On Mischief I've paused a bit to get some AA so I can tank Paw and other group content for the time being. Does anyone have any suggestions on maybe the first 200 AA I should spend? I keep getting conflicting information, but it seems to me any of the defensive should be priority one, like CA and CS?
Defensives and heals. Then dps. Mana regen. If you don't tradeskill, you cap out on useful stuff around 750 aa or so at that stage of the game.
Without getting into too much detail, since it's been such a long time, you can take a hybrid approach to early AAs. When AAs are first available, there are quite a few lines (especially under archetype, IIRC) where the first rank or two are really useful and a much bigger bang for the buck than later ranks. So, even though we mostly recommend maxing out one line of AAs at a time, when you first start AAing, and especially if you have an AA cap or earn AAs slowly, look into spreading them around a bit, for maximum value. A tool like raidloot might be pretty handy to research this approach, as you can see all ranks of an AA at once, and can see where the value breakpoints are.
Defensive AA should always be your priority as a Paladin. Your a tank in both group and raid settings. After that stats, these would be your natural durability, planar power and the like. The proc rate AA are really good, especially when paired with a weapon that has a good heal proc. Only after your defensive and stat stuff should you move on to cures and heals unless. There's one notable exception to that route I had a lot of fun with during DoN. Windfury Katana is a weapon that has absurdly fast swing rate given what we had access to during that time. I slapped a stun proc on mine and found it much better than sword and board on any stunnable content. Worth maxing out melee damage, crits and the 2H AA if you get your hands on one. It's an oddity for us. An oddity that I remember lasted a couple of expansions before it began to lose effectiveness.
Fast weapons are trash in this game now unless they have a higher ratio. Damage bonus has been normalized. A slower weapon with the same ratio is more damage than a faster weapon due to higher riposte damage. And you still lose less dps while casting when you use slower weapons. That said, a couple 2h weapons that were terrible are now awesome due to this change. That fast 2her out of disease or whatever during PoP that was too fast for a 2h damage bonus and therefore was considered a poor weapon? Well, now its near the best weapon in the expansion. I also don't know why you think the faster weapon would mean anything with a stun proc. Procs are normalized to X ppm and the slower the weapon the higher the proc rate, but its the same chance of procs per minute. So no, you did not tank better with a 2her due to putting a stun proc (that wasn't even a real stun, its an interrupt 1 second stun) aug on it.
I thought these things because I used those weapons and parsed the differences regularly. Because I carried around a plethora of weapons and experimented with them to find any particular utility they posses. Because I didn't just digest what others fed me and verified information for myself. You may want to look at stun procs more closely because they are not all the same spell, there are two, possibly three functional variations to them.
You're wrong. *shrug* But feel free to believe what you want with absolutely no real evidence. The claim that you somehow magically took less damage using a 2her during an era where you had shield block + the ac from a shield raising you softcap is silly. Also, the only stun proc you "slapped" on your weapon during DoN was chaotic strike aug from DoN vendors. Chaotic Strike IV Slot Description 1: Decrease Hitpoints by 175. 2: Stun (1.00 sec/70)
Thanks for the advice all. I'm up to CA/CS 9 at the moment, then I'll work on the stat ones, then heals. Actually, probably going to jump to the proc rate one first because I have a sword that procs group heal that isn't procing enough.
