As I slowly progress on my Paladin, I keep having more questions. Hope someone here can help me. Are (Raiding) Pallies using Stormwall Coalition at all right now? What is needed to trigger this? Is it really just nukes for 1500 damage or more? If I read the description right and the "Max hits 6" counts spells that need to be cast, isn't that having to cast 6 spells over 18 seconds for it to work? Too much for one Pally, sure, but maybe doable for 2? Although I am also wondering, is it worth to use it just to boost the normal nukes by "Increase Spell Damage Taken (After Crit) by 31951 "? What do people use Tribute wise? I am currently going with Bulwark of Honor, Eyes of the Hunter, Power of Conservation, Power of Recovery and Power of Will. Bulwark is a new addition, I removed 6% chance boost to Triple Attack for a bit more surviveability. Recommendations for a better set very welcome. I also need some more advice on setting up the Tanking Spam key. I am mostly using Crush spells on Raids for aggro. Specificly, my setup consists of Crush of Umbra, Force of Generosity (for some self healing), Crush of Twillight Sea, Valiant Disruption and Parlay for Honor. Also the Standard Tank and Taunt AAs, like Repudiate, and anything else that recycles quickly and causes aggro. I kept aggro okay all in all, but my surviveability was . I also pull "my" adds with Ardent Audacity. Yet another aggro spell. So I am wondering whether all those aggro spells are overkill and I should put it some more self healing stuff. Not that any self healing I put out will ever be enough to keep me alive on raids, but I am trying to prevent our healers from having a heart attack when I am tanking. ;-)
Delete all versions of the coalition line. It is one of the most useless spells in the entire game and should never be on your spell bar, even if just in the guild hall. (I'm only exaggerating by a little ... it truly is a bad spell and one the developers cannot seem to understand is not similar to the priest ones ... would actually be much more useful if it was a 4th priest one.) For personal, I just use the heroic boosts in dex, sta and agl ... the ac boost ... and Fury of Combat (flurry). But I have not changed my personal tribute in probably 5 years so I could be behind the curve. I consider the trophies much more important and have the best 8 (and have gotten the 4 extra slots from collection completions). There are good guides to spell setups in other threads, so I won't comment specifically on that. I'd make sure to have eclipse force in your rotation (insta cast spells rock!). Brilliant should also be available (several events require twincast splash ... which you should also have). I personally pulled with honor (or eclipse) cause instant >>> .5 sec cast ... and there were usually shammy totems galore so resists weren't an issue ... but I like going to work on my assigned add as soon as it went active (or in range). But usually my job was to keep the add busy until the raid was ready to evaporate the mob so I had some time to build aggro.
Thanks for letting me know how useless the Coalition is. So I guess I can spend the effort to look up other area's of improvement. I have Ecliptic Force on my Spellbar, but I tend to keep it for when my group takes damage and use it to stopgap that to give Healers more time. I was worried about putting it on the spam key because of the recast time. But it might be an idea to replace the second Crush with it. I will check that out. I changed my Tribute to contain HDex, HSta, AC and Flurry now. Retained Eyes of the Hunter. Uncertain whether I want to give that up for 20ish more Agi. Thanks for the feedback. Every bit of help is appreciated.
You're correct on all counts about Coalition's functionality. As a bottom line thing, it's pretty universally not worth. Common tribs are Eyes, Fury, AC, hp, hDex. I see you updated to include hSta - unless you're coincidentally hitting a step up of 400 to bump your Melee Shielding (which is possible. something to watch for. but unlikely), the plainer +hp trib will add to your stats more. You might download a parser program, check out how much "some self healing" you're actually getting from Generosity. That one's an uncommon choice for sure, since the HoT doesn't stack with shm/cle HoTs, HoTs are in general somewhat shady on raids, and the spell is otherwise unimpressive against stun-immune targets. As an alternative, you could keep Protective Revelation going. It's a good heal, and its protection is 5% stronger than cle Shining buff. That might push back against the way you say you feel squishy.
