Getting back to the OP, Ardent Defender is a useful talent in the most common situations paladins have and will be tanking. I know it would have saved me dura this week on live when I died to Skitterer packs. It's not useful to think of it as a mitigation talent, or something designed to be used while MT'ing, rather something good for AoE tanking or good for other healers reaction times for "oh looks like the paladin is tanking something."

What needs to be changed is very plain: Weapon Expertise needs to be removed for a good, single-target mitigation ability.

Regarding the discussion of why Protection for warriors is important, Toughness is actually one of the single most important talents (even though its early in the tree), along with Defiance. The difference between healing a tank with Toughness and one without on Patchwerk is huge. This talent alone is a reason for a paladin who intends on tanking to drop points in protection.

"paladins have and will be tanking"

This is exactly what I don't want to see. Why should prot pallies be limited to these situations? What's the point of rolling a tanking paladin, whose healing is neutered, when a fury warrior can do just as well?

Exactly my point, thought the new talents seem to make a big step in the right direction.

Because they won't do just as well even if the talents in Beta stay exactly the same.

Maybe a better way to put that would be: "Ardent Defender is a useful talent in the most common situations TANKS have and will be tanking." Clearing trash is usually more time-consuming than killing a boss after all.

I'd be a bit weary of that. I'd much rather see more of a hybrid talent along the lines of Holy Guidance. Protection has no healing utility (even Ret has Improved Sanctity Aura), and some sort of mitigation/healing talent would be better than a pure mitigation one, I think.

I didn't mean to imply that those would be the only kind of situation we could tank. I just mean, at the very least, you will still be consecrating on aoe pulls in raids, and that talent specifically seems to be another multi-target tanking aid. I think this entire thread thus far has pointed out that prot paladins > fury warriors. The newest talents are the ones that are exciting from a single-target tanking perspective.

The other difference is going to be the relative amounts of aggro generated. You already see people advocating druid tanks for Thaddius due to aggro, and as the mitigation gap between paladins/druids and warriors closes, the issue of who generates more aggro may become more important for many fights.

What will be awesome is wearing your Paladin Dreadnaught equivalent and healing in PvP.

"Joe Man's Mortal Strike hits you for 45."


Actually that just might make warsong stupid.

Especially since both sides will have Blessing of Salvation, so blizzard can design fights that are a lot more aggro sensitive.

Has anyone run the numbers on Prot Warrior vs Prot Paladin threat generation? The other thing to consider with a paly generating threat, they can only keep it up for a limited time? What happens when mana runs out? Rage won't run out, it will just keep building up, but mana runs out and a paly tank is screwed.

I see some pretty decent differences... in the warrior's favor,
7.1% more effective hp vs spells
4.4444% more effective hp vs Melee
immune to crush on command without any significant gear
doesn't have gear with int (I don't see why blizzard has put this on tank gear, its almost useless with the new pally skill)

the pally advantage is- ~70ish hp?


DS+ taunt lasts... 3 seconds, don't think it can be compared with shield wall
(BoP + multiple taunts can last for 10 seconds, and it does nearly the same thing)

hardly fair to compare a single hour long cooldown (which another pally can cast on the main tanking warrior, probably with the 30% armor benefit), to a 10 minute and 5 minute cooldown
--

sure, if there's a significant difference in gear
;o

True, on the difference of cooldowns, it's reduced to 40minutes via talents though. And for a pure Tanking spec, i'd consider taking it over 2 points in parry. Like This)
And if you can ever use Last Stand twice in an encounter, well... hehe... that's not really going to happen. (Might in xpac, I guess you can't discount the idea, really)

Admittedly, I may have been a bit liberable with my use of "hardly any differences", but there are certainly a lot less differences than there are now. The score is certainly evened up a fair bit. (And yes, this means the Protection Warrior is still the premier tank, just not by such a large margin any more)

BTW: Righteous Defense
Requires Level 14
138 Mana40 yd range
Instant cast15 sec cooldown
Come to the defense of a friendly target, commanding up to 3 enemies attacking the target to attack the Paladin instead.

I didn't realise it had a duration? I thought it shifted ALL threat to the Paladin, meaning DS -> RD was invuln. tanking for the duration of the DS? Does RD work on bosses immune to taunt?

Spiritual Attunement.

