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.

The prodigal tank returns! This is actually a topic that someone on Twitter suggested to Anafielle, who then proceeded to dither with writing it, allowing me to steal the idea in the dead of night. Or the middle of the day.

In any case, this is a topic near and dear to my heart, because I love the way the major glyphs work. I am elated whenever situational forethought is rewarded, and the ability to adapt to specific circumstances with specific glyphs is very rewarding. Below I’ve listed instances where each major glyph has a particular use at 80. I’ll have to do this post again in a month or two for 85, but for now, this should be fairly comprehensive.

Glyph of Consecration — Great choice for an AOE tanking build, and especially useful for fights with lots of adds like Dreamwalker (rot worms!), Gunship defense, or OTing ghouls/shamblers during LK. And, of course, can award some nice threat for trash tanking. Not that dps will wait long enough for Consecrate to tick before they attempt to roll their faces all over the dps meters.

Glyph of Dazing Shield — I still swap this in for the Lich King, for an additional slowing effect on the Valks. Just in case. Because I’m paranoid. Usually best not paired with Glyph of Focused Shield, because the value is multiplied in cleaving that slowing effect. Moreover, this is a good choice for pvp I would assume.

Glyph of Divine Protection — This glyph is killer for high magic damage fights (read: Sindragosa). With the short cooldown it’s ideal to hit as many of her Frost Breaths as you can, and thus take the edge off one of the biggest attacks that she brings to the table. Other fights in ICC have a much higher proportion of physical damage taken over the course of the fight, so it makes more sense to keep the ability unglyphed and roll Divine Protection off-cooldown as a damage-taken-over-time reduction.

Glyph of Focused Shield — An absolute must have for any single target spec. Also: a must have+1 for fights like Saurfang, where there’ll be adds you do not want to hit and possibly yank from the dps. Maintanking Lich King is a similar circumstance, because you don’t want to build threat on his ghouls and make the OT’s life harder.

Glyph of Holy Wrath — Ruby Sanctum. We’re not in the expansion pack full of dragons and elementals just yet, but nonetheless, you can take this glyph for a spin in the only majority-Dragonkin raid we have currently. Great for rolling on the massive packs once the commander is separated and slept out of range of your HW.

Glyph of Salvation — When tanking Festergut, I like to (on the tank switch) self-cast Hand of Salvation, cancel Righteous Fury, and then go to town on Fester with a full stack of Gastric Bloat. Combine the temporary threat drop with the removal of my threat buff, and I don’t have to worry about catching Anafielle for the rest of the fight.

Glyph of Turn Evil — Fun toy for ICC trash if you’re so inclined. No real practical use in any boss fight, unfortunately.

Glyph of the Ascetic Crusader — Mana isn’t really much of a concern at all in single target, provided you avoid Consecration and judge when necessary, so this is really just a budgeting glyph. Probably our most boring choice. I most often use it on bosses for lack of a better choice.

Glyph of the Long Word — I’ve got nothin’. Maybe in Cata?

If you’re not carrying a stack or two of Vanishing Powder at all times, you’re not doing it right. Major glyphs are a tool–a valuable one–and one that should be exploited whenever there is a gain to be had, no matter how minute it may seem.

Here’s your chance to stay ahead of the market before demand makes prices skyrocket. Assuming 4.0.1 drops this week, all your glyphs are going to change and it’s ideal to stay on top of that shift.

Compiled below is a list of glyphs on Live and what they’ll be turning into with the patch. (I’ve adopted this list from the original created by El’s Anglin’. All credit for the research goes to them!)

• Glyph of Avenger’s Shield (-> Glyph of Focused Shield)
• Glyph of Avenging Wrath (-> Glyph of the Ascetic Crusader)
• Glyph of Flash of Light (-> Glyph of Word of Glory)
• Glyph of Seal of Righteousness (-> Glyph of Dazing Shield)
• Glyph of Seal of Vengeance (-> Glyph of Seal of Truth)
• Glyph of Sense Undead (-> Glyph of Truth)
• Glyph of Shield of Righteousness (-> Glyph of Shield of the Righteous)
• Glyph of Spiritual Attunement (-> Glyph of Divine Protection)

Glyphs not changing from spell to the other, but you still want to pick up, are:

• Glyph of Consecration
• Glyph of Crusader Strike
• Glyph of Hammer of Wrath
• Glyph of Holy Wrath
• Glyph of Judgement
• Glyph of Lay on Hands
• Glyph of Salvation
• Glyph of Turn Evil

I suppose you could go whole-hog and buy all the current Paladin glyphs. Nonetheless, everything above are things that will probably be directly or situationally useful for us at some point, I suspect. Like the boy scounts say: semper paratus. Go stock up!

A few changes to our spec in the latest build. Nothing particularly worth writing home about.

Glyphs

The Glyph of Seal of Truth survives for now, which is pretty exciting in face of recent threats it has received.

Nonetheless, the only actual glyph change I could see was a new Glyph of the Ascetic Crusader that reduces mana cost of Crusader Strike by 30%. Yawn.

Talents

Vindication now has a new effect, making Hand of Justice able to interrupt spells if a mob is not stunnable. If you’re scratching your head, that’s because Blizzard quietly removed that capability from HoJ a few builds ago. I guess it’s good we can now interrupt again, albeit poorly. Rebuke would be nicer. But that goes without saying.

