So. I’m at the point when I need to start thinking about secondary stats. ilvl 400 ish.
I play prot. I like haste because i like being able to cast more judgements for the damage and just generally having more buttons to click.
I don’t care much for crit.
I’m stuck between vers and mastery for my next priority. I like the increased block chance from mastery because I talented into blocking spells, and because more blocks=more grand crusder=more judgement/shield, but I’ve read that there are diminishing returns with mastery. Also, when I PvP or when having to kite, I don’t reliably stay in consecration so the DR and increased block and AP don’t count during those times.
So I’m thinking about vers. More healing, damage, and DR, but no extra block chance. Are there diminishing returns or no?
Sim for dps
Survival: ilvl>haste>rest
The AP and block from mastery are not dependent on standing in consecration
The rest… kind of depend. So the stats have been balanced such that if it gives more control it gives less value, and if it gives less control it gives more value. So if you just looked at pure dtps, it’d be along the lines of crit>mastery>vers>haste. But of course control is way more important than dtps; having coverage for a few more hits on a boss is way better than sometimes parrying them.
Because of the way this balance is set up, your stats are actually really similar to each other and why any prot worth his (or her) salt will tell you that more stats are far better than the right stats (at least for survival)
So the control haste gives you is unmatched. The value of your other stats though will depend on what you need in a given situation and what you’re willing to trade in.
Crit’s value goes up in big aoe pulls where the frequency of incoming attacks evens out the innate spikiness of the stat where you’re doing these big pulls. In addition it is for many the best dps stat, and your dps as a tank is more important than ever in m+. So if your context is handling big pulls in m+ then perhaps crit is your 2nd best seconday.
But for many, the big pulls aren’t necessarily where you’re most tested. You’re typically rolling cds or kiting for those moments and if it’s a high key you can’t constantly mass pull, in which case lieutenant mobs, small but hard hitting packs and tyrannical bosses may be your biggest fear. Crit’s rng loses it a lot of value in those situations so you’d be better served running vers. Vers will always be there to assist you in those situations where the other stats can let you down and perhaps then would be your 2nd best seconday.
But suppose you’re not doing super high keys, perhaps you’re pugging lowbie keys or higher keys but the group isn’t very well coordinated. Holy Shield comes out for dealing with missed interrupts or just very heavy magic damage dungeons. Or perhaps you can just handle the rng of block because it’s meaningful and you don’t play at the level where vers is even noticeable. In that case perhaps mastery is your 2nd best secondary stat.
However… that’s not really the case. Most people don’t go into a dungeon saying “I don’t care about anything but surviving that one boss fight”. If you do then well you can make your own decisions, but for the majority all of those situations will pop up in every dungeon and the tiny amount of benefit you get from switching between a vers/mastery ring or a crit/haste ring is not going to make the difference between living and dying (or more likely: enough of a difference that your healer can dps at that point).
What will make the difference is play. If you run into a dangerous pack with nothing up, no matter how many stats you have, or how many mythic pieces you have, or what your secondary make up is, or which traits your running, you will die. While the tank who had none of those things but planned out his mitigation and cds will live. Ultimately your stats just don’t matter, but how you press your buttons do.
No, it’s not. OP won’t be 400 for long, it’s stupid to try and gear for secondaries until you’re 430+. He needs to keep gearing and then focus on getting more haste.
Forgive me for leaving out the painfully obvious detail that is, ofcourse a 430 peice of gear is an upgrade over a 400 piece regardless of secondary. SMH
For dps sim it. If the difference is negligible you might just decide to keep what you have cause it’s cheaper/easier
For survival: Haste
Note that the answer to this has changed over time as strength has been reducing in value over the course of the xpac. Early in BoD I might recommend double str gems, but with the way stat distributions have been set up in bfa and cause of azerite gear we’re getting a lot of str but only a few secondaries per ilvl. So each point of secondary provides more relative value than each point of primary for most (every?) classes. Food also follows - most raids aren’t even bothering to place feasts because most of their raiders prefer the secondary food anyway.
This “value” argument is more accurate, but for an easier to “feel” argument: str is a “win more” stat for prot with its parry and sotr amp while haste’s control is a “save” stat
As a small addendum to Doyouneedbro’s post, Inspiring Vanguard gives us a huge amount of free STR with very high uptime; so if you have multiple IV stacks then that further increases the value of secondary vs primary stats.
