Taugrim's MMO Blog

This is my 1st PVP video @ 85.

My partner Kashmír and I are new to this comp. Our record was 5-5 in WotLK, 10-7 last week, and 19-7 this week (which was really 18-6 when we factor out DCs). We’re still in the learning process.

It’s a fun and uncommon comp and our matches tend to go quickly as we’re both “DPS”.

I make some silly mistakes in the video – do as I say not as I do

Excerpt from the YouTube video description:

This HD video is narrated footage of my 85 Protection Paladin in Cataclysm Patch v4.0.3a in Arena 2v2 with an Enhancement Shaman, Kashmír. We won 18 out of 24 matches in which neither side lost a player due to DC.

This is my 6th Prot PVP video since 4.0 launched and my 1st at 85 in Cataclysm.

This video features the following opposing comps at ~1800 MMR:
- Feral Druid + Rogue
- Warlock + Restoration Shaman
- Mage + Enhancement Shaman
- Warrior + Discipline Priest
- Mage + Holy Paladin

Tips / Notes
- As I talk about in my Prot PVP Guide, you should try whenever possible to not use Shield of the Righteous unless you have the Sacred Duty buff up. The reason is that SD guarantees that SotR will crit, and if you use SotR without SD you’ll be using our Melee Crit rate, which with my gear was ~6%
- If you need to bubble yourself to heal up, it’s a good idea to use the first GCD after popping Divine Shield to cast Judgement, which procs your mana regen. Then spam-cast FoL. That way you can heal up without going bone dry on mana
- CS is often my #1 source of damage (~22% of my total). This make sense given how frequently we can use it and the synergistic buffs to damage and crit from Wrath of the Lightbringer, Crusade, and Rule of Law
- We did face comps that went after my partner since he can’t bubble, but with his Wolves and the Paladin abilities Hand of Sacrifice, Divine Guardian, and Holy Radiance, we had instant-cast tools to extend his time-to-live. I usually charged in ahead of Kash to force opponents to deal with me, and shortly after Kash would engage
- Attacking a Restoration Shaman is not a smart thing to do, it generates mana for the Shaman. LOLZ
- I had thought that Seal of Truth and Retribution Aura were underwhelming at 85, but after looking at Recount from matches I realized that SoT and RA is still worth using. SoT is typically 10-12% of my total damage and RA against melees is ~3%

Errata:
- The 2nd comp was incorrectly listed in the video as Warlock + Holy Paladin, but as I said in the video it was actually Warlock + Restoration Shaman

For detailed information about Prot PVP, check out my PVP Guide:
http://taugrim.com/2010/10/14/guide-wow-4-0-protection-paladin-class-mechanics

Please post feedback / questions / comments. Thanks!

Cataclysm went Live on December 7th, but it took me until the 15th to reach level 85.

Gear Summary and Recommendations

As of this post, I have purchased the following seven pieces of 85 PVP gear:

• Bloodied Pyrium offset belt, bracers, and boots
• Bloodied Pyrium helm
• Bloodthirsty Scaled set shoulders, chest, and gloves

I love that Blizzard has introduced crafted PVP gear (i.e. Bloodied Pyrium for Prot and Ret Pallies), as you can buy those pieces to jump-start your PVP viability until you have time to grind out Honor and Conqueror gear. The mats aren’t that expensive, on Wildhammer they’re roughly 250g per crafted piece.

Here are a few suggestions for gearing up quickly:

• When you ding 85, definitely buy the crafted Bloodied Pyrium offset belt, bracers, boots, and one other piece (helm, legs, or shoulders). The Honor pieces are slightly higher iLevel, but there is no set bonus for the offset pieces. Moreover, the crafted pieces have a lot of Hit rating, which is necessary to get to the 5% Hit cap
• Get to 2/5 and then 4/5 Scaled set as soon as possible. The 2/5 set bonus includes 400 Resilience and 70 Str, and the 4/5 bonus includes the Judgement cooldown reduction (huge, see below) and 180 Str. The 1st set piece you should get are the gloves, as they have a CS damage bonus
• As you are saving up Honor and Conqueror points for an expensive upgrade, rent gear upgrades and then return them before the 2h expiration. E.g. I’m saving up for the Scaled legs which cost 2200 Honor, so once I had 1250 Honor saved up I bought the blue ring to use, and once I earn another 950 Honor I’ll return the ring to buy the legs. Ditto for the Conqueror shield

I wanted to make sure to share those gear insights because some players I spoke with were gearing up the wrong way (e.g. buying the crafted set pieces and offset Honor pieces, instead of the other way around).

