Part of that is just the fun of seeing big numbers on your screen while you're tanking. They've said they want to increase tank dps, and it sounds like they have, and I think it's a good thing. Making tanking fun that way will hopefully encourage more people to try it.

That said, you don't need to be doing five times the threat of your dps to be able to have fun.

Are you saying he was generating 5-10 times more threat than his DPS? As in, they were at (for example) 2000 TPS and he was at 10000 TPS? (This is what it sounds like you are saying, but it seems absurd.)

Or, are you trying to say that he was 10-20% ahead of his DPS on threat, as in they were at 2000 (for example) TPS and he was at 2500 TPS? (This would seem to make more sense.)

5x the dps' threat is pretty absurd and will probably be fixed. Remember there are some classes that are doing about 4x the dps of other classes which blizzard has said is unintentional. I don't think a major patch has come out since they started their dps balance pass. I figure we will see numbers going all over the place for a while before they get into a final state, and I figure they won't even bother with tanking until they have dps in a place they like.

I think thats whats more important is the general mechanics and feel of prot at the moment, and from what I've heard I'm optimistic about it. I've been bringing up off tanking/dps since thats what I've been worried about but its looking rather solid. The change to divine plea is also promising and could mostly eliminate our mana issues. I'm content to wait for the next major push before dong any more bitching.

My open question now is how does HotR actually play? By PsiVen's numbers it seems rather underwhelming. I'd love to hear some feedback from people who have actually run around and used it in different situations. Does it need a damage buff or some kind of secondary effect? As it is its a lot like cleave that ignores armor which is good but not really in the spirit of 51pt talents being heroic and something that makes you go wow! Any thoughts on reasonable changes to make it better?

I believe that heroics in general have become a lot more forgiving and are more of in between level 80 5 mans and naxx. It makes sense that a moderately intelligent tank would be able to handle that assuming there wasn't a massive gear disparity since dps won't need to be pushing the limit of their threat and healers shouldn't be pulling agro just keeping the tank alive. Once you get into naxx+ we can expect encounters that are much more tightly tuned and that the raid will have to squeeze out every drop of dps that they can so the difference between a moderate tank and an exceptional one will be evident.

It really shines for multi-target combat. When you're fighting 3 mobs it's really nice to get a hit plus a seal proc on each. The damage feels kind of meh; with a 112dps and 2.8-speed weapon it's doing 500-600 a hit for me right now at level 79 wearing mostly the "new" T6 gear with two pieces from Sunwell. Right now it really feels more like a seal-triggering utility than something that has a significant punch on its own.

At the very least I'd prefer to see it be 120% weapon damage at 100% threat, instead of vice versa like it is now. An outright damage buff to 150% or so would be even better. I guess it depends on how much they intend for it to feel like a serious damage tool by itself, and how much it's supposed to just be a tool for hitting three mobs at once with SoV. I've also been wondering about using it with SoJ in caster packs, or even in some of the large scrums in PvP (AV especially).

It does feel worth taking in its current form, so it's good enough to meet that test at least.

I'm not sure what the rules are with regards to linking a post from the BB but this is what he wrote. It seems better to just do this than debate over my interpretation;

That's Patchwerk though, who traditionally had some mechanic that made it nearly impossible to rip aggro. One of the guys in the tankadin channel on Northrend was reporting some obscene threat generation on him as well, possibly due to little more than the fight itself.

As for HotR, it's absolutely worth taking right now, though it only really shines in AoE (it's also responsible for SoR being possibly competitive single-target, but that remains to be seen). I'd like to see it buffed simply for the sake of giving us more scaling from our weapon's damage range. One thing to consider is that the only alternatives to taking HotR are Sheath spec (which drops a ton of mitigation talents) and just putting the point somewhere else despite being 50+ deep... so it's not saying much to be worth taking.

There shouldn't be an issue with copying a post from the BB as long as it isn't incriminating to anyone and credit is given. A few BBers never read non-BB threads.

HotR is a great ability because it does something unique and gives you another meaningful button to push.

The old Shield Spec talent is gone (it's been replaced by the BV bonus on the new Redoubt). So if you're going from your current block value, you can't count the Redoubt bonus again. (Unless you're saying you have 1300 block value without Shield spec?)

But yeah, it's still a shitload of damage and I'm also surprised they buffed it up so high. Fully talented ShR has gone from 242% of block value to 343% (counting 1-h spec).

I don't think they'll nerf the gear, because block value already gets weaker as you level. The issue is really just that ShR scales way too well with block value. Honestly I was surprised they started with it scaling at 200% BV, considering that Shield Slam is a fixed amount of damage plus 100% BV (and is mitigated by armor as well).

I want my god damn 4% stamina bonus back.

We effectively have one less equipment slot and something like 1,200 health less than warriors. 2% bonus probably won't cover that the same way 6% would have.

Overall the changes are nice but I feel like I was expecting more, or some added talents, instead of compression and re-shuffling. Lets hope this is just a baseline for them to work with for us because it still seems a little awkward that pretty much everything from tier 5 onwards is mandatory.

What's up with the change to Combat Expertise? When I saw some of our T7 gear had expertise on it I felt it'd become a little more useful for us then we lose it from our talent tree and gain crit? A little contradictory I think, though from looking at Worldie's ShoR numbers, if we could somehow up our crit in a realistic fashion, that would be pretty cool.

The Reckoning change is great and synergizes well with us.

Playing around with our revamped talent tree, I came up with something like this. That pretty much picks up everything with 2 or 3 points to play around with from tier 4. The way they've worded past statements made me feel that they'd want us to go down other trees for things. From a "fun" point-of-view I'd hoped we could go down Retribution for a choice of Heart of the Crusader, or Pursuit of Justice, or perhaps even Vindication. I guess hoping for that while taking Seals of the Pure is probably being a little greedy though.

Finally, can anyone explain why BoK is a 1 point talent with a 4 point follow on instead of just being a flat 5 point talent? At least with Sheath of Light being pushed further up the tree and BoK moving down, Holy can pick it up while still taking Conviction while saving us all from those interminable discussions.

Look better, Shield Spec has been folded into redoubt. I got 1300 block value with Redoubt (the passive part, which is the old Shield Spec)

The reckoning change... it's useless. We will still use SoV (possibly with the new Glyph) to tank, and Reckoning is close to useless for that purpose. It's still a leveling talent.

No. Taurens didn't teach you anything? 16% stamina scaling was excessive. However, now they need to increase our base stamina.