That's surprising because my impression has been that Paladins are ahead on threat by a reasonable margin mostly due to Judgement of Light.

I do agree that Warriors are causing pretty rough threat problems right now. I have a T6 geared Arms Warrior alt myself and I know that on many fights I have to hold back - unless I get Vigilance from a Protection Warrior. It's funny how something Warrior's whined about for so long is now something I would very much welcome Paladins to have.

Oh yeah, I'm assuming that's gonna get nerfed hard and wasn't using it. But as things are right now, you're right.

Anecdote to be sure, but I'd argue this. Our warrior MT and I have had roughly the same gear for a while now (and lately even more so). Since the patch, we've been able to just cruise through BT (except Illidan...first attempt on him is tonight). Unless I specifically make an effort to not pull aggro, by either waiting to start attacking, bubbling, HoSalv'ing myself, or whatever, I'm pulling threat and he can't do anything about it on taunt-immune targets. And he's definitely not a noob in any way...he earned his spot as our MT by proving himself. It's even worse on mobs that are susceptible to Exorcism or Holy Wrath. I'd say it's just one of those things that's too close to call, though; other people's experiences may be different.

Oh...and that's with JoW.

Cathela, perhaps also the warriors you are comparing with have re-socketed and re-enchanted for strength, while you haven't?

Has there been any calculations on the threat differences between mongoose and potency? I've found plenty of comparisons for the various ranks of spellpower and ap enchants available in wrath, but nothing comparing them with mongoose. I realize that potency will be better for strict threat purposes, but how big is that difference? The haste and extra chance to crit when it procs have to count for something, right?

It just seems odd to me as to why you would go halfway with a weapon with defensive stats, but not a defensive enchant (I know, there is Block Value from the 20 strength, but the proc from mongoose is several percent of extra dodge).

Note: My question is mostly in reference to level 70, though at 80 it might still be applicable - as far as I know there is no new proc based enchant suitable for tanking at level 80.

Zapf, while I acknowledge that Mongoose's AGI is worth several percents of avoidance, my primary issue with it is that the benefit is based on an inconsistent proc.

In contrast, I can gear for unhittable and rotate for 100% Holy Shield uptime such that I'm always getting the full benefit of Potency's ~12 block value.

As far as the AGI's crit contribution, it would only go towards auto-attacks (which do not get RF's threat modifier), Judgements, 5-stack SOV procs (which are extremely small), Hammer of Wrath (which only comes into play much later in the fight) and Avenger's Shield (which only comes into play once every 30s). Without Shield of Righteousness, we just don't have a lot of threat moves that can crit.

Finally, the 2% haste effect doesn't really do anything for SoV.

Speaking semi-empirically from watching the Omen meter on Bloodboil last night, I can tell you that aggro gen is maybe 25-50% improved over a bear. I was pulling about 1700 TPS when attacked, compared to 1100ish for the other two tanks (a somewhat lesser-geared paladin and a comparably geared bear). We don't have any warrior tanks, so I can't give you any numbers there. As far as DPS threat, the only person who was ever able to touch me was our 2k DPS ret paladin when he was in his PvP spec without Fanaticism. Ouch. Even on Horseman runs, as long as I have Sanctuary up and skimp on the Consecrate, I never run out of mana and never come close to losing aggro. In fact, I've taken to not using Consecrate at all except on pulls with 4+ mobs, partly because I'm lazy and partly because the increased killing speed plus the effectiveness of HotR makes it a mana drain that's hardly worth the effort.

Were you holding back at all? I know myself and the other tanks I play with (1 warrior, 1 druid) all sustain something in the 2000-2500 range while being attacked, spiking up over 3k rather frequently. Of course, BB is a quirky fight so I understand why you might not go all out. I certainly can pull off of them if I try (wingslol), but the comparative threat gen of the three classes is much closer than I thought it would be. The exceptions are undead/demon targets which I typically dominate, or caster mobs where I fall behind.

And yes, DPS warriors are nuts now. We have one guy that gets 2-3 salv applications at the beginning of pretty much every boss. Even then it's not always enough when we ask how he still manages to pull aggro and he informs us he landed a 15k execute crit about ten seconds into the fight.

For Bloodboil, I was holding back because my one OT wasn't that well-geared and my other OT had been complaining of aggro gen problems. No wings, no Consecrate, no JoL. In ordinary situations, when my best OT is raiding and we're using JoL, both of us are right about where you say you are. I do think my feral OT's spec isn't optimized for threat gen, so that might explain why she was so far behind.

