Better Late Than Never Friday, 10/16

Wow, I haven’t done one of these in a long, long time. To be honest, this is just filler to cap off the week. On Monday I’ll have what I hope will be a very informative post on tanking strategies for heroic ToC 10, so that will be something of substance to look forward to. As always, I’d appreciate any additions or corrections to any answers I give in the comments!

breastplate of the white knight gems

Let me list them in order: Solid Majestic Zircon, Solid Majestic Zircon, and Solid Majestic Zircon. Ignore the bonus, you’ll lose too much stamina trying to get it.

vindication, paladin, worth it?

Absolutely! Vindication is hands-down a mitigation talent and a must-have for any serious paladin tank. I’m a big fan of self-reliance, and I don’t trust any raider to keep up a debuff I can do myself.

does vindication work on raid bosses post 3.2.2

Yes.

mark of the relentless or the leviathan’s coil

I would choose the Coil for when you’re dealing with more physical damage (the armor) and the Mark when dealing with more magic heavy fights (more stamina).

shadow strike timer burrower

Every 30 seconds the adds will both pick the farthest player from them and target them for a shadow strike. Interrupt all the burrowers to prevent a one-shot of the target.

0/58/18 paladin spec

When I first saw this query my thought was, “how the hell did this person add up 76 talent points?” Then I realized that they were talking about Cataclysm when we’ll all be level 85. If I had those five extra points now, I would probably put them in Seals of the Pure for a nice threat boost. I think that’d work out to more tps than 3/3 Sanctity of Battle and another 2 points in Conviction. I can’t see anything mitigation-wise that would be a better fit for them.

2% magic reduction meta

Very, very situational. I can count on one hand how many fights that might help in, if at all. Not worth it except as a very narrow gimmick.

245 tank libram of valiance up time

According to the log I did the other day to test Quel’Serrar, 98.3%.

3.2.2 pally tanking with spell power weapon

No, no, a thousand times no. You’d get more threat out of a dps one-hander with a high dps number than a spellpower weapon. Spellpower is dead, get with the times.

anub’arak solo tank adds interrupts

I do this for 10-H and 25-N. It’s totally doable. Having a lot of block value helps significantly.

best prot pally weapon enchant 3.2.2

I’m partial to Blood Draining for the survivability aspect. If you’re hurting for threat, I would recommend Accuracy.

can a paladin interrupt hammer of justice coliseum twin

Yes, assuming the shield is down. Holy Wrath is a better choice for this, though. (Damage and interrupt in one!)

do prot paladins need alot of hit rating 3.2

I am a vocal proponent of hit rating. I strive to always run as melee hit capped (though I don’t gem or enchant for it). There is nothing better than hit to ensure a steady, consistent stream of amazing tps.

fresh 80 tankadin what libram should i get?

Libram of the Sacred Shield! You can easily nab it after 4-5 heroics.

Yawn: A look at updated 3.2.2 patch notes

Well, I’m fresh out of ideas, and frankly the idea of doing two BLTNFs in a row bores me to tears. So, I decided to do a post on everyone’s favorite, excruciatingly mundane topic: patch notes. Contain yourselves, please.

Blizz updated their test realm patch notes, which you can see on mmo-champ and elsewhere. The official site too, I suppose, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Seal of Corruption and Seal of Vengeance: These seals will now only use the debuff stacks generated by the attacking paladin to determine the damage done by the seal and by the judgement.

Nice fix to an annoying bug.

Hammer of the Righteous: The damage from this ability is now considered physical instead of Holy. The threat generated by the ability has been increased such that it will continue to do approximately the same threat it did when it was Holy damage.

This will hopefully help us with our one source of snap aggro on multiple targets. I for sure wasn’t relishing the prospect of having diminished threat in the snap category, so this is a nice mitigation to an annoying nerf.

Relics: All buffs provided by relics (idols, librams, totems and sigils) now share an exclusive category such that gaining a buff from one of these items will remove all other buffs gained from items in this category.

This really doesn’t affect us. I think only the most intense of the min-maxers were actually bothering to libram swap. The swing timer reset was too much of a hassle, and the threat bonus was marginal, all things considered. I wonder if this change means other classes were relic swapping as well, or if Blizzard’s trying to be ahead of the curve.

Speaking of librams, I’ve been seriously considering picking up the Libram of Valiance for my threat set. And, by threat set, I mean in heroics I tend to swap out my stam trinks and Libram of Defiance for Lavanthor’s Talisman, the STR Darkmoon Card: Greatness, and Libram of Obstruction.

Supposedly, according to numbers I’ve seen elsewhere, the 200 STR of LoV has a 90% uptime, so is worth a constant 180 STR, which then threat wise works out to an equivalent of 540 BV. Not straight conversion, mind you. Threat conversion. So, even with the change to Libram of the Sacred Shield in 3.2.2 to ~450 BV, the LoV will still work out to be better.

And that’s before the mind-shattering additional spell power you get from strength. Just try to wrap your head around that! … Uh, yeah.

All around we’re looking at a 5-6% threat nerf. Not great, but could be worse.

Great news about the new prot libram

… You don’t have to get it!

Thanks Blizzard for making such a crappy libram that we get to save the 25 Emblems of Valor. Take that Holy/Ret chumps.

From mmo-champion.com:

Paladin T8 Protection Relic — Increases your block rating by 136 [8.5% -ed.] while Holy Shield is active.

This is an upgrade to Libram of Repentance, I guess, but not much else. Personally I’m already block capped, so all that extra block rating would be pushed right off the table. It’d be a perfect waste of a relic slot.

And you can’t even argue it’d be a good starter item for tankadins, since it costs Emblems of Valor to get in the first place.

Very disappointing.