Help with Utgarde Keep and general Paladin tanking

[Frosty]

I’m having problems attempting even the trash mobs in Utgarde Keep. First, I am have no problems at all holding agro and I can tank 1-2 of the first guys with no problems at all. But when I get 3 my HP drops, and it drops FAST. My HP also drops fast when I tank even a single drake in the second room.

My Paladin is 71, and I’ve seen posts that people have cleared this instance at 70.
I know I can use CC and that does help/work, but I feel like I should be able to take these hits a little better than I am. I even lead off with Earth Shield and Power Word: Shield.
I have a nice set of crafted Cobalt armor, but can anyone see anything I could easily improve to help my tanking ability?
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Ysera&n=Lielu

It may also be that my healing rotation just sucks.
My basic, normal heal sequence goes like (Shaman is Resto): Riptide, Chain Heal, Lesser Heal, Lesser Heal.
BUT, I also have separate keys for greater heal, and yet another key for the Priest to break out of shadow and heal (not counting self heals).

At this point, I’m wondering if I should respec both Shaman and Priest and reverse their roles.

[Oatboat]

are you using holy shield on paladin? Also make sure to kill the Runecasters first.. they have a nasty fire dmg buff and a dmg absorption buff.

[Hachoo]

I don't even have a resto specced shaman and I cleared UK fairly easily with a 70 DK and 4 70 shamans.

First off, how is your pally geared? The only reason it was so easy for me is because I bought my DK the entire "cobalt" tanking set (level 70 crafted green plate) which is almost entirely str/stam/def. This gave me something like 470 def at level 70, 12.5k HP, and 14.5k armor. This is with neck/rings/cloak/etc from outland (greens and blues).

Sounds to me like your pally is undergeared. With 3 mobs my DK hardly had to be healed at all, with 4 I usually had to heal once and thats it. I just use 4x lesser healing waves to heal my DK, no dedicated healer.

[Frosty]

are you using holy shield on paladin? Also make sure to kill the Runecasters first.. they have a nasty fire dmg buff and a dmg absorption buff.
Yep, I start off with holy shield, and it's also in my rotation to keep it up.



First off, how is your pally geared? The only reason it was so easy for me is because I bought my DK the entire "cobalt" tanking set (level 70 crafted green plate) which is almost entirely str/stam/def. This gave me something like 470 def at level 70, 12.5k HP, and 14.5k armor. This is with neck/rings/cloak/etc from outland (greens and blues).

Sounds to me like your pally is undergeared. With 3 mobs my DK hardly had to be healed at all, with 4 I usually had to heal once and thats it. I just use 4x lesser healing waves to heal my DK, no dedicated healer.
I posted that I had the Cobalt set, and provided a link to my gear. :P

Unbuffed I have about 13k HP, 450 defense and 13224 armor. (according to wow armory). So it looks like you have a little more defense and about 1.5k more armor.. I may need to look into my gear.

[Frosty]

My basic, normal heal sequence goes like (Shaman is Resto): Riptide, Chain Heal, Lesser Heal, Lesser Heal.
BUT, I also have separate keys for greater heal, and yet another key for the Priest to break out of shadow and heal (not counting self heals).

I think you need to work on your healing methodology.

I use Riptide when heals ARE NOT needed. Its a pre-emptive thing. Planning ahead.....

The way deep resto talents work, you get a fast healing wave after a chain heal. So chain heal THEN healing wave (not lesser - I never use lesser). This how you get the big punchy heals that keep you alive.

How is your healer geared?
I'm sure that's the way I have it set using healing wave not lesser..I'm just going from memory here..and my memory sucks. :P
And that is just my junk heal.... but since you've said it..I'll double check anyway. I did the rotation to try and take advantage of the talents.
Riptide is usually cast at the beginning of the fight and refreshed as needed.

My healer gear? I would call it crap, but I'm sure that would be an insult to crap everywhere. But, I never have mana issues from healing either.
I've found very little healing-chain gear so far from quests though.

Ugghh...I just looked at my armory for it.. I do need to get some upgrades... :S
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Ysera&n=Bassia

[Coltimar]

You are short on mitigation. Until further notice, especially while leveling, threat is out of balance. You won't need to stack much in the way of threat producing talents and equipment to get the job done. This will change as gear changes and characters change, via patches etc,.