You may be wondering why I got the crafted helm instead of the Honor helm. The Crit damage meta gem is “broken” because it won’t activate unless you have more blue gems than red. This is supposed to get fixed, but in the meanwhile it means that helm meta gem isn’t that useful. As I’m in a hurry to fill the many gear holes I have, I went ahead and bought the crafted helm.

I’m continuing to use 80 epic PVP gear instead of Cataclysm PVE items. Many players are neglecting Resilience so far in Cataclysm, and I have beaten other players of the same spec who have more 85 PVP gear than I have. YMMV.

Right now I have 2400 Resilience (25% mitigation) and can’t wait to get more 85 PVP gear. My survivability is very good at 2400 Resilience and should only improve once I get at/over 3000.

Enchant / Gem / Reforging Recommendations

• Str for red sockets
• Resil for yellow sockets
• Str/Hit for the blue sockets to activate the socket bonus, or go Str

Reforge the following stats to Hit until you reach the 5% cap, then reforge to Crit:

• Haste (almost completely useless for Prot)
• Mastery (only helpful against melees)
• Expertise (actually not that bad, reduces avoidance for any target)

You’ll notice it’s tough to get Hit-capped and reach even 10% Crit. I’m close to 7% Crit now.

Mechanics Changes @ 85 compared to 80 for 4.0

OK, with all that gearing and stats stuff out of the way, here is my take on how Prot functions in PVP now.

Summary: we are truly “outlast/support” tanks now @ 85:

1. Our FoL and WoG healing is very inefficient now. FoL with my gear only heals for ~10k but I have 110k HP. WoG isn’t worth casting at less than 3 stacks unless it’s an emergency heal. You won’t be able to bubble and heal up to full from low health
2. We have very good mitigation abilities in Divine Protection, Ardent Defender, Guardian of Ancient Kings and a solid AOE “mitigation” heal in Holy Radiance. In PVP you should use these abilities as often as possible and chain them under focus-fire
3. We can chain some solid burst together with Avenger’s Shield, 3-stack Shield of the Righteous with Sacred Duty, and Hammer of Wrath. But don’t expect to burst people down in 10 seconds – fights take much longer now. I actually prefer this to the critfest that characterized pre-Cataclysm PVP. Fights are much more tactical in nature
4. Our sustained damage has taken a hit. Our Seal damage and Retribution Aura damage are now fairly insignificant. My crit Crusader Strikes hit Cloth for ~8k and Plate for ~6k, so it’s a modest burst ability

Tips:

1. If you remember only one thing from this article, remember this: our Crit % is pitifully low now. Mine is 7%. Therefore, you should try whenever possible to wait for Sacred Duty to proc before using a 3-stack SotR for the guaranteed Crit. That is partly what makes the 4/5 set bonus so critical – you want to have as many opportunities as possibleto Judge to proc the SD buff
2. In mass combat pop Divine Guardian and Holy Radiance. They can keep friendlies up long enough to make a difference in the outcome
3. Don’t save your mitigation cooldowns. Fights in Cataclysm tend to last a long time, and by the time the current fight is over many of your cooldowns will be halfway to being ready for use again

Rated BGs and Arena

I organized two 15-person raids for Rated BGs for my guild. We went 3-3. We lost 2 matches due to healer DCs and stupidity. The AB loss chapped my hide because we would have won it down a player (14v15) if we had simply stayed near the BS flag. The SotA loss was  embarassing – I got my Demo from the beach up to Yellow gate but no one picked up the 2nd Demo despite repeated asks from another player on Vent. If the 2nd Demo was with mine, we would have shaved at least a minute off the time to finish. It’s a learning experience, hopefully we’ll improve as a group.

My main complaint about Rateds is the queue in our Battlegroup is slow to pop, sometimes 15 minutes per. Too much downtime. Hopefully the 10-person Rated queue will pop faster.

I ran 2s with two different comps:

• Prot Pally + Holy Pally
• Prot Pally + Enhancement Shaman

The Holy Pally and I went 6-3. My partner possessed no Resilience gear, had dinged 80 right before Cata, and had no experience as a PVP healer. E.g. he kept moving out into open fire lanes even though I suggested he find a pillar to hug. This comp actually functions very differently compared to pre-4.0 now that Holy Pally can put out functional damage with Exorcism spam. It’s a viable comp and the matches don’t last 15 minutes like they used to.

