Soloing Low-Level Instances: Prot or Ret?Follow

I plan on keeping 3 gear sets, for DPS, Tank and Heals.

When I am solo, I rather like the Ret-style play (I've yet to try Prot, I'm going to wait until I get some key things, like SSO items, Cobalt set, etc at Lv70), but for soloing grey instances, I'm wondering..

Would Prot be better than Ret, due to increased survivability? Or is Ret better, due to how much faster you can kill stuff?

I planned to start out with easy crap (ST, Scholo, etc) and slowly move my way up, to see just how high a Lv80 paladin can solo (surely they can duo outlands stuff?). I've got a GF to bring along, she plays a Boomkin, I'm thinking that a Boomkin+Paladin could go quite far...

*nods*

It would take a Lv80 with decent gear to solo outlands stuff, I'd think.

It should be possible, though, as Lv70s with decent gear solo'd Lv60 stuff... I don't see it being all that far-fetched that someone could solo Lv70 content while being Lv80 with decent stuff...

And if I can't solo it... well that's what my Boomkin lover is for. *grins*

But you think Prot is better? *nods* That's what I was leaning towards myself... I'll definitely give it a whirl.

I soloed Mech last night as a 78 protadin and I'm not sure if I could have done it Ret. I know the DPS would have been much higher meaning faster fights but Ret may not have been able to mitigate enough damage. The big robots were harder fights than the bosses. Sepethrea went down quickly and Fire Aura did a good job of resisting the fire damage. The final boss' summons do nicely to restore mana by whiffing and hitting shield consistently.

Speaking of Auras, I had Crusader's up until Sepethrea and Fire up until I exited >_>

At 78, I got about 1200 rep and it took maybe 30 minutes. One more run should get me exalted with the Sha'tar!
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Terokkar&n=Toothdecay



Edited, Dec 5th 2008 8:47am by MobiusRenoire

Prot will always get you further than Retribution will in the race for "how far can you go solo". The mitigation is so important that the extra damage Ret brings does not even starts to compare. And the fact that generally speaking for a protadin "the more enemies the better" is very true just adds to the solo-bility because instances tend to not be 1 enemy at once...

At 80 my prot pally pushes 1200 dps...I've run level 70 Outland dungeons with people who struggled to sustain 500 dps. Damage output as a prot pally has gone up enormously since 3.0.2, and at 75 when you can throw in Shield of the Righteous, killing things with 10-15k HP isn't all that much of a challenge...which is about the HP of your average level 70 Outland dungeon mob.

Ran a guildie through Scholo last night - About the same difficulty as using my frost mage to run SM. (i.e. Could I have died? Yes. Was it possible to pull to many? Yes. But you'd have to be retarded to do it.)

I guess technically you can always die (I recall clubbing a lvl 70 to death in Un'Goro with my 40/50ish mage) but you really shouldn't.


The right pull size was about 25-28 mobs. Any more and you risk wasting time hunting down casters. Any less and you don't get enough blocks to really replenish your mana fast enough to spam every spell you have.

In another thread I asked about shield spikes. They help if you plan on doing this. I have one shield that was recently replaces - I put a spike on it for this sorta run... Cost me 25G for Titanium...