how to tank as a paladin - cataclysm

Upload: ericpat

Post on 08-Apr-2018

242 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    1/19

    How to Tank as a Paladin

    NOTE: This guide has been completely revamped to reflect the drastic changes that were

    implemented with patch 4.0.1 and the release of Cataclysm.

    y Tanking Basicsy Talentsy Glyphsy Holy Powery Stats and Geary Unhittabley Reforgingy Gems and Enchantsy Threat Rotationy Multi-target Threaty Sealsy Consumablesy Macrosy Things to Remembery Return to Main PagePaladin Tanking Basics

    So you want to take a beating, do you? Well, youve come to the right place. This guide

    will walk you through the basics of playing a protection based Paladin, or Tankadin as they

    are commonly called.

    Playing a Tankadin can be a lot of fun b

    ut can be q

    uite challenging, so yo

    usho

    uld only enter

    into tanking if you are prepared to be responsible for groups and learn a lot. Tanks are the

    lynch pin in every group and as such are expected to know and understand all of the fights

    in an instance or raid. That is an easy task compared to actually knowing how to tank. To

    tank you need to know what to do and when to do it, thats the biggest difficulty in actually

    learning how to tank and doing it well. That's where this guide attempts to help.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    2/19

    So why play a Paladin tank, and what makes a Paladin tank different from the

    other forms of tanks?

    Paladin tanks have solid damage mitigation especially when taking many hits. This is

    because any hit we block has its damage reduced by 40%, and we block a lot of hits.

    While we do not have a rage bar like a Warrior tank, we have a mana bar that gets used in

    much the same way, and gets replenished every time we get healed. We also have both a

    single target and multi target ranged taunt that can be used as a backup taunt in the form

    of Blessing of Protection. We have several ranged pull backs in the form of the Avengers

    Shield and Exorcism. We also have a stun on a cool down timer and an AoE stun against

    undead targets. We also have an AoE heal, single target instant heal from Holy Power, and

    a group or raid damage reduction.

    Because all of the Paladin abilities are on timers or act for very short time frames, tanking

    as a Paladin involves very close management of spell casting if you want to get the most

    threat and damage mitigation possible. You constantly have to manage all of your abilities

    and cooldowns, all while watching what is going on around you. It can take some serious

    getting used to.

    Threat

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    3/19

    Paladin Tank

    Paladins work best when

    you can group creatures up

    and tank many at

    once.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    4/19

    Starting at the beginning, your job as a tank is to hold threat, sometimes called aggro, on

    you and off of your DPS and healers. This is a measure of how mad the enemy is at you

    and how likely they are to attack you. As a tank this is your primary concern, keeping the

    enemy attacking you.

    How you keep threat starts with the most basic tanking ability you have, Righteous Fury.

    This is a buff that you cast on yourself that increases all threat that you cause by 200%.

    This means any damage you do to an enemy counts as 3x the actual damage you did for

    threat generation purposes.

    While the base UI has a simple threat meter system built into it, I would strongly

    recommend getting a mod such as Omen to track your threat. This will help you figure out if

    you are generating enough for your DPS and let you know how far ahead you are from

    them. If you consistently have a huge lead in threat it allows you to do other things without

    worrying about losing threat.

    Talents, Glyphs, and Holy Power

    As a Tankadin, realize that you will need to place almost all of your points in the Protection

    tree. You need to do this to grab all of the major tanking abilities, many of which are found

    very deep in the tree. You will spend at least 31 points in the protection tree and likely a bit

    more before venturing over to the Retribution or Holy trees to spend your remaining talent

    points.

    There are many critical abilities in the protection talent tree though. In fact there are more

    good talents than most players can reasonably take. Just a few of the key ones are: Divinity

    which grants 6% bonus healing, Toughness for 10% extra armour, Sanctuary to prevent

    critical hits against you, and to suffer 10% less damage, and Holy Shield which blocks an

    additional 10% of damage. There are many more useful talents in a good build, but ratherthan go through all of them, take a look at a standard raid build.

