Prot PVP @ 85

Vort wrote:/target Thqrxoxo
/cast Word of Glory
/targetlasttarget

Can you rewrite that as /cast [@Thqrxoxo] Word of Glory ? It ought to prevent you from losing white hits on your current target with the target switch. (I may be barking up the wrong tree, if you don't actually lose the swings.)

Pretty sure I'm not getting white swing loss on my current target, it simply casts the WoG without any targeting changes from my end. I'll test on a dummy in a sec to confirm but I've used a similar macro since Vanilla to do this kind of thing and I haven't noticed a decrease in dps etc.

It does change your target and change it back, you just don't see it on screen because it's done instantly. I don't remember whether changing targets actually reset your swing timer, I don't think it does from memory. WoG used to, but doesn't anymore either.

I've been thinking about replacing my 2nd trinket. I've been using Badge and Insignia. Insignia is the weaker of the two. And once the patch hits with resilience scaling more linear its only a 3% loss to damage reductions.

Hurricane seems to be the best choice for raw damage but it costs a bloody fourtune. I have an herb gatherer and could have someone mill one out but the chance of getting the cards can drive you insane. There's also the thought of how long it will last. Ilvl scaling might simply outclass it next season.

I'm hoping for a ZG/ZA str trink but I highly doubt there will be one (data mining isn't finished yet). Wouldn't that be awesome though. A remade Zandalarian Hero Charm that has str and on use dmg boost. Stack it with badge and wings... 2minute prot paladins :p

Kelaan wrote:

Vort wrote:/target Thqrxoxo
/cast Word of Glory
/targetlasttarget

Can you rewrite that as /cast [@Thqrxoxo] Word of Glory ? It ought to prevent you from losing white hits on your current target with the target switch. (I may be barking up the wrong tree, if you don't actually lose the swings.)

you could also use @arenapartner1 in the event you run with someone else.

If you are changing targets you are probably losing white hits.

Tested it out on a target dummy and I'm not losing time on white swings. The only issue is like most Australians, the GCD sometimes initiates without casting due to client to server response. Client side my target is in range or in line of sight but server side is a different story.

Necropost!

So, I've been pvping again, as prot. I've noticed that while it's almost impossible to die if I have a healer, I generally don't have enough throughput to threaten anyone that has a healer. So, I am finding that I pretty much ought to group with another DPS player, so that we can at least kill someone. I wish I had friends or people on the server willing to try double prot, as that sounds funny, if suboptimal.

In the meantime, I'm just about honor capped, but saving it for 4.3. I haven't bought a 359 weapon yet, as I'm trying to save up for a 378 one before points are reset. (I'm not optimistic that I can do it in time.)

The other dilemma is, should I be going ret (or even holy) instead? That would influence weapon choice. I enjoy prot, as I know the rotation so well, and feel like I know my toolbox well, but on the other hand I feel like I have so much more flexibility as holy or ret. Probably ret, as then I can do PvE ret too. Ugh. Decisions, decisions.

I finally got my new Paladin to 85 and started running random BGs again. I still enjoy prot, but some things seem much less fun at 85 than they were at lower level.

The main one is healing - in randoms I'll rarely be healed, so I'm reliant on self healing, but heals that used to take me up by 10% health or more at lower levels now barely move my health bar. Even Holy Light with the Crusade proc does pathetically low amounts of healing. Not sure what happened to the scaling between 75 and 85, but it sucks.

Crusade procs heal me for something like 15% of my health - it's a lot. I use it mainly while soloing (when I remember). I don't use it in arenas though because I always get interrutpted, or take more damage than it heals. Word of Glory, though, tends to heal me for a pretty significant amount - I just wish it were usable more often. I tend to use WoG almost exclusively.

I'll have to see if I can work a good macro for holy light, and set up a power aura so that I can see when I get a Crusade proc, though.

well with the recent changes to vengeance, I'm really thinking about doing some prot pvp. as this stacks now incredibly fast the burst seems to be just amazing. Towelliee is having fun with this too and did already a video about this (please hit me)

but well I got a couple of questions.

1. as vengeance is now stacking faster is stamina stacking now the better choice? Or is strength still the stat to go for?
2. would a change weapon macro be viable to execute the CS's with a two hand sword, and switch back to one-handed + shield for every shield ability? I mean hey. 317% weapon dmg on CS with a two hand mace (I'm a dwarf)? woohhooo.
3. is there any S11 pvp shield? if no what shield should I use?.

edit: Just checked the numbers:

30 Stamina = 507 HP - 10% = 50,7 AP
Strength: 20 strength * 1,05 * 2 = 42 AP

with now almost permanently having 100% vengeance HP seems to be THE choice to go for.