I would ditch Guardian's Favor in lieu of more Divine Strength. Strength will help with mitigation.

I would also drop Benediction and max out deflection. At the moment, especially until you have lots of gear, should not worry about mana. If you are taking damage you will have mana. At this point (and prolly until the blue gear starts falling) you are going to need the mobs to miss you more. Blessing of Sanctuary too, if mana become a problem.

I would maybe replace the enchants on your bracers and shield with stamina and replace the stam on your chest with def and that will help a bit.

I don't know what your servers AH economy is like, but on Durotan you can snag an "of the champion" ring off the AH for 10-15g and pickup more def, str, and stam.

At this point in the game you should get close to def cap, than stack stamina. Those are the easiest stats to get with the green gear from Northrend.

This was on the WoW forums somewhere and I just stole it:

70 490
71 495
72 500
73 505
74 510
75 515
76 520
77 525
78 530
79 535
80 540

Def cap for each level.

[Frosty]

Thanks Coltimar and Fursphere.

I have the money to spend, but there are almost never any "of the champion" items in the AH (I search every day).
I'll check out those links for the healer too, thanks! :)

[puppychow]

Definitely increase your defense, 450 is way too low at level 71. A few crits every now and then are ok I guess, but at 450 you will be taking a lot more than a lot less. I pretty much gear my pally for defense first, then stamina, then stamina, then stamina, then other stuff (expertise, dodge, parry, etc). There are few tank items while leveling which sucks terribly, I've actually run my pally in single groups for hard instances (Violet Hold, Utgarde Pinnacle) because I wanted drops to make multiboxing easier.

Also I wouldn't put chain heal on your healing spam macro. Its very mana expensive and you will run oom. Also for many fights you want to have the tank at a decent distance from the group (avoid AOEs, cleaves, etc) so chain heal is not that useful there. You may want to consider having the priest heal and the shaman respec elemental, circle of healing is very powerful for the AOE times and the shaman can then drop a totem of wrath/air. Priests also are stupendous at mana regen and they have fade which can be a lifesaver. You will want at least 4 heal buttons:

1 = fast heal tank (lesser healing wave, flash heal, etc) == this should be mostly used
2 = slow heal tank (greater heal, healing wave, etc)
3 = heal group
4 = shield/hot tank

And imo you will also eventually need buttons for heal person1, person2, etc because some bosses target only a single person for a spike of damage, and you don't want to waste a ton of mana healing the entire group just to heal that person. But to be honest you probably won't need it until level 75 (Gundrak, Draktharon), I don't really remember ever having to in Nexus/UtK/AzN/AK, but I run a 3 shammy team so 3x chain heals pretty much tops everyone off as I need.

[Frosty]

And for your Pally - DITCH RECKONING! it gives mobs and bosses more chances to parry you, which means they get to hit you more. Its really a bad talent for tanks.


Ah hah! I wonder if this might be part of my problem with my health dropping so quickly when fighting more than 2 mobs..
I like your talent specs, I'll give those a shot tonight too.

And it looks like it may be time to upgrade the gear on all my toons after looking at those sites. 8|

[Frosty]

Also I wouldn't put chain heal on your healing spam macro. Its very mana expensive and you will run oom. Also for many fights you want to have the tank at a decent distance from the group (avoid AOEs, cleaves, etc) so chain heal is not that useful there. You may want to consider having the priest heal and the shaman respec elemental, circle of healing is very powerful for the AOE times and the shaman can then drop a totem of wrath/air. Priests also are stupendous at mana regen and they have fade which can be a lifesaver. You will want at least 4 heal buttons:

1 = fast heal tank (lesser healing wave, flash heal, etc) == this should be mostly used
2 = slow heal tank (greater heal, healing wave, etc)
3 = heal group
4 = shield/hot tank

And imo you will also eventually need buttons for heal person1, person2, etc because some bosses target only a single person for a spike of damage, and you don't want to waste a ton of mana healing the entire group just to heal that person. But to be honest you probably won't need it until level 75 (Gundrak, Draktharon), I don't really remember ever having to in Nexus/UtK/AzN/AK, but I run a 3 shammy team so 3x chain heals pretty much tops everyone off as I need. Thanks for the tip on defense.
I pretty much have the rest of my macros/binds set up for the rest of this though. :thumbup:

[Hachoo]

Still...if you have those stats, it still seems rather weird that you're having so many issues.

