The Path to nowhere

Count me among the many that were disappointed by the announcement that the Path of the Titans was being scrapped for Cataclysm. I understand that they may have been unhappy with the iteration, and honestly the system had the probability of being ultimately very unwieldy, but the potential of PotT was so huge that I think it was worth the fighting for. There was something majestic about an ancillary system of customizing your character, where we could bask in an extra level of min/maxing. I rue that we’ve been robbed of that.

In the place of PotT, we’ll have medium glyphs. What are medium glyphs?

Medium glyphs are the kind of glyph you’d take if you had more choices.

The example they gave was cooldown glyphs for Fury Warriors. So in that example, major glyphs are the ones that directly affect dps, while the medium glyphs are the ones that are a little weaker that you would understandably avoid.

Also, please change that name. “Medium glyphs” is just about the laziest name they could have given to this feature. I’m sure it’s not final, but, gawd… terrible name. Even for a stand-in.

But I digress. Let’s think about what would constitute a medium glyph for Prot Pallies. Following the definition about the first tier/second tier preferences, I suppose one glyph that immediately jumps to mind as the kind that would be a medium is the Glyph of Salvation. It’s not something we’d take first-string because it’s pretty situation (ok, very situational), but it’d be nice to have full-time. Another glyph that I would love to have, but generally stick with improving threat over it is the Glyph of Righteous Defense.

Thought exercises aside, this discussion is pretty moot because (I think it’s safe to say) the whole stable of glyphs is probably getting seriously revamped. Or the abilities they currently modify are being changed, like taunts maybe going onto the melee hit table. We’ll have new glyphs for new abilities, new ones for old abilities, we’ll see the removal of crappy glyphs, and maybe the redesigning of some standbys. No point in getting too deep down into this at the moment.

And lastly, since we’re talking about glyphs, I’m pretty happy with the decision to let us “remember” glyphs we’ve used and swap them in as we will. This would be pretty handy for a situation like when my guild was learning Heroic Anub 10 back in the day and the Glyph of Holy Wrath was pretty helpful for the adds, so every night we’d do that fight I’d slip in a Glyph of Holy Wrath. Then once the night was over I’d put the Judgement glyph back in. Invariably I ended up with a stack of each Glyph, which I remember costing a bunch.

Hopefully Blizzard will work out some system that scratches that “alternate leveling” itch we all have. Being five levels short with nothing extra to show for it now is pretty lame.

Armory datamining tells all

Last week, Armory Data Mining updated itself for patch 3.3.3. The site is fascinating and I recommend checking it out to see how everyone out there is speccing, gearing, gemming, and the like. It’s an interesting peek into the vast multitudes that play this game and how they play it. And, most importantly, it provides a view of how many people are playing the game correctly–ie, by the established and settled baselines widely understood among more top-end players.

While poking through the site I was floored to see just how many people were “doin it rong,” so to speak. As a caveat, I know a lot of surveyed characters may be fresh 80s, or abandoned characters from when the standards were different a year ago (or whenever). However, in the grand scheme of things, it’s shocking how many widely recognized “knowns” are ignored. I’m going to go through a few data points in this post just to show the more interesting things I noticed.

(Note: Unless otherwise stated, percents given are of level 80 Paladins.)

No one is using Shifting Dreadstone. For gems, the popularity (according to the site, popularity correlates to total numbers of gems compared to the number of characters with at least one gem) of red slot gems are 38% for Regal Dreadstones, 21% for Defender’s Dreadstones, and 15% for Dreadstones. Shifting isn’t even on the board, it’s popularity percentage is less than 10%.

You and I both know that when you’re gemming a red socket and going for that socket bonus, you want a Shifting Dreadstone. According to Theck, Agility is 83% as effective as Dodge for avoidance and, thanks to Agility giving Armor, each point of Agility is 4% more effective than Dodge when it comes to reducing damage. The fact that this information is so widely unknown among the surveyed masses is discomforting.

35% of Prot Paladins are using a +stats chest enchant. Look at those numbers. This I can only explain via simple ignorance. The standard for chest enchants should be this: if you’re under the crit cap, enchant +def, if not, enchant +health on your chest. Never, ever should you use +stats. Much for the same reason we avoid Nightmare Tears, the stat spread just isn’t as good as solid defense or solid hp.

63% are using Armsman on their hands. I can see the allure to this enchant, and hell, even at end game there can be some honest disagreement over what is better. Nonetheless, personally, I would always rather enchant for survival than for threat. So while this isn’t egregious or anything (definitely not on the level of no one gemming Shifting), it’s still fascinating to see how vast the appeal of this enchant is.

