From the mailbag: getting your foot in the door

I received a really great email over the weekend from a new tank who’s struggling to get off the ground and start tanking heroics. He’s stuck in the same mire that many other fresh 80s are where the gear score-wielding snobs of the pug world are just looking for tanks with 40k health to carry them through the dungeon, and tend to heap scorn on any new guy who just wants to learn the ropes.

Consider the insanity of the situation: back in December we were tanking Naxx with 25k hp, but now that’s barely enough for a heroic.

I mourn for all new tanks out there and can’t rely on a guild for guaranteed heroic groups.

Anyway, as to the letter:

Hey Rhidach,

I had a couple of quick questions regarding tanking.

First, and probably the one you get a lot, why is corruption/vengeance superior to command after the command AoE changes? Wouldn’t hitting multiple targets help with multiple mob encounters in instances? I want to stop using command and move to vengeance, but I feel like I need some sort of authoritative position to prove to me why I should.

Second, I just hit 80 on my Paladin (my first character to 80), and I immediately specced out of Ret and moved over to Prot. I’m very happy tanking, but my gear score is only 3700ish right now and my defense is 512. I’m having difficulty finding gear upgrades, and as you probably know there’s no pvp gear for tanks.

Many times in groups I get ridiculed for not having enough HP (24k with BoSanc) or Gear Score to be effective, but in all my times running heroics I’ve never lost aggro and never seen a single party member die. Despite this, many people drop group when they see my score, or give me constant criticism over my HP. I’m not sure what do to here – I can’t get groups for ToC Heroic, much less any 10 man, and none of the heroics other than ToC offer me tanking upgrades. Where do I go to find tanking upgrades? I’m very tempted to gear up for Holy through PvP and spec it to gear Prot as an off, but that process would take time and I don’t want to stop tanking – it’s what I really love to do in MMOs.

What would you suggest? My armory is here:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Illidan&n=Emigre

Any advice you can give is much appreciated – I just want to know how to make the jump to being better geared.

Thanks,

Emigre

To answer your first question Emigre, it’s been worked out by some theorycrafters (primarily Theck) that if the mob is living long enough to get a 3-stack or higher of the Seal of Vengeance dot (generally 4.5 seconds, depending on your weapon), use SoV; otherwise, SoC will be more threat. Though, even then the threat gained is ultimately negligible. I think you’d ultimately be better off putting that point into Conviction and enjoying the constant 1% crit than a niche Seal choice.

As for the crux of your email, I poked around with your set on warcraft.net and came up with the following get-up that will give you 27k health unbuffed and 540 defense. Should be enough to get past the gear score snobs. One thing I couldn’t find was the Greater Inscription of the Gladiator for the shoulders, which will give you 30 more stamina and enough resilience to cover the defense loss. Also, if you have money to burn you might want to put epic gems in there instead of rare quality.

Now, the beauty of this set is the items you’ll need to put this together are mostly purchased from blacksmiths and jewelcrafters:

• Tempered Saronite Breastplate
• Titanium Earthguard Ring
• Titanium Earthguard Chain
• Tempered Titansteel Helm

Though, you will need the two trinkets from normal instances (easily done, at least):

• Seal of the Pantheon (HoL)
• The Black Heart (ToC-5)

Altogether you will be in a pretty good spot with this. You have some good equipment right now, you just need to build on it.

Does anyone have any other recommendations for how Emigre can gear himself to make himself a more desirable tank to the pug snobs?

Better Late Than Never Friday, 11/6

I sat down today and told myself–told myself–I was going to write the next “chapter” in my 4 Characteristics of a Great Tank series, and then I got sidetracked and completely forgot. Mea culpa, friends.

In lieu of a wall of text, enjoy this short and sweet filler feature. Bonus: there’s about 20 Vindication questions in here. (Which I hope doesn’t reflect a disconnect in the tankadin community between folks that know it’s an amazing talent and folks who still think it’s for Ret. Short answer: Vindication = amazing!)

seal of righteousness or vengeance for tanking

Vengeance by leaps and bounds. You get so much more threat from the dot and stacking proc than you would from Seal of Righteousness.

how much does stamina increase pally spellpower

0 per point. Our spellpower comes form Strength now thanks to the change in 3.2.

