Ok, so my partner is a 80 prot paladin that has the “desired” build and is using the “desired” rotation, at least according to icy veins and wowhead. They are decently geared, enough to do heroics fairly easy. They are stressing about having trouble holding aggro and think its their fault where i believe its a “big dick” dps issue with them not controlling their threat because everything is a dick measuring contest now. Im looking for advice on how they can keep their threat super high and not worry about dps pulling off of them.
Bonus question: mitigation. I ran heroic AN last night with a pug prot pally and when Anubarak did his pound the prot pally didnt seem to take any damage at all. I didnt think to look at their build or ask how they did it, but how did they do it?
With seal of command, hammer of the righteous and consecration I don’t see how a paladin could struggle with AoE threat.
If the problem is single target, well, I’d need to look at his logs to say it with certainty, but Icy Veins’ protection rotation is just awful. Like, with the icy veins rotation you’ll be doing at most 60% of your optimal DPS. Their stat allocation suggestions are also problematic.
What you want to do is open with Shield Of Righteousness, followed by Hammer Of The Righteous, Judgement, Avenger’s Shield and THEN use consecration. You can also open with exorcism and Avenger’s Shield simultaneously, then proceed with the normal rotation.
Your friend’s biggest stats are, by a wide margin, block value and block rating. Block value, in particular, is the best offensive and defensive stat he has access to. He still wants to gem for stamina before he outgears the content.
If the tank has severely less gear than the DPS, there is really nothing you can do except get better gear. A 195 item level tank has no chance to hold threat from a decent 210 ilvl DPS.
If they are around the same gear as the DPS and still losing threat, they can build for more damage. Once you are defense capped you can mix in a STR trinket and look for hit/expertise instead of stam/mitigation. A lot of tanks have 2 sets and swap to stam for Patch then just go damage for all the other bosses since they don’t really do anything.
You can out range this ability by running away from him during the cast.
Wrath completely removed high ceiling threat rips, its a dead mechanic. If a tank loses threat on the opener to a big dps its because the tank isnt pressing his buttons fast enough. You have way too much threat per second, especially with bloodlust up which it should be on every pull open, for any threat drop excuses past tbc.
Pound is actually just a semi-circle around the boss that hits in the direction the tank is CURRENTLY at. So if the tank runs away and goes through the melee dps and they stand still he won’t take the damage but they will die.
Make sure they’re not using seal of command for single target. Pull with exorcism and avenger’s shield when you can pull from ranged, pop wings on pull if forbearance isn’t going to screw up a defensive cooldown later in the fight. Then your standard 6969 rotation. If they don’t know what that is have them read Light Club discord or the wowhead prot paladin page, since I think it’s the same author as Light Club.
Also keep in mind paladins have hand of salvation.
Your paladin friend could make a macro like
/cast [@targettarget] hand of salvation
Im not at my computer to test if this is the exact way to set up this macro but the idea is to cast salv on whoever pulled threat without dropping your target of the mob you are attacking. In case its just the dps has to much of a gear lead for the pally to hold threat.
Another option is to let the dps open up, taunt (gives you the threat they generated) then use your own threat generation abilities.
I was doing this in heroics in tbc. I would have my pet intimidate, growl, and misdirect my initial burst to the pet, the tank would taunt and i would send my pet onto another target and turn growl off. Would give the tank a good threat lead on that target and he could focus threat building on the ither targets more (was very useful for non paladin tanks in tbc) the only problem was if the mob was immune to the intimidation stun my pet would be dead before the threat could be transfered with taunt.