Prot questionsFollow

I got the stam, I'm missing the hit and the expert and know it. Not sure if I have the avoid yet either as I'm not sure how my relic boosts. So I guess I'm looking for a gear check. I have no problems tanking heroics, most raids and even H ToC. I do have a problem keeping threat, be it that I'm loosing to an overgeared mage Krowdkontorl or a destro pug lock. It's bothering me that my tps is under par. Ideas there?

And before you ask, yep on the FAQ, yep on the how to's, and I just got done reading related topics on the forums. Been Tanking since BC came out. Just dropped this toon for a priest (not the greatest choice as paladins RULE!!!). Anyway, thanks for the advice and tips!!

No recommendations on gear, on spec though, Seals of the Pure will get you more threat gen than Conviction, and I agree w/the switch out of SoR glyph, Vengeance is a nice one if you're short on expertise, although it doesn't appear you are.

Oh yeah, and fill up Divine Guardian too, Sacred Shield should always be up and it absorbs a surprising amount of damage, since the whole spell-power adding to shields thing stacks quite nicely with Touched by the Light.

So yeah, swap that one glyph, Seals of the Pure and get Divine Guardian are my only recommendations.

We were talking about this in /g (actually, /r) the other night and how the concept of a cookie cutter prot build has gone out the window.

And I have to admit I've only done some preliminary searching for concrete evidence to support a variety of different builds as superior.

The information I've found as been underwhelming.

Personally, I would never take an "increased chance" for much of anything over a sure thing. 15% extra damage from seals and judgements, to me, will always seem like a better option than a lower single digit increase in chance to crit. Conviction, to me, is wasted talents. Vindication has its uses, but the question is one of which talents you're going to forego in order to get it. I would actually prefer the 5% additional healing from Divinity over a reduction in mob AP, because again...the reduction is chance on hit (regardless of uptime), whereas the healing bonus is passive and available all the time.

I see a lot of pallies running around with 2/2 Imp. Judgements claiming to be authorities on all things prot pally. It makes me a sad panda. It tells me they haven't done their homework. They're just looking at the talent trees and thinking, "ooooh! shiny!"

I actually have 2/5 reckoning on my prot pally right now. Why? Because those two points there seemed like a better option than anything else available to me and those were the two points I had left over after everything else was spent. I see prot pallies crowing over Heart of the Crusader. Sure...if you do 5-mans and 10-mans or are in one of those unfortunate situations where you raid 25-mans without a ret pally. If you've got a ret pally in the group, it's wasted talent points. And all those points thrown into the ret tree to dive deep enough for a boost to crit %?

I'm not convinced. If someone were able to point me to a link that shows definitively that all these talents being thrown into the ret tree are really offering all that significant boost, I would be appreciative.

Thanks for the link. There's one thing missing from that post, however, and that's any talk of survivability. Prot pallies are highly survivable with Holy Shield (phys only) and especially Ardent Defender.

What tipped me off to the focus on threat in that post was the commentary on Redoubt. There's no mention of the BV bonus on Redoubt as a talent in terms of mitigation. It talks about the DR on SotR threat.

It's as though pallies saw their niche as the "high threat tank" taken away and decided that the new focus would be on driving into the ret tree for threat. In a way, I'm tempted to give kudos to Blizzard for giving pally tanks that freedom to decide between a defensive build and a more offensive/threat build, but the trend I see is disturbing. Fights like NB in ToGC25 still give our tanks fits from time to time (primarily Gormok) where a bad Impale + melee can insta-gib a tank (we had our main warrior tank take 57k damage in 0.4 seconds the other night).

I used to be very confident about my tanking skill and general knowledge of prot pallies up until this past March when I took a break from WoW. I only took up tanking with my pally again about 6 weeks ago (I'm 2-3 upgrades away from feeling ready to tank ToGC10). It's taking a bit of time to get caught up with the tweaks since then, but the way people are expounding the virtues of driving ret isn't sitting well with me right now.

I read through this article last night and was again concerned about the logic employed by the author. An example would be his take on Divinity. I don't want to keep referencing Gormok because that's a fairly extreme case, but the reality is that tanks still die in raids. At the point of their death, their threat gen becomes zero. If it's a case where a greater focus on a defensive build could have averted the wipe, the extra 500tps at any other point throughout the raid would become moot.

I've actually got two prot builds on my pally right now with dual spec, even though my second prot build is pretty much identical to my first (I haven't seriously tweaked it yet). I could see turning the second prot build into one that focuses on heroics/raid trash and one that focuses on boss tanking in which case I would seriously consider going as deep into ret as I could because survivability is less of an issue. For boss tanking, I still don't see pallies having threat issues (or at least, not issues as created by class mechanics).

As long as I can out-threat the dps, I don't need more. That's not to say that more threat beyond what is required is useless since it's also dps and damage kills mobs, but I'm seeing a view on pally tanks that seems to assume that they're already geared beyond the content they're running at which point threat will obviously take a back seat to survivability because the gear itself is making up for some of the lost defense from talents. If a pally tank is still progressing through the content, my personal feeling is that survivability > threat and will remain so until they see the most current content they're running as easy farming.

That 55-60k spike really shouldn't happen unless you're taking 3 impales which you shouldn't be doing on heroic 25. Not saying it hasn't happened to me, but only when someone forgot to taunt or dc'ed, etc. Pretty sure parry haste is off for both normal and heroic.



I think you're overvaluing HS atm. It simply isn't that great as most bosses are of the slow, hard hitting type or have lots of unavoidable damage(Beasts in ToC). Or in the case of Jaraxus+Twins don't really hit hard enough to even worry about. HS was great against Patchwerk, and is amazing on Algalon, but those are about the only 2 fights where it really shines.



What talents would you consider 'more defensive'? The 0/53/6 base has everything except Vindication in ret spec. Otherwise you're looking at going into holy for Imp LoH or AM, neither of which leaves you pts for Divinity. Divinity was an ok choice before 3.2 as there really wasn't anything better to take, but now that reckoning is decent again and vindication was changed and overhealing is the norm it's a pretty lackluster talent to spend pts on.
How would divinity have saved you from the same damage spike your warr died from? Either you have the EH to survive the spike in which case your healers will heal you back to full immediately or you don't. There is a very tiny window in which 5% more healing would help you survive the next hit. Really more of a 10man talent where you may only have 1 healer dedicated to you and the hits are smaller.

Agreed; my prot build only goes 5/59/7; many talents like Conviction, for example, or Heart of the Crusader, aren't needed for threat generation, even with a basic tank weapon (for "basic", I'm talking something like Axe of the Sen'Jin Protector) we should be able to hold threat against most DPS that at least give us the first shot at them, without having to spec so deep into ret we might as well bust out the 2h.

I'm of the school of thought that would recommend Divinity over Crusade, because of the boost it gives healers; it stacks quite nicely w/Imp Devo Aura.

Dont raid with overgeared ppl, no matter what you do you cant keep up with them.
By the way, his trinket is worth around 15.000g. Yes its not BoE , its 99% ninja item.
You cant beat these people.