Protection Paladin 8.3

[Treckie 1]

On 10/7/2018 at 12:11 AM, Guest Zebi said:

One addition: in the  Heartsbane Triad fight you can use blessing of protection to cancel the https://www.wowhead.com/spell=260741/jagged-nettles debuff. This is quite usefull if the healer can not keep up with the healing or does not know the mechanic.

Very true!
A big update is incoming for the mythic+ page, and I'll make sure that it's included to reflect it!

 

[Nubcake 0]

can any one provide a azerite forge string for this as most sites only focus damage abilitys ? ?

or know where i can find some ?

 

[zangdor 0]

Hi,

In the guide you say some traits "can in some cases bump a piece up", but I'm still a bit confused about when Inspiring Vanguard/Gemhide become less interesting than anything else, I just got the Pauldrons of the horned horror at 355 from my weekly chest and I've been running with the 7th legionnaires shoulderplates at 340 since it has both of those important traits.

I was wondering if the +15 ilvl and Armor/Strength/Stamina that comes with it were worth letting go Inspiring Vanguard for Judicious Defense or Ruinous Bolt and Gemhide for Impassive Visage or Bulwark of the Masses.

[Treckie 1]

On 10/16/2018 at 11:47 PM, Nubcake said:

can any one provide a azerite forge string for this as most sites only focus damage abilitys ? ?

or know where i can find some ?

 

This is very hard to provide as it requires you to basically put a number to represent and rank all the traits, which is not a very fair way to look at the traits due to both defensive and offensive values.

On 10/17/2018 at 12:09 PM, zangdor said:

Hi,

In the guide you say some traits "can in some cases bump a piece up", but I'm still a bit confused about when Inspiring Vanguard/Gemhide become less interesting than anything else, I just got the Pauldrons of the horned horror at 355 from my weekly chest and I've been running with the 7th legionnaires shoulderplates at 340 since it has both of those important traits.

I was wondering if the +15 ilvl and Armor/Strength/Stamina that comes with it were worth letting go Inspiring Vanguard for Judicious Defense or Ruinous Bolt and Gemhide for Impassive Visage or Bulwark of the Masses.

In your case, I'd say the 340 piece is better. 15 item levels is a lot, but you're basically going from straight up Best in slot traits, to completely useless traits, so the 340 is going to defensively be better even with less stats.

 

[Guest Tearea]

Hey

I just tried conclave on heroic and one cannot remove Kimbul's dot by bubbling it. You are immune to the damage, yes, but the dot remains - plus you loose aggro

 

 

[Treckie 1]

15 hours ago, Guest Tearea said:

Hey

I just tried conclave on heroic and one cannot remove Kimbul's dot by bubbling it. You are immune to the damage, yes, but the dot remains - plus you loose aggro

 

 

This is correct! 
It was apparently changed from PTR, and an update later today will reflect some of the changes that came in with the release.

[Medifrag 0]

In which tier would you say is "Judicious Defense" located? It's not mentioned in the guide. On my piece it only competes with "Righteous Conviction". Which one would you say is better?

"Grace of the Justicar" also isn't mentioned in the guide. Would you say it is better than a second Soaring Shield or Inspiring Vanguard?

Edited February 7, 2019 by Medifrag

[Treckie 1]

On 2/7/2019 at 7:44 PM, Medifrag said:

In which tier would you say is "Judicious Defense" located? It's not mentioned in the guide. On my piece it only competes with "Righteous Conviction". Which one would you say is better?

"Grace of the Justicar" also isn't mentioned in the guide. Would you say it is better than a second Soaring Shield or Inspiring Vanguard?

Hey! Sorry for the late reply, progress keeps me busy ?

Honestly, Judicious Defence is such an incredibly weak trait that you really never choose it. It's uptime is incredibly low, and it's effect is even less relevant.

 

When it comes to Grace of the Justicar, it's technically a Holy trait which is why it is not listed, but it does deserve an honorable mention as in very rare occations it can be a useful raidhealing trait in very very rare situations.

[Guest mairenn]

for Grace of the Justicar, maybe it should be raised up a few tiers, as it is pretty good threat generator as the prot pally is not only damaging but also healing the raid at the same time.

[Treckie 1]

On 5/19/2019 at 8:44 AM, Guest mairenn said:

for Grace of the Justicar, maybe it should be raised up a few tiers, as it is pretty good threat generator as the prot pally is not only damaging but also healing the raid at the same time.

This is not true. Most heals do not generate threat anymore for tank players.

That said, in 5mans, the healing from Grace is so tiny that it will not make any difference at all. In raids where the healing will be somewhat reasonable, threat is however never really an issue, and it wouldnd't make any impact either.