My 4 shamans were severely undergeared when I beat UK - ~600 spell damage each, only 8k mana, 8k hp. No resto spec shaman, though from what I hear having 4 DPS can sometimes be BETTER than 3 DPS + healer in a lot of cases. As I said, I really didn't have to heal that much in this instance, even on boss fights I had a pretty wide gap between heals, especially on the last boss who hardly hit me. Trash was pretty easy 2, max 1 set of lesser healing waves per pull generally, even on the 4 pulls.

My dodge is 16% and parry is 14%, not sure how to really translate that to compare it to the block that a paladin uses though. Just seems odd you're having so many probs. Are you maximizing your DPS without any pauses? One thing I did that helped a lot is made a DPS macro that was bound to the same key as my secondary tanking macro... I can pull mobs with my DK and start a death and decay (sort of like consecrate) and then once I'm done with that I mash a single key and my DK goes through a tanking sequence while my shamans spam LB/CL/Purge on castrandom - works very well, the shamans never pull aggro and if I need to heal really quick I just spam a different key for a sec and my DK keeps tanking while my shamans all cast 1 lesser healing wave on the DK which generally heals him all the way to full in 1 cast (even if he is at ~10% hp).

[Bigfish]

Hard to say. Do you have a healing button you actively mash, or do you only press it when you think you need a heal?

[Frosty]

Are you maximizing your DPS without any pauses?Yep, I have some very elaborate and well planned out macros set up in macaroon. :)


Hard to say. Do you have a healing button you actively mash, or do you only press it when you think you need a heal?
I have several lines of heals set up along with backup healing and potions.

I think my problem is with a combination of my gear/defense and the talent that Furshpere mentioned.
If I fight 2 mobs, I generally don't have to heal. Add 1 more, and then my health just drops too fast to even begin to heal.
I'm thinking I'm getting hit extra from Reckoning and when I use Hammer of the Righteous..then through in my crappy defense = dead.

[Bigfish]

Well, no idea if this will help, but this is the macro I put on my resto shaman for instance running:


/castsequence [target=focus] Earth Shield, Riptide,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Riptide, Chain Heal,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Riptide,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

It goes on my spam button, so yes, it goes off even when I don't need a heal, but in an instance that isn't often. I also have a


/castsequence [target=focus] Chain Heal, Healing Wave

set up on a seperate button for when I need a stronger heal to go off. Adjust the commas to 12 time the number of times per second you hit the button.

[hibiki]

A good way to figure out if you're uncrittible is to hover over your defense rating in the character sheet and check what percent crit reduction you have. Same level mobs have 5% base chance to crit you, your pally has 3.8%. For each addition level they outlevel you there is an additional 0.2% added. The level 70 needing 490 is against raid bosses(3 level higher).

Also, my healer is a priest and I have a castsequence macro with Prayer of Mending and Renew bound to the same button as my dps' spam button. As soon as my dps start casting, my priest hits my pally with a PoM followed with a Renew and sits there until PoM is ready. I have Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing bound to other buttons in case I actually need healing. Is there a skill that shamans have that's on a fairly short cd so you're not spamming heals on your tank but also allow you to prevent spike damage? My experience with shaman healing is 4x chain lightning. :P

[wowphreak]

One of the things I would change is skip on stoicism and get improved devotion which increase yer heals received by 6% the extra armor is always nice

At this point if yer doing something along the lines of a 9696 rotation there is no way any of yer chars will pull agro therefore its better to use
devotion aura/blessing of sanctuary.

While leveling the gear yeh get for yer dps shammies dosen't have to be mail yeh can use cloth or leather, as long as it has spell damage and int on it.
Just look at the stats.

I would also put chain heal and healing wave on separate buttons

[Frosty]

Well, I got a few upgrades (there were only 4 items with "of the Champion" level 60-74 in the AH :S ), and bumped my defense to 491, re-spec'd and gave it a shot.
I got further than I had before. Now I think I just need to work on my stratagy a little.