3.2 vindication for protection paladins

I was curious to see what happened if I googled this specific phrase, and I’m happy to see this page with RD as the second link:

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

does vindication stack with other pallys?

No, and it doesn’t stack with Demo Shout/Roar either.

how does vindication work

Vindication can proc from all our direct attacks (melee, Avenger’s Shield, Shield of the Righteous, etc.) and from Seal of Vengeance damage. The effect lasts for 10 seconds, and generally it can be assume that as long as you’re continuously attacking during that 10 second period, Vindication will be up.

While it’s awesome that Vindication is passive, the only downside is it’s single target. HotR and AS can feasibly spread it around, but to keep it up 100% you’re going to have to devote your attacks to one target. There’s the rub between this talent and the warrior/druid shout.

judgments of just vindication stack?

Yes. Please have both in your spec!

best tank leg enchants 3.2.2

There’s only one choice, Frosthide Leg Armor. Find a friendly LWer to do that for you.

can anub’arak be beat with one off tank?

Normal-10? Yes. Heroic-10? Yes. Normal-25? Yes. Heroic-25? Excepting some super geared, passively unhittable, ubermensch tank, no.

how to get away from icehowl charge

As soon as you hit the wall, hold down your right mouse button and strafe left/right key. Pick whichever will get you away from him faster (ie, if he’s to your right, pick the left, and v/v). As soon as you unstun you’ll run off in the proper direction, to safety, with plenty of time to spare.

how to use different voice vent

I can only imagine the intent behind this question.

is it worth it for tankadins to be jewelcrafters wow

Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.

quel vs ardent guard

Ardent Guard (Heroic) > Blood and Glory > Quel’Serrar 25 > Ardent Guard > Quel’Serrar 10

titanium plating any good for tankadins?

Only for a shield specifically devoted to a threat/dps set. 81 block value is nice, but you’ll get more (EH) mileage out of the BC-era 18 stamina enchant.

GC sez: LoH only causes Forbearance if self-cast

A welcome clarification.

The change we’re thinking about now is that LoH only causes Forbearance if you cast it on yourself. A paladin healing a paladin tank wouldn’t run into the Forbearance problem.

We don’t think the paladin tank needs to be able to stack both tools at once. If you know big damage is coming you can use Divine Protection. If you managed to take the big damage, you can use Lay on Hands.

Fair enough.

Well, that was definitely Insanity

We did not deserve to get the achievement we got last night.

Actually, scratch that. Considering what we came back from and managed not to wipe on any boss… the skill that was shown by each person on different fights to make up for goof offs or silly mistakes… we definitely deserve the accolade.

Beasts was a total clusterfrak. We lost one person to an acid cloud under a worm, and a healer and dps to Dreadscale’s breath attack because they didn’t notice Demo bringing the worm around and then standing in front of the boss. Not to mention we forgot to tell a shadow priest we needed him to go disc for Beasts, so we only had two healers the whole time. Once Icehowl came out we had one healer, two tanks, and three dps. Things looked bleak. And yet somehow, with second left on the enrage timer we managed to down him.

That basically set the pace of the night.

Then on Jaraxxus–the first effing portal–we got two Mistresses. Got them both down, kept going. Things got hairy towards the end when we got another pair of Mistresses when Jaraxxus was at 5% or so. I taunted them both and held everything I could while dps just burned the boss down. A few dead, but we pulled through in the end.

Then champs we had a second week of easy comps: Enh Shaman, Rogue, Warlock, Mage, Holy Priest, Resto Druid. Ezpz to burnt through, and (bonus!) the 245 Eitrigg’s Oath dropped again. I envy the lucky tank that… agh, can’t keep a straight face while saying that.

It was about this time I noticed, and tweeted nervously, that we hadn’t wiped yet. Shades of Undying were coming back to haunt me.

Twins went surprisingly well, but the stress factor was only amped up further. We now only had Anub between us and victory. Anub being the only fight we’ve yet to one shot, and typically take three tries to down.

