[Wotlk] Maintankadin 101 - Winchester.

There added some info about patch 3.0.2 and made things a little less level 80 exclusive.

lemme know if i missed something.

I was wondering why I'd seen people talking about how strength was needed now and lo and behold, I find a post explaining why.

Great guide, thankyou for the effort.

wonderful summary.

One thing though about spellhit and consecration:

And here is a list of paladin abilities affected by spell hit:

1st tick of Consecrate.
...*snip*

fully resisted/missed ticks are currently not shown in the combatlog and make you think only the innitial 'consecration debuff' can be resisted.
However, any of its ticks can miss.

Reference

Neganur wrote:wonderful summary.

One thing though about spellhit and consecration:

And here is a list of paladin abilities affected by spell hit:

1st tick of Consecrate.
...*snip*

fully resisted/missed ticks are currently not shown in the combatlog and make you think only the innitial 'consecration debuff' can be resisted.
However, any of its ticks can miss.

Reference

interesting, i was unaware that they had changed consecrate so that the ticks were fully resistabble. i'll check this out when i get a chance.

Same scenario as before, except against a boss
Like I mentioned earlier, the avoidances are reduced by 0.2% each and the mobs crit chance is increased by 0.2% per level. A boss is 3 levels higher than you making this -0.6% to each of the avoidances and an increase of 0.6% to his crit chance.

0.01-4.40 = miss
4.41-13.80 = dodge
13.81-23.20 = parry
23.21-32.60 = block
32.61-38.20 = crit
38.21+ = hit

So let’s say a boss attacks you, he rolls a 28, since anything between 23.21-32.60 is a block, which means that attack was blocked.

Are you certain that the attack table works like that? The way you have it laid out, it would be possible to push Critical Hits off of the attack table with sufficient avoidance + Block Rating. I was under the impression that the only way for us to mitigate critical hits is from defense or resilience, not by manipulating the attack table. Or is high defense "insurance" against stuns and such things that prevent us from avoiding/blocking hits?

Kudos on the update for 3.0 -- useful info here!

rulander wrote:Are you certain that the attack table works like that? The way you have it laid out, it would be possible to push Critical Hits off of the attack table with sufficient avoidance + Block Rating. I was under the impression that the only way for us to mitigate critical hits is from defense or resilience, not by manipulating the attack table. Or is high defense "insurance" against stuns and such things that prevent us from avoiding/blocking hits?

Kudos on the update for 3.0 -- useful info here!

Yes you can get rid of crit by knocking it off the attack table. If you're using holy shield to do that you'd only be uncrittable while it was up, and that would be bad. For example you'd be crittable from behind, you'd be screwed when silenced, holy charges run out and knocked down.

Thanks for the clarification - not that I planned on being below the defense cap anyway

Regarding Reckoning, since it was changed at 5/5 to now proc from blocking, is it a good choice to pick up? One of the pre 3.0 arguments (which was quite valid) was that at end game, you simply didn't take damage often enough (due to ever increasing avoidance as you geared up) for the proc to reliably occur, and so was a waste of 5 TPs. The other argument was with regards to giving a boss an extra opportunity to parry the additional attacks, which in turn could be bad for the tank.

The first argument seems to be more or less dealt with, while the second (I think) still remains a valid concern. However, since we now are looking to stack STR (resulting in higher white damage), is 5/5 now more worthy an investment for raids than it once was? Or do people feel that with new talents the points are still best invested elsewhere?

Selonya wrote:Regarding Reckoning, since it was changed at 5/5 to now proc from blocking, is it a good choice to pick up?

No.

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/ ... 84&start=0

@Winchester: Linked back to this from my FAQ (which is terse) for people who want full explanations by a polite person.

n00b tank here

I decided to make a Paly tank at exactly the wrong time it seems. But now I'm going to make the best of it.

I just wasted about 2 weeks grinding out the honor (doing AV 7 billion times) to get a decent caster weapon. Now it looks like I should just turn around and do it all over again to get a melee weapon instead.

But that got me thinking. With crushing blows effectively removed, is PvP gear now a much better choice for tanks? Get a few pieces to get the huge Stam bonus, and get a chunk of crit immunity through resilience?

I know Def Rating does all the avoidance stats, but everything now has deminishing returns right? It seems to me, a baseline of a few select pieces of PvP gear combined with those few and far between pieces of great avoidance gear would be the best way to go.

But again, as a MT I litterally haven't seen anything. I doubt my paly will even become my main.

wow.

I have been playing a paladin off and on since release. Since the announcement of WoLTK, however, its been my main focus.

As such, I have decided that it is high time I actually pay attention to the details. As I am now wanting to focus on some of the end game content, I think I need to get up to speed. So, I find myself reading this post, and other here, and .. well.. wow. Nice work folks.

That being said - I still see that gear is just as important as ever. I have heard about a defense of "490" or more, and just dont know where to start. I have some people telling me that a mail or leather piece, with gems, is better than some of the plate thats out there - even w/o the armor. I dont see how thats possible.

So, I am looking for more information on getting my defense up, rather than all the other "supurfolus" stuff..

Please keep up the efforts here - it is a great reseource.

PVP is not tanking gear it is a stop gap for maybe 1 or 2 pieces.

tanking gear is balanced between defense/miss/dodge/parry/block and stam for the most part.

If you stack stam before you have defense/miss/dodge/parry/block at ~102.4% then you are still going to be a squishy tank. Ideally you want to be > 102.4% (with holy shield) because then anything that hits you will be a miss/dodge/parry/block with no direct hit.

