Considering you're listing quest rewards I'm assuming you're mostly soloing.

Being heavy ret I would focus on strength and crit above everything else. I would go for the battlemaster's breastplate, int and +damage be damned.

+damage on SoC is 20%, and I'll assume a 40% proc rate and 3.4 speed weapon, so you're getting 8% of your spell damage per hit, or 2.3% of your spell damage per second from SoC.

+damage on JoC is 42.9% and I'll assume improved judgement, so you'll get 5.36% of your spell damage per second from JoC if you hit it every cooldown.

+damage on CS is 40% and hits every 10 seconds, assuming you hit every time it's up you get 4% of your spell damage as dps.

So Assuming Constant SoC, JoC and CS at every cooldown, you get 11.6% of your spell damage as DPS. Which means ~8.6 spell damage per 1 dps. Now accounting for 40% damage reduction from armor you get only 2.4% from CS, so it's nearer to 10% of your spell damage, so 10 +damage for every 1 dps.

Strength (assuming divine strength talent), on the other hand gives 1 dps per 6.4 str assuming the same 40% melee resistance you'll need 1.66 dps to do 1 actual dps, so 10.6 strength for 1 white dps.

It also adjusts SoC so at 40% proc rate, 6.4 str gives 0.4 white dps (unless I'm mistaken and SoC doesn't ignore armor), then 10.6 str gives .6625 white dps.

Also adjusts CS damage, so 10.6 strength gives 3.4 damage/10seconds from that, so .34 dps per strength. This gives a total of about 2 dps per 10.6 strength. Or close to 1 dps per 5.3 str

10/5.3 = 1.88

So I would say as a ret pally with improved judgement, crusader strike, and divine strength, 1 strength is worth about 1.88 +damage. That is assuming you hit all your cooldowns immediately and don't spam consecrete every time it's up.

If you're not on top of all of your cooldowns every fight, it tends towards strength more.

If you spam consecrete every fight, your +damage is worth some more, but then you have to really start worrying about carrying a heavier mana pool to support it

Personally I would stick to a rule of 2:1 as a ret paladin, erring on the side of strength, if I was going for soloing gear.

The theory I work off is that for a ret spec, 1 AP ~ 1 +dmg for comparison purposes (assuming you have crusader strike). I could be wrong here, but that's my rule of thumb.

Battlemasters: 38 str (76 AP), 21 agi, 22 sta.
Retribution: 23 str and 27 damage (46+27=73 AP), 22 int, 33 sta
GCC: 14 str and 42 damage (28+42 = 70 AP), 13 int, 4 mp5, 15 stamina

From that, all three of those chests are comparable, personally I'd wear Battlemasters for the crit from agi (but then again I'm a diehard retnoob) and keep Retribution for tanking. GCC is probably better for a hybrid role.

As far as int goes, I haven't been too worried about it on my gear for soloing, I just drink more often (for less time per drink, so it works out, except for the increased cost of drinks, which is fairly marginal). In groups int/mp5 are more important, because they determine how hybrid you can be (in other words, you need more mana to be able to heal/taunt/cleanse/etc.). If you're tanking content that is even remotely challenging, however, then int/mana5 become less of an issue due to Spiritual Attunement.

A quick question for any paladin tanks. I am not sure if you are familiar with the new priest spell Prayer of Mending, http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=33076, but if you are not, it is a heal that "procs" when the person it is cast on takes dmg. The most interesting part of this, aside from its massive efficiency when it is able to make multiple jumps, is that it credits the person taking dmg with having casted the heal, meaning that they receive threat from it.

The question I have is if this heal has its threat increased by Righteous Fury. If so it creates a very nice synergy that may set paladin tanks up as the absolute BEST multple mob tanks (something they already excel at from what I understand). If any of the paladins are experienced with aggro testing, it would be very interesting to see if this is the case. They would simply do an aggro test with and without righteous fury (with the only threat gained for the paladin being a PoM).

edit - apologies if this has already been brought up, my searches did not find anything.

