Kings being 6/7/8/9/10% would be more reasonable I think.

The real question will be if BoK is better then 5% spell crit. How much crit do you get per intellect point at level 80? And I guess also per agility point even tho you'll only have base agility in holy gear.

For a guild that have 3 dedicated Paladins with 3 different specs, BoK won't be an issue because the retadin will buff it while the holy one will do BoW/BoM and the prot one will do BoS, but that seems to a be a bit too ideal to actually be happening 100% of the time. I guess what it comes down to is that some other class needs to get a buff like BoK to even things out. A BoK like shout would be extremely useful for that you can get your BoK and BoSanc while not actually buffing yourself with BoK.

Paladins get 6% and -15% mana cost of 3 spells, warriors get 6% and +10% increased all damage, both for 2 points. Warrior talent is definitely better. Furthermore, Def.Stance is 10% damage reduction, while IRF is still 6%. With druids getting 12% reduction, paladins will again be the "OOM tank" using Ghostcrawler's terminology.

Concerning stamina talents, health gap at 80 is (7584-5624) ~1950 HP. With 6% better scaling, Paladins will catch up at 1950/.6 = 3250 stamina. This means that from Naxx to Icecrown warriors will have higher health, and somewhere right before Arthas paladins will close the gap and become equal. In TBC my pally had higher health somewhere mid-BT. Which situation with health gap is intended - TBC or WotLK beta?

It doesn't matter if Reckoning will proc from full block - with Vengeance becoming the tanking seal, all that Reckoning will do is increase white damage from your (caster) weapon. Actually, Blizzard really should increase incentives to melee the enemy for prot pallies. I often notice that I don't autoattack at all while AOE tanking during Felmyst p2 and Muru p1 - just refreshing Consecrate and HS. Also, what can be done for Paladins to prefer fast melee "tank" weapons? You can see many of them itemized in the Beta, and exactly zero slow weapons with defensive stats, Caster weapons may add flavor for some, but I personally don't feel like a melee with all abilities being spells, seal being a refreshable DoT, and white crits for 200.

And to add to the melee question, Paladins need to scale with Bloodlust and other haste effects. Currently all I can see is trying to insert Avenger's Shield / Hammer of Wrath into BL'ed 6/9 rotation, but new Windfury looks nearly useless.

HotR now does the same damage regardless of the speed of the weapon (dependent on DPS only, as far as people can tell).

Proof can be found here:

Maintankadin :: View topic - Intriguing numbers with Hammer of the Righteous

I should have been clearer: Stronger and easier to get than it was before.

And still, we're blocking more. Way more.

Oh, god dammit. Why the hell are they fucking everything up just so they can have their precious "tanking weapons"? Are they planning to itemize a bunch of two-handers with +defense so the DKs can have some too?

It would be so easy simply to let prot warriors tank with fast one-hand dps weapons, prot paladins tank with slow one-hand dps weapons, DKs tank with dps two-handers, and druids tank with whatever the hell it is they use for tanking. It would avoid creating all these specialized single-spec-only categories for gear. Hell, when I first saw HotR, I assumed that's what they had in mind. Why are they undoing all that now?

It's not just about HotR either; if they try to shoehorn us into using "tanking" weapons it's going to gimp Reckoning as well.

It was 100% weapon damage at 120% threat before; now it's 120% weapon damage at 100% threat. (Before RF, obviously). It's an increase in damage without being an increase in threat.

About blocking: I ran some napkin math a couple of weeks and figured out that it was still possible to gear for unhittable with Holy Shield up. Cath (and other beta Tankadins), what's your avoidance? I never really published my numbers so I never got them verified, but now I'm genuinely curious if you guys are close.

About tanking weapons: While I agree with you that the "Warriors fast, Paladins slow" dynamic was a great piece of flavor, I always knew that homogenization would never be complete. Blizzard is fine with letting Holy Paladins have healing plate as an outlier, they're fine with Feral AP weapons as an outlier, and most importantly, they're fine with creating outlier items for categories that are otherwise supposed to be completely homogenized.

Case-in-point: A pair of plate boots with Shield Block Rating. It's not a tier token, it's not crafted and it's not a shield. By all accounts, this item should not exist, because it violates homogenization with regards to Death Knights, but Blizzard keeps making them anyway.

