New Paladin tank Help/Advice needed.

[Forest]

Hi, I just started tanking (2 days ago) on my Paladin but I have some questions. Before you start asking me additional questions, I do not raid with guilds so I have little content availible to me, I can do a 8-11/12 10man normal run and a few Lk attempts and odd hardmodes if it is a good group. 25man I have only been 8/12 (including pp) in a pug.

Armory link is here: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...&cn=Forestgimp

1) Is it worth stacking Mastery as much as possible?
2) Do I need hit an expertise cap? If so do i need 26 or 52 expertise?
3) Should I be using a 2.6 speed damage weapon or a quicker DPS weapon. At the moment i have Saurfang 25 DPS sword and Marrowgar 10man mace.
4) Is my spec alright? I decided to go for the Word of Glory bubbles to help out healers rather than do damage with hammer of the righteous, did I make the right decision or should I change my spec? If so what to?

All other advice about gear/enchants is appreciated.

[BlazeDale]

Hi, Yes get mastery on all your gear until you get unhittable. 30% damage reduction due to blocks while holy shield is active is boss.

So what do you need to get your mastery to.
Well, it goes like this. You need 102.4% avoidance to become unhittable. Meaning all attacks made on you result in either a block, parry, dodge, or miss. So how do you get there?

Add up the following

Block + Dodge + Parry + 15(Holy Shield) + 5(Everything has a 5% chance to miss another thing of equal level) = X

When X = 102.4 then you stop with the mastery because it is wasted after that.

So what is up with 102.4%? Why not just 100%? Like I said before everything has a 5% chance to miss anything else of equal level. Well bosses count as being 3 levels higher than you so you need a little more. that is where the additional 2.4% comes from.

On your question about hit and expertise. Absolutely get to your hit and expertise caps. We need 262.32 Hit and 26 Expertise.

On your question on choice of weapons. Either. The sword has decent stam on it and the higher weapon DPS might help you with threat. The Mace is a tanking weapon and is ultimately better for survivability but I wouldn't sweat it too much.

As far as spec goes I do something more like this:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZGMhcRddRRuco:cskqsmMcm

I don't think anyone has really worked out the best spec. I like the self healing too but for serious threat you aren't going to want to use it instead of Shield of Righteousness but it might save your ass from time to time. You definitely want 3/3 Crusade though. 30% Damage on our main attacks should not be overlooked. Oh and your glyphs are terrible but I assume you know that. Looks like they are left over from a healing spec.

As far as rotation goes just interlace your other abilities between Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous. Shield of Righteousness when you have 3 holy power. It is sometimes in your best interest to fish for a Sacred Duty proc on Judgement before you use your SoR. Meaning if you have 3 Holy Power and no Sacred Duty proc and your Judgment is about to become available it may be in your best interest to save the 3HP SoR till after you judge. The auto crits are key to out threating insane DPS.

I'm not going to go over the gemming and enchants for tanking. Those can be found on this site fairly easily. Just a note though with unhittable being so easily reached now it is making the Hodir Shoulder enchants better than the ones with 30 stam. You might consider it.

[BlazeDale]

Quick correction for you. I just got wind of the news that your DPS weapon is by far better for threat. Tanking weapons don't come close anymore so keep using the sword.

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.c...wtopic#p593316

[sifuedition]

I am curious...you recommend he get unhittable "because it's so easy". How do you figure? If you take from dodge/parry you are only shuffling the avoidance to minor mitigation but not really getting closer to 102.4. However, in the same post you say he needs hit/exp caps. What stat is he supposed to reforge?

Hit/exp are your lowest priority. Take what is on the gear natively and only reforge any away if you find yourself over cap. I would not take away from them otherwise because they are your best threat stats. They are just less critical to threat than a proper rotation/spec/glyphs. Likewise, don't reforge to them unless absolutely necessary because rotation/spec/glyph have more impact on threat and if you have threat problems, it probably lies there.

I can't say definitively, but I have been hearing you should reforge dodge/parry to mastery only after they are around 23% and trying to keep dodge parry balanced.

[BlazeDale]

I would agree that taking Mastery over Hit and Expertise when you are not capped is not a great idea. And if you have approximately 264 level gear reaching hittable through mastery is easy without gimping your dodge and parry too much.

Its your call though. I would prefer to be unhittable than have higher dodge parry avoidance that's just me though. Essentially, your block will raise you effective health which has been shown to be better for survivability than pure avoidance stats like Dodge and Parry. This is why tanks have adopted the mentality to stack stamina vice dodge and parry. I haven't done any calculations on how 30% damage reduction affects your effective health pool but my gut instinct tells me it will go up.

[Exiledknight]

Being block capped effectively drops your incoming physical dmg to pre patch levels. Do it, there is no reason not to unless you are bad(or playing with ret gear because your healers will never notice/care). Once you are they block capped(do not forget food and kings and HoW) work on expertise it is worth more threat up to 26 than hit, once you hit 26 get hit capped then start looking for a way to hard cap expertise.

[sifuedition]

My pally is in all 251+ gear. He was only at 21% each for dodge parry. Reforging to mastery cost me 2% of each to get to the 40% block. I haven't had the chance to test this is a raid yet but I will.

