Bastion of Glory

Bubbletaunting consists in using Divine Shield and then istantly taunting the mob/boss, forcing it to hit you while immune for 3 seconds, and then cancel Divine Shield (or let it go on whatever person is 2nd in threat).

It's usually a way to buy 3-4 more seconds into a enraged boss, or to delay a taunt from the other tank.

The technique had its glory during Wotlk when with 2 taunts you were able to force a target into you for 6 seconds while being immune.

And need I add, still useful today: as Divine Shield and Hand of Protection clears some (not all!) debuffs, tankadins who have mastered "bubble taunt" have been able to break tank swap mechanics and solo tank encounters intended for two tanks, particularly with Clemency talented. Durumu in Throne of Thunder stands out as a very recent example.

While I'm at it:

Adeya wrote:(1) Is there a Haste "cap" for Protection spec paladins? What I would really like is a formula to convert the numeric total of Hast to the percentage shown on the paper doll, and vice-versa. :-)

50% haste (not sure off-hand what the numeric total is). At this point, the GCD is reduced to 1 second and will not reduce further. If you hit this, you should probably dump any extra itemization into Mastery.

Regarding formulae, check out Theck's Haste Breakpoints for Tankadins post on Sacred Duty.

Adeya wrote:(2) Do you know of a formulary relationship between melee haste and spell haste? For example, my paladin's current melee haste is +23.16% and spell haste is +35.47%. The WoW API has a function to get the paladin's current spell haste, but there isn't one for obtaining the paladin's current melee haste.

Aforementioned Sacred Duty post should answer this too. :)

Adeya wrote:"Your next Eternal Flame used to heal yourself heals for an additional ___%". With 1 BoG on the stack, the number which follows the last word is 35%; with 2 stacked, the number is 71%; (I missed the 3rd BoG); with 4 BoG the number is 142%; and with 5 BoG the number is 178%.

Yep, this is what I meant. For a 1-stack, it's 35%, which is 10% plus your 25% mastery. For some reason, most tooltips use a floor() rather than a round(), so your 25.7% ends up being 25% in tooltips (but the full floating-point value is used in calculations). It's clear from the rest of the data that each stack adds another 35.7% (2*35.7=71.4%, 3*35.7=107.1%, 4*35.7=142.8%, etc.).

Adeya wrote:All I can say is that I usually do not produce more than 2 BoG stacks before EF must be refreshed, and perhaps produce 3 BoG every third or fourth "rotation" -- i.e., without using Holy Avenger, or Avenging Wrath with Sanctified Wrath, and without Divine Purpose procs even if Divine Purpose is selected as the Level 75 talent.

With the default rotation (CS-J-X-CS-X-J-CS-X-X), you generate 5 guaranteed holy power every 13.5 seconds. So in the 30 seconds of the EF buff, we generate 11.1 holy power. In other words, even with zero haste and zero Grand Crusader procs, you can refresh a 3-BoG EF within 1-2 GCDs of it falling off. Add a single Grand Crusader proc every 30 seconds and you can keep a 3-BoG EF up 100% of the time.

In Siege gear, you'll probably have 40%-45% haste (or more if you're deep into heroics). With 40%, you're now generating 15.56 HP in the 30 seconds of the EF buff. Again, add 2-3 Grand Crusader procs and you have the 18 you need to keep a 5-BoG EF up 100% of the time.

The T16 4-piece makes it utterly trivial because it makes WoG/EF free if you have 3+ stacks of Bastion of Glory. So you only need 15 Holy Power every 30 seconds to keep a 5-BoG EF active, which you'll already be guaranteed to have above 40% haste, regardless of Grand Crusader procs or T75 talents.

Adeya wrote:Please note that I am using the "standalone" CLCProt which was a module of clcInfo, AKA the "FCFS Rotation Helper".

I actually use the Ret version as well, though I don't use it for prot. I assume it should be fairly good for prot as well.

Adeya wrote:(2) And until the paladin's melee haste reduces the global cooldown and the spell cooldowns of CS, HoR, J, AS, and SoR (et al.) as described for the Sanctity of Battle. The way that the benefits of the Seal of Insight are stated apparently does not imply that any spell cooldowns are shortened -- a 10% reduction in "casting speed" does not seem to have any meaning for an "instant cast" spell, so I suppose it affects Flash of Light and Redemption .... is there one that I am overlooking?

Sanctity of Battle compresses the whole rotation, because it reduces the GCD and cooldowns of all of our rotational spells. It does that based on melee haste, though. Seal of Insight gives 10% spell haste, so it doesn't reduce cooldowns.

Adeya wrote:(1) Is there a Haste "cap" for Protection spec paladins? What I would really like is a formula to convert the numeric total of Hast to the percentage shown on the paper doll, and vice-versa. :-)

(2) Do you know of a formulary relationship between melee haste and spell haste? For example, my paladin's current melee haste is +23.16% and spell haste is +35.47%. The WoW API has a function to get the paladin's current spell haste, but there isn't one for obtaining the paladin's current melee haste.