Interesting thought, but I wonder if it's worth taking the big hit to your damage when you're not being focused. I know prot damage is pretty poor without vengeance anyway, but any hope you might have had of taking someone down who's not attacking you would go out of the window if you swapped all your strength for stamina.

the secret would be to dare them to hit you ^^ as towelliee calls his new series "please hit me". so of course if you run behind a flag carrier who just tries to flee without fighting back. you can't stack vengeance, but running behins a flag carrier all alone is always fail anyway.... the thing is that 2-3 styles from any enemy is about enough to get 100% vengeance now. so as soon as anyone dares fighting back you burst him to the ground. Can't access YouTube here from work but just search for "please hit me" on YouTube, a video on tgn by towelliee shows pretty well what changed.

I would love an answer for 2. and 3. tho as I'm not that experienced with prot in pvp. but I will definitly give it a try one of the following days (as soon as I get a day off of pve progress in DS )

Weapon change macros are tricky to work with, particularly if you think you're going to do something like macro it into a finisher. For example, if ShoR misses you still want your shield equipped, if WoG procs Eternal Glory you'll want to follow up with ShoR. AS might come before CS most of the time but also comes before ShoR sometimes.

I can see it locking you out of abilities a lot of the time if you're nto very careful with it.

Is it not possible to put the weapon equip part of the macro at the beginning of the ability you want to use it for? Thereby equipping (or "re-equipping" it if you miss) the weapon you want, instead of trying to equip what might be the next weapon for your ability sequence.

Equipping triggers the GCD.

Interesting point about the vengeance changes, Schroom. I tried Tol Barad for the first time since the time 4.2 launched and felt surprisingly beefy: maybe I was feeling the positive effects of the vengeance changes?

I am the world's worst PvPer: keyboard turning clicker, hyper-ventilating, wildly flailing about not even looking at the target, alternately tab targeting and tunnelling etc. But when I saw three horde going after a siege engine, I tried to protect it. Ended up killing a hunter and warrior, then when I tried to heal and belatedly noticed a shadow priest draining me (world's worst PvP player remember), promptly dispatched him. Having a 397 weapon probably did not hurt either, though.

KysenMurrin wrote:Equipping triggers the GCD.

You can swap weapons within an already in-progress GCD without penalty, though.

3. is there any S11 pvp shield? if no what shield should I use?.

Use a PvE weapon and shield until you get enough honor (8000?) to unlock the PvP weapons and shield. As prot, you already have 10% extra damage reduction from talents, so missing ~200 resilience shouldn't be a big deal.

Schroom wrote:1. as vengeance is now stacking faster is stamina stacking now the better choice? Or is strength still the stat to go for?

30 Stamina = 507 HP - 10% = 50,7 AP
Strength: 20 strength * 1,05 * 2 = 42 AP

with now almost permanently having 100% vengeance HP seems to be THE choice to go for.

It's pretty close, and worth simming I suppose. However, I frequently find myself NOT getting 100% vengeance -- more like 20% to 30% -- and that pushes things in favor of Strength. Stamina's better when you need to WoG, I guess, but Strength will help you put out damage when everyone's focusing the people around you. Do vengeance stacks show up in World of Logs? If so, I'll have to see if I can figure some average uptime (while in combat) for BGs and arenas.

In short, Str seems better when you're not getting hit. Stamina seems better when you are.

Schroom wrote:2. would a change weapon macro be viable to execute the CS's with a two hand sword, and switch back to one-handed + shield for every shield ability? I mean hey. 317% weapon dmg on CS with a two hand mace (I'm a dwarf)? woohhooo.

I tried doing 2H-CS and swapping to shield for ShoRs, but the damage was pretty close on the target dummy. With vengeance it may be different, of course, but frankly I found it really jarring to be unable to use the procs or skills that make Prot pvp unique: shield toss. Being able to silence a healer for quite a bit of a fight seems to be really useful, and I can't do that without a shield equipped.

