f13.net

So, I finally saved up 1k gold and bought a dual talent spec. My other spec was as a protection paladin. So, my question is, why do I seem to have major mana issues as a protection pally? Am I doing something wrong? As a ret pally I never, ever seemed to run low on mana.

Prot's spells are mana-heavy. 

Have you ever noticed how protection paladins never, ever stop pulling when they're tanking an instance?  There's a prot talent (Guarded by the Light) that refreshes Divine Plea when you hit an enemy.  So you start your pull with Divine Plea and as long as you're hitting the mob it's permanently refreshing it.  That way you're constantly regenerating significant amounts of mana.

If you know all that already and you're adjusting your play for that info, then I've got no idea what to tell you.

Before you get Divine Plea, if you aren't getting heals from someone else you probably want to run Seal of Wisdom. Once you get Divine Plea (71) you'll have infinite mana because you can keep it up all the time.

Other than that, keep BoSanc on yourself and use Holy Shield on CD; blocks are a good source of mana regen.

Just from watching them on my priest it goes away at higher gear scores for whatever reason.  Also I have to switch my priest to holy for under geared paladins, if I go disc and keep them bubbled it screws their mana and slows things down.

Never... stop... pulling. In a way I equate it to the Warrior/Druid rage system; tanking & taking damage = rage so that you can use abilities to generate threat - as a pally I struggle when I stop getting heals/taking damage so I need to take damage to get the heals. If I start to starve for mana and Plea isn't up I pull another pack to take damage so that I get heals which helps with my mana. I hate being bubbled by priests too and usually ask them not to (in heroics - not raids).

It's also why if a stupid hunter has growl on then I let his pet fry - I want that damage but I'm not wasting mana on a pet - I'll grab it after the pet is dead - sometimes I let the huntard die too because hunters today seem to forget where their FD button is. :)

Ahhh....well I'm only level 65. So that's my problem right there. I need to get up to the level when I get divine plea and I'll be good to go it sounds like!

Edit: So, any tanking tips in general? I find my biggest weakness is when one or more mobs gets away I'm not real quick to notice it sometimes. Usually I just see someone else's healthbar going down...

At level 65 all you can really do to decrease your mana usage is consecrate less and use Blessing/Seal/Judgement of Wisdom. You could also take Alchemy for the Endless Mana Potion, I've been using that on my Disc Priest while levelling her from 60-70+. After level 70 the amount of mana it returns is less useful but at 65ish it's awesome.

As for general tanking tips the best one I can give is to learn to relax. In my view your main job is to keep agro off the healer. Generally the DPS need to look out for their own agro. Mark targets, even if it's only binding a key to Skull, and if they ignore that then it's their problem. After a few deaths they either leave (and are replaced instantly) or learn to adjust their DPS to fit the tank's abilities.

Make sure you know the dungeons too. Learn where to pull, which rooms are wipe rooms and how to avoid that, learn which mobs fear, mind control, silence, etc. The Outland instances can be a bit brutal these days since they were designed with CC and careful pulling in mind but most people now have the WOTLK "grab all the mobs and just AOE like crazy" mentality and just assume that tanks have infinite health and healers have infinite mana. Fuck them, let them learn the hard way ;)

I also highly recommend TidyPlates (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/tidy-plates.aspx) with ThreatPlates (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/tidy-plates-threat-plates.aspx) addon. Very, very useful mod.

Prot pallies are great tanks but need to be played carefully while dungeon levelling IMO. Once you get to 80 and have a decent 232+ tanking set they become invincible facerollers who can pull every single mob in the entire dungeon at once  :awesome_for_real:

Edit: URLs for the mods. Plus what Merusk said is spot on.

Best tip I ever got for 5-mans was Zoom out & don't watch yourself, watch your groupmates.  Learn to camera pan during the fight to see that incoming patrol that the mage/ hunter/ priest is standing right in the way of so you can intercept it.

If you have problems with adds getting onto DPS or Healers, use Hand of Protection and Hand of Salvation; one stops damage taken, one lowers threat. HoP is particularly useful for overaggroing melee, as you cannot attack while it is up.

Also, make the following macro:

#showtooltip Righteous Defense
/cast [@focus] Righteous Defense

Then, at the start of every instance, focus the healer; you can now use RD to pull any mobs off the healer without losing target, spinning the camera, etc. If you find that it's a DPS over-aggroing instead of the healer, just set them as your new focus.

Another thing that can help is to make sure you have Target of Target displayed (Main Menu > Interface > Combat > it's on the right hand side); that way you can see who the mobs are hitting.

Fixed that for you.  Dumbass DPS needs to fucking learn how to play again before the expansion.  Tricks of the trade, Misdirect, CC.  Get your fucking act together DPS.

A lot of prot tactics depends on knowing the instance. Should go without saying, but it helps set your pace.

Mana isn't really a problem, unless you have to spam consecrate for whatever reason. Then it gets ugly. Divine plea is arguably your key mana recovery tool. I try and not use wisdom, but sometimes it is necessary if you're sucking fumes on mana. Also, if you're an engineer, engie pots can fill your blue bar in one shot.

Paladin tanking is--right now--about as easy as it gets. I enjoy it quite a bit, but the difference between so-so tanks and good tanks is really knowledge of the instance. Your basic 969 thing and knowing how to set up a T9 set should go without saying. Of course, bad paladin tanks fail on both of those issues, and I do have stories...

Ok, so what skills are good ones to have in the rotation? I'm curious about your thoughts. All of you really.

God, I agree so much. SO MUCH. So many people are going to hit a brick wall when they enter Cata dungeons so fast because they try to faceroll them.

MD and Tricks are both getting nerfed for Cata. And do you guys not remember that WotLK heroics used to be hard? I can think of a few bosses that were just a nightmare (King Dred in DTK, Xevozz in VH, etc) and the trash in the last wing of H HoL can still be deadly if the pats are poorly timed. And that's just the originals. I can't imagine Cata heroics being much harder than the ICC 5mans.

