Mechanics & Play changes:Welcome to
Pandas and Pikachus Mist of Pandaria!
Q:
@^%$@!! Everything is different!?A:
Yes. 5.0 is a massive reboot. Yes, even bigger that the 3.0 and 4.0 reboots. Blzzard have given up on re-jigging the Talent trees and deleted them - every attempt by Blizzard to avoid "
Here's your cookie-cutter build" has failed so they gave up. The primary concept of "tanking" has also been radically altered since the second half of Cataclysm: Threat is no longer something we're supposed to worry about. If you're tanking a mob, you're not supposed to have to work hard to hold its attention. Every tank is now "
DK-Cataclysm-Flavoured" - you use active abilities to
take less damage rather than to
generate more threat.
Q:
You're biased!A:
Yes, very.Q:
You said that in the Philosophy section!A:
I'm repeating it to make the following point in case someone skipped the first post; and to say this:My advice is based on what will make you a successful tank, assuming you have the ability to be successful. That means I'm not going to advise you to do everything it takes to do the most threat or what it takes to be the most survivable. I'm going to tell you what you need to know to do your job!Q:
So what's my job?A:
Thanks for asking.Your job has four parts; in general the earlier parts are more important, but success at a tank requires you to balance them to some extent. They are:
- Keep the healer alive. It's their job to keep you alive.
- Help the healer do their job - stay alive! This is not the same thing as taking minimum damage. You want to be easy to heal - in MoP, being easy to heal doesn't mean taking the least damage, it means taking smooth damage. If you die, the healer's going to die eventually and you failed job 1.
- Keep the DPS alive. They're going to kill the shit that's trying to kill you, and unless they're shit, they're easily going to out-DPS you. If everything's dead, the healer can't die and you can't take any damage - Job 1 & Job 2 success. Some people think you should let the DPS fend for themselves - and I'll be the first to admit that I let stupid people die. But saving them is going to help in the long run. If they're too awful to live, don't group with them.
- Do as much damage as possible Threat doesn't really matter anymore (deliberate Blizzard design goal since half way through Cataclysm). But doing a lot of damage gets things dead faster. If things are dead, they can't kill you or your healer. The sooner things are dead, the less chance your healer will go OOM and the less chance he'll fail at his job 1 (keeping the tank alive).
Theck's mathcraft tells you the deep details of how to do 2 & 4 - I'll summarise hist stuff, but feel free to consult his stuff for the details. I'm sometimes going to give you advice that contradicts the maths, because I'm trying to help you see the big picture.The rest of FAQ will stick to tanking & paladin mechanics.Q:
Zomg, what happened to the talent trees?A:
Deleted! The things masquerading as talent trees aren't even trees - they bear no resemblance to any previous version's talent trees. They're perks; and in general you can just pick anything you like. They're also cheap and fast to change - think "
changing a glyph" rather than "
visit a trainer". You pick a spec at level 10 and that gets you all your spec-specific abilities, specials, spells - pretty much everything you would have (
had to have) picked as a talent in previous expansions. Some you get at 10 (passive abilities), the rest are collected as you level up (active abilities). The "talents" give you stuff that's interesting but flexible - the first paladin talent is a perfect example: Every paladin gets to run fast, but how do
you want to run fast? A cooldown for fucking fast, judgement as a closer or just always a little faster than normal? I'll give some specific advice, but it isn't game-breaking to pick any talent you like (which is kind of the point).
Q:
What? I have to pick a spec?A: Yup. Click a button and pick Holy, Ret or Prot. Picking a spec defines your "
Mastery" bonus and gets you your signature abilities:
- Holy get Holy Shock; +400%[b] Mana; spirit-based mana regen; 25% bonus healing and "can't miss" with Judge, Holy Shock & Denounce.
- Ret get Templar's Verdict; +10% to 2H damage; Spellpower hard-fixed to 50% of AP; mana regen (2% every 6 seconds) and +30% to WoG and FoL heals.
- Prot get Avenger' Shield; theier tanking passives (Stam, Block, Crit reduction); Vengeance (see below); mana regen (2% every 6 seconds); Spellpower hard-fixed to 50% of AP and WoG is off the GCD
Q:
Huh? What's Mastery?A:
Every spec gets a semi-unique nifty boost from high-end gear.
