1. When facing LK u go for Armor and Stamina over avoidance, even tho u chose the lower level items.
    Sure thing, 100% agree.

    u trade avoidance for [...] any posible healing increase effect.
    Not-sure thing. There's only 1 item in the balance anyway so it's going to be hard to obtain reliable info. You claim one way, I claim avoidance ain't that bad when compared to heal increase when the comparison is applicable.

  2. And you are always and always should be comparing the 21.6% (3x hits chance w/out Mithrios) and the 20.0% (3x hit chance w/ Mithrios) because what you notice is the relative increase/decrease not the overall one. The same goes for armour, you always compare the relative change : going from 71% to 72% is a 1%/29% = 3.44% reduction is physical damage. A 72% armour tank takes 3.44% less physical damage than a 71% armour tank.
    Again, you aren't giving enough consideration to the inherently stochastic nature of avoidance. The 8% figure just means that on average a streak of any 3 hits is 8% more likely to be interrupted with the extra 1.5% avoidance, but it doesn't fix the most essential problem with RNG. Some streak of 3 hits might have more than 1 instance of a dodge/parry/miss in them because of the 1.5% extra avoidance, whereas some streak of 3 hits might not have any at all. When it comes down to it there's also simply no guarantee that when you do actually avoid hits as a result of that extra avoidance, that it would have been an instance where it was actually life-saving (or helpful in some other way).

    You are right and wrong about avoidance. Yes avoidance is unpredictable. But keep in mind, any tank can be 3 hit dead on Lordearon, even through 20% damage decrease cooldowns : Sindragosa hits for 35k. 3x hits is 105k, bears have around 70k HP while paladins are around 56k. So what do you aim at?
    • Reliabable EHP from heal increase? We saw that 4-5% heal increase is in the range of 1.6k - 5k worth of EHP, depending on scenario. You'll still die.
    • Unreliable Avoidance by reducing the worst case chance (the 3hits in a row) by a relative 8%? You'll unreliably survive.


    The EHP solution may or may not save you. Usually, its on the "may not save you" side. 3 hits in a row mean 105k damage, with 56k HP you'll need 49k healing to happen to save you from dying, and another 40k to get you back to a points where you are able to survive the next blow, all this in the 3.6s+1.8s window of the 3+1x hits. That's 7 non-crit Holy Lights or non-crit Healing Waves (assuming ES/PoM/Seed/hots will have ticked for 10k, reliably).
    The avoidance solution may not save you either, but it reduce the chance of that worst scenario by "a lot" and therefore ensures higher uptime on the Ardent Defender talent "life saving" part and therefore... makes you live a little bit more often.
    It might not save you but the point is that it's the surest bet in an environment where tanks are bombarded with heals from multiple healers, all of whom aim to have him topped up immediately after the next hit he suffers. The majority of tank deaths occur as a result of one or more of the following:

    1) One or more of your Holy Paladins (or whoever else are appointed the primary tank healers) happen to move for an extended period, and they try and cover this movement time with smaller heals like Holy Shock and instant Flash of Lights, but it just isn't enough.
    2) Your non-Holy Paladin healers neglect their tank-healer assisting responsibilities for a moment too long and your primary tank-healer(s) just happen(s) to get overwhelmed with the damage your tank takes.
    3) A 1-shot (or close to it) mechanic your tank didn't have enough defensives up for.
    4) Boss DPS just exceeding Healer HPS, even though reasons (1) or (2) aren't really to blame. This happens when the worst stars line up and your tank takes very high sustained damage (think something like LK melees + lots of Val'kyr Shadowguard damage in late Phase 2, or Soul Reaper's hasted hits, or taking melee damage while soaking left-over Vile Spirits, etc), and your healers can't put out the HPS to keep him up through it, which might be because of issues like unlucky crit droughts on their direct healing, maybe one of the Hpallies had a Divine Plea up, etc.

    The Sindragosa example adds more complexity to this because of factors like Unchained Magic significantly weakening some of your healers but the essence of the argument still applies. Most of the time, a healing increase directly remedies the unfortunate line-up of circumstances that lead to the typical tank-death.

  3. Well, unless I'm wrong, but you should count the holy paladins out of the picture in terms of heal increase, because besides LK phase 1, they are healing through Beacon of Light, whose heals will not be increased by the off-tank Last Word because they are healing the raid. That's a huge drawback from the weapon. You lose the stats and you sneakily loose the heals, making the weapon not as good as it is on the paper. Sindragosa fight is clearly a fight where you should always go Mithrios over Last Word. Because of the expertise, and because the vast majority of heals you get are from Beacon, especially in the last phase, the hard one, where Holy Paladins are "immuned" to Unchained Magic, (aka, they ignore if they have the 1st one, and bubble in time to remove stacks and to immune the next, and when the 3rd unchain spawns, they go yolo and stack up till the boss dies. Meaning that most the heals you receive are Beacon of Light heals, who are not increased.

