paladin tanking 5 man heroics

[pkm]

im new to tanking heroics only done a couple so far. I want to know the advantages and disadvantages of pally so i know what i am capable of doing and what im not. Any other tips and tricks are welcome. I will be doing alot pugs so there will be some nasty times and i want to be prepared incase there are incompetant players in the group. Thanks

[klausi]

• Lay on hands to top yourself or anyone else off every 7 minutes
• Hand of Sacrifice if somebody stands in the fire
• Hand of Protection if you got some overeager dps
• Mass (x3) Taunt on a 8s Timer
• Aoe (x3) ranged (!) silence
• 6s single target stun on a rather long timer (60s)
• group stun for elementals, dragonkin, demons and undeads on a short timer (15s)
• strong on aoe
• blocktank (steady flow of incoming damage, more predictable for healers)
• ardent defender = immortal if you screw up
• bubble = immortal a second time if you really screw'd up + removal of almost all debuffs
• option to assist on healing with seal of insight+keeping word of glory on cooldown
• raidwall on heavy aoe moments

Overall it's a well elaborated tank with a LOT of utility, dps/tps is fine compared to others.

[pkm]

i was wondering if i am on the right track as well i got 121k hp unbuffed and i think alot of block chance which is mostly from impetous query and tia grace trinkets. I think they arent really tank trinks but the mastery from both is huge. I am lefrog on gundrak/us. Thanks !

[Tengenstein]

IQ is very much a tanking trinket, Tia's Grace, while not really meant to be a tanking trinket serves just as well (until 4.2 anyway)

[Ishamaelazure]

hey welcome to pally tanking will link the help i had when 1st started will hlp you with gemming reforging and gear to go for only change to the advice on it is with the new hc's most of the dps has gone up i found i had to stick a bit more than stated into hit exp but not much heres the link

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...of-marshmallow

will also link couple more sites so you can check set up

for spec http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/specs

for gear optimisation http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear
well have fun and hope this hlps

[aresius]

If your starting to tank the best advice i think i could give is to read the tooltips for *all* your abilities carefully, even those that dont seem like obvious tanking abilities. Whenever something goes wrong, try to think "what could i have done to salvage this" before blaming someone else (even if it really is someone elses fault). This practice will let you play your class to the fullest.
Later on when your feeling more confident you know what is you need to do in varied situations, something many tanks (as well as other roles for that matter) find vital, is reconfiguring their UI to make sure the information they need is alweys easly available, and the information they dont need is not polluting.
There wont be any encounter you, by class design, are incapable of overcoming.
If you hoped to get additional information on how to pull a group of mobs or when to use cooldowns by "any tips and tricks", i think we would need more specific questions. This aspect of tanking is more a matter of experience and "getting a hang of it", and would result in too long a awnser if we were hoping to be precise.

[pkm]

ok thanks i read the tooltip and all but i still dont understand how ardent defender works. I have only ever used for its damage reduction. What does it mean by the next attack that will otherwise kill you gives you hp. Is there some sort of special visual effect?

[Tengenstein]

Pretty much, can't say theres a visual effect anymore haven't tanked with a paladin since ToC, but bac then it when the Insta-Rez effect happened you got the yellow pillars of light like a prist rez

[pkm]

thanks for those links ishmael. Would you happen to have a link that shows stuff like heroic boss mechanics and explains them?

[Grindleguts]

wowpedia.org has pretty much everything.

No real drawback playing a palatank, most utilities of all the tank classes. Sure you don't have Charge but +15% runspeed isnt bad. If you link us your armory profile we could check your spec/gear/reforge/gem choices so far and see what could be tweaked.

[Kazistrasza]

Hey pkm!

I just finished leveling my own Paladin, and talk with a number of fairly skilled paladins on my server and in my guild.

The best piece of advice I can offer you is to read as much as you can. Good, solid Paladin tanking info is hard to come by if you don't know where to look, but obviously you're at the best site in existence right here. There's a sticky on the WoW Paladin forums that is really good for getting into it. As to your original question, I'll give you a quick list of advantages, give you my thoughts on each more elaborated, and then give you my thoughts of disadvantages and my thoughts on those.

Please keep in mind this is coming from a very basic knowledge of warrior tanking from my friends, my experiments with tanking on my druid and people I've talked to for that, and the knowledge I've gained from tanking on my DK.

Advantages of Paladins as tanks:
-Phenomenal threat, single target and AoE!
-Good at helping healers save other players that are less good at keeping themselves alive (i.e., the DPS that like fire's warmth).
-Very consistent damage taking.
-Operates on a fairly basic rotation.

The hardest part of a pull for a tank is usually just the first 10-30 seconds. Paladins are REALLY good for this. When I'm pulling trash, I basically try to throw my shield to hit as many casters as I can if there are any present as I'm running in, then immediately drop Cons, HotR, and then HW. When I pull a boss, I pop DP for 3 HoPo going in, then pop wings as I cast Exorcism followed immediately by shielding them as I run in and pop Inq and start the normal rotation.

Paladins are LOADED with group help buttons. Divine Guardian is AMAZING in raids and is also very useful in heroics if you look for places to use it. If someone manages to agro a lot of things, like for instance if your squishy priest healer gets healer agro on a lot of little critters in the first boss of H SC, you can BoP (HoP?) them and they'll be left alone for the moment. If someone is about to get hit by a ton of physical damage, you can HoP them and save them. If that won't work and they're about to take a lot of damage, like Magmantron's Acquiring Target or if you were trying to move the first boss of H ToT out of the geyser as she started to cast her thing you have to interrupt and you're too far to get to it, you can HoSac that person and take part of the damage on yourself but save their life (use this wisely!). You can save someone (or yourself) with LoH, which is better than most any other class can do. You can also toss your WoG every 20sec. onto other players in the group to help out the healers.