Here's (http://www.wow-pro.com/class_guides/tannyrs_paladin_tanking_guide) a detailed explanation of the prot pally 969 rotation.

Basically you have two 6 second abilities (Shield of Righteousness and Hammer of the Righteous) and three 9 second abilities (Consecrate, Hold Shield and your chosen Judgement) and you alternate them.

I am a really bad pally tank because 99% of my paladins playing time has been as a healer, but just using that rotation even I can tank most heroics easily.

Xevozz still sucks, especially if the tank doesn't kite him or if the dps are sloooow. And those runeshapers in HoL have that terrible whirlwind that destroys your group REAL QUICK.

Yep... the spellslingers in h-OK can eff you up as well (I think that shadow blast they do is a % of tank health). When I tank (feral druid), I always pull them with a faerie fire and feral charge the first cast, then bash near the end of the second; however, at that point I'm all out of tricks and barely any DPSers seem to know what an interrupt is nowadays. They are the only thing in the instance I need to blow my survival cooldowns for.  :why_so_serious:

The spiders in h-COS are also fun, they put a poison on the tank that hits for 15% of max hp every 2 seconds (75% hp total). Most healers can brute-force heal through it (the last few paladins didn't even bother to cleanse, just bombed a few holy lights), but it can be nasty for a less-geared healer.

The 969 thing is really pretty easy in and of itself (and you do need 1 talent in the cooldown reduction for seals to do this; two isn't necessary, though some go that way). The real trick is knowing when to use them, and that comes back to situational awareness and knowing the fights/instances. Still, it's not rocket surgery.

Generally, if it's an AoE fight, you'll be throwing avenger shield to pull (or a grenade, if you're an engie and it's on cooldown), throw down consecrate (9), hammer of the righteous (6), refresh (or get it the hell up) holy shield (9), then hit your seal of choice (9). Then repeat. 969969969. Boss fights or single targets will generally substitute shield of righteousness for hammer (much more threat). Once you get the hang of the cooldowns, picking abilities becomes second nature.

Interestingly enough, PvP as prot is kinda similar. A lot of people will assume a pally with a shield is holy and attack immediately. It's always amusing to see how long they'll stand there and kill themselves on your shield in your consecrate patch before it sinks in that this pally has an assload of hps and armor, hits like a friggin' truck (but it's only a 1hander...), and, gee, my daggers aren't doing squat...oops, hello GY. Of course casters are a different story, but, eh, that's what glyphed avenger shield and pyro rockets are for.   :why_so_serious:

Interesting, I go slightly differently as 6/9/6/9/6/9 as I usually group pull and just Avenger, HoR (6), HS (9), SoR (6), Consecrate (9), HoR (6), Judge (9), SoR (6) and so on. Maybe I just like the number 69, but it works for me. I keep all my core tanking buttons close together:

HoR to Q and SoR to E (my 6s)
HS to 1, Consecrate to 2 and Judgments to 3 (+ shift-3, alt-3)
Avenger to middle mouse button and Plea to mouse button 5 (MB4 is my auto-run)

As a result, I just have to keep track of which 6 and 9 is coming up next. If it's a single target and omen says my threat is good, I drop consecrate from the equation. On bosses I keep consecrate up because I'm taking damage and getting heals etc to keep my mana up.

Holy Wrath is bound to 4 as I love it for packs of undead despite its mana usage - in places like the tunnel in H-PoS or as a stun in H-HoR it's great and against non-dead it still gives me a tiny bit more threat. I also have stuns bound to shift-4 and alt-4

My "oh shit" shield is bound to 5 and has my trinkets macro'd to pop at the same time to reduce damage for when the healer is asleep.

HoS is bound to G (F is my mount button) and  Righteous Defense to R.

What that gives me is my core tanking skills around my movement keys and F1-F4 to target retards that pull aggro - if I decide to let them live.

Pally tanking is easy/fun... having come from Druid tanking, it makes me cry at how easy Pally's have it in order to keep group threat.

Well I tanked my first BC instance last night. I made a couple of noob mistakes. I won't lie. Luckily the healer was cool and plays a tank as an alt so he whispered me and gave me some pointers. I picked up about halfway through the instance.

Things I learned:

1) Use consecrate right after the pull. Generally I didn't have to use it again since it built threat slowly right off the bat which was good because consecrate was my biggest mana eater. I also got lucky in that 2 out of the 3 dps targeted what I did.
2) Watch out for patrols before pulling. Duh. Talk about a noobish mistake.
3) That macro to pull things off the healer with righteous defense is awesome.
4) If you don't know the instance well, (my first tanking experience was an instance I'd only been in once) don't be afraid to ask other party members for hints and tips about boss fights and such.

I got extremely lucky and got 2 drops that were good tank plate items. (Both added to stamina 1 added to defense and the other added to dodge or block if memory serves.) I also got very lucky in that the non-tanks were more experienced than I was and willing to forgive my mistakes when I made it clear I was learning and open to advice.

Glad to hear you had some luck! Keep at it and you'll be doing fine in no time.

Ok, you guys can admit it.  You are being helpful and nice in this thread because in the back of your mind you are thinking, "He might tank for me sometime.  I better be supportive and give good advice!"

If this would have been a question of "How do I do better DPS on my hunter?" you guys would have become a tank of sharks tasting blood.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing.  More good tanks is what this game (any diku really) sorely needs!

Not necessarily.  Most of those types of questions have been hashed to death at places like ElitistJerks and whatnot.  For a DPS class you need to figure out your rotation and abilities and when to use them, then use spreadsheets or something like Rawr (http://www.codeplex.com/rawr) to determine your best gear upgrade paths.  DPS is pretty cut and dried for most classes, whereas tanking is a bit more involved than that and yes, more good tanks is never a bad thing ;-)

I'm helping because he asked. If someone asked for how to play a DPS class that I had, I'd do my best to help them too. Retarded dps hurts a group almost as much as a retarded tank.

