Hello everyone,
I was reading a thread earlier about prot pvp and I was shocked about how little people in this community seemed to really know about Protret.
So let’s explain, Protret is basically a Protection specced paladin, in retribution gear, its pretty simple, and the playstyle of Protret is very similar to ret. So here’s what this guide will cover:
1) Glyphs
2) Talents
3) Gear
4) Rotation/Playstyle
5) Macro
So here goes nothing.
Glyphs
Glyph of Avengers Shield is a must, there is mandatory, no questions asked.
Then you have a few more choices for the other things,
Glyph of Turn Evil: Can be very useful in certain situations, fearing a lichborned DK, or his gargoyle, or a warlocks pet, can be game breaking used properly, but if you are a beginner to Protret I wouldn’t go for this.
Glyph of Judgement: It’s a nice little damage boost to your judgement, however, unlike Ret, Prot’s judgement damage is pretty low so this glyph has a lot less value, go for it if you like damage, but otherwise no.
Glyph of Divine Plea: If you’re running with a lot of pve gear, which you should if you wanna max your damage potential, then this is a valid glyph to take.
Glyph of Shield of Righteousness: I really like this glyph, in long games it can really help you stay on top of your mana, and gives you a button to hit even if you are on 1% mana.
Glyph of Salvation: If you are gonna take this, I would take it over Divine Plea, it depends what you want, if you play with a healer I would suggest plea glyph, if your going double dps, salvation.
Glyph of Hammer of Justice: Pretty underrated glyph in my opinion, the 5 yards can be real useful at times.
I think I’m running with Avengers + Hammer of Justice + Turn Evil on my prot atm, but any of the above choices are valid as long as you pick up glyph of AS.
Talents
I would like to clarify firstly, do not get judgements of the pure over crusade, I can see why people make this mistake, but an increase to all your special attacks simply outweighs the damage you get from your judgement, which hits like a wet fish anyway, and your seal damage, which is nothing to write home about either.
http://wow335.gamestool.net/paladint...00000000000000
That's the spec I'm using atm on Warmane
Gear
I really see a lot of poor advice given about how to gear Protret, it’s all about strength really, whereas Ret uses strength to gain attack power, which in turn converts 30% of your AP into spell power via Sheath of Light, prot has touched by the light, which converts 60% of your stength into spell power, therefore, attack power, whilst not totally useless (buffs your judgement, auto attack, and hammer of wrath damage) is fairly useless.
Therefore when gearing your Prot, you don’t want to take the pvp gear which has stam + ap/crit, ONLY take the PVP gear that gives strength, so the bracers, belt, and boots. Grab pve neck, cloak and rings for the strength. Use at least 4/5 Pvp main set and your resilience will be fine, and all your slots will be giving strength for max damage.
Right now I am using some tank 226 legs, I cant remember the name of it, but it gives a huge amount of block value and is pretty amazing, but don’t go for any neck or cloak or anything that gives block value, the loss in strength is not worth it. In actual fact, when I have enough arena points for 5/5 wrathful chances are I will go for that instead over the 226 legs anyways, the increase in strength, crit and resi is just too huge.
Deaths choice is the best trinket for protret, no questions asked. Use double death choice if you can as human. DMC: Greatness is fine too. Libram of Valiance is mandatory, 200 strength for prot is simply amazing, its got a 100% uptime, must have.
You MUST get the Icecrown Glacial Wall shield, it’s the best for prot by far with plenty of strength and looooads of block value, the heroic version even has a red gem socket on it. The main hand weapon is not as important as the shield, as there isn’t any strength dps weapons in icc, you want something that’s slow, so I would recommend simply getting the wrathful weapon for the resilience and the crit it offers, and as I mentioned earlier, attack power is not totally useless.
You should be able to get enough hit rating from your pve offset items to reach the 5% cap for pvp.
Obviously gem full strength, get the +5% block value meta gem.
+10 stats on chest, ap/resi on your helm and shoulders, I havn’t done the math but I prefer + stats over AP on my bracers. Pyro rockets on the gloves, you don’t need tuskarrs vitality on your boots if you spec into PoJ, so grab attack power and finally I am in a big debate with myself about 40 resi + 28 stam vs. 75 ap + 22 crit on legs, I’d say its personal preference, though if you are human with double pve trinkets, get the resi, but its kinda depending on how much pve gear you have for the other races. Berserking on your MH, and the shield enchant that increases block value, I forget the name
Rotation/Playstyle
Pro tip: Remember to use Divine Plea at the start of fights, don’t let it drop off if you can avoid it.
Let’s talk 2s firstly. If you play with a healer, (FYI the best healer for a prot paladin is a resto shaman, and this is easily the best setup for a prot paladin to play.) your main job here is to catch the opposite healer in a hoj + avenger with wings and BL, your shaman must help you with purges and frost shocks when you are going for a kill. Timing is key, because against good players it can be tough otherwise. Hexing the DPS to prevent him peeling when going for a kill is also important.
Make sure you are tracking their trinkets, don’t pop your cool downs for a kill if the healers trinket is off cd or he will simply trinket it and probably survive. Force the trinket with your first hoj, then when its off cool down again, tell your shaman you need BL, and he should then help you nuke down the healer with wings, if you are geared no healer can survive that without blowing some major cds. Then rinse and repeat till you have yourself a kill.
Killing the DPS in healer/dps games is possible but difficult, if you are on him and the healers trinkets down, here is where glyph of hoj comes in handy, you rambo over to the healer, stun him, avenger the dps so hes dazed to ensure you can catch up, pop wings and have your shaman hex the healer just as the stun ends. It’s easier generally to kill the healer, but keep an open mind, if the healer is refusing to die, try switching to his dps, it can work.
