Tag Archives: taunt

Bubble&Taunt: Pulling victory from the jaws of defeat

Sometimes you can’t depend on some stupid streak of luck, you’ll need to make your own victories when the enrage timer hits zero. I’m sure you’ve been there before, the health bar on the boss is rapidly approaching zero, in tandem with the enrage timer. Either you or the boss is about to explode, and if only you had a few more seconds you could ensure it was the latter.

Some of you might already be doing this, but for those neck-hair-raising moments I recommend the Bubble&Taunt maneuver. What you do is in the second before the boss enrages, quickly cast Divine Shield, then use Hand of Reckoning. This will buy you three seconds. After the three seconds is up, the threat negation of the Divine Shield will make the boss turn and crush one of the raid members to dust. If you’re fast enough you should be able to squeeze off a Righteous Defense and buy yourself another three seconds.

In total that should be about 6-7 seconds of extra time you’ve bought for the raid to bring the boss down. Sometimes that’s all it takes for those really sloppy kills or those epic first downings.

Hmm: Taunt hit chance changing?

I’m going to vote for not interesting gameplay.

At the very least, you should be able to reduce your chance to miss a Taunt to zero if you reduce your chance to miss with a weapon to zero. It’s also possible we’ll just let them always hit. (Source)

Taunts going on the melee hit table is a long overdue change. Taunts always hitting seems like unnecessary trivialization. I would prefer the former.

Make it so, GC.

Better Late Than Never Friday, 1/22

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.

righteous defense taunt small ooze

The Small Ooze is taunt immune, so unfortunately that won’t work. The only way to get rid of them is to merge one into a Big Ooze.

best libram tankadin

Eternal Tower is, technically, the best for survivability (although the ramp-up time is annoying and can cause issues). It’s a marginal upgrade over Defiance, however, and not worth getting until you run out of better things to spend Emblems of Frost on. Just farm Triumph badges and get the 245 dodge libram. Contrawise, Valiance is the best threat libram right now.

how to use righteous defense

Back in my day to use Righteous Defense you had to target the person being attacked, and if you wanted to directly taunt the attacking mob you’d have to use a /targettarget macro. Thankfully, Righteous Defense was changed a while back. It’ll work the same if you use it on the mob or the mob’s target.

armour penetration for tankadins

Bad stat for us, don’t even think about it! The same reasons that make ArP bad for Ret Pallies bad for us–our threat derives primarily from Holy damage, which pierces armor as is. It’s for this reason I always cursed the tanking gloves off of Ignis that had ArP on them.

does the hp5 on purified onyxia blood talisman work in combat

Yes. But you shouldn’t use it unless you’re soloing old content, or something equally frivolous. hp5 is not a tanking stat.

festergut amp magic

Bad idea, amplify magic will make the various raid damage attacks do even more damage. The only fight amp magic is good for is Saurfang, because every attack in that fight is classified as physical damage.

20 defense vs titanium plating

Neither, go with the BC-era +18 stamina enchant if you have the defense to spare. Otherwise get the +defense enchant.

22 agility titanweave dodge

Agility if you have enough defense, Titanweave otherwise.

3.3 divine sacrifice worth it?

Absolutely! Assuming you get Divine Guardian as well, it’s like a free 20% damage reduction cooldown for us that benefits the raid as well. DS/DG is a mandatory talent for raiding.

blacksmithing vs engineering tankadin

I’m partial to engineering, myself, for the cool toys and the armor glove enchant/agility cloak enchant. However, you’d probably be better off if min/maxing just to go with the straight +60 stamina of blacksmithing.

seal of righteousness vs seal of vengeance

Seal of Vengeance is still our best single-target threat seal. Seal of Righteousness has it’s uses though, particularly on Rotface if you’re kiting the Big Ooze. You can’t melee it, and because SoR’s judgement offers the most damage in that situation, it’s the best choice.

Third times a charm?

So the guild’s loot system changed… er, again. This is now the third change to the system since early February, and it’s only mid-March. Yikes.

And in case you’re wondering, yes we finally gave in and implemented DKP.

I don’t want to get into the details of how this came about (big hint: more loot drama), just that it’s kind of disappointing. I was hoping we’d all be “mature” enough to deal with how the loot was distributed, that people would be willing to pass if they got a string of pieces, that there’d be little to no greed.

Don’t get me wrong, people generally were great. But the system had huge flaws that would show from time to time, and this was just inevitable I guess.