(1) There's no specific cap - you can keep stacking haste as much as you want. It stops being very effective after 50% though, because the GCD has a 1.00-second minimum, and most of the benefit of haste comes from compressing the rotation.

(2) Melee haste is just your haste rating divided by 425. Spell haste should be a little higher because of the 10% bonus from Seal of Insight and/or the 5% bonus from the raid buff. Note that these are multiplicative, so if you have 23.16% melee haste and Seal of Insight active, you'll have 1.2316*1.1=1.3548, or 35.48% spell haste (again, 35.47% on char sheet because they floor() instead of round()). With the raid buff you'd have 1.2316*1.1*1.05=1.4225, or 42.25% spell haste.

Adeya wrote:Lucky you! In my experience with WoW, all pseudorandom number generator outcomes for everything are always in "streaks", and they pass through "normal" only briefly on the way from one extreme to another. (Would you like an example for the distribution of Black Trillium Ore vs. White Trillium Ore?) If Divine Purpose actually did proc at least once out of every four times that I cast EF or SoR, then I would not have made the remarks that I did. It won't proc twice out of eight or even sixteen casts without doing so three or four consecutive times, eventually, then nothing. It does as I described. It always has. Indeed, often I wonder whether the WoW developers do implement and use an actual pseudorandom number generator in the game software. If they do, then it does not seem to me to be a very good one. Or maybe it has a bug(s).

They use a standard uniformly-distributed (pseudo)-random number generator. You probably remember the streaky times more than the more uniform times, but they both exist. I get streaks of procs or lack of procs too, that's just how random numbers work.

Adeya wrote:May I remind you that you can't use WoG if you select the talent for EF?

The instant-heal part of Eternal Flame is identical to WoG. You don't lose that by taking the talent. I tend to use "WoG" to refer to the instant heal and "EF" to refer to the HoT for clarity.

Adeya wrote:By the way, thank you very much for telling me about Text Area Cache! It works very well in my experience so far. :-)

No problem!

Adeya wrote:If by "maintenance buff" you mean that you don't believe that Eternal Flame should be activated and refreshed for continuous coverage, then what can I say?

In my experience so far -- I don't have the 4-piece Tier 16 set, or any set at all, yet, just the T16 Raid Finder gauntlets -- ordinarily my paladin can use SoR at least twice after activating or refreshing EF and maybe 3 times every third or fourth rotation. So there are only two or three BoG stacked. (This is while using the CLCProt addon which I've been updating and upgrading for WoW 5.4 MoP, so the rotation is as close to "perfect" as it can be, at least until I can obtain some data that might allow me to tweak it.)

How much haste do you have? Note that you can execute a rotation perfectly but very slow, in which case you're still doing it wrong.

Adeya wrote:The argument for Eternal Flame is that it mitigates the effects of damage spikes and allows your healers to respond more effectively. Theck has written about this convincingly: http://www.sacredduty.net/2013/09/04/ef-you/. You must have EF in place before those spikes occur. If you cannot predict exactly when they will occur and cast EF accordingly, then, at least, you need to have EF active before they are likely to be inflicted.

Just because Theck throws some numbers out there, that doesn't mean that has to be the be-all, end-all way to play. Consider it a vast source of information and wisdom that'll help you, but you still need to work with it on a case by case basis.

As for EF having to be up in front... why? Sure, the EF hot helps mitigate spikes a bit. But the EF cast instantly tops me back up when I do get a big spike, and THEN applies a 30 second EF hot. If I cast EF at 100% health, and then get that big spike, a single EF tick is not going to top me back up... I rather not have EF ticking when I don't really need it, because I got this strong EF cast in my pocket, to pop whenever I need some burst healing.

Adeya wrote:Frankly, your comment about "... having a 5 BoG EF in the pocket ..." puzzles me. When SoR generates a Bastion of Glory, the buff has a duration of 20 seconds. Each time that another BoG is applied, the duration is refreshed for 20 seconds. So far I have not observed whether using SoR after the stack reaches 5 BoG will refresh the duration without, of course, adding another BoG to the stack (I doubt that it will). So maybe you can maintain a stack of 5 BoG for as long as you use SoR at least once before it expires. Regardless, it seems to be a very expensive "reserve" to acquire and maintain -- especially if the duration cannot be refreshed beyond the last 20 seconds of the 5th BoG. You had just as well cast it regardless of your health, especially if you know that a barrage of incoming damage is imminent.

The duration DOES refresh even if you're on 5 stacks already. And if I know a barrage of incoming damage in imminent, I much rather wait until I get the first hit of that barrage, cast EF to immediately heal back to full, and then have the hot ticking for the next 30 seconds.

Adeya wrote:EF is not all that great for after-the-fact healing, insofar as the initial burst is not nearly as much as what WoG provides, even if EF is cast with a stack of 3+ BoG. Casting WoG with the same BoG stack is just as strong or stronger and the healing is in one lump sum. :-) Of course, you cannot have both EF and WoG.

