Indeed. And with all the changes to mana regeneration going into effect, this was absolutely vital in order for Prot to feel more complete. We could have existed without it, of course, but I really like the idea of a full mana bar every 50 incoming attacks, plus mana regen from other sources. It still doesn't affect mana loss when being placed in an OT position, but that *may* work itself out elsewhere.

The "mana while not taking damage" issue applies more to 5 and perhaps 10 mans when you outgear the place. In these situations one might not have replenishment which leave the paladins with JoW which is at most 0.5% mana per second. A HoTR/SotR/HS/Judgement rotation is still 3.66% mana per second.

How does the mana regen of SoW now work? (cant get onto beta)

Reason being, in a raiding situation as an offtank, one would drop HS from the rotation and just used judgement/HotR/Sotr. This would only use 2.56% mana per second. Replenishment and JoW should reduce this down to 1.56%. A offtanking paladin could seal swap between SoW and SoV with only a smallish drop in threat output. This may cover him.

I don't think seal swapping would work. SoV needs to be refreshed every ~11 seconds, so you'd have to recast SoV every 10 seconds and then recast SoW, you'd just increase the mana usage instead of lowering it, since they both cost 14% of your base mana.

Well, there's also the role that weapon speed plays. Hammer of the Righteous uses normalized attack power, so the speed doesn't matter a whole lot for the actual HotR damage, but if you're using SoR, the speed of the weapon directly affects how large a chunk of SoR you get on a HotR strike. One reason why the Titansteel Guardian is so good threatwise is because it's a caster weapon that also has a slow attack speed.

This is why if you look at PsiVen's charts, you can see that slow melee weapons and fast caster weapons have similar threat values, but the slow caster weapons tend to drastically outclass other weapons at the same ilevel.

It's also fantastic for soloing; the more mobs you pick up, the more mana you get back. Basically it means if you grind 3+ mobs at a time, you can use SoR instead of SoW. It also means stacking avoidance is a nice way to go for soloing.

You could fit a seal-swap into a standard 9/6 rotation pretty neatly. You'd have to replace Consecration to do it, but casting a seal every 9 seconds costs less than casting Cons every 9 seconds.

Not so fast! Why would a warrior get BoSanct? Because you have both a prot warr and a prot pally.
Why would balancing the gains given by BoSanct to different classes matter? Because you'd have to choose one or the other for a particular fight.
Why would a warrior be chosen over a paladin, assuming identical gear, for this particular fight? Probably to ramp up the single target threat on whatever that is.
Why would a pally stay prot for this boss then? Because BoSanct's rage gain is awesomesauce enough to be worth it.

The rage component of this spell gets my Tarutaru Seal of Approval-Wooval.

Is this actually true/tested? My observations loosely indicated that HotR had not been normalized, and the spreadsheet reflects non-normalized AP currently.

I tested it with two low-level weapons with different speeds from the vendor in IF near the bank and found that it gave identical damage for both within a few points. This was 1-2 builds ago.

[Club] and [Shortsword] were the weapons, IIRC.

How haste works in Beta is everything that you cannot cast while silenced GCD is affected by it, while melee abilities like HotR and CS are not affected.

I doubt this will change, since it could unbalance Warriors and Rogues.

Good point about crit, and actually I'd been thinking along similar lines that I'd like to have access to a bit more crit. A crit ShR or HotR is fun.

Prot warriors have easy access to crit talents (Cruelty is tier 1 Fury). While I can see the argument that Conviction is more powerful because it gives melee and spell crit now, I still think it would be nice to have it on Tier 1 of Ret. I also think it would end up better for Holy, since it wouldn't force a choice of Conviction vs BoK, but that's for the general paladin thread.

The haste situation is tricky to theorycraft, because of the cooldowns and because of the slack in Holy Shield spacing, and I want to figure out exactly how it works before I start trying to wrap my head around it.

Shaman have the melee crit talent in Tier 2, and Druids have it Tier 3 or 4 since the classes are not "pure" you have to go higher than Tier 1 to get that type of talent. So it most likely will not be moved.

The best hope of for Protection is Parry to be Tier 1, buffing Benediction somehow into Tier 2, so you have a 5/61/5 build for tanks.

The best thing for all Paladins is to make BoK baseline, so that all specs can give the class-defining buff without "wasting" 10 points.

Tilted, nothing has to change.

If it's a spell, the merged haste rating will affect its GCD.
It it's a physical ability, then it won't.

This is already happening with Paladins getting Bloodlusted - your Seal, Judgement, Consecration, Exorcism, etc. GCDs go down, but not your Crusader Strike.