About your characterCharacter name (include armory link):Gloryrider @ EU-Twilight's HammerRace, class and spec:Blood Elf, Paladin, Protection and Retribution
Professions and skill level:Engineering and Jewelcrafting. Both maxed to 600.
Why do you play your class and spec?:Over 2 years of playing WoW I haven't managed to find anything more interesting than tanking, and with mists coming I've liked Paladin tanking even better than before.
I like the feel of a tank being a central piece of a raid and that you can (have to!) fullfil so many roles at the same time. You can balance your healing VS your damage output and VS your damage intake on a boss-to-boss, be in charge of positioning the boss and thus, most of the raid.
And even as DPS a paladin maintains it's utility as a hybrid class having decent offheals without sacrificing any (or very little) of competitiveness on the damage meters.
Is this your main? If so, do you have any alts, and if not, what is your main?:Yes it is and has always been. I had a 6 maxxed characters in Cataclysm, but so far only my most favoured alt, my priest Aethyx, has made it to 90 yet.
Outline an overview of your rotation:The biggest priority in my rotation is generating holy power, and keeping the needed buffs up. Besides that, in 10-man (and 25m now with uncapped Vengeance) a tank's DPS can still make a big deal in killing a boss or not. 5% wipes are not uncommon, and even tanks can contribute or hinder in these situations.
This means I follow a general priority based system:
Crusader Strike > Judgment > Avenger's Shield (with proc) > Sacred Shield (close to running out) > Avenger's Shield (without proc) > Hammer of Wrath > Holy Wrath > Consecration > Sacred shield (on high duration)
That my Holy power-costing abilities are off the GCD makes it a lot easier to manage of course, which means I can put a lot of nuisance into changing my rotation over a fight based on wether more damage, more healing or more defense is required.
I can go very in-depth in this, also with sacred shield (or Eternal flame, for that matter) scaling with Vengeance levels and thus having interesting "vital timings" when to refresh, to make maximum use of it.
Tell us about any specific choices you've made regarding your class, whether it be gem selections or spec details:Well, Here's a full breakdown of spec and glyph choices as protection (and mostly for Retri) paladins
- Spoiler:
Alright, take a seat and be prepared...
Since my talents change a lot even over the course of a couple days i'll just explain any viable choices that I might have selected on my armory page at the time of reading
Tier 1: Mobility.
All 3 are -technically speaking- viable choices. Then again as tank there's not a lot of fights where you are constantly moving, making PoJ worse than the other 2 options.
Long Arm of the Law is my current favourite choice. Judgment CD is so short it's almost on-demand and 45% is a more than decent boost to get where you need to be, or avoid certain mechanics (WoTE cleave, add pickups, etc)
Speed of light has it's occasional uses where a long distance has to be covered quickly. First 2 bosses in HoF are a prime example.
Tier 2: Stun/CC/Slow.
This is usually on Fist of Justice for the occasional stun, making add tanking just a little bit easier. Also Stunning your converted healers might stop them from blowing necessary cooldowns unwillingly.
Of course, if you need a slow to kite something around pick the slow, if you need a cc, pick the cc.
Tier 3: Extra heals!
Selfless healer is a bit of an oddbal. With that I mean it's usually absolutely horrible. Might be worth it when using sanctified wrath, but I haven't found any gimped fight yet where it shines over the other 2 options.
Eternal Flame and Sacred shield are very comparable: they both give you an extra hot-like ability. The downside of EF is that you need to spend holy power (and your Bastion stacks) to keep it up properly, and last time I checked, the scaling wasn't as good.
Thus, Sacred Shield is my absolute favourite here. It's better than EF because you don't have to spend resources and can easily apply it inbetween HoPo-generating abilities. On top of that it's an absorb: not a heal. No point having a HoT when you are bursted down by 2-3 swings. A shield however might keep you from dying in the first place, and gives your healers less stress.
Tier 4: Utility
Basically I use unbreakable spirit, mainly for the shortened LoH and Divine protection cooldown.
The other 2 can be used on any gimped fight with either high DoT damage (Stone guard for example) or where any of the hand-spells shine. (double HoP on your casters? byebye zor'lok aoe!)
Tier 5: HoPo generation/cooldowns
Even though Divine purpose is supposedly the greatest HoPo generator over the course of a long fight, it's quite horrible as a tank.
The whole idea of (my) paladin tanking is staying in control of your damage intake. Randomly doubled Shield of the righteous hits are thus not a big help.
Most of the fights i've been a big fan of Holy avenger, it gives me another 2min cooldown that will either reduce my physical damage taken for (a little more than) it's uptime and a quick ramp-up of bastion stacks OR a lot of healing output by spamming Word of Glory all over the place. Or any combination of the 2.
(potentially amazing raid cooldown with "increased healing" mechanics and EF talented: could hot up the entire raid on Elegon)
Sanctified wrath is also really good, and is frequently switched to on fights that require a lot of tank healing (obviously to make use of the 20% extra healing taken). It transform my wings into more awesome wings!
