Significant DPS/Damage Reduction Tricks For Protection Paladin (Patreon)

The protection paladin level 100 talent "Last Defender" is an overpowered talent that does the following: "Each enemy within 8 yards reduces the damage that you  take and increases the damage that you deal by 3%. This effect has diminishing returns. " What diminishing returns means in this context is that as you converge on 100% dps and damage reduction the effect reduces so that you cannot effectively add performance over 33 mobs. 

Naturally there is a trade-off for paladins between pulling extra mobs and the damage these mobs actually do-as Blizzard undoubtedly intended. However, it was apparent to me that if you could smuggle low-level mobs into a specific high-level encounter situation they would act as effective damage reduction and dps boosts.

Experimenting with various items I discovered that the toy item "Trapped Treasure Chest Kit", can be useful. This item is on a 15 minute cooldown and has a chance to proc 8 level 1 spiders, which count as enemies for the purposes of last defender. This is a significant gain of roughly 20% in dps and damage reduction. This method works in all forms of pve, including raids, with the exception of mythic dungeons.

I experimented with other items. The target dummy items, "Turnip Punching Bag" and the seasonal toy "Love Fool" also work with Last Defender, however these only work in the open world apart from the Turnip which works outdoors in dungeons. Very strangely, the item "Tear Of The Green" Aspect, which summons a vision of Ysera the dragon, also activates the Defender talent, though this has a short duration, and only works in the open world. (It is quite likely there are other items, I do not possess all the toys in the game). 

There is also the possibility of acquiring a debuff from npc's which spawn other npc's, as demonstrated in this older video of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CatkPvSL2OU . 

Keeping these mobs alive in high-level encounters may or may not be impossible or trivial depending on whether aoe is likely to be used.