Threatening Light

Hi guys and gals,

Saintlyn's here with another update. Week 2 of Mists of Pandaria is behind us. I've had enough time to run A LOT of dungeons, did Mogu'shan Vaults raid (first 4 bosses) on 10 man, tanked and killed World Bosses and had "fun" grinding reputation. Man I hate daily quests!

The topic of discussion today will be about threat thou. I quickly found out that recent changes to Seal of Truth hurt a bit more then expected. My tanking partner in raids is a Blood DK. I do have to admit that I'm a bit jealous about the amount of damage and threat they put out. I usually have to fight him for threat on tank switch encounters. One may say - "Well, they nerfed paladins! Deal with it". However, I decided to look into things we can do now to level the playing field. More after the jump


1) Righteous Fury

This one is big! Don't ever forget to have it on. Since I have to switch to retribution every so often - I just figured I'd put it out there. It increases our threat by 500%.



2) Vengeance

Vengeance is the main threat mechanic. It requires us to be in protection spec and significantly increases damage our Shield of the Righteous and anything depending on AP does in raids. This increase depends entirely on damage we take. Long story short - the boss hits you, your AP increases by 2%. This effect stacks for 20 seconds. Then your, for example, Shield of the Righteous hits the boss with all that AP! Pretty sweet!

3) Healing Threat

We knew that stuff - you should say (and I truly hope you did). So what about Healing Threat? Glad I got your attention here. Now this one is not one of usual suspects. Healing threat is something that was around for ever, however we never really took into account how we can use it to our benefit. It's a no brainer that when a healer casts his spells, un-tanked adds for example run straight to her. We mash our taunt buttons - adds run to you. Wouldn't it be cool thou having those adds run straight to you? But we can't spend our GCDs healing can we? Turns out that now we can!

Seal of Truth and Censure were our main tools for threat keeping. I'm about to break this apart. With glyph of Battle the Healer and Seal of Insight we heal nearby allies for 30% (!!!) of damage we do. Only actual healing is counted towards threat thou.

Conclusions:
Now, have you read the parts above regarding Vengeance and ShoR? Here's a scenario for you. Boss hits us, deals massive damage, AP goes up, we hit back with ShoR (factor in Glyph of the Alabaster Shield damage), allies nearby get healed - we gain A TON OF THREAT!

This, however, will have it's drawbacks. Say in currently easy mode heroics. Nobody is really taking damage. TPS will be lower then SoT/SoR. In raids however - everyone is taking damage (AoE, mechanics, you name it!). So SoI+Battle Healer should be a pure win!

Gonna test it tomorrow and report back!

Saintlyn out!