There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to look for something on the forums and be told exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. After a PM from an incredibly awesome scrub, I decided a thorough scrub guide from the #1 scrub around would be a decent idea. Roll film. Paladins right now are very polarized. You have to know exactly what you want to do in order to set yourself up for it. In AAs, in gear/stats, and in play style. This guide is geared towards alts, people who aren't in big super awesome guilds, and people who want basics. Everything is up for debate and situational. We're not wizards. First up is stats/gearing. Reuse speed is king, but hard to come by. Take it where you can get it. I would suggest you adorn for casting speed. It's cheap. The cap is 100%, but casting speed reforges AMAZINGLY well. Land yourself at around 80% solo. Make sure you're critting the content you're participating in (I'm not entirely sure about the number for the heroic content or easymode raids) This is the general order of things in terms of ease and usefulness. I prefer to cap things out one at a time, rather than trying to get everything at once. Start at the top, and don't work down the list until you've got enough. Crit Chance (Get it capped for whatever content you're doing. 650 is the current cap.) Reuse speed (Cap is at 100% total. This will affect your spending of AAs) Haste/MA (200 cap for both, 100-150 in each is the goal. Buffs add A LOT.) Casting speed (Easy to cap, helps everything along) Mitigation (15000 Solo is ideal. Cap is 17. If you consistently have a druid and go over, adjust.) *Crit bonus / Potency (Very rarely will you have to choose between taking these instead of other blue stats) DPS mod (600 cap. Large quantities required) Ability Modifier ( Debatable, but pretty effective. 2-3k is a good place to be. Ability mod cap is per spell. +50% base value) Flurry/AE auto (Whichever you prefer. At this point, you're capped on all of the above.) Spell Double Cast (I haven't gotten this far yet. I chose to work on the above instead.) You'll have the option of choosing between potency on armor and mitigation on armor in the latest expansion. Most of the time, you should take the mitigation. Just try to keep your potency up with a couple big armor pieces (BP alone is ~40 potency, for example). It helps your damage and your aggro. Procs are unaffected by potency though, so if you're leaning heavily on them, you can afford to lose a little extra. AAs.. the entire ballpark spec is posted below. (ADORN/REFORGE YOUR ABILITY REUSE FIRST) Details follow. The point assignments for reuse-based AAs are based on 85-90% reuse speed.. More reuse = less points spent there. In your crusader tree, Strength Agi Stamina is the way to go. Trample provides amazing AE Auto and max out the divine aura duration. 2 points in Crusader's Faith, because when Crusader's Faith is up, you're basically immune to death minus one-shots. My spec works well, check it out. In your paladin tree, I would DEFINITELY suggest you take Raid Armament and rez enhancement. We're amazing at rezzing ( Make a mega macro with 24 different rez macros. One for each member of your raid, and the top one blank for when you need to rez someone specific) In your shadows tree, enhance your diety pet on the first line instead of mana pool. CAST THAT ****, IT'S AWESOME. In the second line, only put 1 into rescue (It's probably capped on reuse. Reuse cap is 50% reduction (3 minutes can go down to 1.5, etc) In your heroic tree, this depends on what you want to do. The top line doesn't really matter. The second one does. KEEP 10 in REUSE. That's huge. Put 10 points in crit bonus, 6 in potency. Use some remaining points to max reuse on stonewall if necessary. If no need, put 2 more in potency. Put 10 in Crusader's Faith In the last line, Zealous Smite all the way. If you're doing almost entirely heroic content, you can (with a little knowledge) pull points out of other places and pick up Soul Claim also, which isn't terrible. In the prestige tree, things are a little different than they were last expansion. Faith is a powerful reflect due to the damage boost. If you are taking damage.. or CAN take damage without upsetting someone, take left side. Leave out Faith's Aura. Take the stamina HP bonus instead, and get consecrate. In the DRAGON tree, This is pretty straight forward. Your extra points will go here. Ideally you finish out both the defensive line and the utility line. The extra snap from Provocation is amazing and long range. You want one point in taunt damage at the far right so your taunts can trigger things like VC and other procs. IF you are put into a main tank position, or you find yourself having to deal with LARGE amounts of incoming damage, the left side provides very powerful tools for doing so. But the right side has fallen out a bit with the changes to our reckless stance. I stay mostly in defensive, but I switch back and forth. It's part of being a Paladin right now. Your AAs should look something like this: Basic Paladin AA (1 Point for Reuse) And your gear should ideally be identical to mine Maergoth [95 Paladin] - Antonia Bayle - EQ2U - Character Details
