The gap closer is suppose to be our better scaling stamina (6% more), but the issue with that is that we have both a static and increasing gap to fill. The static gap is that both base health and stamina for a warrior is higher. The increasing gap is their ranged slot. As they find more powerful weapons to put in there, they will get more stamina from it. Our Stamina scaling covers only the base health gap effectively. We do not have the option to get stamina out of our libram slot, so we will always remain behind with our current setup. I highly doubt we will see 3120 stamina unbuffed in this xpac. I think the best fix here is stamina on certain librams.

Does anyone have firm confirmation on the hit/miss mechanics of ShoR now? Basically I want to know for certain if it behaves like a spell, ranged attack or melee attack.

Of these three, the first is the only one I see that has merit. The caster issue in the example given is weak because you can simply choose to have your CC go to the caster instead in that given pack (plus, I have yet to see a pull I couldn't LoS... All that time in City of Heroes really did pay off I guess). The notion that we need a shorter duration mitigation tool is ignoring the fact that we have a 31-point talent that fits the bill perfectly, and quite honestly I'm stoked about the change to Divine Protection.

The taunt issue, however, is very real. RD is hands-down our least reliable tool. The multi-target issue is enough of a reason to give us a "real" taunt that targets an enemy rather than a friend. The latency issue is what gets me, though. Case in point: big AoE pack, warlock pulls aggro, I hit RD at the same time he hits Soulshatter, mob kills mage because RD activated on the warlock with nothing targeting him anymore. The same thing happens when hunters Feign Death or mages Ice Block. I would much rather have a taunt that works on a hostile target so that I know it will work, and if that were to come in the form of an added spell or talent I'd be even happier.

It depends on what content you plan on doing I'd say. In raids the taunt issue isn't all that big, and even when it is problematic for boss encounters it's always on just a few bosses, not on all of them. A short term mitigation buff ability however would help on all encounters, and be flat out required on some. All in all the only real way to influence wether you die or not is loh (20m cd really is a lot, I understand they can't lower it for arena's, but still), holy shield wall and clicky trinkets. When you compare that to other classes it seems a bit limited. At least wotlk pocketwatches are a bit more widespread right now, so it might turn out to not be needed at all.

For 5 mans however the taunt issue is quite real and needs to be adressed. Either by a backuptaunt or by just fixing RD somehow that it's a bit more forgeving on mistaunts.

ShoR is ranged mechanic, HotR is melee mechanic, according to my non rigid testing. Someone else told me that's what it was, so I tested a little bit and decided they were right, then stopped worrying about it.

RD was changed so you can cast it on a mob and it will taunt it and up to two more off thats attacking its target so its usable as a normal taunt. The problem is that it still seems to have some latency since I get the same kind of failed taunts when casting it on a mob instead of the player with agro and it goes on cooldown but the mob doesn't get taunted. And no its not resisted, I see nothing in scrolling combat text or in the combat logs at all about RD when this happens. Its incredibly frustrating when I do my job correctly and the taunt simply doesn't work.

Also on the taunt topic we don't have a real aoe taunt while bears and warriors do. If we end up with adds that go after different people or another tank dies who was holding a few mobs they will probably split up. In both these situations we can't really do much but drop consecrate and hope the people with agro stand in it. AOE is supposed to be our stronger point, or at least as good as any other tank but we lack this vital tool. I've lost track of the number of times I've had to remind raid leaders that challenging shout doesn't exist for paladins.

I would really like some more oh shit buttons we could play with. Shield wall is nice but why is it only 50% instead of a warrior's 60%? While a lot of people are expecting divine last stand as our 11 point prot talent I would really like to see some more interesting things for us.

Maybe something like Shield of the Martyr: 12 seconds. +100% chance to block, +200% block value (does not contribute to ShoR). When shield of the martyr fades you take 125% of the total damage blocked while it was active over the next 12 seconds, this damage cannot be avoided by divine shield or divine protection. Unique, useful, situationally very powerful but it requires careful use or you will just nuke yourself when it ends.

Or Shieldbearer: All friendly characters within 10 yards of you gain a chance equal to your block chance to redirect damage equal to 200% of your block value to you per hit they take. This damage cannot be mitigated by divine shield or divine protection. Enemies take damage as if struck by your holy shield causing threat for you. Kind of an aoe intervene, pretty unique and situationally very powerful. Makes the block chance from redoubt somewhat useful and scales with the paladins gear. This also thematically helps with the whole idea of actually protecting your group from enemies.

How about something really wacky? Faith Sustain Me: 1 minute duration, 45 minute cooldown. When the paladin is reduced to zero or fewer hitpoints he does not die but instead becomes filled with divine power for 4 seconds. The paladin continues to take damage and healing as normal and can have negative health. At the end of 4 seconds if the paladin is below one hitpoint he dies. Kind of like an ankh but without the death first, to be fair you should probably take durability damage when it goes off but not a second time if you are at 0 hp when it runs out as it would still be the same 'death'. Pretty much the ultimate burst tanking tool providing your healers can get you back positive afterwards. Probably unbalanced but but it sure wouldn't be just a clone of something another class has.

I know this isn't really the place for making up abilities but those kinda popped into my head. It doesn't take that much to come up with something interesting thats not just a copy of what warriors have, and the prot tree could use some exciting things. Most of our talents are pretty boring and while effective don't really add a whole ton to tanking except to give us the basic tools that other classes start with.

