Yeah, I hear ya. I'm not so much saying anything should change, but that we're looking at beta right now so things might change. I personally would love to see melee GCD lowered by haste since warriors/rogues are primarily limited by rage/energy anyway, but I admit I'm more biased since my warrior is my PvP toy rather than trying to clean up ideal rotations for prot/ret cycles for a paladin.

These issues are getting brought up often by posters in that thread already. Repetiton won't hurt; make it clear that these are important!

But also, I would especially encourage people to post if they have points to make outside of the "consensus" issues. For example, I made these points, which have all been discussed here or in the general Paladin WotLK thread, but which I haven't seen really on the WoW forums:

• Shield of Righteousness would be better called "Shield of the Righteous". Seems like a small point, but IIRC they did actually change the name of a warrior talent based on feedback from testers (Xaviera suggested "Imp. Sunder" -> "Puncture" I believe) and I'd like to avoid spending the next several years using "ShR" as an acronym instead of "SotR".
• Shield of the Righteous needs a sound effect and a much better animation.
• Hammer of the Righteous needs a better casting sound and animation, and needs to have the primary range made equal to the bounce range.
• Conviction in Tier 1 Ret would be really neat and would open up a lot of options for everyone.
• Right now we have lots of cooldown-locking and rigid rotations, so taking Holy Shield off of the GCD would be kinda nice.

If anyone has other "non-mainstream" points they'd like to make, post them here and I'll see about putting them up in the thread.

Cathela, what about current tank gear itemization? Is that a legitimate concern?

From the "fun" standpoint, being unable to hold aggro is definitely unfun, and so is having to replace all your gear much quicker than everyone else simply because the new stuff is has the "correct" stats.

Now, a cursory pass at the math established that Tankadin TPS is definitely going up even after the new mechanics hit, but as with Warrior TPS, we have no idea if the increase is enough to account for the new DPS.

Of course, Blizzard has always maintained that feel is more important than numbers, which can always be adjusted, and I agree, but I'm genuinely worried that they might be getting the "wrong" numbers if we're using incorrectly itemized gear at 70.

One thing that concerns me about the way the prot tree currently looks is the total lack of anything to do when not MTing. There has been a consistent message that Blizzard wants tanks to be able to do something else, and so far the feral and DK seem like they fit the bill. They both have to make talent sacrifices to be optimized tanks, but both can clearly do solid (though inferior to full dps spec) damage. Protection warriors can already do some amount of damage when dual wielding, but right now prot paladins are incredibly gimped.

Either they want prot pallies to heal when not tanking or they want us to dps. If they want us to heal then either a total tree overhaul is needed or they need to add some absolutely ludicrous healing ability in the last couple tiers of prot. Touched By the Light is fine, but it by no means makes a prot pally a acceptable backup healer, it merely elevates us to garbage instead of hopeless. Given that there simply aren't any talents in prot at the moment that help healing at all barring TBTL, that late talent would have to be shockingly powerful to make us reasonable.

The better (and easier) choice is to make us dpsers when not tanking. Since they want tanks to do more damage this would be much more straightforward to implement because many of the talents we take could be useful for both roles, unlike most healing based talents. One huge barrier to that is the lack of (who would have thought it would be PROT asking for this!) threat reduction. If we are intended to use a sword and board to dps with we would be capped at something like 65% of the dps of a regular dpser just due to the high threat nature of our abilities and the lack of 30% threat reduction.

I LOVE the idea that it would be a strong choice to have a prot pally dps with sword and board. In many fantasy/historical movies shields are used to smash faces, and this could hold true for PVE dps. Using our Shield and Hammer abilities along with judgements we could (in theory) put out quite a beating, but even if our dps could get up to 65% of a real dpser, we would be brutally threat capped, which means we are really subpar. My napkin math leads me to believe that prot paladins will be able to hit about 60% of ret paladin damage with what we have now, and if the tree is changed to incorporate more dps oriented talents I surely expect that we will exceed that threat cap amount handily with a Hammer/Shield/Judge rotation.