I was freaking out.

We got down in the pit, took some necessary breaks, and geared up to do it to it. No pressure, we assured everyone, while secretly gearing up to hate forever whoever cost us the achievement.

And, well, you know the rest. Anub down, achievement dinged, and ES shot up to 6th on the server for 10man content. Pretty exciting stuff!

Loot was done and the guild now has its first 258 piece, the Drape of the Sunreavers. Grats to Nomi for nabbing that. Other drops were Perdition, Anguish, Attrition, and the Swift Horde Wolf, which Fal ended up winning. Grats to him as well, and curse Anub for not giving us any tank gear. I’m still itching for my Greaves of the Lingering Vortex and Ardent Guard.

An amazing victory for the guild nonetheless. I’m very happy that despite any issue we may have with 25man heroic, we can rock the hardest 10man content.

Nevermind, tier10 confirmed (and yes, a dress)

Top of the fold update: Blizz fixed the page. Originally they had what will probably be our s8 set up as t10. They’ve since corrected it.

Now what we have is just what we saw from mmo-champ, and the dress is confirmed as well.

Sigh, looks like another tier of offset legguards for me. (Not a huge loss considering how awesome those crafted pants looked.)

Another week, another Heroic ToC 10 achievement

And yes, you are seeing AD proc.

How do I tank?

A spin on the meme that spread through healer blogs like wildfire last week, this survey is a brain child of The Renaissance Man of The Children of Wrath. These are great questions, and I hope my answers weren’t too brief. Hopefully this will catch on as much as the healing incarnation did.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?

Rhidach, Paladin, Protection.

What is your usual tanking environment?

Usually ToC-25, 10, and 10 heroic. We’ve been working on 25 heroic, but that’s a work in progress for sure.

What is your favorite encounter to tank, and why?

My favorite encounter right now is offtanking Anub10 heroic. It requires so much attention to detail it’s nuts: you have to contribute as much dps to Anub as you can swing, while being aware of when the Burrowers come up so you can nab them before they eat a healer, then you need to position them quickly and efficiently, get them burnt down by the dps, and then be ready to pick up and drag off the next pair. Then, once you hit phase 3 you need to juggle pouring damage into Anub while being prepared for adds to come up. And the entire time your eyes are darting back and forth watching for when the Burrowers turn to cast Shadow Strike so you can squeeze off an interrupt.

I’d probably enjoy the encounter a lot less if we couldn’t down it. But as is it’s pure, stressful bliss.

What is your least favorite encounter to tank, and why?

Thorim25 I think will always stick with me as one of my least favorite encounters. The arena is unadulterated mayhem and was hell to deal with when we were progressing through it. Not because it was hard but just the stress of having to constantly pivot around and hit various guys with taunts of shield tosses, or judgements, and being sure to consecrate at the right time to have maximum effect and making sure I was facing the mobs in a way to maximize my HotR bounces. Madness! One of my healing friends and I used to spend the wind up to the encounter whispering back and forth how much we hated the encounter.

What do you think is the biggest strength of your class, and why?

We’re pretty hard to kill. Between AD, our Guardian Spirit effect, LoH, DP, etc., I tend to be the last one standing during any wipe.

What do you think is the biggest weakness of your class, and why?

A lot of Paladin tanking is too passive. We have a set rotation that could (if you were bad/a robot) macro’d to two buttons, our biggest cooldown is a passive effect… I hate it when other tanks accuse us of facerolling, but honestly, sometimes it feels like it. I wish our abilities were more proc-dependent, or that we had something similar to Revenge or Rune Strike. I want a little challenge in our “quality of life”.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel is the best tanking assignment for you?

Add management. The system the other MT and I have set up right now is he has the privilege of standing there and getting punched in the face by the boss, while yelling our various things dps should already be paying attention to, while I get to run around like a maniac and keep adds under control. Adds can be a hard thing to master–in the hands of the wrong person they can go wild and kill off your healers–so it’s important that they are taken care of correctly. I feel like I excel best in those situations.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with the most?

