Prot Paladin PvP-Why you should be prot

[soto]

Protection Spec Paladin Healing “Prot” Tips

So You Think You Can Tank

And heal. That is the first way you have to look at this spec. You are passively defensive with the ability to heal for great amounts. I suggest actually learning tanking mechanics of the Prot tree before attempting this spec, understanding how the Prot abilities work will help you with controlling the match. Controlling the match will help lead you to victory.

Pros/Cons

Advantages: Big heals with a short cast time. A high damage burst + silence with a short cooldown on Hammer of Justice. More health and damage mitigation. A 30% damage reduction when under 35% health. Sacred Shield absorbs a very large amount of damage. Permaplea’s infinite mana.

Disadvantages: No instant heal. Susceptibility to interrupts. Easy to counter if the other team understands how to make divine plea run off or take advantage of the healing penalty. Less crit and haste. Limited to a certain number of partners.

Identifying Your Play Style

Are you a ret mentality healer like myself? Do you believe you should help to blow up DPS and keep the other team on the defensive? Or perhaps you are more a defensive minded, sit back and win on mana type of player. Knowing how you play will be key in venturing forward with this spec. Knowing when to change your play style will be key to success.

Center your game around being offensive or defensive then understand how to play the other way if the match requires it. Once you know what you want to do specifically, you will be able to succeed where others have failed. Inside and outside the arena, you have to know what to do to be successful.

Gear, Gems, Enchants

Rule of thumb is full PVP gear is the way to go. Stamina benefits your SP, survivability will help versus any class that gets on you. The difference in Prot Spec Healers is the way they gem, which stats they feel are more important. The same goes for their enchants.

Spell Power – If you like to keep pressure on an opponent then I suggest going full SP like myself. I have 2812 Spell Power with kings and my heals crit for 10k on targets within my auras. SP also helps Sacred Shield at a rate of 0.9*SP.
Haste – Some more defensive minded players will go for as much haste as the gear permits. Haste makes your heals land faster, reduces your GCD for cleansing and lets you proc your seal more often if you are in melee range of a target.
Stamina – Some other defensive players stack Stamina in an attempt to outlast any and all opponents by making their health the primary obstacle to beat. I do not recommend this route.
Hit Rating – Avenger’s Shield and Hammer of Justice missing can and will cost you a match. I suggest getting near hit cap to alleviate these worries.
Critical Strike Rating – Crit is not a primary concern as Sacred Shield proc’ing will give you 50% extra crit on whoever needs healing. If you can get it and nothing else is available then get it. Otherwise don’t gem or enchant specifically for Crit.
Intelligence - Intelligence improves critical strike rating and the mana return from Divine Plea and Seal of Wisdom. It is a route that I wouldn’t suggest but is affable for players that intend to win solely on mana effiency.

Talented Paladins

I am currently using the following build.
http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc...00000000000000

I chose Reckoning over Redoubt and Anticipation. If I am targeted and reckoning procs it allows me to generate twice as many seal strikes. Seal strikes can help your mana efficiency, keep you healed, or do damage to a target.

I also choose Hammer of the Righteous over one point in Divine Intellect. This relates to my play style as Hammer of the Righteous can proc extra seal strikes which can lead to (in some cases) four seal of wisdom procs on a group of targets netting 1800 mana on a 6 second cooldown.

 
Redoubt can help you handle small damaging attacks, anticipation can help you deal with melee. I used these before and am currently using reckoning on a trial basis. Keep in mind your Shield Block Value in this spec is very low and the 30% you gain from Redoubt amounts to around 50-60 SBV.