32% are using Blade Ward. This I’m sure can be explained away by those 32% being completely ignorant of how awful this enchant is. Which is a shame, because if they even did a cursory Googling, they would find that Blade Ward is widely derided as a bad enchant.

Only 15% are using the pvp shoulder enchant. Again, this is probably one of those counter-intuitive, makes no sense to the layman kinds of things, but unless uncrittable, you really want to have that +30 stamina shoulder enchant. The return on investment is much better than any of the Hodir shoulder enchants. It’s somewhat distressing on 15% of the Prot pallies out there have gotten that message.

On the other hand, there is the “holistic” gearing argument–that most of that 85% are T10-geared tanks that have enough stamina and are scaling back to emphasize damage reduction through things like avoidance–which is a valid philosophy at a certain gear level. Nonetheless, I find it hard to believe that that 85% is made up of just people who need the defense and people who are being holistic.

Glyph of Divine Plea is nowhere near as popular as it should be. GoDP has a popularity (same formula as gems above) rating of 63%. Judgement 60%, Seal of Vengeance 48%, Righteous Defense 26%. Those are my big four. Contrawise, here are some facepalm ones: Holy Light 25%, Flash of Light 19%, Consecration 29%, Seal of Wisdom 16%. The list goes on.

Only 18.4% of Prot Paladins use a 53/18 build. And of those, only 10% use the cookie cutter build we know and love. The rest somehow are across the board on 53/18.

34% of Prot Paladins take Seals of Pure, while only 24% take Crusade. And as we all know, Crusade builds are more threat than SoP builds.

1% of Prot Paladins take Eye for an Eye. What is this I don’t even. I’m hoping this is from a pvp Prot build… oh, how I hope.

62% of Paladins put points into Divinity. There’s some merit to this talent in harder content where trickle-down deaths are frequent and every ounce of healing matters. 62% of Prot Paladins are not currently in that content. This is another case of the talent “sounding” good and people putting points in without determining if the talent is best for them or the content they are currently tanking.

22% of Prot Paladins take Vindication. Sigh.

85% of Prot Paladins take Judgements of the Just. This is somewhat heartening.

54% of Prot Paladins take Divine Guardian. This makes me sad. This talent is so key and has so many, amazing uses that it’s a shame for anyone (let alone 46% of all Prots) to pass this up.

Ultimately, what I’ve learned from perusing the wealth of information compiled by this site is the wide disconnect between those that look up information on the net, and attempt to better their character and playstyle through the resources available to them, and those that wing it or (more likely) are unaware of what kind of treasure troves exist out there for the taking (or have consulted out of date/just plain wrong resources). A lot of what I listed above will more or less seem obvious to you or me (with some debatable exceptions), and yet it all might be considered arcane knowledge to others.

There are many horses out there that must be brought to water, methinks.

Better Late Than Never Friday, 4/9/10

Better Late Than Never Friday is a random monthly feature where I pull a bunch of search terms from Google Analytics that landed folks here and try to answer questions that may not be directly answered at this site, as gleaned from their keywords used.

best paladin tank enchant waist 3.3

Well, technically the only waist enchant is the Eternal Belt Buckle. If you’re an engineer though, you have two supplementary choices for some additional AOE damage. Using the Frag Belt or Personal Electromagnetic Pulse Generator tinkers on your belt (stacks with the buckle) can give your big pulls a little more oomph. The former obviously summons a bomb for you (with a neat little stun) and the latter can set off an Explosive Decoy for a chunk of physical damage. Both pretty handy.

nightmare tear does it give 10 to dodge also?

No, but it does give 10 Agility, which translates to some dodge. Though, not as much as 10 Dodge Rating would give.

glyph of judgement or command low level

Command is pretty nice at low level for the free mana it gives. That’ll make the early levels much easier to suffer through when going OOM is a constant, looming shadow.

sindragosa parry haste

Sindra does indeed parry haste (confirmed in this thread). This shouldn’t be much of a worry for two reasons: her breath is her biggest source of damage rather than her cleave, and dps will die if they sit in front of her, so you don’t need to worry about a clueless warrior causing you trouble, he won’t be up for long.

what kind of damage is putricide dealing? amplify magic

To the raid it’s either Shadow or Nature damage, depending on the attack. Your tanks will be taking a huge chunk of Physical damage from Putri’s melees, but even then there’s a lot of magic damage (especially in phase 3) and you don’t want to risk a tank gibbing ruining your attempt. I would recommend against amplify magic, honestly.

can i exchange my voa sanctified for emblems and mark?

