Wouldn't suprise me - I was using [Merciless Gladiator's Salvation] with +81 healing enchant as tanking weapon for a while. It had total of 168 spell damage, which was slightly better then for example Continuum Blade with +40 spell damage.

After upgrading to [Gladiator's Gavel] with +40 spell damage I ceased to do that of course, but point is that certain healing items might at some point be marginally better then spell damage weapons - especially considering that there is a good chance damage ones will be highly contested drops.

For those of you that do arenas, do you respec pvp holy before your matches, or have you found a 20/41/0 build sufficient for both raid tanking and arenas, in any cases?

Technically anything is fine for arenas...the main problem with prot paladins is the same as prot warriors: you can simply ignore them. Your throughput will take a sizable hit.

If you're playing on a super-casual "we just want to do 10 matches each week and get our welfare epics team" then you can do that fine in your tanking spec. I didn't respec when I did arenas and it was no big problem. Just don't expect to go over 1500 (~350 points/week) if your team does this.

If your team is semi-serious and you want to actually climb the ladder and get more points, you'd better respec.

EDIT: I should note that at the level I'm talking about, a lot of people will assume you're holy as long as you're not wearing a two-hander and you don't give them reason to think otherwise. So they may very well decide to focus fire on you anyway, and it can actually be a lot of fun "tanking" in PvP, so long as your team has another healer.

I'm making a guess here that you're not MTing, either that or you made an extremely compelling case why you should get [Light's Justice] over a healing class( In which case my outstanding tip would be not to piss off the healers, they gotta luuuuuvvvv you).

In that case, don't stress at your gear level about getting to uncrushable. For the vast majority of stuff you're going to be called on to tank, it really won't be make or break if you take 1.5 hits every once in a while. Frankly, due to silences, stuns and, if you're me, occasional lapses in cooldown management, you're going to take the crushing blow here or there anyway. Your goal should therefore be to make it so you can take said blow without being insta-gibbed. Uncrushable will come with time( I feel that this is somewhat controversial advice of mine, so take it as you will. Additionally, if you're MT, you have to be uncrushable, so disregard everything earlier).

To that end, I'd replace all the +8 dodge gems with +12 stamina. Dodge is an expensive stat, and stamina will probably serve you better. Also, pay for the good gems, it's worth it. You've got a coupla hundred hp lower than were you to use +12's instead of your plus 9s. The defense is more tricky, because it is absolutely crucial that you keep that above 490 and you're not too far above it. I would switch out as many gems as possible till you're around 491 or so. Again, I'd say stack stamina. Your helm is socketed to get the strength bonus, which is fairly useless.

I wouldn't use [Light's Justice]. You only gain 7 spell damage over the [Crystalforged Sword] and lose 14 stamina and some cheap block rating (which would push you back toward uncrushable - block rating is easily the "cheapest" stat out there to get to uncrushable). It's just not really worth it, at least in my opinion.

Anyway, those would be my suggestions. The badge gear will put you ahead of where I was at that level, so there's no reason you can't be successful. The cloak and bracers are good pickups too, when you can get the badges.

I'm MT'ing kara yes, hope to MT stuff later (if it's possible with a tankadin). I took the light's because it was either take it or it was going to be sharded so I snatched it for my healing setup instead of getting yet one more void for the guild.

Ok thanks for the advice, I'll get +40 on my crystalforge sword and get the last 7k of rep for LC. I'm hoping to get the helm off the prince one of these days as I don't really think the stalwart defender is a very good piece of gear. I have 1/2 the cards for the furies deck and I'm hoping to complete that at some point as well.

Any advice on talents for MT/threat generation?

Thanks!

Quick question:

I debated between using the libram off Mother Shahraz over the Libram of Repentance (the badge libram). My question is: would it be beneficial to use a mod that auto switches librams for you (such as Librameister) so that when you cast a judgement it switches to the libram off Mother for the 4 second buff, then back to the Libram of Repentance.

I have my judgement spell macro'd to cast seal of righteousness afterwards so the global cooldown is being used up anyway.

what about Seal of blood and Seal of righteousness ?

How much + sp should we have to get the same damage up with the seal of righteousness that + ap with the seal of blood ?

Would a warrior-geared pal protec with strength instead of sp be viable ? Would he make aggro enough ? Wouldn't he hurt himself too much ?


(I did seached fo 30 minutes in the forum, but I didn't found anything :x)

bowbaq, I did some calculations a while back on another site and from what I remember, assuming you're using a good damage weapon (sun eater was the example) it'd take 170 spelldamage before you outpaced it with a spelldamage weapon. And that's on a single target; if you do any add-tanking seal of blood/AP is far worse since you aren't getting as much damage from consecrates.

Let's see. For AP equivalence:
1 STR = 2 AP
14 AP = 1 damage

For SoB, you get 30% of your damage as holy damage. The judgment scales with spelldamage, btw (another reason spelldamage is better: it improves SoR and JoR). So let's take the same base damage weapon:
base: 41.5 DPS

For SoB, each 14 points of AP is (1 + .3*1.9) threat, which is 1.57 TPS per 14 AP.
For SoR, each spelldamage is .5 TPS roughly. Thus you need about 3 spelldamage for the equivalent value of 14 AP. That's rough, but it's going to be close to this - so you can see how badly SoB scales for threat.

SoB is probably not a bad choice if you've got something like sun eater, don't have the spelldamage and are starting out - but it quickly becomes poor as you get better gear.

This has always been an issue.

I think that they are specially scripted to ignore many types of incidental damage, and probably periodic damage. This would make sense, since otherwise they would aggro on healers, or anyone casting an AoE, or a number of variable generic threat sources that would stop them from merely running towards and meleeing Akama. I figure they are just not responsive to the threat from consecration because of the style of damage it is, whether it is just because they ignore consecration or whether they ignore all holy damage I'm not sure.

Have you been able to keep aggro on them through SoR/JoR at all? I've never tried. I have just known that it didn't work for us, so I took a side. I like handling the sides better anyways because the mobs come out 3 at a time, which is perfect for Avenger's Shield.

I believe the general idea is that even if Seal of Blood did decent amounts of threat if you gear yourself towards AP/STR, everything else is going to suffer from your lack of spell damage. Your Consecrates and Holy Shields are both reliant on spell damage, and wearing Warrior-esque gear will cause your mana pool to tank (pun intended).

That being said, Judgement of Blood is very situationally useful. From the Retribution thread, it was concluded that JoB can never get a full resist, so if you ever need to snap aggro on a target, JoB will always come through.

If you're crushable without the Libram of Repentance, it's not worth the momentary gap.
If you're uncrushable without the Libram of Repentance, it's not worth the swing timer reset.

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I have some questions myself:

What do we know about Blessing of Sanctuary? Specifically:
1. Does the damage reduction apply to every hit, or on every block?
2. What's the minimum damage required to get the full 80 damage reduction on a hit? I know there's some sort of multiplier at work.

What are our gem recommendations for red and yellow sockets?