Ya, I'm going to need to turn off the amount of floating combat text spam, because on multi-mobs it was hard to figure out where I was in relation to my target. I do like the sound though, sounds like I'm bashing the mobs, which is exactly what I want to be doing.

Instant cast avenger's shield is the awesome. So useful, from trash, to bosses, to pickups on sinister reflections. Was having too much fun with it last night.

Edit to avoid a double-post:
This is wrong, as has been proven earlier in the thread. First, reckoning is normalized on anything above a 2.0 swing( you hit fewer times, but hit harder each of the times ). Second, you don't need to fit 5 swings in the duration, you only need to swing 4 times. Take the following timeline:
0.0s - you swing. 0.5s reckoning procs. 2.0s - swing, 4.0s -swing, 6.0s - swing, 8.0s -swing, 8.5s -reckoning would drop. Anything below 2.0 seconds though, and you're swinging more than there exist procs, and "wasting" dps.

I have to agree that I was somewhat frustrated with HotR sometimes. It seems as though it's an ability greatly affected by lag as well because of its limited range. The floating combat text from Blizzard is also rather confusing when AoE tanking, so I replaced it with a combat text scroller which helped a LOT in seeing my incoming and outgoing damage.

Also, for those of you with Reckoning, I assume you took it because you do not have kings? I've never actually had reckoning because of the whole inverse scaling bit.

Make use of the current Judgement of Light while we have it. I just topped healing meters on Brutallus with 4.2k HPS.

[Edit] I used JoL on Felmyst and out TPS'd our tank and everyone else just standing still. No one caught up till it wore off.

Nods - that's where I'm at, just more succinctly, thanks
Sorry to creep this back in, but when I saw the use of a 1.6s wpn over a 2.6s for Reckoning, I had to comment.
[And make sure I hadn't missed anything, myself]

As I level-up my AoE Pally alt, it's BoSanc and Reckoning for me - I also skip Anticipation.
However if you're tanking more primetime groups/ramping up avoidance right, this makes less sense.
Even in 3.02 now though (and at 60 primed to grind) I simply avoid avoidance for now.

I'm under the personal opinion Holy should be taking Kings, but we'll see how well that pans out :}
[Noting that the Holy tree is the one I've watched/kept up with the least]

I believe ret pallys are actually in the best position to take Kings. Holy pallys at 80 will likely dive into ret for crit.

Not at 70 we aren't.. At 80, I'd agree. We can expect the holies to grab imp Might, so kings is a natural choice. Plus it helps us reach for imp HoJ ;-)

Huh. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong. Mages and hunters can still catch me, which is...worrysome, and I've been praying for ShoR/Divine Plea.

Going to have to invest in JoL more often, I've been using JoW.

JoL is entirely worth using, especially in melee-heavy 25-man groups. I led Gruul healing meters and the melee said that they could stand in the cave-ins the whole time. I was also maintanking and had a roughly 50k threat lead on a warglaive rogue and the offtank (a feral druid)... and they both have T6, while I only have one piece and some offset T6 quality pieces mixed with some T4 and T5 and a King's Defender. Our threat is absolutely through the roof right now with JoL up.

Sorry if I posted something inaccurate, it was just my understanding of the ability (apparently a bit flawed).

Surely the advantage of reckoning is more based around the seal damage than it is around the white damage?

Edit:
I didn't choose [The Unbreakable Will] over [Rising Tide] purely based on the fact that I believed reckoning to be more effective on the fast weapon. The main reason was that the threat gain seemed negligible, and when you are finishing boss fights 200k threat above the DPS, it seemed worth investing more in avoidance. The believed reckoning advantage was just a bonus. I would still go for [The Unbreakable Will] as a better tanking weapon in 3.0.2

While I totally get the added threat, I wonder about the healing meters used - they ignoring JoL overheals?
I'm also wondering if this is providing [the same] threat to the Pally even when characters are full hp?
[If not, might suggest players using damage-self effects, and this shining even moreso in enemy AoE damage fights]

I can see why it'd be a great asset to the raid, I'd just be surprised if the 'effective' heals from this beats out effective healers, numerically.

[And Healers should still remain comfortable, obviously even terrific JoL love isn't as important as the big spike heals, particularly for the MT ]

There seems to be a lot more group mana options lately and regularly heals are always good, but has anyone compared JoW to JoL for threat generation now?

This is the WWS for Brutallus kill I mentioned being top of healing with 4.2k HPS. As you can see, it shows 96% overheal so you can get a more realistic view of the actual healing JoL did.

They already nerfed it somewhat, SoL and JoL are healing for half of their listed tooltip values on live now.

Also, for the person saying that Mages/Hunters can catch up to them on threat, it really all depends on the situation. On single targets, I've had SOME problems early on if the Mages/Hunters are careless and/or get a string of lucky crits, but if I really tried (Avenging Wrath at the start, Righteous Weapon Coating, etc.) then they never really got above 70% of my total threat.

It'll be fixed once Judgement procs are working as they should be, in other words, with a 4 second internal cooldown for the person triggering the Judgement. Currently we're at the point that your average dual wielder is at 6 or 7 procs in a 4 second period, and while a large part of that is overhealing (Though it depends on the fight), that's still a lot of extra threat that wouldn't be there if Judgements were working properly.

