Paladin Hit Rating

[BobGnarly]

Hi all,
simple question, how much theat do I lose with my current low hit rating? I have not geared at all to hit but I am now wondering should I try to increase it more to hold threat better? I normally start to lose threat to my destro crits at the end of a mob pull and so wondering can I fix this.
All advice welcome

I believe that hit is important to tank, if you've got any kind of threat issues. In addition to my shaman creeping up on my threat, I also tank for a group of friends including a hunter than can routinely push ~5k TPS.

Don't overlook the threat gloves enchant, and also take a look at 2pc T9.

I don't think hit rating will help you much here.
70% of your threat comes from abilities that cannot miss. Holy Shield, HotR, SotR, JoL and consecrate. Might be just that your locks are over gearing your paladin too much. If anything, expertise should help you more. But I don't think it is worth gemming for it either.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I know for a fact that judgement, AS and consecrate can miss because I've seen them do so before. I believe that HotR was just changed to physical damage a while back which leads me to believe it can miss as well. Do you have a source for this claim?

Also, don't overlook the threat generated from white swings, especially when you consider reckoning and the application/refresh of SoV.

The numbers for avoidance are nearly identical for AGI / Parry / Dodge, I think gemming for Parry is fine (I'm on the fence for dodge) I think if pure agi was the way to go you'd see A LOT more paladins stacking AGI over Stam. just like you see so many bears going nuts for AGI. Maybe I'm just too deep in the math to make sense of it.

Parry/Dodge are great stats and should definitely be part of your gearing decisions (including gemming). The whole mitigation mechanism is pretty convoluted right now. I hope they work it out a little in the next expac, if for no other reason than to stop people from saying/believing things like "You should never gem parry".

The main source of this confusion comes from the fact that parry and dodge (and "miss" rate from the defense stat) are subject to dimishing returns. That means that each subsequent point of these stats will yield less actual chance to dodge/parry/miss than previous counts.

To pile on top, miss diminishes faster than parry which diminishes faster than dodge. It's definitely worth looking at the advantages of gearing defense past 689 rating, even with DR, but dodge and parry are usually compared just because of the gemming possibilities.

Since parry diminishes faster than dodge, it makes sense that, all else being equal, if you have to choose between these two stats you'd choose dodge (considering mitigation only). The problem is, all else is never equal. You have to consider how much you currently have. If I already have a ton of dodge rating, it could be that parry is the correct choice because the high amount of dodge rating has pushed the dodge DR over the parry DR, even though the parry DR diminishes faster.

So how do we know what to do? Well, honestly, the best thing to do is get something like the RatingBuster mod. It factors in the different DR rates into its comparisons, so you can compare the tooltip parry and dodge mitigation values. The other thing you can do is realize that there is ratio of dodge to parry that is ideal. This ratio is:

(character_sheet_dodge-10%)/(character_sheet_parry-10%) [this equation courtesy of the following thread]

This ratio should ideally be 1.88. If the ratio is higher than this for your character and you are faced with a "parry or dodge" decision, go for parry. If the ratio < 1.88, go for dodge. I actually created an in-game macro to display this ratio for me so I can always see where I stand.

This is all explained in great detail here:

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f63/4...avoidance.html

If you are interested in improving your tank, or just like to nerd out on mechanics like me, I highly recommend you read this thread, and even the linked threads where they explain the math behind it all.

So why not just always gem stamina? Hey, I understand, I'm a stamina whore too. However, there are two reasons:

1. While I'm big on stamina as a tank (IOW, I subscribe to the EH model), there does need to be some mitigation. If for no other reason than you are forced to. You're going to have to make gear decisions where one piece has dodge and the other parry. Which do you choose? Well, now you know.
2. +sta gems are sometimes a suboptimal choice, at least in my opinion. Consider a red socket with a +8 sta socket bonus. I can either put a Solid Majestic Zircon for a net +30sta (no socket bonus), or I could put either Regal Dreadstone or Defender's Dreadstone for +23 sta and +10 dodge/parry. I definitely consider +10dodge or parry > +7 sta. So now I have to choose between dodge or parry.

Having said all of this, I have to say that there are exceptions to everything. Perhaps if I have an insanely well geared character, my dodge/parry DR are already so high that +7 sta IS > +10 dodge/parry.

For this reason and many others, I cannot strongly enough recommend using something like RAWR to make gearing decisions. These tools not only factor all of this stuff into the decision, but they also consider your current character stats. IOW, rather than making independent, arbitrary decisions, they have all of the information about your character and can make the correct choice for that situation. If you are serious enough about your character to be asking these questions, you're serious enough to download the program and use it. Besides, it's fun!