If no one in your raid has kings currently, I would argue that you're the one doing it wrong. It's arguably the single best buff you can provide a raid.

It sounds to me like you're just biased against kings, as opposed to looking at how good it actually is, and then you want to argue about it. If your main goal is to be the best tank possible, and to emulate a warrior (which it sounds to me like this is your goal) it is ONE talent point for 10% extra stamina.

Just a few posts up, you said "mitigation + HP is what MT's ultimately rely on" but then you call 10% extra stamina a crutch?

Call it what you want, but if no one else in your raid has it, it's the single best talent point you can spend. It's definetly better than blessing yourself with light when you've got a priest healer.

Wow, am I dumb. You are correct. I just never noticed that BoL is only for paladin healing spells (I thought it was for all Holy spells). Kings is slightly better than worthless in a common enough situation for people gearing up. When you're in a group that has no Paladin healer and you're outgeared for the encounter, kings is the way to go.

I do not seem to be advocating stacking stamina only. I do believe that stamina is your primary stat when evaluating gear, followed by defense, avoidance, armor. As a tank, stamina IS your final line of survivability which the Warrior forums around the world can tell you. What did I have before my kara neck? The badge neck. What did I have before that? +24 socketed stam Necklace of the Deep. If you take a look at the graph, you'll see stam wins (with lowest % wipes, represented by the lowest curve) in every encounter that a paladin can realistically tank. The graph is also a little unrealistic as it is a test of solely physical damage, which is not how real encounters go. In almost every level encounter (but especially SSC+), the spell damage mitigation (even with talents) just isnt enough combined with the large monster damage. Itemization fails us, having to sacrifice mitigation for stam or the reverse, making warriors painfully superior through gear. See where on the graph stam goes from 24% wipes (stam curve) to over 50%? That's the point a paladin is no longer tenable. Putting a paladin in a purely physical damage encounter (which doesnt exist) gives you over a 50% chance to lose the tank when guaranteed good healing and the boss is doing over 7250 a swing. Realistically encounters can fall somewhere above and below this "breakpoint" depending on luck. Prince is a prime example with his phase 2 chance to flurry on hit or getting axes on you.

How do these 2 statements get put together? First you claim kings is slightly better than worthless, then you turn around and say stamina is your primary stat. Kings is a LOT of hp, it's at least 1k hp for me. Kings is absolutely the first blessing I want on me.

Actually this is not a weakness, since paladins won't get crushed like warriors or druids will. The weakness lies in the fact that warriors can tclap and demo shout, so if you don't have a dps warrior and/or is unwilling to do it you take a hit there.

After reading through alot of wording indicating "Hear ye, this is the truth" and then just reference to warrior-threads, I fail to see the relevance.
I'm sorry, but the idea of just comparing a pala to a warrior is not the way to go. Sorry to break the bubble you're in but you are NOT a warrior. You will never be a WARRIOR as long as you play a PALADIN. Annoys me that every once in a while people still come out of the woodwork and go off like warr is THE tank-role, all others are just wannabe/half-assed copies. And when it comes from a paladin it's so much worse. If you play a paladin, then by all means learn that class, don't start a character only to try and play a different class with it.

Warriors has adapted that crown since not long ago there was no other tanking-class with all the perks a warrior has.
Now that paladins has more viability to tank every boss endgame, sometimes better, sometimes worse, I think it's time to move on from that notion alltogether.

Threat, stamina, mitigation is what paladins should aim for, order dependant on what level of progress, and what you lack most to do your job properly. If you only aim for stamina you will starve your dps sometime in the progression.

Oh, about the pocketwatch you mentioned in one post, it IS one of the best trinkets when things go bad. All fine if you still want to have Adamantite, just think about that as long as your above what's needed in defense (490 for lv 73/bosses), each point in +defense (2,4 def rating) above is only adding .04% chance to your miss/dodge/block/parry. Not bad, but you're gonna need one hell of a lot more def to make up for the on-use dodge on the Pocket Watch. I'd go as far as saying I regard it's Use-effect as my "Shield Wall".

One last thing though, the revamp on more stamina for us through talents, I would say came from the simple idea that since we have more stats to juggle than warr's/druids Blizz buffed it so we could stop worrying so much about stamina and get other, more important stats to better the paladin class in end-game tanking situations.

Summation, go read about paladins and stop worrying so much about how warr's do it !

RE: Paedur

You get 1% evasion from 19.5 defense rating (this is not including the block) versus 1% evasion from 18.9 dodge rating. The two stats are practically equal for all intents and purposes, meaning the only thing the Pocketwatch has over other trinkets is the use ability. Which, admittedly, is badass.

