Magister’s Terrace, the new 5-man instance is fun. We ran it a few times this weekend, on both normal and heroic. On normal, the difficulty and loot are roughly equivalent to a low end heroic. On heroic, the difficulty and loot is roughly equivalent to Karazhan (opinion might change once we run it a few more times). There’s a very nice tanking trinket: Commendation of Kael’Thas.

At exalted with the new faction, two nice tanking shields are available. One being a marginal upgrade to the one that drops off of Nightbane (but way prettier). I am hoping though that at least one of the raid shields will drop before then -_-…

2.4 broke a good chunk of my add-ons, including Omen, Recount, and some of my boss mods. Omen 2 is utter crap, it doesn’t show anything half of the time. When it does, it is grossly inaccurate. The new combat log is neat, but annoying. Why does it have to scroll through every piece of information every time I rezone? Oh: Did you know that you can now display the lucky charms in chat? The format is: {name}. So, to display the square: {square}. Awesome!

We got dumped on by the instance server this weekend: It kept booting our entire raid and resetting all of the trash. Getting lag dumped right before a victory kill is especially lame. I took my gimpy 68 hunter through Attumen in Kara yesterday afternoon. lol, he picked up his very first badge of justice and epic. Time to level him to 70 so that he can equip it (and so that I have a secondary character to farm daily quest gold).

It’s been nearly a month since I was supposedly going to fix the site theme and errors, bah. Busy and “busy” with various items lol. Oh, I know that the footer isn’t a very glorious spot for all of my favorite WoW blogs, must fix that and the links as well (half of which are broken and out of date).

If you don’t already use it, WoW Web Stats is an excellent performance analysis tool. It’s probably the most accurate and detailed out of all the current mods and combat log parsers out there. It doesn’t display information in real time though like DamageMeters or Recount. You have to instead, enable combat logging (/combatlog or something, that will write everything in your CombatLog to a txt file in WoW/logs) and then upload it to the site. If you don’t want to manually toggle it, there are mods that will do it automatically in accordance with what zone you are in. LoggerHead is a good Ace2 mod with said functionality.

Things that I found interesting, based off of a rather small sample size: 

• I migitate roughtly 25% of all normal incoming damage via block/armor (normal as in not a special attack or spell). Roughly 54% of all damage is avoided.
• In a night’s run, I seem to let a few crushing blows slip by. I’ve noticed that when I engage a boss, I don’t always get Holy Shield up by the time I’m within the mob’s hitbox. I’m not sure if the rest are from spell lag, me not minding my spell rotations, or positioning issues.
• Consecration does roughly 30% of my total damage on a boss fight, followed by Holy Shield at around 20% – 25%. Seal of Whatever comes up third at around 15% to 20%.
• On fast attacking bosses (Halazzi), Holy Shield comes out on top at around 40% of my overall fight damage (it’s uber nice, TPS goes way over 1.5k)
• In my off-tanking gear Lay on Hands crit heals for 25871, lol.

The forums have changed yet again. Toying with new software.

I’ve picked up quiet a few items since the last time I’ve posted: The Pauldons of Stone Resolve from the timed chest event in Zul’Aman, the tanking boots from the first boss in ZA, the badge reward tanking coal, the badge reward tanking belt (not the spell one), tons of ZA crit gear, and the healing mace from Maiden in KZ. I’m at around 15277 HP unbuffed; Just need to chant my healing crap now (boo, expensive).

Observations: I’ve pretty much outgeared all of Karazhan. I’ve been having to swap into spell damage gear on most of the fights otherwise I go out of mana too fast (which is fine with me pew pew pew). Also noticing that tankadins are especially nice on some of the fast attacking ZA boss encounters because of Improved Holy Shield’s 8 charges. I think Shield Wall is being proc’d off too fast on some of the warriors, who are getting crushed.

Oh, the mini-patch added a neat feature: When you perform a readycheck, marks will appear next to the names in the raid screen showing who is ready and who is AFK. Some of the custom UI’s have integrated this feature as well. That is super duper handy.

Soaked up a few pieces for my offhealing set: [Spaulders of the Advocate] off of Halazzi and [Mojo-mender’s Mask] off of Akil’zon. I am not honestly sure what either is supposed to be, the shoulders look like, as a guildy put it, “crap glued together” lol.

Got Jan’alai down in Zul’Aman. There are two important factors to the fight: Egg popping and bomb dodging (bombs are easy as shit to dodge). The boss is on a platform with a two separate platforms off to the East and West side, each platform containing a number of eggs. Every 45 seconds or so 2 trolls will spawn, each will head to a platform and begin popping eggs. When the eggs pop dragonhawks will spawn.

Every time the trolls spawn you want to allow a certain amount of eggs to pop because when Jan’alai reaches 35%, ALL of the eggs will pop at once. We kind of brute forced it: When he was at around 55%, we accidentally let ALL of the remaining eggs pop, so about 20 or so dragonhawks were free. Nuked them down and nuked the boss. If all of the eggs are popped, Jan’alai enrages. Compared to the damage output of say, Halazzi, it’s pretty weak. Pew pew.

