Shield of Righteousness

[Isabelli]

Have no fear! I am 75 on the beta. Shield of the Righteous is a pretty win ability. Last night I was running Drakthalon keep (or however its spelled, the one between Zuldrak and Grizzly Hills). Anyway at first I was doing my full threat rotation of consecration, holy shield, judge, hammer of right, shield of right and rapidly went oom.

So I switched to just judgement, hammer and shield. The 3 combined kept mobs on me most of the time without any trouble although occasionally the lvl 75 warlock in sunwell gear would get agro on one if I was low on mana. Shield was hitting for about 790, i have about 390 block value and I dont think i was sporting redoubt/shield spec. Thats holy damage so figure it with its basic threat bonus + whatever the bonus threat from the ability is.

It is not usable while silenced though so that sucks. We are still screwed by silence since pretty much nothing we have works while under silence.

Cool! So were you using oldschool Spell Damage gear? Or have you swapped items out and using Strength now?

[Forlorn]

I was using my old school tanking gear, in fact the only change from my armory is that instead of the hammer of judgment i was using the arena S2 sword. With hammer on i had around 1k spell damage, without it I was around the high 500s.

I am currently trying to find someone to craft the new [url=http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=763
]lvl 75 blacksmith gear[/url] for me but sadly no one seems to know how to smelt Saronite yet or where to even get it. As soon as I get a set of that or some other new tank gear I am keen to try things out.

So far Ive only upgraded a couple of peices of ret gear and my healing (was the kara one) shield to a drop in Drakthon keep. Sadly I'm not seeing much in the way of tank gear available although "of the Champion" weapons (str, sta, def) will probably be in pretty high demand initially by DK's at least.

[Forlorn]

Oh one other thing, if things stay the way they are now and you plan to be questing while leveling, go ret. Prot just has no mana regen when attempting to do quests and you are going to be drinking alot. Ret on the other hand never really runs oom and even if you do get low bust out Divine Plea (50% of max mana returned over 6 seconds, channeled, 5 min cooldown) puts them right back up with never needing to drink.

[tbolt]

Oh one other thing, if things stay the way they are now and you plan to be questing while leveling, go ret. Prot just has no mana regen when attempting to do quests and you are going to be drinking alot. Ret on the other hand never really runs oom and even if you do get low bust out Divine Plea (50% of max mana returned over 6 seconds, channeled, 5 min cooldown) puts them right back up with never needing to drink.

Looks like I gotta hit the bgs and farm me some S2 Ret gear.

[Forlorn]

I would recommend it. Although if you have a decent healer set you could instead go with a shockadin build since all that heal gear is gonna be spellpower. But while I love prot, its just not a leveling build.

Now you might say you plan to just do instances, but ill be honest the instances while fun are only about 30 to 45 min log at most so youll probably get really sick of running them pretty fast.

[Boldbeard]

Well you said yourself that you dont have much STR gear. Perhaps if you had STR gear your white dmg would go up, as would SotR (from BV) and HotR so that you wouldnt have to spam other spells, draining mana, to acheive a reasonable amount of dmg??

I would think if you had effective STR, giving you good dps from H/SotR alone and by using JoW, your mana could last a while.

[Forlorn]

Possible I suppose. Sadly I just havent seen any drops before 75 that I would really consider using. However I'll give it a shot in my ret gear which has a fair amount of str and see how it does.

Even if it does work probably means you wouldnt want to do that route before 75 anyway since youd be limited to just Hammer and Judgement. I will try this out tonight when I get home from work and tell you how well it works.

[Boldbeard]

Cool, thanks!! I'll be mashing refresh until then.

My pally was rolled day of release, and my first talent point was in redoubt. Once I slooooowly got to 60, I quickly realized I was in the wrong business. F it, I rolled a priest. When TBC came out, I was let down because my prot build had no place anywhere in the game outside of an instance....I shamed myself and specced Ret to level off an on. Again pally shelved for a Mage. I've recently dusted off the pally to try tanking end game and I'm really really really hoping that my Prot pally can be a reasonably practical build in all aspects of the game....pvp included.

[Forlorn]

I wouldnt hit refresh to much, its going to be about 3 hours before I get to it at the earliest.

Sorry

Maybe youll get lucky and someone will beat me to it.

Although if i can get decent dps out of a prot build in ret gear might hold a glimmer of hope for pvp where a sword and board paladin wouldnt be a thing to snicker at.

[Boldbeard]

I wouldnt hit refresh to much, its going to be about 3 hours before I get to it at the earliest.

Sorry

Oh that...I was being dramatic. But my pally story, sadly, is a true story.

[Forlorn]

Ok, so it may be viable with both Shield and Hammer.

2076 ap
13.73% crit
459 bv

I crit for about 2.2k with the shield and about 1.4k with my s2 sword.

Ill get better numbers in a bit but yeah i think if you have some decent ret gear you could do a fair bit of damage sword and boarding it.

[Forlorn]

Against a lvl 75 mob though im only doing about 600 dmg with Hammer and about 1108 with shield. Not great numbers but not to terrible.

[Vanifae]

Against a lvl 75 mob though im only doing about 600 dmg with Hammer and about 1108 with shield. Not great numbers but not to terrible.

Those are actually decent numbers.

[Forlorn]

Like i said, not great/not terrible. Ret I average a low hit of about 1k. Crits up to 4k, 8 if they are stunned with wings, but still things die acceptably fast that you could do it if you have a decent set.

[Ascendant]

what is a paladins base mana supply looking like at lvl 75?