The way I understand HoS, is it reduces your Total Threat by 10%, so it wouldn't it be better to wait to use it (because your total threat is bigger, so 10% is more)? Unless you have a few Pallies to just chain cast it, then it doesn't matter much.

Also, ask him to wait five seconds before dps .

You're definitely right about getting the most out of a single application, but since he's the only person we need to worry about we just chain cast it on him at the start. Typically our sustained threat is enough to allow him to go nuts for the long run, and it's the spikey damage at the beginning that causes problems. Plus, the cooldown is short enough that if someone starts riding threat later on we can use it again if needed.

And yeah, telling DPS to wait anymore just doesn't mean as much as it used to. Hell, half our pulls see ranged attacking the first target before a tank is even there, and thanks to the charge-in-defensive-stance change they can pretty much unload without worry.

So I've been avoiding posting for a while because I wanted to fully test out the mechanics of our new systems, because I had (obviously) highly different results. The results have been...mixed.

Firstly, yes, I was doing it wrong. Short version, I was depending on Cons far too much, and it is FAR too little of our aggro generation now, and costs far too much mana.

Secondly, while the JoL bug is obviously a bug, it is unreal in terms of aggro generation. Not so much in melee-light 5mans, but it's fairly comical on 25 mans. I had to hand over JoL duty to a ret or Holy pally on KJ to let the feral hold aggro (all dps was far, far below)

Overall, I'm pretty mixed. We definately retain (and perhaps improve on?) our title of 'god of 5mans'. After 8 heroics last night I was suitably impressed- rare drinking, relatively few aggro pulls (more on that in a moment), a speedier pace and a generally smooth running situation. Our AOE aggro seems relatively diminished, though there's a healthy bump to single target.

On the other hand, mana is still quite a concern. On single pulls or even some bosses, I tend to have some limiters. Our threat does link directly to mana, and while I'm remaking my threat gear it doesn't seem to have the same 'oomph' no matter what (does anyone have any experince with using ret pvp crit-immune gear with a shield and 1h for threat gen? That's my next try). I've also not properly regemmed or re-enchanted my gear, because I've been sitting on the fence as to the exact way I want to gem out. In addition, I'm not 100% if the aggro problems I'm having here and there are gear, skill, or the people in question- a mage chain critting with hot streak (dear god I hate instant pyros in the first 10 seconds), a hunter hitting every cooldown before the mob finds me (and of course, not assisting), or a ret pally using Whirly Death off the bat (personal rename for 51 pointer).

On the gripping hand, we don't have 2 primary abilities till 75. Divine Plea handles our mana concerns and is not insignificant aggro. ShoR is our primary threat move, and gives some pretty insane TPS even if it does run at 17% resist (still confused how that number got confirmed, any way I could see the logs?). I'm not doing backflips over live prot pallies but we're not in the dire straits I had thought, nor are we looking in trouble compared to the other tanks at 80, even if our gear choices are a bit odd. Expertise still appears to be a pretty bad stat for us, which is fortunate for myself in particular as all tanking weapons appear to be swords (from a moderately brief perusal of the new loot tables on wowhead).

I'm also loving the new Hand situation. HoSalv and HoSac are in particular glorious. I'm not nearly as wild about Sanc, but that's primarily bitterness that warriors/druids get exponentially more from it than we do, and not anger over the ability itself.

Edit:
Wraithblood, you've got to remember that we're missing our 'big gun' TPS ability at 70, so while we're losing threat from that change we get a pretty nastily high TPS ability come 75-80. I'd also be hardly surprised if they moved ShoR back to ranged hit mechanic and/or buffed it from 100% to ~120% or something.

Yeah, that's about right as far as level 70 goes. For level 80, two things: First, what Oggie said. SotR is a huge amount of threat, so the relative effect of reduced seal damag will be lower at level 80.

Second, you can't work HoW into a level 80 threat rotation without bumping something else out. HotR and SotR are on 6-second cooldowns and Judgement, HS, and Cons are on 9-second cooldowns (well, not exactly, but it works best if you pretend they are). That's enough to fill up all your GCDs, so there's no room for HoW in the standard rotation. That's not to say it's not worth using HoW; it might be worthwhile to switch things up once HoW becomes active to increase threat a bit. But whatever you do, you'll be giving up something else to do it, so HoW isn't a large net threat gain.