Eternal Glory was nerfed again as well to 15%/30%. I keep eyeing this talent, thinking it might be useful in a spec combined with Guarded by the Light. But that feeling diminishes every new build.

I guess we can feel lucky they didn’t put this effect on a talent we’d normally avoid.

T11 Bonuses

The bonuses for the eventual first Cataclysm raid tier sets have been datamined. For Prot Paladins, they are:

2pc — Increases damage done by Crusader Strike by 10%.

4pc — Increases duration of Guardian of Ancient Kings by 50%.

The 2pc bonus is ok. Not amazing, just ok. The 4pc bonus is interesting. We’d have an 18 second 60% damage reduction cooldown with this bonus. That’s a bit long, but I’m not going to complain I suppose.

Milquetoast changes, all in all.

I know my beta reportage lately has been nothing short of abysmal, and I apologize for that. I finally got my lazy self back on there last night to check out the changes applied in the latest build that dropped earlier this week, as well as poke around with all the glyphs.

First things first, let’s talent about talent and spell changes. Here’s what’s pertinent to Prot:

The Vindication change isn’t that shocking, since they mentioned earlier their intention was we were not going to let us aoe-attack power debuff. The Grand Crusader change makes sense as well, since HotR was basically giving multi-fold chances to proc the effect over just Crusader Strike.

Sanctuary’s new damage reduction effect brings us in-line with the baked in damage reduction that other tanking specs currently enjoy with their respective tanking stances/forms. The wages of our tanking “stance” being usable by Holy or Ret.

And lastly, Consecrate is just getting slapped around a bit more as part of the tanking aoe nerf. Hurrah.

Oh, and apparently the Guardian of Ancient Kings animation is now in beta!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3e0j8VvlE]

As for glyphs, I was excited to check out the new interface and all the new (not yet finalized) glyphs available for the class.

So, I logged onto my Draenei pally and attempted to fly to the nearest flight master (at the World Tree) to make my way to Dalaran in the most round-about way possible.

After three crashes while trying to enter the part of Hyjal where the world tree is, and a bug report later, I then just hearthed to the Exodar and fumbled around for some way to get to Stormwind. I then got hopelessly lost, huffed, puffed, and logged over to my Belf pally who was in Orgrimmar.

One zep later and I was up in Northrend. I flew my way over to Dalaran and found the various Glyph vendors outside of the Inscription building. I loaded up on all the Paladin ones and started learning them, one by one.

Many minutes later, I then happily opened my glyph window and found …

And nothing had changed. This begs the question: where are my glyphs, exactly?

I’m sure I missed some little trick to make them appear in beta, so playing musical chairs with them will have to wait for another day.

In the meantime, let’s look at the list of glyphs pertinent to our spec. Some of them are pretty cool.

Prime Glyphs

• Crusader Strike – Increases Crusader Strike’s crit chance by 5%
• Hammer of the Righteous – Increases the physical and Holy damage dealt by HOTR by 10%
• Judgement – Increases Judgement’s damage by 10%
• Shield of the Righteous – Increases ShoR’s damage by 10%
• Word of Glory – Increases Word of Glory’s healing by 10%

Major Glyphs

• Consecration – Increases Consecration’s cooldown and duration by 20%
• Dazzling Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now also dazes
• Divine Protection – Removes the physical damage reduction of your Divine Protection, but increase the magical damage reduction by 20%
• Focused Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now hits 2 fewer targets, but deals 30% more damage
• Holy Wrath – Your Holy Wrath now also stuns Elementals and Dragonkin
• Salvation – No longer reduces threat over time, but completely removes threat as long as the Glyph is active
• Seal of Truth – Increases expertise skill by 10 while Seal of Truth is active

Minor Glyphs

• Blessing of Kings – Reduces mana cost by 50%
• Blessing of Might – Increases duration by 20 minutes
• Lay on Hands – Reduces cooldown by 2 minutes
• Truth – Reduces Seal of Truth’s mana cost by 50%

In case you’ve missed the explanation given by Ghostcrawler, Prime Glyphs are meant to be obvious, useful glyphs that directly affect threat or damage taken (in our case), Major Glyphs are situational, and Minor Glyphs are more for quality of life or cosmetic changes.

I’ve already said in the past that in Cata I intend to dual spec a trash/threat spec and a boss/survival spec, and these glyphs (while not final) are totally playing into that.

I can see my threat spec using HotR, ShoR, and Judgement for Primes; Consecration, Seal of Truth, and Holy Wrath for Majors; and, well, Minors don’t matter in this scenario.

Contrawise, a survival spec would possibly use Crusader Strike or Judgement (depending on what does more threat), ShoR, and Word of Glory (assuming us using WoG in our rotation pans out) and then Seal of Truth, Focused Shield, and Consecration for Majors. Then, for say a magic-heavy fight, I could swap in Divine Protection instead of Consecration.

Of course, the glyph design is not anywhere near finalized. Case in point:

That Avenging Wrath glyph no longer exists. It’s far too obvious a dps increase to be a major under the new paradigm.

The Seal of Truth one is on the bubble. It’s still in for now, but it’s pretty much a no-brainer given the stat savings it offers.

Overall, I like the design of situational major glyphs, it makes character customization more interesting and cerebral than running around with the same three glyphs all the time.

Now, how about some minor glyphs that are actually interesting? Too much to ask for?

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.

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 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.

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.

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. :(