Not entirely sure if this is worthy of its own thread, so I thought I would post here.

I'm a newly rolled Horde Paladin, just off 70 and looking to raid soon. I've gone for a 31/30/0 build since it appeals to the playstyles I like, but I've only recently respecced to it. To put my problem in its most basic form it is the picking and planning for my grinding/solo gear. I'm honestly unsure if my selections of things to be plumping for as I play are correct.

As a previous Retribution spec that was relatively easy.. 2 sets of gear, one that was essentially DPS Warrior gear (crit/hit/strength with a big old 2-hander) and one that was basic healing (+heal/mp5/int). Easy enough. However the respec means I need a third set of gear, and its an unfamiliar area for me:

- Stat priority on armour. Appropriate gear has a mixture of +spelldamage, Int, Strength, Stam and mp/5. How important are each of these to the paladin? What kind of scales should I be thinking when I have the option to lose mp5 for additional spelldamage.. Should I essentially ignore the fact they put Strength on the items, just being grateful for the small DPS increase it provides but without concentrating on it. What about more defensive stats? What is an appropriate sacrifice?
- Weapons and Shields - Do we use low DPS weapons with +spelldamage and compete with casters or higher DPS weapons and compete with the melee? I've been selecting the former as it seems right.. am I wrong?

I have a good understanding of our seals, of threat, of healing power and love the class, but I have just been having problems understanding priorities on our gear if you're a protection paladin.. Any help or pointers would be great.

There's a good chance it works with righteous fury Beann however because it counts as self healing it doesn't trigger our spiritual attunement. I've gone out of mana a couple times with priests that are pretty keen on prayer of mending and holy shield. In a larger raid when you've got enough mana from other heals sure it might be good but you'd have it on you anyway right?

Yeah I've been trying to gear up for a similar spec too Liono. At this point with the size of the upgrades I usually just choose by item level but yeah ideally I think you want little to no strength and plenty of stamina and spell damage. I use a low dps +spell damage onehander also I try to avoid spellcrit as much as I can (except on my healing set).

Actually thats interesting.. spell hit and spell crit can often appear on these +spelldamage items. It appears to me these provide little actual use to the paladin, so would we want to avoid these items if we can?

Aye fjord, eventually the loss of mana from a priest using prayer of mending would outweigh it's usefulness. However at the beginning of a multiple mob pull, a paladin should be able to gain some serious aggro on any and all loose mobs - both from his/her own barrage of threat generating abilities and from the massive threat the heals would be generating.

The answer depending on what you are planning on tanking. If you're looking for main tanking on tough mobs, any good warrior will tell you getting defense high enough to be uncrittable is Job One. I've seen two +30 defense trinkets and with 20 more from talents you are well on your way. Once you manage that, your gear will probably seesaw between +dmg and +sta depending on how your threat generation is going; I expect to end up with a deep bag full of similar but different gear. Any amount of Int, Str, or MP/5 is icing on the cake-- none of them increase your survivability in any appreciable manner.
If you're going to be a zerg/pinch tank and aren't worried about becoming crit immune, copious amounts of stamina and shield block are ace to play to the strength of Redoubt and Holy Shield (which I know you don't have atm, but specs change :D) and of course +dmg to generate threat via Consecrate.

You are on the right track with the +dmg weapon. You get much more bang out of a 41 DPS/+220 dmg sword than out of a 75 DPS sword.

As a holy/protection paladin, your gear will depend mainly on what you want to do. (I keep my ret gear in the bank since there is very little use for it with this spec.) Your +healing set stays the same, you will only want to replace your 'dps' set. The stats I look for are Spell Damage, Mana/5, Int, and Sta - in that order. I don't believe you will need strength since your damage dealer is Holy Shock, SoR, and JoR. Once a decent amount of +spell dmg is collected you could even factor in spamming Concecration(Rank 1). The damage will add up and the mobs will die quickly. If you had the opportunity, grabbing some +spell crit gear (For healing and for solo-dmg) would be very helpful.