As would I.  No one has asked to how to mage DPS though, so there's no reason for me to chime in ;-)  Hunter is the only class I've never played before and that seems to be one of the ones people here ask about, so I really have nothing to contribute to those threads.

Don't worry about mana, make sure you have tons of drinks with you or have a friendly mage summon some up. I still have issues with it at 80 when a group is DPS heavy and stuff just dies to quickly you end up burning too much mana on initial aggro that you cannot recoup it over the duration of the fight.

Always get that cons off before you start a 96 rotation! Even when you pull DPS has an uncanny ability to start winding up on non focused targets with high threat at the start of a pull. Combined with the initial hammer of the righteous your on your way to good threat. Hopefully if someone aggros the wrong target the mob passing over the cons AOE might get a tick or two of aggro in before running off to kill a squishy.

Make sure you have Omen installed (forget the other ones name), and tab target every once and a while to check aggro on mobs. I know people generally disagree with the tank changing mob targets but DPS usually cannot follow instructions. If your group is a normal pug generally after the first target everyone is on different targets so checking them all will help you find out who might peel aggro next.

Your avenger shield talent(make sure shield of the templar is maxed) is used 95% of the time pull as it has a silence/slow ability attached. It's great to toss it at one caster and bum rush the other and drop cons and usually ends up with a nice grouped cluster your AOE dps will love you for. Note: the shield will miss when you need it the most and the spell effect with show it sailing off far away from mobs for an extra kick to the groin.

To help out with positioning and seeing if a target has changed focus charge into the pulls, spin around so your facing the group. It will help out greatly if your zoomed out a fair bit to notice a mob turn about and head towards or cast at someone. Of course as you probbly have noticed only charge in where you know a pat wont wander on top of you :grin:. It also has the side effect of preventing special talents from hitting the group(like cleave).

One fun thing you should try to pick up is line of sight pulling for fun as you can still use it on the initial ICC trash(silly rogues!). Use your environment such as doors to block casters from seeing you so everyone has to run to you. An example would be right after casting hand of reckoning move out of line of sight (where they can see you) and then dropping a cons before they run around the corner for extra threat. There are quite a few old dungeons you should be running now where you can do this (around your level in shadow labyrinth the room with all the skeletons and casters before the orge, and in slave pens before the shammy boss to clear the lower ramp you can try this out).

Pally tanks are extremely fun and really rewarding at the higher end, nothing like being main tank and slaying DPS classes on overall damaged done. Have fun!

No tank should slay dps at high gear levels.  :oh_i_see:

My DK started as a tank.  I was rather appreciative when I got helpful group members.

Other than giving people a bit of a ribbing, and that my play style tends to be super casual unique snowflake, I see no reason to dis on someone trying to learn a class.  (Now the hardcore on the other hand are fair game.  They can take it and dish it back though.)

You would be surprised how often my tanks do.  I don't know whether it's laziness or stupidity.

I'm surprised you got an understanding and helpful group, Riggs. Most people(myself probably included would either sigh, say something about bad tanks, and leave or bitch about bad tanks more loudly and leave. Nice to see helpful players though, and I do give recommendations and such if people say they're new and ask about it. I just hate the ones that don't take advice :awesome_for_real:

How the hell does a geared dps *ever* lose to a tank in damage? I would say both laziness AND stupidity.

You won't in dps, but you very well might in total damage done. My protection pally routinely tops total damage on the recount chart. DPS, not so much, and not very often anymore. It's more of a matter of you being the one that initiates combat and all the AoE and reflective damage. Since you're the tank, mobs beat on you and they take rather substantial damage because of it.

Now if the protection warrior is topping the charts in total damage done, then something might very well be wrong. For a DK or prot pally, though, it's pretty routine. Really switched on dps will blow you away, but they're not the norm in heroics.

I was ribbing my DK friend the other night in UP since a boomkin was smokin' him in dps and my pally was right beind him. He stepped it up and put everyone in their place, but even at the end of the instance, my pally was only about 3% behind him in total damage done, despite about only having 80% of his dps.

So, do you guys tank with Devotion Aura or Retribution Aura? I've heard it recommended both ways...

Depends on the healer and the instance relative to your gear/skill level. If it's going very easily and the healer isn't breaking a sweat keeping everyone at 100% pop Ret. If it's a bit harder going or the healer is having mana issues then Devotion.

Although, thinking about it, 90% of the time I use Devotion just to make life easier for the healer.

If a Resistance aura is at all applicable in the encounter, I'll run that.  Baring that, Devotion.

Retribution's damage is rather pitiful and only helps your threat when you've already got aggro which isn't where your problems usually are.

As for pulling, I'll rarely pull with Avenger's Shield.  It's amazingly useful when something's been pulled off you or as an extra interrupt so using it over Hand of Reckoning is a bit of waste.

I use Avenger's Shield to silence spellcasters.  That way they have to come to me like the melee and I can group them up easier.  I try to target the furthest spellcaster back in a pull and let it bounce around to the others.  At the same time I run into the middle of them and consecrate.  Then the AOE classes burn em down without a worry to grabbing agro.

If the group is purely melee, I just taunt normally.

Thing is your missing the initial damage by shield that will smack three targets on a good bounce for some nice aggro as its holy damage. You end up blowing %50 of your mana (that and cons) but I hardly ever loose any mobs on me unless I'm playing sloppy.

As for damage yeah its pure laziness or lack of understanding how to play. Dig into recount and look at their cycles and you will see stuff like hunters doing 98% autoshot or something else face palm worthy. I have been in many groups easily pulling 40% of overall damage done. In the 3.2 dungeons It's really easy for a pally glyphed with sense undead to do a lot of damage but 30-40% is outrageous. There's no way a tank should be doing that overall. When I've had some really good DPS group you should see 20-25% of the overall damage done at best.

Almost always in devotion aura. I'll use ret if I'm trying to gather up lots of low end mobs I can't actually target to annoy (zombies in CoS, mudballs in HoL, shardlings in HoS, etc.). Resistance aura if they're warranted (FoS). Protection PvP calls for ret, though.