    Shown below is a typical Tankadin build that many players are currently using for raid

    tanking at level 85:

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    5/19

    Typical Tanking Build

    You can find a typical build in a Talent Calculator here.

    Glyphs

    While there are a number of decent Glyphs for a Protection based Paladin theres not a full

    set of prime, major, and minor that you need to take. Instead, there are primes that you

    must have and a few major glyphs. So the ones you really should take are as follows:

    Prime Glyphs:

    y Seal of Truth for the 10 Expertise Rating which is a huge buff, and frees upitemization points on your gear to be used on other stats.

    y Shield of the Righteous for an extra 10% damage with your shield.y Crusader Strike for 5% extra crit chance with it, or Judgement for 10% extra

    damage. Both are much weaker choices than the first two though.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    6/19

    Major Glyphs:

    y Holy Wrath so that it also stuns Elementals and Dragonkin. This helps reduceincoming damage for a short period of time.

    y Focused Shield is an option for raid main tanking as it ups the damage and threaton a single target, but gets rid of the bounce and therefore the threat on secondary

    targets. Situational

    y Whatever you want for your third.Minor Glyphs:

    y Nothing provides any huge bonus specific to tanking, so you can choose whicheverones you want.

    Holy Power

    In Cataclysm we now have what amounts to Rogue like combo points called Holy Power. We

    earn Holy power by hitting opponents with CS of HotR. The points stack up to 3 and can be

    used at any time to trigger abilities such as Word ofGlory (a self heal), Inquisition (bonus

    Holy damage), or Shield of the Righteous (a huge damaging hit).

    Generally we sho

    uld

    use o

    ur Holy Power only when it gets all the way to 3 stacks. Howe

    ver

    as soon as it does we should use it right away. How we use it is as follows:

    y Shield of the Righteous if we are tanking a single target and need threat. This isalways the first priority.

    y Inquisition if we are tanking a group of enemies and have Consecrate and HolyWrath off cooldown and available to use right after.

    y Word ofGlory if we are low on health but have lots of threat. Anytime we are wayahead on threat in a long fight this is a good option as it saves the healers mana and still

    generates some threat as healing creates 50% threat.

    Stats and Gear

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    7/19

    Gear for a Tanking Paladin is pretty easy in theory, but turns into a constant juggling act of

    micro-management in reality. In theory you want to stack avoidance to the point where you

    can not suffer a normal hit, have enough stamina to survive any hit, and enough threat

    causing ability to hold the boss on you instead of on your DPS. Actually, that doesnt look

    so simple does it?

    Because of the complexities of managing gear, many tanks suffer from something I call

    Stamina Stacking. Many tanks simply do not understand the importance of all the stats and

    therefore focus strictly on their health pool by stacking stamina. Worse yet, many DPS and

    Healers that dont understand mitigation just look at a tanks health pool to determine if

    they are geared enough for an instance or raid.

    ffective Health

    Obviously the more health you can have as a tank the better, and this is what too many

    players focus on. What a smart tank or player will focus on is your effective health. Your

    effective health is how much damage you can take over time which is far more important

    that looking at simply how big of a simple hit you can take, well it's more important once

    you can take the biggest hit you need to be able to take.

    Let's look at two simplified examples, the first a tank with 300,000 health but no avoidance

    and a second tank with 150,000 health and 20% dodge and parry and 30% block. We willthen have them fight a boss that hits for 50,000 damage every 3 seconds after armour

    reduction, or 20 times in a minute.

    The first tank will take 1,000,000 damage over that 1 minute fight because he will get hit by

    every attack. The second tank will parry 4 and dodge 4, taking 400,000 less damage, and

    then block 6 more attacks stopping 40% of the damage from each, or another 120,000

    damage. This means that the second tank only needs to be healed for 480,000 health over

    the minute fight, instead of 1,000,000. Ask a healer which tank they would rather heal and

    I think you can guess the answer.

