I’m surprised, 2.1 was a relatively smooth patch. No real problems with my UI, no lag, and no server errors, other than the rolling restart that occurred before I got home from work…on my server at least :P. Because of the Spiritual Attunement nerf, my mana does drain quite a bit more, though from what I tested last night, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal; Will just have to throttle my threat generation/mana better in the future. Though, I can’t really say for sure how much the nerf sucks until I test it out in a raid this weekend.

I want this: The Sun Eater, and I am intent on farming Heroic Mechanar every (non raid) evening if needed until it drops. That is a lot of stamina and avoidance on one sword, probably one of the best tanking swords in the game, barring drops from higher raid instances. Since I am already at my 102.4% avoidance/block goal, the sword will push me way over the top, meaning that I can resocket and replace certain items for more stamina/block value.

With the new patch, I am also able to equip my Vambraces of Courage with a Thick Dawnstone socketted into it (used to be warrior only). I still kind of want the Bracers of the Green Fortress crafted, but I am being cheap (and weighing the value of dodge/slightly more stamina against Block Value/socket). Anyways, my current unbuffed tanking gear status after the patch:

• Health: 11287
• Armor (with aura): 15378
• Defense: 509
• Dodge: 15.79
• Parry: 16.7
• Block: 25.44
• Miss: 10.76

103.69% with Holy Shield active and the Holy Shield libram equipped (around 104%+ with BoK). My armor went up by around 1k, and my health by around 300 (HP is still low, I would like it to be at around 12k unbuffed). Avoidance and block went up slightly.

Oh also, several changes as always, didn’t seem to make the patch notes: In heroic Mechanar, Nethermancer Sepethrea will reset once she hits the glass floor in the hallway. What most people did, was kite and blast her all the way to Pathaleon’s room. The adds are significantly slower than her at full run.

Not exactly a paladin or tanking related post, but I found this interesting: Someone on my realm forums started a, “cool places only accessible via flying mount” thread. I can’t believe that I’ve missed this one: Fly to 51,14 in Nagrand (the “G” in “Laughing Skull Ruins” for those who do not have a mod that gives out coordinates). Nestled in the hills is Challe’s Home for Little Tykes. Well, you have to see for yourself, just…lol. So we know that Humans, Orcs, Draenei, elves, Tauren, and Trolls have children, but what about the Dwarves and Gnomes?

The instacast bug is being fixed in the next patch. Explanation: Whenever you do not have a sword or shield in your hands, you cannot parry or block. Unfortunately this rule applies to the short casting animation that occurs during consecration, cleanse, etc. So if you are getting crushed by normal attacks with 102.4% avoidance, this could be a reason why. Also, taunt will correctly work through crowd control. Can’t tell you how many times I have taunted a sheep, only to have it break free and gank a clothy while my spells were on cooldown

Rumor is that 2.1 will go live this week. But, hasn’t that been said every week for the past month?

Meh, been busy/lazy/website apathetic lately, thus the lack of postings.

• I have been healing a little more lately, so I am (err was) thinking about doing a temporary respec to put a bare minimum amount of points into Holy. I would essentially be sacrificing 5% parry (and one of the prot talents likely) to gain 10% int and the healing bonus.
• Not convinced that would be a worthwhile return. I don't have the gear to make up for the 5% avoidance drop anyways (Crushing Blows bad).
• Been reading some interesting articles and musings on avoidance vs block. Tanks with really high levels of avoidance seem to succumb to spike damage whereas tanks with really high levels of block seem to succumb to the priests going OOM
• Even though the healing is smoother with higher mitigation (over avoidance), the tank is still receiving more overall damage. It seems to me that finding a balance between the two would be more appropriate (and possibly adjusting the avoidance/mitigation balance on a per fight basis).
• "The big announcement" from Blizzard is tonight. Starcraft 2 anyone?

Please note that this [b]only applies to normal melee hits[/b], aka white damage. [b]Not yellow damage[/b]…yellow damage comes from special attacks and use a different calculation methodology all-together.

Okay, I think some people are confused about what exactly a crushing blow is and why it happens: A crushing blow is a hit that is 150% of normal damage and can only be dealt by mobs (not by players). It occurs whenever a mob has 15 or more points in Base Weapon Skill over a player’s Base Defense (in other words, a level 73 mob vs a level 70 player :P).

So if you have skilled your character’s Base Defense out to 350 (base means 350 WITHOUT any gear and WITHOUT any talent bonuses), only a mob with a Weapon Skill of 365 will be able to hit you with a Crushing Blow; in other words, a mob of level 73.

Also, remember that all possible attack outcomes on your character are mutually exclusive. In other words, a block is a block and a crit is a crit. You cannot block crits or dodge crushing blows….that is simply not the way hits are calculated.

I’ll make this addition to my existing guides later today or this week but: In order to become completely uncrushable you need to have a total of 102.4% avoidance/block(not just 100%). The reason for this is that for each level a mob has over you, 0.2% needs to be subtracted from each of your avoidance/block stats. Just think of it this way: Every point of defense that you have increases all of your avoidance/block stats…it’s something similar with mob hit rating (I don’t think that made much sense but meh, starving).

