Comments on: Tanking as a Holy Paladin

By: Siha

Siha — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:01:44 +0000

As a general rule, yes. When you’re tanking, you have a couple of primary jobs: 1) build and maintain enough threat to keep the mobs on you, which comes through spell damage – about 300-350 will be ample unless you’re tanking for really well-geared DPSers, and 2) stay alive. Generally if you go for the stuff that looks like pally tanking gear – spell damage and defense on it – you’ll have way more spellpower than you need, and not enough avoidance/stamina. For armor pieces, you’re better off aiming for pure survivability, unless you really need more threat than you’re generating.

By: Szayel

Szayel — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:26:53 +0000

Well, I’ve just found your guides. As a 68 holydin, the offtanking route is quite interesting to me as well. Your holy and tanking guides are really useful! I guess I should start picking up some tanky gear. So basically for tanking, I should ignore traditional pally-style gear and go for warrior tanking gear?

By: Siha

Siha — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 04:21:00 +0000

Tego – your suggestions are reasonable, although I probably wouldn’t go for them myself. Avoidance really comes into its own when you’re well past 50% avoidance, and I can’t hit that mark with Holy spec, so I’m generally better off sticking with Stam. I use pure time-to-live as my guide, as calculated by addons like TankPoints, and numerically 12 stam generally gives more time-to-live than [8 dodge + socket bonus].
As far as spellpower on the gloves goes, I may well take that route when my overall tanking gear improves in survivability and my spellpower goes down as a result. At the moment I’ve got around 360 spellpower on my tanking set, and I hold agro without too many problems, so more spellpower is superfluous. But I have a pair of T4 tanking gloves (spare tokens ftw) that are my ‘threat gen’ gloves; they’ll get a 40 spellpower enchant when I start needing to use them :)
As for Seal of Vengeance, I’m not sure of the internal mechanics of it – I know it’s very dependent on weapon speed but I need to find out more details – but I’ve measured my threat-per-second and I get more TPS out of SoR than I do out of SoV. That said, I do use SoV when I’m tanking stuff where I’m not going to be hitting the boss for significant periods and I want the HV stack to keep ticking away generating threat in the meantime.

By: Siha

Siha — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 04:13:29 +0000

Ralph –
Looking at Talent progression, I’d push straight for 3/3 Healing Light in Holy, then 3/3 Imp Righteous Fury and then Kings in Prot. Then back to Holy for Holy Shock, and then you can probably switch back and forth between the two trees. Note that it will be hard to level outside of instances with this spec, though.

Gearwise I think you have the right approach – take stam/def gear for a tanking set, and int/healing gear for a healing set. You’ll want a bit of spelldamage if you can get it in your tanking set, but that’s pretty hard to come by pre-58, although the buffs to old-world gear in 2.3 may have helped there.

By: Tego

Tego — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:15:21 +0000

I have to say that this is a decent guide. I come at healadin from a different path than most i guess. I started as a prot pally and had been a prot pally for some time. getting to the point of tanking channelers in Mags off and on as a sub. I heal now for content reasons, and i love the list you hav. it is very good for even a starting pally (save the spell rotation a bit, but thats debatable) I only have a few suggestions. First if you have the ogrilla Aegis do not put stam gems in it. put the +8 dodge gems into it. better avoidance, and you keep the socket bonus. I would recommend them for any red slot actually. you have to strike a balance between avoidance and hp. you need the hp to stay alive longer (as all healers know) but if you are constantly taking full blows your healers may OOM…. and if you have never done this more power to you. also i would put spell power insted of agi on the gloves. This is more damage and more damage is more threat. More threat gives quicker death through increased dps from your dps. Also in long fights i prefer seal of vengeance over rightiousness. for me it ends up being more DPS as long as i can stack 5 quick, and with a quick blade it stacks quick. this can throw initial threat, so i reccomend this rotation to begin fights: seal of rightiousness -> judge -> seal of vengence -> seal of Crusader (just before judge is off of CD) ->judge -> SOV -> judge ->SOV….. as i said this is personal choice, but it worked for me for a long time when i needed an extra threat burst. the other option would be to start with SOC and judge, then bring holy shock with auto crit. that is an opening any dps’er can love

By: Ralph Melton

Ralph Melton — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:31:16 +0000

It turns out that this is very nearly the guide I needed. Many thanks!

Do you have any suggestions on a leveling path to take with this point in mind?

I’m in a somewhat unusual situation with my new paladin alt:
- I want to be holy at 70, because I have enough other tank and DPS alts.
- I want to level as holy, because a) I tend to be slow to adopt new playstyles and b) I think it’s easier to learn healer skills in the simpler low-level instances than in the complex higher-level instances. (And you can’t go back; when they’re too easy, they aren’t good learning experiences.)
- However, my wife has just taken up WoW, and she wants her druid to be a healer. So I’ll be a tank for her (and hope I get some healing opportunities). I know about tanking, albeit not specifically about paladin tanking, so I think I can do it even if I have a suboptimal spec.

To be more specific in my questions about this career path:
- So far, I’ve been heading up the holy tree to Aura Mastery. If you were leveling up with the spec you’ve referred to, at what point would you switch over to take the protection talents?

- What sort of gear should I be looking for with this path in mind? My current guess is that for a tanking set, I can just take the gear I would take as a warrior, and do adequately without much +spelldamage until I hit Outland. Will I be sad if I take that approach?

By: Siha

Siha — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:18:16 +0000

True! I try not to give advice like that, though, as one can never guarantee what keybindings people use. (I’ve long since rebound F to something else myself :))

By: That dude

That dude — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:24:35 +0000

You can also cast righteous defence on the target of a mob by pressing the righteous defence button and pressing “f” (default) and you will cast it on the enemies target.

By: Siha

Siha — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:17:36 +0000

Thanks! As you can see, my blogroll’s in a dire state, but I’m doing my template redesign before I try and get everyone linked. :)

(And never apologise for puns. Puns are /awesome/. :))

By: Rhoelyn

Rhoelyn — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:46:54 +0000

Hiya, Eleanor! We can be the two, the proud, the Proudmoore. ;) Sorry. Pun death.

Anyway, it’s good to meet you. I love your blog. Great stuff in here! Welcome to my blogroll. :D

Best wishes,
~Rhoe