As for scaling, I would probably not sacrifice 5mp5 or more for 10 or less spell damage. Intellect for me has always been relatively unimportant - judging wisdom and drinking has been efficient enough for me.

(Keep in mind this is for solo-ing. If you plan on tanking anything you will want to hover at around 250 Plus/Minus 50 spell damage to keep agro well and you will want raw Mitigation stats and health besides that. )

Unfortunately every item is potentially a paladin item... Warrior dps plate, warrior 2h weapons, Warrior +def gear, caster +dmg 1h'ers, priest and druid healing 1h maces and so on.

You really can use everything and if you want to try ret or holy or prot for awhile you really do need a whole other set of gear to be effective. This is the bane of hybrid classes collecting 4+ sets of gear (heal, tank, ret ap/crit, +dmg, resistance etc) where as say a lock or hunter can just collect the 1-2.

My advice collect as much of every type of item as you level and run 5 mans. For raiding well you're going to end up healing unless you somehow have a dedicated tank or dps slot (quite unlikely imo) so it makes sense to collect the heal stuff first to be the benefit to your guild then work on the other stuff.

Spell hit is a great stat for our holy damage and don't forget taunt! In fact one of our only advantages over warrior tanks is going to be a ranged taunt from a tank that actually uses spell hit. They have their four piece dreadnaught bonus for now of course but soon.

Charges are consumed immediately as soon as blocks happen.

If you have 4 mobs swing at you and block them all immediately after your holy shield is up, it will hit them all, consume all charges, and holy shield will be down.

I hate the current implementation of Holy Shield. It looks nice on paper with the bonus to block until you try to actually tank with it. On single mobs that hit moderate to slow it's great...but due to the charges you find yourself without it up more often than not when tanking more than one mob or even a faster hitting mob. Keep in mind i'm not complaining about the fact that you have a successful block -- it's the fact that the buff is based on charges.

For example, a raiding Prot Pally with holy Shield up will achieve roughly 80-90% block rate, which is almost a guaranteed block. If you are tanking a mob that uses cooldowns, this is what can happen:

00:00 Mob attacks normally, you block (charge 1)
00:00 Mob uses hamstring, you block (charge 2)
00:02 Mob attacks normally, you block (charge 3)
00:03 Mob attacks normally, you block (charge 4)
Your Holy Shield Fades.

Or even better...

00:00 Mob 1 attacks normally, you block (charge 1)
00:00 Mob 2 attacks normally, you block (charge 2)
00:00 Mob 1 uses melee ability, you block (charge 3)
00:00 Mob 3 shoots you, you block (charge 4)
Your Holy Shield Fades.

Basically the ideal attack speed for a mob is somewhere around 2.5 seconds if you are running around with HS active...or maybe 4 mobs that hit once every 10 seconds (haha).

On the point of gear, the only place I have really seen contention (sometimes heated) is not on the plate front, but the "caster" gear that goes in the other slots. I've had entire groups call me out for rolling on spellpower and spell crit gear because of the perception that I am simply a watered-down warrior with heals and bubble. I don't find myself going after Warrior plate because the way Warrior plate is designed it simply does not have good synergy with Paladin abilities compared to the tanking itemization that is designed specifically for Paladins (like this thing). Warriors still send me tells not to take their drops or exclaim loudly in group about how "Pally is gonna take my stuff" though.

I'm not sure I understand the complaint. So you block 4 times in 10 seconds in the first part of the 10 seconds, rather than spread out? It's the same number of charges either way. Yes, I realize less bursty = good, but it seems like any situation in which your Holy Shield is gone instantly you will also have Redoubt up, so you're still doing well burst-mitigation wise(and continuing to generate threat with BoSanc), and if you're comparing overall mitigation for extremely well geared tanks, I don't see how Holy Shields's "block 4 every 10 seconds" is somehow worse than Improved Shield Block's "block 2 every 10 seconds."