Alas, I’ve only tanked on a Paladin (my only 80). I therefore have a very limited pool of experience to draw from.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with the least?

See previous question.

What is your worst habit as a tank?

If you asked me two weeks ago I would have said clicking. I used to not have Judgement bound to any key and I think that majorly affected my tps and my performance. I’m happy to say I’ve since rectified that, but it’s very embarrassing it took me this long.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?

People not paying attention to stupid stuff. For example, during Jaraxxus when a melee gets Legion Flames and doesn’t notice and drops it right in the middle of the melee pack. I understand wanting to maximize your rotation for the best dps possible, but I can’t fathom zoning in/out that much that you tunnel vision and miss warnings. Or people dying because they stood in a void zone for too long. I guess that’s why DBM/BigWigs/etc. have added screen flashes to catch people’s attention.

Do you feel your class/spec is balanced with respect to the other tanking classes?

No. I think we’re probably more powerful than we should be at the moment. As guilty as feel about it, I remember the dark days when Paladins were the worst and squishiest of the four tanks, and I have no wish to go back to those days.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?

World of Logs, TankadinTPS, Recount’s Deaths tab. One of the great things about tanking though is you need few tools to judge your performance. It’s usually a binary question of if you’re alive or not.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have with your tanking class?

It’s easy mode. While Paladins in general tend to require less effort (we have no equivalent of Revenge/Rune Strike, like I mentioned) to tank successfully, any form of tanking is still pretty hard. With Paladin tanking it may be easy to be mediocre, but the spec is difficult to master.

What do you think is the toughest thing for new players of your class to learn about tanking?

There’s more to Paladin tanking than just standing there and hitting two buttons. We have lots of utilities that we need to learn how to toss out effectively to maximize the potential of our class. Your various Hand spells are there for a reason, use them!

If someone were to evaluate your tanking ability via tools like fraps, recount, and World of Logs, what tendencies would they notice?

I’m really bad about sticking to the strict 969 rotation. I tend to run around a lot and lose my place. I’m a very active tank.

Stamina or Avoidance, and why?

Stamina, no contest (sadly). I’ve written about this extensively, but the cliff notes version is Avoidance is, when you boil it down, RNG. You can’t depend on RNG to save your life, you need to be ready to take an unfortunate string of big hits. Only stam can give us this security. Moreover, we get more than enough avoidance by default from our gear, we don’t need to go the extra mile and gem/enchant for it when we’re just pouring ipoints down the gaping maw of diminishing returns.

Which tanking class do you understand the least?

Warrior tanking. I don’t think I have the digital dexterity to constantly hammer a button mapped to Heroic Strike. (I kid!) Honestly, they seem to require the most attention to play even satisfactorily. I can’t imagine the dedication and fortitude it takes to be a grade-A Warrior tank.

What addons or macros do you currently use to aid you in tanking?

I use Recount to find out what I die to, Pitbull to make my unitframes clear and easy to read and to place them optimally, and Bartender to keybind all my abilities to make my reaction times as short as possible.

Do you strive for a balance in tanking stats, or do you stack some higher than others, and why?

I try not to enchant or gem for avoidance unless I absolutely have to (match color for metas, or the avoidance enchant is much better than straight stamina), and even then I tend to favor agility over parry/dodge because you get threat and mitigation in exchange for a little less avoidance.

To help the survey along a bit, here are some tags for folks (that weren’t initially tagged) I’d like to hear answers from:

• Wrathy of Avenging Wrathy
• Adgamorix of Divine Plea
• Amber of I Like Bubbles (you tank sometimes!)

Those last two did the healer one, but I know they are itching for another survey to fill out.

The time has come Blizz: give us stances

Warrior tanks go into defensive stance. Druids shift into bear form. DKs apply frost presence.

Paladins do not have an equitable ability (Righteous Fury is not, at a nuts and bolts level, the same).

Ghostcrawler, want to differentiate the three Paladin specs and make it so each cannot dabble into the realms of the other two? The only way is by forcing Paladins to choose a stance.