Jan’alai drops a really nice shield that I want. Getting a graphic update too! It currently shares the same graphic as the Hakkar shield, which is kind of ugly…

I finally finished off my cooking to 374 and acquired the Fish Tracking spell (new in patch 2.3). Just an FYI: You get the spell from the Weather-Bean Journal, which can be found in any of the crates that you fish. The easiest way to get it, by far, is to look for the Steam Pump Floatsam in Zangarmarsh. Fly around the edges of the lakes/lagoons, look for piles of floating crap, fish in them. Took me a half hour. Fish tracking by the way, makes it 10x easier to farm crawdads.

Halazzi is more or less a, “tank n’ spank gear check add fight”. Have your off-tank pickup the Spirit of Halazzi immediately, have your melee DPS focus on taking down the totems as soon as they pop, and have healers keep both tanks topped off because Halazzi does major damage.

Tanks: Halazzi’s most annoying ability is Saberlash, an 18k cleave that splits between 2 people (not unlike Nalorakk’s Brutal Swipe). Both tanks need to stand on top of each other for the entire fight. At 75% and 50% HP, he will split into two: Halazzi and Spirit of Halazzi (kitty cat). You need to pick up the Spirit ASAP, without moving off of the MT (soaking a full Saberlash = insta-wipe). Halazzi does not crush.

DPS: Totems will spawn throughout the fight. All melee DPS must take these down in seconds, they kill. The totems will spawn more frequently after Halazzi hits 25% health. When he splits, ignore the add. Hunters can tranq shot off frenzy.

Healers: Keep the tanks alive, it’s not unreasonable to need 3 or 4 dedicated healers. The MT will take a ALOT of burst damage.

Tankadin note: Halazzi has a very fast attack speed, it’s not uncommon for your TPS to break a steady 1k or so! The screenshot (which is sort of large, didn’t shrink it down…) has my updated UI, I’ll make a separate post about that at some point.

0 Holy/49 Protection/12 Retribution

This build is specifically for raid tanking, as everything is built around maximizing health/mitigation, easing uncrushability gearing and threat generation. There are plenty of great protection builds for more hybrid healing or DPS roles, but this isn’t one of them lol.

Protection (49 points)

I dropped Reckoning because it’s not really useful for high level tanking anymore. It doesn’t proc much at all because I avoid roughly half of all attacks. Doing more attacks is not necessarily a positive thing anyways because of the way Parry works for mobs. Other than that, I maximized mitigation, avoidance and threat.

5/5 Redoubt

Damaging melee and ranged attacks against you have a 10% chance to increase your chance to block by 30%. Lasts 10 sec or 5 blocks.

Great for AoE tanking, marginally useful in a raid tanking situation. It is however, a prerequisite for Shield Specialization (besides, Imp Dev Aura is trash).

3/3 Precision

Increases your chance to hit with melee weapons and spells by 3%.

Being able to hit a mob more with your attacks and spells means more threat generation (and DPS :P).

5/5 Toughness

Increases your armor value from items by 10%.

Scalable! Toughness will increase a well geared tankadin’s armor by around 2,000 to 3,000 AC. Good talent, take it.

1/1 Blessing of Kings

Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing total stats by 10% for 10 min. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.

BoK is one of if not the best player buff in a the game. Unless you are 100% certain that you will always have another paladin to be the BoK slave, you might as well take this. 10% all stats means more health, more mana, more dodge (from agility), and more love from group members.

3/3 Improved Righteous Fury

While Righteous Fury is active, all damage taken is reduced by 6% and increases the amount of threat generated by your Righteous Fury spell by 50%.

Almost doubles your threat and reduces ALL damage taken by 6%. A staple for all paladin tanks.

3/3 Shield Specialization

Increases the amount of damage absorbed by your shield by 30%.

Paladins are block heavy tanks; Much of the high level tankadin gear is heavy on Block Value. Shaving an extra 100 off of a 3,000 damage hit may not seem like much, but it adds up. Taking less damage = the healers won’t hate you as much.

5/5 Anticipation

Increases your Defense skill by 20.

Even though Anticipation doesn’t scale, 20 is a LOT of defense skill. Remember that at level 70, 2.37 Defense RATING = 1 Defense SKILL. This talent is equivalent to having a piece of armor with 47 defense on it.

2/2 Spell Warding

All spell damage taken is reduced by 4%.

With Imp RF, that’s a total of 10% spell damage mitigation. Not bad. If you are aiming for raid tanking, take every single bit of mitigation possible.

1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary

Places a Blessing on the friendly target, reducing damage dealt from all sources by up to 80 for 10 min. In addition, when the target blocks a melee attack the attacker will take 46 Holy damage. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time

Decent buff, though highly situational and rarely used unless you have like, a bazillion paladins in the raid. It is though, a prerequisite to Holy Shield so take it.

