Right, SoB gets boosted by upgrading your weapon and by strength/attack power, which are easier to come by in terms of raid/food buffs etc. Windfury + Seal of Blood + Reckoning anyone? Seems like you're going to get ton more damage upgrades out of that.

Btw, 125 dps will be cake considering there are already 78.8 dps 1h weapons from rep rewards, plus 10% 1h weapon damage.

My question for Seal of Blood is this. How does SoB rate using a 1h, and how does SoC rate using a 1h. For comparison, how does SoB rate using a 2h, and how does SoC rate using a 2h. As I understand it, SoB follows melee crit rules.

As someone else said "Bang, there's the mitigation." Deep Prot past 31 still seems lacking, but in a way, I think that's a good thing. It means I can spec deep into another tree to be able to do two things decently well. Before this, I was leaning between 31 Holy/30 Ret, and 31 Prot/30 Ret. The latter seems the clear winner now, since I want to get away from gimping myself as a healer totally. Now I can tank or backup dps when extra tanking isn't needed.

While I feel for the nerfing of Vengeance and Crusader Strike, I'm glad paladins may finally become *wanted* tanks.

Question now: In light of these changes, do the talents in deep prot need adjusting now/still? Specifically, Ardent Defender, Weapon Expertise, and Avenger's Shield? Part of me wants them to stay "useless" as they are, to make the choice easier to dump the rest of my points in another tree for added versatility. Getting "more bang for my talent point buck" as it were.

One other important factor for paladin raid tanking I haven't seen a test for yet is the resist rate of +3 mobs against the paladin's various holy attacks. Do judgements and such get resisted at the spell miss rate, the melee miss rate, the innate level-based resist rate, or something else? Do spell hit, melee hit, or spell penetration have any effect on the resist rates?

As a retired main tank, I'd say anything that makes you lose health every hit is a bad idea. Also, when you're comparing SoV and SoB, you're saying, yeah it's fine we'll get 120+dps from 1h and then SoB will be better. But the better it is, the more hp you lose. It MIGHT not look like a lot, but it might just be enough to get you in the exact range to get one shotted(say you're at 22%, mob is going to crushing blow for 21%, totally bypassing your ardent defender, you hit right before, lose hp to SoB, now at 21%, one hit).

I definitely wouldn't feel "ok" using a seal that drains your hp on every hit when I'm going to main tank a raid boss. That's just stupid, that's like saying, ok I'm going to use a leather chest piece to tank because it has better threat generation stats than the plate one. There's really very very very few fights where you'd do that(unless it's a total elemental based fight). Keeping the tank alive > threat, which makes mitigation > threat on most hard hitting encounters(obviously if you're tanking adds on noth for example, threat > mitigation because you have to burst them down fast).


SoB is a bit weird, I like the idea of having different seals, but they should have the same use with different ways, not different uses and different ways, or we'll go back to GG EZ MODE bullshit which is annoying as hell anyway. If the racial seal should be a tanking one, make it so blood is the best tanking seal too(compared to base seals). I can already hear the whinning when, 6months past release, you have blood elves 2shotting people with an overpowered melee seal of blood in bgs, under their improved bubble, and hordies arguing it's ok because there's a video of illidan being tanked by a prot dwarf paladin using vengeance and sustaining 1400threat/s. God protects blizzard next time they make a boss with fear too, but that's another subject ^^


P.S: Is there anyone who could tell me what's the proc rate on Vindication? I know it doesn't work on bosses, just trying to figure if it's worth taking for leveling. Is it a ppm or a flat %?

Wow, I take back my previous comments. Prot/Holy build here I come!!

I really like both Ardent Defender and Avenger's Shield personally. I've been testing Protection for about a week now (after the recent Imp RF and Imp DS changes), and even with the leapfrogging issue, AD saves my ass more often than I can count in both 5-man and PvP. Maybe it won't have as much impact in raids, because if you tank, you probably have multiple healers monitoring your health, but I don't see myself ever without the talent in deep Protection builds. I'd love to see it as a 3-point talent like Blessed Life and Divine Purpose since it's rather situational, but functionality-wise, it works great.

As for AS, I've only found myself using it for pulling, but that's not a bad thing. It's made my life a lot easier with those crazy DPS that go all out as soon as you engage. :P The bounce distance feels a bit short (sometimes doesn't chain to the next target even when the mobs look like they're close) though. It's pretty good for PvP as well. AS followed by JoJ seems to frustrate Druids to no end, for example. :)

Weapon Expertise, as is, is worse than Precision.

As far as I can tell, SoR doesn't ever fully resist. JoR does though.

I believe it's around 3 PPM.

3PPM sounds VERY low, with the few tests I ran with my paladin, I was getting at least a proc rate equal to SoC, which is 7PPM. In fact it was probably procing more than that so 3PPM I find hard to believe. No one ever bothered parsing it?

As for the difference between players and mobs, I would have thought it would be advantageous to PvE instead of PvP because mobs would have higher stats than players(since they don't use special skills). Is this not the case? That'd make the skill pretty worthless for leveling, and I don't really plan to PvP with a ret spec.