I started pvp'ing in prot this week and have found it pretty fun even in limited pvp gear.  I got a nice high damage one hander mace lately and it really made a difference.  I never would have even thought of trying it until somebody mentioned it here.

Oh, it's a blast. I stacked up shield block and got a nice, slow axe. It's surprising how hard you can hit people, especially clothies. There are a few talent/glyph changes necessary, but mostly you roll like you would as a PvE tank.

What always stuck with me was the fact that the other side would almost invariably assume you're holy (especially if you're running with a warrior or DK) and mob you. Most wouldn't figure out they'd made a terminal error in the victim selection process until they hit the GY. Fun times.

Ok, I looked at Omen and the 2 Plate addons (Tidy and Threat I think they were called.)

What makes one better than the other? Also, I've heard curse addons sometimes have keyloggers in them?

What other addons are recommended?

I've seen recount and heard good things about gatherer and the auction one.

You don't really need a threat addon, the base UI highlights people with threat and has a toggle to show percentages above your target.  It's not the greatest, because it doesn't show how far you are ahead as a tank, but it works if you're not trying to micromanage threat.  Personally I like clique as a paladin tank, because you can bind Hand of Protection, Hand of Sacrifice, and Righteous Defense to clicks and just scroll over the guy with the red highlighted portrait and click to win as a tank.

Curse is legit.  People who buy advertisements there are sometimes not.  XSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting) is a serious problem for any WoW site that hosts advertisements from third parties.

So you might bind, for example, Hand of Protection to Shift left click, then shift left click their portrait to cast it on them?

Effectively yes.  You don't even need a modifier button, but that takes a little more effort to sort out without disabling your ability to target people by clicking or use the dropdown menu.  It's a really fucking nifty mod, especially if you have a working 4+ button mouse, which I don't anymore.

Also, I might not respond to further queries.  If so, it's because I'm in the backwoods of Manitoba working in a place with limited phone, internet, television, and radio access. :uhrr:

Well, I tanked 2 more BC instances today. One went flawless. We had a wipe in another because the dungeon guide neglected to mention that the mobs have a fear ability. 3 people ran 3 different ways and brought down 3 different mobs. Other than that it went smoothly.

Oh, and in both dungeons I topped total damage. I was at 39-40% consistently. I was 3rd in DPS but 1st in total damage done. Kind of odd really.

You don't *need* any addons, but I've found ThreatPlates to be a really, really useful one for tanking. It just changes the appearance of the mob nameplates depending on their level of threat to you.

In tanking mode (which it automatically activates if you're tanking) mobs which you have high threat on are small and green and as you start to lose threat on them they get bigger and yellow and then go bigger still and red when they agro onto someone else. Means you can easily see and target any mob in a pack that isn't hitting you.

Grid & Clique, or just Clique is very useful for player-targeted skills as Sheepherder said.

A lot of the BC instances are horrible for fears and mind controls. If you get Sethekk Halls tell the group to KILL THE CHARMING TOTEMS ASAP! I've killed most of the group before as tank when mc'd there  :oh_i_see:

I am blanking on which dungeon it was. It was one of the ones in the reservoir. It ends with the big boss fight right after rescuing the druid. I think it was the Mermaid-like Enchantresses or whatever they were called.

Threat plate sounds nice. Does it conflict with Omen? I liked Omen but noticed it only seemed to track what I was currently targetting.

Edit:

Well, I now have a few mods downloaded and installed:

Auctionator. I love this one!
Buffwatcher. It pops up somethnig telling me if my blessings, seals or righteous fury are off. Which is good because I sometimes get too wrapped up in the pull/tank rhythm and let my buffs lapse.
Clique. I haven't gotten much use out of this one yet but it's just because I haven't developed the "training".
Deadly Boss Mobs. I don't think I actually need this one.
GearScore. This one makes me feel dirty but I figure it may be needed eventually.
Omen Threat Meter. Good but somewhat limited since it only tracks the current mob I have targetted.
PallyPower. A Pally raid buff tool. It's alright, useless to me at the moment.
Recount. Again, I feel dirty but it's interesting to see the various stats. And I was shocked to be leading damage. I was doing 40%, a warrior in the group was doing roughly 30%. That means the two of us dang near took care of the dungeon ourselves! My wife's hunter was at around 20% with the last 10% split between the rogue and the healer.
Tidy/Threat plates. I like the idea of this one but haven't been able to test it in action yet.

I just use Healbot.  It works well enough for tanking and I already use it for all my healing chars.  You bind the "hands" and other tricks you like to use to each mouse click.  I set up the bars to light up as soon as a person gets agro, not just when they get damaged.  That way, well before they even get hit by a MOB, I've taunted either directly or indirectly and/or put a hand on them.

Unless somebody is being stupid and targetting that one spellcaster 20 yards away from me nonstop, I very rarely lose anybody to loose agro. (Still talking about my pally tank.)

That would be Underbog.
This was the way it worked a long, long time ago.  It now provides a more granular display of what the game already tracks.  It should show aggro on other mobs when you target them.
I use this in small groups all the time.  You can set the blessings and then just use a single hotkey to bless your group.
This can be really handy.  It tracks tons of stuff.  You can see those by clicking on the tiny little arrow buttons on the window bar.  One thing I really like to use is the death tracker.  You can use it to figure out why someone dies.  Say, for example you are wondering why your tank died.  You can see that in the 20 seconds before he died all he got was a single renew tick in the way of healing.  The overhealing meters aren't as useful as they used to be.

In my guild this is mandatory for pallies who want to raid.

It's one of the best addons I've ever downloaded and I don't raid with my pally.  As Dd there says, set shit up and it's one button to buff and it's just a quick glance to see "nope player xyz is red, their blessing is down." No need for a bar mod or multiple buttons for all the damn blessings.  Plus you can set it to buff yourself with RF, no more forgetting that after a wipe.

