Where does our threat come from?

Here's a threat table from Klimpen's blog showing where our threat comes from, and how it changes as our spell damage goes up. The biggest % of our threat is coming from consecration, although Seal and Judgment of Righteousness are way up there.

It makes sense that our white damage threat becomes a much smaller portion of our threat as we increase spell damage. I've been running with my Libram of the Eternal Rest (increases the damage of my consecration by up to 47) now that I'm uncrushable without my blocking libram, which should help even more.

Something I hadn't realized before is that we gain threat from SA (Spiritual Attunement). I knew that gaining mana, from a mana pot, eathing food, etc gave a little bit of threat. It turns out that the mana I gain when I'm healed also gives me some threat.

Another interesting thing to note here is our reactive threat (holy shield, Ret Aura, Blessing of Sanctuary and Spiritual Attunement) all start becoming noticeably smaller percentages of our threat generation. This means holding secondary aggro on something (see the Gruul video below) becomes significantly easier as we get more spell damage gear and buffs.

Paladin tanking progression is pretty messed up. We're great main tanks in Kara, but don't perform well for gaining secondary aggro because, at that stage of our progression, we don't have the spell damage to build the aggro and have to rely on our reactive abilities. We have to work hard at being uncrushable, unlike a warrior or druid, which makes them more natural choices for tanking. Paladins then get thrown into off-tank positions and either can't hold secondary aggro because they aren't getting hit, or are taking too much damage because we're still crushable.

In the second half of Kara, we start coming on stronger, and then get hit by High King Maulgar and Gruul, who hit fresh paladins like a steam roller because of our lower health. Throw in Gruul's silencing ability and it's game over. Of course, lets not forget Nightbane w/out fear ward.

It isn't until we get a high spell damage weapon (over 200) and most of our tier 4 that we can really start competing for secondary aggro.

The good news is, we are a lot more useful in TK and SSC. Picking up the adds on Hyrdoss, Al'ar, and Tidwalker are good examples. Void Reaver is our first boss to really prove ourselves. When we reach him, chances are our spell damage is still a little low, but it's starting to get where it needs to be and we can normally hold him for a fair amount of the fight, which will only increase as we get better gear.

I'm looking forward to the other upcoming fights and seeing where we end up. I hear good things about paladins in Mt. Hyjal, but that's still a ways away.

Tidewalker - First look

Had our first real look at Tidewalker last night. Learning the pulls too him took a little longer then I would have liked, but it should go a lot faster next time. We only got two pulls on tidewalker him self before we had to call it. I wasn't able to pick up the adds the way I expected, but it was rather chaotic on the first pull and we didn't have the placement down for the second.

Our real target right now is still Al'ar and then Magtheridon, but we were in there and didn't have the tanks for either of those two fights. We'll get there soon enough, though.

I found this video in which I really like the placement of everyone.



Blacksmithing at 367. These last points are a real pain.

Derb 2.0

Derb 2.0 is coming to an instance near you. With the patch looking like it'll be out on Tuesday and the other gear I'm soon getting, my threat will go through the roof:

1-Merciless Gladiator's Mace - 24 arena points to go before I get this bad boy, +105 spell damage over my continuum blade.
2-Boots of the protector - about 85 points on my blacksmithing and I can make these, another +27 spell damage.
3-Flask of Blinding Light - 80 spell damage (56 more then the Adept's elixer)
4-Threat enchant - gloves - 2% added threat to gloves will be available from the shat'ar vendor
5-Consecration will now properly hit large creatures - It used to be the consecration had to hit the center of the mob, now it just has to hit a mob's hit box.

So, what does all that mean? Lets look at some numbers:
Right now, in my standard tanking set, I have 223 spell damage. With righteous fury, that works out to 334.5 threat (223*1.5).
With the new gear and flask, it'll be another 188 spell damage, add the righteous fury buff and the 2% modifier to my total threat and we get 628.83 threat ((188+223)*1.5 * 2% threat).

That's getting close to double my current threat, and I can still throw on my spell damage gear if I need.

Secondary Aggro for Paladins

A lot of people, including me, have said paladins have problems with building second aggro on mobs. Check out this paladin keeping solid second aggro on Gruul.


Stats from the paladin in the video:
Base spell damage: 357
Gruul Flask: +23
Food buff: +23
Shaman Totem: +101
Superior Wisard Oil: +42
----------------------------
Total spell damage: 567

To get the kind of spell damage numbers show in the video while staying uncrushable, especially when only progressing up to Gruul, is rather difficult. Kara is easier because everything is undead, but Gruul's lair is a real hurdle for any paladin tank. On our first HKM/Gruul kills, I was in full heal mode. Now that I'm starting to get more tanking items from SSC and TK, I'm starting to see my threat really take off (it was already pretty good).