If you go straight with pvp gear your other stats will be hurting quite a bit.

meh, maybe... of course (I don't know if you looked) I'm still at the point where WoLK greens will probably be better than most of my gear.

I'll wait and see what the new stuff looks like really. The Def rating seems easy to get. I had 490 in crap gear and no real enchants before the nerf, I mean, patch.

Crushing blows don't really mean anything anymore so it's not like 102% or die.

SO yeah I'm just saying, 5.8% crit avoidance will probably be easy to come by. I'm imagining 500 def rating with some good avoidance gem slots or bonuses of some kind. Then It will probably be a challenge topping off that last little bit. That's where I'm thinking the PvP gear will come into play. Get the last bit of crit immunity and trade some avoidance for raw survivability in the form of higher base armor rating and much more stam (not to mention that even the basic, non-arena, PvP weapons always have much higher base DPS ratings compared to PvE weapons).

But yeah, the more I think about it, the more I resent having to build a Warrior (with a mana bar). What's the big difference? Palys are suposed to block more? Um... block isn't even a real avoidance--We still take damage (and don't get Rage for it). Are there any block rating gems yet to match the dodge and parry gems? A new enchant maybe, to put on something other than the shield? OK going way off topic now.

Anyhoo... the Paly MT days seem to be over. Now it just seems like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. If we need Warrior gear, why not just be a Warrior? I think I'll just stick to the +spell stuff so that I can be good at AoE tanking, maybe even better than the other 3 flavors of tanks.

@Selonya: It kind of depends on the seal you tank with, if you use SoV you won't benefit that much from reckoning except from the added white hits. I invest points in it over BoK due to that all the holy paladins in my guild have picked it up already. So it also depends on what you are giving up to take reckoning.

@TanAxys:
If need be you can replace a tanking item with a pvp item, but a pvp item will only give you a slight crit reduction and about the same stamina as its pve counterpart.
While tanking items, that reduce your chance to be crit with defense also boost your avoidence alot in the process.
Diminishing returns are not so bad that you need to worry about them so soon. You won't notice them much until you've gained about 15-20% without the base avoidences.
The reason pvp armors have a higher armor value is because they have a higher item level. S1 arena gear is 3 levels above tier 4, S2 gear is 3 levels above tier 5, however S3 is the same level as tier 6, you'll notice they both have the same armor.
As for weapons, the same thing goes. Weapons that drop in BT are item level 141 while vengeful weapons are 146.
Paladins have an advantage over warriors, we start with a full mana bar, and we get all those neat mana regen buffs from our raid. And now with the sanctuary buff we gain 2% of our mana per block, dodge or parry.
Block CAN be counted as a real avoidence if your block value is high enough to negate all of the incoming damage, in my regular gear raid buffed and all im blocking around 1200damage.
We still use spellpower for aoe tanking, infact the only thing that has changed is our abilities now also scale with attack power, and the touched by the light talent has seen to it that our spellpower is about the same or higher than it used to be.

@Dexie: I will be adding a gear guide to uncrittable for wotlk.

Winchester wrote:@TanAxys:
If need be you can replace a tanking item with a pvp item, but a pvp item will only give you a slight crit reduction and about the same stamina as its pve counterpart.
While tanking items, that reduce your chance to be crit with defense also boost your avoidence alot in the process.
Diminishing returns are not so bad that you need to worry about them so soon. You won't notice them much until you've gained about 15-20% without the base avoidences.
The reason pvp armors have a higher armor value is because they have a higher item level. S1 arena gear is 3 levels above tier 4, S2 gear is 3 levels above tier 5, however S3 is the same level as tier 6, you'll notice they both have the same armor.
As for weapons, the same thing goes. Weapons that drop in BT are item level 141 while vengeful weapons are 146.
Paladins have an advantage over warriors, we start with a full mana bar, and we get all those neat mana regen buffs from our raid. And now with the sanctuary buff we gain 2% of our mana per block, dodge or parry.
Block CAN be counted as a real avoidence if your block value is high enough to negate all of the incoming damage, in my regular gear raid buffed and all im blocking around 1200damage.
We still use spellpower for aoe tanking, infact the only thing that has changed is our abilities now also scale with attack power, and the touched by the light talent has seen to it that our spellpower is about the same or higher than it used to be.

Yeah, I've pretty much decided this was all a moot point anyway with WoLK out in 2 weeks or so. S3 gear will be the new BG gear which like you said is T6ish in quality. I'm stocking up on honor for a Ret set to level with. I'll worry about all this again later when I hit 80. By then there will probably be some solid theorycraft from the live servers with all of the latest and greatest changes. It not like anyone runs around trying to go through Molten Core or anything now, so I doubt anyone growing up in the next expansion will ever see or even want T5 or T6 gear when T7+ is out there and probably easier to get. I imagine Kara groups will still be fairly easy to get if the XP is OK, and the loot lasts a couple of levels. Then a few people might do Gruuls/Mag to complete the set, but I don't think many people will have much luck getting 25 man raids together. SSC and beyond will most likely require too much effort for the rewards--people will have the choice of getting 25 non-retards together, or just trying to ding 75 or so.

And of course all of this varies widely from server to server as well. Tanaris is an *ahem* medium poplation server (yeah right) and there's only a handfull of guilds in the T5 content. A full set of T5 gear is still very rare. T6 is just a dream for just about everyone on the server.