Heroic Paladin TankingFollow

Hey fellow paladin tanks.

I've posted a few times recently about gearing up for heroics and am ready now, I believe.

Just for anyone who remembers my earlier posts, I am now at 26k HP unbuffed, and 536 Defense. I will be getting the Teldrassil Protector tomorrow, and am occasionally running HoL for the Seal of the Pantheon trinket when I feel like fighting futility....

Anyways, just looking for some rankings on Heroic difficulties, any notes on mobility of boss fights, and pulls would be appreciated. Obviously I know the HoL fights pretty well, but am looking for others without many ranged mobs, which I don't like at all.

Thanks guys, and take care.

P.S. Does anyone know what is up with the new emblem system? My understanding is that all Heroics and Naxx will drop Emblems of Conquest, and Ulduar, and the new Coliseum instances will drop Emblems of Triumph. Any clarity would be welcome.

Heroics:
(apologies about boss names its late here)

Utgarde Keep: Pretty much the same as normal. Move Ingvar away from his decapitating flying axe when it spawns. Your melee dps will apprecitate it.

Nexus: Pull the horde commander back into the corner to avoid pulling extra adds when he fears. If you can throw Hand of Protection on your healer when he gets close with his whirlwind, super. On Keri use Hand of freedom and cleanse to break out of ice novas and Pop divine protection when she soft enrages(5%?). Jump dont strafe. Its annoying as a dpser.

Drak Keep: Pop frost resist aura on Novos to reduce his blizzard damage. Kite the last boss out of poison gas cloud whenever your not stunned.

Violet Hold:
Water Boss: Position yourself so that the knockback knocks you to a zapper lever each time (saves you having to worry about someone else doing it)
Ethereal Boss needs to be kited up the stairs where the bird boss comes from then along the upper ledge to avoid his orbs killing your party.
Lavanthor: should be faced away from party. Strafe a little each time he does his cone of fire so your not standing in more than one.
Face last boss sideways to party. Frost resist her blizzard and save divine protection like Keri in Nexus for the end of the fight if you can. Boot deathknights that pop AotD and wipe your party.

Apart from that try and get to the portal that spawns above the ethereal boss asap. The mobs split and run different ways. If your not going to make it wait at the stairs leading out of the instance with your party behind you.

Culling of Stratholme is fairly straightforward too. Just let the group know ahead your not going for a timed. If you by chance get there with a little time left kite him away from his portal for a little extra time.

Not sure on badges but I think anything that drops EoH or EoV will drop EoC after the patch. I think the heroic daily quest will award EoT too.

bah beaten by another poster

Edited, Jul 14th 2009 5:35pm by arthoriuss

Unless the healer is a paladin, in which case this is just an efficient way to wipe.

Thanks for all the replies guys! Ive run UK twice, it was the daily the first time I did it, tried Occ because its been the daily past two days in a row and gave up when I accepted a rez and didnt have my drake essence anymore....

Just finished HoS which was pretty easy, short story...

I go in as DPS because i realized how much fun it is to just beat the snot out of something with a big mace, well things are going great until I realize our tank is running a little bit faster than me.

I check his talents, and sure enough he has points in PoJ, 2 in Imp. Judgement, and guess! You'll never guess.... Eye for an Eye! So I proceed to ask him why he doesn't follow a 969 rotation, he asks me what "that" is.

Now I understand some people like the flexibiliy of the Imp. Judgement at 2 points, for example if a judgement misses. But he had no clue.

We get to the last boss, and I start to really look at him, hes only got 20k HP, which the healer hid very well by keeping him up the whole run, and then we wipe on the boss. I politely suggest that I should tank considering Im at 28k HP with Kings on and well, I know how to at least talent spec a Prot Pally.

He then decides he wants to DPS in his fricken tanking gear, no 2-hander, nothing, just his sword and board. Hes totally convinced that he does more DPS in his tanking gear. I insisted we do a recount.

He comes up at around 650 DPS, and Im at the top over the DK, and the other Ret pally with 1250 DPS, and he says that the scanner must be wrong.

Now, now, now, to top it all off, we get the boss down and the epic mail leggings drop. And he Need rolls them! Im like WTF. I tried to explain the "hunter weapon!" joke to him and told him people are gonna start calling us Palatards if he keeps that crap up...

The End.

PoJ is a tanking talent for Palys because we have no intercept/charge type ability and for the purposes of kiting. (1st boss of Spider wing :)

EoE is not a tanking spec. Frankly it's not a DPS spec either. If I recall it does reflective damage for being hit with a crit - hopefully, if you are a DPS you aren't being hit at all. I believe this is largely a PVP tool.

The Imp. Judge is ok. There are more optimal things to do, but it's not like he choose a healing talent...