[Guest Bounty]

I got a 440 hatchet from waycrest the damage dot is good but I have a 435 hook from freehold should I use that because it has those bonus stats or go for the hatchet for pure dps?

[Treckie 1]

On 12/11/2019 at 12:03 AM, Guest Bounty said:

I got a 440 hatchet from waycrest the damage dot is good but I have a 435 hook from freehold should I use that because it has those bonus stats or go for the hatchet for pure dps?

Sorry for the late reply ?

440 Hatchet is generally a go-to single target damage weapon. While a weapon does not bring a whole ton of defensive capabilities, the secondary stats on the 435 would make it better in a defensive situation. But Hatchet is good for damage output.

Which one to use really depend on the situation, and Hatchet loses value when AoE tanking compared to secondary stats.

Happy holidays!

[Guest The WoW Generalist]

Hello, 

We noticed in your talent section you neglect to discuss the true function of Retribution Aura. Note that it does holy damage, and Prot Pally generates the most aggro from holy damage spells. The intent of this talent is to ensure you have aggro on ads that may hit another team member. This talent does really well for weeks like Skittish when you may lose aggro. I would recommend taking this talent if you feel that your ability to maintain the majority of aggro on skittish weeks or big burst pulls is low.

There were also a few parts of your guide that was perceived as lacking. There are concepts and talents you graze over that can be the difference between giving people the right tools and setting them up for failure. For instance, I've been able to maintain 92% uptime on Shield of the Righteous(SoR) during boss fights and 80% overall for mythic+ 15 dungeons taking the Crusader's Judgement talent. You tell players that they should expect downtime on this spell and they should expect to take heat when its down, which can be misleading.

Without taking the Crusader's Judgement talent, we have still been able to achieve 67-70% up-time on the armor buff. Through testing the up-time we achieved on SoR is able to be replicated and has shown reliability when pushing its function. Also, it is worth noting that this spell can stack in duration, which is how we got such high up-times. You mention that with the Avenger's Shield build you can achieve a 30% chance to proc your reset and therefore resetting your Judgement if you're taking the tier 2 talent. If you abuse this talent with high amounts of haste you can achieve ridiculous amounts of up-time on the armor buff.

There are a few other minor points on your guide where we feel you could have expanded. For instance, you talk about having a low block chance when referring to taking Redoubt as a talent from tier 1. You happen to be heavily suggesting players taking Soaring Shield for an azerite trait for the increased damage, but you do not explain that the stacking mastery buff can help push players over 80% block chance. Putting mastery enchants on your rings and weapon while taking Holy Shield will ensure you achieve over 80% block chance frequently in combat, provided players have followed your guide with talent and azerite trait selection.

There also is a haste cap. For your Global Cool Down recovery rate there is a cap. 50% haste will refresh your action bar every .5 seconds, but it can not be refreshed faster than this. So, any further haste points past 50% will only decrease the rate that some of your abilities cool-down. Haste also has the second heaviest weight of all the secondary stats for a Protection Paladin. 68 points of haste = 1% haste. Versatility is the most expensive costing 85 points = 1% versatility. For Mastery, 51 points = 1% mastery, and Crit; 59 points = 1% crit. That being said, your discussion on secondary stats may be biased with preferences from previous expansions or builds. The priority you have suggested will leave new players starved for secondary stats because of how much they will need to have for a satisfactory overall percentage. Adjusted priorities can achieve the same or better results if you think about their function and synergy within some of the gear and talent selections available to us.

Also, Mastery provides more defense than Versatility and your comment that says otherwise is incorrect. If 1% versatility provides .5% damage reduction, then 85 points of mastery provides 1.6% attack power and .57% damage reduction from standing in consecration. Even though at just 1% the difference is small, we all have more than 1% of these stats, so as you can assume; the % increase in mitigation scales accordingly. Just for clarification purposes 147 points of mastery = 1% damage reduction from standing in consecration and 147 points of versatility = .86% flat damage reduction. Your priority of Mastery over Versatility we completely agree with. If we were to make a suggestion for a new priority it would have to be this: Crit, Mastery, Haste, Versatility. If you are wondering why we feel this way, our guide on Protection Paladin goes into great detail on this subject.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Blainie
Removed link to guide - a feedback thread is not the place to promote your guide and YouTube.

[Treckie 1]

On 4/30/2020 at 1:09 AM, Guest The WoW Generalist said:

We noticed in your talent section you neglect to discuss the true function of Retribution Aura. Note that it does holy damage, and Prot Pally generates the most aggro from holy damage spells. The intent of this talent is to ensure you have aggro on ads that may hit another team member. This talent does really well for weeks like Skittish when you may lose aggro. I would recommend taking this talent if you feel that your ability to maintain the majority of aggro on skittish weeks or big burst pulls is low.