Another big part of what makes both prot and ret so good is their defensive utility, a lot of people make the mistake of just damaging as ret, they don’t seem to realise you can have a huge impact on the game without doing any offensive stuff. Your healer can call for hand of freedom to get away from melee and stuff, plus if hes low you can hand of protection him. With gear, your sacred shield will absorb a pretty decent amount of damage too and should always be kept on the healer, divine sac and hand of sac are useful in double dps games for helping your healer survive, though they should be saved against stuff like mages to break the polymorph on you if they go for your partner.
Contrary to popular belief though, prot cant heal, it really is a waste of mana and time in most situations to try and heal your partner if hes taking a lot of damage vs. double dps, you are better to blow your cds and try to kill something asap rather than trying to heal or something.
I just wanna quickly talk about auras, if you are playing with a healer you generally wanna use concentration aura, they will really notice the pushback reduction. If you play against a rogue or feral though, use ret aura, their quick melee attacks means the damage from it adds up to a lot fast. Fire/frost/shadow resistance are not too useful because any self respecting DPS will be spell pen capped. However some disc priests are not spell pen capped, so if you play against disc teams its worth using shadow resistance aura in case you get lucky, equally, a lot of warlocks don’t gem for the spell pen cap and use curse of elements instead, if you play with a shaman healer, he can dispel it and then shadow resistance aura is again useful (use shadow against destro locks too, resisting a fear is way more important than resisting an immolate which you can dispel anyways)
You also wanna make a dispel macro for your healer so you can quickly get him out of polys, fears etc, for instance if you are fast on dispelling hammer of justice, a warrior/DK + paladin team shouldn’t be able to score a kill on your healer ever.
In 3s, I would recommend playing Resto shaman/Resto druid/Disc with a Hunter + you. This is my favorite prot paladin setup and it works nicely. The hunters cc is on a 30 sec cd, and so is your AS + hoj, time this stuff together can win you a game easily. In 3s you need to be prepared to give your hand of freedom to whoever needs it, not just yourself, for instance if you play with a hunter they will need it a lot more than you if they are being tunnelled by a tsg or something. Against spell cleaves in 3s you wanna stay near a pillar, somewhere in line of sight of your healer and your other partner, and simply dispel immolate or flame shock or whatever, then pop out and nuke something when your hoj/AS is off cd, hit stuff for 10-15 seconds, then run back again as soon as they switch on you if something didn’t die, let your hunter or whatever you play with do most of the damage. Prot is easily killed by 2x spell casters if you stand in the open too long. Basically, if you don’t use all your defensive tools that you have at your disposal, and don’t time your burst right you wont get very high in 3s as prot.
Macros
Here’s just some pretty basic macro’s for you to use on your new protret pala!
Focus Hammer of Justice:
#showtooltip Hammer of Justice
/cast [mod:shift, @focus][] Hammer of Justice
Focus Avengers shield:
#showtooltip Avengers Shield
/cast [mod:shift, @focus][] Avengers shield
Cleanse on partner:
#showtooltip Cleanse
/cast [Target=yourpartnersname] Cleanse
Cleanse on you, modifier to cast cleanse on partner:
#showtooltip Cleanse
/cast [mod:shift, @yourpartnersname] Cleanse
I would also recommend you make a similar macro to the ones above for Hand of Protection, Hand of salvation, and hand of freedom. Just use the above format but change cleanse to the name of the Hand spell where applicable.
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Member
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Member
cool guide! are you able to reupload the talent tree it doesnt work when you click it
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Member
Yep, the link doesn't work
You can use OpenWoW's calculator or give us the name of your char so we can search you on Warmane's armory :)
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Member
Considering the OP's last login date was June 5, 2015 you're unlikely to get his char name.
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Member
Does anyone else have a good talent build for this??
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Field Medic Moderator
http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#sZVGzurkgGsIufzVfMobc
Probably something like this. I'm no expect in this sort of spec or gameplay, but this is what I'd go with. Maybe exchange around some of the mitigation/armor talents, or take a point or two out of Reckoning. But that'd be about it.
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Member
http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#sZVGzuruLusIufdVfzLbz
:This is how i play atm.
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Member
http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#sZVGzGrzTusIufdVf0hbc
This was the talent tree Swizzled used if anyone is still interested.
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Member
Can someone link talent tree? None of the links above work.
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Member
https://wotlk.evowow.com/?talent#sZVGzGrzTusIufdVf0hbc
I just searched for another talent calculator with same url format and copy pasted.
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Member
Still doesn't work, anyone have any new talent tree's for this?
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Member
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Banned
I like the idea of Protribution and I think that I’ll make
One in a month or so but, I have some questions first:
1. How viable this spec is against full BiS Shadowmourne wielders(Retri/Arms)?
2. What is the average damage output feel?
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Member
1. How viable this spec is against full BiS Shadowmourne wielders(Retri/Arms)?
As a prot you have good avoidance against melee attacks, and your main attacks
cause magical damage that ignore the armor of the warriors, dk and paladins.
You can survive against them, from my experience the order of difficulty are dk > paladin >>>> warrior
2. What is the average damage output feel?
You have less burst but high sustained damage
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Banned
DK being the easiest or the hardest? I can see UH, death strike-ing until I get killed by boredom.
I know protri is harder to kill with less burst, but what I’m asking is: Am I going to feel lack of damage in fights? Note: I don’t expexct that I’m able to nuke down a healer with 1.3k resilience.
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