That's surprising because my impression has been that Paladins are ahead on threat by a reasonable margin mostly due to Judgement of Light.

I do agree that Warriors are causing pretty rough threat problems right now. I have a T6 geared Arms Warrior alt myself and I know that on many fights I have to hold back - unless I get Vigilance from a Protection Warrior. It's funny how something Warrior's whined about for so long is now something I would very much welcome Paladins to have.

Anecdote to be sure, but I'd argue this. Our warrior MT and I have had roughly the same gear for a while now (and lately even more so). Since the patch, we've been able to just cruise through BT (except Illidan...first attempt on him is tonight). Unless I specifically make an effort to not pull aggro, by either waiting to start attacking, bubbling, HoSalv'ing myself, or whatever, I'm pulling threat and he can't do anything about it on taunt-immune targets. And he's definitely not a noob in any way...he earned his spot as our MT by proving himself. It's even worse on mobs that are susceptible to Exorcism or Holy Wrath. I'd say it's just one of those things that's too close to call, though; other people's experiences may be different.

Oh...and that's with JoW.

Cathela, perhaps also the warriors you are comparing with have re-socketed and re-enchanted for strength, while you haven't?

Has there been any calculations on the threat differences between mongoose and potency? I've found plenty of comparisons for the various ranks of spellpower and ap enchants available in wrath, but nothing comparing them with mongoose. I realize that potency will be better for strict threat purposes, but how big is that difference? The haste and extra chance to crit when it procs have to count for something, right?

It just seems odd to me as to why you would go halfway with a weapon with defensive stats, but not a defensive enchant (I know, there is Block Value from the 20 strength, but the proc from mongoose is several percent of extra dodge).

Note: My question is mostly in reference to level 70, though at 80 it might still be applicable - as far as I know there is no new proc based enchant suitable for tanking at level 80.

This is my exact experience as well. I can rip a mob off the equally well geared Warrior and Druid tanks without JoL or the mob being undead, even if they have a 5 second headstart on me.

On Felmyst and KJ, I always ask another pally to use JoL so I don't overaggro the tank.

Speaking semi-empirically from watching the Omen meter on Bloodboil last night, I can tell you that aggro gen is maybe 25-50% improved over a bear. I was pulling about 1700 TPS when attacked, compared to 1100ish for the other two tanks (a somewhat lesser-geared paladin and a comparably geared bear). We don't have any warrior tanks, so I can't give you any numbers there. As far as DPS threat, the only person who was ever able to touch me was our 2k DPS ret paladin when he was in his PvP spec without Fanaticism. Ouch. Even on Horseman runs, as long as I have Sanctuary up and skimp on the Consecrate, I never run out of mana and never come close to losing aggro. In fact, I've taken to not using Consecrate at all except on pulls with 4+ mobs, partly because I'm lazy and partly because the increased killing speed plus the effectiveness of HotR makes it a mana drain that's hardly worth the effort.

Were you holding back at all? I know myself and the other tanks I play with (1 warrior, 1 druid) all sustain something in the 2000-2500 range while being attacked, spiking up over 3k rather frequently. Of course, BB is a quirky fight so I understand why you might not go all out. I certainly can pull off of them if I try (wingslol), but the comparative threat gen of the three classes is much closer than I thought it would be. The exceptions are undead/demon targets which I typically dominate, or caster mobs where I fall behind.

And yes, DPS warriors are nuts now. We have one guy that gets 2-3 salv applications at the beginning of pretty much every boss. Even then it's not always enough when we ask how he still manages to pull aggro and he informs us he landed a 15k execute crit about ten seconds into the fight.

The way I understand HoS, is it reduces your Total Threat by 10%, so it wouldn't it be better to wait to use it (because your total threat is bigger, so 10% is more)? Unless you have a few Pallies to just chain cast it, then it doesn't matter much.

Also, ask him to wait five seconds before dps .

You're definitely right about getting the most out of a single application, but since he's the only person we need to worry about we just chain cast it on him at the start. Typically our sustained threat is enough to allow him to go nuts for the long run, and it's the spikey damage at the beginning that causes problems. Plus, the cooldown is short enough that if someone starts riding threat later on we can use it again if needed.

And yeah, telling DPS to wait anymore just doesn't mean as much as it used to. Hell, half our pulls see ranged attacking the first target before a tank is even there, and thanks to the charge-in-defensive-stance change they can pretty much unload without worry.

Somewhat overlooked in the despondency by ret over their recent changes is that Prot (and holy, but this is the Prot thread) took a significant hit to their dps in the last beta patch.

I've been trying to estimate the impact on pally tanks, and the results look painful.

The two changes that impact tanks are:
- 20% reduction in seal and judgment damage
- HoW usability being reduced from targets at 35% to targets at 20% (a 42% reduction in usable time, though this is pretty conservative. Other classes abilities like Execute kick in at 20%, meaning bosses typically spend a lot less time below 20% than they do between 35% and 20%.)