Rasczak, I'm sorry, but I have to (strongly) disagree. It's not the same as a normal taunt, period. In fact, if there are 4+ mobs on someone you have no reason to assume the mob you really want is going to be taunted. It really doesn't work like a normal taunt and unlike every other tank class we don't have a backup. They gave DKs a backup, so it's hard not to be bothered by it.

RD's a great idea in theory, but that it can fizzle due to RSTS is idiotic.

Good posts from everyone.

My experience with threat in the beta has been that regardless of where we stand relative to other tanks, we're producing way more than enough right now. Damage-wise I'm not so sure, but I do know that we're putting out a lot more damage than we did in BC.

But I put those in the same category as mitigation; if the numbers are off it's easy enough for the devs to make a simple adjustment in a patch (e.g., more damage from HotR, slightly lower coefficient on RF, or whatever). That's just a matter of someone opening up a data file somewhere and changing a few numbers.

The problems I listed above (actually that Snowwight listed) are systemic flaws that can't be addressed so easily; they require (probably) the creation of new spells, which take a lot of extra coding, testing, etc. History has shown us that the only time we have a really good chance to get new spells is during beta.

Regarding the caster issue, you do have a pretty good point. Another thing in that regard is that with AS doing more damage and being instant-cast now, it's easier to use to offtank something at range, and you can even use the AS glyph to specialize it for that. I'd still like to have something to use against casters, but it's not a fatal flaw.

The reason I don't count HS as a burst mitigation tool is that it falls into the same category as preWotLK Shield Block; you just hit it every time it comes off cooldown. It's assumed to always be up except in rare circumstances. Really, it should just be a long-term self-buff like this:

Holy Shield
Instant cast, 30 minute duration
Increases chance to block by 30%. Blocked attacks deal X Holy damage to the attacker and consume one charge. Gains one charge per second at a cost of Y mana per charge, to a maximum of 8 charges.

And then we should have something that you can actually use to anticipate fairly frequent bursts (e.g., Brutallus stomps). Perhaps the end result would be too similar to the warrior model, but the point is that abilities that you simply spam every time they cool down are much less fun than abilities that you need skill to time properly. (Perhaps an ability that allows you to briefly block magic attacks with your shield?) And of course I'm mindful of balance implications, so if our steady mitigation needs to be nerfed to give us more burst mitigation, that's cool.

I guess what frustrates me is that the developers correctly identified the biggest flaw in warrior tanking in BC, which is the rigid, unvarying optimal threat rotation, and they added talents and made changes to rectify that flaw for warriors... and then they proceeded to give us a bunch of new GCD-triggering abilities on 6 and 9-second cooldowns, recreating exactly the problem that warriors had in TBC.

Strangely, I don't think I've ever had a problem with the standard taunt macro. Perhaps I've been extremely lucky, or I have a super-awesome connection (don't really think so), or I'm just selectively not remembering the problems, but I really don't recall ever having a problem. For example, I've never missed a taunt on Nalorakk when other people were complaining about it.

I do recall right after they added the "cast on bad guy" functionality to RD I tried it and found it weird and unreliable, so I just went back to using the macro like I have been.

[e]

Whoa, I didn't even notice the range increase on Taunt until I read this post. That's a good change, and something warriors needed IMO. But yeah, at this point every other tanking class has more taunt versatility than we do. In some circumstances you can kinda use HoP as a multi-target taunt (if the person in question just pulled a bunch of mobs off of you) but it doesn't do anything for the "Oh shit, the tank just died" situations like Rasczak described. I don't think that's a fatal flaw; every tanking class has a weakness and I don't mind if that's ours, but it just seems like too many of our weaknesses are related to taunts.

Agreed on the point about needing to be 51-prot before a melee weapon becomes your tanking preference. This is one reason why I think changing Reckoning to "your weapon does holy damage for 8 seconds" would be a good change.

Some oddities in that screenshot that may have contributed to issues:
She only did HotR 18 times to 21 SotR. If she's dropping a few HotRs for Exorcisms I could see it, but her consecrate is doing less damage which either means she was dropping consecrates for them, or should have been.

I'm not going to straight up say we're not needing more damage or threat, but if she worked on her rotation/priorities she might have better results.

...actually, we know how much damage she did, and how much dps she had, so you can figure out the length of the fight to 175 seconds...3 minutes. In that period of time, I'd expect to see at least 28 SotRs, but I see only 21. I'd expect to see the same amount of HotRs, unless that's what she was dropping for exorcisms/reseals. If I'm recalling correctly, consecrate ticks every second, and only the first tick can be resisted. If she had been dropping consecrate every 9 seconds, and the first tick was resisted each time, you'd still see 132 ticks for that time period.

Is she lagging, using some odd rotation and subbing in non-damage abilities, or am I completely failing at math?

Also, she got crushed 30 times...isn't that supposed to be out, or is that something special about Patchwerk?

Reading back over my post I was pretty unclear. I meant to say it can be cast as a normal taunt without needing to target the player like you did in previous incarnations. It certainly doesn't have the guarantee that a normal taunt has, and it doesn't even intelligently ignore mobs that are immune to taunt.

Nalorakk is a special case and there is pretty good evidence that taunts can't miss, or at least have a massive boost against him. Also unless someone pulls agro he doesn't change targets except occasionally to charge and RD fails most when the mob is changing targets when its cast.

That is probably a bug in recount of some sort. The damage you are looking at are Fiorina's attacks, not patchwerk's. It is saying Fiorina crushed Patchwerk 30 times, not the other way around. Still weird though.

As an aside, the good old crushing blow that we know may be gone as a raid boss mechanic, but its offspring live on as special abilities:
Crush - Spell - World of Warcraft
Crush - Spell - World of Warcraft