EF, especially on 5 stacks, can easily bring me from almost dead to fully healed. I'm not sure where you got the idea from that EF initial's heal is less than WoG. To my knowledge, it's not. According to Wowhead, it's even slightly larger...

Why would we want both WoG and EF? EF is WoG+hot.

Adeya wrote:But, again, from all that I've read, apparently there can be a significant risk that the paladin will die from a cascade of incoming damage spikes before the player's cast of EF (or WoG) can do much about them. So the best practice is to have EF in place before the damage is done. Eternal Flame is not Word of Glory. They are not interchangable. They are different tools for staying alive.

You got this all backwards. If there's a burst of damage close to each other, there's a larger chance that I will be able to react to it myself, than that the hot tick lands in between them by pure chance.

Adeya wrote:

Adeya wrote:But Divine Purpose is shooting craps. Sometimes my paladin is flooded with the free casts, and all the while that is going on I know for a fact that soon they will rarely happen, if at all, for a long time. They can be rather beneficial if I am lucky enough to get them at the right time. But I cannot rely upon them at all. (As I have often observed, if the design of your game depends upon pseudorandom "rolls" to determine the outcome of events, then the player's satsifaction with your game depends upon pseudorandom events, thus, consequently, they determine the amount of your company's revenue.)

Holy Avenger. :) It's similar to a burst of DP procs and then a long time of nothing, but at least you can choose when the "procs" apply. Sure, it has a lower total gain than Divine Favor, but being able to control your gain makes it so much better.

Yes, HA is my favorite L75 talent, but I suspect that it is not always the best for every fight. Sanctified Wrath is actually better for fights with a lot of mobs, or if you're tanking adds. Avenging Wrath lasts 50% longer, so you kill them more of them and more quickly. You cast Judgment twice as often, thus roughly doubling the amount of damage you do with it (+20% for AW), and it generates 2 HP instead of 1. Add the Grand Crusader procs, and you may not have a stack of 5 BoG to refresh EF, but you should have no trouble getting 3 (even with ilvl 541 gear).

Uhm, what is making Sanctified Wrath stronger to survive against AoE packs? For one, it actually fills 3 out of every 4 global cooldowns, so there is a bigger chance you're wasting Grand Crusader procs than with Holy Avenger. And then there's the fact that HA will be up more often than AW.

Unless you're talking about DPS, not survivability... in that case, you could be right, I don't know. I haven't done the math recently. Still, SW forces you to use Judgment a lot, and push HotR back, which can't be that much of an advantage in an AoE situation... Add to that that you can stack HA and AW most of the time, if you're looking for specific burst moments...

Thels wrote:I'm not sure where you got the idea from that EF initial's heal is less than WoG. To my knowledge, it's not. According to Wowhead, it's even slightly larger...

If I remember correctly, there's been a bug for quite some time where the EF tooltip was indicating a smaller heal than WoG

Worldie wrote:Bubbletaunting consists in using Divine Shield and then istantly taunting the mob/boss, forcing it to hit you while immune for 3 seconds, and then cancel Divine Shield (or let it go on whatever person is 2nd in threat).

It's usually a way to buy 3-4 more seconds into a enraged boss, or to delay a taunt from the other tank.

The technique had its glory during Wotlk when with 2 taunts you were able to force a target into you for 6 seconds while being immune.

Thanks, Worldie. Retribution folks talk about using it to remove adverse effects, then canceling it so they can return to producing DPS. Frankly, I don't know how to "cancel" Divine Shield, or transfer it to another player. Correction: Okay, I suppose you "cancel" Divine Shield like any other "buff" by right-clicking on it on the buffbar. /facepalm

But how do you "let it go on whatever person is 2nd in threat"??

Maybe more to the point, given the typically desparate circumstances under which I use Divine Shield, canceling is the last thing of which I'm thinking. Its duration is plenty short enough as it is. Rather, I try to take as much advantage of it as possible to heal, assess the situation, and prepare to return refreshed and ready to resume dispatching my enemies into oblivion.

Whatever the merit that canceling it might have, since the normal cooldown is 10 minutes, ordinarily the player can use it only once during a fight, or maybe twice with Unbreakable Spirit. Perhaps that is the reason that some people regard it as having so little importance that they would use it for a "bubble taunt" or just to remove a debuff(s). But for me, it is the ultimate storm shelter and emergency escape hatch. :-)

POSTSCRIPT EDIT:

Worldie wrote:

Thels wrote: I'm not sure where you got the idea from that EF initial's heal is less than WoG. To my knowledge, it's not. According to Wowhead, it's even slightly larger...

If I remember correctly, there's been a bug for quite some time where the EF tooltip was indicating a smaller heal than WoG.