I'll give it a shot, though, as soon as I can get a 2H weapon to experiment with. (I can try it with my PvE one, I guess -- I can afford the resilience loss, I think.) The biggest problem I had was in having macros for swapping to/from using a shield or using a 2H. That, and any time I've been in a high-vengeance situation without a pocket healer seems to be a recipe for dying, and other times I don't seem to get as much vengeance. Maybe I'll watch my vengeance status more closely and see.

as I never really played pvp with my pally (with other classes I did tho) I don't have any pvp gear at all for the moment (starting to farm tho) so I tried a couple of random bgs just to see what happens in a full PVE set. I only changed some glyphs, but I didn't even had a proper pvp specc (as my raid was only 1 hour away and didn't want to respecc just for 1 hour...) but nonetheless it was really fun, I even got the most kills. Best thing was though, there was a BloodDK in my group pretty much trying out the same thing (tanks in pvp and vengeance). And he didn't have any pvp-gear as well.

we rocked the BG. it was us two versus a druid cat in bear form as flag carrier. 2 hunters one heal priest and a melee shaman. we killed em all and they just didn't manage to kill us.
After regaining our flag. 2 healers and a rogue joined us an we sieged their base. because they couldn't kill us and when they tried the got vengeance burst to hell. never seen anything like this. never saw alliance dominating so hard in a BG and win 3:0 so easily. just love it

Kelaan wrote:

Schroom wrote:2. would a change weapon macro be viable to execute the CS's with a two hand sword, and switch back to one-handed + shield for every shield ability? I mean hey. 317% weapon dmg on CS with a two hand mace (I'm a dwarf)? woohhooo.

I'll give it a shot, though, as soon as I can get a 2H weapon to experiment with.

I did some experimentation w/ a target dummy; it's not perfect as my vengeance was low, but 2H-CS (with what as a finisher? Inquisition?) was about 2k dps less than a normal 939-like rotation. Partly it was that (glyphed) AS as filler contributes well, but also you have a finisher for the holy power other than WoG/Inq. Being able to use Sacred Duty procs to control a healer or other caster (esp with a /cast [@focus] ... macro) is something I'm so used to that it really rankled me not to use it.

I haven't tried with weapon-swapping macros built in with attacks, yet. That might help me use ShoR more reliably.

Glad you had fun. It's a blast. Give you a healer or two and it's frightening what you can do. (I DID notice vengeance was higher ... but frankly so is everyone's resilience.) You can also spend JP on honor (inefficiently). Do a few BGs, and have a fun time. Casters will eat you until you have resilience, but PvE tanky stuff probably works well enough versus melee.

Also, START NOW with an arena team in 2v2. Wins even at low rating give conquest points.

I'd like to see some math on the difference between

I have been PVP prot now for a while and have studied taugrims guide extensively. couple of questions:

Up until this point I was pretty much stacking Ret gems and enchants. as much str as I can. with hit capped and expertise capped. then ran across another prot pally that was mostly gemming Parry and dodge, and mastery.. As I understand it mastery is good in that it will block melee attacks against us but not much for those spell ranged attacks. Does Parry and dodge work against PVP the same way it works in PVE? If it did why would we need resilience?

So for PVP purposes do we as prot pallys stack like a ret? or prot?

ret: hit cap> exp cap > Str = Resil > crit > mastery
or Prot: Stam > Parry = Dodge = resil > Mastery > hit > exp > crit

ryanh55 wrote:then ran across another prot pally that was mostly gemming Parry and dodge, and mastery.. As I understand it mastery is good in that it will block melee attacks against us but not much for those spell ranged attacks. Does Parry and dodge work against PVP the same way it works in PVE? If it did why would we need resilience?

I'm no expert, certainly not highly rated, but here's my thoughts on it.

Parry/Dodge are great versus melee teams, but don't do much versus spells, whereas Resilience affects all damage equally. Casters (and snares) are very much the bane of my existence, compared to melee.

In full resilience gear, you will have ~4k resilience, which is basically an always-on 40% damage reduction. You have an additional 10% from Sanctuary in prot spec, so you can look at that either as "I get to wear non-resilience trinkets" or as "I have 50% damage reduction". Without resilience, you'll be taking FAR more damage than you can heal/mitigate from any team with a caster. Note that MANY "melee" classes have things that can prevent you from dodging/parrying, also -- such as stuns, hitting you from behind, spell damage procs, diseases, or poisons. You want resilience.

You will also usually NOT be the focus target until your partner is dead, which means that dishing out enough damage to pressure a healer is important. As it is, in full ret gear (aside from sword/shield), I have a very hard time killing anyone that has a healer if I'm by myself, and losing out on Str/hit/exp would cut that significantly.

I definitely agree with Taugrim that we should stack hit/exp. You need every bit of holy power you can to be able to make a healer take enough damage to more than HoT themself.

R.I.P. Prot PvP.

Vengeance is no longer triggered by receiving damage from other players.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/4270421

With Blood DKs being so overpowered, we should have seen that coming long ago.

Nerf four specs because one of them is OP?

KysenMurrin wrote:Nerf four specs because one of them is OP?

I see you and raise you:

"Nerf ret because it's double dipping from an ICC change implemented by Blizzard and not were it's where Blizzard wants them on the DPS charts?"



XD