Glyphs
Avenger’s Shield – Increases the damage of AS by 100%. This can lead to a 5-6k critical strike that silences a healer for 3 seconds. This can and will decide close matches.
Salvation – Turns your useless hand spell into a 20% damage reduction spell. It is useful, I could imagine a spec without it though.
Flash of Light – 5% critical strike chance for a glyph slot is hard to pass. I know what I said about crit before but you’re giving up a glyph in this case, not SP or Haste.
Turn Evil – Death Knights are my worst enemy and tear me to shreds when gargoyle is out. I am tempted to drop FoL for Turn Evil so that I can deal with gargoyles easier. Also helps versus UA warlocks who are going for a kill, fear the felhunter and heal your partner.
Blessing of Kings – Reduces mana cost of BoK by 50%, helps you to put BoK as a trash buff over Divine Shield, Sacred Shield, etc.
Of the Wise – Reduces mana cost of seal of wisdom by 50%, allowing you to swap to the seal easier to try and melee your mana back up.
Sense Undead – Increases your damage versus undead. Not the most exciting, but it’s the best left.

What Seal Do I Use?

Seal of Justice is not the best seal for a protection spec paladin. The reasoning behind this comes down to one very loud fact. RNG wins a fight randomly, skill wins a fight always. SoJ has a very low proc rate and it is hardly situational. I haven’t used it since the first week of the season.

So this raises the question, what seal should I use? My answer to this question is all of them. Well, not Righteousness or Justice. But using each seal in particular situations will help you win close matches.

For example: You have a Warrior attacking you with Taste For Blood proc’d, you need to heal but if you cast you will get the unrelenting assault debuff. What can you do? Seal of Light. Seal of Light will heal you for ~400-550 on chance on melee hit. This is the Protection instant cast heal and it can proc off of special attacks. Mixed with Judgement of light and Argent Defender and Sacred Shield you will be very hard to take down at low health.

So what is a basic strategy for which seal to use? Well, here is a list of my rules of thumb.

Seal of Wisdom – Best used versus Druid/Priest teams, has priority if mana is becoming an issue and your opponent is dealing more damage than can be mitigated with Divine Plea up.
Seal of Light – Best used when you are in mono e mono situations with a melee DPS class and in some cases ranged DPS classes. Whack a fel hunter to outplay a Warlock’s DoTs. Not advisable versus rogues.
Seal of Vengeance(Corruption Horde Side) – Best DPS seal you can use. If you will win on mana and you need to kill something this is the advisable seal if you don’t need light. This is also very good versus Priests, Paladins and Rogues. Any teams with priests and paladins will hate Seal of Vengeance because if you stack it up on someone then stun them, it acts as dispel trash. It is as hard to cleanse as Polymorph.
Seal of the Martyr (Blood Horde Side) – Best used situationally. Ideally against mages who are casting polymorph, you can break the polymorph with a judgement cast at the end of the polymorph. This has high potential to not work, but if it does you can skip the 10 second duration polymorph. In theory this can also be used to break other CCs but you’d have to be very lucky.

The best players will always use every available resource to win. Do not limit yourself to one seal based on a glyph or ideal.

Auras

A quick rundown on which auras to use and when to use them. This is mostly straight forward but might have something you didn’t think about.

Devotion Aura – Useful versus any physical damage dealing class, good for defensive minded players or if you have partners in cloth armor. Personally I only use this aura versus BM/MM hunters and occasionally versus Ret Paladins.
Retribution Aura – The gravy of having a large amount of SP. Retribution aura is the bane of all melee’s existence and your SP will make it even more so. I run this aura almost always versus melee classes. Exception: Death Knights.
Concentration Aura – Useful in 5s if you have casters, useful in 2s and 3s used with Aura Mastery. I’ll provide a macro for this later.
 
Shadow/Fire/Frost Resistance Aura - Shadow versus DKs with Bone Armor + Named Ghoul, UA Locks and occasionally against disc priests who have low spell penetration to resist fear. Fire versus survival hunters who still haven’t figured out Spell Penetration, Destruction Warlocks, Elemental Shamans. Frost versus death knights without a named ghoul and bone armor and mages with ice barrier up. Frost/Fire can be used versus arcane mages to resist some damage from Fire Blast or Nova+Cone of Cold.
Crusader Aura – The best of all the auras especially when used with Aura Mastery. You do this and you are sure to win! ^_^

Playstyle

Offensive play styles that I use require that I’m in the middle of the action. This can prove useful and bad in different situations. A lot of the tips I’ll include here are common knowledge but need to be paid attention to especially in this spec.

