WotLK Tanking Seals: Preliminary Analysis

Wrath of the Lich King appears to be dramatically overhauling the way that our Seal and Judgement system functions, to better accommodate our new shared equipment with Warrior and Death Knight tanking specs. Of particular relevance to Protection Paladins are the changes to Seal of Righteousness and Vengeance.

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Seal (and Judgement) of Righteousness have been changed such that they scale not only with spell power, but with attack power as well. The currently accepted formula for Seal of Righteousness' damage - derived through experimentation by Coriel - is now:

Damage per hit = 0.05 * weapon speed * AP + 0.1 * weapon speed * SP

The formula for Judgement of Righteousness is now:

Damage per Judgement = 0.45 * AP + 0.73 * SP

Based on these formulas, the TPS gained by adding one attack power is 0.202, and adding one spell damage yields 0.363 TPS. Assuming you have Improved Judgements, of course.

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Seal (and Judgement) of Vengeance (and Corruption; silly Blood Elves) have also been altered in much the same way, with one additional twist: they now proc on every hit. That really eliminates the biggest shortfall that the Seal originally had; that a bad streak could cause your stack to fizzle out, and subsequently your TPS. Seal of Vengeance could be a real contender this time around.

The new formula for Seal of Vengeance is as follows:

Damage per tick = 0.07 * AP + 0.034 * stacks * SP

The new formula for Judgement of Vengeance is as follows:

Damage per Judgement = [0.36 + (0.036 * stacks)] * AP + [0.58 + (0.058 * stacks)] * SP

Additionally, when you have five stacks of Holy Vengeance up, your melee swings will cause additional holy damage calculated by this formula:

Damage per hit = Damage = 0.012 * weapon speed * SP

Assuming you've already got five stacks established, Seal of Vengeance will gain 0.173 TPS per point of attack power, and 0.337 TPS per point of spell power. Again, assuming Improved Judgements.

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Based off these numbers, if you are only able to fit a single Seal into your rotation, Seal of Righteousness remains the clear winner. Seal of Vengeance will still have some practical use in fights with mechanics like Gurtogg Blood boil (where you can build the stack during Fel Rage, Judge at the end, and have 18 seconds of free Holy Vengeance ticks while you continue a Righteousness rotation), or Felmyst (where, although the Seal will generate only 85% to 90% of Righteousness' threat, it will tick while she's in the air, making it 10-17% more potent), but for general use will be largely disused.

Seal twisting now appears to be possible, though. Thanks to the 100% proc chance offered by Seal of Vengeance, only random misses, dodges, and parries will interfere with Holy Vengeance applications, rather than the additional burden of unreliable procs. However, given the number of new abilities we are going to be juggling while tanking, twisting while tanking seems not necessarily impossible, but extremely cumbersome and potentially unreliable. We also don't know how Consecration is scaling yet, which may also render seal twisting while tanking not only unnecessary, but inefficient seeing as >90% of your time could be occupied by core tanking skills.

That being said, seal twisting while building secondary aggro (see: Gruul, Essence of Desire, Gurtogg Bloodboil) looks to be significantly more appealing. With Holy Shield being dumped from your rotation, it frees up a little more than two GCD's per 18 Holy Vengeance cycle to Seal twist to maintain the stack, cycle in Vengeance Judgements, and still make regular attacks with Seal of Righteousness. Here's some (very) rough napkin math:

Vengeance DoT = 0.044 TPS from AP, 0.108 TPS from SP, 100% uptime.

Vengeance Judgement = 0.128 TPS from AP, 0.207 TPS from SP, 100% uptime.

Righteousness swings = 0.095 TPS from AP, 0.19 TPS from SP, 15/18 uptime.

Vengeance swings = 0.023 TPS from SP, 3/18 uptime.

In total, you end up with a total of 0.251 TPS per attack power (a 24.3% increase over Righteousness alone) and 0.477 TPS per spell power (a 31.5% increase). Regardless of how tanking stats are weighted in the future, that's a non-trivial increase in threat by utilizing free GCD's while not tanking. Since building secondary aggro is a real weakness of Paladin tanks in the current raid game, things are starting to look pretty interesting here in Paladin Land.

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Edit: I omitted crits on Judgements because, well... I forgot about them. That will tilt the scales slightly more towards Seal of Vengeance (since its Judgement hits 20% harder), but unless we somehow manage to exceed 100% critical hit rates it will never surpass Righteousness' total damage. I figured it bore mentioning, though.