Okay, will drop HSta for pure HP. I use Generosity because of the 20% Chance to proc Healing Light for the group on the off chance that it helps. I had Protective Revelation going for a while, but felt I did not get aggro quick enough when using that... I guess I will have to play around with that a little bit. Checked the log and I seem to heal for 10-25K per tick with Generosity. More often 10 than 25.Guess that means it may not be worth it. Will try to replace it with Protective Revelation again and see how that does.
what I mean is - does it actually heal for that much? or does it mostly heal for 0? are you filtering the 0 ticks, so you don't even really see how frequently it's actually doing its 10/25k, versus just not? compare the total healing you get from it to how many times you cast the spell
Coalition/Alliance is trash. Paladin's are not just priests, somehow our alliance upgrade got lumped in with priests despite being a (laughable) dps spell. It requires 6 vs 4 casts for the counterpart spell as well and does far less damage. Is this the order of the spam key? Force of Generosity is wasted if you have clerics that use Elixir at all. Clerics is better and overwrites the HoT from FoG. I'm not a crush fan, but that is because it provides zero self healing/mitigation capability. I also noticed you don't use burst in your spam key or ecliptic. My spell spam can range from 6-7 gems depending on my personal movement. Valiant is also very low in your lineup if that is the order. Force of Umbra > Valiant > Ecliptic > Burst > Pious Force > Protective I often play similarly manually casting ardent/parlay on mobs that I am both actively tanking and ones I want to creep aggro on. The spam key itself has /disc repudiate > /alt activate 3826 > /alt activate 660 > /alt activate 2029 > /useitem Necromantic Dragon Bone. My clerics are usually asking me to take off my pants.... to give them a challenge in healing me as I tank multiples. Last cycle I had the boss from Door and at least 1 add each wave, often 2 adds. Zero deaths.
The question becomes are you tanking or trying to tank/buff/heal? You can't complain about agro and not use crushes, your leaving so much agro left untapped. If your tanking, you have to rely on your heal team to do their job and use what other tools available to mitigate and make their job easier.
I checked manually, and it actually does heal that most of the time, as I usually have aggro fairly quick after that. But after thinking about this for a while, I switched back to Protective Revelation instead. It heals more and the incoming damage reduction should be much more useful. Yes, that was the order of the spam key. I tend to save Ecliptic Force to be my go to spell the moment I notice my group taking damage. Despite it causing aggro, I would rather have the quick cast heals available when I need it then waste it in the spam key when people are not taking damage. My Healers do not heal me well when they are dead. ;-) Keeping aggro has not been a big problem so far, I only lose it when better geared Tanks go all out. My Spam key also has mostly the same Discs and AAs as yours. I don't have the Dragon Bone, though, so I have Taunt in there instead.
I have not played a raiding Tank since 2004, so I am not sure what the problem is... Is Taunt saved for emergencies or something? Why not stick it in there if I have space?
Taunt is an emergency snap agro ability, when it does not fail placing you 1 point ahead of the next highest. Not a good choice by any means in a spam key.
Also, are there zero times in your gameplay that you are assisting? That maybe someone else is tanking and you are providing secondary aggro, building to take over if they go down? Or perhaps your role in an event is to provide AE healing/curing and not particularly tank, right now? I'm thinking every single time there is a raid boss and zero adds, you're now ping ponging the aggro with taunt in a spam key.
I am never really providing secondary aggro, unless we are doing something like Zlandi and are low on Tanks. Mostly I do only Add Tanking and that usually only when we are low on Tanks, or there are many adds, seeing as I am relatively low on AAs and Raid Gear. When my role is pretty much not Tanking, I have a different spam key set up for that. Mostly I am producing heals then and dps. Well, as much dps as a Pally will provide, anyway. That Tank key does not include any extra aggro spells, except for Valiant Disruption. It contains Repudiate, but no aggro causing AAs.
Because my role is a tank. Tonight I ended up tanking both Gumdrops and several adds, the faster cast time and the fact that brilliant does zero healing (twin the next spell I know)... In the event I am not tanking something, burst because a pass through heal, healing my target's target, if I end up tanking, then I continue to heal myself. For me it's about versatility, survivability.
hands of tunare for the win when ae healing is at premium or you are tanking multiples and the incoming damage is potentially your entire hp bar.