2/2 Sacred Duty

Increases your total Stamina by 6%, reduces the cooldown of your Divine Shield spell by 60 sec and reduces the attack speed penalty by 100%.

The Divine Shield buff isn’t really useful from a tanking standpoint…but MORE STAMINA IS!

5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization

Increases all damage you deal when a one-handed melee weapon is equipped by 5%.

This was semi-recently changed: This talent will increase ALL of your damage by 5%: Consecration, seals, judgements, white damage, ALL. More damage = more threat.

1/1 Holy Shield

Increases chance to block by 30% for 10 sec and deals 185 Holy damage for each attack blocked while active. Damage caused by Holy Shield causes 35% additional threat. Each block expends a charge. 4 charges

The bread and butter of paladin tanking. The threat bonus is awesome but the true beauty of this spell is the 30% block bonus. Absolutely necessary for uncrushability.

2/2 Improved Holy Shield

Increases damage caused by your Holy Shield by 20% and increases the number of charges of your Holy Shield by 4.

It’s very easy for a fast attacking boss to use up all 4 Holy Shield charges before you have a chance to recast it. 8 charges means that it is almost guaranteed to stay up. More holy damage = more threat.

5/5 Ardent Defender

When you have less than 35% health, all damage taken is reduced by 30%.

AD is more useful than it seems, it’s saved my butt quite a few times. 30% reduction isn’t as much as 50% (how it used to be), but the increased threshold to 35% means that it kicks in earlier and reduces the chance of a big hit leapfrogging AD and instagibbing you.

5/5 Combat Expertise

Increases your expertise by 5 and your total Stamina by 10%.

MORE STAMINA! This talent boosted my unbuffed health by around 1.2k or so…

1/1 Avenger’s Shield

Hurls a holy shield at the enemy, dealing 494 to 602 Holy damage, Dazing them and then jumping to additional nearby enemies. Affects 3 total targets. Lasts 6 sec.

The 41 point talent, the crown on the king’s head, the showcase of the protection tree. At first glace, Avenger’s Shield appears to be nothing more than a pulling spell. Upon further inspection it is so much more:

• 
  Frontloading threat: With imp RF, an average AS hit will yield approximately 1,000 threat. Judge SoR, recast SoR, throw on a Conc. That is easily several thousand threat in a couple of seconds. The more threat you frontload, the sooner your party can start DPS. Being able to generate buttloads of threat within seconds is one of the advantages of a paladin tank.
• 
  The daze: AS is the paladin equivalent of the warrior’s intercept. Same effect (minus the distance closing part :P), same cooldown, same range and deadzone (approx). The daze lasts just long enough for the other party members to CC. Did CC break midfight? The mobs are aggro’d on you already, they won’t run to the clothy. Can’t taunt and a mob starts running to someone on the other side of the room midfight? No problem: Toss a shield, daze, clothy has time to run away while you gain massive threat.

Retribution (12 points)

5/5 Benediction

Reduces the Mana cost of your Judgement and Seal spells by 15%.

I go through mana pretty fast, even with Spiritual Attunement. The better geared you are the less healing that I need, the less healing that I get, the less mana I get back.

2/2 Improved Judgement

Decreases the cooldown of your Judgement spell by 2 sec.

Faster Judgements means that you can generate holy damage faster.

5/5 Deflection

Increases your Parry chance by 5%.

Pretty much the reason for a tankadin to place any points into retribution. Invaluable towards raising your avoidance/mitigation to 102.4%.

The trash: The eagles and the trolls don’t stop spawning until you kill the Amani’shi Tempest, who is located on the stairs. So just keep pulling

Akil’zon is a, “pay attention and move” fight. You have exactly 8 minutes to down him before enrage happens and people start dying (8 minutes is way more than enough time). Make sure that everyone in the raid is on the stone platform before you pull. Anyone on the stairs will get shut out of the encounter by a magically invisible door.

MOST IMPORTANT POINT: Every 45 seconds Akil’zon casts Electrical Storm: An 8 second channeled spell. Electrical Storm is cast on a random player, a cloud will appear above that player, anyone not under the cloud will take mega damage and die. So for that reason, everyone should run to and collapse onto the main tank before Electrical Storm is cast so that everyone will be under the cloud.

• The new Deadly Boss Mods has a timer for his abilities. I usually call out and have everyone collapse onto the tank 8 to 10 seconds before Electrical storm. You can manually time it too but I loathe doing that.
• Once Electrical Storm ends, spread out immediately. If you stand too close to someone, both of you will take mega AoE damage and get a debuff.
• Around a minute or so into the fight Akil’zon starts summoning eagles who will swoop down and randomly hit people. They are near impossible to target and respawn when they die, so just heal through them. Have a paladin put up Concentration Aura to help the casters, make sure that everyone is topped off health wise.

…as long as everyone pays attention and MOVES when they need to this isn’t a really difficult fight. I don’t have the specific details on Akil’zon’s abilities.

Edit:

1. Be wary of being overly dependant on the DBM timers or any mod timers. I’m not convinced that they are accurate at all.