Yeah, I see what you mean about outliers. It just seemed like this was a blindingly obvious place to get rid of one class of outliers. Instead, they're going to leave this class of outliers in, mangle the mechanics of HotR to force it to fit, and then either:

1. create a new set of outlier tanking two-handers for DKs.
2. force them to dual-wield tank and get horribly parry-gibbed, not to mention gimping their own threat gains from parries.
3. balance them for tanking with regular old dps two-handers, which is a great and perfectly workable idea... so why don't they just do the same thing for us?

It's really just baffling to me why they're going this route.

Anyway, I logged in and tested, and yes, HotR is operating completely independent of weapon speed. It's basically pretending you're using a 2.5-speed weapon with no damage variation at all at the same dps. So e.g., if your white dps is 200, you'll do exactly 200x2.5x1.2 = 600 points of damage for every HotR. If they really do go this route, at least they're doing it with a fairly slow speed. I still hate the idea though.

As far as my avoidance goes, I don't recall the numbers offhand (just logged off so I can't check them now) but they're quite low; I'm still wearing mostly my T6/SW gear along with some of the blue crafted tanking pieces. I think around 13-14% each for b/d/p. On top of that I'm still at least 5 points below the max innate defense for level 80. Actually I think even once I finish leveling up defense, I'll still have a lower total defense skill at 80 than I did in the same gear at 70. How's that for stat decay?

Are you accounting for the new diminishing returns on avoidance? I forget who did the work, but someone posted a maintankadin link awhile back showing the testing he'd done. Basically there's a diminishing return whereby every 100 points of (parry|dodge|block) rating is 5% less effective than the previous 100 points. Presumably this is intended to prevent the massive avoidance levels of Sunwell tanks from happening again.

I don't mind the complete normalization situation. I would also have preferred that tanking weapons be done away with completely and everyone simply use dps weapons, but given that they have decided to keep them in it makes sense that at least we can use the same weapons as warriors.

I do wish that spellpower weapons weren't our best choice still though. At the moment because we get no extra threat on white damage there really can't be any competition and we should be using 2.0 speed caster weapons ideally. The faster a weapon is the better it is for Seal of Vengeance, but any faster than 2.0 and we lose reckoning uptime, so a 2.0 speed caster mace is the new tankadin ideal weapon for threat.

That's actually only an issue right now because in WotLK caster weapons are scaling upwards in their DPS as well as their spell power, which in turn means we're double dipping in the stat bonuses since both benefit.

For equal item level weapons at level 70, like say the Hammer of Judgement and The Brutalizer, the physical DPS weapon is actually slightly better than the spell damage weapon due to the combination of extra white damage, and the extra Hammer of the Righteous damage this gives. As we get higher level in WotLK though, the caster weapons get both higher physical DPS and they scale their spell power up at the same rate too, and since we still benefit from both of these aspects, we end up with caster weapons being better after a certain point.

If you are using SoV as your tanking seal extra attacks from reckoning (and as such, the whole talent) becomes largely irrelevant as illustrated just a couple of posts ago. As for melee/caster weapons, I'm sure Blizzards intention is that we use melee weapons. They have "some knobs to turn" if they come up worse than the caster ones.

I don't mind caster weapons being favored by prot paladins at all, except that there aren't any tanking caster weapons. If there was a reasonable way (IE not cluttering up loot tables terribly) way for us to use spellpower weapons with tanking stats that would be great, but I don't see it. Right now on beta we are pretty much looking at using suboptimal weapon types if we actually want to have tank stats on our weapons, and that isn't ideal.

I would much prefer either tanking weapons get removed or we actually get set up to want melee weapons so we can properly share weapon types with warriors.

Also, by 'new' tankadin standard I mean new for the beta. For awhile it looked like either a 2.8 speed melee weapon or a 2.8 speed spell weapon was the ideal, but now the sweet spot has certainly shifted to 2.0.

Faster weapons get the initial stack of Vengeance up more quickly, and that is a big benefit. They have no benefit after that, but obviously quick aggro is better so having a quicker weapon is advantageous so long as it doesn't cost you reckoning uptime.

Also, does anyone else think that given reckoning mechanics the 4 charge limitation really should go? I can't see any point to it.