yooo pally gaaaaang
can someone give me scenarios on when I would use the following defensive abilities?
Ardent defender and ardent king (i feel like i never use this and dont know when the right time to use them is)
lay of hands
and shield of righteous which am I meant to spam this ability or time it with boss abilities or something?
also should i be spamming avengers shield to get that juicy holy power or timing/holding it to interrupt/silence abilities?
Lay on hands is a “panic button”. Press it when you feel you’re about do die.
Cons (if down) > Judgment > Hammer of Wrath > Avenger’s Shield > HotR/BH > Cons (if up)
Shield of the righteous you should cast at 5 holy power (and a generator is about to come up if not using DP, if you are using DP then cast as soon as you hit or about to hit 5 holy power) or when incoming damage is expected to be high.
Currently on prepatch with full endgame gear we have a tonne of haste so you can pretty easily hit full sotr uptime, so it’s not actually punishing to just spam sotr whenever you hit 3 holy power. But you’ll miss the added damage from the judgment debuff doing that, and it’s poor practice as you won’t have full uptime at the start of SL (not until legendaries and better gear and maybe taking some dps drops such as Sanctified Wrath)
Cooldown use is a bit more complicated. In general you want to press them when you expect damage to be high, and press them early rather than waiting until your at low hp then pressing them. However it’s better late than never.
When you’re only just starting to learn tanking you might “save them” for if something goes wrong like a ninja pull, in which case you should pop them early when you see things go wrong, and chain them rather than stack them (don’t pop goak and ad at the same time, let one expire before pressing the next).
However if you’re doing endgame content such as m+ that’s very inefficient. It’s better to use your cooldowns to enable a big pull. I’m pretty casual so when I have cds available I’ll just play more “aggressively” and do big pulls until I’m forced to pop those cds, then when they’re on cd I’ll play more conservatively and do pulls I know I can survive without them.
If you’re pushing higher m+ or CE level raiding then even that’s inefficient, and instead it’s better to pre-assign CDs to pressure points you know will come up. That way every time you’re at this point in the dungeon/boss fight you know you’ll have this cd available and can be consistent and efficient each time.
Ardent Defender - You want to use this abilitiy if you are taking Large ammounts of damage and you are worried that you will die or expect to die. The use of this is stated in the short description: "Redues all damage you take by 20% of 8 seconds, While Ardent Defender is active, the next attack that would otherwise kill you instead brings you back with 20% of your max HP, pretty good ability i use often,
Guardian Of the Ancient Kings - Use this one if you expect to take large damage but you are not worried about diying, so for example if i was pulling 10 mobs in a raid at they all aggro onto me at the start of a pull, or if you’re running Final Stand and you’re about to come out of the bubble with all 10+ mobs beating on you, just throw up Guardian of the Ancient Kings and as the ability states "Reduces all damage you take by 50% for 8seconds)
The biggest thing about these two abilities is the cooldown, DO NOT be afraid to use them, my Guardian of the Ancient kings has a cooldown of 5minutes, or 1 raid interaction, you can even use this twice in a single fight if it goes long enough. And Ardent Defender has a 1.4min cooldown, but i also run the “Unbreakable Spirit” talent in the lvl 35 row.
Lay of hands - You want to use this is you are worried about to die or if you see a healer about to die, i will just Lay of hands them. If my Ardent defender is on CD or is about to expire and im still on low HP i will just cast Lay on hands or if i have no defensive abilities up, just LOH to buy you enough time.
Sometimes if im really scared of dieing and i have a ton of mobs on me, i just cast Guardian of Ancient Kings, if im still dropping fast ill pop Ardent Defender 2-3 seconds later, and if im still going down ill wait for my Ardent Defender to activate and bring me back at 20% hp and then Lay on Hands or just LoH to breath easy.
Shield of the Righteous - This is your bread and butter paladin ability, you want to get as close to 100% uptime on this if possible, you can stack multiple Shield of the righteous at the same time up to 15seconds total (I believe). You want to run “Divine Purpose” its a talent on the lvl 40 row in your talent tree, It gives you a 15% chance to make your holy poer ability free and deal increased damage and healing. So if you run that talent and keep using Shield of the Righteous you can get free shield of the righteous casts to use 2 of them in a row. and use your HP on other abilities like Word of glory for instance, or Seraphim. but that is a must take talent for prot pally. You want this ability up as close to 100% of the time as you can because its your main damage mitigation ability, Without Shield of the righteous up my armor damage mitigation is 45%, but with shield of the rightious active this damage mitigation goes up to 63%, and this isnt even including the extra 3% damage mitigation from Devotion Aura, and the extra 13% damage mitigation from Consecration. so if you add all of that up thats a lot of damage reduction. to bring it all together you will use your Ardent Defender and Guardian of Ancient Kings when you need extra damage mitigation on top of all this.
Avengers Shield. You want to use on cool down. for example your standard rotation will be (Avengers Shield>Blessed Hammer>Judgment>Shield of the Rightious) this is what you will do when you first pull. You want to use it on cooldown because it generates 1 holy power. and you always want to use Shield of the Righteous when you have 3 holy power available and your shield of the righteous is off cooldown or in danger of becoming off cooldown. There are times in a fight when i will save my Avengers shield after the initial pull rotation and not use it on cooldown if i need to interrupt a casting mage that is away from the raid that i have threat on to bring him into the group of mobs being killed by the raid, or if there is a boss or unit mechanic i want to be safe with interrupting, but dont forget. The Protection Paladin has 3 interrupts to use for these situation. we have: (Hammer of Justice, Avengers Shield, and Rebuke). Rebuke is your main interrupt, but sometimes i need to interrupt again before the 15 sec cd on Rebuke so i will use avengers shield in this situation.
Im sorry for the book but this is everything i was able to figure out from playing prot for so long. If you have any other questions let me know and i would love to help.
Some final rules to help you:
These were both really good quick guides to prot paladin, I would take their advice if I were OP
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here but I’m pretty sure that divine purpose and seraphim share the same talent row
You are actually correct here, “Divine Purpose” and “Seraphim” are in the lvl 40 talent row. I was more just trying to list the only abilities we have that cost Holy Power. But I now understand why this would be confusing. I suppose another thing would be, if you chose to run Seraphim you can rely on “Hammer of Wrath” in the execute phase to get more Holy Power generation to help with casting Seraphim while keeping your “Shield of Righteous” uptime high?