Ok, I was certain it was on all 4 stats, miss/dodge/block/parry and that 25 def skill

[top] 1 % in each, not 25 def rating. In equipping Pocket Watch I gain 2% dodge. Unless I'm mistaken you're going to need something extraordinary to gain an equal amount with a def-trinket.

Anyway, depending on where your progressing atm, there's really not any dodge/avoidance-trinket better than Moroe's point-for-point, until the Scarab of Displacement from Hydross, and even that one don't offer 1%(42 def rating

~17 def skill) towards dodge/block/parry/miss on equip.
Between those 2 I still use then Pocket Watch for boss-fights, unless I'm in resist-gear and need alot of defense to stay uncrittable.

Tbh though, I've come to use the Scarab rather often as of late, since Badge/ZA-gear is lacking in defense.

25 defense skill is not a 1% avoidance gain, it's a 1% gain in each of miss/dodge/parry.

60 defense rating ~= 25 defense skill = 1% miss + 1% dodge + 1% parry = 3% full avoidance.

Hence, 20 defense rating ~= 0.33% miss + 0.33% dodge + 0.33% parry = 1% full avoidance. Varuk's figure of 19.5 defense rating above is (I assume) the exact number, but I use 20 as a rule of thumb. So in fact it's really not much better than dodge, and 99% of the time you shouldn't worry about the difference between the two; just take whichever you get the higher number of.

Scarab of Displacement is, therefore, 2.1% full avoidance.

Assertion: Kings does not belong in a solid prot paladin build.

I am not biased against kings per se, I'm biased against the prot pally spending a point in a buff that he typically, could spend in a more efficient manner given our inherent inferiority to warriors. In an encounter where there's too few people to guarantee a holy pally in the group it doesnt matter, in a group where the encounters are much more volatile, you will have someone else who has it. Much like prot pally doesnt spend 5 points in improved might, you dont waste a point in Kings as a tank.

Assertion: Stamina stacking is the final goal of a prot paladin, after reaching uncrittable and uncrushable w/ holy shield.

Saying a paladin is not a warrior is self evident. So what? The concept that you fundamentally build a pally tank different than a warrior tank is just wrong. The monster vs tank mechanics dont change based on your class. Yes you have to make some defensive sacrifices to maintain decent threat and are gimped on itemization (what i wouldnt give for a gun slot), but the monster doesnt care. The role of a prot paladin is to tank regardless of the assertions that a warrior is better (in most encounters, with equivalent tiered gear).

Yes you will get crushed from time to time, which is the point...encounters have an element of randomness that either makes them easier or harder, usually the latter. Every prince attack has a chance to flurry, including flurry proc'd attacks. You have only 4 charges on your holy shield up? Axes get on you + flurry = yur prolly gonna get crushed multiple times. There are no guarantees about being uncrushable, you just have better statistical uncrushability over a prolonged fight. The graph linked shows an encounter where there is basically no randomness at all, which tells us a little but doesnt directly translate to any non-heroic (SSC+) encounter. A prot paladin in full righteous is simply going to die against Heroic Quagmirran. The main problem? Stam.

If I'm sounding very argumentative, I apologize. I mean to inspire discussion and counter arguments so that people can decide for themselves.

All true, I stand corrected!

Although I also wrote "25 def skill = 1 % in each" and meant 1% in each stat, dodge/parry.. etc.
But I messed up the Scarab numbers since I honestly never thought about adding those together for a total avoidance like that, my bad. I see what you both meant now, thx for clearing it up.

In the end I'd rather have 2% dodge, than 0,7% dodge, 0,7% parry, 0,7% miss if I'm at def cap and uncrushable, since I don't want much parry. But that's just my personal opinion ofcourse.

My build is clearly horrible in that case, as I have both.

The key point to whether or not you take talents that give/improve blessings is that this is really something that depends on your guild. None of the other Paladins in my guild have Improved Might, and I personally don't have Improved Wisdom. It's not unusual for me to be raiding with only one other Paladin present, and typically it's a larger gain to have the (Holy) Paladin use Blessing of Wisdom overwriting it on me with Light while I buff Kings on myself than the other way around. That's also true for buffs on the other healers in general; Improved Wisdom might not seem like much, but spread out over your entire healer team it's a fairly large gain in mana they are capable of spending. The fact that I have Kings allows me to optimize the fact so that people that want Improved Wisdom can get Improved Wisdom in this particular case.

