Paladin tank at lich king heroic

[Cassyboy]

Hello guys

Let me introduce myself first. I am a protection paladin which is currently at the realm first status on a dead drained server. It is a very competing guild, in my opinion, with about a world rank 200. However, there are actually no "good" (paladin) tanks on this server.
Naturally I refrain from getting to sites as elitistjerks and copy paste info. I'd rather research myself and draw conclusions from that. Aside from that I don't want to be too cocky and reject all the possible information which is very important for tanking, like numbers which you need. So I'm a person which constantly want to challenge myself and be curious to improve myself. I thought to myself, why not look at the spec, gear and tactics of one of the bests tanks and draw conclusions of that? So I did.
I went to the site and found tracked down the armory of Lazeil and I saw a few things which I intrigued me.

First of all, the obsession of armor. If I could be honest with you, I haven't really been calculating the EH value of armor since ToC. Back in ToC, I came to the conclusion that the armor trinket just gave 200 more effective health than the stamina trinket so I took the whole armor thing as forfeit and prefered the "avoidance rng with high hp".
Due to the increase scaling with damage in Lich King hc with damage which could nearly one shot you, the avoidance rng affects you too much. So I made 2 chardev profiles with set of gears (see TankingSetWithTier and TankingSetWithoutTier) and suprisingly the difference was 7000 physical effective health and the tier cooldown vs 1.6% avoidance and 1275 health ( which can be ignored for physical EH ).
Obviously the tier set is better. After that I did more calculations with getting more armor items (see FullArmorTankset). When I did my calculations I came to a staggering 12350 physical effective health difference between the full armor set and tier set. Even though the physical effective health which increases my survivability by a lot, I would loose an other 1045 health and 3.56 avoidance. I would still go for the extra physical effective health.
The problem is with hit. Currently I'm tanking all the adds and use a rotation with HoJ and Holy Wrath to stun the adds. When I stun with Holy Wrath, I make sure I take a few steps back to not get hit for the last second. Also I optimised the stuns so Holy Wrath will be used when 2 of them are up at the same time. But due to the low hit chance, my HoJ has a very high chance to miss. If it misses, I'm technically dead meat. So when I check the armory of Lazeil, how did you manage to stun all the adds without getting it to miss? Did you gear for that extra effective health taking into account that other people should help you with the enrage? If so, is that a very good decision then?
Last thing about armor. If you're soaking the spirits, wouldn't you prefer a set with 2000 more hp instead of all the armor which wont help with soaking them?

Second of all the specs were a little bit unusual, but I could draw these conclusions:

1. spec one is mainly for an avarage heroic fight and if needed you can switch Glyph of Righteous Defense with Glyph of Salvation

2. This spec seems to be really optimised about mitigating magical damage, is probably used to soak the adds and has an additional cooldown for the Lich King tank. There isn't a constant threat danger in phase 1 either, if you're on the adds and you only need to taunt/meleeswing the ghosts to let them explode. So threat can be neglected.

Unfortunatly our guild's bear tank went inactive recently, so we have to do it with a warrior. I got a few questions about this situation. I personally would think that a paladin tank on the boss would be a lot more effective than a warrior. Paladins have more reliable cooldowns, more effective health and a fail safe mechanism. If a warrior is tanking, I could provide him a Divine Sacrifice for Soul Reapers, but the warrior could provide me the Safeguard. But you also want as many frequent reliable cooldowns on the spirits as well.

So what would you guys think? Apart from the "ditch the warrior and recruit/gear a druid"

Any constructive comments would be loved, but lets keep it constructive.

Yours sincerely,

Cassyboy (Thunderhorn-EU)


*edit*
I couldn't really find a good "tanking section" on the forums. If you feel it is misplaced, feel free to move the topic.

[Cassyboy]

Just to add a note, his post is a sincere question and no personal attack of any kind to any player. I am still excited for a respons :-)


C.

[smeirlap]

I'll quote a few things lazei said :

Bracer, head and cloak enchants. I didn't use resist in 10 man though, just 25 man.
Soaking with a warrior is probably a bit harder than with a paladin. You'll take damage faster (no holy wrath to stun half of the spirits and give your healers time to catch up with healing) but you'll have better control for loose spirits if your raid isn't positioned correctly.

So, lazei had a lot of shadow resist enchant.

yeah HP would be beter, but with so much shadow resist, some items with armor are the best (like wrists).

Another quote which will, I hope, give you some answers.

Yeah, you should be ok. Soaking never killed me if I had some cd up (sindra trinket/sw/ardent defender/glyph of salv/pain suppression/divine sac) when I soaked without resists.

Since they have hunts to http://www.wowhead.com/spell=19801 , and since paladins have AD, he can miss 1 HoJ. It isn't a serious problem (I don't think 2 misses will happen often). (In they guide they said their ret pallies stun the horror, so no tranq shot but HoJ which can't be missed I suppose)

I hope it helped you and sorry for my english (tried my best!) ;)

[Cassyboy]

As the guild is currently busy with phase 1 and 2, I'm not sure if I will end up tanking the liich king or the adds. The problem is, just as paladins are "superior" for the ghost soaking, so are they superior to tank the boss with soul reaper. Many cooldowns and a failsave mechanism are always favored for those bursty moments.

So we got 3 shadow resistance enchants.

1. 70 on bracers, leatherworker only.

2. 15 resistance on cloak

3. 25 shadow resistance and 30 stamina on helm

Now there is an other question rocking up, did Lazeil specificly reroll proffesion to leatherworking then? Is the shadow resistance enchant really superior to 60 + 40 stamina of JC / BS?
When you haven't got the leatherworker enchant, you will have with AM, Trinket, head enchant and cloak enchant 568 shadow resistance. When you add up that 70 enchant you will add a 2% resist, to keep it avarage.
Although I actually like the idea of using shadow resistance head and cloak enchants if I'm soaking the adds, the bracer enchant isn't too helpful and if it is, the difference is too small to put such a situational enchant.
Also when those mobs enrage, they hit from 80K to 114K on a tank, with a weapon swing of approx 2 seconds. It is a total gamble to just let yourself get hit by those hits.

Last thing is hunters using Tranquilizing shot. When I found the LK heroic clip which Lazeil had posted, only then I noticed how quickly and efficient Tranq shot was used. In fact, I was wondering if stunning was needed at all there. I need to have a talk with our hunters here.

Thanks for the info!

Cass