The other guy didn't know what he was doing, but that doesn't mean much or prove anything. I purposely spec'd for more DPS when I was at that phase because I solo'd a lot. Optimal tanking (Your reference to 969) isn't needed until later. You are by no means wrong for trying to do it right, but if some dude isn't pefect - it's unlikely you'll be punished with a wipe so long as the rest of the group and the healer know their jobs.

In the end - mark the guy, next time you get a /invite do a check on him. See if he's straightened himself out. When I started there was this ****** Warrior tank named Tankerz or something like that. He was terrible. Couldn't hold hate, insisted on less than optimal use of my mage's Sheep, and several other annoying factors. I grouped with the dude later - he was great. Got into a guild that straightened him out - he was great....

Focus 100% on Defense chants first. Do not worry about Stam until you are Def capped. You want 540, not 535. Yes you can be crit immune to heroics, but I have been invited to raids IMMEDIATELY following a good Heroic run and if I was not 540, I'd have to decline. With 540 you can slither into OS or VoA or Naxx 10's because they are so easy that anything can tank them with def cap.

Once you have the 540, then focus on Stam.

Hey there all, it seems like its been a week since I posted this, and came on to see it still near the top of the forum list.

I do understand that many of the WotLK fights are pretty mobile, but they are not anything that can't be done without speed increasing enchants and talents.

Also, before I get creamed by all the raiders out there, I havn't seen the spider wing fight or anything of the sort to know if we are fast enough without PoJ or Tuskarr's.

I did mark that player but decided to help him out a bit, the next time I saw him, he was defense capped at around 558 actually, in some pretty decent gear. But noticed his HP was still a little low (about 22k).

I took some time and sorted through his talent tress and realized he was missing alot in the +Stam % talents and got him on the right track. Hopefully this will make one more good tank in the world.

Hmm, I just did this last night (stupid Authentication issues preventing me from continuing the said run), so...



PoJ is also nice as a Paladin OT, which I was. You can DPS Anub a bit and then when you see the Raid Warning that an add is coming, PoJ lets you go run over towards where the add comes from and get to it hopefully before it starts attacking healers and ranged DPS. That's quite a distance you'd have to run, and I was glad to have had PoJ.



Again, from the Paladin OT's perspective, it was nice getting to, and keeping up, with the MT as they moved her away from the fire, etc. Also, I was able to join in on the fight as soon as my adds were down. Its little things like this that add every second, and if you're running with a lower-geared raid, sometimes that 1% can matter.



Again, as an OT, the adds.... omg. I hated that fight lol. I tried everything from dropping a Consecrate right near Maexxna, to running around throwing shields and hammers, I just couldn't keep those stupid spiders away from the casters. I ended up running several of em down. The lack of PoJ would have made it so that it would have taken me at least 5 seconds longer per add phase to get the adds. Considering she released like 4 sets of spiders, if I recall, that's 25 sec that I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off instead of adding some extra DPS on the boss. Like I said, in a lesser-geared raid, that extra little bit can count.



One more thing I'll say here, if you're just starting Raids as a Paladin, you may get asked to OT more than MT. The whole spirit of OT, is to assist the MT in tanking duties. This means grabbing at least one, maybe two mobs off of the MT (ask them, even, how many or what they want you to help tank) in Trash pulls, and also, a big thing here, is if the MT goes down, your job is to immediately grab the boss. Be ready to assume the role of MT if the MT goes down for any reason. Don't ponder it, don't ask, just target the boss and use every threat ability in the book. That's your job; to keep stuff off the DPS and heals. In my first run of Naxx10 last night, the MT went down on Faerlina *and* Maexxna, and I wound up saving the raid by taking over as MT, throwing my threat abilities on those bosses. I wasn't geared quite as good as the MT, but it was enough to keep tanking the mob until the DPS could finish it off.

Just because you're an OT doesn't mean you can be lazy and just wade through the instance doing nothing but tanking 1-2 mobs and just DPSing boss fights.

PoJ helps an OT a lot, because the OTs are the ones running around picking up adds, running back and forth from DPSing the boss to grabbing adds, etc. Also, if the MT dies while you're running around doing your OT stuff, you need to get to the boss ASAP; that boss is currently picking off your raid members one-by-one and every millisecond counts.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2009 9:27pm by Zariamnk

I was just adding to what you said, more from an OT's perspective, especially since most "Mid-Heroics" paladin tanks, when invited to raids, get asked to OT.

Paladins make great OTs; OTs are usually running down adds, grabbing add packs during boss fights, etc. We're great for that role. We've got a good bit of instant ranged "grab this now!" (even after losing Exorcism, we still have 3 such abilities) attacks that other tanks may not have.

PoJ is just another coin in the purse, as to why Paladins make great OTs, and why any given Prot Paladin is most likely going to asked to be one during their first few Naxx10/OS10 runs.