing glyph of hotr with glyph of divine plea, which decreases the damage you take aslong as dp is up.

Keybindings are kinda a playstyle choice and what works for one in terms of where buttons are placed may not work with others. However I will explain my bindings to you just to give ya an idea, I use a norwegian keyboard but I will put it in US mode to show where my keys are in relation to my hands.

q w e s are my main moving keys, I dont use a and d very often. I use other letters to bind certain spells along with the numbers above the letters, my keymap is like this:

1. my taunt macro
2. HotR / Hammer of wrath on alt press
3. Judgement of Wisdom
4. Shor / Holy Wrath with alt press
5. Consecration
6. Judgement of Light
7. Hand of Sacrifice
8. Hand of Salvation
9. Arcane Torrent (I always use 9 for my racials on all toons, just a habit
0. Divine Sacrifice macro
Backspace. Hammer of Justice
F1. Cleanse
F2. Holy Shield
F3. Hand of Freedom
F4. Lay on Hands
F5. Trinket
F6. Divine Shield
F8. Avenging Wrath
]. Sacred Shield
\. Divine Plea
T. Avengers Shield
G. Hand of Protection

Thats about all I can think of atm

anyways http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZV0tAbuMusIufdxfMzbc:pkG is the spec you are best off with, its all around good for dealing with nearly every encounter.

[Harmacy]

See I just bind my 9 second abilities to 2 3 4, and my 6 second abilities to R F. That keeps them distinct and seperate in my mind, and helps me mash them with greater efficiency!

(I also have Holy Frisbee bound to 1, Sacred Shield bound to 5, my two taunts bound to T and G... umm I forget the rest, my fingers have them memorized but my brain doesn't!)

And the 53/18 spec Shieldie linked is solid. The most important part is Touched by the Light - bonus spellpower affects our Seals, Judgements, and Consecrate damage, which of course is a huge chunk of our threat (both single-target and AoE).

[Kedehyrn]

Thanks Shieldie!! I've tweaked my Talents and rotation now and will play around with the macros and key bindings. Think I'll work on trying out the combos on Origammar dummies and get used to casting them while I still get myself some better tank gear and then it's a case of throwing myself in at the deep end. Afterall, practice makes perfect lol
Thanks Harmacy, some useful stuff. Always good to hear about the variations of peoples keys etc

[Shieldie]

no problem.

Just remember to keep divine plea up and while you are testing on the dummies, use seal of wisdom / judgement of wisdom, else you will run outta mana :P

But in instances use seal of command for aoe and seal of corruption for single target

[Theotherone]

I actually never use AW on the pull, just throw my shield (I love the Captain America shield toss), run in put down consecration and go through my rotation; I've never had threat issues.

[Shieldie]

Well sure.
It goes along the same lines of people not using the 969 rotation though. In some cases you can prettymuch do whatever you want as a paladin tank and get by just fine. Its just not optimal. Theres no reason to not use AW on the pull. The only time I dont is on Marrowgar, during the nights where I am trying to relieve as much damage as possible by using divine shield every cd in order to prevent movement related damage spikes.
Nothing is going to kill you right off the bat, in any fight I can think of, not using AW at the pull is just wasting a cooldown which could have been utilized. Im sure in most cases I could pull just fine without the help from AW but theres no reason not to use it. its the same as skipping holy shield. sure, you could live without its mitigation and minor threat increase, but why would you want to?

[Kedehyrn]

Thanks for the further advice. Been off and on WOW the past couple of weeks so not properly had a chance to run the tank role but this is plenty of info for me.

Thanks again!