Holy Shield, No Spell Hit, Lots o’ Resist

Previously, I posted about reasons a Paladin would want spell hit on his gear. If Holy Shield hits or misses based on Spell Hit mechanics - meaning that it misses a base rate of 16% against bosses - there is a lot of room for Spell Hit to improve a Protection Paladin’s threat generation.

Initially, I was a bit unsure if this was true or not. There seemed to be little evidence that I could find - short of personally testing the ability - to determine if Holy Shield was indeed resistable and if that resistance was based on melee hit, spell hit, or something else. Now that I’ve re-specced Protection and had a chance to test it myself, I’ve got an answer.

Holy Shield Can Be Resisted

In my initial research, I came across a statement that Holy Shield would never be resisted by a mob unless it was four levels or more above you. This would effectively mean that Holy Shield could never be resisted during a raid situation, and spell hit or melee hit rating would not affect it.

This is patently false. After I re-specced Protection, I grabbed SW Stats and went out to kill some stuff. While doing my Shattered Sun dailies (I’ve still got a ways to go until Exalted and my shield), I made sure to use Holy Shield as much as possible.

When I completed the quests, I checked SW Stats. Sure enough, Holy Shield had been resisted 1-2% of the time. This would seem to jive with a spell hit scenario. The mobs are mostly around level 70, and with precision I would have only a 1-2% chance to miss.

According to this initial test, Holy Shield can be resisted. No doubt about it.

Holy Shield Misses Bosses A Lot

The bigger concern, however, is whether or not Holy Shield works off of regular spell hit mechanics. If it does, your Holy Shield has a base chance of 83% to hit a Boss level mob. Thems is bad odds. Assuming you take Precision, you would need 164 Spell Hit rating to ensure that your Holy Shield misses only 1% of the time.

Last night, I went to Gruul’s and Mag’s with my Pally Tank. I didn’t do a whole lot of tanking in Gruul’s. I was assigned (with another tank) to play with Olm - which meant we ran around after him for most of the fight. On Gruul, another Pally tank (with slightly better gear) got the task of tanking Gruul, so I switched to my healing gear. When we got to Mag’s, though, I had a chance to tank a Boss mob (a channeler) for an extended period of time.

At the end of the fight, I checked SW Stats and it reported that Holy Shield had missed 14% or 15% of the time. Again, this jives pretty well with an expected miss rate of 13% - since I have Precision.

Unfortunately, I forgot to save the SW Stats report for proof, but I’ll be sure to do that in the future. I stand pretty convinced, though, that Holy Shield works on Spell Hit, and that’s a pretty good reason to be looking favorably at Spell Hit on Prot Pally gear.

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