It's a single talent point, and it'll give you a buff that's the best survivability buff for any tank, and for a few specs/classes also their best general buff. For that reason I always say it's worth spending on. If the talent were instead phrased "At the cost of you casting a Blessing, you and everyone in your raid gains a 10% increase to Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intellect and Spirit. Does not stack with other Paladins that have this talent", most people would be all over it I suspect, despite the fact it's the exact same thing.

Edit:

Shorter summary: If your guild is good with you not having Kings, lucky you! A lot of us don't have that luxury.

Assertion: You're wrong.

You seem to be missing a lot, and honestly, you're one of those paladin tanks that gives us a bad name. I'm not sure where to even start. You seem to like the Prince example, so I guess I'll start there. Prince is the best single-target paladin tank target I can think of. His fast attacks in P2 mean that he'll tear through warrior shield block charges, and consistently crush druids. Paladins with enough avoidance(including block here) to hit uncrushable with holy shield will very, very, very rarely get crushed if they're playing correctly. The only situations where you would get crushed there is a hit in the lag time between casts of holy shield, or an incredibly unlucky string of hits that would have left either of the other two types of tanks dead. Also, it's 8 charges on holy shield, unless you're not (and why on earth wouldn't you) speccing that way. ( Also, you're is not spelled yur...).

Second, pally tanks are not just a poor substitute for a warrior tank. If that's your mindset, you better switch to healing or re-roll now and save yourself a lot of trouble. You're assertion that we're all tanking the same mobs, while accurate, is also misleading. I think you'd be hard-pressed to tell druids that they should tank like warriors, even though they're tanking the same mobs... Our strength most certainly lies in multi-mob tanking, something Hyjal will firmly impress upon your warrior and druid tanks. We're fantastic at ranged pickup - something that is painfully obvious on fights like Vashj, Anatheron, Akama, Leo, etc... We have high front-loaded threat capabilities, something that is extremely useful in some fights. We use mana instead of rage, which is great for fights like RoS P3.

Third, stacking stamina always is just stupid. Stacking stamina is good, in moderation. It shouldn't come at the expense of other stats, but rather when you have your stats in good standing, then stack stamina on top (Stats in good standing doesn't just mean uncrushable either, I find that a bit more avoidance than strictly uncrushable calls for serves me a lot better). Avoidance can be super-useful, depending on the fight. I've found myself using Moroes Lucky Pocket watch on fights like Bloodboil, Council and RoS P1 and being very thankful that I held onto it. The on-use effect is near godly, especially with a 2 min cooldown (I've survived an entire rogue phase on the council without a healer thanks to the pocket watch, a healthstone and Hammer of Justice).

Fourth, Kings is a stupidly great buff. You can call anything in the game a crutch if you like, but anything that gives you 10% to all stats really can't be overstated. Imagine an item dropped with the following stats: +100 stamina, +9 spirit +14 strength, +20 int, +9 agility - all of which scale as your gear gets better. How on earth could you justify not picking that up? The only time I don't use kings is when I massively overgear something and need Wisdom to keep my threat up. Otherwise it's hands-down the best buff in the game.

IF something I say is in error, or if I have missed something earlier in this thread (sorry I haven't read all 43 pages yet) I apologize now, and feel free to correct me.

That said, WTF?!?! Kings, is the single best all around talent point for a Tankadin. Kings adds Health, Mana, Armor, and Avoidance.
Now, we CAN assume that most Holy Paladins have kings available. However, most holy paladins have improved Wisdom or Might. Why would you want to force them to drop Imp Wis from all the paladins in the raid because you think you have a better place to spend that 1 talent point.
I'm going to assume a Main Tank build of 0/51/10
so where? Reckoning? ASSUMING it procs and runs its duration, it does a little more tps. Whoopty do.
Stoicism? 10% resist to stun? Never noticed a big difference whether I included it or not.(would be nice if they included fear resist...) Or 30% chance to avoid dispell? what are they gonna dispell?
Improved Dev Aura? lol

Here is what I believe to be the best all around Main Tank spec for Protection Paladins. You could spec differently for more threat, but its really not needed, I maintain around 800-1.2k tps (depending on a lot of boss variables and what buffs I'm running).
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Paladin -> Talent Calculator
(Arguably you could go 0/49/12 for the imp crusader and drop reckoning altogether, but as my guild is planning on trying out a ret paladin in the raid soon, I'll leave that judgement to him.)