Except for the part where they get in their heads that certain classes require a particular buff that one of the subclasses might not want. Then it's like arguing with a rock about the 10 minute buff that's needed--but they still can't figure out why.

This happens about every week when that pallies insist on buffing all shaman with wisdom, which is almost completely useless for enhance. Then a ten minute debate occurs about why we want king's and might, and not friggin' wisdom. Every. Week. Because they don't want to be bothered with 10 minute buffs because of the addon.

I'd rather the one enhance shaman go without might, than have all 3 pallies say "I'm doing all kings" and have only one pally buff per raid.

No, what's worse is the Resto Druid saying "I don't need Might." every other rebuff when a) there's a Feral Druid in the raid that does and b) they have all the other Blessings as well.

More germanely though, it's actually really easy to set up individual normal blessings with PallyPower.  Getting other Paladins in your raid to actually follow their buff assignments is another matter.

I felt shitty when I installed this too but it's actually incredibly useful. Firstly it can show a lot more than just a single GS number. If you use the /gs window you can see whether someone is vaguely appropriately geared for their role or not. Very hand for quickly spotting the DPS DK in Frost Presence tanking or the PvP warrior who's queued as tank, etc.

Secondly it shows the raid experience of a character, so if you're putting a raid together you can quickly see if that *character* has done XYZ raid or not. Of course this tells you nothing about the player.

It's also useful if you have a lot of alts that you're gearing up and you set it to show all iLvls in the tooltip. Then you can just mouseover yourself and see at a glance which slots still have that iLvl 176 green trinket from an Icecrown quest that you keep meaning to upgrade but have forgotten who's wearing it  :awesome_for_real:

Problem with gearscore is it's still non-representative of the character past average i-level. Anything else it does you can do yourself with a glance at inspect. Yet it's still treated as gospel and means very little past what you can see standing in front of you.

I don't accept it as anything even beginning to approach valid.

I doubt if I'll do much raiding, if any. That said, I do like how it rates my gear broken down into holy/ret/prot so I can get a better feel for "oh, so GS thinks this is better for retributiion? That makes sense..."

If they're arguing because of the addon then they need to learn the addon better.  You can set individual 10-min buffs for people for when you have different specs of the same class.

Of course, which is why I said "Of course this tells you nothing about the player".

I think of GS like a kind of SatNav. It gives you an idea but if you rely on it totally without using your brain too you'll end up in a ditch.

The instance in which you rescue the druid is actually Slave Pens.

GS will always annoy me. My GS is not low, but it's not very high.  5.4k or so. "NO NOO NO you need 5.5k GS for this ICC25 run! Anything less is trash and you are not worthy!" Ugh.

You're right, but it could be Underbog.  The hunter boss, Swamplord Msomethingorother has a bear pet that is a druid you "rescue".  But there's that one giant pat right before the Stalker that makes it not "right after rescuing the druid."

It not only doesn't tell you about the player, it doesn't tell you about gems and enchantments.  It doesn't tell you if they have the "right" gear either.  For example, they may have a bunch of MP5 gear like a healer, but they really should have gotten Crit since they are trying to fill the DPS role.  Or, "Why does that Ret Pally have a bunch of Tank gear on ?"

GS just tells you the person has put a lot of time in getting high level gear.  Nothing more.  We agree.  I just think it is less useful than you indicate. ;)

Dren, you're entirely wrong. If you /gs someone, it will show their GS for each spec; each will be represented as a percent of their real GS, as reduced by useless stats (with those useless stats and how much . So if they're wearing PVP gear, points will be deducted for resilience. If they're wearing Tank gear, points will be deducted for DPS gear. It will also clearly show if they're missing enchants/gems, and what slots. Here's a screenshot of my Prot pally's Retribution GS:
Please continue to hate on something you don't understand.

The fundamental problem is the GS maker had to basically assign values to all this stuff to come up with A Number. I don't accept his subjective calls on relative values of gems, enchants, whatthehellever. I won't go quite so far as to say he pulled these numbers out of his ass, but you have no idea where most of them came from.

You can make very strong arguments for gemming haste or AP as an enhancement shaman. It's a different philosophy on damage and both are valid (what they do best at is different, but both have worth). That's just one example.

Again, I don't accept the validity of this addon for anything more than average item level. It's a plague on WW, and I've mostly quit PuGs because of it, since arguing with morons isn't something I find fun. I don't know the BS, errrr, GS of my shaman, my DK, my warriors, or my paladins. Morever, I don't care. It doesn't mean that much. It won't tell you much either, other than offering an illusory security blanket of "Gee, he has T10 and is gemmed with...something vaguely appropriate."

That's a valid criticism Shrike; it's not a perfect evaluation tool. Neither was wow-heroes when we used to use that. Nor is "Whats your dps on Patchwerk?" Nor "Link Achievements". But it is one EXTRA tool, and its reasonably comprehensive. You can tell with a single command how many kills that character has on a given raid boss, if they're in reasonably appropriate gear, fully gemmed and enchanted, hit capped, defense capped, etc. It takes a lot of the things you can see with an inspect, and condenses them so they're easier to read.

From the way you're talking, you've been kicked from PUGs for low GS; all I can say to that is tough luck. Forming PUGs is not easy, and if you've never lead a 25m PUG you simply don't get it. Try filling up an ICC25 or three and maybe you'll change your attitude.

I understand it fella.  I have it.  I use it.  I don't hate it.  I use it for my own purposes to know what pieces help advance my characters in one form or another.

Can you /gs somebody that isn't within range of you?

You also ignored my point on gems and enchantments.

Having a bad day?  It will be ok.

GS is just a tool -- one that a lot of people misuse. It tells you the level of gear someone has, and that's it (edit: I don't raid, so boss kills etc don't really matter to me.. besides everyone just asks for achievements). Low gearscore != incompetence and high gearscore != competence; HOWEVER, low gearscore might = too undergeared to do the content (and no, this (http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/06/just-impossible-gas-cloud.html) doesn't count for 95% of the wow populace).