Tier 6: Extra Hybrid ability
All of these talents give a boost to my potential damage and healing. Execution sentence is generally the weakest here since every use you'd have to decide to do either damage or healing. Never both. It only excels when there is a high single-target DPS requirement that the raid is unable to achieve, or where you can gimp the big burst healing/dmg on a timed ability.
Holy prism is a very nice and interesting ability on any single-boss encounter where it can also heal at least 3 players every time it's used (or the other way around). It will pull slightly bigger numbers than Light's Hammer, but over a smoothened amount of time.
Overally the strongest, in my opinion, is Light's hammer. I've found it more helpful than holy prism due to it's longer cooldown and thus it can be used as a mini raid-cooldown to heal difficult points in an encounter, or doing a ton of aoe-damage.
Then my glyphs, these also change around a lot based on encounter and even raid setup. There's a clear distinction between Utility, Damage and Defensive/Healing glyphs.
I'll give you a rundown of my commonly used ones.
Damage:
Alabastar shield: sims out as the most powerful damage glyph, as long as you're activily tanking most of the fight.
Focused Shield: Need I say more for any single target fight?
Final wrath: funnily enough the 3rd best Damage glyph available.
Hammer of the righteous: yes, actually a damage glyph, not utility. It allows you to use more Crusader strike instead of HoTR, but sadly enough the gain is very, very small due to CS still hitting like a wet towel.
Defensive:
Divine protection: take this whenever you anticipate getting wacked in the face by something solid often.
Battle Healer: amazing glyph whenever you have a lot of raid damage! Especially with my Hit/Exp/haste gear setup it can pump out quite some on your co-tank or other raid members (more on that later)
Glyph of Flash of Light: quite weak actually, even when sporting selfless healer. Any more selfhealing probably goes into overhealing, since the healers have usually caught up by then.
Utility:
Blinding light: Useful for tanking stunable adds like elegon's little buggers.
Consecration: My hardest hitting AOE-ability now with 25y range? yes please!
Dazing shield: for kiting, if ever in this current content.
Holy Wrath: another stun on the occasional adds. (elegon, again!)
That's about all, hope you didn't get too bored already. Did I mention i Spec "Text Wall" for my applications?
Here's some interesting info about stats and gems:
- Spoiler:
Protection paladins seem to be very intersting now that our "model" is also one of "actively (or rather: pro-activily) mitigation"
Since the biggest chunk of tank deaths consist of getting burst down within several seconds by taking full melee hit(s) combined with specific boss- or raid-abilities, the main goal of a skilled tank is to smooth out it's damage intake and make it easier on the healers
This also makes you have more use in hots and the stream of healing a tank receives regardless of how much damage he/she is taking (PoM's bouncing off, Beacon of light, etc)
And most importantly: your healers stress less and will have to use less flash-heal-type abilities to keep you up when they suddenly see you drop like a bomb.
So why is all this so much more important? because now we don't only gear for it (like with block cap in Cataclysm) but we can also play like it.
First priority to achieve this as paladin is maximizing and steadying your Holy power generation, which results in more Shield of the Righteous (ShoR) hits and thus more "spike damage tops" shaved off.
Having, for example, a crusader strike parried will result in losing 1.2 holy power (the +0.2 comes from 20% chance on AS proc) and possibly delaying a next Shield hit by up to 4.5 seconds.
This is devastating since regular bosses run with a 1.5s swing timer. This hitting you 2-3 times in full force, on top of the regular down-time on the ShoR buff.
Solution: Hit capping and HARD capping expertise.
This is top priority and soaks up a lot of the stat points already, but after that there is still a choice between 2 gearing strategies
a) haste/mastery build
Mastery is the first "traditional" tanking stat we see here. It increases the dmg reduction from ShoR and is thus a very powerful tool after having so much hit and exp. We are, after all, focusing on generating and spending holy power on ShoR.
However, having more mastery only makes the buff more powerful, not last longer. In total damage reduction it is the best stat after hit/exp caps are reached. Damage is already smoothed and thus a focus on reducing damage taken more seems logical.
Haste, then again, shortens the cooldown on all our rotational (and holy power-generating) abilities, as well as their GCD. this means that more haste = more Holy power because we squeeze in more abilities in the same timeframe.
This makes it a very powerful stat indeed, increasing our uptime of the ShoR buff even further. On top of that, gearing for haste increases our DPS immensily, but also our HPS due to how seal of insight procs on attacks, and gaining Sacred shield ticks at predefined breakpoints.
b) dodge/parry build
Dodge and parry are the traditional tanking stats, but are actually quite weak. There is a very lengthy explanation (with a lot of math involved) why exactly it's worse than option a. I will not bore you (even more) with this. google "sacred duty" for Theck's blog if you're interested.
But that's why haste is currently my most favored stat after hit/expertise, after testing all other options and being most satisfied by this particular build.