Ye gods no.

does armor penetration stack with hammer of the righteous?

The damage is Holy, so it’s already penetrating armor.

does judgement proc seal of command cleave?

It does if you have at least one point in Judgements of the Just. It isn’t the judging the procs the cleave, it’s the application of the JoJ debuff. Probably a bug, but I’m not complaining.

festergut melee parry gib?

Festergut has parry haste turned off, so there is no danger of that.

Hit, expertise, and your third glyph slot

A major concern that is wracking the tanking world right now is the utter dearth of hit rating on 25man raid gear. Prior to the few upgrades I yanked out of the Coliseum this week I was sitting at full hit cap, 263. Now, thanks to said upgrades and swapping in the SoV glyph I find myself already soft capped for expertise (great) but now only at 175 hit (boo).

This problem is only going to get worse as I continue to get gear from Col25. If I were to deck myself completely out in those items, I’d be sitting at 214 expertise. That’s 26 skill, the soft cap.

Once the soft cap of expertise is reached, additional points of expertise come with a tps benefit reduced by half.

As such, I’m contemplating how much longer I’m going to delay before I ditch the SoV glyph… er, again. And, likewise, what I’m going to replace it with.

Because of the loss of hit that will be going hand in hand with this rise in expertise, the Glyph of Righteous Defense is a natural choice. What concerns me most about losing hit isn’t so much the tps loss, but the threat to the healers’ well-being if a taunt misses (which it’ll have a much higher chance to do).

I could swap in the Judgement glyph, but Judgement is such a miniscule part of my tps that the glyph wouldn’t have enough of an effect to be worthwhile. I’m definitely open to suggestions for replacements.

Better Late Than Never Friday, 7/31

On a house keeping note, I’m going to be on vacation next week. I’m trying to decide how to handle my absence, which I’ll probably either fill by making 5 posts this weekend and spacing them out with “Publish on x day” settings, or maybe with teeny tiny awkward posts on my iPod’s wordpress app (whenever I can find wifi in northern New Hampshire). I’m personally hoping I choose the former and then the patch comes out next week, while my (transparently) pre-written posts are about “How bad expertise sucks” or “If only we had a second cooldown.”

Although I could probably do a mad-libs raid recap… hrm… the possibilities.

does it matter if i don’t get my socket bonuses

Not particularly, assuming that bonus isn’t stamina. Avoidance is nice, but stamina is better. And block rating or hit/expertise aren’t worth gemming to achieve. Refer to my flowchart here for when to go for socket bonuses.

enchant weapon – blood draining does it increase with spell power?

I looked at a WWS from a recent raid to compare the heals that both I and Demogar (warrior tank) received from Blood Reserve, which is the heal the enchant gives. As you can imagine, I’m rocking about 860 spellpower (from stamina, I swear!) and Demo has a pitiful 0. Srsly, what a nub. Anyway, while just skimming through the WWS and writing down some numbers, for a one stack heal I got back around 391-466 hp, he got 405-412; two stacks I got ~894 and Demo ~900; three stacks 1215 verse 1243; four stacks 1665 versus 1650; five 1941 versus 2299.

Short answer is no. Actually, long answer is no too, but I’m pretty sure we get an additional 30% benefit to any crit heals from Blood Reserve. And yes BR does indeed crit. For example I received 1755 hp from a two stack crit. Not too shabby!

hit cap on righteous defense

17%, or 446 rating. Please don’t try to reach this. It’s not worth it.

glyph of seal of vengence vs glyph hammer of righteous

I’m very partial to the latter which is very, very useful for snap aggro in AOE situations. For example, on Kologarn when I pick up the rumbling adds that spawn, the glyphed HotR plus a Consecrate guarantees that I pick up every add before they have a chance to make a break for a healer. The SOV glyph isn’t as good right now because expertise is kind of bleh. But, in 3.2 it’ll be much more useful because we’ll be more dependent on the 5-stack SOV proc for threat. In 3.2 you’ll want that glyph. To actually answer the question, I’d get both.

paladin stamina to health conversion

For a Paladin 1 stamina is 10 hp. With the proper talents, 1 stamina is 11.4 hp.

how often do saronite plated legguards drop

If you’re in my guild, only once.

