Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Picking Plate Armor for my Protection Paladin?

Its rather simple that only 2 classes wear plate armor gear in WoW, Warriors and Paladins. However as a Protection Paladin I'm realizing for quest rewards I'm been offered allot of plate armor, yet its just as confusing deciding which armor gear I should actually wear. I do think its when I get to 70 I have to make harder gear choices for stats. Most my gear is still green and some blue gear as rewards and I still find it hard to decide which of the plate armor gear benefits me the most for my play style. Can be tough deciding on a item with Agility & Dodge or Defense Rating vs another item with Stamina and Intelligence yet I need all of them.

I can mostly tell when when its Warriors plate armor, its not loaded with intelligence stats or mana regen or spell damage. Most my gear is still green. I've elected not to really buy any or much AH gear if I can help it (Gold Sink) and just pick up gear as quest rewards of beat it out of a mob on a loot drop since I'm going to replace it often anyway.

So I'm wondering, I know most Paladins depending on spec need lots of Stamina/Intelligence Plate Armor. As a Protection Paladin I need to absorb lots of damage, take the hard blows or dodge it with Agility if I can get it, but I also need to deal damage when I'm soloing quests. But what the hell do I do with Strength stats? I know it affects AP and help soften blows. But do I completely dump it from my armor? I know I need lots of spell damage and I pick it up in armor stats but on the other side what value is AP to me or does it have little or no value since I'm now relying more on spell damage? So which is it? Comments appreciated.

Edit: My play style is very much solo, group or tank when I have to for a Instance. But soloing is what I love to do, so that's lots of fighting mobs or many mobs at a time and having to deal damage.

9 comments:

wheatgerm said...

Thank for the armour

Joyd said...

If you aren't already, I'd as soon as possible start building up two sets of armor, for soloing and for tanking. Obviously there's going to be a lot of overlap, but there are some things that help a lot when tanking, and other things that help a lot with soloing. I don't know what your soloing style is, but I assume that it's a mix of prot grinding and conventional hitting a few guys at a time. For example, I'm not positive, but I suspect that a large amount of +def isn't as useful when soloing as ways to kill things faster.

Using strength to try to up the amount of damage your shield blocks is pretty ineffective; you need a ton of strength to up it even by a small amount.

I wouldn't be afraid to use some warrior tank armor and some ret or holy paladin gear together; not every piece of gear needs to have every stat you use on it. (Something that I've been learning the hard way.)

Anonymous said...

Ok, I have been reading through your blog and have a few small pointers to make. Firstly, yes you need two sets of armour… correction you need three! But first, your talent points steers your options, there are a few talents which will change the way you fight, but considering that you have made it all the way up the prot tree to ardent defender I am assuming you have a decent load in it. Do you have the Ret spell SoC? If yes Your solo gear should lean more towards AP and Agi as this will increase Crit chance and white dmg, which the SoC thrives on! If not, then spell dmg spell dmg spell dmg, and use it with SoR and JoC. Also your solo gear will need to contain a decent amount of Int as you can not rely to heavily on pots, yes you can make them but you don’t want to be caught with no mana and the Pot on cooldown, as our DPS and dmg mitigation can be very mana dependant at times. When in a group, I assume you will be MT, trust me, no wan wants a prot pally as DPS, maybe as Healer with the right gear… Maybe… On to the gear:

Here intellect and DMG are important, as is some stamina and armour, with SoC like I said a good white dmg 1H, AP and Agi goes a long way to give you crits and good dmg, but don’t forget to use you Holy Shield (HS). No SoC? Then Int, Splldmg and a good 1H white dmg once again, this as the really good splldmg items won’t be available before LvL70 and a lot of runs/rep, Note that a faster hitting speed is preferable than a slightly higher DPS as you get SoR dmg with every hit.

Tankadin gear, here you need a few different values, all the values I give you here are for LV 70 Blue gear, but it is at least what you should aim for to be a good MT. As MT you need aggro, lots of FRONTloaded aggro, If you start low you might never catch up, especially on solo mobs as Consc. won’t do enough dmg. That is why you need splldmg to increase your holy dmg. Forget about White dmg, yes you read me right, white dmg is useless as MT as it does not go with your improved Rigtheous Fury, because if you are gonna tank I assume you have 2pts in that. Your gear needs Defence, Stamina, Splldmg, Block, Dodge, and Parry. In that order, some Int might be nice as well but when you MT, you won’t need as much because every friendly heal on you will give you mana. Noteable values are: Armour 13k HP10000+ Def 490 Splldmg 300+ After this, more sta and int doesn’t hurt, and Splldmg is always good to increase Aggro and DPS.