In the future I will aim for a specific Sacred shield-breakpoint (30% spell haste raid buffed = ~5.3k haste rating) and then gear for more mastery. (haste will have heavy Diminishing Returns on this level)
This is also reflected in my gemming, reforging and enchanting. with the occasional extra stamina... We don't want to get wacked from 100->0 by some of the bad luck that will always remain, right?
About youReal name: Ward
Age: 20 in 2 weeks
Location: inbetween the beer, waffles and chocolate, there is a country called Belgium
Tell us a bit about yourself: (hobbies etc.)Gaming in general is definitely a hobby of mine, I stay up to date with recent releases and regularly buy indie games or games that are on sale on Steam.
This can range from RPG to RTS, FPS and anything else really.
Other hobbies include going squashing, windsurfing and going out with friends in the week(ends).
Oh, and skype-calling with my long-distance girlfriend. No worries, she knows better than to interupt raids
Do you have any problem with communicating in English?:Not at all, I have been raid leader before and am entirely confident in talking English with others
RaidingAre you able to make the raid days mentioned in the other thread?:Yes indeed.
What is your raiding experience, past and present?:Raiding has been my prime occupation in WoW for a while now, about 2 years. (I've been playing for 2.5 years)
It started out very casual of course, can't play hardcore when you're a noob, in ICC. Later in Cataclysm I inherited the guild and raiding team when the GM quit.
I led the raids a little more progression-minded, but I was, again, very new to all of it. Luckily I got good feedback and had a nice team to back me up and we cleared full normal T11.
After that we merged with another semi-harcore guild and got 6/7HC (4 pre-nerf) T12. Around this time I started having a bunch of alts on which I'd clear Firelands with several heroics 2 to 4 times a week...
Then just when Dragon Soul came out I switched realms (went from Dragonmaw to Stormscale) and immediately found a really nice guild that accepted me into their main team after seeing my performance in the 2nd or 3rd week, when they needed me as replacement tank.
In this guild, Left Behind, we started HC progress about 4 weeks into release (some rerolls required gearing from normal) and we managed to catch up a lot of other guilds and got a competitive spot in the top 8 of the realm.
Sadly the team disbanded after killing Warmaster HC on the first day of the 5% nerf, several members found the progression rush over now the nerfs had hit, and went their own ways.
After this I guild-jumped around a bit, played a lot on my Priest alts with some friends I met on Stormscale, until I ended up in Divine Legacy, my previous guild. After 5.0.0 we cleared up until warmaster with the nerf turned off, and cleared 8/8DS HC often and easily.
In that guild we were aiming for some heavy progression in Mists, but due to a lot of issues with attendance and the likes we ended up slacking around a lot or having bad raids with back-up or PuGed raiders. Within the first few weeks of Mists we transferred here to Twilight's hammer due to Stormscale being flooded and 2-3hour queue times
And that brings us to the present, where I have knowledge of all normal fights and several Heroic ones. Having been raid leader or the last couple weeks my knowledge is in-depth and accurate.
Are you willing to use an offspec that would benefit progression?:Yes indeed, be glad I did not discuss my ret spec or this app would take up several more kb on your website
We use Teamspeak 3 during raids, are you able to use this?:I have so many voice comms I can't keep track anymore, i'm sure TS is in there somewhere!
Do you have a microphone? (not mandatory but is useful):Well, could never have lead a raid without a microphone, tbh.
General questionsWhy Deception?:It's a guild with the progress that I would've liked to compete with, and know that I can compete with, at this stage. Sadly that did not come to pass and thus I'll have to take a shot at joining.
I'll be honest, this is not the only guild I've applied to since raiding is my top-prio in this game and I want to get started in an amazing good guild right away if possible. This however doesn't mean I will waste your time by posting meaningless apps. If I would get a positive reply for a trial raid or a chat in-game (or on skype/ts/...) I assure I will be there and not just ignore it and well, waste your time. As long as you don't waste mine
Do you know of any of our members?:Not at all, but if I join that shouldn't take too long.
Which guilds have you previously been a part of and why are you no longer a member?:Well, the experience and "why deception" part sums it up really. The guild I'm in is not what I'm looking for and is kind of disbanding as we speak. I want to raid, and I want a team that puts in at least as much effort as I do.
Any additional information that you would like to add about yourself or anything else:Me? I'm just a nice guy who's dedicated and knows what he's doing. Even though most of my application concerns my Protection spec, I am fully up-to-date (and geared) with my retribution spec and can thus easily fulfill the needs of a raiding team, like any serious raid should be able to.
My knowledge of English is better than most native English speakers and I have no issue with rubbing that in their face either!
Oh, and I try to have a not-too-offensive sense of humour. I'm also adult enough to be sure it's not grammatically correct to use "fucking" or "retarded" 3 times per sentence. I expect the same of the people I converse with
Other than that I hope my application gave you all the information you needed, whether it be about my character/experience or my personality as a raider.
Looking forward hearing from you.
Sincerely
Gloryrider
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