For 5 mans, I agree things like the Righteous set are ideal, but for anything serious the "warrior" gear is definitely the way to go. The real synergy is that our blocks generate aggro via BoSanc and through our Holy Shield charges, so +block and +block value has extreme power in situations where paladin tanks truly excel.

The implication of having the charges spread out so that the 4th charge expired on the 10th second (or 8th, or whatever) would be that the additional 30% block chance would stay up longer and the ability would provide a great deal more overall mitigation than it does. You are correct in that it does work out to be an equal number of blocks as a prot warrior using Shield Block: I think the point is it's more comparable to a threat tool than a mitigation tool since Holy Shield essentially has Revenge threat built in, only the direction of that threat isn't targetable on multi-mob pulls. In that sense, it's hard to justify it over Holy Shock if you're waffling between 30/31 and 31/30 since Holy Shock is directed, ranged, and doesn't require you to already have the target's attention.

I suppose the complaint with Holy Shield is this...

I have zero issues with how HS operates in practice against single, hard hitting mobs, such as as many raid bosses.

My issues is that Holy Shield is charge based, and as long as you block it expends a charge. It could be a gouge, hamstring or other weak damage ability that you block that eats the charge while the big hits come through in their stead. having 600 block value against a gouge or hamstring is overkill and it's not what you push block up to that level for. In AE tanking or regular instance tanking, HS becomes a sort of cushion against initial DPS and helps solidify agro, then you're done with it until the cooldown is gone. I would much rather HS be a sustained castable buff over the course of 10 seconds at a reduced rate of blocking -- this would have so much more synergy with the rest of the shield-related talents in the tree.

In regards to gearing up Paladins as if they are Warriors, I think that is fine for the time being. However, people need to realize that the Paladin's main strength in tanking is their ability to generate insane amounts of threat above and beyond what other tank classes can achieve, on both single and multiple targets. The Warrior's Lament is that their basic threat generation is ability centric rather than gear centric, and when there does appear gear that helps with their threat, it generally has poor synergy with their ability/talent set, or is unassociated with it altogether. By not taking advantage of the fact that Paladins are blessed with extremely good threat scaling due to the equipment/talent/skill synergy that they have, you are in the end taking them down the Warrior's path...and well, we have Warriors for that, and they have far better tools for it.

Encounter design has for quite a while now been taking off in different directions from the simple tank/spank endurance fight that many people have been conditioned into theorycrafting/strategizing around. There is no reason not to take advantage of the inherent strengths of a Paladin tank - attempting to shore up percieved weaknesses that are drawn from trying to measure up with the other two tanks is an exercise in futility and ends up diluting your strengths rather than reinforcing them. Let them excel at what they do best, and we shall do likewise.

I'm wondering if it might be worth looking at Vindication again at the heroic and/or raid level (either for a paladin tank or a retribution spec), now that trash is both dangerous and vulnerable to many debuffs and some bosses seem to be vulnerable to Scorpid Sting, which was frequently quoted as the comparison skill for the original Vindication nerf. Has anyone tried it and found it useful? Does it stack with Demoralizing Shout or Curse of Weakness?

As a paladin who have been tanking both heroic and Kharazan, I can safely say that Holy Shield is by far, the most important skill a paladin can have. Nothing compares to it aggro wise, its extremely mana efficient, and it also provide great mitigation. As for the complaint about the charges expire too soon in a multi mob situation I can only say 1 thing, if the diffrence between not having 30% more block in this situation and having is dying, you shouldn't be aoe tanking then.