Third gear you need should focus on four things: Healing, Spell Crit, Int and spirit, in that order… Stam and Armour is only a bonus, do not be afraid of using cloth, leather or mail here, they are all good for healing gear and to be honest, if you are getting hit as a healer, well something has gone wrong and you can bubble up.

Small tactics, Yes you can pull and hold three mobs without CC, heck I usually do 4 or 5 on those stats, just make sure you have a good healer, who can keep up should you get some magic dmg on you. Rouge Zap is useless with Pally MT with three mobs or less… really you don’t need it either, with four, just zap the one furthest in one direction and bounce your disc from the other side. Sheep after pull! Pally tanks should always pull, or possibly, misdirection from a hunter can work, but when possible, paladin does the pull. Hope some of this helps…

Sylvina Solaris said...

Yeah, everyone pretty much has this covered. Your bags and bank are going to be packed so be prepared for that. Pile on uber STA gems on almost all your gear, screw set bonuses (STA is the hardest stat for a paladin tank to get it seems). Get a good 'mage' sword with +spell damage and that should hold you over a good bit. Aside from that, almost any gear should be good, the 'Blue Lightforge' looking set is fairly cool and well-rounded for all specs but it's all instance based.

Anonymous said...

1. Don’t worry about AH. Outland provides a lot of plate armor suited for a protection Paladin.
2. For armor, settle with +spell damage. Once you start running higher 5-mans (70+), Heroic and 25-man raids as the MT/OT you need to incorporate + defense, stam, and become un-crushable.
3. Stats: that depends on your playstyle. Do you like to cast and unleash seals or do you like to melee attack with little judgment? That will ultimately tell you if you need more of a certain stat.
4. I would personally forget about agility as a protection spec. Str is more crucial since it will help with your blocking especially when Shield block proc and you fire Holy Shield.

Joyd said...

Strength doesn't help with your blocking much at all. It has zero effect on how often you block; it only affects how much damage is blocked when you do block, and it gets miserable returns. Specifically, for every 20 strength you accumulate, the amount of damage your shield blocks when you block increases by 1, which is totally insignificant.

Anonymous said...

Raid Tanking
For end game raiding: 490 def, at least 13k armor, 10k hp, 200 spell damage. It's a little harder for a paladin to get uncrushable in comparison to a warrior, but it's far from impossible (doable in pre-raid blues). Our biggest problem is stamina...we start with a pretty significant health pool deficit. There is a fair bit of warrior/paladin gear crossover in terms of tanking items. Honestly though, you don't really have to worry about building an uber tanking set until you reach 70 and start doing heroics & raids.

5-Man Tanking
*shrug* I do normal 5-mans in my spell damage set...go OOM too fast otherwise. Part of the trick with gearing is finding the right balance between gear sets to fit the situation.

Protection soloing
The downside to prot is that our single mob damage absolutely blows. Stack on as much spell damage plate as you can, find a patch of around 4 to 6 mobs, ret aura, judge wisdom, AW, Consecrate, Holy Shield. It's the fastest way for a protection paladin to grind. 600 is a good amount of spell damage at level 70, don't remember how much I had while leveling (iirc, the blue lightforge set is a good and well rounded).

Healing
Don't bother with spirit, the 5-second casting rule makes it completely useless for paladins (we don't have a spirit talent like priests do). Focus on stacking +healing and +mana/5. Int, as always is important too. Spell crit is good, but it's more valuable for Holy builds who have Illumination.

I Find that it's usually easier and more efficient to focus on two primary stats while gearing, otherwise you spread points too thin.

Ardent Defender said...

So far I'm appreciating the feedback and it does help allot especially everyone points of view and also why they look at the gear stats they do and for the Paladin role situation.

I can admit gear situations can just be confusing sometimes so I'm sometimes left holding some my quest reward gear unsure which one to use or which one be best.

Anonymous said...

I agree with the three sets of armor.

Tanking, SMASH, and healing.

SMASH is my big two-hander and all the +spell damage gear.

My main focus is tanking. So when reviewing quest rewards I'll pick the one that works best for tanking first. In most cases though there's only one plate reward offered.

I use the Addon "Outfitter" to keep the sets straight (to make sure I don't accidentally DE the healing helmet) and to help with switching between sets.