mongoose at level 80 tankadin

I know some people are very attached to this enchant for tanking (for the avoidance) but I’m just not a fan. It’s worth 120 agility when it procs, which is 2.3% dodge. Thanks to PPM it’s basically like adding .76% dodge to your character sheet, which I guess is nice overall. Based on what I’ve read it’s the best avoidance enchant but my biggest beef with it is the fact it’s proc based. You need avoidance the most when you have low health, and there’s just no guarantee that Mongoose will up to maybe give you that extra oomph to avoid the next hit. You have just as much a chance for it to proc at 100% health as at 5%. I’d recommend getting an enchant that’ll be there when you need it most and actually provides some EH; namely, Blood Draining.

seal of righteousness verses seal of corruption for tanking

SoC/V for sure. Righteousness is good for trash when stuff will die too fast for you to build a five stack and maximize the threat potential for that seal, but on longer living trash or bosses SoC/V is far and away your best choice.

tankadin effulgent skyflare diamond

Thankfully this gem is no longer bugged. Before 3.1 it used to, laughably, increase your resistances by 2% rather than reduce spell damage. Now it’s working as it should be. Does that make it a good gem? Eh, not particularly. You’ll in the end get more mileage out of the Austere meta. This gem seems too situational.

trouble picking up kel’thuzad adds

On 10man the trick is to fall back and watch both halves of the room. When an Icecrown Guardian spawns you have a few seconds to run over and pick it up before it beelines for a healer. Then immediately run over to the opposite end and grab the one that will shortly spawn there. Use Avenger’s Shield, Exorcism, and Reckoning to get their attention. In 25man you’ll probably be on one side with a different tank on the other, so there’s less running. As a fail safe, set the healer with the highest global aggro as your focus so you can watch their health and see if a Guardian snuck over to them.

ulduar demo driving

The trick to driving a demolisher (which I always do in our raids) is use your mouse buttons to drive forward and turn/aim and use keybinds to fire boulders. Time spent keyboard turning and fumbling to target something is time lost dpsing. Demolishers are slow so your biggest priority is cutting movement corners when you can.

why wont titanguard drop

I swear this isn’t me! I feel your pain, my friend. :(

Tanks, what 3.2 means to you

Ardent Defender, our new cooldown

Our long national nightmare is now over, we finally have a second cooldown! And a real one at that, not some slap-dash, Mickey Mouse cooldown.

So sum up all the changes to the talent: AD has finally been fixed so that it is no longer leapfroggable (ie, any damage that applies under 35% of your health is mitigated), and it has a new effect that, if you are reduced to 0 hp, you receive an immediate heal to 30% of your max health (assuming you have 3/3 in the talent and 540 defense skill).

Once you receive that heal you get a debuff from preventing that save from occurring again for two minutes. Originally on the PTR that debuff also removed AD’s damage reduction, but that is a bug that has been fixed.

Dodge couldn’t avoid this nerf

Our avoidance is taking a nerf that will reduce our dodge across the board while presumably increasing parry. Overall this will amount to a reduction of our total avoidance. Rather than rehash the numbers, as I’ve done previously, just know the three take-aways on this are: (a) agility/stam gems are now junk for pure avoidance, (b) parry gems are not an immediate red flag for bad tanks, (c) defense is now, oddly, our best avoidance stat. There’s a lot more nuance in this, mind you, thanks to diminishing returns.

Sacred Shield is less awesome, but still great

Not as awful as I originally supposed in my post on Friday. I mistakenly assumed that the Holy Pally hot would only apply if their shield was on you, but any old SS will do. So, despite my earlier ruminations, still get Divine Guardian instead of 2/5 Reckoning. But anyway you slice it, only one Sacred Shield is disappointing.

Sweet, sweet Vindication

This is perhaps my second-most favorite change in 3.2, an attack power debuff to a boss that’s automatically applied. We don’t have to burn rage or gimp our dps/threat to get this up–nope, it comes just from us meleeing. This will be a great mitigation buff to us overall.

You’ll probably want to shift two points from Conviction into this talent, assuming you’re running the 53/18 spec (and you better be! /shakingoffist).

BV is better, but still not better than avoidance

Block value as you know is getting a huge boost. Does this mean you want to start wearing your block set and slapping the Titanium Plating on your shield for tanking Ignis25? Er, no. You’ll still want a heavy EH/avoidance set. Considering most BV pieces also have block rating, you’ll want to continue keeping most of these pieces out of your heavy tanking set, but by all means, use them for trash.