ARRRGGGGGGHHHH!! For what it is worth, I suppose that I shouldn't believe that someone's calculations in a forum post were correct without verifying the data. But it would not surprise me if they obtained the data for their comparison from the respective EF and WoG tooltips since, after all, that is probably where I would get it. I made some notes of the calculations, but I cannot find the sheet amongst the motley assortment that has accumulated.

Thanks again. :-)

Generally people use a macro for Divine Shield:

/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

So that the first time you hit it Divine Shield is applied (it's not active, so the /cancelaura does nothing), and the second time you hit it Divine Shield is cancelled (it's on cooldown, so it doesn't get re-activated after the cancel).

When you bubble you have no threat, but if you taunt while bubbled the boss will fixate on your for 3 seconds. After 3 seconds, if you remove the bubble the boss will stay on you. If you don't, the boss will go after who's highest on the threat table. This is what was meant by "going on whatever person is 2nd in threat", though technically you are an artificial first, being it's a fixate instead of a threat response.

It's a handy tool to use. If you get smashed, you can bubble-taunt to gain 3 seconds of immunity to allow the healers to catch up before you take damage again, without losing control of the boss.

As far as "just to remove buffs" goes, there are plenty of fights that go from mandatory 2 tanks to solo-tankable because we can drop the stacking debuff. That can make a big difference if your raid needs a bit more DPS, or if your off-tank isn't very well geared or if you're in LFR and your off-tank is incapable of avoiding the ground effects on Durumu. Stack management can easily make the difference between a wipe and a kill on that fight.

Kelerei wrote:And need I add, still useful today: as Divine Shield and Hand of Protection clears some (not all!) debuffs, tankadins who have mastered "bubble taunt" have been able to break tank swap mechanics and solo tank encounters intended for two tanks, particularly with Clemency talented. Durumu in Throne of Thunder stands out as a very recent example.

So far I haven't encountered Durumu or been in any Throne of Thunder Raid as a tank. I don't recall whether I've encountered Durumu while my paladin was in Retribution spec.

Why would anyone want to "break tank swap mechanics"? .... Okay, I don't understand the phrase. Only once have I taken over tanking a boss from another tank, and we finished that fight without transferring control back to him. And that was in a Cataclysm raid, the name of which escapes me ATM.

The universal "Haste cap" appears to be 50% insofar as the global cooldown has a minimum duration of 1 second. Although, AFAIK, the cooldowns for abilities affected by Sanctity of Battle continue to diminish after melee Haste passes 50%.

I've seen only one paper doll for a paladin who had Haste of 50%, and the player reported that SimC suggested that he reduce Haste to favor Mastery to maximize his Retribution DPS. There was a discussion about this on the main EJ Retribution thread and, the last that I heard, the recommended Haste cap was 40%.

Insofar as the tank needs to inflict damage to maintain threat, I wonder whether compromising that -- if such be the case -- by increasing Haste to 50% in order to reduce the GCD and ability cooldowns is an acceptable trade-off.

Regarding formulae, check out Theck's Haste Breakpoints for Tankadins post on Sacred Duty.

Will do, thanks!

Koatanga, thank-you for your remarks. I forgot about using /cancelaura. A player can enter the command on the Chat Frame command line, too. :-)

Koatanga wrote:Generally people use a macro for Divine Shield:

/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

So that the first time you hit it Divine Shield is applied (it's not active, so the /cancelaura does nothing), and the second time you hit it Divine Shield is cancelled (it's on cooldown, so it doesn't get re-activated after the cancel).

When you bubble you have no threat, but if you taunt while bubbled the boss will fixate on your for 3 seconds. After 3 seconds, if you remove the bubble the boss will stay on you. If you don't, the boss will go after who's highest on the threat table. This is what was meant by "going on whatever person is 2nd in threat", though technically you are an artificial first, being it's a fixate instead of a threat response.

It's a handy tool to use. If you get smashed, you can bubble-taunt to gain 3 seconds of immunity to allow the healers to catch up before you take damage again, without losing control of the boss.

Ahhhhh.... I forgot that the tank loses threat when they use Divine Shield. So I can see how the "bubble taunt" can be a valid tactic. Whether I would ever use it, I don't know, because customarily (so to speak) I've only used Divine Shield as a "storm shelter and emergency escape hatch". In my experience, 3 seconds is too short for anyone to respond to anything.

Internet latency guarantees that. These 3-second and 6-second durations for interrupts and immunity to stuns, etc., make them so useless in practice that I seldom bother. Hand of Freedom? Six seconds of "freedom" to do what? Rebuke? If the boss isn't immune and the game host receives my input in time to acknowledge and apply it, then the boss is casting the same spell no less than 6 seconds later anyway.

As a case in point, the "trap" that the Lich King drops behind him in WotLK (the Heroic raid on the throne) will blow any PC off the platform and all members of the party go with them, to their deaths. The player supposedly has 5 seconds to get out of the trap before that happens. But by the time that the game client displays the "trap" and the player responds by moving their PC out of it, the game host has already concluded that the PC is still in the trap and acts accordingly. The last time we tried it, I moved my character from behind the Lich King, completely clear of the area where the trap would fall before it was even shown as cast by the game client. We were still wiped, and everyone blamed me. So I left that guild.