Plus it means you never need to worry about shuffling gem sockets because STR gems are unique, or swapping INT vs STR for Holy, etc.
Judgment reduces the cooldown of SotR by 2 seconds, or 4 seconds if it crits.
If you run the talent Righteous Protector instead of Seraphim, SotR reduces the cooldown of HotP and Avenging Wrath by 3 seconds.
Avenging Wrath increases crit chance by 20%, helping Judgment to Crit to better reduce the cooldown on SotR to more frequently reduce the cooldown on Avenging Wrath.
Taking Crusader’s Judgment and Righteous Protector talents with Vision of Perfection, I would think Crit would be your best friend.
Memory of Lucid Dreams as a secondary looks like it would work well with this setup, though the tooltip doesn’t give any information on how often Lucid Dreams occur.
With such an increased availability of HotP, Anima of Life and Death seems like a solid choice for a 3rd essence. Greater total health gives the potential for greater HotP. Judgment crits and Lucid Dreams give more SotR to reduce HotP cd. All the Crit + Avenging Wrath’s 20% Crit gives a high likelihood of HotP crits.
Just an alternative look from an ultra casual without the means to put this setup into practice.
Crit isn’t a bad stat (no secondary is), but if you’re trying to increase SotR uptime then you could go the roundabout route with Judgement crits… or you can just do it directly with Haste with vastly greater efficiency.
There is a build which takes RP + VoP to maximise your wings uptime, but the big benefit there are the Avenger’s Might and Righteous Conviction traits. Crit is actually low value with this build, because a) during wings every HotP / LotP is already a 100% heal and b) high uptime of 20% crit from wings naturally devalues the crit stat.
It’s great that you’re thinking about builds and trying different stuff though! There’s no harm in trying it, and if it works out for you then all the better.
Hey man, for now, focus on gearing up. Higher ilvl on gear is going to be the biggest upgrades for you for a while and until you have 430 pieces in each slot I wouldn’t worry too much.
The reason we are all preaching haste is because more haste = more uptime on Shield of the Righteous, which is our active mitigation.
The double-edged sword with paladin is we are an absolute brick wall when SoTR is up, and super squishy when it’s not. So having more haste adds much more uptime on SoTR making your survivability significantly increase.
Haste enchant on weapon is a great source for haste by the way.
This had been done before by several different people, but I decided to prove it for myself:
https:// puu.sh/ERMvB/d8ee9dce12.png
Visions is okay, but at 0.85 ppm it can’t compete with CoF for offence or lucid for defence. (fun fact: RP results in the same relative CDR with and without VoP minor, this is because RP has less time to work when the cd is reduced. VoP major is also 0.85ppm regardless of talent choice so they don’t really interact with each other). As a bit of fun, sure, but even running something like 3*AM+2*SS+1*IV with HS+RP+VoP+maybe a lucid minor+maybe HotP you’re dumping so much of your toolkit to build some kind of balanced dps/survival build when you could just run lucid major and go full offensive in everything else.
Maybe if there’s boss out there in the future that is made up of entirely a huge magic dot but I can’t recall any of those in the past.
Lucid minor is (0.3*neck level)% chance to proc per cast
Anima is a big trap. As a major it sounds pretty good, and if you could decouple minors from majors it could serve as a slightly more defensive alternative to CoF in m+. But the minor is so god awful that it drags down the entire essence, whereas CoF and lucid both (and sigh vop too) have competent minors that follow the same philosophy as their majors.
In fact, I argue that the anima minor is actively hurting you as the “fake hp” it gives you makes you feel sturdier than you are, and the moment you enter a threatening situation when you need it most it disappears and makes you spike harder.
Stop thinking about one or the other. Both matter. Your statement is wrong just like the statement “it’s about skill not gear” is wrong.
Optimizing your gameplay in the field is far harder and long-term than optimizing the stats on your gear. If you don’t do the latter which is low hanging fruit then you are doing it wrong.
Anyways in terms of M+:
haste > mast > vers> crit
a general priority for gear pieces that are not far apart in ilvl, and for ring slots in general since they have no primary