I've got a few items up-coming, including the paladin boots from SSC when I get my blacksmithing up, the merciless gladiators mace from the arena next week, a new pot for additional holy damage in the next patch, the threat enchant to gloves in the next patch, and just last night I got my head piece of Prince. The helm isn't as good as my goggles for mitigation, but it's a nice threat piece. It'll be scary.

Lore, from the maintankadin forums, had this to say on paladin off-tanking:
I see this a lot on these boards: "Paladins make very poor offtanks." It's just plain not true.

First, a definition of the term offtank, for the purposes of this thread: A tank whose job is to build secondary threat on a target, below the main tank but above other players, for the purposes of boss special abilities.

Alright, now to the meat. There are two "explanations" commonly given as to why Paladins supposedly generate poor secondary aggro: loss of Holy Shield, and OOM issues.

Myth: Paladin threat is severely nerfed when the Paladin is not the mob's primary target, as Holy Shield is a huge part of Paladin threat generation
Fact: Paladin threat gen is actually pretty spread out. On the average, "slow and heavy" boss encounter, Holy Shield, Consecrate, and Seal of Righteousness tend to be pretty even in total threat gen, with Judgement of Righteousness coming in just behind. So although it is a threat loss, it's not an enormous amount, and not nearly as much as the loss a Warrior tank feels without Revenge and reliable rage generation.

Myth: Paladins can't keep up offtank threat because they run out of mana.
Fact: Though possible, there are many methods a Paladin tank can use to keep a mana flow coming. Some of the more common tools are active use of mana potions, and being put in a group with a Shadow Priest. Our initial mana pool also lasts quite a while.

It's also important to note that by definition an offtank is going to take some sort of damage at some point (if they aren't, there's no need for an offtank), so our mana will be replenished a bit by that. The mana we get from healing goes a lot farther than the rage a Warrior or Druid tank gets from damage, as well. In fact, mana generally lasts a lot longer than rage by design in any situation.

Notes:
It's also a lot easier for a Paladin tank to ramp up threat generation. We have Avenging Wrath available to us, which is many times more effective than Misdirection for threat gen purposes. There are also a myriad of items that sacrifice tanking stats in favor of spell damage; this is the kind of thing that stuff is for. Warriors don't have that luxury - the best they can do is stack as much block value as possible for a minimal overall threat benefit, or put on some DPS gear at a much larger mitigation sacrifice.

Druids still win out in offtarget threat gen over Paladins. Much like Paladin gear, there is a lot of Druid tanking gear that sacrifices some tanking stats for threat (in their case, attack power). On top of that, there are no Druid threat abilities that require them to be in the MT position to use, so they have all their main tank abilities at their disposal. That doesn't make them the de facto best choice for an offtank, though. Every encounter is situational, and Druids function well in a flex role due to the dual nature of the Feral spec (that's a fancy way of saying "Feral Druid DPS > Prot Paladin Healing"). So if only two tanks are necessary (ie: Gruul), it's probably best to put the feral druid on DPS and have the Warrior MT and the Paladin OT.

Derb vs Curator and Nightbane (1 - 33)

Another week and no leggings or chest piece.

Curator: 26 kills, 1 Wrynn Dynasty Greaves (I didn't get the drop)
Nightbane: 7 kills, 0 chest pieces

Not as worried about the leggings now as I've settled for my tier 4.

Recent Personal Successes

I typically don't play on Tuesdays, but yesterday I made one of those rare appearances and managed to pick up both my tier 4 leggings off of Gruul and a nice set of tanking bracers from Lootreaver.

On top of that, it was my first time tanking HKM and Gruul. My healers were actually suprised at how easy I was to heal on HKM, which was good because we were very light on healing. We only had 5 for HKM and 6 for Gruul, and then lost a healer in the first 40 seconds of the fight. We had another healer who was new in the guild and hadn't downed Gruul before. We pulled it out, even though I died at when he was around 10% health. I'm calling it a win, but just barely.

I would rather have the leggings off Curator then my tier 4 leggings from Gruul, but considering I've only seen them drop once since we've been killing him (2nd or 3rd guild on the server to do so), I'm not holding my breath until they drop. Nightbane won't give up his tanking chestpiece, either. I'm really starting to hate random drops.