Change is a blessing

Blessing of Sanctuary has been given a +10% stamina modifier (that doesn’t stack with Kings) in order to make it more attractive to Paladins. But is it? Sure, if you can have Kings as well. Kings gives avoidance (through agility) and mitigation (through strength) which between the two makes it the superior blessing for raid situations if you have to choose between the two (which hopefully you won’t). At least now you won’t have to bemoan the loss of Kings’ health while in heroics where the mana return of Sanc is critical.

Exorcism is not for tanking anymore

Exorcism has been retooled to make it a situational move for Ret Paladins. That is, Art of War procs and they fire off an instant-cast Exorcism, and the rest of us shlubs are stuck with a 1.5 second cast time. This change of course makes Exorcism unusable while tanking, because time spent casting is time you can’t avoidance any attacks (and pushback, oh the pushback).

They changed Hand of Reckoning so that it does a lot more damage if the mob is currently not targeting you, which is supposed to make up for losing the Reck/Ex pickup combo for a run away mob. It’s an annoying change overall, but one we can work around.

Expertise isn’t terrible anymore

With the change to Seal of Corruption/Vengeance to do an additional 33% of weapon damage with melee hits after a five stack is up, expertise becomes a valuable stat again. For example, this change makes the SoV glyph the second-best TPS glyph in the game now (and one I’ll happily swap into my spellbook after the patch now that I don’t need said Mickey Mouse cooldown anymore). You’ll probably not want to gem expertise or purposefully gear for it, but don’t shun any gear anymore because it has expertise on it. A junk stat no longer.

Other cool little things

Lastly, two dopey little changes I’m happy about are Auras reapply after your death automatically, and Righteous Fury lost its duration and mana cost.

Two down, none to go

Only cost 300g and had to get a guildee to buy it off the Alliance AH, but 3% damage reduction is worth it dammit.

One down, one to go

Just bought Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous for 99g on the AH. Score.

This is getting old(uar)

Still haven’t set foot in the titanic prison/city yet. Grrr. I think this patch picked the worst possible week to drop, and by worst possible, I mean most inconvenient to me. Clearly none of you matter in this calculus. So there.

Last night I logged on around 7 server just to start playing around with all the new doodads that the patch hast wrought. I bought my fancy dual spec and started putting points into Ret, but then realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and put the whole matter on the back burner. I’ll do some research and come back to it.

Naughty secret: I’d like to make my second spec a dps sword and board hybrid. Dare I dream? Yes, I know it’d be awful.

In any case, after that I hearthed back to Dal and flew off to try the new fishing daily. I have a love-hate relationship with fishing dailies right now, the Outland one being completely unwilling to give me the Captain Rumsey’s Lager recipe after a solid year of attempts.

Supposedly this new daily can also give the recipe, so at least that ups my chances.

Following that it was finally time to check out the Argent Tournament. I picked up the dailies and collected a chunk of Aspirant’s Seals. I’m itching to start collecting Champion’s Seals so I can save up for the Argent Hippogryph (so help me god if there’s no walking animation…).

Argent Tournament looked like a lot of fun, but it was getting old being challenged to a duel every 7 seconds as I was running around looking for the training guys.

Also checked the AH last night, and surprise surprise no Glyph of Divine Plea or Glyph of Hammer 0f Righteousness. Thanks to the RNG it’ll probably be some time before those two make it into the general economy. I don’t care about pricing, but I’m also not going to pay more than a few hundred gold for those.

And lastly, once again, I wasn’t able to hang around long enough for the Ulduar raid. My time will come tonight though, I have the whole evening dedicated to raiding and all the bugged-out Ignis attempts I can stomach. Plus 25man this weekend, for good or ill.

I’ll report back tomorrow on how my first night in there went.

The waiting is the hardest part

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to jump into Patch 3.1 last night, but apparently I didn’t miss much. The server itself didn’t come back online until like 7:30 eastern, and by the time my guild got its 10-man expedition into Ulduar, the raid server collapsed like a wet cake, stranding the GL’s toon in the nether between instances.

I’ll be able to hop on tonight to finally play with my new spec, buy dual speccing, and start hunting down the enchant/glyphs I need. I heard from a few people, Logan in the comments on another post among them, that Glyph of Divine Plea is impossible to find right now? If so, grrrr.

I hope Ulduar went well for anyone that managed to get in there.

I’ll report back tomorrow on what, if anything, I accomplish tonight!