Control Haste Strategy and Tier 14

Hey everyone,

I have been thinking about this for a while, and I figured I would ask the Paladin community since I can't come up with a definite answer.

For a Control/Haste Paladin, some of the Retribution Tier 14 pieces tend to have better itemization compared to the Protection pieces. Most of the Prot pieces have Dodge or Parry, while Ret ones have Hate or Mastery (all tend to have hit/exp). My question is this:

Are the set bonuses (mainly 4 set) worth getting in comparison to the better itemized Ret pieces?

If your gearing haste/control then generally there are some really strong advantages to the prot set since haste increases your sotr uptime going prot four set can give you a large damage reduction during that. And two set is nice as well. Ret 2 set is worthless and ret 4 set is not bad for damage and a minor survivability gain, but I think the more relevant question you should consider is whether your survivability is more important or your dps to the raid. Ret four set will provide more dps and prot four set will provide more survivability. Personally in my raid I went ret primarily due to our healers being awesome and ret provides a good dps increase.

While the prot set will not increase your damage at all but the set bonus will have a solid increase in survivability. If your like my raid and you are 2 healing on all the fights and healing is a non issue i'd say go ret. But if your 3 healing I'd recomend going prot and maybe becuase your able to take less damage your raid is able to go down to two. Dodge and parry aren't complete garbage but it will still help your survivability and with the control set up you still have to take 1 piece with crit(gloves) so itemization wise its not a big boost it just really depends what value you put on dodge and parry and what your raid needs. Consider that 10 percent increase in sotr is equivalent to 6000 mastery but on that same token mastery does give you passive block which the set bonus does not so its not quite as good as mastery.

If you take the Head, Shoulders, Chest and gloves of the Prot set and BiS everything else along the lines of Haste/control, I worked it out to be around 35% haste with hit/exp hardcap. The benefit of going ret pieces is marginal, about 2% haste.

@Lastwolf - Could you please post a list of (or a link to) the items you used to reach these numbers ?

Extermi

Sure thing.

I seem to be forgetting a few things from my original list (should have saved that) and I'm having real problems getting under 9% hit now


Main Hand (509) Scimitar of Seven Stars
Off Hand (502) Steelskin, Qiang's Impervious Shield
Head (509) White Tiger Faceguard
Neck (516) Shackle of Eversparks
Shoulder (509) White Tiger Shoulderguards
Back (509) Hisek's Chrysanthemum Cape
Chest (509) White Tiger Chestguard
Wrist (516) Bracers of Defiled Earth
Hands (509) White Tiger Handguards
Waist (509) Warbelt of Sealed Pods
Legs (509) Articulated Legplates
Feet (509) Impaling Treads
Ring 1 (509)Vizier's Ruby Signet
Ring 2 (509) Ring of the Bladed Tempest
Trinket 1 (502) Lei Shin's Final Orders
Trinket 2 (489) Lao-Chin's Liquid Courage

with the right gems, reforging and enchants it, 9%hit 15% expertise and 31% haste.


Just remembered, Bonded Soul or Serrated Wasp instead of Defiled earth bracers, but the loss of Sta is 100-200sta, so not sure is that's a good idea or not.

Swaping Prot for ret pieces is actually a lot less of a benefit than I remember, it's around 1.5% more haste.

You might try going with Legs instead of Hands for 4 pc. Grasps of Serpentine Might are Parry/Expertise which also gives you the option of a socket bonus in both slots one of them being stamina.

I think that's what I had for my BIS list to get me under hit cap but I'm not positive I'll check after work.

EDIT: Also iirc Deepwater Greatboots (516) have a little less hit than Impaling Treads and no hit socket bonus so that could work as well.

Yeah, if you make the bracer switch it's 7.88% of something, Think it'd just live with it at that point.

I think the reason I did the legs instead of hands is some discussion where Theck made a convincing argument about the stats overall being a higher by swapping out the tier legs, I can't remember the details but it sounded right.

It's a long way off for any real test, so far tier legs is the only bit of tier I have and the only item on that BiS list I have is rather annoyingly also some legs, and I'm talking normal version not even anywhere near heroic yet (as the majority drops outside of MSV).