- Be close to but not on top of melee who can interrupt you and be aware of when they move towards you if they are attacking your partner. Roundhouse kicks to the face versus rogues when they’re burning down your partner are not fun.
- Know how to juke, know how to tell if they expect you to juke, don’t juke yourself to death. Versus Death knights I recommend a stopcasting cast cleanse macro.
- If a death knight misses his mind freeze it can still hit. What this means is start cast, stop cast, wait. If you start another cast too quickly, his missed interrupt will hit the beginning of your next spell.
- You can eat around two mana burns at a time with divine plea up, but you need to LOS and interrupt as many as you can. Two mana burns in every twenty seconds would be ideal to running the priest OOM while you keep your mana up.
- If you are about to die, don’t worry. We have an automatic damage reduction that most classes have to have a cooldown for. This 30% damage reduction with sacred shield will make the last 35% of your health a burden on your opponents. Using Hand of Salvation will make it even harder to kill you and sacred shield will be proc’d for longer allowing more critical strike flash of lights.
- If you can, make the other team cry. Go close to OOM versus a Druid and let him innervate and then use Permaplea to end up with more mana than him. This requires knowledge of whatever class you are facing and a defensive mindset. Seal of Light and Judgement of Light heal for 100% when divine plea is up, use those to your advantage with plea.
- Know how to use divine plea effectively and how to play through damage when it is up. Versus a death knight run like hell and spam cleanse, use seal of light and judgement of light. Versus a rogue use holy shield and try to make sure you face him. A partner’s defensive CDs are handy when Divine Plea is up as well. Sacred Shield proc’ing keeps Flash of Lights rolling at 5k per application so you can keep your partner up for around twenty seconds with Divine Plea up provided you are not CC’d and he was at full health to start.
- Make certain that your partner understands your weakness of having no instant cast heals. He needs to be aware of where he is relative to you and know how to get back out to you if need be. He needs to run back into your LOS, not directly on top of you. This leads to focus interrupts.
- Use Hammer of Justice every 22 seconds. This allows for six seconds of stun, fifteen seconds of diminishing returns and a one second buffer. I’m not saying to always use HoJ when it is up, but if you need to train multiple stuns in a row, be aware of the DR.
- Use HoJ + Av’s Shield whenever they are up to pressure your opponent then stop using them until it becomes more strategic. Avenger’s shield costs a large amount of mana that you won’t get back easily. Use it conservatively.
- Hand of Sacrifice or Divine Sacrifice if you anticipate a blind or polymorph. Blinds will usually follow the use of a trinket when your partner is at 40%~ or less health, so a macro to trinket + divine sacrifice is a safe bet versus rogues.
- Learn about the classes you face and know what to expect that isn’t the most obvious.
- Versus Priests you can kite shadow fiends by jumping off a ledge to make it pathfind around to you, stun the shadow fiend and also have your partner taunt it and you taunt it back to keep it from attacking anything. Mana wins a lot of games.
- Only HoJ a ret paladin after he casts freedom (doy).
- Grounding totem + Purge can be your biggest enemies. Make sure to hit the grounding totem before stunning and make certain that sacred shield is up on whoever is being focused, keep putting it up until they stop trying to purge it.
- Sacred Shield provides great utility and kiting a melee class with Sacred Shield up can reduce their damage output by 25% if stationary or more if moving.
- Judge Justice on Druids and Rogues, then whatever else on other classes at your discretion. Justice on Ret Paladins helps kite them.
- Be aware of when interrupts are up and fully cast if they are waiting for a juke (i.e. they don’t bite on the cast immediately). A very good way to force an interrupt is to start a holy light then stop it 1/3 of the way. No one wants to see a holy light go off.
- You can win matches when you go OOM, and you can kill priests when you bubble and they’re mass dispelling you.
- Dictating the pace of a match will help you win a match. Using your CCs in a way to keep the opposing team playing in a way that you can handle and/or overpower will grant you easy victories.

Add-Ons

I recommend the obvious addons like Gladius, Grid/Healbot (something to assist with healing, buffs debuffs), Decursive, a Bar Mod if you like to declutter your screen, OmniCC for cooldown counters. A very important addon that I recommend is Interrupt bar found at the following link.

