Five WoW accounts, one keyboard broadcaster and me.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Patch 4.0.1 Paladin Tanking

While I didn't like what I read about the paladin changes up front on MMO-Champion, I find that I am actually quite happy with the implementation. There were a bunch of things to note before I got from 'WTF?!' to 'Aaaah, cool!'. I'll list those below:

Hassle-free Blessings!
With Blessing of Wisdom folded into Blessing of Might and Blessing of Sanctuary's effect being talent based, this leaves two paladin blessings: Kings and Might. The kicker is that both are applied on everyone in your party/raid. That means a tankadin does Kings by default. A second paladin does Might. End of story. Combining that with minor glyphs reducing mana cost for Seal of Truth and Kings, we can be buffed up and running without drinking multiple times now! YAY!

AoE tanking changes!
So, they weakened Hammer of Righteousness (unless you have more than ten mobs around you) and put consecration on a longer cooldown. WTF?! Well, that's not so bad. Since they also buffed Holy Wrath and put it on a 15s cooldown. Between the shorter Hammer cooldown and Holy Wrath we are fine. We can throw in a consecration every half minute as well. Glyph for both Consecration and Holy Wrath and it feels like we have more AoE power than before. The AoE stun of Holy Wrath, applied to Undead, Demons, Dragonkin and Elementals is incredibly power- and useful.

Holy Power?!
Holy power is a nuisance, but we can live with those combo points easily. Crusader's Strike and Hammer of the Righteous generate one holy power each. The proper tanking use for Holy Power is to accrue 3/3 Holy Power and then use Shield of the Righteous.
Don't waste Holy Power! Using SoR with less than 3/3 is a waste, generating more Holy Power while at 3/3 is a waste as well. That means avoiding accidental use of Shield of the Righteous and ensuring use at 3/3.
To avoid using Shield of the Righteous too early, I moved it away from my spam/rotation buttons (1-5).

To ensure that I don't waste holy power generation, I installed Power Aura's Classic and set it up to show Holy Power clearly. I am amazed that Blizzard gave us a notice for Avenger's Shield but not for the critical Holy Power. But hey.
I put Shield of the Righteous and Avenger's Shield on Mouse Wheel Up and Down respectively, making one finger responsible for reacting to AS procs and full holy power.

This WoW-Forum post shows the proper Power Aura setup. See summary below:

  1. Install Power Aura Classic
  2. Type /powa to enter the configuration menu, press the button "import" and copy inside this code(repeat for each code)
    • Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.8471; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; buffname:holy power; bufftype:10; texture:65; alpha:0.95; threshold:1; PowerType:9; aurastextfont:18; size:2.44; torsion:1.1; y:20
    • Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.851; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:66; alpha:0.95; threshold:2; PowerType:9; size:2.3; y:22
    • Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.8824; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:67; alpha:0.95; sound:23; threshold:3; PowerType:9; size:2.5; torsion:1.1; y:20

I've chosen the following talent and glyph setup and am quite happy with it:
http://wowtal.com/#k=-wcHRfv.a5o.paladin.-BYW5A