Well our offtank/prot dps cycle (as in dps once your mob is dead for fights like karathress/keal) uses about 1.2% of our base mana per second as worldie calculated. So to stay mana neutral we need to take about 12% of our base mana as damage per second to regen through spiritual attunement. I recall seeing that paladins will have about 4.5k base mana at 80 but for the life of me can't find it. Going off 4.5k base mana that works out to be 540dps. For an off tank that takes damage thats not bad at all considering BoS will be returning a good amount as well, but if you are just dpsing thats a fair bit of fire to stand in, although not as bad as I was fearing. If you are really hurting for mana you can stop using one of judgment, SotR, or HotR and be almost mana neutral while still doing reasonable damage and having some buttons to hit which is a huge improvement.

edit: Mostly beaten for the mana consumption. Using Theras' numbers (which look right to me) thats 412 dps we need to take to stay even, or 230ish with blessing of wisdom or mana spring totem. That works out pretty well for us. Taking reasonable damage we can even drop consecrates from time to time.

So here's another subject: Ghostcrawler has said that defensive stance and the like have gotten a bonus to threat baked in to make up for the lack of salv. Have we seen this with RF or our abilities yet? I'm not in beta and I don't remember seeing any patch notes or the like about it but I may have just missed it.

Second are seals and RF still dispellable? Considering that seals are much more expensive now and RF has always been expensive and is both our threat and mitigation stance its a real kick in the junk that they can be knocked off rather easily. Its looking a bit like prot could be fun in bg pvp but being unable to seal and losing mitigation so easily is a real pain. This is even worse for holy since it can be pvp viable but can't pick up sanctified seals. Also some bosses love to purge RF like in old hillsbrad which makes tanking as a pally a real disadvantage until you outgear it, and now that seals are 14% base mana its even worse. I forget if HS is dispelable but that would add insult to injury. Druids and warriors don't need to worry about getting knocked out of bear for or def stance, or even worry about it running out in mid fight,. The fact that we do doesn't add any balance or interest to the game, just frustration. Changing these to be undispellable would let blizzard try new things with bosses that dispel without seriously dicking over paladin tanks.

Has blizzard given a reason why RF isn't a stance or is dispellable? It seems to be one of those things like weapon skill thats sticking around for no good reason other than that its always been that way.

Also 2 mins on seals seems like its there just to be there. Its a very small mana cost over its duration (.117% of base mana per second) so any sustaining build will be able to afford it. It strikes me as roughly akin to a shaman's weapon imbues where it should last a long time and not be dispellable.

And yeah I think everyone has forgotten to redo RF before a pull or had it run out mid fight and and had some sort of horrific wipe where the healers are constantly pulling agro.

Blizzard never gave a answer to why it's dispellable.
The only reason i can think of is because holy and retri can use Imp RF for PvP.

Blizzard did not want to make a "stance" for Protection at the beginning (Paladin used Seal of Fury to get aggro then), and Righteous Fury was added in the Paladin patch to cover the removal of Fury.

Since then, they didn't want to mess with spell, since the magic buff Righteous Fury is helpful in PvP and the devs like that players have to rebuff every so often.

You have any numbers to show that we need consecrate to do decent threat? By the look of it HotR, SotR, and judgment will do the majority of our single target threat. All of those scale very well with strength and by the look of it strength will be abundant on tanking gear.

Well to be more accurate, these numbers are from my spreadsheet with approximately my current setup at 80:

ShoR: 935 TPS
SoV: 905 TPS
JoV: 511 TPS
Cons: 427 TPS
IHS: 220 TPS
HotR: 182 TPS

Without Holy Shield we are performing at 93%, without Consecration we're down to 80%. These numbers mean it might be acceptable to drop Consecration, but keep in mind that our normal threat here is over 3k TPS. A bit more than would be expected, and SoV/ShoR are the most likely targets of a reduction.

Well 80% threat while not being hit doesn't seem that bad. Anyone have numbers for what warriors/bears/dk can do while they aren't taking regular damage?

Also what level gear are you wearing to get those numbers? 80 blues or SWP purples (and new or old version of BC gear since its a pretty big change)? 182 tps for HotR is pretty lackluster for a 51 point talent that doesn't have any secondary effect.

No, I haven't yet taken a look at any changes to coefficients in the last build or so.

Rasczak: Updated SWP gear with a few blues and 6 80 epics. I'll try and get some proper raid buffed figures to go with when I find the new coefficients.

By the way, a recent blue post stated in passing that the next revision of Divine Plea will be "more like Blood Rage than Evocation" which may be exactly what we're looking for here.

I find quite interesting that if we are doing over 3k TPS, we are actually also generating 1500+ DPS while tanking.
That's not exactly "low".
And since our TPS depends on damage, i expect our DPS going up even more in later tiers. A rather amusing change from the horribly low DPS we do at the moment.

Xav recently posted in a Naxxramas thread that he was doing 1300 DPS while tanking and the full Sunwell geared DPS were at 10-20% of his threat. In another, he said, self buffed (read: with Battle Shout on) he was about to put out 4000 TPS on a five man boss and guessed that in a 25 man raid environment he could hit 6000 TPS.

I know this is in regards to Warrior's and not Paladin's and, to a degree, conjecture, but it should give a little indication of what we can expect to do if they're really going to keep us as balanced as they say.

I agree that it does seem excessive but he also added that it made tanking feel fun. To use his terminology, building threat didn't feel like a "sub job"; mobs were just on you and you had fun using abilities outside of TBC's strict threat rotations without worrying that someone was going to leap frog you on threat.

Remember that Blizzard said they want you to be able grab some random tank you don't know and not have to worry about whether he's going to hold threat in a Heroic PUG. The numbers do seem at the extreme end of each spectrum but I have no doubt that truly exceptional tanks will always have ways to shine through even if things stay as they are now.