Make Devotion Aura the tank stance. Fold RF’s threat multiplier into it, make certain abilities being exploited by Ret/Prot or Holy/Prot pvpers dependent on Devo Aura, like Avenger’s Shield. Also, take Divine Protection off Forbearance when using Devo Aura.

Retribution Aura becomes the dps stance, with a huge damage multiplier (along with a baseline damage nerf to balance the two out), and attach a threat reduction to it. Concentration Aura becomes the healing stance, with a healing multiplier (and again, a baseline healing nerf). Normal aura buffs given to party/raid members still apply.

I have no idea how to square this with resistance auras, however.

Basically, the idea is, if you want to segregate the specs, then do it like you do with every other class. Make Paladins choose their role, rather than neutering our abilities and watering down our capabilities to make up for imbalances. It’s clear being a “utility” class means little or nothing anymore, so let’s go whole hog and fix this nonsense once and for all.

I fear for LoH’s safety

We may have dodged the bullet last week, but there’s no denying that Lay on Hands is clearly in Blizz’s crosshairs. Hell, Pallies in general are. Damocles’ nerfbat is dangling precipitously above our heads.

Ghostcrawler recently asserted in a thread on the forums that “for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment.” And approvingly quoted a poster who said that Paladins differ from other hybrids in that our healing capabilities are much more baseline.

Fair enough, but this peek into GC’s thought process bodes ill for our future situation. It appears that the developers intend to differentiate Paladins a lot more based on what spec they are. That is,

if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend [sic] about the Prot’s ability to self-heal or the Ret’s ability to tank you.

What does this mean for us? For starters: LoH doesn’t have a very bright future ahead of it. Because it is such a massive heal, it’ll probably be dumped deep into the Holy tree, much like Spiritual Attunement was back in 3.1. Our spellpower might be further nerfed so our off-healing capabilities can’t even begin to compare with Holy’s, and our damage dealing will surely be dealt a body blow for a nice double whammy of neutering Prot pvp and pve tps in one fell swoop.

Concerning my first assumption, to drop another quote bomb, GC went on to explain that they don’t consider the long cooldown on the ability (or the inability for it to be used in Arena is a balancing factor). Rather,

We don’t think “Sure I can heal myself for 25,000+ health as a dps spec or 50,000+ health as a tank, but not very often,” is balanced. Abilities can be unbalanced even if overall a character is not.

Gulp. Notice he specifically invalidated LoH for Ret and Prot in that example? Nice knowing you, old friend. Tell the Holy Tree we said hi.

The future of Paladins is probably this: Holy will have access to impressive self-heals (including LoH) but have little damage output, Prot will be a damage sponge but unable to kill anything or heal itself (basically, just slowly die in pvp), and Ret will be a paper tiger (good luck getting them to reverse the burst nerfs once you guys are mortal).

Normally, I wouldn’t mind this “recalibration” of the specs, but like most balancing matters, Blizzard will fail at the follow through. They have a bad habit of nerfing or buffing X to make up for Y, and then when they finally remove Y as a balancing factor, they don’t put X back to where it used to be. When Prot doesn’t have a third “cooldown” anymore, once LoH is gone, what is going to be the balancing factor to remove disparities?

Side question: does Blizzard even consider LoH a tanking cooldown? Admittedly, the reason I keep putting the word “cooldown” in scare quotes is because the classification is scurrilous at best, considering LoH is used more as a panicky free-heal and usually contributes to overhealing more than anything concrete. Still, the question is, do they factor its existence into the equation at all for us?

It’d be nice to get an answer on that.

To return to my previous point, another example: Blizz decided Ret was too bursty, which rubbed up against their survivability, and made it so their damage ramped up (expecting that they were going to live that much longer, so a ramp-up was justifiable). If Ret’s survivability craters, are they going to shift back to a bursty dps model? Of course not.

If I seem overly pessimistic, it’s because I am (pessimism is a bad habit of mine). Blizzard has a knack for going overboard, and I can just see them “recalibrating” our class and badly handicapping us as a result.

The mask slips!

Ghostcrawler shows his true colors:

We agree with Communism.

Better dead than balanced!