Good things and more good things...

My buddy Everdawn and I plunked down 2, count them, 2 60 day WoW cards for the Child's Play Charity Auction starting this week. Everdawn is a graphic artist when not playing WoW, and makes some damn fine t-shirts and promo goodies out in Vegas.

Now it's your turn - the auction starts May 1st, and there's a bunch of good goodies to bid on. Go support a great cause and get some great stuff in the process! Details here:
http://www.brigwyn.com/2009/04/its-almost-here-childrens-week-childs-play-charity-auction/

Inside the game, I've been pondering my gear as I fish for Fish Feast ingredients in WG. I love that I can step off the flight path and cozy up to a nice quiet fishing hole in the middle of a BG. But I digress... I need to finish the gear process in getting up to Naxx-able, and I've been struggling with block and avoidance stats now that my def is nicely capped with a bit to spare. And even with regular upgrades, it's been a slow process. Upgrades were huge for +def, but less immediate satisfaction for the avoidance stats. So I did what anyone would do, and went to find my favorite uber pally to pick his brain for a bit...

Sadly, he's Alliance :-P But Turall is a RL friend, and very helpful and clear about explaining stuff to me about stats and gear and other things Pally. And he plays more than I do, so I get the benefit of his knowledge and experience. And he has excellent taste in cars. We batted back and forth about stats, talents, glyphs, and rotations to build the most effective tanking machine.

Some excellent points:

Improved Judgements:
If you look at the main protadin rotation, all your abilities have 6 or 9 second cooldowns (Ok, Holy Shield is 8 seconds, close enough it fits into a 9 second slot), except for Judgement, which is 10 seconds.
By putting only one point into Imp. Judgement you get a perfect 9, 6, 9, 6 rotation. SoR and HotR are 6 secondConsecrate, Holy Shield and Judgement are 9 second. You can tailor the actual rotation to your preference. But with this method you get always have an ability ready after a Global Cooldown (the 1.5 second cooldown after using a skill)

I must admit, my rotations aren't as machine-like as they could be. I'm tempted to set up a macro to see if it improves. Then again, that kind of takes the human monkey fun out of the picture, now doesn't it? Maybe I should just get better, improve my HUD, and practice.

His glyphs:

Majors-Glyph of Seal of Vengeance: bumps up expertise, nice for keeping Vengeance stacks up (it's the only seal I use for tanking)
Glyph of Salvation: %20 damage reduction when Hand of Salvation is active. You can use this as your own emergency button if your threat is really high, or it is good for saving someone's ass.
Glyph of Divine Plea: duh.

I personally am not a fan of the Salvation Hand. I get the mechanic, but my mindset while tanking involves using my taunts, not dropping their threat. Probably a good consideration, but I don't think I've ever, ever pressed this button. Ever. I suppose I could while healing, but I have yet to do so while tanking. Interesting thought.

Time to go mess with some basic setup and gear stuff. I did add the Aldor shoulder enchant last night, getting my dodge up a smidge more. And I'll go change my weapon enchant to STR, which should help my block a smidge. And I'll probably respec, he gave me some good points that I want to see in action.