    While in real life the stat difference may not be as drastic, healers can very easily tell even a

    5% difference between characters and will start questioning why a stamina tank is so hard

    to heal compared to an avoidance tank.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    8/19

    So instead of just focusing on your total health let's look at all the stats that matter to

    Paladin tanks.

    Stamina Stamina grants 10 health for every point of stamina. In addition, because of

    Vengeance, we gain up to 10% of our health as Attack Power which helps us generate

    threat.

    Dodge and Parry Dodge and Parry on gear provide boosts to the percentage chance to

    either dodge or parry an incoming attack. At level 85 you need 177 points in either to earn

    1%. Both are subject to Diminishing returns once you are above a certain point, which is

    just below 10% at level 85.

    Mastery Mastery provides 2.25% chance to block per point. This is not subject to

    diminishing returns and therefore offers the most bang for you points until you are Block

    Capped, which will be described later.

    Hit Hit rating is required so that you do not miss with your attacks. To hit a raid boss you

    require 8% hit at 129 points per percent which works out to 1032 hit at level 85.

    Expertise Expertise helps minimize or eliminate an enemies chance to dodge or parry

    your attacks. Once you get to 26 Expertise a boss can no longer dodge, and at 55 Expertise

    they can not parry. Your goal is to get to at least 26 Expertise which is referred to as the

    soft cap. We do, however, gain 10 expertise rating points from our glyphs so that means

    we only really need 16 rating, each of which requires 31 points of expertise on your gear.

    Meaning you need a total of 481.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    9/19

    Paladin Weapon Threat

    Paladins get threat from the damage they cause with thier weapon and abilities.

    Once you have enough health for the content that you are tanking (the amount of health

    you should have is subjective, however a good starting point is 100k for level 85 instances,

    125k for heroics, and 150k for raids) you should instead focus on becoming "Unhittable" or

    "Block Capped". While this is a bit of a misnomer since you can still be hit, what you are

    looking to do is raise your avoidance stats to a point that you are not able to be hit with a

    normal hit, instead the worst you will suffer is a hit that you block with your shield. What

    this means is that the worst an enemy can do to you is their normal hit damage minus your

    block value. We will look at this more in the Unhittable section below.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    10/19

    While +hit and +expertise will increase your threat output due to you hitting the enemy

    more, threat is generally not an issue. +Hit is helpful though so that you can always hit with

    your taunts and special abilities. If you can, reaching the melee hit cap of 8% is useful but

    not nearly as necessary as with other tanks. The same applies to expertise since it adds

    additional threat but is not a necessity like it is for Warriors and Death Knights.

    The Hit Table and Reaching Unhittable or Block-capped

    As explained above this does not mean you can not be hit, but that you can not suffer a

    normal full damage hit. Prior to the WotLK expansion this was called uncrushable, but

    WotLK essentially took crushing blows out of the game. The same math as before applies to

    figuring out if you are unhittable.

    You must understand how the hit table works before we start though. A raid boss has a

    102.4% chance to hit you since you are 3 levels lower than he is. This means that you need

    102.4% of total avoidance to not suffer that hit. How is it made up?

    Your avoidance stats are Miss, Dodge, Parry, and Block. Miss is normally a base 5% chance,

    however since a raid boss is 3 levels higher this goes down to 4.4%. At level 85 once

    specced as a tank and with some decent level 85 gear you will have numbers such as the

    ones below:

    y 4.4% - Missy 12.5% - Dodgey 12.5% - Parryy 30% - Block

    This means that you will be hit normally by the boss roughly 40.6% of the time. Those

    stats are relatively easy to reach and pro

    vide a great starting point for Heroic

    C

    ontent, but

    you will want to ramp up those numbers before raiding.

    Once you start raiding your goal is a set of numbers something like this:

    y 4.4% - Missy 20% - Dodge

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    11/19

    y 20% - Parryy 52.5% - Block

    By maximizing block first since it is the easiest to get you remove all normal hits from the

    hit table and lower overall damage significantly. Once it has been maxed and your total

    avoidance is 102.4% then you can start to shift some back into dodge and parry.