War Rune (Red / Purple adorns) These are a mess right now and really depend on your situation. Try to obtain them with reforging in mind. Large chunks of stats like Spirit of the Jester or Screams of Battle are very powerful if you're not getting Jcap and BC. Relentless Conviction is still very good also, and the 50% chance to resist control effects. Play this by ear depending on what you need at the moment. Deity Information - There is no right answer for which deity you should choose. For tanking, pick Tribunal or Bristlebane. For DPS, pick Sol Ro or Rallos. They each have different benefits (I use bristlebane because death immunity with swindle fate and +20% max health and power from deck of cards). Tribunal has a mitigation blessing, and a heal reactive... neither are super powerful right now. General CA/Spell priority - Precast holy ground if you're not tanking anything. Don't hit them mob with it to avoid gaining that one hate position. It's good to cast while jousted out for red text, etc. You can open up with encounter taunt and AOEs for multiple mobs (Faster cast/reuse if adds die slow, and higher damage/reuse if they're living for like, 5 seconds). If you have timewarp running, skip the encounter taunt, Doom Judgment, and hammer ground. If there are 4 or more mobs, use every AOE every time it's up. Charge up Divine Territory ahead of time and MAKE SURE its up for adds if you're spec'ing for it. Faithful Cry and Holy Strike for single targets (Both can be timewarped!) Harbinger of justice hits hard. You should be getting max charges for it every 10 seconds. Don't use it right before adds spawn. If you're NOT full charges of Harbinger of Justice / Divine Territory.. Zealous Smite. Every time. It grants 6 charges per group member (For some reason). And is great for building charges quickly. You shouldn't save it for this purpose or anything, just keep it in mind. Great to use right after emptying your charges. The more efficiently you use your harbinger of justice / divine territory, the better your parse will look. And with a good parse comes good aggro. I am currently not spec'd for this, but if you do, you have to do it properly. ---- Play styles vary too greatly to pinpoint. All I can do is recommend you check out some of my raiding videos *May contain partial nudity.. but probably not. Just offensive language. Maergoth <-- Live Streaming Big End-Game Paladin Cinema <-- Archive of recordings Adblock Plus is your friend. ---- There are a few little tricks I can recommend: 1. Macro EVERY emergency or twitch-click ability with /cancel_spellcast in front of it. Intercept, Lay hands, ALL of your saves. It saves you the keystroke of hitting escape, or having to wait for a spell cast to finish. 2. Make a mega macro for rezzing. You'll be the first to rez EVERY time without fail if you make that macro. Again, just fill a macro with rez spell casts, and input the name of every raid/group member. It takes a little maintenance, but it's worth it. 3. SPAM AOES. When adds are due, stop worrying about DPS. Back into the center point of the raid, and spam Ancient Wrath. Adds tend to stick to people, and the only way to prevent that is to frontload your aggro and SNAP. Divine Territory works well for this. Coercive Shout is your friend. Ask for it. 4. Use ACT. Make timers/triggers for tons of stuff. AOEs, red texts, time warp, whatever. It's a powerful tool. Here is an example trigger: <Spell N="DS" T="14" OM="F" R="F" A="F" WV="0" RD="T" M="T" Tt="" FC="-16776961" RV="0" C=" General" RC="F" SS="" WS="tts Down" /> <Trigger R="DS" SD="" ST="0" CR="F" C=" General" T="T" TN="DS" Ta="T" /> Paste that into the XML snippits box in the options. Both of those. And add a command line in a Devout Sacrament macro that says "/DS" You can make macros for many things this way, but DS is the most important since it doesn't show in maintained. Basically you're telling ACT that seeing "DS" in chat is important with one of the lines, and the other is telling ACT that when it sees that important thing, to start a timer. Simple. 5. Aura of the Crusader works on everything it's supposed to. Don't be bad and argue it. If a CURABLE detrimental hits you and PREVENTS you from taking action, use aura of the crusader. Just twitch click it. Don't examine anything, don't even look. 9 times out of 10, you'll be all better. Effects that apply "No Hostile" and "No Beneficial" don't count. 6.Become VERY familiar with the range of Holy Ground. Practice it in your free time. Lots of times an add will spawn and you'll grab the named with it if you're not careful. DO NOT run the mob around. Spin it away from the raid, yell at the main tank to grab it back, and don't do it again. 7. Ward accumulation is a thing. If you're tanking and an AOE is due, and you're not sure if it's going to kill you, use Stonewall. Wards will build up on you while you're blocking and your chance of survival will increase, even if block chance doesn't DIRECTLY reduce AOE damage. 8. If you ARE using the left side prestige and Faith, make absolutely sure you INTERCEPT the main tank EXACTLY when the AOE hits. You'll stoneskin his damage, and add it to your total reflect amount. Also stand in front of the mob for that. And if you're tanking the mob, take your shield off. (You can make a macro for this. /unequip secondary. And then have a second part of the macro casting faith, and a third part putting the shield back on. Since you cant unequip and re-equip instantly, you can click the macro again in 2s to put the shield back on. By then, faith will be about to come down) Furthermore, if you're taking LARGE amounts of damage, you can click temp buffs that raise your HP while you are charging faith up for the group. It will raise the cap, which is determined by your own health UPON DAMAGE TRIGGER. 9. Smoldering Adornments of Avoidance. Best adorn ever, dirt cheap. Forerunner's Magnitudes are also amazing. Best temp adorn in the universe. Worth the investment. 10. Tinkerer tools are amazing. Overclocked Manastone, Defibrillating heart stopper. Buy them! 11. Take Consecrate as your grandmaster. It's your highest DPS yield. 