Well, SotR isn't just a huge amount of threat, it's also extremely mana-efficient; it's only 4.2% of base mana with GbtL (even less if you pick up Benediction) which makes it cheaper than judgement or HotR. So I think that once you get SotR, you'll find yourself less needing to use the high-cost abilities (Cons in particular is a mana hog) because SotR+HotR+judge+HS alone will leave you very comfortable on threat.

Well, they do get more from BoSanct than we do (e.g., it takes about twice as many procs of BoS to "pay for" a SotR as it does to pay for a Shield Slam) but on the flip side we have a lot of other mana sources -- BoW, JoW, Replenisment, totems -- and they only have one other rage source -- damage dealt. I'm not sure the overall picture is precisely equal, but my experience on the beta is that once you get SotR the mana/threat situation is fine for us.

And yeah, I love the hands now. We have a dps warrior who's terrorizing the threat meters with the deep wounds bug, and it's a lot of fun to just smack a salv on him and watch his threat plummet. Sacrifice is great for any kind of offtanking (e.g., Gurtogg) because not only do you mitigate damage on the MT, you also get SA mana. And since our threat has been changed to work much more proactively, you can actually convert that mana into threat.

And this has been said before and it's pretty obvious, but the decoupling of hands from blessings is a huge improvement. One big drawback of BoP/BoF/BoSac previously was having to worry about what blessing you had up on the target (e.g., do you want to BoSac the tank if it's going to wipe kings? Probably not.) It seems like a small thing, but only now do I realize how much that need for a mental check crippled my usage of situational blessings.

[e] In response to Oggie's edit:

SotR working on a spell-hit basis is dumb, period. Right now RD and SotR are the only abilities we have that use the spell mechanic, which means you can hit-cap everything else at 9% but you have to get to 17% for those two abilities. In the case of RD that's exactly what the glyph is for, so that's cool. But that leaves SotR as the odd man out; you'll either have to live with 8% miss once you've hit-capped everything else, or you'll need to gather another 8% hit just for this one ability.

If they want it to be highly avoidable then just make it subject to all forms of melee avoidance (m/d/p/b) and then we can gear against that with hit and expertise.

(How does Shield Slam work anyway? My primary alt is a prot warrior but I honestly can't remember if I've ever seen Shield Slam parried/dodged or not.)

[e2] Also in response to Oggie's edit:

I'm not so sure we'll see a buff to SotR's damage. At level 80 on the beta I can hit a 2500-point non-crit SotR with just passive BlkVal bonuses and the Mother Shahraz libram, and another ~400 points with the auto-blocker activated, which would be nearly a 6k crit. Without AW, mind you.

That's mostly legacy gear with stacked block value, so it's not necessarily good for any purpose other than producing ZOMG numbers, but it gives you an idea of how strong SotR could be in PvP, and if I were in the devs' position I don't think I'd want to buff its damage at this point (though I could see them adding a higher threat multiplier).

Cathela,

Swapping consecrate for HoW in a 969 rotation seems like an easy way to pick up a big chunk of threat/dps, and by the numbers (I'm not in beta and can't test) HoR might be worth swapping out as well.

However, you're quite correct that ShoR isn't in my rotation on live, and its kind of a huge thing to be missing (as you note, both from a threat/dps standpoint as well as from a "filling out the rotation" stand point).

I'll start posting on this again once we start hitting 80 and I can play with the numbers for a while.

I'm not sure I agree with you there Cathela (re: rage vs mana). I've not raided much at 80 so I will defer to your experience, but while we're both getting 'aggro stuff' from being hit, with the relative cheapness of warrior prot abilities (assuming stuff like FR), I have found that our JoW is simply not always equivilant to autoattack- with of course, the proviso that they choose between higher threat or better rage gen. I don't think BoW makes up the difference, with the secondary issue of needing 3 pally buffs? Our primary is Sanc, our secondary is Kings, and besides hunters as far as I'm aware nobody else needs 3.

Obviously our mana-starved TPS and DPS is considerably higher once we get our 'big gun', and if memory serves shield slam is ranged hit mechanic (which I had thought ShoR was on). Are we 100% sure that it's spell now? I agree it's really stupid that it's spell if its' spell. If they make it scale ever-so-slightly better, and move it to ranged hit I think that might bring us more in line, but I'm honestly not sure. If nobody has test logs or anything I'm going to log over to beta in a while and combatlog mess around with it.