Paladins take roughly the same rate of damage all the time. Even in 5-man heroic gear, you probably still have about a 50% or more chance to block. This makes your damage taken per second very consistent, as opposed to classes like DKs whose health drops in spikes and requires faster mental processing on the healer's part. This also means you're less likely to get hurt by the occasional unkindness of RNG where you would take a ton of unmitigated hits back-to-back.

The basis of your threat generation can be summed up into the simple CS>J>CS>AS/HW>CS>ShotR rotation. You can do all the 5-man heroics and even most normal mode raiding (assuming you don't have any ridiculous people pushing 25k-30k DPS) using only this. It's very beginner-friendly. For AoE tanking in 5-mans you change to HotR>J>HotR>HW/AS>HotR>Inq and everything works out just as well.

Disadvantages of Paladins as tanks:
-Can only self-heal once per 20 seconds.
-Going OoM mid-fight sucks.
-Getting the full phenomenal threat requires lots of paying attention.
-Nothing to really help against magic damage.

Your only ability to "reliably" self-heal comes every 20 seconds now with the nerf to Word of Glory. Druid tanks heal themselves an albeit small portion of their health every time they crit, which is probably 1/3 attacks so roughly ever 2-3 seconds and give themselves a shield every other time they crit. DKs heal and shield themselves about once per 8 seconds for a considerable amount that increases the more they get beat on. You simple toss a heal every 20 seconds. Your only other heal is LoH. LoH is powerful, but only once. If something happens to your healer, say someone misses an interrupt and he gets one-shot or he gets mind-controlled and you're on your own, or he simply starts to run out of mana, there's only so much you can make up for.

You HAVE to use Judgement relatively often in a fight, or else your mana pool will run out. If for any reason you die in the fight and have to be rez'd during combat, you're not going to have mana afterwards. Other tanks can simply pop a button and get rage or come back with their runes, but you come back with a very limited amount of mana and won't be able to jump right back in as fast. This also means that if someone is suddenly pulling a ton of threat (like during a fight where Heroism is blown on the start and someone has cooldowns going at the same time) and you're having to put out your max, you still have to find places to use Judgement or you'll come to a screeching hault.

Getting your maximum amount of threat out, which becomes important when you get into a 5-man group with DPS that really outgear you or get into higher-end raiding, requires a lot of paying attention and timing. You have to really play with your rotation and vary from the basic to make ends meet. Figuring out how long GC procs will last that you can get an AS to speed up the HoPo generation most efficiently is big. Also learning when its best to use Inq over ShotR takes a lot of paying attention. Once you're familiar with it, it becomes easy, but it's not the easiest for beginner tanks.

Magic damage hurts. It's not mitigated by blocking, or by physical shields, or other such things. Warriors get a Spell-reflect every 30 seconds. DKs get an immense magic damage absorb every 45 seconds. Druids have a passive 6% reduction in magic damage. Paladins can eat it to the face or use their regular damage CDs for it. The only other thing you can do (which all tanks should), is farm TB rep for the Mirror of Broken Images. It has a ton of mastery and a use effect to give you a ton of magic damage resistance. This isn't as bad as it sounds, but it definitely isn't good.

Final bits of advice.
Don't worry about your max HP. For where you are on your paladin and where you're likely to be for a while, there's nothing where you need to have a lot of health. It doesn't increase the amount of damage you mitigate or increase the effectiveness of one of your cooldowns, so it really isn't something to worry about. It really just determines the amount of time your healer can spend to help someone else before coming back to you. If I'm healing you on my druid, I can HoT you and spend X number of GCDs/casts to heal the other 4 people in the group before I have to start pumping more heals into you and get you back up. If a socket is blue and comes with a dodge/parry/mastery bonus, it won't hurt you to put in a mastery/stam gem and match the socket, but it won't help you quite as much as many people might tell you (some people still believe every boss will one shot you if you don't have enough health). When it comes to doing your gear as a beginner, I recommend prioritizing your stats as Mastery > Dodge > Parry> Hit > Expertise> Other. Essentially, if an item doesn't have mastery on it, reforge the stat on the right most of that list into mastery. If it does, then reforge the stat on the right most of that list into dodge. If it's mastery/dodge, don't touch it. Use the Stamina/Armor% meta gem. Use Mastery gems for every socket unless it is a red or blue socket and gives dodge, parry, or mastery as the socket bonus.

Just my 2 cents.

[pkm]

thanks kazistrasza that was very detailed just what i was looking for ! Thanks.

[Paladoon]

Personally, I love using the rawr tool, just google it. It pretty much tells you what gear you currently have that should be equiped as well as what gems/enchants/reforges to use. Setting it up and getting to know how to use it may take a little time but if you truley want to optimize your toons for max survivability rawr is the way to go!

On another note, I believe using the solid ocean sapphire for geming gives +60 stam and should be used in almost all of the gemming slots possible. I know stam is doesnt necessarily mean a better tank but I think the +60 stam is def going to benefit uou more than any other gems atm.

[sifuedition]

No to the solid gems (60 stam). More health without protecting it is just more hp the healer has to heal. Gemming should attempt to have mastery on every gem at least until heroic modes raiding.

If the socket bonus is tank related, ie stam, dodge, parry or mastery, then:
Red = parry + mastery
Blue = stam + mastery
Yellow or prismatic = mastery

Blocking for a paladin reduces damage by 41%!!!!!! (if you are using the block meta and keep holy shield up). At least until 4.2 when they make holy shield just like warrior shield block. Keep holy shield up by using holy power for shield of the righteous or word of glory. This is why it's dangerous at times to use inquisition. You have to be good at managing your holy shield before you do that.

Mastery is how paladins get more block and once it is high enough, it's like having a cool down up most of the time.