The point I am making is that the avoidance stats I had before reforging I take less overall damage but it tends to be spikier. Block is NOT armor that affects every hit so it is not the same as we used to gear.

To get block cap and have 21% each dodge/parry without sacrificing hit/exp obviously requires more than an average 260 gear level and I don't call that "so easy" to get.

It seems to me, the question now becomes which gearing strat do your healers find easier because not all healers are the same. Some would prefer the more predictable damage with high block even if it is more overall dmg and some may prefer to heal the spikier dmg.

[Exiledknight]

All numbers and theorycrafting are based off the worst case scenario, in the case of a tank its based off H LK. Without being block capped you can get one shot by an enraged shambling, where as without you cannot. If you are still progressing in ICC and are not block capping you are doing it wrong, and yes the block cap does make up for armor. Please explain how armor affected every hit but block does not? You block cap, you block EVERY hit and thus take 30% less dmg the same exact hits armor affected.

The level of your dodge/parry mean nothing they really don't, your avoidance is not going to change the fact that you are being spam healed, trying to go back to that is bringing us back to the start of gearing solely for EH back at the start of ICC. You are being spammed, period you avoid something then it becomes an overheal, you need to minimize the predictable dmg you take, thus why armor is so good.

[BlazeDale]

Another note about threat. If you are having threat issues in heroics don't sweat it. I was for awhile too but once you get into a raid environment and start taking heavy damage your threat will sky rocket. Look and the summary of you prot talent tree and check out Vengeance. Up to 10% of your health as attack power based on how much damage you take. If you have 60k health that equates to 6000 attack power. I'm easily getting over 8k attack power in a 10 man raid.

Your threat will go through the roof. Last night I did 11k dps on Festergut as the tank. Granted there is a damage boost due to gastric bloat but I'm averaging about 7k dps over all. I can't hold threat in heroics to save my life but in raids I'm doing better than great and I'm 10 below the Expertise cap.

Please get block capped through mastery. We are not trying to feed you misinformation we are trying to help. Reforge parry, dodge, and any extra hit/expertise over the cap until you get there. You might have to reforge every piece of gear you have.

[sifuedition]

Unless I have seriously misunderstood something (which is always a possibility) block cap only guarantees a block if you are unhittable. As he only started tanking 2 days ago, I think we are applying BiS (or at least relatively near BiS) strategy inappropriately I we recommend all mastery yet.

To recommend it as a future goal, I can see.

[BlazeDale]

This just in from blizzard:

• Holy Shield will be changed to increase block value by 10% (40% total) instead of increasing block chance by 15%. Since this will cause Mastery to become more valuable, the amount of block granted by Mastery will be reduced to 2.25% block chance per point of Mastery, down from 3%.
• Paladin tanks are not intended to go cap block as fast as they can. It’s fine if you want to do that, but we don’t treat it as “the new defense cap” and we don’t balance paladins assuming they have a 100% block chance. That is something the community identified as being not only possible, but likely, and one of the reasons we changed the way block works for paladins.

As you can see apparently blizzard thought it was too easy to reach block cap. Once this goes through I don't believe it will be possible to get block capped until higher levels. I personally like the change because it makes our blocking more valuable and gives us something to look forward too.

[BlazeDale]

Oh I just found this on MMO-Champion:

Due to recalibrating expertise for Cataclysm, level 80-83 creatures (which includes bosses) dodge and parry less, so you need less expertise, 23, to be exact. Sorry we didn't announce this. I would classify it as an unintended consequence (though not unknown) and not a desired change on our part.

At level 85, you will need 26 again.

[Tazlex]

You don't have to have BiS gear or near BiS gear to reach the minimum needed to block every attack (it makes it a lot easier though), now you do need relatively high end gear but it doesn't have to be the best of the best.

Something to also consider is using trinkets like Corpse Tongue Coin, or Ick's Rotting Thumb and reforge those dodge rating stats to Mastery. If you are over 21.4% Dodge, and 21.6% Parry (not 100% sure on the numbers but I think those are close). I would recommend reforging extra dodge and parry into Mastery as you are not getting the full value of each point of dodge or parry after DR's.

[Exiledknight]

Ok since there seems to be some misunderstanding going on I will try to clear some of these things up.

Block cap means that you are unhitable, blocking an attack does mean it hits you which is why block cap is what is used. This happends when your dodge, parry, block chance, plus 5% base miss, and 15% from HS equal to 102.4, this is of course with raid buffs. From what it seems full 264 gear reforged straight mastery mixed with raid buffs and eating agi food should get you there. Myself I have several peices reforged for expertise and hit and I am pretty much full BiS.

Now for block capping in this case, I would feel that with a few gem tweaks and all out reforging to mastery in mostly 251 gear you can make it happen, however at a loss to threat stats.


The change to holy shield goes live with 4.0.3 so its not live atm, and the patch will prob be up the week before cata.

The 21.4 and 21.6 numbers are where DR kicks in pretty hard, these are not caps simply references, if you can get block capped and are below these you will still take less dmg than if you stopped at those points.

Hopefully this will clear things up for some.