12. If you're down the left prestige line and you use Devout Sacrament for damage reduction, IMMEDIATELY cast holy aid to try to refresh it. You can accurately assess the remaining time on the 12 second damage reduction by looking at the time remaining on Holy Aid. It's better than digging through your buff window. (Holy aid has a 25 second recast for me. When Holy Aid is half way into the cooldown, I know that my Sacrament DR is probably gone.) 13. Try to squeeze in your taunts to stack increments of HP. It is worth it. 14. When you have to use a save, use whichever has the fastest recast first. (Don't use Divine Aura if Stonewall will suffice, etc) 15. Buy avoidance food/drink from the broker. It's usually treasured and crafted. Get the parry stuff. 16. Put a " /auto 2 " macro on Faithful Cry. When Faithful Cry is down, it will activate your auto ranged attack. Saves you a slot on your hotbars, and makes it easy to quick bow a mob. 17. Put an "equip shield" macro in front of Stonewall. It will take your two hander off, equip a shield and cast stonewall in one button. Great for when you've got a 2 hander on and need to tank in a pinch. 18. If you are using the INT line (I do for raiding, I don't need the reforging that strength provides), use Devout Sacrament alongside Legionnaire's Conviction. Since LC reflects all the damage the paladin reduces and not just the damage reduced by LC, using other damage reductions will greatly increase the damage being dealt by LC. Melee damage included. If you have any other questions or anything to contribute, go for it.
Tanking 101 (Ala Sigrdrifa) Preparation To start with, before your group heads into battle, get your buffs from each member. Many classes have helpful buffs that make you more effective as a tank. Ask questions about what folks place on you so YOU know which buffs are helpful, and so you can ask for them later in other groups! Aggro The job of a tank is to HOLD AGGRO. You are not there to deal damage to the foe really, you just have to hold aggro so it doesn't eat the rest of the group while THEY kill it. That being said, pretty much 1 point of hate = 1 point of damage. There's no way a tank is going to dish out the humungeous damage that, say, a wizard nuking can. So you also have other tools in your repertoire to help you get more hate than you can acquire simply beating on the foe. Some tank classes have stances that increase hate towards the tank. Paladins have a spell called Amends that lets you have a percentage of the hate of another member of your group. Some tank classes get hate by being hit. Read through your spells/combat arts, and see what each of them really does. All tanks have some taunts. Some have more taunts than others. When you pull, you start off EARLY on the mob. You want to get it hit once and taunted at least once as you pull. The hit establishes you on the hate table, and the taunting adds to the hate you have directed at you. Another trick is that some classes, such as Swashbucklers, can do a HATE TRANSFER. It's basically a buff that transfers some percentage of the hate they're getting to you instead. Selecting a Place to Fight Another critical item when tanking is that you are the one who keeps the group safe. And it's your responsibility to position the group in a place that you can safely fight without getting adds, so you learn to pick a good place to fight in. Usually the way you've just come is clear of foes - presumably you killed them on your way in - but you kind of keep an eye out for adds or repops that way. Turning the Mob However, the way your group is headed is full of foes, so it's a REALLY good idea to turn the mob after you pull it. This leaves you, the tank, between your group and the foes further in on your path, so that anything that wanders up will hit you first and not the lightly-armored healers or casters. You also need to turn the mob for the safety of your group. Anytime the foe ripostes, or does an AOE attack, if the thing is facing AWAY FROM THE GROUP, only the tank gets hit. Your healers need to focus mainly on healing the tank, so you want for JUST the tank to take damage if possible. And turning the mob is critical to allow your scouts to do the most damage. All the scout classes have flank or back attacks that usually do pretty high damage, so you need to allow them room to get in behind the foe. Finally, turning the mob(s) is a BIG help to you as tank. If you see the mob facing you, YOU have aggro. If you are looking at its hiney, you DON'T have aggro and need to switch to that mob and taunt and whallop until you get aggro back. The Fine Art of Body Pulling A key tool to learn early on is the Fine Art of Body Pulling. At first, not many foes are SOCIAL. The higher in level you go, however, the more social mobs you are going to encounter, so you need to learn this technique early and get it perfected. When I say a mob is "social", that means if you hit it, it can call to its nearby friends for help. Then instead of having one thing to fight, you have the whole room trying to eat your face. To deal with this, the body pull is used. Instead of, say, lobbing an arrow or a taunt at the foe, you edge up until it JUST notices you. then when it does see you, you backpedal and it comes with you. Once you have it far enough away from its friends, you start taunting. Here's some info from a thread on the old forums two iterations back (http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/...d=Newbie&message.id=154977&query.id=0#M154977) that's helpful for all classes, especially tanks. This is the illustrated fine art of body-pulling...