Fursphere, my healing macro WAS using Lessor Heals. Ooops! :whistling:

At this point, I'm wondering if my group make-up just can't put out enough DPS though. It takes me for-friggen-ever to kill a single drake.
Going to research each class a little and see what the best use of spells is and double check all my macros. They all seemed to be firing off pretty reliably last night though.



One of the things I would change is skip on stoicism and get improved devotion which increase yer heals received by 6% the extra armor is always nice

At this point if yer doing something along the lines of a 9696 rotation there is no way any of yer chars will pull agro therefore its better to use
devotion aura/blessing of sanctuary.

While leveling the gear yeh get for yer dps shammies dosen't have to be mail yeh can use cloth or leather, as long as it has spell damage and int on it.
Just look at the stats.

I would also put chain heal and healing wave on separate buttonsMay give the devotion aura a try, thanks for the suggesiton. I've had 0 problems holding aggro (until I die).

[Hachoo]

So whats the biggest issue you have with the drakes? I had a huge issue with the drakes when I was running 5 shamans but once I put a DK in they were cake. I think I healed my DK once on each drake fight, and my stats are definitely worse than yours after your upgrades.

I have 4 shamans so the DPS is pretty good though i have very low +spellpower so I'm not sure what the issue is...

Are you turning the drakes away from the rest of your party and keeping them far enough away that the rest of your party doesn't get hit? I'm assuming so since you say you only have issues with your pally dying fast not the rest of your party.

I just can't figure out what the issue is...the drakes don't hit altogether that hard on 13k+ armor.

[Frosty]

So whats the biggest issue you have with the drakes? I had a huge issue with the drakes when I was running 5 shamans but once I put a DK in they were cake. I think I healed my DK once on each drake fight, and my stats are definitely worse than yours after your upgrades.

I have 4 shamans so the DPS is pretty good though i have very low +spellpower so I'm not sure what the issue is...

Are you turning the drakes away from the rest of your party and keeping them far enough away that the rest of your party doesn't get hit? I'm assuming so since you say you only have issues with your pally dying fast not the rest of your party.

I just can't figure out what the issue is...the drakes don't hit altogether that hard on 13k+ armor.
I was able to handle a drake and one mob that comes with it ok last night.
I park my toons away from where I’m pulling the mob, but where I can get my back to a wall so the knockback doesn’t put me or the drake out of their range.

I really think I’m having some sort of DPS issue though.. It seems to take me at least 30 seconds or more to kill a drake… I thought maybe it was just the new instances, but I haven’t really done any instances for quite a while since I’ve been focusing on leveling for the new content.

I haven’t tried it..but I’m assuming I can have my toons duel each other and test out my castsequences.. I’m going to check them all tonight.

Or it might be that I just need to re-think my entire play-style.

[Bigfish]

You could use the level 70 practice dummies in the capital cities. They're great for testing castsequence and dps.

Edit: As far as I can tell, 30 seconds to kill a drake is about right. The things have 72k~ HP, and at 30 seconds, your group would be putting out 2400 DPS, which is a bit low, but only at about 80% of what my marginally well geared group does. Bottom line, I don't think there is any single contruibuting factor you can "fix" that will make your group run better. Gear wise, your paladin is good. I would suggest getting the full frostweave sets for your clothies (barring idivididual pieces that may be better) and potentially the crafted mail spell damage set (assuming it exists. Haven't looked in to that).

Are you using all your avilable DoTs and Debuffs? Those can make a big difference.

On the shadow priest: they always have low DPS compared to other DPS classes, which will pull down your group DPS, but the returned health is worth it, and I don't think you'll improve your group by switching specs on your shaman and priest, since you'll probably run in to the same problem of low dps on the Shaman. Also, watch those mind flays. Too often my priest stands there like an idiot because he hits mind flay in his castsequence and he's out of range.

You could consider having your resto shaman spam Lightning Bolt with the other DPS, just set his macros to have priority for healing. This typically doesn't work for bosses as you go OOM faster, but will pull your group DPS up a bit on trash.

Consider using an infernal or doomguard on your Lock. Infernals now have a short life span, and doomguards have 15 minute lifespan, both with a longer cool down, but both are superior DPS to even the felguard. Also, they no longer go rogue after a period of time, they just despawn, and the doom guard doesn't actually kill a party member now, he just takes a chunk of their life. Worth looking in to if the dragon stables are giving you trouble.