Unfortunately, Protection Paladins do NOT generate extra threat from holy damage. Almost ALL of our damage is holy, and that which isn't, is Physical.

The sad truth about Retribution aura is that it really does not do enough damage to do what you are suggesting. Keep in mind during skittish weeks, Retribution aura damage is also subject to reduced threat as the damage comes from you as a tank. 4 hits from Retribution Aura hits for about as much as a single tick from Consecration, the damage is literally just so incredibly weak.

The only reason to take it is if you either know you are not going to have to run much if any at all (thus no reason to run Cavalier), and you either NEED to use Blessing of Protection, or you have no reason/benefit from using Blessing of Protection/Spellwarding. This is never the case for progress raiding or Mythic+, but usually used in rare situations when trying to go for logs (even then most people do not bother using it).

On 4/30/2020 at 1:09 AM, Guest The WoW Generalist said:

There were also a few parts of your guide that was perceived as lacking. There are concepts and talents you graze over that can be the difference between giving people the right tools and setting them up for failure. For instance, I've been able to maintain 92% uptime on Shield of the Righteous(SoR) during boss fights and 80% overall for mythic+ 15 dungeons taking the Crusader's Judgement talent. You tell players that they should expect downtime on this spell and they should expect to take heat when its down, which can be misleading.

Without taking the Crusader's Judgement talent, we have still been able to achieve 67-70% up-time on the armor buff. Through testing the up-time we achieved on SoR is able to be replicated and has shown reliability when pushing its function. Also, it is worth noting that this spell can stack in duration, which is how we got such high up-times. You mention that with the Avenger's Shield build you can achieve a 30% chance to proc your reset and therefore resetting your Judgement if you're taking the tier 2 talent. If you abuse this talent with high amounts of haste you can achieve ridiculous amounts of up-time on the armor buff.

While the easy mode section of the guide does indeed mention that your rotation in general may sometimes have downtime especially when running with low Haste, the guide does however not refer to Crusader's Judgment as a spell they will have downtime on, but I assume you may be talking about Shield of the Righteous not having 100% up-time. 92% up-time on Shield of the Righteous  as you mention, is not really realistic over the course of an encounter, even with super high haste you do not reach that high, unless we are talking about a 5man dungeon boss that dies in 40 seconds with Bloodlust the entire duration of the fight.

Yes indeed, the applications of Shield of the Righteous does stack, and you are able to cast it while still having the buff without losing any value (up to 3x applications at once), you may have spotted an oversight in the Guide, as I'm not sure if I do mention it and it may be worth mentioning. However it is mentioned that a common mistake people do when playing Paladin is to cast it way too frequently, rather than adapting and delaying the next usage depending on what is currently going on, such as spell casts or phase changes. Besides, your own "Guide" mentions it stacks to 20 seconds, it does not. It caps at 3x applications of the buff itself, thus it caps at 13.5 seconds.

I mention that with the First Avenger talent, the proc chance for Grand Crusader is increased to 30%. However, should you choose this talent, you no longer get a free Judgment when it does proc, meaning it is really only an offensive alternative, so it is not possible to abuse this talent to achieve ridiculous amounts of up-time of Shield of the Righteous.

 

On 4/30/2020 at 1:09 AM, Guest The WoW Generalist said:

There are a few other minor points on your guide where we feel you could have expanded. For instance, you talk about having a low block chance when referring to taking Redoubt as a talent from tier 1. You happen to be heavily suggesting players taking Soaring Shield for an azerite trait for the increased damage, but you do not explain that the stacking mastery buff can help push players over 80% block chance. Putting mastery enchants on your rings and weapon while taking Holy Shield will ensure you achieve over 80% block chance frequently in combat, provided players have followed your guide with talent and azerite trait selection.

If you are AoEing, you mainly want a stack of Soaring Shield due to the Azerite trait allows Avenger's Shield to hit an extra target. The Mastery it provides is nice, and if you are AoE tanking, it can be very strong, but even 3x Soaring Shields will not let you reach 80% block chance.

