Paladin ArmorFollow

I have a 63 paladin with some pretty pathetic armor. I am now getting regularily asked to tank in groups and, well, i die a lot. what armor would anyone reccomend i acquire. I have a bit of plat to buy the items, and i do not mind questing for a piece of armor, or items to make armor either. I just want reccomendations on what i should get.

Magnetic is good also you will need to do a bit of research but check out bazaar for Ornate molds. If all else fails do a search on Class, Slot, and AC once the list comes up check th stats for Hit Points and anything eles you need.

Aye, probably your best bet is a combination of ornate/magnetic and some of the plate OOW drops. There are armguards and boots that drop like candy in WoS that are very decent and pretty cheap these days.

Once you gear up and lvl a bit you can start working on DoN armor as well as OOW ornate pieces. Faction is a pain in the *** though.

It's not just gear that will make you a better tank start looking into your AA's.

I've seen a 63 tank w/o aa's splat compared to an equally geared 62 tank w/ aa's.

Mainly your defense aa's

Combat Agility 3 (Arch type dmg avoidance)
Lightning Reflex 5 (PoP dmg avoidance)
Combat Stability 3 (Arch type dmg mitigation)
Innate Defense 5 (PoP dmg mitigation)
Natural Durability 3 (increases base hp)


Lightning reflex lvl 5 will make the biggest difference but I highly recomend these defense aa's. There might be others that a tank needs but I don't play a tank. (Unless you include when I tank on my chanter). I've seen a huge difference in the amount of dmg I can handle with these aa's and I'm not even melee. Imagine what they can do for you.

Edited, Wed Aug 10 17:50:38 2005 by MentalFrog

As some of the others have said, look for magnetic and Jaylia's.

Magnetic Breastplate
Jaylia's search

You can buy Ornate molds now for fairly reasonable prices. LDoN has some decent upgrades as well, but requires alot of effort if you don't have the points saved up already. You can also look at DoN, more bang for less effort when it comes to gear and if your budget allows you can buy the crafted stuff in baz, though if your server is anything like mine you'll be hard pressed to find a DoN group that will take you below level 65.

For gear, look for pieces with high AC. Hps are imporatant too - but the AC will push you higher. Also, consider items with regen.

Shell Inlaid Collar
Tainted Cloak of Treachery
Mana-threaded Bone Bracer

Best advice is work on the AAs. Get into groups as a backup tank or anywhere you can get xp.

At a minimum, max out:

Combat Agility
Combat Stability

and then start working on:

Natural Durability

With just these few you should be able to tank most zones with a good healer and slower. Stay away from WoS though.

Edited, Wed Aug 10 20:50:30 2005 by Netos

I am currently in the process of upgrading gear for my pallie too. I second the slavetraders option (boots, gauntlets, chestpiece). currently (at least on my server, Povar) they are quite cheap. boots start at 500 pp, the chestpiece starts at 4,5 k. plus - other than magnetic - you can resell later, as its not attunable, but lore only...

good luck

One item that comes to mind you might look for is the conquers cape. I am pretty sure tanks can use it, I know my monk could. ITs a back itm with 105 hitpoints. It has a recommended level of 66, but it should still be pretty good for you.

We had a problem last night in a DON where the tank simply couldn't handle the mobs. About every other mob the tank died, and that was with the cleric and Shaman casting heals. After a few times we simply disbanded. The tank was a 67 warrior the rest of us was between 65 and 68. I forget what her title was, but she had plenty of AA's. She just wasn't in a high end raiding guild.

We can thank the gear from time and high end GOD zones for the difficult mobs that hit for 1000 damage I guess? SOE does not seem to understand that there are lvl 60+ people out there who doesn't have 100AC breastplates, epic 2.0's, and gear with 305 hitpoints on it. Even though there is now some really nice stuff in bazaar with DON, it is still outrageously priced and most people who are not in the high end raiding guilds probably don't have 1millionpp in the bank. However every expansion they make they gear the mobs towards the high end players, and as usual leave the casual players with bazaar bought gear pretty well screwed. I have actually been in groups and had them say NOT to invite such and such cause they don't have enough gear to tank.

Yeah. The separation between "uber geared" and "moderate geared" does grow larger over time. But that's not super new really. Also, it's mitigated somewhat by the trickle down effect in the bazaar.

