There’s been a lot of rambling about crowd control and Paladins. Some people (mostly ones not playing paladins) complain that Tankadins are always smashing their cc and generally not cooperating.

The reasons for this are many, and varied. However I haven’t seen a good post about when cc is good for a Tankadin, so I’ve decided to continue that trend by writing a bad post about when cc is useful for a Tankadin.

The situations where a Pally needs cc are limited.

1. Fighting two big critters at a time. By this I mean when the group is supposed to be pulling only a single massive mob to pound on and gets two with a miss-pull or patrol. In this instance cc away as the big guy can probably dish out more damage then a poorly geared pally can handle.

2. The mobs are casters. Casters don’t spend time pounding on the Pally physically. That means the pally isn’t doing damage to them, and the damage they are doing with spells is probably eating a hole in the Pally’s hit points. CC these buggers, the Pally will get less manna from healing, but it will make the healers happy.

3. Runners. Runners are bad okay. If the Pally can pull ‘em back great and he’ll probably do so and break your cc at the same time. Just don’t sheep runners, we spent all that time pounding them to the edge of death so that they flee in terror, there is no point just letting them heal up in wool-form.

I’m currently attempting to shuffle the girlfriend off to another country so that my computer and I can engage in some ‘quality time’ together. As such posts will be a bit slow (as you may have noticed) due to my lack of playing time.

There is a school of thought that says anything that is stunned or crowd controlled isn’t doing damage to the party, it is therefore better to stun then DPS.

This is false. Warlocks, Hunters and Rogues I’m looking at you now!

I’m a Tank. I’m a Paladin Tank. This means if something isn’t hitting me then it’s not taking damage. Instead of my passive-aggressive holy damage enraging the beastie beyond the limits of self-control it just stands there with a dumb look on its face… like George Bush facing a word with more then two syllables.

Stunning is Bad…. that stunned beastie isn’t getting aggro from me, it’s getting aggro from the Healer who is keeping me alive. That’s right, that squishy little tissue wearer with the survivability of a goldfish in a blast furnace is rising on the Trash Mobs “to eat” list. This is NOT COOL, this does not make Big Daddy Hammer happy, and when that occurs he feels like shoving that mauve hammer so far up your……. um…… got a little carried away there.

In summary, if you can stun it, Ipso facto (for the educationally challenged that’s Latin for “by that very fact”) it’s probably a trash mob. If it’s a trash mob and you have a Tankadin at the fore then you probably shouldn’t stun it.

Doing damage as a Tankadin

So you’ve been made the sacrificial meat-shield, and now you need to know how to hold aggro on those big bosses and trash mobs. Guess you’d better up your strength to do more damage, after all strength = more damage = more threat, right? Wrong!

A paladins threat comes from holy damage magnified by Righteous Fury. With RF up 100 points of holy damage delivers 190 points of threat. By casting one simple spell we double our threat output. Add to that the standard 3 button combination of doom Seal of the Crusader, Judge crusader so you’re doing and extra holy damage and then Seal of Righteousness (SoR), each time you strike your opponent you are doing over 190% of your holy damage in threat, and every time they strike you they take an additional 190% of your Blessing of Sanctuary, Holy Shield, and Retribution Aura damage in threat.

Assuming you’re hitting your target, and your target is hitting you, the damage really clocks up. So now just up your spell damage. Each point of spell damage is extra damage to your foe and twice as much threat as the equivalent in white damage. Strength (a big space hog in ‘of the Champion’ items) is possibly the most useless stat a Protection Paladin can have. The moral of the story is avoid Strength and Attack Power. The only exception to this rule is if you’ve gone deep enough in the Retribution tree to get Seal of Command and you’re wielding a two-hander.

Ideally you’ll want a fast one-hander (faster weapon means the blessing on your weapon hits your target more often) with built in spell damage. Add a +spell damage enchant to this and you have a great deal of your spell damage requirements met without hogging your other slots. The PvP ‘Gavel’ rewards such as the Gladiator’s Gavel provide some of the easiest attainable weapons that meet this criteria. Keep Consecration going in combat and you’ll have all the threat generation you’ll ever need. 

 

I was going to do a post about the Pally Train, the tactic of clearing a path for more ’squishy’ characters on the way to, or away from an objective… but I can’t. I was beaten to the punch by a green skinned wench over at yonder and now I’ll have to think of something else.

so sad.. 

There are of course downsides to being a Tank, you get whispers from strangers asking you to tank the daily heroic for them before you’re at the right gear level, and invites to 5-mans once you’re wearing epics. If the Healer dies its your fault for not keeping aggro (even if he did reject salvation), when the party wipes its also your fault (even if the hunter did pull more aggro then you and the healer combined and, then decided to feign death before you could retake the aggro). It also takes forever to farm, unless you can AoE a cluster of six or more.

Then there are the feel good moments, when you get up to cook for the mewling beastie in the other chair before it attacks you and chews off your leg, only to return to find a rogue pummelling you. I was AFK and sitting when he attacked, when I got back he was at half health, and I was at three quarters. It only goes to show once again that trying to melee DPS a Tankadin is kin to beating a hedgehog to death with your penis. Its painful, futile, and NEVER a good idea.