The Enhancement Shaman was the same player (Kashmír) I had run 2s as a Moonkin. We went 5-6 for the first 5 matches, as we were new to the comp and learning from simple mistakes. He got focus-fired most matches, which made sense given our specs, but he only had 1k Resilience so he was squishy. So we got him the 3 crafted offset pieces to get him to 1.5k Resilience and we changed our strategy a bit  to having me be the frontline aggressor.

We won the last 5 matches to finish 10-6 for the week. Some points of interest:

• Neither of us has strong/efficient cast-time heals, but his Wolves heal him for a lot and I have a lot of mitigation tools, Holy Radiance, Divine Sacrifice, and Holy Protection to help protect my partner
• We beat different Healer/DPS comps consistently
• Mage/Lock gave us the most trouble because of the CC and ranged DPS
• This was a fun comp, matches go very quickly!

I was trying to record some good footage yesterday in Random BGs queued solo, but out of a dozen queue pops I got mostly AV and IoC, which I dislike for videos because they often zergy.

Hopefully I’ll get at least 1 video published before my vacation starts and we hit the road.

I have some work to do to update the Cata Prot Pally PVP Guide but what I’ve written above is a good starting point if you wanted the skinny on Prot @ 85.

EDIT (2010/12/21): I’ve updated the Cata Prot Pally PVP Guide, so let me know if you have any questions.

It’s not what you might think. E.g. the lack of survivability, the lack of counters that other caster classes have, etc.

The biggest challenge I’ve faced is simply the unwillingness from the playerbase to try 2v2′ing with a Balance Druid, aka Moonkin. Aside from my real life friend from high school (who plays a Mage) and his co-worker, I’ve only found 1 person (Kashmír, an Enhancement Shaman) willing to give it a legit shot. I’ll get to Kashmír in a bit.

To see what it’s like partnering with other classes, over the 6 weeks I’ve responded to individuals looking for a 2s partner on chat. Most people were not willing to give a 1.1k resilience-geared Moonkin a try, and even the few that did remained skeptical – even when we had a winning record together.

Let me give you an example. One of them was a Warlock with a team with a Team Rating (TR) of 1475. I checked on wowarmory and his team had been hovering in the 1400s for a couple weeks. He was asking for a Mage or Resto Druid on /2, so I sent him a whisper asking if he’d try a Moonkin. He agreed and invited me to his 2v2 team.

We had neither practice partnering with the other class nor with each other. We lost our first 3 matches (and to his credit he was patient), then went 11-6, so 11 wins and 9 losses overall. That showed me that we could hold our own around 1500 even though we were new team mates. At the time, I didn’t have any Wrathful gear with a TR requirement. My PR (Personal Rating) started at 1000 and finished at 1230, so I was not too far from getting the 1st Wrathful upgrade. I logged, and while I was offline the Lock replaced me on the team with a Mage. The Lock sent a very polite email, which I appreciate, saying that he wanted to try a more conventional partner. He found a Mage. I checked the next day and it turns out they had a losing record together, even though the Mage was better geared than me.

In the past the Lock’s highest TR had been around 1600, and IMO if we kept playing together and I got the Wrathful upgrades at 1300, 1400, etc, I’m quite confident we would have broken his highest TR. But, your partner has to believe that too.

Fortunately, about a week ago Kashmír the Enhancement Shaman was looking for a 2s partner on chat. He was very willing to give me a shot, as he had met a Wrathful-geared Enhancement Shaman in a battleground who had gotten to 1950 TR with a Moonkin.

As with the Lock, neither Kash nor I had played with each other’s class/spec. When I joined his 2v2 team (Beasteh), the TR was around 1380. We went 48-37 over our first 85 matches, and that was including 6 DCs on his part. If the DCs hadn’t happened, we would have gone 51-34. And on top of that he didn’t have a working mic so our communication was limited to me talking, him typing. Nevertheless, we got to 1551 TR in three days and Kash got his 1550 TR achievement. Our matches go incredibly fast and I’ve seen firsthand that an Enhancement Shaman packs a lot of burst, good survivability, and strong utility – contrary to the common perception that Enhancement Shaman is a weak 2v2 class.

This week Kash got a working mic and we’re now at 1617 TR. The competition has gotten steadily better in terms composition, gear, and skill, but we haven’t hit our wall quite yet. Neither Kash nor I have Wrathful set gear or a weapon, whereas our competitors often do, partly because it is late in the arena season and getting to 1800 now is harder than it was months ago. Both of us want to try getting to 1800 with our preferred spec instead of facerolling with a Resto spec. With 145 matches played together, we’re still learning and experimenting, especially against healer/DPS comps.

If we can crack 1700 or so TR, I’ll record some footage for a 2v2 narrated video.