Finally, Dark Favor downed Al'ar last night. First server kill. I'm happy to see some more server progression. If we could get all our players on the same night, I have no doubt we could get a few more server firsts for ourselves. Server firsts aren't our priority, but they are nice.

The Road to Sisters of Elune

Here's a little background on me and how I came to SoE.

I started playing WoW the last week it was in beta and have been a constant player ever since. I first rolled on Argent Dawn with a small group of friends. I was the guild leader of our little guild 'A Herd of One'. As a small guild, we pretty much ran out of content that we could do, including playing several characters to 60. Our big claim to fame was running Scholomance in a 5 man group when most people were running it with ten. We were not a very advanced as a guild, but we had fun. When Rags was killed on our server the first time, I had no real concept of what that entailed nor had I ever been in MC. The prospects of getting into a raiding guild on AD with all my friends were slim, and getting into a raiding guild solo as a rogue would also have been tough due to the number of rogues on the server.

Around Christmas, the queues on Argent Dawn starting getting really bad (over 45 minutes). I decided to roll an Alliance toon on a brand new server, Vek'Nilash, which opened Jan 2nd, 2006 to get out of the queues and start from scratch.

On Vek'Nilash, created a warrior named Jamison. The first guild I joined was one of the first created on the server as well as one of the bigger ones. The people were ok, but it obviously wasn't going to make it far in raiding due to lack of leadership and completely open recruiting. It was way too early to worry about raiding anyway, as nobody on the server was over level 10 when I joined. By the time I hit level 40, I decided to find a different guild which had more prospects for higher end content. The most promising was 'You and Who's Army', but they really weren't looking for warriors. I rerolled a lock named Kianda and got into the guild where I stayed all the way to 60 and even became an officer. We couldn't didn't quite have enough to raid Molten Core, though. We even tried merging with another guild to get enough people, but that didn't work out for various reasons. The merger was my last hope for the guild to be able to hit MC. It failed, and, with no hope of real progression after that, I quit the guild and got into the most progressed guild on the server, 'Decerto', who had cleared Zul'Gurub and all the way through MC up to Domo (all server firsts).

'Decerto' was the best move I made. I learned a lot from that guild. We had tons more server firsts, including Domo, Rags all of BWL, all of AQ20, Satura, 3 bugs, Krinaxx (sp), and Huhuran, and we were the first original guild on the server to take down the Twin Emps. Also, we were told by a GM that we were the fastest guild across all servers to open the gates to AQ.'Decerto' went from starting on a brand new server to taking down the Twin Emps in 7 months, with a majority of their members never having raided before.

Less then a week after we opened the gates to AQ, server transfers were enabled to Vek'Nilash. As a newer server, Vek had a lower population and short BG queues. This was a time when high population servers were reeling under the weight of huge player bases, experiencing huge lage spikes and crashes aplenty. Several high end guilds transfer to Vek'nilash. Some of our better players decided loot was easier to get by joining these guilds that were further along then us. Other players were getting burnt out and, after loosing a few too many top players, the officers decided to /disband. It was rather fitting that the last boss we killed as a guild was Vek'Nilash in AQ40. For more info on 'Decerto', click here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Guild:Decerto_(Misha_US)

While I was still in 'Decerto', my friends on Argent Dawn hooked up with 'Circle of Fear'. 'CoF' had been raiding MC for a long time, but was still struggling with Domo. I joined them, and became an officer with 'CoF' because of my raiding experience and being the guild leader of my old guild. It was easier then it sounds to be part of two raiding guilds as our schedules worked out almost perfectly. 'Decerto' did it's new content raids Fri-Sunday while 'CoF' raids M-W. When 'Decerto' broke up, I came back to Argent Dawn full time so I could play with my friends.

I wish I could say my raid experience from my Alliance character paid off and that I was able to bring a lot of what I learned to 'CoF', but in fact, it didn't work out that way. We didn't make a ton of progress on AD. We did manage to take down Onyxia, Ragnoros and finish off ZG, but never took down any bosses in BWL, AQ40 or Naxx, although we took a few attepts. I would have to say this is mainly due to poor/inconsistant raid attendance.

With the expansion coming up, and queue times on AD building up again, me and a few friends decided it was time to jump ship and start over. Blizzard opened up free transfers to a new server, Sisters of Elune. On the same day we decided this, in a completely unrealated incident, several other players decided to leave 'CoF'. They came over to Sisters of Elune to try out our new guild we were making, and 'Bloodmoon Rising' was born.

I had already decided to roll a paladin because I had a much better understanding of how powerful the paladin buffs were and how much they would be needed. The fact that Blizzard was trying to make paladin tanks viable was icing on the cake.