    Reforging

    Reforging is a great way to adjust your stats to those that better suit your exact needs. For

    a complete guide on how to reforge check out our guide here: Reforge This - A Guide to

    Reforging in World of Warcraft. As for paladin tanks you should adjust your stats so that you

    maximize mastery.

    As you will only be equipping tanking gear, you dont have that many options on reforging

    as you will not have stats that you can easily sacrifice such as haste, crit, spirit, or others.

    Instead all your gear will have only Stamina, Strength, Expertise, Hit, Dodge, Parry, or

    mastery. So, which to switch around first?

    Your first priority is to reforge any expertise and hit into mastery on your gear to up your

    block percentage. This is counter to previous expansions where hit and expertise mattered,and dont get me wrong, they still do. However, while in theory focusing on hit and

    expertise should take priority, threat is currently not an issue on raid bosses due to the

    tanks vengeance ability. Our threat is so solid that we can afford a few misses or parries

    past the first few seconds of the fight, and those points are better spent on maximizing your

    mitigation.

    After moving any expertise or hit into mastery, if you have pieces that only have dodge or

    parry they are next on the list. On these pieces reforge your highest avoidance stat (dodge

    or parry) and move it into mastery to provide block until you are at the block cap. This is

    because mastery is not affected by diminishing returns and will do more for you by lowering

    incoming damage faster than the other stats once they are over 10%.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    12/19

    Gems and Enchants

    Gems and enchants will play an important part in getting you to the numbers you need to

    be able to tank heroics and raids.

    First we'll start with the easier topic of gems. In general you should be putting Stamina

    gems in your blue slots, parry in red slots, and dodge or mastery in yellow. Given how

    important maximizing mastery is you may want to consider every slot to be filled with a

    hybrid stamina/mastery (blue or yellow sockets) or parry/mastery (red sockets) gem to get

    the highest avoidance.

    As for your helms Meta Gem socket you should grab a Austere Shadowspirit Diamond ,

    which grants 81 stamina and +2% armour value. Better yet it only requires you to have 2

    yellow gems which will easily be satisfied by any mastery gems you have.

    Now onto the more difficult topic of enchants on your gear. Proper enchants can add a ton

    of stats to your already good gear. The most critical ones depend on the stats that you are

    lacking at the time and will fluctuate as you gear up.

    Gear Enchants

    Slot BonusNotes / Source (if not from anenchanter)

    Head +90 Stamina and +35 Dodge Earthern Ring - Revered

    Shoulders +45 Stamina and +20 Dodge Do Therazane - Honored

    Chest +20 Stats May sub with +15 to all stats

    Back +250 armor

    Wrists +50 Dodge May sub with +50 hit

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    13/19

    Hands +65 Mastery May sub with the cheaper +50 Mastery

    Legs +145 Stamina and +55 Agility

    (Charscale Leg Armor)

    May sub with the cheaper Twilight Leg

    Armor

    Feet +50 Mastery

    Shield +40 Block Rating May sub with a +160 armor

    Weapon +40 hit May use Mending or Windwalker

    instead, but both are very expensive

    Single Target Threat Rotation - 93939

    Ok, you now understand the basics about gear, stats and talents but how do you actually

    tank something? Knowing that most of your threat generation comes from holy damage how

    do you cause as much as possible as quickly as possible? What is the best rotation to

    generate as much threat as possible on your target so that they stay attacking you?

    The new best single target (boss) tanking rotation is called by the name 939 or 93939, this

    is derived from the old 969 rotation. These two simple number based names come about

    due to the cooldowns from your basic tanking abilities, and involve weaving the two

    cooldown lengths together to cause as much threat as possible.

    The 3 refers to the abilitiy that you will use every second global cooldown, which is every 3

    seconds. This is your Crusaders Strike. You will use this ability every other global

    cooldown.