One thing pointed out to me last night was that our tanking rotation, unlike everyone else's tanking rotation/dps rotation/healing rotation, is a hell of a lot less proc based/responsive. This doesn't bug me- though I've not really tanked with the new system nearly enough to know if it will eventually- but does it bother any of the rest of you guys?

edit:
For clarity's sake, I don't feel that SA and rage gen from damage taken are even remotely equivilant, due to the relative cost differential. On the flip side, JoW we can choose to get all the time, as opposed to white hits vs HS/Cleave spam. I think the balance is slightly warrior favored, if not hugely.

Edit 2 for Cath (GO RECURSION):
While I don't disagree, I don't see what else they can really buff without giving us a threat modifier, and frankly I don't want those anymore. We already have a pretty psycho threat modifier on ShoR last I looked at it (overall, including 1.9x + the buff to RF that I cannot for the life of me remember), and I've really prefered most of our threat coming from damage (as warrior threat generally is) with a moderately static modifier. I'm uneasy about our threat modifier on any specific ability coupled with our already-higher 1.9 base (plus whatever modifer is on there for WotLK) increasing our threat dramatically while, as you said, hurting DPS. I get the ShoR (I'm sticking to my acronym!) hitting too hard in pvp, but since it's basically our only hard hitting pvp ability as a full prot spec I'm not sure if that's the biggest deal ever (with 23k+ in decent pvp gear for an average player, 2.9k per hit noncrit, assuming generious gear stacking) isn't exactly as huge as it sounds.

I'm also fairly worried about DPS while OTing (god that sentence hurt to type), as well as of course grinding and farming. It's somewhat balanced by JoL selfheals and that GLORIOUS PW:S ability we get at 80 that I cannot recall the name of, but really I'd like them to tune up damage on a few abilities or seals and lower our threat coefficent enough to keep us in line.

By the way, I'm perfectly aware that warriors are not the other valid tanks. However, I don't feel comfortable enough to do DK comparisions- ignoring the fact they do NOT scale with incoming damage, which is beyond weird- and ferals work with crazy moon logic. So warriors are the only ones I feel seriously well enough versed to compare to.

Oh right. I'm not claiming that HoW isn't worth using as a tank. I think right now my HoW does more damage than a single-target HotR, so if you're running SoV you'd want to use HoW over HotR as you suggest. My point was just that you can't add another ability to an already-full rotation without knocking something else out. So in practice, losing HoW is going to be at least partly made up for by casting something else.

Just for example in my gear HotR hits for ~950 and HoW for ~1100. So the actual damage difference due to HW isn't 1100 damage every 6 seconds, it's 150 damage every 6 seconds, which needless to say is a much smaller amount. There may be other ways to jigger the cycle around to fit HoW in more efficiently, but the point is that no matter what you do, you have to give up something to squeeze it in, which is going to reduce the threat gain from HoW pretty substantially.

Incidentally, I hate this change anyway for other reasons, mainly to do with PvP, soloing, and dps'ing when not tanking. Just so you don't think I'm defending this as "it makes no difference".

Fair point about JoW (especially post-nerf). On the other hand, one thing I didn't mention that works hugely in our favor is the difference between Bloodrage (~2 shield slams per minute with talents) and Divine Plea (around 10 SotRs per minute when you factor in talents and the difference between base mana and total mana). DP by itself basically pays for your primary threat generator.

Again, I'm not going to claim we're precisely equal, and the balance may very well favor the rage-based tanks. But it seems to me that things are close enough for now, and if we turn out to be a bit mana-starved in raids I think we'll have the tools to do all right until the devs can take care of it.

And about the rotations: Yes, it absolutely bothers me. What I find frustrating is that very early in the development cycle the devs said "We know that the warrior threat rotation is way too static and rigid, and we're going to shake that up" so they added the procs and stuff -- and then when they did prot paladins they built us a static and rigid system. In particular they said they didn't like the way Shield Block worked where you just hit it every time the CD came up, so they changed that -- and yet Holy Shield works exactly the same way. Ostensibly it's a dynamic mitigation that you activate when you need it, but in practice it's just a buff you keep up all the time by hitting a button every 9 seconds.

