WoW TBC Classic BEST Shields for Paladin AOE Farming - Petrified Lichen Guard, Skullflame Shield, Force Reactive Disk

WoW TBC Classic BEST Shields for Paladin AOE Farming - Petrified Lichen Guard, Skullflame Shield, Force Reactive Disk

6/29/2021 3:38:36 PM

In this World of Warcraft Classic TBC guide, we are going to settle the debate on what is the best prop paladin AOE farming shield, is Petrified Lichen Guard, Skullflame Shield or Force Reactive Disk. We are going to show you actual footage of the shields and the actual damage that they're pumping out and then we're going to go into actual hard numbers and math and see exactly which shield will win based on statistics.

Top 3 Paladin Shield for AOE Farming In WoW Classic TBC

Let's want to go ahead and introduce the top 3 paladin shields in WoW The Burning Crusade Classic and go over how they work and proc first, you might need to know before you can actually properly assess which is the best shield:

1. Petrified Lichen Guard

Petrified Lichen Guard also known as the sporgar shield. The reason why you get it from sporgar reputation which is a reputation in western zangar marsh. In order to get up your reputation with sporgar we recommend going and buying these items from auction house with WoW TBC Classic gold:

1. Bog lord tendril/Mature spore sac
2. Glowcaps (save 10)
3. Fertile Spores/Sanguine Hibiscus

In order to be bale to turn them into get your reputation up to honored as soon as you get out there you will need 10 glowcaps to buy the actual shield itself, so make sure you keep some extra glowcaps after you've already gotten the reputation just to be able to buy the shield.

WoW TBC Classic BEST Paladin Shield For AOE Farming - Petrified Lichen Guard

The way this works is that every single time you block, you apply a poison to your enemy - now the poison does 12 damage but if you have the one hand specialization, it can do about 12.5 to 13 damage, but you're going to do let's just say base 12 damage not including any additional damage increase. For example, when you block three times in a row, you have a tick of 36 that will take four times, so you can basically say that each tick or each application is equivalent of 48 damage; if you get up to four stacks and you have 48 times 4 damage. It does take 12 seconds to actually do the full proc duration and so in order to properly assess this, we need to make sure that we're going to have the applications run the full duration.

Some important things to consider is one that you need to block - block chance can be increased by both holy shield and redoubt, in addition to your base blockchain, so you can see you have 58.18 chance. However, redoubt only has a few charges and holy shield only has a few charges which means we can't really rely on them in our calculations to see how effective it is.

The other thing to remember is that a lot of the fights are going to be pretty quick and so the Mobs might die before the Petrified Lichen Guard debuff actually runs off the MOB, so you may not get the full damage. Assuming that the full damage will occur though you can treat each tick as 48 damage overall over the course of 12 seconds.

2. Skullflame Shield

Skullflame Shield was really popular in pre-patch for farming SM and is still a very good shield and we'll see later how much damage it can do, but there's two different procs on it:

1) The first one is a 3% chance when struck in combat of stealing a 35 life from a target this does heal you, and it also scales with spell power at about a 95 coefficient which means if we had 500 spell power, we would then heal ourselves for about 530, not exact math rough numbers.
2) You also have a 1% chance of dealing 75 to 125 fire damage to all targets around you, that does not scale with spell power, so that will on average do about 100 damage.

WoW TBC Classic BEST Paladin Shield For AOE Farming - Skullflame Shield

But to every single mob, there's the key difference between Petrified Lichen Guard and Skullflame Shield and Force Reactive Disk is that their AOE abilities and so instead of applying a singular DOT to one mob, we're now hitting every single mob; and so if it procs a ton, it could do a ton more damage.

The issue is that the Skullflame Shield proc chance is actually really low and it's even lower now that we're level 70, it has a 1% chance to proc but only when you are dealt damage, so if you have a high avoidance percentage for example 65 avoidance, that's not factoring that the MOB is level 48 and because the mob is a lower level we actually have a much higher avoidance chance and we are constantly blocking dodging parrying or the mob is missing on us. There also is the block chance versus block value consideration when you're facing a mob that is around your level, or if you're facing a boss or something like that when you block you block a percentage of the damage. However when you're facing a mob that's much lower than you, you can actually block the entirety of the damage, so that's something to take into consideration when you're factoring in SM, Stockades or potentially even Maradon since the mobs will be around the greater lava spiders level.

3. Force Reactive Disk

Force Reactive Disk is a popular shield, it can pump out a good amount of damage but also takes a good amount of durability at the same time, it's kind of a combination of Petrified Lichen Guard and Skullflame Shield, in that it procs when you block and deals AOE damage like the Skullflame Shield, so procs like Petrified Lichen Guard deals damage like Skullflame Shield.

WoW TBC Classic BEST Paladin Shield For AOE Farming - Force Reactive Disk

There's a 50% chance every time it procs to lose one durability, so this can kind of become an issue when you're facing a lot of mobs and doing instance farming over and over, so you may need multiple Force Reactive Disk, if you choose to use this shield.

There's one important consideration though as well, in that there's actually a one second internal cooldown and a lot of people don't realize this, which means that it is capped at the damage that it can do, when it proc so it will hit every MOB for between 25 and 35 damage so typically around 30 and it can crit as well. So it can pump out some serious damage very quickly but you also run the issue where it will break rather quickly as well, and it looks like it breaks from most farms in about two runs.

