SotR is also going to add some burst to a Prot paladin in arenas. If I were going to design a prot build for arenas at 80, I'd probably go with something like this. The logic behind the talent choices is:

• Anticipation, Deflection, and Toughness aren't that big a deal, since you'll wreck melee attackers anyway; you need those points to help you against casters and to improve your offensive utility (Benediction, Divine Strength, Conviction, etc).
• Leaving Reckoning out since arenas are about burst damage, and an extra weapon swing isn't a terribly large portion of that.
• Ardent Defender I'm kind of wishy-washy on. Perhaps someone with more arena experience could comment on this.
• I decided to leave Spiritual Focus out on the grounds that the Prot mana pool is going to force healing to be almost entirely FoL, and 5 points is far too expensive for the utility SF provides.
• Seals of the Pure would be nice, but again it seems like a large investment for a relatively small value.
• JotJ seems not very useful for arenas, since it's about reducing steady damage and basically does nothing to reduce burst. I could see it being useful if a match boils down to a 1v1 between you and a melee class, but in that case you've basically already won.
• I'm assuming that a Prot paladin would be expected to bring BoK to the team.
• I think Benediction is essential for arenas as Prot, and I probably wouldn't want to be without Imp. Judgement. The further 11 points in Prot are crit-boosters and PoJ; if you wanted you could shift those over to Holy for SotP (or SF I suppose) plus Healing Lights, UF, and Aura Mastery if you want a bit more of a defensive/backup-healer build. That may depend on the exact makeup of your team.

The big advantage I see to a Prot arena build is that you get a lot of the early-tier Prot PvP talents "for free" whereas Ret and Holy builds have to stretch and/or make choices to get these. e.g., things like a 30-second HoJ, Stoicism, GF, are "built in" for a Prot build where they aren't necessarily for a Ret or Holy build. If the devs decide to make the 11-point talent some kind of gap-closer/snare or some other PvP utility (GC has hinted at that) then that's another bonus.

Another more theoretical advantage is that a Prot paladin has a better chance of surviving after popping AW (i.e., better chance of surviving without needing to bubble). I dunno how much better, and you'd probably want to have full points in AD if you want to test this.

The big question mark is whether there's enough offense and/or group-defense utility here to draw attention. The model for Prot warriors in arenas is that they do pretty good burst damage, and also have a lot of disruption/control/defensive utility (group Spell Reflect, AoE stun, single-target stun, Vigilance on the weakest party member, etc, in addition to all the baseline warrior stuff like fear, hamstring, etc) so you pay a price for leaving a prot warrior alone. Does a prot paladin have enough guns to draw attention? I'm kind of skeptical. (I'm curious to see what HotR+SoJ can do though.)

This is all a theoretical exercise at this point (for me, anyway) but I think I'll give it a shot at 80 and see what happens. What I will predict, though, is that it'll be better than Prot in arenas was in TBC; that was basically just like playing a Holy paladin except that you were marginally harder to kill and your healing was incredibly worse.

[e]: I was misremembering Vigilance. It's only 3% damage reduction, which is not much by PvP standards, and refreshing Taunt doesn't amount to much either.

Oh yeah, from any practical point of view this is not a good idea. I'm just looking at it as an experiment.

Personally, the appeal for me is that I like the playstyle and I'm just curious to see how well it can work in competitive PvP (meaning arenas, and BGs that aren't AV). At one point Ghostcrawler was talking about adding a few more "cool" talents to deep prot, and the implication was that these might have PvP utility. That never happened (I assume due to time constraints) but if the devs ever get back to that it'd be nice to have some kind of feedback to give them about how well the tree works now.

Yeah. But a raiding PVE spec does ok on battlegrounds, expecially if he took the 3 points of improved hammer of justice to get a fast-enough-cooldown spell interrupt . I had some practice with this during the weekend on a 0/56/5 spec. The L80 raid spec would have one point in improved judgement, 5 in seals of pure or blessing of kings and 4 points scattered around in other talents mostly irrelevant for the comparison.

The only real prot tree talent you're likely missing that would be helpful in PVP is the stun/dispel reduction one. If I end up doing my dual spec as Prot/Holy, it would be the prot spec I'd bring for honor grinding. Holy for arenas, if I did arenas with her at all.

