Those addons sound like a great idea for your full time pally tank, although they'll probably need updating in a few days in 2.3 (or at least so they say...)

Thank you for your continued work on this. This is a valuable tool as i try to level up and plan gearing for my paladin.

In response to this, using the default gear in the spreadsheet, a 0-49-12 "Cookie Cutter" spec, and swapping the points back and forth between Reckoning and 1H Spec, I get 912 TPS for Reckoning and 923 TPS for 1H Spec. I was using a mob of type "Unspecified" and an attack type of "Dual Wield". Pretty much everything else was default (healing per second received, ranks of all abilities, etc).

This would theoretically be a "best case scenario" for reckoning given top-end gear (DW, non-undead mob), but 1H spec beats it out slightly in that situation. Oddly, however, if I switch to an "unarmed" or "two-handed" mob attack type, total TPS jumps by about 50 and Reckoning starts to edge out 1H spec ever so slightly. That seems suspect to me; why would Reckoning proc more/be better against that sort of mob attack? And why would threat be so much higher?

This is, of course, a very rough test since I used an arbitrary gear set and the relatively arbitrary default incoming HPS number. But, since we have the spreadsheet tool available, maybe some people could run numbers for their own gear and specs?

EDIT: Following up, it seems that Holy Shield threat as calculated actually DROPS when a dual wielding mob is selected, as does seal threat from seal of righteousness. It looks like the spreadsheet is expecting you to get hit less when fighting a dual wielder, not more (which isn't making sense to me). Unfortunately, I can't verify or find my own thought process error b/c I'm not sure how to show the hidden sheets where all the threat work is calculated. Can anyone else confirm?

While I can't speak for Vampiric Touch, any non-regen energy gains cause threat. This includes mana potions, rage potions, Thistle tea and, more importantly, Spiritual Attunement.

Assuming a single target, SA would contribute threat equal to your (damage taken * 0.5 * 0.1) as you're being healed up.

That's probably because a dual-wielding mob suffers from dual-wielding's higher base miss rate?

Dualwielding mobs are generally assumed to get +19% miss penalty on melee auto-attacks (same as dualwielding rogues/warriors/shaman). WWS also show dualwielding bosses with increased miss rate. So yes, you'll get less hits from dualwielding mobs, even though there will be more attacks per second. Depending on your gear, that additional miss can outweight extra hits and produce less holy shield procs overall.

Right, the combat table is going to push a lot of your block off, since it's filled up with the additional miss rate. So lets say that you run around with 55% to block on your normal table with Holy Shield active, so vs a dual wielding mob you're dropping down to 36% to block. That's a significant dropoff.

Add your avoidance to their miss rate. With high avoidance you could even get 0% hit on the dual wielder while getting hit on the non-dual-wielder, thus showing that the ratio between the hit rates can be anything between your listed value (assuming bosses really have base 5% miss...) to infinity, depending primarily on your avoidance.

D'oh! Ok, so I was missing something obvious. The gear in the spreadsheet has a 55% total avoidance rate on it (Miss + Dodge + Parry) prior to adding the additional avoidance from the DW penalty. Thus, the numbers become:

Single Wielding Mob, 1.8 speed
(1 weapon*(1-0.55% total avoidance))/1.8 = 0.25 damaging hits per second

Dual Wielding Mob, 1.8 speed
(2 weapons*(1-0.74% total avoidance))/1.8 = 0.29 damaging hits per second

That is a lot closer, but still not close enough to explain the dropoff. Presumably, to avoid crushing blows each of those damaging hits is blocked, meaning even with the additional miss rate Holy Shield threat (and Reckoning procs) against a dual wielder should be slightly higher.

The spreadsheet, on the other hand, shows about a 40% dropoff in Holy Shield threat against a dual wielder; roughly what I would expect if only one of the two weapons was being accounted for:

Dual Wielding Mob, 1.8 speed, counting 1 weapon only
(1 weapon*(1-0.74% total avoidance))/1.8 = 0.14 damaging hits per second
0.14/0.25 = ~56%, or a 44% reduction.

It looks like a bug to me...

For Hydross add-tanking, get as many craftable NR/FrR pieces as you can get (chest/helm/legs of one school or the other, one of each craftable ring, and one of the craftable necks), and then scour the AH for "protection" greens. The nice thing about the hydross adds is that they ignore armor, so you can wear cloth/leather/mail if necessary. Get the violet eye shoulder enchant (+7 all resists) for your shoulders, get a resist enchant for your helm, and if you feel like farming Botanica go there for the chromatic resist cape and get the all-resists enchant on that as well.

I think my hydross set hits about 220 each in FrR/NR unbuffed, which comes to over 300 with auras and a chromatic flask. If you don't have a good (i.e., epic) spelldamage weapon, you may have to go with a blinding light flask instead, but that should still leave you in the high 200s for each school. (I regularly skip the resistance flask these days and it's never a problem.) Weapon oil and spelldamage food are important as well, of course.

You can safely ignore defense; although you will take a few crits, stacking that much resistance will reduce the overall incoming damage to a level where they won't make a difference. Using this setup I have no problem AoE tanking all four adds when necessary, although we usually have the "off" MT pick one up just to make things a little easier.

As far as picking up the adds, drop a consecrate where one will appear (this should be easy to guess), judge another, and throw your shield at a third. By the time the shield gets off, the last two elementals will have started moving, most likely towards the same person, and if you're lucky you'll get both with the shield. If not, taunt or hope that your other OT(s) are on the ball. Then just consecrate and call for AoE.

Has there been any looking into [Stormchops] and how it might compare to spelldamage food for trash mobs/grinding in general (I don't usually eat food buffs for my dailies, but it might be something to take into consideration)? A quick search on the forums and in the 2.3 patch thread didn't bring up any information on food at all - no proc rates, damage output, if it breaks cc, if it generates threat, etc.

This may seem like something incredibly minor in the realm of aoe tanking, but the buff text reminds me of the first time I saw a video with [Force Reactive Disk], and would definitely be interested in getting some cooked up regardless.

When tanking Hydross adds, I just wear [Wildguard Leggings], [Wildguard Breastplate], [Iceguard Helm] and [The Frozen Eye]; together with my Frost Aura and AotW, this gives me 155 FR and 190 NR. The rest of my set is all Merciless Gladiator / Veteran shockadin gear, the resilience from which easily makes me crit immune when combined with either [Scarab of Displacement] (once you've killed him at least once ;P ) or [Timelapse Shard] (in which case you should be extremely careful NOT to Use it accidentally). Using PvP gear also has the benefit of putting your spell damage through the roof, allowing AoE to start pretty much immediately. I'm able to tank 3-4 adds with this setup, though as with Cathela we usually have a bear pick up 1-2 of them and bring them into the Consecrate. In terms of grabbing the adds, I do exactly as Cathela described earlier.

Personally, I don't care much about the name so long as the idea's useful. I think it can be useful for comparing talents as well, which'll help answer some of the other questions in the thread. For example, using the "Crush Avoidance Rating" name, each point of Avoidance is 5.1 CAR and each point of Deflection is 7.9 CAR. Holy Shield is 237 CAR, but that's pretty much academic .