Cue the H-HOR run where the 5500+ gs DK wanted to votekick my 4300 gs hunter because "ur not geared enough". Then I outdamaged him while also CCing a mob in every pull and doing single target damage instead of just explosive trap + volley. :oh_i_see:

Since you missed it the first time. And no, you can't /gs someone and get accurate information if they aren't near you.

Sorry, missed that part.  Dock my pay 10%. 

As for range of /gs, that's what I thought.  So, you /gs somebody after you have invited them to the raid and summoned them to you?  Then you kick them when they don't meet up to your needs?

I'm asking because I've never been in that situation.  I guess I'm not hardcore enough.  I get invited and then we go fight Internet Dragons.

People get kicked for showing up to a PUG raid with insufficient gear with or without gearscore, all GS does is make it faster to inspect someone. I guarantee you that even in the old days someone was manually inspecting everyone to make sure they weren't bringing in some guy in quest greens.

It is nothing to do with the GS addon and everything to do with players and how they approach the game.

On PallyPower

I guess I just need to figure out how to configure it. It sounds like it is quite powerful I just haven't sat down to figure out all the options.

Not 100% sure, but i belive every "gear metric" addon / website (wow-heroes, gearscore, etc) have almost always used some kind of relitave calculations based primarily on the Item level + quality of the item in question.  That Item level 200 Purples are statistically X amount better then Item level 200 Blues is a fairly well doccumented fact, and i believe you can find the exact stat weights for every Stat and how they convert to item level and vice versa on a piece of gear pretty easily with a bit of google fu.

Originally i believe the Gear Score addon just totaled up the sum Item level of gear, and that was it.  Now, it does a little bit of checking to see if stats on gear match a spec, and for 90% of most class / spec combinations, it will probably be accurate to within 10% of whatever a decently informed raid leader would be looking for anyway.

For something like your enhance shaman example, I highly doubt gearscore in it's current form is even configured to care if he is gemming AP or Haste.  It probably just has a checklist of "These stats are completely wrong" or "these stats are acceptable" gems that it looks for, and thats about it.  Being able to asses a hunter and tell if he has 1 too many ArP gems socketed is beyond it's scope.  All it cares about is "is he wearing a caster ring, or an AP DPS ring", and thats likely as far as it takes it.

The only thing I wish pally power did was give you an option to minimize the fucking thing when you dont need to see all it's little tabs. 

A quick way to conceptualize GearScore is: 1.8618 * Σ Item Value (http://www.wowwiki.com/Item_level#Calculating_Item_Level)  (Item Value is just Item Level, assuming full use of the budget, without the Slot and Quality Modifiers.)

When you combine it with sanity checks for spec, gem, and enchant appropriateness,, it's a reasonably useful number.  It also solves the Slot Modifier problem (http://www.wowwiki.com/Item_level#Slot_Modifiers) of taking a straight Average Item Level but while doing so it produces a number of others.

First, Ranged weapons have an outsized influence on performance relative to their Item Value for Hunters.  Secondly, that 1.8618 constant is just there to obfuscate.  Finally, and related to the previous point, it's presented dimensionlessly as "GearScore" instead of as Total Item Value which means it's only useful in comparison to other "Scores" from the same source.

I'd like to think that last part is what contributes to people asking for outlandish numbers to run even the most basic raid, but before that people were asking for equally outlandish and equally meaningless numbers so it's just people being lazy.

Even with the Slot Modifier problem, I still prefer Average Item Level (with sanity checks and other context, ala Elitist Group (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info15573-ElitistGroup.html)) because that's more grounded in my everyday playing experience.

No. You tell them "Come to North Bank for gear check" or some such. Once they get there, you /gs them and either invite them or don't.

Gearscore DOES weight based on slot for most classes (I grant that the hunter weapon issue exists); chests are worth more GS than bracers, etc.

This actually seems stranger to me than using it as a raiding requirement. When you're putting your raid together, you don't have time to do a super-deep analysis of every raid member's stuff, you just want to know people are above a certain baseline and not pursuing utterly useless stats. For gearing yourself, it's always better to just learn what stats are most useful for your class and gear for those. There are plenty of cases where a lower-ilvl (ergo lower GS) item is better for a particular class because of the stat distribution. If your stance is that you're not hardcore enough to bother learning the exact stat equivalencies for your class and just want to use GS instead, that's fine, but then you can't really fault raid leaders for doing the same thing.

Anyway, this argument was better when we had it in the bad groups thread.

edited for clarity

I do get it; I don't accept it. It's bullshit, pure and simple. I've never been kicked because of GS. Frankly, it never gets that far. My shaman is well over what most would consider (even in their most heated GS-driven fantasies) more than adequate for ICC25 hardmodes. The other toons; not so much. But I"ve pretty much given up dealing with the idiots that pimp this abomination for PuGs. I'm pretty happy with their performance in T9 and it's way too close to the expansion to worry about it all that much ingame.


Now come Cataclysm, I have serious concerns about how this shit is going to effect the game. If it's anything like it is now, I"m probably going to have to quit the guild I've been in for 5 years to find a night-time friendly one just to see average progression. Like I said: bullshit.

Your problem is the people, not the tool.

If GS was banned or disabled then the exact same thing would happen as it does now, it's just that it would take longer as people tabbed out of wow to look you up on the Armory or wow-heroes or be.imba.hu or something.

People using the tool badly ("5.6k GS minimum no exceptions!") are the short-sighted idiots. I've noticed that it's use varies widely from server to server. On my server GS mins are almost *never* requested and people get laughed out of trade chat when they try to do so. Achievements, linked from mains if necessary, decent gear for the raid in question and not having a reputation as a ninja/dipshit/etc are the usual requirements, but I'm well aware that this isn't the case everywhere.

Oh, and when I form a pug for the weekly raid and it's something like Naxx I ask to be linked any unrelated achievement. Shave & A Haircut, Plenty of Pets, anything will do EXCEPT linking a Naxx achiev. It's a test of who's reading  :grin:

This. GS doesn't bring anything new to the table, it just simplifies and consolidates existing tools. Even if you somehow got rid of everything except inspect, the process would be the same, it'd just take considerably longer because I need to check ~15 pieces of gear x 25 people for gems, chants, and spec-appropriate-ness.