Based on my guild's last WWS run in BT (cleared through Bloodboil), just looking at damage done in boss fights, my damage came from:

21% auto-attack (physical)
18% blood corruption (holy)
14% hammer of the righteous (holy)
13% judgment of corruption (holy)
11% consecration (holy)
8% hammer of wrath (holy)
5% avenger shield (holy)
3% retribution aura (holy)
2% exorcism (holy)
1% seal of corruption (holy)

(For comparison purposes, I was probably the best geared and arguably the most experienced tank in the raid. I did 725 dps, which was below the 811 done by the bear, but above the 444 done by the warrior tank.)


So, breaking into components:

19% seal damage (blood corruption + seal of corruption)
13% judgment damage (judgment of corruption)

That totals 32%, and knocking that down by 20% means a 6.4% loss of damage.

8% hammer of wrath *0.42 (loss of roughly 42% of its usable time) = 3.4%, though its probably worse than that.

This is very back of the envelope, so, lets say we're out 9-10% of our dps, and since its all holy damage that's affected, we're probably out a good 12% or so of our threat.

Does this sound correct to everyone else? Does this look about right or am I missing something?

(edited for grammar)

Yeah, that's about right as far as level 70 goes. For level 80, two things: First, what Oggie said. SotR is a huge amount of threat, so the relative effect of reduced seal damag will be lower at level 80.

Second, you can't work HoW into a level 80 threat rotation without bumping something else out. HotR and SotR are on 6-second cooldowns and Judgement, HS, and Cons are on 9-second cooldowns (well, not exactly, but it works best if you pretend they are). That's enough to fill up all your GCDs, so there's no room for HoW in the standard rotation. That's not to say it's not worth using HoW; it might be worthwhile to switch things up once HoW becomes active to increase threat a bit. But whatever you do, you'll be giving up something else to do it, so HoW isn't a large net threat gain.

Well, SotR isn't just a huge amount of threat, it's also extremely mana-efficient; it's only 4.2% of base mana with GbtL (even less if you pick up Benediction) which makes it cheaper than judgement or HotR. So I think that once you get SotR, you'll find yourself less needing to use the high-cost abilities (Cons in particular is a mana hog) because SotR+HotR+judge+HS alone will leave you very comfortable on threat.

Well, they do get more from BoSanct than we do (e.g., it takes about twice as many procs of BoS to "pay for" a SotR as it does to pay for a Shield Slam) but on the flip side we have a lot of other mana sources -- BoW, JoW, Replenisment, totems -- and they only have one other rage source -- damage dealt. I'm not sure the overall picture is precisely equal, but my experience on the beta is that once you get SotR the mana/threat situation is fine for us.

And yeah, I love the hands now. We have a dps warrior who's terrorizing the threat meters with the deep wounds bug, and it's a lot of fun to just smack a salv on him and watch his threat plummet. Sacrifice is great for any kind of offtanking (e.g., Gurtogg) because not only do you mitigate damage on the MT, you also get SA mana. And since our threat has been changed to work much more proactively, you can actually convert that mana into threat.

And this has been said before and it's pretty obvious, but the decoupling of hands from blessings is a huge improvement. One big drawback of BoP/BoF/BoSac previously was having to worry about what blessing you had up on the target (e.g., do you want to BoSac the tank if it's going to wipe kings? Probably not.) It seems like a small thing, but only now do I realize how much that need for a mental check crippled my usage of situational blessings.

[e] In response to Oggie's edit:

SotR working on a spell-hit basis is dumb, period. Right now RD and SotR are the only abilities we have that use the spell mechanic, which means you can hit-cap everything else at 9% but you have to get to 17% for those two abilities. In the case of RD that's exactly what the glyph is for, so that's cool. But that leaves SotR as the odd man out; you'll either have to live with 8% miss once you've hit-capped everything else, or you'll need to gather another 8% hit just for this one ability.

If they want it to be highly avoidable then just make it subject to all forms of melee avoidance (m/d/p/b) and then we can gear against that with hit and expertise.

(How does Shield Slam work anyway? My primary alt is a prot warrior but I honestly can't remember if I've ever seen Shield Slam parried/dodged or not.)

[e2] Also in response to Oggie's edit:

I'm not so sure we'll see a buff to SotR's damage. At level 80 on the beta I can hit a 2500-point non-crit SotR with just passive BlkVal bonuses and the Mother Shahraz libram, and another ~400 points with the auto-blocker activated, which would be nearly a 6k crit. Without AW, mind you.

That's mostly legacy gear with stacked block value, so it's not necessarily good for any purpose other than producing ZOMG numbers, but it gives you an idea of how strong SotR could be in PvP, and if I were in the devs' position I don't think I'd want to buff its damage at this point (though I could see them adding a higher threat multiplier).