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...erruptBar.html

Interruptbar will make life easy versus anyone with an interrupt. Lets you see the CD of the interrupt. I set it up in the following manner.

/ib scale 4.3 (so it goes across most of the screen)
/ib lock (if it is locked this will let you move it)
Move it to the top 2/3 of your screen and center it
/ib lock
/ib hidden

This will show interrupts when they are cast and then they vanish when they are back off CD. If nothing shows and you’re facing an interrupt you know that you may need to juke. If you see something then you can freely cast until it disappears.

I also recommend Power Auras to help you see if an enemy has a certain buff (Divine Shield, Anti-Magic Shell, Icebound Fortitude, Ice Block, taste for blood, berserker, pain suppression etc.). It also can be used to show you when your bubble is up so if it gets mass dispelled you immediately know that the mass dispel worked. Not to mention it helps you to see if you are missing Blessing of Kings, Righteous Fury, etc.

Useful Macros

Concentration Aura + Aura Mastery
#show Aura Mastery
/cast !Concentration Aura
/cast Aura Mastery
[Turns conc aura on+off if it’s already on, just on if it is currently off]

Hammer of the Righteous + Shield of Righteousness
/castsequence reset=target Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of Righteousness
[Both attacks in one button, changes to Hammer of the Righteous when you change targets as this ability grants extra seal procs, you don’t need the reset]

Stopcast + Cleanse
/stopcasting
/cast Cleanse
[The juke DK macro I mentioned]
 

Who Should My Partner Be?

Melee. Most melee classes compliment this build including feral druids and rogues. Plate melee will work best because of mitigation of plate armor (rogues get torn up pretty hard). In theory you could run with Mages and Warlocks, sacred shield + Devo Aura would help to defend them. But it isn’t a very reliable method.

The best possible partner would be a Death Knight, preferably Frost. Their defensive CDs and ability to counter any class make them good for any healer but divine plea with those defensive CDs would be key to winning a mana fight.

I run with an Arms Warrior and the commanding shout helps me quite a bit as it increases my 35% threshold.

Go Prot

So if I haven’t convinced you yet that Prot is the way to go, that’s alright. I expect you’ll come to your senses in time. The drawbacks are limited compared to the advantages and it is a much more fun spec to play in compared to Holy. I hope that this information was useful and not just a wall of text. If you have any questions stop by Server US-Greymane and look up Destluck. I welcome any questions from anyone interested in the Spec and will provide whatever information I can that I didn’t provide here.

Thank you, and have a wonderful Prot-Filled Day!

TLR – Well then you suck. Because I wrote 3100 words of the best Protection Paladin advice that these forums have to offer. If you wanna go Prot spec Healing, then I suggest skimming it over. It’s a lot more fun than you would guess from the outset.

[[Soul Eater]]

Protholy Paladin Tips - Go Prot! - Arena Junkies Forums

Gwerh, sorry to burst your prot bubble.

[soto]

Actually, thats my char, posted it on arena junkies aswell because its a major arena website

[[Soul Eater]]

Meh call me ignorant but why did you posted it like 6 days after you posted it on arenajunkies, imo just too suspicious because why didn't you just copy pasted the part too then that you are on 2300 rating with a warrior, and why are some contents missing? Meh can say lots of things bout it but if its yer character yer can prove it by posting on arenajunkies or something, dunnow.

[Archonox]

This has also been posted on the Paladin forums in WoW, nice job copying other peoples posts.

[Chief]

lewl i love when this happens. copy paste realization ftw

[soto]

Meh call me ignorant but why did you posted it like 6 days after you posted it on arenajunkies, imo just too suspicious because why didn't you just copy pasted the part too then that you are on 2300 rating with a warrior, and why are some contents missing? Meh can say lots of things bout it but if its yer character yer can prove it by posting on arenajunkies or something, dunnow.

Because 6 days ago this website was lagging like shit and it took about ~10 minutes to get into the guide section?

I removed the part of what rating I was because I rather not post my e-Identity here