Very nice thread thanks for the detail Maergoth. A question on point 8 - "If you ARE using the left side prestige and Faith, make absolutely sure you INTERCEPT the main tank EXACTLY when the AOE hits. You'll stoneskin his damage, and add it to your total reflect amount. Also stand in front of the mob for that. And if you're tanking the mob, take your shield off." Why would you take shield off when using faith? I must have missed something on my palay so was curious why you are doing this especially when MT.
Also wondered if you could help with some tips for when running zones like VD. As a Palay im not sure if we are at a disadvantage when tanking those kind of zones because we have lower mit to other classes (due to lack of mit buffs). Also I was finding im cycling through my death saves very quick (faith, divine aura, stone wall, divine favor). Divine favor caused alot of issues to me maybe because I have fewer AA's in that chain. Hows your experience of running that zone and do you have any tips especially how you cycle your saves. This is my palay set up: http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/2168961748219 Thanks Zi
You have plenty of mitigation. Too much hate gain IMO.. dirge/coercer will put you way over cap, but for heroic stuff, no big deal. You are wasting A LOT of AAs, mostly in your paladin tree, in things that improve cast speed / reuse speed, which you are capped in. I would redo the paladin tree completely and take my spec into consideration, or the one I posted in the original post. Much waste there, and points missing in good places (sigil duration, etc). Your shadows AAs are also kind of messed up. You have 5 points in Gallantry and Stifle resist for no reason. If you freed up enough points, you would pick up an entire extra line in the Dragon AA tree, which would be very helpful. Faith's Aura is not very good in prestige. The duration is so short, its hard to utilize it effectively (especially when the range is so short). Switch it out for duration and cast speed. And instead of putting 3 points in Faithful Protection at the top, put one in Field Commander's Charge. Put parry in your rings instead of defense. Pick up some AE auto purple adorns also, especially if you're doing heroic content. Revisit your adorns in general and try not to waste crit chance in slots where you could have something better. Start with that, let me know how it goes. For saves, you should rotate these 3 as often as possible: Stonewall, then Legionnaire's Conviction / Devout Sacrament (Sometimes LC isn't up, just use DS by itself. Immediately try to reset, don't wait), and then Crusader's Faith. Those 3 will cover you almost completely. If you run out and can't risk waiting for reuse timers, use Divine Aura. That is a last resort. You should be able to bridge the down time with self heals and priest saves and stuff. Communicate with your healer. And with Faith, you take your shield off so you get hit MORE, resulting in more damage with faith, while taking zero extra damage (because you're immune). I'm not a huge fan of this metagame, so I want Xelgad to make Faith remove all of the caster's avoidance for the duration. I doubt he'll go for it though.
As far as scrubs go, I come close to topping the list so this will, in fact, be quite useful for me. I'll be sunk in heroic content with some minimal exposure to raiding. What this does is give me a couple solid templates to play with and decide what works best with the groups that I'll be in with guildies for the most part. I consider them all good players so I should have a little more leeway than I would with completely random PUGs. Once I start running through stuff full-bore, I'll consider putting together a much scrubbier list of gear that what Maergoth has proposed Although, if someone else out there already has a gear list, I'd strongly encourage you to post it somewhere on the forums or even here in this thread for ***** and giggles.
^^ Awesome. In general, thanks much for the write up. I just dragged my paladin out of the cellar this past weekend and am re-learning how to play it. Riding a bike right?
Absolutely! The same can't be said about EQ1 though. I made a heroic character over there after not playing since PoP, and suddenly I have 7 hotbars, more buttons than my EQ2 toon and NO IDEA what I'm doing. Not advised, lol. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Great write up! It has inspired me to make a pally, one of the 3 classes I have never played. I would love to see a screenie of your hotbar setups, since you mentioned it.
LOL. My hotbars are unconventional and similar to EQ1's old setup. 2x4 hotbars with a 1x8 "buff" bar to the left. You can check out my stream to see the hotbars. They work for me, but there's definitely more efficient ways to handle it.
Good point. I check out your stream from time to time, but twitch seems to have issues sometimes.. very slow even on a 75mbs connection
You'd have to take it instead of mitigation in almost every situation and currently, it isn't worth it. You'll pick some up along the way, and if you're having some trouble surviving after capping mit then go for it, but it's not something you should worry about.