As far as "just to remove buffs" goes, there are plenty of fights that go from mandatory 2 tanks to solo-tankable because we can drop the stacking debuff. That can make a big difference if your raid needs a bit more DPS, or if your off-tank isn't very well geared or if you're in LFR and your off-tank is incapable of avoiding the ground effects on Durumu. Stack management can easily make the difference between a wipe and a kill on that fight.

Okay, I'll keep my eyes open if I continue tanking.

This discussion has reminded me of so many utterly incomprehensible contrary outcomes of various past events that I'm not even sure that I want to continue playing WoW. I cannot afford a Tier 3 connection even if the aging computer is still more than adequate to play the game (although Blizzard tells me that my computer and Internet service connection are better than anyone really needs to play WoW).

The local telco had an excellent ADSL staff, but their business practices and policies were atrocious (e.g., double-billing that they refuse to acknowledge, let alone correct) so I went to Cox Communications. I used the tracert utility to diagnose latency problems, and discovered that the Level 3 router which connected the internal Cox network to the Internet backbone was dropping packets. When I contacted Cox, they refused to talk about it, let alone acknowledge it. Cox just wants everyone to pay them $100/mo for cable TV and extra for "special" programs to boot.

It is all well and good to discuss the game as if these "external events" do not affect it. Yet, the reality is that the WoW developers design and implement the game as if it were played via a low-latency, stable synchronous network instead of the unstable, high-latency asynchronous Internet. Discussions with many players whom I've met reveal that they do not participate in either PvP or raiding primarily because commonplace "technical difficulties", about which they can do nothing, cripple their ability to play. Your experience may differ.

Thels wrote:

Adeya wrote: Yes, HA is my favorite L75 talent, but I suspect that it is not always the best for every fight. Sanctified Wrath is actually better for fights with a lot of mobs, or if you're tanking adds. Avenging Wrath lasts 50% longer, so you kill them more of them and more quickly. You cast Judgment twice as often, thus roughly doubling the amount of damage you do with it (+20% for AW), and it generates 2 HP instead of 1. Add the Grand Crusader procs, and you may not have a stack of 5 BoG to refresh EF, but you should have no trouble getting 3 (even with ilvl 541 gear).

Uhm, what is making Sanctified Wrath stronger to survive against AoE packs? For one, it actually fills 3 out of every 4 global cooldowns, so there is a bigger chance you're wasting Grand Crusader procs than with Holy Avenger. And then there's the fact that HA will be up more often than AW.

Unless you're talking about DPS, not survivability... in that case, you could be right, I don't know. I haven't done the math recently. Still, SW forces you to use Judgment a lot, and push HotR back, which can't be that much of an advantage in an AoE situation... Add to that that you can stack HA and AW most of the time, if you're looking for specific burst moments...

It is unclear to me what you mean as to Sanctified Wrath: "... it actually fills 3 out of every 4 global cooldowns, ..."

As to HA being "up more often" than AW, funny that you should mention it. I've been scratching my head over that since it became clear that HA is off cooldown before AW, after I forgot to put the macro that I use to launch them simultaneously on the action bar. The macro is one that I created for Retribution originally. So, here is why: in Retribution spec, both Avenging Wrath and Holy Avenger have a cooldown of 2 minutes, although AW has a duration of 20 sec. and HA has a duration (now) of 18 sec. So I launch AW followed immediately by HA and the difference of 2 sec. in their subsequent availability is hardly noticeable.

But in Protection spec, I've discovered (thanks to you!) that AW has a cooldown of 3 minutes and HA has a cooldown of 2 minutes. Now I have HA on the action bar as well as AW and I'm not using the Retribution macro to launch them. Not that you cannot launch them simultaneously when both are off cooldown -- a great increase in DPS, for sure! -- but I would probably not want to wait another minute (literally) for AW when HA becomes available afterward.

With respect to using Sanctified Wrath in multi-target fights, yes, I am thinking primarily of damage-dealing instead of survivability. With HA your paladin kills a hostile that has 1000 health with 8,000 damage. With SW, the damage is not nearly so much without the 30% HA buff, but it is enough. So, in that respect, HA is overkill and the duration is too short to make it as effective as AW with SW, which lasts 30 sec. Yes, you will use Judgment a lot, and it will "push back" HotR, but the quicker kills of the respective targets make that acceptable, the 20% AW buff to its damage makes it a good hammer, and you get 2 HP instead of the 1 that HotR grants.

Also, in multi-target Eternal Flame really shines, making it easy for the healer to keep me going and even allowing them to heal other toons who need it. Its HoT is strong enough to prevent the small amounts of damage that is typical from accumulating. The health bar constantly veers back-and-forth over the same short range of low - high percentages. Occasionally a spike can occur, especially when fighting Mantids when a bigger one is accompanied by a group of smaller ones, but the healer ordinarily takes care of that. When they don't, then a pause between fights for a Flash Heal does.