Given the treatment the warriors prot tree has been given I do anticipate substantial changes to merge mitigation abilities and add in more dps options for a prot paladin, which should hopefully catapult us up to the 75% range. 75% of a dpser while not tanking isn't blowing anybody's mind or stealing a rogue's raid spot, but it sure would feel like we have something to contribute if we aren't tanking. It would also mean that protadins could actually solo/farm reasonably with whatever dps plate they can manage to collect without being forced to grind against melee mobs that come in packs.

In short, we need threat reduction available to a prot paladin. I don't advocate talenting it in but rather just changing the way paladin threat works. The inherent -threat on paladin spells, prot threat ceilings and Fanatacism are clunky at best. They could be easily fixed by simply having a -30% threat modification on all paladin abilities across the board with RF removing that (just as it does now for ret pallies) and adding the threat component it has currently. This would solve threat issues for ret paladins at low levels, fix prot pallies threat ceiling issue and deal with the strange -50% threat on heals that we have now. It would be a rewrite of paladins base mechanics, but it seems fairly intuitive (and in fact much like battle/defensive stance is for warriors) and would solve this problem neatly.

Edit: Prinsesa, they have already changed the level 70 Enhancement gear on the beta realm to use AP instead of Str because of the new enhance str and agil to AP conversions. I have no reason to think they won't just make all of our spellpower into str on current gear along the same lines.

I think so. Posted it in the thread, along with some opinions on SoJ.

I have to assume you didn't read what I posted. Obviously you aren't running RF while trying to dps. Obviously having no abilities that make extra threat would help. Neither of those things has anything at all to do with the fact that even if all our abilities had no extra threat we would be capped at 70% of a regular dpser's threat. That is a rather low cap, and means that a prot paladin is hardcapped at pretty bad dps no matter how well they play or how good their gear is, which is a problem to my mind.

You may not have raided as ret when we had no threat reduction in that tree, but I did. I remember being absolutely capped in DPS because of threat during an entire boss fight and looking at WWS afterwards and seeing myself dead last of the DPSers.

That is simply not a good way to run things, particularly when all 3 of the other tanking classes get very strong threat reduction! Battle stance, cat form and DK tier 1 talents give them from 20-30% threat reduction in the 'dps form' and there is no compelling reason we should not have the same option. We currently have the only tank spec that has this handicap and I am not at all sure that blizzard realizes it. Currently prot dps is so hilariously low that we can't pull aggro if we are running RF while dpsing, so they well might not have noticed this lack.

Do you seriously think that it is somehow better than prot paladins don't have a 'low threat' option like every other tank?

What exactly is the point of some sort of threat reduction for a prot pally, when we currently can't even put out enough DPS for it to matter at all?

Maybe if HotR was usable with a 2-hander, it'd be a legitimate concern, but I just can't see why you're worried about threat reduction to compensate for a hypothetical situation of a Prot Paladin, trying to DPS, being threat capped (which, with a half-decent tank, is currently impossible).

If a paladin is not specced holy, and is not tanking, why does everyone assume we have to heal, because we have a heal button? Warriors don't run around bandaging, Druids don't run around casting HoT's. Combined with the fact that all of our healing abilities are deep holy, off healing will forever remain a joke without a massive amount of crit, and holy gear equipped, without a significant revamp. The Healing crit bonus is nice, except for the fact that crit as prot is well, a joke. Its like congratulations, you just crit for 3000 overheal, because you don't have lights grace and someone beat you to the heal.

As someone posted before, I would much prefer to see paladins turning into a sword and board DPS when not tanking a mob, that way if you are an extra tank (I.E. Illidan flame tank) you have an option to just break out a 2-hander since you can change that in combat, or if there's talents there, just sword and board DPS. That way, if you're in the middle of combat, and an add gets loose, you can still pick it up, instead of being "whoops I'm in holy gear, you're SOL." Giving us more "unique" sword and board mechanics would also make PvP as prot exciting. I already enjoy it as is, and am greatly looking forward to abusing my 1500 block value set when ShR becomes available.