The durability was helpful, the snares/interrupts were decent, the burst damage felt low and sustained damage felt like about half what I could do with my mage. Some of that though was gear. If my paladin had the gear of my mage, especially "threat" gear, both forms of damage would have been better...maybe 2/3 or 3/4 what the mage could do in single target and small-aoe groups (large AOE, the mage has a huge advantage). Ranged options were limited but avenging shield helped slow things down enough to run up and smack them. There were a lot of retadins running around, and I even dueled some with similar gear levels. They flat out did more damage but were easier to burst down. We both kinda sucked at healing/cleansing but were "better than nothing".

I found my resistance auras surprisingly useful in PVP as well, although I had to change them up a lot. Auraswapping did give an edge at times, when I remembered to switch out of Crusader after riding over.

I tried a PvP prot build in beta for a week or so, primarily doing battlegrounds. It's utility and burst capacity is actually quite reasonable, the real issue is that you run out of mana very very quickly and have no reasonable way to recover any of it.

You can be moderately effective in BGs as a raid spec prot paladin, better than you could at 70 at least. But you run into the same issues of mana longevity, and you skip most of the toys that you would have with a pvp build like imp HoJ and Guardian's Favor

Better AOE pickup and threat, one less oh-shit button than warriors and similar mitigation. Much higher single target threat due to JoL depending on fight mechanics.

There is some concern that our T7 itemization is worse than warrior's.

As this is probably of interest to people, I will not be writing an updated version of the Protection Paladin article for Wrath of the Lich King, as I lack the time to do so. You're all free to copy any existing content from the article if anyone is willing to write a new version, though most of it outdated when it comes to Wrath of the Lich King. I would appreciate being given credit if a new version does end up with a significant amount of content re-used from the original article though.

In battlegrounds, in some fairly common situations, sitting and drinking is reasonable if you're careful. node/tower defense, flag defense in wsg etc. There is a reason people whine for tables whenever I play my mage.

I agree though that mana is a huge problem in BG's if you get caught up in a sustained fight. Unlike with many chars, your mana bar will run out before your health bar, and with chaindrinking potions off the table it's going to come up sometimes.

After reading this, I decided to do my part by updating Chicken's original piece to 3.0 standards. Is anyone else interested in getting in on this?

Also, I have a beta question concerning Sacred Shield. From what I've come to understand, it's something we can use if we're riding on zillions of mana for whatever reason as an extra damage-avoiding perk, but not something we want to use as part of our base 96969 rotation. Furthermore, we don't want to use Sacred Shield when we have a Holy Paladin on us, since only one SS can be on a target at a time and it increases the crit chance of FoL by 50% for the caster, thus helping them in their throughput.

So in summary on Sacred Shield's role for a prot paladin:

-'- Nice extra mitigation spell when mana is not an issue
-'- Not part of basic rotation due to mana limitations
-'- Should not be used with a Holy Paladin

Correct?

Thank you Saladin... I was just about to go looking... after noticing that his post was redirected to a non post

Block Rating has nothing to do with SotR, you want either block value or strength if your aim is to beef up your SotRs.

The defence cap, in terms of the actual +defence rating on your gear, is going to go through the roof. I can hit 540 at level 70, and I'm fairly certain that I won't be able to once I'm actually level 80 without replacing gear.

The end result of that? You want high defence pieces. In a lot of cases, you're going to end up dropping avoidance and threat stats in order to pick up defence on mediocre blues, just so you can avoid the crit factor. All of the content is tankable with a crittable tank (at least, in the ten-man versions) but being uncrittable is pretty recommended. Unfortunately, I can't remember the conversion ratio at 80, I just remember being way short of it. (Think going from ~500 defence at 70 to a little over 490 at 80, after gaining 50 base defence and replacing a few pieces with higher-defence blues already.)

Past that, I would focus on getting fairly good avoidance, then on Hit/Expertise, then on strength. Block rating is useful for reaching 102.4% mitigation, especially since the increased focus on strength/block value will increase your block's damage reduction by quite a bit. I would personally focus on strength, rather than on block value, because it scales all of your abilities, which means that it's a significant boost to AOE threat/damage as well as an increase in block mitigation and SoR damage.