The talent clearly reads "when your Hammer of the Righteous does damage to your Primary Target.

Only the primary damage (the single target physical damage part) that is dealt to the current target by Hammer of the Righteous can trigger Grand Crusader.

Started to put epic gems into normal Dragon Soul gear (397 item leves ones, that will not be replaced too soon). Being around block capped with raid buffs (+1.2%) and planning to use some pure stamina gems to have HP and more effect on Souldrinker sword.
Wondering if around 17% dodge and parry level should be enough to stay, or it is better to invest into more avoidance instead? What is your experience with it?

That mainly depends on healers. In 25man with a lot of HoT classes, stamina might have slight edge over avoidance, but if you are a 10man tank, go avoidance over stamina.
Also the LFR version of souldrinker isn't that attractive. You're better off staying with the Beth hc weapon, or even Morchok normal.

You still have the EH tests in ten man DS heroic though, and they only count your (armor and) maximum health. The only things that are really capable of killing a tank in heroic DS are the unblockables/unavoidables, thus I am going down the "maximise CTC then stamina" route, and would recommend it to any other Paladin or Warrior tank in a similar situation.

Any insight into which is better heroic hand of morchock versus normal souldrinker (considering both dps as well as survival)?

It's certainly not completely irrelevant. It depends a lot on the fight; on the following I would say it is categorically not worth dropping CTC for 10-15k more hp (this is a 25 man perspective):

Morchok heroic (unblocked melee swings post-stomp will kill you)
Zon'ozz heroic (late phase 1 melee swings are dangerous, and psychic drains should be cooldowned anyway)
Ultraxion heroic (given you have 100% holy shield uptime the difference between a blocked and unblocked hit is a lot larger than normal)
Warmaster heroic (combination of devastate and an unblocked hit will destroy a tank in late phase 2)

For Yor'sahj wearing double resistance trinket (Sindragosa's, Mirror of Broken Images) is going to make you considerably easier to heal than not doing so, and being able to remain block capped while wearing those requires a lot of mastery gemming which would be less than ideal both for that encounter and for general gear.

For Hagara the tank killing burst is the focused assault, which is completely unavoidable/blockable. Admittedly taking an unblocked melee swing at the end of the focused assault is going to add a bit to the burst, I'd probably stick with block cap on it until it was on farm (but with lower gear you may need to drop block cap to get enough hp to survive the focused assault in the first place).

For Spine heroic it depends on your role, and 10 vs 25. For almost solo tanking on 10 I'd certainly keep block cap. For what I do on 25 (which is controlling the bloods we kill, taking the amalgamation through them to the plate), the damage intake is lots of fairly small hits from bloods along with some big hits from the amalgamation that can be cooldowned through, so letting a few unblocked hits through isn't that big a deal. The question is though, is gearing a different way going to increase our odds of downing the encounter? From the second plate onwards I don't get to contribute to tendon dps much, so our tendon dps has to be enough without me gearing for hit/expertise or wearing dps trinkets, and given the damage intake is lots and lots of small hits stamina stacking isn't particularly useful. If I were doing the bulk of the kiting I'd probably ensure hit cap vs bloods and max my hp beyond that though.

For Madness heroic you need enough effective health to comfortably survive the impale with whatever cd rotation your raid can provide you. If you can attain this while keeping the Mirror equipped for tetanus so much the better. I couldn't for 25 man, so went with Stay of Execution (57k absorb for Impales) and the best stamina trinket I had available (heroic soulshifter vortex with its horrible proc). This left me below block cap by 7% or so with full stamina gems and stamina flask. More hp (and shadow resistance) is the only way of increasing your chances of surviving tetanus as well. The only dangerous blockable damage in the encounter is the mutated corruption's melee swings following/preceeding getting hit by its crush. There should be more than enough healing overhead in a 25 man raid that even an unblocked melee plus crush isn't particularly dangerous; I imagine it'd be more of a worry in 10 man.

For Windwalk vs Landslide; on most encounters, especially on 25 man, Windwalk procs will get lost in noise. They're more likely to save your life on 10 man, but tank dps is also more relevant to enrage timers on 10 man. The only encounter in current content where I felt Windwalk was a better contribution to our chances of downing the encounter was Warmaster Blackhorn heroic.

Thanks for the detailed answer, gonna redirect our paladin to this post next time.

Regarding weapon enchants - after looking at our logs more thoroughly I realized that most prot paladin damage is magic, hence doesn't get any benefit from +AP effects, so Landslide will hardly provide reasonable DPS increase.

Despite being magical, all of our abilites scale with attack power. Landslide is simmed to be roughly 300 dps increase for t13 gear, which is admittedly hardly game breaking, but neither is 0.7% (on average) dodge.