If your guild won't bring your alts because "Their GS is too low" it's probably because they'd rather have your main. I've used that excuse a number of times, because it's hard to get progression when you're carrying 5 badly geared (T9) alts.

People have always wanted to PUG people who overgear the encounter, GS just let's them have some pseudo-arbitrary number to shout about in Trade.  The only real solution to the "problem" is to take matchmaking / group creation out of the players' hands entirely ala the Dungeon Finder.

I really don't understand this sentiment. Is 5k GS too high of a bar for ICC25? It's not about outgearing the content, it's about taking a group where even if you have a few people under performing for their gear level, you're not going to wipe constantly.

Say you "could" clear ICC25 (or even the first 4) with a full raid at 4.5k GS, if everyone was amazing at the game. If you then decided that 4.5k GS was the min you'd take for your PUGs, you'd wipe nonstop. You probably wouldn't even kill Marrowgar, because you're not going to get that level of player quality in a PUG. Hell, I'm lucky if i get 1-2 PUGs who are actually good at their class and the game. Most people are mediocre, with the ability to DPS, get out of fire, and little else. So, you need to raise the gear bar to compensate.

Now, an ICC25 PUG that only intends to clear the first 4 doesn't need 5.5k GS, nor does a ToC25 need 5k. But expecting to hit 80 in greens (even on an alt) and get a raid spot in any current-tier content is absurd. Even in early WotLK you ran heroics before getting into Naxx. The old check (before GS) was simply "Does he have on any blues?"

Also, imagining doing ICC using the Dungeon Finder makes me stabby.

That is absurd, and also why gear resets exist, and also no one's arguing for that.

What's also absurd is that someone in Tier 9, the gear from the raid that directly precedes ICC, is considered "badly geared" for what I assume are non-Heroic fights.  If someone's in Tier 9 (mixed ToC-10/25 and Heroic ICC-5s) they're in the appropriate gear to go into ICC a year ago.  (Maybe they don't have the appropriate brain, but that's a different matter altogether.)  With an extra two tiers of gear via buffs, they're basically outgearing the place as-is.

On top of all that, ICC (and RS) isn't a place that you can really muscle down.  ICC's bosses, with a few exceptions, aren't like Algalon or Sartharion+3 who can just be rushed down with more DPS.  Those few hundred GS points of gear really doesn't matter if someone's still going to do abyssal DPS/healing on Festergut, or let themselves get Mind Controlled on Lana'thel, or sit in a Defile on Lich King.

That's not to say that more stats, either through gear proper or buffs, doesn't mean more kills, it's that the returns on "better gear" to boss kills are pretty damn tenuous when it comes to most players.

Excellent point, that. T9 is obviously good enough for ICC because when ICC came out, people did it in...T9!  With no buff. PuGs *are*  different though, and T9 is basically handed to you now, so there's no way to know if someone in T9 is competent. And a dumbass in T10 would do better than a dumbass in T9, right? And better gear allows them to stand in fire a bit longer before dying :awesome_for_real:

"People" might've done ICC in T9 with no buff, but the average PUG back then was lucky to get the first 4 bosses, with wipes to everything but gunship on the way. If that's what you want, then go ahead and accept anyone in T9. But now with how easy it is to get frost badges and equivalent gear (crafted, VoA), the bar for entry can be higher to filter out people who haven't put any effort into gearing their character.

What you're saying is that you're compensating (or at least insuring for the eventuality of) stupidity with gear exceeding that which would be needed under normal circumstances.  So, you're trying to outgear the place.

That's a perfectly valid tactic, but if you don't screen very aggressively for gear, you're not going to get significantly better players.  Better players is what a group needs to move from one half of ICC to the next.  Better gear, and even with the full 30% buff I'm not sure it's the case anymore, might get you past Festergut.  Slightly above that might get you to Rotface or Blood Prince Council, but for those two gear matters even less.  (At least that's my experience on US-Wildhammer-Horde, which is a backwater.)

Or, it may be the case that almost anyone trying to get into a pick-up ICC-25 is going to be a mouth-breather so one may as well make the ride to five/six kills as comfortable as possible.  I'm inclined to agree with that, and then my argument is only that gear, above a certain threshold and up to top-end gear, is only vaguely associated with success as a raider.

Tangentially, being in middling Tier 10 now is just a sign that the player "took the effort to farm Frost emblems for a while", which isn't any stronger an indicator of success than "took the effort to farm Triumph emblems for a while".

I'd like to think that previous raiding experience is a strong indicator, but if there's no entry level raid anymore, that's as impractical as requiring gear from the instance you want to run to run the instance.

Well, that's why I said PuGs are different. And farming frost badges takes a lot more time than farming trimumph, obviously, and unless you have a ton of patience you'll want to use ICC to do it, which you won't be allowed to do if you're bad,  most likely, unless you have a good guild to carry you. You can easily and quickly gear yourself with triumph badges regardless of whether or not you're terrible, or you can get carried.

BTW, my resto gear will *never* drop in VoA. Not if I do it a thousand times.  :uhrr:

Problem is, you can't outgear stupid.

Second problem is, GS doesn't tell you anything worthwhile, aside from average item level and, yeah, the owner of the character might (or might not) have spent some money on their gear after getting it. You have no clue whatsoever they know what they're doing until you actually try them out.

PuGs fail. So what? It's going to happen because of a) stupid, and b) these people aren't used to working together. In the past, I've seen ToC25 GDKP runs disolved and reformed because of stupid, despite whatever GS assholery was used to form the raid. When you got people that weren't window lickers, things started to move forward, regardless of whatever GS hotflashes the RL might have had. Even then, it wasn't anything like a guild sponsored raid, but progress would be made. Actually, the best PuGs I've run into were partial guild raids, with some PuGs added. Our guild does (or did) this frequently during doldrums like now and it generally worked out OK, and usually resulted in a few recruits that could walk and chew gum at the same time without bodily injury. On the other hand, these never made progress like a full up guild run. Never.