You wont be able to tank really really well in the newest expansion(s) on a budget, but you will definately be able to tank in earlier expansions far better then you could have at your same relative raiding level when those expansions were new. As a tank, you somewhat have to expect that you're going to have a hard time tanking "new" content, unless you have relatively "new" gear.

Mostly really good advice in here. When searching the bazaar, make absolutely sure to check the relative costs on things. This can vary from server to server obviously, but I can tell you that on my server ornate plate is an absolute waste of time. The cost for the molds are completely out of whack with respect to the relative quality of the items. I'm sorry, but I'm not paying 15k+ for an item that's at best roughly equivalent to a magnetic piece I could purchase for about 3k. Ornate BP molds are still going in the 80-100k range, which is absolutely ridiculous...

Best bets are likely to be magnetic and slavetrader stuff. You can work on DoN gear, but the "really good" stuff is going to be required level of 70, and you'll have a hard time tanking if you don't have something a bit in between your current gear and that level (kind of a "you can't get there from here" thing).

I'm not sure if LDoN is really a viable option. That one is really really dependant on your playstyle. Let's face it, unless you have a regular group to do LDoNs with, it's going to take you a very very very long time to get enough LDoN points in the right camps to get the gear you want.


The advice for AAs is right on the money. If you don't have "uber" gear, you absolutely have to have those AAs if you want to tank. Ok. Really every tank should take those AAs, but how much you "need" them is going to depend on your gear. Tanks are probably the only classes that "need" to take AAs while leveling. You simply can't do you job without them.

Take CA3 and LR5 *first*. Avoidance is still going to give you more bang for the buck in the majority of situations. CS3 and ID5 are right behind in importance. Don't forget PE (physical Enhancement IIRC). It increases all three "tank AA" lines by a set percentage (you gain bonuses to avoidance, mitigation, and HP with one AA). For 5AA points, it's not worth taking if you only have a few of the other ones, but once you've run down one or two lines, it's very worthwhile (I'm sure someone has calculated exactly when it become cost effective, but that person wouldn't be me!). Obviously, you'll want to take the ND line at some point, but remember that at this stage, you'll gain more HPs from gear enhancement then AA points, so it falls a bit behind the other two.


Let me really reinforce that. Make getting CA3 and LR5 your first priority. You will notice a *huge* difference in your tanking ability just from that line of AAs. Past that, it's all gravy...

Yeah. And if they were treated the same in the actual damage calculations, you'd be right. However, unless they've changed the way the forumlas are done (which I haven't heard of, but admittedly haven't been actively been keeping up on), avoidance counts for roughly twice the "real" damage reduction over time as mitigation.

The reason is the way the combat formulas work. Actually, let me preface this by stating that the reason we believe the formulas work this way is the result of parsing the relative effectiveness of avoidance and mitigation. When parsed, against *most* mobs, avoidance is about twice as effective. The conclusion is that the damage formula first calculates a chance to hit, but then uses the result of that (how well you hit) as a factor when calculating the damage done. Thus, the benefit of avoidance comes into play in both parts of the equation, wheras mitigation only counts in the second part.

Let me explain a bit more clearly. First off, recognize that there are two components to AC. Avoidance and mitigation. There are *also* two components to ATK (part that goes against avoidance and part that goes against mitigation). Let's assume a situation where both parts of both ATK and AC are in balance with eachother. How this ends out working is that let's say a random roll from 1-100 is rolled to see if you get hit. A 1-50 is a miss (since we're equally balanced) and a 51-100 is a hit. The key part is that the result of that roll is then passed on as the base value for the damage roll. So if you rolled a 75, then 25 points of "hit value" are passed to the mitigation result. This one's done as a ratio though. The mitigation AC and ATK against mitigation are compared. The relative "goodness" of the result acts as a multiplier to the base value passed in by the initial to hit roll (the Avoidance roll). That's then applied to a table to determine the value of the hit.

What we find then is that if you increase your avoidance value, you get hit less often, but the resulting hits will *also* be of lower average value. There's some "odd" discrepancies in the hit tables though (for some reason max and min hits never seem to be affected), but all the in between values get shifted in probability. So the curve moves to the left and you get a lower average hit value over time.

