While begging Anafielle for ideas on what to blog about, she mentioned the trouble she went through to hammer out a spec she was happy with. This immediately made me realize I haven’t really talked about optimal specs at level 85. I shall now rectify that.
As you all may know, I’m a sucker for dual-spec prot. Part of that is exercising the luxury of being my guild’s main tank, which means I am seldom sidelined or forced to go offspec–and by seldom, I mean never–which is a blessing and a curse. Blessing because it befits my sloth; curse because I’m so woefully out of practice with the other specs of my class that if I was asked to heal or dps something I’d probably end up accidentally wrapping the mouse cord around my neck and proceed to garrote myself into a coma.
Anyway, as such, here are three specs for you: one for maxing out survival, one for threat and AoE, and one mish-mash of the two. I’ll be using the first two for each of my specs, but any of you pushing the Sisyphean burden that is a Ret or Holy spec up the progression hill might be interested in the third.
The survival spec
0/31/10
I traded Seals of the Pure for Eternal Glory, the reasoning being that SotP is one of our lowest threat talents and is the obvious choice to skip to grab EG instead. EG is amazing for situations where you’re making frequent use of Word of Glory.
Only one point in Improved Hammer of Justice. I like HoJ a lot, but that second point is needed elsewhere.
No points in Grand Crusader. It’s a somewhat negligible threat boost (in the sense that it’s only good for replacing Holy Wrath in the single-target rotation) so it’s an obvious choice to pass over. However, the trade off is you lose from our most frequently available interrupt options, so there’s a tradeoff you might not be comfortable with.
Picked up Divine Guardian. When someone gives you overpowered lemons, you make overpowered lemonade, dammit.
Glyphed Word of Glory instead of Judgement. Judgement was the lowest threat boost of the normal triumvirate of single-target glyphs.
You can also swap out Glyph of Seal of Truth with Glyph of Insight if you’ll be primarily tanking a fight with Insight.
The threat spec
0/31/10
Keep in mind this isn’t a “max threat spec”, there’s probably more tps I could have squeezed out of this. But that would require cuts I’m not comfortable chasing down yet.
Skipped Judgements of the Just. I feel dirty about this, but I’m not using this spec on bosses.
Skipped Hallowed Ground. You might be thinking, “isn’t this an AOE spec?” Well, yes, but my thinking is that I hardly ever use consecration and the threat gain would be so minimal as to completely invalidate any justification for the glyph.
Skipped Divine Guardian. Feeling kind of dirty about this too. The point for it could come Reckoning if you’re uncomfortable with skipping it.
Nothing surprising with glyphs. I went with Hammer of the Righteous instead of Judgement in the primes. That’s the only really notable thing.
The mish-mash
0/31/10
Hrm, seeing a pattern in these numbers. Anyway, nothing really important to note here. I picked the best of both worlds, though there’s still some on the fly customization you can perform with glyphing (for example, glyphing Word of Glory).
And that’s that.
I’m curious how others are speccing/glyphing and if you have major objections to anything I’ve just laid out. One of the major benefits of the stage we’re in right now is that it’s amazing for experimentation. And so, you shouldn’t be shy to try new things before you head into raids and have to ossify into the land of the cookie-cutters, where optimal builds are (rightly) the golden standard. Have fun with your spec now, let your suboptimal freak flag fly… but don’t get your healer killed.
Why not just get the Earthen Vitality or the Lavawalker enchant for your boots, save 2 points from Pursuit of Justice, and never feel dirty again?
Enchants give 8% run speed, PoJ gives 15%. I’d rather have the 15%. The flipside is that if you enchant PoJ, you can enchant Mastery for your boots, rather than Lavawalker, and get 15 mastery rating out of it. In any case, PoJ is one of those “cold dead hands” deals for me, if I’m going to shift points around for Divine Guardian or Judgements of the Just, it’ll be from a threat talent.
I suppose it’s a bad habit I might have to change, but I still spec for Hallowed Ground. I pulled the points out of Rule of Law, kinda thinking that I’d rather have the little help of Cons theat if the dps are really going nuts on a group, rather than the extra 10% crit. That crit might end up being better with Hammer… hm.
I’ve got two points in Grand Crusader and only one in Guarded by the Light. Being able to use Avenger’s Shield whenever I can has been really really helpful in heroics, I’ll probably switch one point between the two talents once I get onto raids!
I love teasing my Holy pally friend with PoJ, hehe. Then he just uses Holy Radiance (Or “Magical Pixie Dust”) to get back at me.
I’ve been using your survival spec, with the point in Improved HoJ moved to Grand Crusader. Making the transition from main tank of an okay guild to off-tank of a great guild has made this talent extremely nice, especially on add fights like the nature boss of Conclave or Maloriak. It’s not reliable, but when it’s there… frankly I fell in love with it using it while I leveled and in heroics and you’ll pry it from MY cold dead hands. :P
Eternal Glory and Guarded by the Light, plus Rule of Law come together to be absolutely amazing. I highly suggest it.
All I know is after my experiences with SOI + WOG self heals over the last two days, you’ll have to pry those WOG based talents out of my cold, dead hands. I love them. I love them. I love them.
I guess I’ll spec out of them for a threat centric or more balanced spec, but I am having a blast. I pulled up healing meters on my recount. I swear I have tanked at least 25% of my recent heroics bosses from at least 40% to 0 without a healer (pug healers are for the win).
It’s so much fun.
i agree Ana…WoG is awesome…i saw the blue post today with the fix to glyph of Insight…making the extra 5% healing with WoG when using Seal of Insight actually work….so i am wondering if and when we don’t have to worry to much about Expertise…if it would be better to roll with Seal of Insight (glyphed) instead of Truth (glyphed)
Here is the spec I have been using lately:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZGMhfRddRMuf0h:os0VmRmcM
Quite a bit different, but here is my reasoning:
As we are constantly taking damage both magic and physical, is Eye for an Eye not just some random free damage? Please correct me if I am wrong and this is a pvp only talent or something… Seems to me that it would be a lot more useful than being able to judge just a bit farther.