Consecration, a Seal, a Judgment and Holy Shield every 10 seconds is pretty much as much as a paladin can cast every 10 seconds. consecration would often not be done unless AoE tanking, so we'll leave it out and see how much mana would be left for doing it. Remember that a pally tank (especially due to new reckoning) gets a lot of damage threat just from autoattack and SoR/SoC.

280 for holy shield, 260 for SoR, and someone on beta needs to tell me how much judgment costs at level 70. 5% base mana, same as earthbind totem, so I'm thinking that 200 is probably an overestimate. We'll say 200.

That's 740 mana every 10 seconds. The paladin needs to be taking 7400 damage in 10 seconds (740DPS) to be healed for enough to get that mana back even without any mana regen at all (and he will have blessing of wisdom at the very least). 740DPS from a raid boss at level 70 is not exactly over the top. There should then be plenty of mana left over for some consecrations.

And that's with 0 overhealing. It was said in an earlier thread that Spiritual Attunement gives back mana from healing cast on the paladin by others even if there's no damage (ie. overhealing), so given a 15% overheal the raid boss' damage needs to be even less for the paladin getting back as much mana as he can spend.

Well 740DPS isn't the total truth.
Overheals count fully to the Spiritual Attunement return. So even if you are at 100% hp, you will get 10% of that druids 7k overheal NS HT Crit.
It's interesting that it is done that way, and i'm not sure if it's a bug or not.

bugger, beaten by the bathroom + edit. :P

No reckoning in that build, I always thought that'd be a really good helper for tanking, what with all those extra hits -> more Holy damage. Etc

Yer, it's definately a possibility.
I think the choice would be 5/5 Reck, 5/5 Parry vs 5/5 Imp. SoR, 2/2 iLoH, 3/5 Parry

Could only tell for certain after trying, but having LoH on such a timer, and Reck basically adding SO much aggro, it'd be hard to call. (Reckoning would equate to the same as iSoR in terms of aggro generated I would think, but it does allow you to get 5/5 Parry. Choices choices.)

edit: Benediction got a buff too over the live version, making it very nice.

I would expect to see most raid bossess taunt immune bar specific and desired taunt requirements of the fights (e.g. everything is immune to taunt except fights such as Sartura, 4H, Ebonroc etc.) So I wouldnt compare DS+ taunt with Shield wall. Even if it works it will only last 3 seconds as oposed to the 15s of talented shield wall.

the problem is the designed paladin-tanking sets are going to have int, and non-set warrior gear will lack dmg/heal (and likely won't be able to cover all the slots)

Alas, Improved SoR only increases the base damage in Beta, so it doesn't scale with spell stat right now (hopefully a bug). Divine Strength is pretty iffy for Paladin tanks as well, since we really only get block value out of it.

I'd personally go for something more like this (in the current Beta, Improved Resistance Auras was changed to Spell Warding for +4% magical damage reduction, and Improved DS was changed to Sacred Duty for +6% stamina; 2 points left-over for whatever).

Spell damage only helps with our threat, and even without any, it certainly feels like Paladins can outaggro non-Prot Warriors already, so we probably won't need the stat on every piece.

True, I knew of those changes, but totally forgot about them when I put that list together. Scrap that original idea. :)

The idea of getting iLoH was because I could get 2 aggro increasing talents to help along the way, but getting Str, and iSoR, kind of work against each other (SoR aggro isn't increased by Str at all) so that's pretty useless. That and iSoR being 'bugged', makes it totally useless.

Definately would go with something similar to your talent tree.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent-bc=aVVhbxzhZV0thxMdgt (remembering that improved divine shield now has the +6% stamina thing) would be my build for prot/holy I guess, retaining some of the healing power in exchange for not having SoC or deflection. It's really hard to get to Avenger's Shield now. I guess I justify not having Deflection by saying that the prot paladin wants to be hit and mitigate it (redoubt, reckoning, BoSanc, holy shield all require being hit to operate), rather than pumping his avoidance, and that keeping the paladin flexible with 24 points in holy is more worthwhile.

It's funny that paladins already started fighting over the prot tree. Why couldnt you check how warriors felt in the past 2 years about their owp protection spec before this?

If you want to be able to heal, tank, and dps at the same time; they will all be in a lower performance; and also it will come a lot later since you have to spend 3 times as much dkp.