Why?
If you need imp concentration aura or BoP, you aren't holding threat. You aren't ready to be tanking what you're tanking.
HoJ lower CD is pointless, what boss of anything does that work on?
And if you are a paladin tank with Imp Dev aura, you have wasted 5 talent points.

The ONLY buff you could feasibly give yourself over Kings would be sanc, but Sanc is useless if you are Main Tanking for anything beyond kara. Gruul, Lurker, VR, Tidewalker... sanc is useless for all of em.

Friendly tip: Please don't come here looking to pick fights or have vehement debate. Few pages back with SoV is about as heated as it's polite to get on here, and choosing inflamitory language and assertions ('Every protadin build with Kings is bad') is frankly, a little silly. Dial it down a couple notches, and come to this group of people, many of whom have been tanking quite a lot of stuff for quite some time, without trying to spur us into an arguement. Discussion works quite well.

Friendly tip the second: Proofread your posts, well. The one quoted has enough typos and the like to take heat if the baleful eye of the moderators happens across it, especially when you're new. These forums are pretty well policed.

Now, to address context:
Personally I like Kings, although with 4 90% attendence paladins, and myself being second lowest at a bit over 97% I could probably stand to get away without it. There's a lot to be said in simplicity and rapidity of blessing assignments, and Kings is just about good enough to always be the third blessing for every class, and is in almost no case a -pull critical hold failure-. This means that my raid isn't waiting on my smaller mana pool and other jobs with group assignments, marking, setups, pulling, chain pulling and rebuffing on the fly inasmuch that we simply must hold continiously if it's not up there. Therefore, giving it to myself gives me the freedom to be 5-8 seconds late into a pull.

This is primarily laziness, and I may well attempt to work up a build and take over Wis/Might on the primary buffing rotations as those are nowhere near the criticality of Salv.

There's also the many cases where I'll run with a Ret in a 5man, or single tank a speed pulled Kara (though to be frank I'll use Wisdom on that unless the healers catch me) where Kings is just a nice choice to have available. I'll accept for you in your situation you don't find it optimum in a 25 man raid with 2 other paladins at least one of whom can afford the point cost, that works for you. Though personally if it's a choice between that 1 point and the 9 mana/5 from imp Wisdom, I'll take the hit- I'm also addicted to mana potion injectors, bringing somewhere like 90 worth with me on Illidan, of which I used 3- healing in tank gear GO. It's certainly not a horrible point of view to be outlined in the OP, but I think I'd call it more of a minority of cases as it stands.

I also somewhat agree without about stamina and it's place among our holy trinity. I often keep myself at or around crushable via dint of pure effort, having moved most of my shield block rating (which is not an avoidance stat, but a mitigation stat in certain circumstances, or better yet just called an 'uncrushability' stat) off of my gear so I can gain the most in threat and stamina. However, it's foolish to neglect those times when being hit is more deadly, or to neglect the power of shield block value or AC in relations to stamina. For reference, I'm closing in on 18.5k unbuffed but rarely step up in over 17.8k for threat or avoidance reasons, and I'm by no means the best geared paladin on this thread. Stamina is very, very good but to obsess about it exclusively is silly. If you think the best warriors do this, you're even more silly- in reality, most protadins do this much more in my experience, and while warriors assign SBR a nil or negative value (correctly) most protadins will like a dash of it on their gear, whereas warriors prize SBV extremely highly while we just like picking it up if we can.

Blanket statements about how protadins are just worse than warriors are unhelpful at best. I'm not pretending we're the best for every fight, but that's getting dangerously close to the (outdated) mentality that you can single tank an instance with your glorious MT. And in a lot of ways, mechanics do in fact change depending upon who tanks it- I can frontload threat significantly faster, bubble out of threats, juggle in higher threat moves depending on boss attack patterns, or use range taunts to massively rework things. We're certainly closer to warriors than druids are to warriors, but that doesn't mean we're clones of them with a different colored rage bar. I'd also argue that we gave up the 'gimped on itemization' since the Glorious Day of 2.3 (and probably a bit before then) but you can't look at the D3 set and even compare it to now. Most of the original designed for us gear was just -bad- in every sense, and they never went back and redid it.

A last note, on crushing blows, while they may occur for us and there is a nontrivial amount of randomness in every encounter, we're more-or-less guarenteed to have considerably less of them most of the time. That, by itself, is extremely valuable.

Ah, no, misunderstanding on the parry mechanic: If he parries one of your attacks, he gets the parry haste. If you parry one of his, your attack gets hasted. Parry's not bad as avoidance except it's more expensive and shows up more rarely on gear as a whole, in addition to being a lot less additional threat (1 swing of rage/HS > 1 swing of SoR).