    The 9 refers to your abilities that are on a longer cooldown and will only end up being used

    once every 9 seconds. These are your Judgement, Avengers Shield, Holy Wrath, and 3 Holy

    Power Shield of the Righteous. You will notice that there are four abilities listed there,

    however you actually time them is based on a set of three.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    14/19

    A standard single target threat rotation will look like this:

    GCD - Ability

    1 - Judgement

    2 - Crusader Strike

    3 - Avengers Shield / Holy Wrath (if AS is on cooldown)

    4 - Crusader Strike

    5 - Shield of the Righteous (whenever you have 3 holy power)

    To make this easier many players will arrange their abilities in a manner that they can

    easily remember what to do next. A fairly standard setup is: Crusader Strike, Judgement,

    Avengers Shield, Holy Wrath, and Shield of the Righteous, as shown below.

    By using this setup on your toolbar your rotation becomes as follows: 2-1-3-1-5-1-2-1-4-1-

    5-1 and then repeated. You can also find a fairly standard macro later in this guide that

    allows you to combine the Avengers Shield and Holy Wrath buttons so you only need to use

    4 buttons instead of 5, simplifying the rotation. While useful and making your bar cleaner I

    would suggest at least keeping the full list on one of your toolbars for fights where you may

    need to break rotation or prioritize different abilities.

    Multi Target Threat Rotation - 93939

    The new multi-target (trash) tanking rotation not significantly different than the single

    target rotation in that it is still basically a 939 rotation. However, instead ofusing Crusader

    Strike every other cooldown youuse your Hammer of the Righteous ability. Also, instead of

    prioritizing your Avengers Shield you prioritize Holy Wrath. Finally youuse holy wrath any

    time it is available instead of Avenger's Shield.

    Therefore a multi-target threat rotation will look something like this:

    GCD - Ability

    1 - Judgement

    2 - Hammer of the Righteous

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    15/19

    3 - Holy Wrath/ Avengers Shield (if HW is on cooldown)

    4 - Hammer of the Righteous

    5 - Consecrate (if available)

    Tanking Seals and Blessings

    It is not like the old days of BC or WotLK, we really only have two seals to choose from

    now. Our tanking seal is the Seal of Truth which causes damage when judged and also

    places a DoT on each target that it hits. The DoT stacks up to five times and deals holy

    damage over time. While in theory you could use the Seal of Insight for some healing

    return while tanking, it is a threat loss and does not return much health.

    The same goes for Blessings in Cataclysm. Gone are the days of multiple Blessings to chose

    from and we really only have two now. Blessing ofMight for damage and mana regen and

    Blessing of Kings for stat boosts.

    Which Blessing you should use really depends on two things. First, if there is a druid in the

    group, you bless might since Mark of the Wild is essentially the same as Kings now.

    Second, if there is no druid it is up to the healer. If they have enough mana regen, then

    Kings is better because everyone gets a stat boost, if not, then bless might so that the

    healer has more mana regen and can heal longer.

    Consumables

    While items and gear are required for any raid, obviously, you also really should bring along

    all the consumables that will help you maximize your tanking ability. The ones that every

    Tankadin should bring to a group or raid are:

    y Flask of Steelskin - Increases your Stamina by 300.y Elixir of The Master Increases your Mastery by 225.y Elixir of Deep Earth Increases your armor by 900.y Lavascale Ministrone - Grants 90 Mastery and 90 Stamina for 1 hour. This food

    grants the most mitigation as it is mastery based.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    16/19

    y Blackbelly Sushi - Grants 90 Parry and 90 Stamina for 1 hour. This food grantstons of avoidance.

    y Mushroom Sauce Mudfish - Grants 90 Dodge and 90 Stamina for 1 hour. This foodgrants tons of avoidance.

    y Mythical Health potions - Bring a stack just to be safe, however they dont reallyheal a lot, at probably less than 10% of your health.

    Macros

    There are several very common macros that every Tankadin should use (assuming they

    haven't started already) to simplify their life. Many more can be found in the official forums.

    The most common that I use though are as follows.

    Simplified Rotation Macro

    When using a standard 939 rotation, you want to use Avengers Shield (AS) any time it is

    not on cooldown and only use Holy Wrath when AS is not available. This is not always

    predictable though due to Grand Crusader procs. Many players do not like to tie up 2 slots

    on their action bar for both abilities though, and will sometimes miss using AS when GC

    procs.