Landslide dps sim.

I'd just like to add that Yor'sahj is also a fight where using a Prismatic Elixir instead of a flask is beneficial, so you can compensate somewhat by pairing it with a mastery elixir.

I still advocate hitting CTC cap before pushing Stamina for Dragon Soul, because bosses still hit for 60k or more before block. But I also advocate doing that with mastery as much as possible, so you can shed dodge/parry for more stamina.

I don't know what paladins are you referring to, but most top guild tanks are going full stamina for 1 reason only: Heroic Madness of Deathwing. You need a lot of HP to take a 1.2M Impale. That's it, no other reason. It's definetly not good to drop CTC.

I've seen no real reason at all for a prot to try and maximize DPS.

Unless you're in a 10 man with people who aren't performing their best, tanks should focus on survival before anything.

Quite a few tanks put on DPS-optimized sets for certain fights (Ultrax, in particular). I gain around 5k DPS by swapping to that sort of a set (~6% hit, 26 exp, 2T13 prot + 2T13ret), and because of the fight mechanics your survivability isn't all that strained by doing so.

That said, T13 ret is a bad choice for that; you're actually better off with 2T12 prot + 2T12 Ret, assuming you're stacking hit and expertise in that set. The T13 ret bonus gets less valuable as you gain hit and expertise.

<edit> Mistakenly wrote T13 instead of T12. Bolded corrections.

I've been tanking on my prot paladin since TBC. The only thing I can say is a tank should focus on their main role while in a raid. If the group you are in really needs the extra 5k dps you do with dps gear on you're probably in trouble either way. Now, by all means, if you are CTC at 102.4%, reforge your gear anyway you want. I would suggest expertise since it has the highest dps value until it caps at 55. It just pains me to see tanks talenting into useless skills and wearing dps gear in situations where its really not needed. By all means, if trying to raise your dps is that entertaining, feel free to do it. You might want to consider rolling a dps spec or class if thats the case though.

Considering aggro is a joke, you think your role consists entirely on pressing cooldown buttons at the right time? Don't underestimate tank DPS. 2 tanks togheter can do as much damage as a DPS.

A tank should focus on doing whatever they can to increase the chance of killing a boss. In most cases that's by increasing survivability. But when the serious barrier to success in an encounter is a DPS check (Ultraxion, pre-nerf Spine tendons), then you do what you can to help out. 5k extra DPS from a tank, or 10k from both tanks combined, can be the difference between a wipe and a first kill.

I'm not normally one to advocate gearing for DPS, because usually it's not warranted. That doesn't mean you should make blanket statements about it though, because there are definitely cases where it is warranted.

I'm going to go off and assume that Windwalk will still be the one to aim for. Couple of reasons:

1.) You have the 15% movement speed bonus.
2.) Even when CTC capped, the extra Dodge from Windwalk will "push" Block off the CTC table since it has higher priority (The game checks for misses, then dodge and parries, then hits, with hits being divided into normal hits, blocked hits, crits, and crushing blows).

Echoing Ronark's comments, having full CTC just makes your dodge proc ~30% less valuable. Sure, that's less, but Mending just isn't doing much for you at this point.

The breakpoint at which WW pushed ahead of Mending (it basically came down to how much blockable damage the boss did) was roughly t11 normal 10-mans. They were about even then. Knocking WW down for full CTC maybe moves the breakeven point to t11 normal 25-mans. Either way, most folks are well past it. If you're absolutely fine on survivability and are severely struggling to beat enrage timers, then I guess go ahead, but as a raid you're probably better off stacking even more survivability on the tank (if possible) and bump down a healer.

OK, thats what I was after. It really hadn't been addressed and I have seen other paladins running around with other enchants. I'm not worried about engrage timers, especially as the buff continues to grow. I haven't main tanked in a while but I think it was important to address why we'd still use WW even after the CTC cap. Especially for people like myself coming back to main tanking.

Junlex, there was lots of great advice in your post, I appreciate it. I have seen a few folks say what you did about holy shield on Ultraxion, can you explain how we maintain a 100% uptime, what changes with the mechanic?

*edit* Found my answer: Last Defender of Azeroth - Spell - World of Warcraft You can delete my post (sorry ><)

Unlike many of the other threads on this forum, there isnt much discussion on the talents for this spec in the first post.
Could someone elaborate on why "improved judgement" is recommended over "eye for an eye"?
"Eye for an eye" isnt even mentioned but im sure ~12% spell damage recoil yields more threat than 20 yards extra range for judgement.

Having a 30 yd Judgement is a large boost to quality of life. It makes picking up adds much easier - not having to run another 20 yards to hit a mob can be a very big deal.