While Divine Shield is up, you keep your threat, but you cannot get aggro except by fixates. Reckoning causes the target to fixate you for 3 seconds, (Threat is a value that mobs use to determine who they want to attack. Aggro is having a mob actually attack you. They're related, but not the same thing.) so you can Divine Shield-Taunt tank a boss for 3 seconds, which can be useful if the boss uses a heavy instant nuke on the tank. For general damage reduction it's not required.

Either way, except for the taunt trick, popping Divine Shield means the boss will wander over to who's next in thread, which you generally don't want. Therefor, people macro their Divine Shield, so they can quickly double tap the hotkey so it's gone instantly, and the boss stays on them. This is useful for clearing debuffs, which had several uses in ToT, but not so much in SoO, as most of the tank swap debuffs were immune to it. It does work on the stacks from Xaril and Kilruk, allowing a paladin tank to tank the first, and then later on the second too.

For retribution, you also want to dispel Divine Shield the moment you're safe, as it halves your damage output, but if there's heavy AoE going on, it might be wiser to keep it running, especially since Divine Shield prevents you from using Lay on Hands for the next minute.



The issue with raiding is that raids currently have 2 tanks, and Blizzard wants to enforce that both tanks have something to do. For a lot of fights, this results in the boss placing a stacking debuff on the tank, causing the tank to take more and more damage, so you want to have the second tank take over, so the first tank loses his debuffs. When the first tank loses his debuffs, he takes over again so that the second tank can lose his debuffs. If you do not do this, eventually the debuff causes the tank to take so much damage that he gets oneshot.

(Note that this doesn't really apply to LFR. While the stacking debuff is there, there's usually a cap, or it may hit so weak that even getting all the stacks for the entire fight is not really a problem. They don't want LFR groups to wipe just because 1 tank is not actively taunting.)

On some fights, such as Durumu and Iron Qon, it basically means that the second tank is just picking his nose and doing meager DPS to the boss, while he waits for his turn to taunt. If you can manage to reset the debuffs without swapping tanks, you only need 1 tank, and the second tank could then be replaced by a DPS (or switch to a DPS offspec), which means an overall better performance. On Durumu this has the added advantage that you don't have a nasty dot ticking away on a second tank, so it's easier on the healing as well.



At 21250 Haste rating, your base haste reaches 50%. (Note that there are buffs to attack speed and spell haste, which causes your melee attacks and spells to have more than 50% haste at this point, but since SoB goes on base haste, we really only look at that.) So getting your base haste up to 21250 rating/50% can certainly be useful. Note that Thok's Tail Tip DOES amplify base haste, so you can use that trinket to get to the 50% softcap.

Up to 50%, haste reduces your GCD and your attacks by the same amount. At 0% haste, you have a 1.5 second GCD and a 4.5 second CD on CS, so you can CS once every 3 GCDs. At 50% haste, you have a 1.0 second GCD and a 3.0 second CD on CS, so you can still CS once every 3 GCDs. Now imagine that you gain more haste to reduce the CD of CS so 2.5 seconds:

You start with CS. It's now on cooldown for 2.5 seconds.
After 1 second (your GCD), you press J. CS is now on cooldown for 1.5 second.
After 2 seconds, you have 0.5 seconds remaining on the CD for CS. If you wait for it to come off, you are basically wasting time, and pressing less buttons than with 3.0 second CS. But if you press another ability, you push CS back, so you still only cast it once every 3 seconds, making all the haste beyond 50% useless.

Ok, technically, haste beyond 50% is not useless, but it's a lot less useful up to 50%, because after 50%, it doesn't allow us to press abilities more often, due to the 1 second GCD cap.



For retribution, the same thing applies, but there's something else going on as well, that causes retridins to stop around 40% haste. The thing is, Haste, Mastery and Crit amplify one another, but don't amplify themselves.

Gaining 5% haste is the same increase in damage if you're at 0% haste or at 45% haste. It's a linear increase. So getting more haste doesn't make haste better.

However, gaining 5% mastery is a lot better at 45% haste than it is at 0% haste, because at 45% haste you attack much more often than at 0% haste, so there are much more attacks to get boosted by mastery. The same applies to crit.

Therefor, at around 40% haste, retribution paladins start switching towards mastery.



From the sounds of it, you seem to be unable to react quickly to what's going on (It doesn't matter if that's due to player skill, poor PC or poor internet). That does drastically change things. Heck, if you are very slow to react, and it's hard to follow your rotation, you likely don't even WANT haste to begin with. You're likely better off with lots of mastery, followed by dodge. Their passive benefits would help someone with major lag a lot better. Also knowing that you likely won't react in time to a damage spike would mean that it's recommended to keep EF running all the time, though if you usually cast it with only 2 BoG stacks, perhaps SS is the better option for you.