I took Hallowed Ground for the same reasons as above poster, to give me an extra boost during AOE.
I skipped IHoJ as 40 seconds still seems like a long way out there and I heard that blizz isnt balancing bosses assuming the tank can interrupt.
I also skipped Divine Guardian and Pursuit of Justice (and I might not go for the run speed increase boot enchant either) simply because if everything is going right (I know it dosen’t) people, including myself, should know not to stand in the fire.
My glyphs I am still fiddling with, so any input there would be awesome.
Hope this gives you all some fuel for thought. Any comments regarding my build would be much appreciated!
Pallys FTW.
Eye for an Eye is generally not worth much because it’s very, very situational. It only works on magic attacks, it only has a 40% chance to proc, and it only returns 30% damage. Over time it’s going to do far less damage than any of the more “vanilla” threat talents can produce.
Run speed boosts are great not just because it helps you get out of a fire faster–it helps you engage the boss a little more quickly, or to intercept a rogue add before it eats a healer, or a myriad of other situations where you need to get somewhere a little faster. PoJ is the good kind of situational talent, the kind where if the time arises when it’s useful, it’ll likely save your life or someone else’s.
I think the thing I like most about PoJ beyond the run speed increase is the 100%chance to gain HP during stun, fear, or immobilizing effect. This seems to happen a lot in Cata, atl east to me, and means I can WoG just a little more a little faster.
Hallowed Ground is a low-value talent right now because HotR is just unfairly overpowered at AoE. I’d skip Hallowed Ground for something more useful. Long range judgements are extraordinarily useful – during pulling, during kiting, for add pickups. You can pry that talent out of my cold dead hands.
Divine Guardian is about the single most mandatory raiding talent a prot paladin could have. You should have it. PoJ is also a huge quality of life boost.
DG is the only part of your spec that’s an outright mistake, though. Everything else is a flavour choice.
Yea Orrin, my spec is close to yours, except I used improved judgements.
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZGMhfRddRMucbh
I like having plenty of AOE threat for mobs… this is probably more of a normal/heroic dungeon spec than it is a raid spec, but I haven’t done any raiding yet.
HOJ cooldown is just ridiculous even if it is specced so I didn’t bother.
Pursuit of Justice.. I don’t see this as being very beneficial either as we have plenty of other ways of getting threat off party members without needing to be right up to the mob.
I havent done any heroics, but I am assuming you use your survivability spec in sinlge target boss fights from what I read. Do you stay in your threat spec in boss fights with more than 1 target or adds that you have to pick up? Or do you do the fight in your suvival spec and just live without having the auto refresh avengers shield?
I use the survival spec on boss fights, no matter how many adds there are. The extra survivability is worth the tradeoff of a normal, 15 second AS.
I have never been a fan of Reckoning and have not specced for it ever. How beneficial is it? Last time I looked into it, the concensus was that for Paladin tanks the benefit was minimal. Has anything changed? I also got used to avoiding Divinity as it did not seem necessary throughout ICC, judging from my survivability compared to my OT, who specced for it. I know that the game has changed significantly for healers in Cata. Perhaps healers can comment as to how necessary they feel Divinity is. Personally, I would prefer to spend the points elsewhere. In particular, I would consider Eternal Glory a must. Finally, skipping Grand Crusader would be crippling in my opinion, particularly when tanking multiples or waves of adds. One of the exciting changes to the paladin prot spec is the way we can use Avenger’s Shield, how accesible and readily available it now is.
Where Reckoning was once a paltry boost, the changes to block and our subsequent stacking of Mastery makes it one of our strongest threat talents–along with Wrath of the Lightbringer–by a significant margin.
Divinity is mandatory. Boss fights now have an extra enrage in the form of healers running out of mana. It will happen to your healers at some point. Running without Divinity is like crippling your group/raid for absolutely no reason by making healers spend extra mana to put out the same amount of healing on you. This isn’t ICC, where the extra healing was lost to over healing, this is a significant survivability increase.
While I enjoy having Grand Crusader, it’s definitely not a mandatory talent. Proper forethought and positioning, along with someone else on interrupts (GC is unreliable as an interrupt anyways), means you never really NEED to have it. I took one point in it simply because I enjoy having it (though before leveling I told myself I would never, ever bother) but it shouldn’t be taken over some of our major talents such as WotL, Divinity, and Reckoning.
Hello, this is my first post on your site and I wanted to say I think it is great and I have found it very useful, when I stumbled across it just before patch 4.0.1 kicked in.
Moving on to topic, I noticed that all the glyphs in two of your different specs appear to be the same. Is that intentional? or would you be changing your gylphs to suit a certain spec?
Also in a previous thread you mentioned that changing your glyphs before a particular encounter/boss fight of course can be advantageous. Have you found that you have had to do that much so far in Cata? In particular for the HCs? or was that more reserved for Raid Instances?
Cheers
There are some base glyphs you can use as a foundation in your specs. Shield of the Righteous, Seal of Truth, Lay on Hands, Holy Wrath… they all have wide-ranging uses. Others are more situational: HotR and Consecration are only good for AoE, Word of Glory is only good for when you need to max survivability, etc.
I do swap glyphs sometimes if needed, though I haven’t run into any such circumstances yet while doing Cata heroics. I’m sure raids will definitely be another story. But for heroics you can go with a pretty standard kit.
some ideas what to write about:
- HC boss tactics
- which mobs in which HC to cc
- maybe to have a holy and ret paly as guests sometimes
just a thoughts :-)