80 Prot Paladin

d07.RiV

Legend
So I just leveled an 80 paladin and a dk for soloing, and am a bit confused on some of the other paladins' armories.

I assume it is impossible to become unhittable as a paladin like DKs do (perhaps due to lack of str from the two hander)?
On the other hand, it is possible to gain 100% physical damage reduction, which requires 2492 mastery (not including elixir/food), which they do have, but I really don't like having to use cloth bracers when there's a plate version available. My question - wouldn't it be better to take engineering over leatherworking and use the dragonling instead of porcelain crab? It should give just enough mastery to use plate bracers.
We lose: 120 dodge from crab, 90 of whatever stat we reforged the spirit to, 345 stamina and 165 dodge from leg enchant.
We gain: 303 strength, 225 crit/163 exp, and a bunch of tinkers that might be useful for soloing (e.g. the 2k strength one should make us temporarily unhittable, which can be useful on pull when we don't have SotR/sacred shield up).
Thoughts?
 
You tend to lose a lot of dodge/parry through even reforging (and gemming) going for the mastery cap. Unhittable is possible against wotlk bosses, I've guessed at around 119% being the max possible (using all available gear/chants), which is 5% below the cataclysm cap (damn you swordshattering!)

Sure it's worth it, but you have to consider a few things:

1. You're overcapped on expertise. It's possible you will be around 1% under the exp cap for cata bosses (assuming 20% is the cap), so it's hardly necessary.
2. With such high values of vengeance, the increased str is next to useless besides getting more parry (which is actually bad considering what we're trying to achieve), and the crit will be the only useful thing.
3. Since it's possible to overcap without engineering, perhaps using DBW as a second trinket is the better option. For the burst scenarios that affect protection paladins, it provides a 30sec buff of crit or haste (ignoring the str one for now), plus a decent chunk of passive crit.

Sacred shield should always be up. Again, with enough vengeance, the best boss burst damage won't get through several hundred thousand absorbs in the 6 second window it takes to refresh (remember this also scales with haste, so it's much less of a window with 409 gear).

The only reason I'd take engineering would be to get rocket boosts, or the distract tinker so I can cheese some mechanics.

Just my thoughts.
 
You don't lose that much in other stats, there are quite a few added mop pieces.
And you get way more health, in particular because you can use [Brooch of Munificent Deeds].
Chardev doesn't take prot spec bonus into account (haven't picked spec in the profile), with it it shows 129. The trinket would be another 10k or so.
 
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let's see the stat difference between this chardev and my paladin.

You lose 18% haste.
You lose 3% reduction from armor (70% to 67%, quite a difference at that reduction)
You lose around 15% crit.

For maybe a 30% health buff that doesn't really, in addition to eliminating a few 80-only things?

I'm just not seeing how it's that much of an advantage, especially when we can kill practically everything available at this point.
 
Chardev has wrong stats on almost all mop blues, so you can't really look at haste/crit values there.
Damage reduction from armor depends on target level, the tooltip just shows what it would be for a target of your level. So for 83 bosses you might have slightly less reduction, but for 88 or 93 it goes up due to more mop gear.
 
I'm still not seeing this. It might be based on your target's level, but it's also based on your own, otherwise gear would never scale once people got 75% armor.

What I'm seeing is that you'll get slightly better soloing zerging bosses down with a bug, and maybe slightly more un-vengeanced dps, but lose all the other benefits 80s have (none of which matter if you don't intend to raid with a group or PvP).

But I'm an 80s purist. I guess if you want to go 81 for that buff, go 81.
 
80-4lyfeyo!
 
I think I got a pretty idea of how vengeance is computed now, and it is pretty close to what I observed in-game.

When you get hit by any attack, a few things happen.
  1. Your current vengeance is reduced based on the amount of time left on the vengeance buff. If the last hit you took was 2 seconds ago, it reduces current vengeance by 10% (2 seconds out of 20). If you didn't take any hits in the last 19 seconds, you will lose 95% of your vengeance.
  2. The game tries to figure out unmitigated damage for that attack. For some reason, it doesn't know the actual unmitigated damage and tries to calculate it based on damage taken and your current damage reduction (which is how the vengeance bug works). Damage reduction for paladins includes armor, passive 15% reduction from sanctuary, and active damage reduction cooldowns (including SotR).
    Armor damage reduction formulas can be found here: Armor - Wowpedia - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft
    To put it short, damage reduction vs level 80 target (found on your tooltip) is A/(A+15232.5), where A is your armor value. For level 83, it is A/(A+21735); for 93, it becomes A/(A+58370)
    SotR is apparently capped at 99%.
    So for example, if I took a 100423 hit from a level 93 boss and hit SotR at the same moment, the game would calculate unmitigated damage as 100423/0.85*(1+34363/58370)*100=18769767.
  3. You gain vengeance in the amount of 1.8% of the unmitigated damage. In the above case, that would be 337855.
  4. There is an extra mechanic designed to improve vengeance ramp up time. It tries to predict how vengeance you will get at the current rate, and bumps your current vengeance to 50% of that amount if it is too low. The formula is simple - we multiply the normal attack vengeance by the expected number of hits in a 20 second window. For auto attacks, this is target's current attack speed; for special abilities, this is apparently 60 seconds. Baine has 2 second attack speed, so we get 337855*(20/2)*0.5=1689275 vengeance.
In that particular case, I got 1757373 vengeance, so its pretty close.

