A list of gear goals that I am currently working on for self future reference. Might also be useful if there are any prot paladins reading as well. Because of our itemization, it's hardest to achieve the health and avoidance goal…that is what I am having trouble with now. Unfortunately, much of the current paladin tanking gear is heavy on int and mana/5, which in a heroic/raid setting is not really what we need (damage mititagion is by far more vaulable).
I'm currently 7/47/7…not really sure why I bothered putting any points into Holy. Will in the near future need to respec to 0/49/12, leaving out the 5% Parry bonus in Retribution was a very bad thing to do.
Health: 10k unbuffed bare minimum, hearing of paladins that have 11.5 and even 12k unbuffed o_O. We have a base deficit of around 3k health in comparison to warriors and bear druids.
Mana: Around 6k unbuffed is good enough because of the mana recieved from Spiritual Attunement. In normal 5-man dungeons I tend to run out of mana if I'm not careful, but in heroics I am getting healed so damn much that most of the time, I am sitting on almost a full blue bar…and that's while spamming every single holy damage spell that I have.
Spell Damage: 200 is sufficient, any less than that then you will have trouble holding aggro, any more and you will be gimping your damage mitigation. A lot of tankadins make the mistake of overfocusing on spell damage, at the expense of more valuable stats (stamina, block, etc). You really don't need all that much if you are full prot.
Defense: 490 is the magic number to negate all critical strikes. Once you reach this goal, start focusing on pushing dodge/parry/block to 100% avoidance. The math: All mobs 3 levels or higher (raid mobs are level 73) have a chance of landing a crushing (150% damage) blow on you and all mobs have a base 5% chance to crit. 365 (mob level * 5) + 125 (to compensate for the 5% crit) = 490.
Avoidance: It's the crushing blows that will get you. Blocked hits can't be crits (not an issue with 490+ def) or crushing blows and neither can dodges or parries. In order to become immune to crushing blows you will need your dodge, parry, and block percentages to add up to 100%. Recall that Holy Shield increases your block by 30% while active (10 second duration and 10 second cooldown).
Amount needed per 1% damage avoidance at level 70:
(OUT OF DATE)
- Block: 7.9 block rating per 1% block
- Defense: 14.7875 defense rating for 0.25% to miss dodge parry and block
- Dodge: 18.9 dodge rating per 1% dodge
- Agility per 1% Dodge: 25 (paladin)
- Parry: 31.5 parry rating per 1% parry
- Miss: Base 5% + 0.04% * difference between mob's attack rating and your defense.
Holy shield gives you a 30% bonus to your block, 35% if you have the epic libram from running heroics (I need 11 more badges, sigh). So, in order to achieve 100% block you will need block, dodge, parry and miss to add up to 65%. Assume a total miss of 10%, so 55% between block, dodge, and parry.
I need 6.78% more avoidance, 11.78% without the libram in order to completely push a crushing blow off of the hit table from a leve 73 mob. I hit 10k HP earlier this evening, would like more. I can probably sacrifice some spell damage and intellect to make a few of these goals, those are over qouta…made some bad geming choices.
These values might also be affected by other attributes, not sure. Didn't finish reading up on all of the formulas.