This.

And fair point caladein. I'll argue that better gear will get you better performance on PP and BQL as well; you'll have better dps switching targets on the former, and higher dps in general on the latter. Higher ilvl also comes with more survivability in the form of higher Sta, which gives the baddies a larger margin of stand-in-fire on pretty much every fight in zone.

Shrike: first off, GS does tell you how much experience a given character has: from 0 to 5+ kills on every boss in every raid zone. Now, that doesn't take into account alts, but it's more than average item level. Secondly, if you don't use GS (or wow-heroes, or armory, or inspect, or some other gear-based evaluation method), how do you decide who to take on your raids? If you just take the first 24 spec appropriate people that send you tells, you're in for a wipefest, period. Finally, while you can't outgear stupid, you CAN undergear content, even with 30%. Someone in blues is not ready for ICC, period. Even someone in Naxx/Ulduar level epics (say, an old raider who just resubbed) isn't.

An old raider would likely not be a mouth-breather though. And unless there's an enrage timer that's very strict, a self-aware, less-geared dps would probably be more useful than a more-geared retard. The raider would likely only have to be told once to never stand in Defile... it all really comes down to the person's skill level, which cannot be judged by any add-on. People can be carried to kills or they could do the carrying, and you would never know until you saw the recount after the run started.

"Stop being lazy and take me, even though my gear isn't as good as the 700 people lined up behind me and you have no other real way of telling us apart!"

I hate sticking up for gear-elitist raiders, but people ask for the numbers they ask for because they can get them.

As the exception (with a very big dose of "not your usual raider") to this general rule of thumb, <Undergeared> (http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/718860-Raiding-in-blues-The-lt-Undergeared-gt-Chronicles) disagrees with you.

Experimental Guild project on an EU server, who has cleared approximately 90% of all Wrath 10 man riad content (including 12/14 Ulduar 10, and 8/12 ICC 10 (many pre 30% buff)) in nothing but Ilevel 200 Dungeon Blues.  The only exceptions they allow to their "No Epics or things derived from epics" rule is they allow the use of Epic Profession based perks (jc's can use their Dragons Eye Gems / Engineers get their Epic Helms), and the use of Epic Leg enchants.  Other then that, No epics PERIOD, and enchants that would require an Abyss crystal.

The margin for "undeargearing" stuff, even with the 30% buff, is MUCH MUCH lower then people think.

While that is impressive, a decent ICC10 PUG on Andorhal goes at least 10/12.

I linked that undergeared thing like 10 posts above, geez! The guy leading it is a Hungarian fyi. It's how we roll.  :why_so_serious:

Like I said back then, the 'undergeared project' is also not representative of the average WOW populace at all, and it's hardly a pug -- it's a very well disciplined group of hardcore raiders.


edit: he also has a second project called 'the pug' which is basically an ad-hoc raid guild (anyone can start a pug at any time)... no gear restrictions there. Those runs are fairly efficient as well.

Sorry Zetor, missed the link when you posted it.

I totally get that, which is why at the beginning of this derail I said the only way to fix the "problem" is to remove players from the matchmaking process.  The system as it stands now will always lead to the only people who can get a group for a place are the people that have already run it (at least in part).

With LFD, characters who would have never gotten into a pick-up Heroic without a guild or friends a year ago are able to run them successfully on a consistent basis.  Part of that is that the places have been nerfed into the ground and you're frequently grouped with people who dramatically overgear the instance sure, but the same could be said about ICC to a lesser degree.

There are numerous reasons why a /lfd for raids wouldn't work, particularly in ICC.

I agree, the current suite of raids and LFD tools just aren't compatible with each other.

With a move to shorter raids, more tank homogenization, more buff homogenization, a (hopefully) balanced healer landscape, and the changes to lockouts; I don't see how a successful Looking for Raid system is an impossibility.

If anything in the above list falls through though, it'd just be Meeting Stones, Take 2: Everyone's Standing in Fire.

Even if they fix everything as you've said, there's still the problem where some dickhead bails on the first boss because it didn't drop his dagger or whatever. No one is going to want to get saved after bosses are down, when they could wait for a fresh run. Tanks and healers would be particularly reluctant, since they'll likely have the shortest queues, while also being the most likely to bail.

Furthermore, how do you handle loot? There are already assholes in heroics that like to hit need on everything. Even if the roll system actually enforced main spec only to hit Need (by checking your current spec), there would still be plenty of room for shenanigans.

Arguing about GearScore is so fucking pointless it hurts. It's not going away. Ever. Get used to it.

These arguments are had every single week in multiple threads on the WoW forums and the exact same things are said over and over again. The arguments that have been made here are identical to the arguments for and against made everywhere else (if somewhat more articulately expressed here), nothing new has been said about GS for a long time.

Every since /inspect has existed people's gear has been part of raid (and guild) leader's decision making process. There is an extremely simple answer to "I don't like using GS to decide who gets into pug raids": run your own. You lead it, you choose who comes. Someone else leading it, they choose using whatever criteria they want. End of story.

Gearscore is a blunt implement, which means that if you're smart it can be tricked relatively easily - either by faker mods or just by putting together a "gearscore suit" which you then swap out for your real gear once in the raid.

Plus the first thing to do for a PUG raid with "Must have GS over 9000!!!" is to go check the Armoury of the raid leader.  :grin:

Yeah this one guy who constantly has a 4600-4800GS is *always* starting raids on my server and insisting that everyone MUST have a 5500GS to come.  People ridicule him the entire time he spams it, I am not sure he ever makes a complete raid.  Same thing with the level 70 guy doing "For The Horde" and insisting only 77+ people can come...

LOL those guys are the best! "LFM Sunwell, 80's only" says the level 70. They're so good they can fail to even come close to meeting their own requirements!