Another highlight from the raid this weekend includes the aforementioned DK from this post returning to our Naxx25 raid, and taunts were a-flying. We did Gothik and it was just obscene. At the phase when he’s warping between the two halves of the room, he pops into ours and I pick him up.

Immediately a taunt. I start just wailing away, grab aggro by out tps-ing the DK. Taunt. I win back aggro again. Taunt. Rinse and repeat until Gothik goes down.

I was talking to the warrior MT before the raid when I saw the DK was in it, and remarked that I had a full night of being taunted off of to look forward to. The MT is immediately like “I thought he was doing that!”

At least it’s not just me, eh?

Better Late Than Never Friday, 3/13/09

When writing this post I accidentally typed the title out as “Best in Slot” Friday… which is a nice Freudian slip of what I keep intending to write a post about. Anyways, this is the second Better Late Than Never Friday, a periodic piece in which I pull search keywords that brought people here from Google Analytics and answer the questions behind those keywords that they probably didn’t find during their visit.

best in slot paladin protection, best in slot prot paladin, best in slot paladin tankadin, best in slot tankadin, prot paladin best in slot list, prot paladins best in slot gear

I’m working on it!

best stat threat tankadin

A tankadin’s best threat stat is strength, hands down. Not only do you get attack power from it (for all abilities), but you double-dip and grab block value as well for mitigation and Shield of Righteousness! A distant second is hit rating, which affects almost all our attacks. Expertise is not a good threat stat–it just doesn’t affect enough abilities to matter.

crit cap for paladins

I’m assuming this means the cap where you can’t be crit anymore. The answer is 5.6% crit reduction, which is around 540 defense. Always double check on your character sheet, because you could have 540 defense but 5.59% crit reduction!

gem strength tankadin

Don’t gem strength for your Paladin. For my sake. :(

good dodge% for a tankadin

Diminishing returns makes this somewhat of a dodgy issue (har har har) but I did some digging and found this chart. According to it, diminishing returns starts around 200 rating and promptly begins to nose-dive around 350 or so. I’m currently sporting 305 rating/21%, so diminishing returns around starting to make themselves known. Honestly though, dodge is the best avoidance stat, so as long as you’re not sacrificing stamina to pile it on, then keep on piling.

hit rating tankadin

Honestly, hit rating is not that important for tankadins. Most of our attacks would require 8% hit rating to be capped, but that would require a lot of sacrificed health and avoidance to achieve. I’m personally sitting at 5% melee hit rating, and I don’t intend to improve it anymore.

how much hit and expertise does a paladin tank need?

Refer to this post for expertise. For hit, by the numbers, a tankadin needs 9% hit rating to cap out most of our attacks (judgements, ShoR, HotR, Avenger’s Shield, etc.) which is 296 rating. For spells (ie, Righteous Defense and Hand of Reckoning) we need 17% hit, or 446 rating.

But again, a Paladin really doesn’t need more than 4-5% hit rating. And the glyph makes sure than one of our taunts cannot miss.

tankadin titanium plating or defense

To answer the question in a round-about way, my ideal situation is to have Hero’s Surrender with Enchant Shield – Defense for boss fights and Wall of Terror with the Titanium Plating for trash.

righteous dresses

And how!

Tanking Etiquette Tips #1: Do Not Want, er, Taunt

turmoil

Hey, you know what’s more fun than fighting a mob? Fighting off another tank at the same time!

If you’re a tank, I’m sure you’ve been in that situation before: you have aggro on something in a multi-mob pull. The other mobs start going down, and one tank is suddenly unoccupied. Those angry little lightning bolts pop up over his head, and suddenly that Bile Wretcher isn’t so interested in you anymore.

There is absolutely nothing ruder than this. It is, with minimum cliche intended, a slap in the face.

It’s like turning to the tank that’s currently holding the mob and saying “hey, I don’t trust you to tank this so I’m taking over” or, more appropriately, “hey, I have the attention span of a gnat, gimme.”

In my guild’s Naxx runs there is a DK tank that has a terrible, terrible habit of doing this. I swear Dark Command (or whatever their taunt is called) is part of his normal tanking rotation. Invariably I find myself engaged in taunt tennis with him, because he will just. not. give. up. on tanking that damn mob.

If you don’t have something slamming its face against your shield, it’s ok, take a deep breath. Just auto attack, apply judgements, hang on in case the guy tanking it goes kablooey.

Just don’t taunt, (pardon the language) it’s a dick move.