In general, stunning a mob means it won't attack you for 6 seconds, making it a MAJOR defensive CD. It also stops it from running away for 6 seconds, giving you 6 seconds time to build threat on it. Downside is that you don't get vengeance from it.

Hand of Freedom is seriously awesome, and can be used reactively. Not only does it prevent movement impairing effects to affect you for 6 seconds, it also removes all movement impairing effects already on you. Got caught in some kind of trap? Hand of Freedom and continue running.

Interrupts are very, very important during raiding. A lot of interruptible abilities will cause a player to die if not interrupted properly. (Assuming Heroic and in some cases Normal. Flex is usually outhealable, and in LFR you are likely not to notice the effects in the first place.) Of course, in such cases, people usually set up an interrupt rotation. "Johnny first, then Pete, then Mike, then Alex, then back to Johnny."



Sanctified Wrath and filling out 3 out of 4 GCDs:

Our normal rotation looks like this: CS-J-X-CS-X-J-CS-X-X-repeat. We maximize CS cast, and maximize J cast after that, so 5 out of 9 casts are CS/J, leaving 4 gaps (the Xs). These gaps we fill with our other spells, starting with AS, and followed by HW, HoW, Consecration and the Level 90 talent. There's an X at least once every 3 GCDs, which are the moments where we consume our Grand Crusader buff.

Note that I didn't include SotR/EF, since they're not on the global cooldown. Therefor, Holy Avenger does not alter this rotation.

When we talent into Sanctified Wrath and press Avenging Wrath, J suddenly becomes the most important button, due to it's CD of only 2 GCDs, which changes our rotation into: J-CS-J-X-repeat. Now you only have an X every 4 GCDs, instead of being 1-3 GCDs from each other. The problem is that Grand Crusader doesn't stack. If we only have room to consume it once every 4 GCDs, there's a much bigger chance that we're wasting Grand Crusader procs, because we got 2 on top of each other, then when we can consume the buff once every 1-3 GCDs.



On protection, I DO macro HA and AW together. Since neither ability is on the GCD, I can press the button and even if only one of the abilities is available, it'll use that ability. It generally comes down to them triggering at different times (except at the start), due to their asynchronous CDs. Do note that the icon only displays one of them, so you need either an addon or a second button to display the second CD. An easy solution is to have the macro show HA (it is very rare that you want HA but not AW), and then keep a second icon for AW elsewhere on your skillbar. You don't need to hotkey this separate AW button, as it's not really needed to suddenly press AW, but not HA, but it can happen that you can use AW but want to save HA as a defensive cooldown for some burst DPS later on.

Note that for retribution, Sanctified Wrath is better than Holy Avenger. Also, if you have the Galakras trinket, AW will have a CD of less than 2 minutes, while HA remains 2 minutes, so they become asynchronous as well. Best to simply talent Sanctified Wrath. Again, I macro Avenging Wrath and GoAK together, even though it often ends up them activating separately.



Again, I haven't done the math, so I'm not too sure about HA vs SW for AoE damage, but I fail to see your points.

First off, if the boss is at 1000 health, then I literally don't care about my CDs. He's gonna die no matter which of my abilities I spawn. Overkill is not something you generally have to worry about, like, at all...

Second, SW forces you to do more single target DPS than HA:
9 GCDs of HA: HotR-J-X-HotR-X-J-HotR-X-X- 3 HotRs, 2 Judgments, and 4 Xs that can be used to consume Grand Crusader, or pop Consecration or Holy Wrath.
9 GCDs of SW: HotR-J-X-J-HotR-J-X-J-HotR- 3 HotRs, 4 Judgments, and only 2 Xs that can be used to consume Grand Crusader. Since you're tanking several mobs, getting at least one Grand Crusader proc every 4 GCDs is quite likely, meaning that you don't even get to place a Consecration...

AoE tanking leads to smoother damage intake in general. Avoidance suddenly starts to become a lot more interesting. With 50% avoidance, you still have a pretty good chance of getting hit by a boss for 6 seconds in a row. The chance of getting hit by 4-6 mobs for 6 seconds in a row is minuscule. With larger numbers, Avoidance becomes statistically reliable. Naturally, EF indeed also starts smoothing things out, but the same thing applies. If you're at 100% at the start, you can wait for your health to drop to say 50%, and then cast it to get you back to 100% and enjoy the hot from there on.

Adeya wrote:... these 3-second and 6-second durations for interrupts and immunity to stuns, etc., make them so useless in practice that I seldom bother. Hand of Freedom? Six seconds of "freedom" to do what? Rebuke? If the boss isn't immune and the game host receives my input in time to acknowledge and apply it, then the boss is casting the same spell no less than 6 seconds later anyway.

As Thels has already said in the post above me, don't discount utility spells such as Hand of Freedom.