If you have 8 people trigger Judgement of Light, and the cooldown is back in, and you have it healing for 350, the threat numbers aren't quite as high as they are now. You'd be doing 2800 healing every 4 seconds, or 700 healing per second, which is a base 350 threat per second, with Paladin healing threat being halved a second time, so 175 base threat per second. If we further modify this by Righteous Fury and the baked in Salvation, we come to 475 threat per second from Judgement of Light.

That's still fairly high for a "passive" side benefit of something you're doing in your tanking rotation anyway now I think about it, so it might get changed so that healing from Judgement of Light is not affected by Righteous Fury, or (more likely) that Judgement of Light healing will generate no threat.

Judgement of Wisdom's mana return also generates threat, though it doesn't get as much help from Righteous Fury as Judgement of Light does. It is completely reliable for threat in fights which don't involve your melee getting constant damage though.

Oddly enough, when I tested JoW on the Beta, it didn't receive any threat modifiers. No matter what I had equipped or buffed, JoW procs gave me 0.5*mana in threat every time. RF, Baked-in-Salv, and 2% to gloves all had no effect. I need to check it on live sometime probably and see if it matches Beta.

Shouldn't your ret pally be the one judging light though? Doesn't it scale further with their high attack power?

That's interesting, I didn't actually properly test that, I just expected the baked-in Salv to affect all threat generation. That would explain why Judgement of Wisdom seems somewhat less good in practice then in theory, I just assumed it was due to the proc rates being strange currently which was making Judgement of Light compare much better, as opposed to slightly better like I was expecting it to do in theory.

With the current proc rate it doesn't really matter, and not all guilds have a(n active) Ret Paladin. Ret Paladins are also one of the other reasons I see Judgement procs being changed so they don't generate threat, as while the extra threat generated is extremely nice as a Prot Paladin, it's the opposite for a Ret Paladin.

HotR can be cast while silenced. Not sure about ShoR, though.

Only Hotr can be cast while silenced on the current beta build. It would be nice if they included Holy shield in that list as well but I doubt that'll ever happen. It seems like the only reason Hotr is castable while silenced is because it's an instant ranged attack and not really a spell like HS is.

Anyone have any good suggestions for an addon and configuration of the addon to enhance visibility of incoming damage?

I do use Parrot (an SCT-like mod) for this, and currently have it configured to only show hits against me over 1000 and damage I do that is over 500 or so, but still have trouble knowing what exactly is happening to me when I think it matters.

I'll give you an example - Illidan flame tanking. I generally am trying to move back out of the flames that appear under me just enough to no longer take damage, but no farther, so that my kiting is slow (allowing flames to dissipate well before I go back over ground previously covered).

However, with all of the damage incoming during phase 2, I really have a hard time telling if I'm just past that edge of the flame or not. It'd be nice to be able to see, at a glance, the last 8-10 major damage sources that hit me, how long ago they hit me, and watch the next few come in.

Perhaps there is no better way than to either set up my combat log to show only what happens to me and look all the way down there, or just keep Parrot configured the way it is and know exactly what ability name to look for and try to catch it before it fades, but....I wonder if some of the tanks here might not have a more clever or elegant solution.

I simply use SCT and look out for blaze damage ticks. SCT shows the icon along with the damage, and the ticks are fairly frequent, so it's pretty easy to see when you're still taking damage.

The trick for me is that I use a HUD and have my SCT go around my HUD - and damage to me always happens to my left. That way I don't have to move my eyes very far and I know what to look for.

I've used SCT for TBC, and just watch the floating combat text for visual cues. For AoE tanking, this can be rather a lot (and since the patch I can hardly see anything, need to adjust some settings ), but I found it great for stuff like flame tanking, where it adds an icon and a color to the floating text. Makes it really easy to identify the size and source of incoming damage.

As for a history, I'd suggest using Eavesdrop and setting it to only show incoming damage, that'll give you a little graphical combat log that you can place someplace convenient on your screen.

I suspect that you just need to reconfigure Parrot. If you're using the defaults, then you have all incoming damage, heals, etc scrolling through one curve; not only is it kind of spammy, but with so many different event types, it's easy to miss aberrations within one type (such as unexpected damage being taken).

The way I've got it set up is to split it into four scroll areas. I think it's more meaningful to split incoming events into beneficial effects (dodge,parry,healing,absorb,resist,etc) and damage taken. The beneficial effects are spammy and scroll by too fast to really follow, but I don't need to follow those, I just need to know that they're happening. Damage taken, on the other hand, fountains off the other side. If something exceptional happens in that area, it's very easy to notice.

Also, in addition to setting minimums for damage taken to display, you can throttle events so that if multiple happen with a time frame, they'll merge together. i.e. throttle to 1 second, and three hits for 323 within a second will display as "-969 (3 hits)", which also makes it easier to track. It will of course only merge events of the same type; normal melee hits will merge, crits or crushes aren't included. A fireball and a frostbolt won't merge. etc. When you have melee hits messages steadily appearing once per second, and all of a sudden a string of fire damage messages come up, it's obvious. Between that and Bigwigs, I find it hard to miss what's going on.