Paladin tanking streangths:
1. AoE aggro.
2. Aggro generally.
3. Ranged taunt.
4. Lay on Hands (The amount of times I uses this is staggering, the thing is on constant cd).
5. Self sufficient, I can cleanse myself, can even get rid of certain debuffs that I couldn't otherwise with the help of Divine Shield (Moroes in Kharazan is a very good example), and I am probably the best tank to have in fights that you have phases in (Imagine Sapph with a palatank and you have no ice block near it, or Heigan during the dance).
6. Tanking undead/demons, the amount of sheer aggro you can create here is insane.
7. Provides both aura and blessings to your raid/group.

Paladin tanking weaknesses:
1. Less health then other tanking classes.
2. Very long cooldown on taunt (In raids this doesn't matter at all tho).
3. Lacking mitigation compare to other tanking classes.
4. The lack of Last Stand/Shield Wall like abilities.
5. Mana dependant (Only an issue in 5-men content, can usually be solved by drinking a potion tho).
6. Pretty bad at being an OT in a boss encounter (You won't have mana to spam consecration, and your best aggro ability will be useless).

A paladin tank is similiar yet diffrent to other tanking classes, your choice of gear will be equivlent to that of a warrior but your tanking is still performed diffrentely, certain fights you will prefer a paladin and certain fights a warrior and certain fights a druid. Similiar gear doesn't mean similiar style.

My current tanking gear:
http://ctprofiles.net/1329664 (under tank tab)

My current build:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=qZV0tIx0dgzxZVfxp00zb

A few comments on the build:
You got all the neccesery tanking talents and mitigation talents, you also get improve Sanctity Aura which provides 10% more aggro and 6% more heal recieve, then you can also grind pretty good, so its really the build I recommend on using if you going to be a serious tankadin.

A few comments on the gear:
The gear itself actually provides more stats but it seems ctprofiles have yet to update sockets, the gear offers you crit immunity and of course a lot of health and mitigation (Around 10700 health currently unbuffed, and have yet to enchant certain items). There are certainly better items I can still get (Libram from Marks of Justice from heroic runs, exalted Shat'ar shield) but this gear provides everything I currently need. Of course if I feel mitigation is good enough I can certainly get items like:
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29185
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=24126

All in all I feel palatank have its place in WoW, my only real concern is the lack of a Shield Wall like ability, mainly because most bosses likes to enrage and kinda make SW really important. I have yet to try doing some Divine Shield kiting, but I doubt I can do that if I have a rogue in my raid (Don't have in Kharazan but will defently have melee damage in 25 men raids) so thats probably not a good idea.

All in all I still believe that the best raid will be the one with 3 diffrent tanks to perform diffrent tasks, we have yet to seriously do Gruul's so this is yet to be seen. Only time will tell I guess.

I picked up Holy Shield over the weekend. It's not terribly useful for soloing single mobs as it's hard to get all the charges to expend, but pulling 2 or 3 at a time it's very mana efficient and any extra bit of blocking helps. I can't speak definitively to its threat generation as my competition for threat in instances is a 60 hunter, but it sure seems to help keep mobs on me like glue when my roommate's ret paladin of the same level is going to town [though some Holy Wrath is probably helping].

In regards to the Vindication question, I would also be interested to know if any bosses are not immune to it now. Scorpid Sting was fundamentally changed (now it is a 5% miss, similar to Insect Swarm) but Vindication was not, so my guess is that most bosses will still be immune. However, I can see its potential on some of the nasty trash in Karazhan and the heroics.

Vindication and Pursuit of Justice are two talents that should have been changed for the xpac but weren't QQ

Much like mitigation and avoidance for tanking, every point of spell crit has an exponentially greater effect than the one previous for a Paladin healing. I am curious how the tier 5+ itemization will look like considering we can already hit an absurd ciritcal rate off of Tier 4. Then again, we could just get a bunch of sidegrades like everyone else.

You could possibly add the fact that Righteous Defense can only be used as a reactive ability as opposed to other taunts, but it may be considered a tradeoff for range/multimob agro/+hit effects.