Another example: enraged shambler hit me for 92983. Shambler is level 83, has 2.0 attack speed, but was under a 50% attack speed buff. Regular vengeance (bugged) is 92983/0.85*(1+34363/21735)*100*0.018=508211. Ramp up value is 508211*(20/2*1.5)*0.5=3811582 (4.2kk on video, but I also got hit by a 25k attack at the same time which is another ~200k vengeance).

Also, actual damage taken might be capped by your maximum health, I'll have to do further testing.
 
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I'll explain the details of what me, Splosion and Zmirnoff have figured out (most of the work done by the other 2 as I don't have an 80 pally :p)
- Shield of the Righteous is capped at around 99% damage reduction, even if you get over 70% mastery
- We think the vengeance bug occurs due to client-server lag. To make it happen, you must take damage (not avoid it) and hit SotR at nearly the exact same time.
- When looking back through recordings of every spike (frame by frame), the SotR was always cast after the incoming hit
- Latency may have something to do with how much time can be between the hit and the SotR
- After taking the damage (without SotR up at the time), the server looks at your buffs and sees the 99% SotR damage reduction, so it tries to reverse it.
- That means even though you didn't mitigate any of the damage through SotR, it still does damageTaken / (0.01 * (1 - armor) * 0.85) which gives a huge number (multiplied by 0.02 for the vengeance)

We could be wrong, but this was our best guess based on what we observed.

Edit: Theoretically, this means you could do it with a DK's Army of the Dead too if you timed it perfectly, but it would only be 1 spike on a 10min cd.
Edit2: I think I just got a vengeance spike on a DK. Will go back for moar testing
Edit3: Best so far is jumping from 20k to 80k vengeance
Edit4: Just got a spike from 20k to 110k. I think this confirms our theory.
 
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I can be paladin too, right? :<

Bug: Vengeance spike from damage reduction cooldowns - YouTube

If you stack all your damage reduction cooldowns in a single macro (including an armor potion!), you can reach even higher levels of vengeance if you time it perfectly.

Edit: Btw, this means it is affecting level 90s and end-game content (just not as much).
 
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It potentially means a prot paladin will end up with almost 50% more vengeance than everyone else, which explains some WoL on add fights.
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Not really, you will be hitting SotR approx once every 10 seconds, which would get you like 1/5th of boss attacks if you are extremely lucky, more likely 1/10th. On add fights when you have like 7 mobs on you, much less. With 50% damage reduction from SotR, you will get double vengeance for 10% of attacks, so around 10% more vengeance. But yes, the potential is there.

Is it possible for an 80 warrior to become unhittable?
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Pretty sure it is, especially as fury. I'm not sure if there's any point in going prot, as there is no absorb shield at 80, and you should be getting really nice numbers as fury with all the stats.
 
Splosion said:
Shield using classes can cap against 83 bosses without too much issue, the reason to stay prot is for the vengeance, tanks do a massive amount of dps compared to melee atm because of it (on long fights)
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Errr, by unhittable, do you mean every attack against you is either a block, parry, or dodge? Or just parry or dodge? Since blocks still take damage. I meant like what Aelobin did (or I assume did) against 25m H Baelroc, wherein he took no damage.
 
Dreamwing said:
I meant like what Aelobin did (or I assume did) against 25m H Baelroc, wherein he took no damage.
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Cata bosses require 124% avoidance to be unhittable and 109% for WotLK. It's possible to hit the 109% on all tank classes but I think a DK is the only one who can reach 124% due to the 4% parry runeforge. Fury warriors might be able to (2x Door-Breakers = lots of str) or a dps class with a decent % bonus to str/agi, but some boss mechanics disappear when you're a tank spec (eg. Shards of Torment on Baleroc).
 
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