Right now in a fight such as Felmyst, in phase 1 I just stand on her foot with a JoL up, spamming exorcism and consecrate to make use of my infinite mana. It would be nice to actually be useful, instead of doing 200 dps and looking like I'm productive. I always loved the dual wielding shield idea that float around, because while they might be wildly outrageous, it shows how much emphasis the paladin class has shield wise. Oh and I would love to see something like holy shield from Diablo II animation effect when you have holy shield active. I loved that graphic.

I don't think a healing "downtime" ability for prot is even worth attempting to make viable, because of the reasons I stated above. With Blizzard pushing strength now, DPS only makes sense(Especially since we'll likely be grabbing Divine strength instead of Divine intellect)- It increases our threat, while also making use of the current gear we have. I'm not exactly fond of having to wait for 2 tier tokens, just to improve my healing set because I'm not needed as prot for X fight. Rogues get to fight over a piece of DPS gear, and can out bid me without even flinching with their DKP pool(This is just an example, I don't try to steal dps loot from rogues obviously, but the same can be said for priests/shamans on healing loot), because I spend twice as much for double sets. God forbid I try to make a ret set too. I just wait until its being sharded to nab that stuff.

This is exactly what I was talking about, though. Threat is not currently the limitation to Prot DPS. It's simply the fact that our spec is specifically currently designed with low DPS...and THAT is our limiting factor at this point in time. Once our actual, raid-buffed DPS goes up, then we can take a look and see what we have to work with. The possible threat cap component is NOT a factor at all in our DPS, or lack thereof, and never will be until we can actually do 70% of an actual specced-for-it DPS'r.

Oh, not only is the actual DPS of our spec-available spells low, we're also mana-limited on top of that, and no current changes have addressed that. Even if somehow we managed to put out 75% or so of someone else's DPS for the first minute or so, after that, if we're not tanking or somehow else taking damage constantly, then we're dry of mana and doing approximately worthless DPS.

So, what does this mean? Current, actual designed-for DPS is our first factor, lack of mana regeneration (and don't say Replenishment...go ask Ret how they feel about it) is the 2nd. IF, and ONLY if, they actually fix both of those, then we can start looking at threat as being a cap. For various reasons, though, even if we do approach that point, I highly doubt that we can expect to do do much more than 75% DPS of someone specced specifically for it. The only caveat to that is if they somehow make an actual Prot DPS line on the order of the Feral tree for Druids, where we'll be forced into a choice between more DPS or more tanking.

No one is suggesting that our dps is currently high enough that threat reduction is mandatory. However, I would prefer to go into the xpac with a full toolkit. We don't want a situation where the devs fail to notice this glaring inconsistency, fix our dps, and then we are threatcapped because we didn't make sure it was a priority. Obviously we need more buttons to hit (or more dps talents built into the tree) to get our damage to reasonable levels, but why not set ourselves up all the way?

I doubt very much that anyone really wants to get our dps fixed and then wait 2-3 patches into Wrath to get a threat reduction fix. We all want to do passable dps asap, (3.0.2 launch day ideally) and part of that package is threat reduction. Prot dps will take a monstrous leap forward with Hammer and Shield coming into our arsenal, we don't actually need a total overhaul, just more dps talents to work in and we can be fine. None of that matters though if we just get threat capped anyway, which is the issue I think they may well have no idea about. Clearly the devs know we need more dps, have they ever mentioned threat? If not, we need to remind them.

Not to nitpick, but Paladins without Fanaticism have a base 100% threat modifier and have to DPS in melee range, so they'd be able to rip aggro from a tank even if their DPS is far below that of a Rogue, Moonkin, etc.

I go agree though that the aim should be the ability to do a non-trivial amount of DPS when we're not tanking.