Binding "/castsequence Fire Elemental Totem, Heroism" is also a good short term group wide DPS boost.

I'd really suggest speccing in to Icy Veins instead of Focus Magic. In the long run in a susatined DPS situation, if your target can keep their crits going, yes, fcosu magic works out to more damage. The fact that your lock has a relatively limited crit chance, and your shadow priest shouldn't be a big crit machine period, the 20% increased damage for 20 seconds every other fight will probably work out better for you in dropping trash and 5-man bosses.

Geez, that worked out to be longer than I expected. Anyway, if you want to post your castsequences, I'll take a look at those and tell you what I think.

[Frosty]

Awesome! I never knew this...that's going to make it a lot eaiser.

[Bigfish]

Note to self, stop writing hour long edits.

Edit: See, this is hy I love these threads. They make me go back and look at my macros. Found out my shadow priest has "Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Blast" which leaves a good 5 seconds of nothin going on. Huh. Quick Robin! To the Time Table!

[Frosty]

Note to self, stop writing hour long edits.

Edit: See, this is hy I love these threads. They make me go back and look at my macros. Found out my shadow priest has "Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Blast" which leaves a good 5 seconds of nothin going on. Huh. Quick Robin! To the Time Table!I went back and read what you wrote, thanks again for the info and tips. I really need to read up on all the classes again..I had no idea they changed the warlock pets.


What kind of DPS numbers is your group putting out? Perhaps its a DPS macro problem? (I use recount to get my numbers)
Well..the funny thing is, I turned Recount off (along with QuestHelper) with the new expansion to try and squeeze out every bit of FPS I could get.
I just re-wrote most of my DPS macro's recently too, so I'll get Recount back up, and hit the training dummies to see what happens.

I don't have access to my macro's right now or I'd post them. :S

[Frosty]

Alrighty...thanks again for the help you've all given me.

Now, let me break down all the ways I suck, and messed things up by myself and with a few other random causes.

Way's I suck and do stupid things:
1. GCD starts at the beginning of spell casts..not the way I had my macros set up..and added a 0.5-1 second delay on every cast ..slowing down all my DPS and trying to recast too early on spells with cooldowns.. This was in ALL my macros. :S
2. The Warlock spell Corruption...over-writes Seed of Corruption...and vise versa. This was a huge loss in DPS the way I had it set up..not to mention waste of mana.
3. Even thought Blizzard rocks in most ways..always check to make sure you main DPS macro is actually the one you thought it was...and not the one Blizzard thinks it should be. My mage was using an old Arcane build macro that I thought I'd delted now that I'm re-spec'd to Fire...
4. Mind Flay has a 20 yard range (I'm guilty of not RTFM)..getting an incription to fix this instead of wasting 2 points on a talent. Only good thing is there aren't enough Shadow Priest spells for me to screw too much up.

I got my my main 3 DPS classes doing about ~800-900 DPS each now on single targets..I'm betting it'll go up once the AoE kicks in.
My Shaman will be doing small random DPS..so that'll help a little too.

Gonna give Utgade Keep another shot tonight to see how it goes. :thumbsup:

[Bigfish]

Got my Shadow Priest macro working about where I want it to.

/assist Focus
/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=24 Vampiric Embrace, Vampiric Touch, Mind blast, Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, Power Word: Shield, Shadow Word: Death, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Vampiric Touch, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Power Word: Shield, Devouring Plague, Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Death, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, Vampiric Touch, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Power Word: Shield, Mind Flay, Shadow Word: Death, Mind Blast,

[Frosty]

My Shadow Priest is something similar, but I'm a little afraid of the SW: Death spell. :p

I also have my reset at reset=target and have Devouring Plague on another key that's spammed less often.

I spam my DPS key too often so I was afraid the reset=(x seconds) wouldn't get Vampiric Embrace on each new mob at the start.

[Bigfish]

I went back and read what you wrote, thanks again for the info and tips. I really need to read up on all the classes again..I had no idea they changed the warlock pets.


I don't think it was ever documented, and I doubt most players know about those changes. I only came across them dropping an infernal on the AH and trying to get King Wrynn to manhandle a doomguard. Was somewhat surprised they didn't try to kill me, and even more surprised they turned out to be pretty good pets.