On 4/30/2020 at 1:09 AM, Guest The WoW Generalist said:

There also is a haste cap. For your Global Cool Down recovery rate there is a cap. 50% haste will refresh your action bar every .5 seconds, but it can not be refreshed faster than this. So, any further haste points past 50% will only decrease the rate that some of your abilities cool-down. Haste also has the second heaviest weight of all the secondary stats for a Protection Paladin. 68 points of haste = 1% haste. Versatility is the most expensive costing 85 points = 1% versatility. For Mastery, 51 points = 1% mastery, and Crit; 59 points = 1% crit. That being said, your discussion on secondary stats may be biased with preferences from previous expansions or builds. The priority you have suggested will leave new players starved for secondary stats because of how much they will need to have for a satisfactory overall percentage. Adjusted priorities can achieve the same or better results if you think about their function and synergy within some of the gear and talent selections available to us.

Also, Mastery provides more defense than Versatility and your comment that says otherwise is incorrect. If 1% versatility provides .5% damage reduction, then 85 points of mastery provides 1.6% attack power and .57% damage reduction from standing in consecration. Even though at just 1% the difference is small, we all have more than 1% of these stats, so as you can assume; the % increase in mitigation scales accordingly. Just for clarification purposes 147 points of mastery = 1% damage reduction from standing in consecration and 147 points of versatility = .86% flat damage reduction. Your priority of Mastery over Versatility we completely agree with. If we were to make a suggestion for a new priority it would have to be this: Crit, Mastery, Haste, Versatility. If you are wondering why we feel this way, our guide on Protection Paladin goes into great detail on this subject.

There is indeed a Haste cap. However it is at 100% Haste which is not really reachable from gear alone, you may sometimes hit it with some extraordinary buffs or procs and during Bloodlust, but it is really not a cause for concern when gearing. You also want to make sure your character is strong outside of the Bloodlust window.

50% Haste takes your Global Cooldown down to 1 second, it is possible to go down to 0.75 seconds when you have 100% Haste, THIS is the Global Cooldown cap. This however is only a "soft-cap" as Haste above this will still benefit you somewhat in terms of Shield of the Righteous recharge time, as well as most of your abilities scale with Haste. 

Haste becomes the best defensive stat due to it allowing you to have Shield of the Righteous up more often, which gives you a lot of control. Critical strike on the other hand is generally strong in terms of reducing total damage taken, but random mitigation is not very useful for tanks, and performs a lot worse as a defensive option outside of AoE tanking.

Your Math and numbers are way off.

Simply put, Versatility is guarantee'd stronger per point. 
Mastery is shortly behind in raw damage reduction, but gains and comes ahead due to increasing block chance as well. 
Haste then increases your Shield of the Righteous up-time, which allows you to reliably mitigate more hits.
Critical strike however, does nothing defensively but randomly remove a hit now and then, but even with a lot of Critical strike, you are still likely to take 2-3 hits in a row, making you have to still rely very much on your active mitigation and effectively does not impact game play.
Thus giving us: Haste, Mastery, Versatility, Critical strike.
Versatility and Mastery are easily swapped around, and in the end, you're likely best of just equipping whatever has the highest item level most of the time anyway.

 

 

[Guest mclem]

A quick question because I've ended up with a 480 Azerite piece with Clockwork Heart (a 480 Mechanized Plate Chasse); one of the negative aspects listed in the description is the fact that it's only available on 415 gear, which is no longer true. I wasn't clear on whether the trait was downgraded a little due to that limitation; in particular, I'm curious how it stands up against the also-attractive Blood Rite. One the one hand Blood Rite is potentially sustainable, on the other Clockwork Heart gives all secondary stats when it does proc.

(Viewing the piece as a whole, it does mean sacrificing one of my three Bulwarks of Light, which I'm not *thrilled* by, but we'll see how it pans out)

[Treckie 1]

On 5/13/2020 at 1:21 PM, Guest mclem said:

A quick question because I've ended up with a 480 Azerite piece with Clockwork Heart (a 480 Mechanized Plate Chasse); one of the negative aspects listed in the description is the fact that it's only available on 415 gear, which is no longer true. I wasn't clear on whether the trait was downgraded a little due to that limitation; in particular, I'm curious how it stands up against the also-attractive Blood Rite. One the one hand Blood Rite is potentially sustainable, on the other Clockwork Heart gives all secondary stats when it does proc.

(Viewing the piece as a whole, it does mean sacrificing one of my three Bulwarks of Light, which I'm not *thrilled* by, but we'll see how it pans out)

This is very true, and is definitely an oversight, will have a fix in shortly.

As for the trait, it's actually very strong of a trait, both offensively as well as defensively. It's super reliable of when it proccs, altho unfortunately it does NOT line up very well with other powerful tools such as Seraphim, which is why many prefer not to play with it.

It is most definitely better than Blood Rites unless you're able to chain it in some absurd way, Il'gynoth is likely the main outliner where Blood Rites can perform insanely well.