    Think about your point 4/ If your Ardent is up, you'll live through it. If you Ardent is not, you'll die. How to keep Ardent up for such cases? Makes sure stars have a hard time to align. Especially since you tank every other Soul Reaper for instance, or since you have transitions to recover your Ardent, having an easy time to have it up. Of course on the worst case fight, avoidance will fully fail you, but if it happens as often as a Defile target change...

  4. What you described is an example of altering weapon choice to suit the needs of a fight. The expertise alone makes Mithrios really helpful on Sindragosa, and the point you made about the quirk with Beacon is certainly very valid too. That said, Sindragosa is the only real example of its kind (inside ICC) that stacks the odds against last word to that degree. In most other fights the lost Expertise isn't really an issue, and the Beacon quirk very often works to the raid's favour by buffing the Hpally healing received by both tanks instead of none.

  5. Well all fights where there is only one tank taking potentially lethal damage at a time (Including Halion, LK phase 2, phase 3, Rotface, Fester, Putricide, potentially BQL depending on the setup) then the main tank gets a lot of his healing (roughly 50-75% I'd say) through beacon of Light. The offtank wearing Last Word probably makes a lot of sense there, maybe a bit less for the main tank. On the other hand, DBS probably is great for the mace once there's a Mark of the Fallen Champion in the raid, providing super duper extra-healing when paired with Amplify Magic.

  6. Talant tree link isnt working. And reading all of the comments didn't help either. Can't seem to really find good paladin tank guide.

  7. is it current on this servie?

    Looking at the people, 75% of the tanks I met all ignore hit exp and they were gem/ench in pure stamina. What is the point of this?
    5.0 GS only get def cap and the rest of stama, does it make sense ?

  8. Looking at the people, 75% of the tanks I met all ignore hit exp and they were gem/ench in pure stamina. What is the point of this?
    5.0 GS only get def cap and the rest of stama, does it make sense ?
    When tanking targets that are NOT dragons or Lady Deathwhisper, expertise is purely a threat stat. IF you do not need the extra threat in order to keep aggro any extra points in this stat would be useless. One should note that expertise prior to dodge soft-cap is a better threat stat than hit. When facing dragons and ldw, expertise reduces the chance that your target will parry you and gain a hasted attack (google parry-hasting for further reference). Most people have two sets, one with much more expertise than the other and just swap them around when need be.

    Now for hit, hit rating's biggest appeal for a tank is to not have your taunts miss as those situations are risky. Despite having 2 taunts, you could be slow to react, they could both fail, you may DR the boss via taunting too much and be unable to taunt again (this last one is a potential issue on LK). So, generally you'd want to have at least your taunts capped, which was 230 + some number rating and your taunt glyph. Note that this number can be even lower if you account for debuffs on just 1 target, which is very reasonable to do in some circumstances (DBW for example). Hit's other purpose is threat, but as said above, it's usually worse when it comes to threat than expertise.

    As for the stamina gemming, after getting def capped, there isn't much of an appeal to focus on extra avoidance unless a particualr boss just has some specific mechanic that would make stacking avoid better overall. Reason being that avoid DRs, both end-game instances will reduce your dodge%, directly or indirectly and in ICC in particular you have a buff that makes stamina even more worthwhile. The basic concept is that you want to be able to take as many hits, assuming the worst possible scenario for you (no dodges/parries/incoming healing/blocks/absorbs).
    Edited: September 29, 2019

  9. Hey guys, the core build link for talents is not working :(

  10. Why not Aura Mastery for Prot Paladin?
    I've been looking at many guides for Prot Paladin recently and almost all of them say unanimously to spec into Prot / ret talents and take zero points into the Holy tree.

    However, on the private server that I play the consensus is completely opposite in that for end game raiding like ICC25 HC and RS 25HC you want to have Aura Mastery. I guess for fights like Sindy, LK, and Halion it's useful for abilities where you would want more magic resist and an extra cool down?

    I'm by no means an experienced tank, and I definitely feel like for trash pulling Seal of Command would be really amazing, and I do like pursuit of justice but I don't really know of it's really necessary (do bosses even disarm us? If I have nitro boots do I really need pursuit?). I guess my question is why is it wrong to go down the holy tree?

    If my threat on bosses isn't that bad or lacking wouldn't the extra CD be better then more threat generation? Should I really be worried about missing out on Seal of Command for trash? For what fights and specifically what abilities of bosses would you want AM over more threat?

    I have a couple other questions like at what point should you go for 4 piece tier set over more armour. How much armour is too much? Would more stamina be better for ardent defender?

    What abilities you need to worry about for tanking in ICC and Halion. How much expertise do you need for Halion. Is blade ward actually useless and if so which enchant to use on weapons?

    Do I need judgements of the just? What about vindication? It seems like both of these can be covered by other classes but what about for fights where you don't have those classes? Would it be better to include these for 10 man HCs? Or in case you are missing the other classes? Like what about Halion where he can party reset? It seems like you would want to have judgements of the just to reduce the attack speed by 20%.

    I appreciate you taking the time to read this. Of you think there is another place to post this please let me know and I'll direct my questions there.

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