I’ve recently started playing a paladin. Leveled as prot and loving tanking. Started 8.3 content with ~350 ilvl, and immediately discovered that I could dance round faceless and keep my own health up while killing them (slowly), but mind flays emptied my health bar in seconds.
I know my ilvl (now ~400) is too low for the content, and I’ll get it much higher before I start to run visions, but this is quite a shock after being able to just pull ‘everything’ up to now. My playstyle so far has been ‘interrupt what I can, and keep hitting it until it stops moving’, so it obviously needs some refinement LOL
Can anyone help me with the tools and tactics I should use to deal with incoming magic damage, especially if I’ve got 2 mobs targeting me at once and I can’t get into melee range of both?
(Please bear in mind that I’m very new to both class and spec, but I really want to play it well.)
Holy shield as a talent combined with a high strength (for blocked amount) and mastery (for block chance) value comes to mind
Outside of that anything that will give you an absorb will help, the nullification dynamo rep grind from Mechagon will give you an essence that refreshes a 40kish magic damage absorb every 15 seconds for 10 seconds, that’s probably the big gamechanger
Other options are the absorb on AS traits, which give you a decent all round absorb every time you cast avenger’s shield
If you’re not getting Azerite gear from raids or m+ yet you should also have access to a few traits in the last ring that give you a passive absorb for every 30 seconds, while it scales terribly (imo the higher the content the more useless it becomes)
There is also a talent that turns your Blessing of Protection into making you magic immune instead of physical but that’s an on demand button and not something that’s passively there or applied by your rotation (priority whack-a-mole).
Outside of that there are the general cooldowns that temporarily reduce damage
For the rest what helped me with gathering, I have a macro I can post later that turns Avengers Shield into a mouseover macro (and casts it on my selected target if there is none) that allows me to quickly silence/interrupt any casters at a distance