All Burning Crusade boss mobs are at level 73, that is a 3 level difference. So you need to subtract 3*0.2% from your dodge, defense, parry and miss. That is a total of 4*3*0.2% = 2.4%. So for warriors and paladins, your goal should be 490 defense and 102.4% avoidance/block (with Holy Shield and the warrior equivalent up).

My paladin is currently at 500 defense and 102.5% mitigation/block. The trick is to time your Holy Shield so that it is *always up.* That means, taking the global cooldown into account. I got Crushed to death for 8k ~ 9kish the other week because I timed my spells poorly and had less than a half second where Holy Shield was down. Boo lol.

I got a new paladin toy last night: Justicar Shoulderguards off of High King Maulgar, just need to decide exactly how I am going to socket it. Lucikly, I got another crafting commission last night after the raid, otherwise I would have been too poor to afford two blue gems in addition KoT helm enchant (and healing gems/chant for the other shoulders).

I can’t seem to find official release notes or screenshots of paladin Tier 4 set changes on the 2.1 PTRs (browsing limited at work), but from what I read, the Justicar Shoulderguards will have 33 stamina and 12 intellect. I skimmed the post, but it looks like they removed the MP/5 and some of the int in favor of more useful stats.

Total Changes: (From this post).
+31 Stamina
-4 Intellect
+14 Defense Rating
+4 Block Rating
+2 Parry Rating
+52 Block Value
+1 Spell Damage
-8 MP/5
+1 Yellow Socket

Please note that this post is written from a paladin perspective. I neither have a druid nor a warrior :P. Warriors have a bunch of tools at their disposal: stance dancing, disarm, etc…but I don’t really feel like listing every little thing. I’m just trying to cover the basics to give a general idea regarding the differences between Bear Druids, Prot Paladins, and Prot Warriors.

Mitigation & Avoidance
Paladin and warrior mitigation/avoidance is almost entirely gear based. In fact, both have the very similar gearing goals, with the exception that paladins need to be somewhat mindful of their spell damage and mana pool. Ideally, warriors and paladins will want 490 defense with 102% block + parry + dodge + miss. Paladins will want around 200 spell damage and around 4,000 to 5,000 mana.

Druids have a significantly higher dodge rating but can’t block or parry in bear form, making them unlikely to completely push off crushing blows. Also, because of the lack of leather +def gear, they aren’t likely to reach the magical 490+ defense in order to avoid crits. Druids though, have by far the highest HP and AC of any tanking class. They don’t try to completely avoid crits and crushes like warriors and paladins, they just take them. For example: At least pre-nerf, many well geared tanking spec’d druids were AT the 75% AC mitigation cap with 20k HP.

Threat Generation
Paladins and druids have scalable threat generation, warriors do not (druids scale with strength/AP, paladins scale with spell damage). Warrior threat, on the other hand is based off of fixed value talents and abilities. It’s a trade off: Paladins and druids can control how much threat they generate, but at the cost of stat/gem/gear slots. Though warrior threat is fixed, it’s all skill based so they are free to focus on gearing mitigation and stamina.

Paladins can also front load a significant amount of threat because they start off with a full blue rage bar. Avenger’s Shield + SoR/JoR + Consecration = thousands of threat in seconds. The fast a tank can generate threat, the faster the DPS can start nuking. On the other hand, paladins LOSE mana while warriors GAIN rage. Even with Spiritual Attunement, a paladin will expend more mana they they will get back.

Multi-Mob Tanking
Warriors can Demo Shout in order to gain initial threat on a group of enemies, but it doesn’t generate a significant amount of threat. To my knowledge, they pretty much have to constantly switch targets in order to hold aggro on multiple mobs.

Druids are a little better: Demo roar will generate a small amount of threat (similar to Demo Shout AFAIK) and swipe will generate a significant amount of threat on up to 3 mobs. Any more than 3 and the druid will have to tab switch targets ala warrior tanking.

Paladins are ideal for multi-mob tanking. Righteous Defense will taunt up to 3 mobs off of a friendly target and Consecration will generate around 200 threat per tick for 8 seconds on anything it hits. Also, the more the paladin is being hit, the more Reckoning, Holy Shield, and Redoubt will proc.

I promise that I have an actual non-WoW related post coming one of these days. Overdue for a short anime or book review. I like how all of my posts are either when: I am eating lunch at work, right before I go to bed, or at 2pm. One huge ass trick to making just about every instance smoother is crowd control. Especially important in heroic instances where you can't realistically tank more than one mob at a time (depending on the mob and instance I suppose).

The raid icons make it stupid easy to let individual party members know exactly what spell needs to be applied on what mob. Make sure to define the icons clearly before the run starts and to use them consistently. Only the party/raid leader or promoted raid members are able to use the icons. The icons can be applied on both friendly and unfriendly targets. I think the targeting icons are unbound by default so you will need to hit escape, go into the key-binding options and bind them to a set of unused keys. Otherwise, you can just use the WoW API to make a macro:

[code]/script SetRaidTargetIcon("target", x);[/code]

Where 'x' is a number that corresponds to the following symbols:
0 = Clear
1 = Star
2 = Circle
3 = Diamond
4 = Triangle
5 = Moon
6 = Square
7 = X

Most people for example, denote the skull as "DPS this target." Make sure to change the DPS icon mid fight so your party members know which target to focus on.