Help. I'm palatarded and our Paladin tank is getting annihilated by Rag!

[feralminded]

Here's the quick and the dirty. Our gear is very similar but my warrior is just flat out taking less damage from EVERYTHING than the paladin.

The Paladin's damage taken

vs.

My damage taken

Look at how much more a normal melee hit, hit him for?! Or the Hand of Ragnaros or fire traps. Anyone have any clue what the hell is going on? The paladin got seriously fed up and eventually switched to his less geared feral druid and took significantly less damage. I crashed and forgot the restart my logs so I don't know exactly what was happening with his druid but when a normal melee hit averages 33% higher on an equally geared paladin something crazy is going on. Any clues? I really don't know anything about paladins so any help would be appreciated.

[feralminded]

Here's his spec if it matters. Both of us logged out in our DPS gear but I'm pretty sure he's geared right ... he's no slouch. Not sure how you could gear "wrong" to produce that kind of a damage taken difference anyhow unless he was tanking in leather or something.

[Sebadoh]

Looking at his buffs gained, it seems he's not using his 50% cooldown (either that or I'm reading the logs wrong or something). He's also not using the TB resist trinket.

Look at this: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/w...?s=4977&e=5311

It seems he's not taking more melee damage, but rather damage from the Burning Wound. Maybe his bear was easier to heal because it has better passive mitigation (including that nice 6% spell dmg reduction talent)? Maybe you're easier to heal because you're using Shield Wall and your TB trinket? I dunno, I'm not an expert on this sort of thing but there are a few ideas.

[Tengenstein]

You're blocking 52% of the time he's only Blocking 45%, while he has 6% more avoidance. Not that that will affect the size of a melee hit or flame traps, but i would assume thats gonna make him rather more spikey. you had a better uptime on Devotion aura across the night than he did, however he had a higher uptime on acestral fortitude.

The more i look at the logs the more i think it has to be something to do with his gear setup.

[feralminded]

Well due to the nature of the fight I am basically able to have shield block up nearly every time I tank Rag so my block numbers should be elevated (that said his holy shield will also be up each time, though it doesn't up his block % just his damage blocked). In any case I still can't account for the damage per normal attack difference being so high. Yeah I shield wall duing fire seeds P2 but that's a very small part of the fight.

I appreciate the help guys, this is a mystery to us ... and its very frustrating ... specially for him and our healers.

[Tengenstein]

Just looking at the last fight, there are points where you have shield block up, and he has Holyshield up simultaneously, perhaps he's not timing his HS very well, he appears to using it on CD, perhaps he's macroed it into his rotation for maximum uptime, regardless of whether he has aggro or not?

[feralminded]

Ok pulling out the 5th pull's data just to see damage taken from melee attacks. I did better against magic but a slight amount and my Mirror of Broken images probably got me there.

Warrior
16 hits : 409,934 damage (25620.9k per hit average) - 19% of swings
42 blocks: 1,096,539 damage (26108.1 per block) - 50% of swings
26 D/M/P: 0 damage - 31% of swings
______________________________________
84 attacks for 1,506,473 damage (17,934 average damage per swing)


Paladin (took 86 boss melee attacks)
16 hits: 773,873 damage (48367.1 damage per hit) - 19% of swings
38 blocks: 1,075,489 damage (28,302.3 damage per hit) - 44% of swings
32 D/M/P: 0 damage - 37% of swings
________________________________________
86 attacks for 1,849,362 damage (21,504 average damage per swing)

That's a crazy difference, like 20%. I'm starting to wonder if there's some kind of bug here. First of all I was under the impression paladins blocked 100%, second of all why would his unblocked hits be literally double the damage per hit of mine?

[feralminded]

Or the same table but for the total dataset. That last one was a little wonky.

Warrior
57 hits : 2,164,807 damage (37,979.1 per hit average) - 14.1% of swings
232 blocks: 6,444,251 damage (27,776.9 per block) - 57.4% of swings
115 D/M/P/A: 0 damage - 28.5% of swings
______________________________________
404 melee attacks for 8,609,058 damage (21,309 average damage per swing)


Paladin
76 hits: 3,769,982 damage (49,605.0 damage per hit) - 15.7% of swings
219 blocks: 6,672,369 damage (30,467.4 damage per block) - 45.2% of swings
190 D/M/P: 0 damage - 39.1% of swings
________________________________________
485 melee attacks for 10,442,351 damage (21,530 average damage per swing)


So in the end that pull was a bit crazy but overall I guess we're taking the same damage per swing ... just he's WAY more spikey than I am. I did not realize that's how paladins worked ... makes for a very scary time for our healers. Does he just have his avoidance all messed up? I have way more block than he does according to these numbers but his hard avoidance is way above mine. I don't understand paladins but almost a 40% avoidance rate cannot be right. Diminishing returns has to kick in at some point.

[Tengenstein]

I think thats more indicative of how he's playing his paly than how pallies work tbh, I reckon he's using Throngus's finger (i think that gives the Duelist buff), so he might be prioritising avoidance over mastery, Have to see his gear to be sure

[klausi]

Diminishing returns has to kick in at some point.

It's not like "at 2500 parry rating you'll end up only getting 50% out of it", it's just a (slightly) reduce after all. I'm in a similar boat, my paladin brethren has way higher avoidance values (up to 5% combined) due to mastery heavy gear only dropped once and i happened to be the lucky one. If you want to look at overall damage intake you'll have to look at more things like: did you wipe before the Lava Scion spawn? Comparing melee damage per swing without taking this into account won't work well. Regulary one of your tanks will end up tanking Ragnaros while the other one will deal with the Scions until they are dead (or something like that). They only hit for less then 30k while Ragnaros almost hits for 50k. If you receive an decent amount of hits from them this will greatly distort the overall melee incoming damage. And what's about Molten Elementals? They only hit for 13k, the actual Ragnaros tank might have to turn his back on them (= no avoidance) while the rest of the raid bombs them to hell.

40% avoidance rate looks fairly normal for 372/378 gear with either a focus on dodge/parry over mastery or just the wrong items dropping: http://chardev.org/?profile=163964 = 40% avoidance + 54% block, everything gemmed and reforged for mastery
Downside on this: damage intake isn't that smooth as with a mastery heavy focus but the overall damage intake should be lower (over an infinite amount of time).

And a final note: if damage isn't an issue a warrior can save his shieldblock ability until it's his turn to tank Ragnaros. Until your paladin get his unhittable/block cap holy shield won't be as strong as that.

[Arekkusul]

Yea well, I don't know. In your logs I see HUGE differences in average damage taken from full hits. It's 11k, which seems a bit too much.
Here are the stats from a full night of wipes on Ragnaros. Same tank setup, palas gear not far behind mine.

Pala's overall physical damage:
Damage taken Hits Average Total Blocks Average Total Absorbed

35280793

50.2 %

247

42227.1

10430091

833

29832.8

24850702

-

-

16137433

My (warrior) overall phyisical damaga:

34630373

46.3 %

161

38632.5

6219828

1019

27880.8

28410545

-

-

27068291

I'll have to ask him how much armor he has. Sience he also used his cooldowns a bit more times then me. And yea, an overall night of wipes may not be the most accurate thing. But the difference it's there and not tiny.