Which is better of the 5 plate team comps.

[smk]

Okay,

I am at abit of a cross roads myself. I need to pick one team to work on and I am curious, based upon the 3 most common and successful (it seems) teams. Which is performing best or most recommend currently.

5 blood dks
5 prot. paladins
and 4 blood dks and 1 paladin.

I have personally tried 5 blood dks and my bloods are sorta scattered lvled wise, from lvl 110 down to 107 but catching up. This team seems to truck through stuff without ever losing much. Granted I have not done Maw of Souls nor have I ventured into Mythic with this team. But I do see other's have and had some success. My only real concerns here are of course, no healer class, which is a negative for doing trinity ques and also certain mechanics do favor having a healer type in your group of course.

The Protection Paladins, the most popular from what I have seen of the 3 choices seems like a safe bet. The main problem I have is, I find this group gets into healing trouble the most, again I am not doing mythics with this group, but I do find that my guys die more on this team than my dk's, so really that is my only real concern and I guess there is the loss of dps for AOE fights.

Last of course is the 4 blood and 1 paladin. This is the one I am wondering about. I would prefer not having to run the paladin as the driver, but it seems the paladin almost certainly dies 99% of the time in dungeons when I drive one of the dks's. Part of the reason I want to drive the dk' I find it easier to manage the skills of the dk's when I am playing one of them. I have been wondering too if anyone is running 2 prot. paladins and 3 blood dks?

One a separate note. I have had massive issues getting interact to work, so the tanks will run towards a target, so most of the time I am running everything with the driver. I don't know if that is unique to me or not.

I do look forward to anyone who might shed some feedback how one of these combos is working or if they are using a different combination successfully.

[Xixillia]

One a separate note. I have had massive issues getting interact to work, so the tanks will run towards a target, so most of the time I am running everything with the driver.

I don't have a max level plate team so I'll let someone who does weigh in on that part - what issues are you having with IWT?

[smk]

Im not sure about the running up to target portion. I probably do't have it set up for that, but generally with IWT. I can't always get it to work to even select quest givers. I need to re-investigate, I must be missing something.

[Xixillia]

When you poke your IWT button, if your characters don't run to the target it can be a combination of a couple things.

1) Your followers have to assist your leader (This way they know what to interact with)
2) IWT button has to be bound and activated across all characters (This way they know they're supposed to interact) [Under keybindings in WoW]
3) Click to move has to be activated. (This way they run to the thing they're supposed to interact with) [Under mouse options in WoW]

[smk]

Thanks for the checklist, it's appreciated!

[Mosg2]

I have DKs plus Holy Paladins at 110 at around 865 average ilevel. They blow through most stuff, including open world pvp. Probably their biggest weakness is that their AoE can be finicky because of Death and Decay.

[smk]

I have DKs plus Holy Paladins at 110 at around 665 average ilevel. They blow through most stuff, including open world pvp. Probably their biggest weakness is that their AoE can be finicky because of Death and Decay. How many dks and holy pallys? I am also curious, do you drive with one of the dks and if so, how do you keep your paladin alive, do you macro his spells?

[Mosg2]

16/4 split.

I drive with a DK. The Paladin's put their Beacon of Light on themselves and I use @targettarget macros unless someone needs focus healing. My experience with Paladin, Druid, Monk, and Priest healers is that the Paladins are far and away better for boxing. Shrug.

[smk]

16/4 split I drive with a DK. The Paladin's put their Beacon of Light on themselves and I use @targettarget macros unless someone needs focus healing. My experience with Paladin, Druid, Monk, and Priest healers is that the Paladins are far and away better for boxing. Shrug. Nice. I am curious how those @targettarget macros work. I haven't used those before, I am guessing that will make it alot easier to heal the tank.

[Wubsie]

Nice. I am curious how those @targettarget macros work. I haven't used those before, I am guessing that will make it alot easier to heal the tank.
They're as simple as they sound. They simply direct the spell at the target of your target. Meaning that if you're targetting a mob/boss, you'll be healing whoever it is attacking. In most cases this will be your tank due to the aggro mechanic, but it's in theory a bit more flexible since it'll also work with mobs that ignore aggro tables.

Think both Mosg2 and I use a focus conditional at the beginning of our healing macros to also be able to direct healing where we want to. Naturally you then also need a way of setting and dropping focus, but that's easy enough. So a basic one could look like:


/cast [taget=focus,help] Flash of Light
/cast [target=targettarget,help] Flash of Light

This would mean that if you have a focus set, flash of light will be cast on it. If there isn't one, it'll skip that line and go to casting flash of light on the target-of-target. The "help" is there to make sure you don't try to heal hostile targets in case your focus / targetoftarget happens to be one.


As to your initial question, it's kinda impossible to say. We only have anecdotal evidence from a few players pushing high level M+ with their teams. It would appear that all of them are viable to around +10 atleast (and more as gear progresses), so I would put emphasis on what you want to play rather than a minute power difference that's going to count for far less than how well you actually manage your team and instance mechanics.

On a personal level I liked the 4x Blood, 1x Prot Pally comp. I'm a sucker for a bit of flare which the pally brought, as well as some of the additional recovery and spot healing it offers. I felt that having the DKs hold aggro and having the Pally work as a semi-healer worked better for my playstyle than straight up 5 Blood DKs. However, I was relying on my pro-config for both setups, so I probably was not getting nearly the same efficiency out of the DKs as I could have with a traditional setup.

[Mosg2]

Wubsie nailed it with respect to the healing macros.

My personal experience doing M+ stuff (Up to +5 with 4 Blood DKs and a HPal to heal) is that a ranged team would be superior in almost every case compared to melee. With the all-tank setup to simplify healing you lose a lot of DPS, which is going to set an upper bound on what M+ level you'll reach since they're timed events.

If you didn't have to beat the timer to upgrade your keystone, then I'd be doing this a *lot* more. As it stands, running tanks+healer, I can't beat a timer on a difficult-enough dungeon to regularly get upgrades. As with world quests at this point, I'm fishing for titanforge procs, and I'd rather do other content where I can bring all 20 characters to bear.

[smk]

The DK's seem to simplify the most healing, the paladins seem to fluctuate more, but have flexible healing options and a very powerful Hand of the Protector skill as well not to mention multiple shields and find a blend of the two would help. I would like to add a healer into the mix myself. I like having that back up.

It does seem with good reason, the all tank teams will have the hardest time advancing up the mythic charts. I don't know how far anyone has taken the all dk team, but davidmage did manage to do EN I beleive with his all palaladin team, the all hunter teams seem to be doing really well, followed by the warlocks.

I personally feel the hunter team is very hard to manage, i have had more success with the warlocks due to their self healing constantly. although they of course have to ramp up their dps.

[mugg70]

my setup is protpally and 4 bloods.
driving from pally. and usually hes got aggro. and when i need to catch up on heals ill taunt trade.
dps could be better but guess its more macro micro manangment from my side.
itemlvl 868-875 ish. did dht +7 yesterday and missed 30min timer with 1:30min.

[smk]

gratz on the +7. It is probably more practical to run with the paladin as the driver, since the paladin problem needs the most attention.

[mugg70]

ive tried to run from dks but as u stated the pally needs abit more Control.
Sor is on its own button just to not spam it all away but wait for inc damage.
dks usually keeps them self up and in case u need to cast a heal just have dks rotate taunt and heal with pally.