I'll give you an example where I find it useful. In Garrosh P1, when it's my turn to take the great clump of adds, I'll tank them close to Garry for the DPS to AoE everything down as best they can, then, when the Ion Star starts rolling across the room, drag them over into the path, pop a glyphed Blinding Light to make sure they stay there long enough to be hit, then get the hell out of dodge. The problem is if the adds have decided to put Hamstring on me at that moment, so I pop Hand of Freedom on myself immediately after Blinding Light, which clears Hamstring and, together with Speed of Light, enables me to get out of there.

Adeya wrote:This discussion has reminded me of so many utterly incomprehensible contrary outcomes of various past events that I'm not even sure that I want to continue playing WoW. I cannot afford a Tier 3 connection even if the aging computer is still more than adequate to play the game (although Blizzard tells me that my computer and Internet service connection are better than anyone really needs to play WoW).

The local telco had an excellent ADSL staff, but their business practices and policies were atrocious (e.g., double-billing that they refuse to acknowledge, let alone correct) so I went to Cox Communications. I used the tracert utility to diagnose latency problems, and discovered that the Level 3 router which connected the internal Cox network to the Internet backbone was dropping packets. When I contacted Cox, they refused to talk about it, let alone acknowledge it. Cox just wants everyone to pay them $100/mo for cable TV and extra for "special" programs to boot.

It is all well and good to discuss the game as if these "external events" do not affect it. Yet, the reality is that the WoW developers design and implement the game as if it were played via a low-latency, stable synchronous network instead of the unstable, high-latency asynchronous Internet. Discussions with many players whom I've met reveal that they do not participate in either PvP or raiding primarily because commonplace "technical difficulties", about which they can do nothing, cripple their ability to play. Your experience may differ.

I'm in Cape Town; my realm is somewhere over in the EU. That's at least ~200ms of latency due to physical distance that I can't do a thing about, and I even have the advantage of being close to the undersea cable landing station (50 km north of me): packets from my raid teammates over in District 9 land either transit down here and then out, or transit to the east coast and then go up through the Red Sea undersea cable network depending on which ISP they're signed up with, which adds more latency on to their experience.

And yet, we're all find our ways and means of dealing with it. It does affect our performance: we've only just cleared normal SoO and only downed our first heroic boss (Norushen) on Tuesday evening. But it's not insurmountable.

Sometimes I forget how convenient it is to have a ping of under 10ms to the game servers <3

Thels wrote:Just because Theck throws some numbers out there, that doesn't mean that has to be the be-all, end-all way to play. Consider it a vast source of information and wisdom that'll help you, but you still need to work with it on a case by case basis.

More to the point, you have to consider where those numbers come from. I've used several different models (action priority lists) for refreshing EF, some more effective than others. I tried to write one that used EF reactively, but never hit upon one that was an increase in TMI. That may just have been a limitation of my conditionals, though, or maybe an under/over-estimate of the health threshold I was using.

If you want to play with it, a line like /eternal_flame,if=incoming_damage_X>Y&holy_power>3 would try to fire off a 3+ HP EF whenever you took more than Y damage in X time. The incoming_damage_X conditional is documented here. I tended to use something like "5s" for X and "health.max*0.3" for Y, but it may be that I needed to be looking at shorter time windows or larger/smaller spike thresholds.

In any event, the trade-off you're making by sitting on EF is (potentially) being able to mitigate spikes better by reactively healing a sudden large spike rather than relying on the HoT to do it for you. This depends a lot on exactly how good your reactions are and how well you're predicting your own damage intake. On paper, it makes a lot of sense. I've certainly done it myself to handle predictable spikes. For example, choosing to delay re-applying EF until immediately after Deadly_Boss_Ability rather than doing so immediately before the ability (if I'm already near full health during the cast).

In practice, I think it's hard to use effectively just due to the ridiculous size of the HoT at high Vengeance levels. If your spike is of the trickle-down variety, and you assume that you let the HoT lapse in anticipation of using it reactively, you're comparing 2-3 HoT ticks to the base heal. You really only "win" if those 2-3 HoT ticks would have been overheal.

Note that all of that only really applies to cases where you're letting the old HoT expire. It's perfectly reasonable to delay EF when your previous EF HoT is still ticking, because there's little opportunity cost there. Given how quickly we re-build 5 stacks of BoG, this is the scenario I usually find myself in.

Worldie wrote:

Thels wrote:I'm not sure where you got the idea from that EF initial's heal is less than WoG. To my knowledge, it's not. According to Wowhead, it's even slightly larger...

If I remember correctly, there's been a bug for quite some time where the EF tooltip was indicating a smaller heal than WoG

The tooltips were incorrect for a large part of MoP. But I think they were fixed in 5.3 or 5.4 - they should be identical now. The spell data very clearly shows that they're identical:





Both have a base of 5239.27-5837.41, both have an SP coefficient of 0.490. Both tooltips reference the values in effect #1 (the WoG tooltip is actually in a different spell because of ~reasons~ which aren't that important to this discussion).