Best Paladin Shield for AOE Farming in WoW TBC Classic

Now that we've introduced the shields, let's compare them after checking them in action:

Skullflame Shield and Force Reactor Disc drastically outperformed Petrified Lichen Guard, but all three shields will honestly give you a much higher chance to actually wipe during the kill phase which is unfortunate because it's a eight minute run to get to the kill phase. So honestly our recommendation is to use a defense shield and just go for maximum mitigation with a high enough block value and block chance, you should be able to limit the amount of stacks you get of the poison which means you will be able to live through the kill phase and then you just have to worry about kiting around. For black moss, the defense shield will win out now. As far as the rest of the dungeons, they all have their unique nuances black mouse has the poison stockades, maradon, stuns, strat has, you know things you got to despel and punts up in the air and things like that.

Best Paladin Shields For Damage & Efficiency

But from a pure damage perspective and pure efficiency perspective, we can look at the shields and compare them with math:

WoW Classic TBC - Best Paladin Shield for AOE Farming

- Basically the idea here is to try to get you know how much avoidance do you have and then once you have that avoidance how is that going to impact the damage of the shields. In instances in which we have really high avoidance since take stockades for example. Skullflame Shield shouldn't proc at all because we should never get hit. Now we could get stunned, and so we could get hit from the stun, at one being stunned because we won't be able to avoid anything, so we'll take damage there and then it'll proc.

- But barring you know stuns we shouldn't take any damage and so skullflame shield wouldn't be good whereas Petrified Lichen Guard might be really good in that instance because we'll be able to block a lot.

- Then we might have an instance where there's a ton of mobs, and we have somewhat of a chance to get hit and so skullflame or Force Reactive Disk will be able to do a ton of damage, because of the quantity of mobs that we're hitting. So we can use these formulas to get an idea.

- Most people don't actually realize that the way that your additional avoidance works is you have to take your defense level - minus the mob's defense which is just five times their level, and then multiply that by 0.16. So basically for every point of defense you have over the mob's attack which is equivalent to their defense in this case, you get point zero four for each of the four avoidance types so that's block dodge perry miss.

- When we do that, we can factor in that into our avoidance that we already have and so we can see our actual avoidance which in this case is 97.2 if we fully block the damage. So if our block value is high enough to mitigate completely this means we would only be getting hit 2.8 of the time, which is what gives us this mob hit chance of three percent roughly - an overall proc chance for skullflame for example of 0.028.

Overall:

Force Reactive Disk is phenomenal, the issue with force reactive disk is that it's going to break very quickly it's also a low level shield which isn't going to give you much mitigation, so if you need more mitigation, more armor or more defense rating things like that, you probably can't leverage Force Reactive Disk as much.

Skullflame Shield has the added benefit of healing you but in some instances where it's a lower level dungeon, it's not going to heal you a ton because it's not going to be able to proc such as stockades, SM. Mara though we're going to be able to see a good amount of procs from this column shield and the strat for mara is actually the proc free action potion which will make it, so that we can't get stunned and we're actually able to pump out a ton of damage with skullflame shield. In higher level dungeon, skullflame really starts to shine because we're actually taking damage a decent bit so we're getting a ton of skullflame procs, we are also then getting a lot of healing and in black morons for example we got healed for 15000 from our skullflame shield throughout the run as well.

From This Analysis:

- Just from a pure damage perspective, Force Reactive Disk would win
- In the higher level dungeons, Skullflame Shield would win
- Petrified Lichen Guard however will likely win strathome, solely because the quantity of mobs and the mobs level fits perfectly for plg to do a little bit more damage, assuming that the mobs basically have the full run of the duration.

Overall though Skullflame Shield would be our choice for nearly every single dungeon for a damaged shield, however all of this being said this damage is nothing compared to consecrates damage, as the whole entire point of these shields is to limit the amount of consecrates we need to do to kill the mobs faster. But we're not actually going to be able to save a consecrate, with any of these farms outside of maybe maradon because our consecrate is actually what's doing all the damage. With 500 spell power which is around what you'll hit with consumables and having the base gear, we're looking at consecrate doing 987 damage per consecrate. The mobs will die very fast, if you have the appropriate spec that is 42 000 damage per second in mardon. All of your damage is really coming from consecrate and if you properly itemize your paladin to focus on spell power and focus on mitigation, so you don't take too much damage which is how you should itemize your paladin, all your damage is going to come from consecrate.

Best Paladin Shield for Living Longer

So the best shield to use is actually the shield that's going to help you live the longest unless you're in a all-out sprint to kill the mobs. If we take a look at the actual damage and we look at kind of the percentage of damage that is done by each ability, we can see that this almost exactly lines up to what we have figured out from the math, and that is that consecrate is everything. Consecrate here is 83.5 of the damage whereas flame strike is only 7.9 percent of the damage. So honestly if you're doing you know less than 10 consecrates that flame strike is not even the equivalent of one consecrate, so if you can live longer that is going to be better because then you can get off that additional consecrate which is going to do more damage.

Now if you're in a situation where you have some cc that's going to go on to you and you're in an all-out race just to kill all the mobs that's when we bring in something like Skullflame Shield to try to pump out those mobs as quickly as possible. So if you need to pump out damage, take Skullflame Shield; if you don't need to pump out damage and you just need to live longer so you can continue to keep up consecrates and eventually kill the mobs, pick up defense shield.