Old Problem: Too many trinket and ranged-slot thingies to make when you have over 30 different specs, also people whine about wrong crit/haste/hit ratios for their special snowflake spec.
Solution: Mastery. Just think of it as "Awesome Rating". Whatever spec you are, right now, Mastery = Awesome. The mastery bonuses for tankadins are:
- Increases your block chance. Yes, really - Blizzard changed things so you can't get CTC (AKA Block Cap) anymore.
- When you hit Shield of the Righteous, Mastery increases the damage reduction buff you receive.
- ShoR also gives a stacking buff called "Bastion of Glory" that increases the power of your WoG. Mastery makes BoG bigger. So when you BoG your WoG you go Oh God!
Q:
What? We can't block every hit?A:
Correct. Q:
Turdburger! Why?A: [b]Too hard to balance, Blizzard changed block to to a "2-roll" system.
Tankadins spent the whole of Cataclysm arguing with nerfs to Mastery and changes to our stat conversion in a (failed) desperate attempt on Blizzrad's part to avoid us blocking every hit. THeck, myself and a few other bloggers pointed out the problem during the Cata beta, but like, fucking whatever. Anyway - at Block Cap, AKA CTC (Combat Table Coverage) Tankadins never took an unblocked hit. This meant every hit was doing 30% less than base. This made Tankadins really easy to heal (smooth damage intake) and thus made us fucking hard to balance. Primary method was nerfing our other cooldowns and damage reduction - so the other tanks could mitigate known burst a bit better or emergency heal themselves a ton more. Meanwhile, we just sat there consistently taking less damage during the "steady state" periods.
Q:
So what's the "two-roll" system?A:
They nerfed the fuck out of our mastery and gave it negative scaling with gear. Q:
Huh?A:
Oh, you want the mechanics? It goes like this: Mob swings at us:
- First Roll: See if we avoided all damage - miss, parry, dodge? If yes, done - take no damage, otherwise...
- Second roll: Do we block? If so, 30% off the hit.
Scales negatively with gear because as we
avoid more swings it takes more mastery to generate the same percentage of blocks - if you have 33% block chance, you block a third of the swings that
hit you rather than (old system) half of the swings the boss takes. This leads to all sorts of complications, including two entirely different gearing strategies - but I'll cover that later.
Q:
What's Vengeance?A:
The fix for tank scaling in raids sucking. Same thing has happened every expansion: Tank threat starts fine, then everyone gets massive gear upgrades. DPS get big DPS boosts, tanks get avoidance and EH. Second part of problem: Raid buffs boost DPS a lot, boost tank threat a tiny bit. Outcome? DPS peel off tanks when we hit the third raid tier.
As of mid-Cataclysm, the solution is that tanks get a fucking ridiculous threat boost (500%) so DPS can't peel unless they're retards on meth + PCP. We still have the problem that tank DPS is shit, which makes us feel useless.
Solution: When you get hit, your AP goes up by 2% of however big the hit was before all your tanking shit made it nice and small, stacks for 20 seconds Result is that you hit like a truck,
but only in a raid when a boss is smashing your face off.
Q:
What's Holy Power?A:
Combo Points that stack on you instead of target. All paladins generate Holy Power, then spend up to to three HoPo them on something nifty. As of MoP, from level 85+ you can store up to 5 HoPo instead of the 3 in Cata, this allows Paladins to spend HoPo on a less rigid timer that we lived with in Cataclysm (and also makes HoPo procs less of a rotation breaker). The 5-point bank is a big improvement to our base mechanics.
Q:
How do we get it?A:
Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Judgement & a Proc. Use CS if you're fighting one thing, HotR if you're tanking 2+, Judge on CD and AS will give you one if Grand Crusader has procced.
Q:
What do we use our Holy Power for?A:
It depends! We use them on active mitigation (ShoR) and emergency heals (BoGged WoG). ShoR smashes in the face of your target, gives you 3 seconds of -30% physical damage taken and gives a stack of Bastion of Glory (+10% to next WoG, stacks to +50%).
ings go to hell. Costs you a lot of TPS, but you may not care.[/list]
Q:
Where's my auras go?A:
Deleted. More simplification of the game - there's no more passive aura type stuff. We do have
Devotion Aura as a raid CD, but the baseline stuff is gone. Your seals stole the stance bar (the spot your auras used to be in) - you'll be swapping them more than you used to.