This by itself isn't super significant, but is measurable. However, there's another factor. Damage from mobs is not a straight roll (it is when you hit them, but not the other way around). Mob damage has two components. A "base damage", and a "mitigation damage" part (those aren't the terms used, but I don't feel like digging through steelwarrior to remember what exactly they call them). Essentially, the Base damage is *always* done on a hit. The mitigation portion is split into 20 parts, each a set number above the last. This is the table I spoke of earlier. The probability curve is broken across these 20 possible results, a magic die is rolled, and that determine the additional damage done.

So a mob might have a base damage of 50, and a "+5" mitigation table. That means that each of the 20 results will increase the damage done by 5 points. The result is a damage range from 55 to 150, with damage *always* going in multiples of 5 damage (55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, etc... up to 150). Increased mitigation only affects the range on that table. So right off the bat, 1/3rd of the damage range *can't* be mitigated with the CS line of AAs. This, combined with the small shift effect caused by the avoidance pass-through to the mitigation roll, is why parsings almost always show avoidance to be better then mitigation.


Obviously, this changes based on the mob. Some mobs have higher base damage then range, or vice versa. Steel warrior has a table of common boss mobs with their relative values, and a resulting disc suggestion for warriors tanking them. Basically, a ratio below a certain point means you use defensive (increases mitigation). A ratio above a certain point means you use evasive (increases avoidance). However, for day to day exp mob tanking, every parsing post I've ever seen has shown conclusively that you are about twice as well off taking avoidance before mitigation.



This really realy depends on the situation. You're right that damage is "bursty". However, the bursts are almost always the result of getting a large number of average hits in a short period of time rather then a couple really big hits. Most mobs don't have such a huge range of damage that the difference between a min hit and a max hit will kill you. You die far more often by a long stream of hits.

This is easily seen with simple parsing. Interestingly enough, damage done is far less "bursty" then rate of hits. The next time you do a long solo fight, stop and go back and look at your damage window (easy to do if you're like me and filter "my hits" and "hits against me" into a single window (yes, this isn't a true parse, but just something to illustrate the point). Count out any 5 hits by the mob against you (5 is just a random number, take any you want). Look at the spread of those 5 numbers. Take an average. Compare them to the average for the whole fight. Odds are, any 5 hits in a row wont be far off the average hit you took during the whole fight (again, not a great parse, but good enough for this).

Now look at the comparison of hits. A simple way to do this is when you're soloing since it's just you and the mob. Compare the white lines to the red lines (your hits and his). Notice that there are sections where you'll see 10 red lines in a row, and sections where you'll see 10 or more white lines in a row. This is not super conclusive, since we're not putting timestamps and such in there. I'm just suggesting a simple and dirty way to see that the relative hits for and against can vary wildly in ratio. If you want, you can certainly run a parser, or just open up a log and do some quick manual checking. You'll see that the rate at which you get hit over any 10 second period of time (picked that randomly, but relevant to the time of a CH for example), will vary wildly. By simply glancing at a log output, you can clearly see that the damage you take over a 10 second period of time can vary wildly, but the average "per hit" over that same 10 second period doesn't. Clearly, it's not the mitigation that causes the burst, but the avoidance, Higher avoidance helps you avoid getting those 8 hits in a row that'll kill you.

Feel free to check this yourself though. Don't just take my word on it. This is just my observations from looking at damage outputs from many many combats. I *always* see huge variation in rates of hits over time within any particular fight. I very rarely see a huge variation in average damage across any arbrary "small" set of hits. It does happen, just not as often as the bursty numbers of hits...


Neither is perfect, of course. And you should aim towards getting both as quickly as possible. However, for exp mob tanking you will see much more bang for the buck going down the avoidance line first.

Just one little piece of advice. Try and get a Loyalist Shield of Honor. Although you will loose some hitpoints and mana, the AC upgrade will last you forever.

More hitpoints will mean you can stay alive longer through AE's but when tanking, go for AC over HP.

Wow, thanks for all the helpful info, as soon as i hit 65 will dump xp to AA's for those and am looking at all of the suggested armor and also what is available on my server.

Again thank you very much everyone for the help.

These are pretty cheap on Tunare ...
Boots of Slaughter
Armguards of Repentance
Benevolent Girdle