    What you do then is create a macro that will cast AS by default, or Holy Wrath if AS is not

    available. Then simply replace your AS and HW buttons on your toolbar with this one,

    freeing up a button space.

    #showtooltip

    /cast Avengers Shield

    /cast Holy Wrath

    Taunt

    This macro can be used to turn your Righteous Defense taunt into a more Warrior like taunt.

    Simply click on the mob you wish to taunt and the macro will target their target for you and

    cast Righteous Defense. If, however, you already have a friendly target set as your target it

    still works as it normally would.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    17/19

    #showtooltip Taunt/cast [target=target,help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget,help]Righteous Defense

    Emergency Taunt

    While not really a taunt, many Tankadins use Hand of Protection (HoP) as a backup taunt.

    Since it protects the affected player from physical damage if the attacker is only doing

    physical damage they will leave them to attack the new person on top of their aggro table,

    which is hopefully you.

    IMPORTANT NOTE: It is possible to hit yourself with HoP with this macro if the attacker

    switched targets while you are targeting them, If you do, the macro will cancel the bubble if

    you simply use it again, however you have now wasted your HoP.

    #showtooltip Backup Taunt

    /cast [target=target,help] Hand of Protection; [target=targettarget,help]

    Hand of Protection

    /cancelaura Hand of Protection

    All in One Taunt / Backup Taunt

    For those minimalist players that want as few commands on their toolbars as possible, you

    can combine the above two macros into one. When combined it will first try to use

    Righteous Defense on the target or targets target and if that has already been used it will

    cast Hand of Protection on that target.

    #showtooltip All In One Taunt/castsequence [target=target,help] Reset=8 Righteous Defense, Hand ofProtection; [target=targettarget,help] Reset=8 Righteous Defense, Hand of

    Protection

    Bubble to Break Fear, Poison, Debuffs

    Sometimes you get feared, poisoned or something else and need to get out of it fast. This

    can happen in fights with mass fear effects when you do not have enough priests for a full

    fear ward rotation or don't have Shamans for tremor totems. Using this macro once casts

    your Divine Shield, using it a second time cancels it so that you can grab threat back from

    the target fully cleared of debuffs.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    18/19

    You will notice that technically it cancels the aura first. That is so that when youuse the

    macro the second time it does not error out with "Spell not ready". If you do not have

    Divine Shield active already the cancel aura command does nothing.

    #showtooltip Divine Shield

    /cancelaura Divine Shield

    /cast Divine Shield

    Tips

    Things to do

    y Learn to use the 939 rotation and staggering your Holy Shield with other abilities tomake sure it is active at all times.

    y You should always run a threat meter of some sort (the one I prefer is Omen). It willallow you to judge how far ahead you are of your DPS'ers.

    y Remember that your Avengers Shield no longer breaks most CC, so feel free to uselots ofCC, you will need it in heroics.

    y Remember everything in this guide! You're not a Warrior tank - you have differentconcerns and requirements. While they are different they are not necessarily better or

    worse, just different.

    y Tanking is not something you can pick up in a day. It is a long hard road thatrequires lots of practice and gear. Make sure it's for you before you even start.

    Things to avoid

    y Since you really need to use different abilities to hold aggro on multiple enemiescompared to single, make sure you dont forget.

    y Also, since some of your multiple target agro abilities break CC, such as Hammer ofthe Righteous and Consecration, make sure you pull enemies away from CC targets.

    y Do no use your taunt right way, instead of trying to pull the enemies back in someother method, unless there is more than one creature on that group member. Then

    taunting should be your first option to grab them back. Try to save it for when your healer

    has pulled aggro or when a DPS'er has several enemies on them at once.

  • 8/6/2019 How to Tank as a Paladin - Cataclysm

    19/19

    y Avoid looking at stats other than your core stats. Due to mana return from healingand blessings you no longer need to worry about Intelligence as a Paladin tank (at least on

    gear).