And aside from that, it's still on the GCD, which Shield Block never was. This ties into the points Wrath and I are talking about: Using HoW on a low-health mob you're tanking doesn't help you, but it should, shouldn't it? Tanking a demon or undead doesn't give you very much more threat, because you can't fit Exo and Holy Wrath into your rigid tanking rotation.

One way I could see to improve this would be to dramatically increase the duration of Holy Shield (30 seconds at least, possibly up to 10 minutes like shaman shields), with the same cooldown and same number of charges. Basically, increase your ability to carry unused Holy shield charges. That way, when the cooldown on HS finishes, you actually have to make a decision: Do you need to refresh HS now because most of the charges got used up? Or do you have enough charges still available that you can leave the current HS up and use the GCD to do something else? It's a reactive choice, and you have to respond to the situation at the moment; it breaks up the rotation in interesting ways.

(This might require an increased mana cost, which would be fine; if you're in a situation where you're burning through all the charges in 8 seconds you're probably getting enough mana back from BoS and/or SA that it doesn't really matter.)

[e]:

None of the above should be taken to mean that I don't like the new changes. I like them -- no, I love them -- a lot. A whole lot. I'm absolutely drooling to level up to 80 on live and start tanking Naxx with all the fun new toys. I'm just saying that a year from now, the rigid rotation is what we're going to be complaining about.

And in response to Oggie's latest, my guess is that the limiting factor on allowable damage for us is going to be PvP considerations. Prot paladins were (correctly) considered a joke in PvP in TBC, but the WotLK stuff gives us a lot more toys to play with, and even if prot isn't optimal for PvP now, it probably wouldn't take a whole lot to make us overpowered.

Why would double pene- oh, right, Divine Plea (sorry, in guild meme that's getting a LOT of use). That's a good point, bloodrage is sort of DP's bitch, but not having it on live is more a source of frustration than anything else. The threat gen from that is roughly .5x5500x.25, versus um....75 (in terms of pure power gain threat), regardless of the threat we get -from- the abilities.

Actually that's pretty brilliant about holy shield- you're ALWAYS going to be burning through the charges if you need to refresh early, by definition, and that's trivially more than enough mana to refresh HS. Bump it up to near Cons level of cost, and you have to make a very active decision. It's high TPS, good mitigation, but costs a ton- so do you HS or not?

I still think we need more things to choose to do, but as I said, it doesn't bother me much. But in a year from now...who knows?

Also the insanity of Sanc is glorious in undergeared instances, despite my issues with it comparatively. I wear full SWP gear, and I pull faster than the healer can keep up with, and am easier to heal than his spirit regen. Glorious. Man I'd love a 15 or 20 second CD on Avenger's shield, or again, a glyph for it. It's simply nutty how quickly I can move. I ended up running most of the heroics with a hunter and we traded AS and MD every other pull, eating mobs alive. Untill we ran into the brick wall of Sethekk Hall mobs that silence and had to actually slow down.

Pick up Glyph of the Wise and when you get low on mana, pop Seal of Wisdom and HotR it all back. That's been working wonders for me in five mans.

Thanks. Earlier I was thinking that HS should be a long buff that just regenerated its own charges passively at a small cost per charge, but this version leads to this need to make decisions, which I think the devs would like, and it would be a very easy change to make.

I agree with you about liking more DPS better than more threat, and it seems like generally the devs want to do it that way whenever possible. I'm just saying that if I were a dev I'd be worried about PvP damage scaling on SotR (and Shield Slam for that matter) and would be real hesitant to buff their damage.

As far as non-tanking dps, I'm finding it pretty easy as an offtank to maintain a little more than 50% of the MT's threat with RF up, which keeps me a bit ahead of the dps. If I didn't have RF up, my threat would be down around 20% of the MT's threat; when I get SotR maybe that'll go up to about 30%? Compared to dps classes doing 45% of the MT's threat, that doesn't sound too shabby to me, but we'll have to see.

And I'm using the acronym "SotR" even though it's plainly wrong, because I believe the name of the spell should be "Shield of the Righteous". This is my quixotic attempt to get other people using the same acronym in hopes of forcing the devs to change the name through popular pressure.

So I threw Avengers Shield at the two mobs in front of Selin Fireheart today and it bounced up and pulled him.

That was interesting.

Avenger's shield has had it's bounce range -highly significantly- increased.

Also, turns out that when you're attempting to hold aggro, use the highest rank of cons and not be a goddamn moron (been using rank 3 for the past, um, 3 weeks?)