Edit:
Oh, and for the record my current gear is (I think?) some bastard child of Holy, while my spec is laughable for anything but what I did (flametank on Illy). So whiel the spec might not change till sat/sunday, the gear will probably regain some sanity later tonight.


Edit2:
Sorry, went on a brain safari halfway through that last sentence on Parry and started talking about TPS from expertise. Ye gods.

oh boy.

Can I just say that Protection paladin talent point assignment has no "best way to do it".

Frankly, your spec should deal with 3 things
1. Your gear
2. where you are in progression
3. what other paladins have

In my case I've made sure I hit the avoidance/defense cap in all my gear (except the gear I don't need too)
and adjusted points according to what I wanted to try and ended up with my current spec.

2. we're in MH and BT attuned, but just starting. I have a ton of AOE packs and tank all AOE mobs in any other instance well with my current spec. My guild one shotted all trash pulls in Mt.Hyjal. Which is arguably harder then most the bosses.

3. We are paladin heavy. We run with at least 3 (in rare circumstances) and often 5 or more (most likely circumstances)
Thusly specing for imp. crusader, imp. blessings and/or kings by me isn't needed. I roll with what I want to accomplish as a tank.

That means def/avoidance caps, stamina and a shit ton of spell power so i can rip agro from our main tanks when I want too. YEAH BOY!

Ok, this was where I first had to comment in favour of the Pocket Watch, which all the replies that followed related to.
With comparing his def-trinket of choice with Scarab of Displacement(since it has more +def, and usually something that replaces Adamantine Figurine) I started a string of replies.

It was just to showcase the above poster with a trinket with more +def on it, and that I personally don't agree it's nowhere as good as Pocket Watch as an "oh shit"-button. Then I moved on with the idea that the 2% dodge on it, easily surpasses the Adamantine/Scarab as an avoidance trinket because the parry you gain...(borrowing your explanation bolded)

I never said parry is bad as avoidance-stat, and I don't think I wrote anywhere something that might have given you the notion I didn't understand parry-mechanics. But it is as you say expensive to get, and not something you see often.

I personally don't aim to get everything that has +parry since I don't count the stat itself as good as pure dodge, just personal opinion. In my full avoidance stats I rather have parry on the lower end and dodge on the higher, just because stacking parry is going to be more expensive, and you can't find that many items with +parry, to give the same % avoidance as dodge does for a cheaper price. Therefore I personally consider dodge a better stat to aim for than the parry through a +def-trinket =)

I have enough trying to put all other stats in good order. And in a choice of getting a 2% pure dodge trinket(Moroes), and a def-trinket(Adamantine > Scarab) to gain 2% towards full avoidance (1/3 dodge, 1/3 miss, 1/3 parry) I'd go with getting 2% pure dodge 99% of the time since I don't count that small part parry I gain from the def-rating anything game-breaking/something I "need".
Not saying it's bad though, the idea came from the outburst that Moroe's is such a crappy trinket and that a +def-trinket will take the crown any day of the week.

How is a tank, stacking stamina, stupid? Give me an example where I'm going to sacrifice stamina for avoidance/threat. What's the conversion you think is sane? The analysis of T4 gloves to Felsteel is right on. If you're so sure that stacking stam is foolish, show some gear choices where you take less stam for more stats. Point for point, what's worth more?

Just to throw out random numbers, this is about equivalent to me (with the caveat that you are already uncrushable)
10 defense = 120 stam = 12 dodge = 18 parry = 18 block rating = 150 bv = 20 spell damage = 1000 armor = 60 int = 21 expertise = 100 str = Agi:dodge (convert all agi to what dodge it provides for weighting purposes) = 30 hit rating.

We'll call it tank rating. I'll suggest a simple 1 pt for all those values and fractions based off of them and look at suggested gear from the start of the thread and what's available in-game. Always assuming your choices will not break your uncrittable/uncrushable status. Unique-equipped really screws us, so 2.4 will help a lot in socketing choices of rare gems.

Rare Pally Shields:
Ogri'la Aegis: 9.82 (dodge socketed)/ 10.36 (stam socketed)
Aegis of the Sunbird: 8.72
Platinum Shield of the Valorous: 9.41
Crest of the Sha'tar: 10.43

Trinkets, Card: Vengeance vs Adamantite vs Scarab vs FotColossus:
Adamantite Figurine: 3.2
Darkmoon Card: Vengeance: 4.25 (plus threat, whatever you decide that counts for)
Scarab of the Inifinite Cycle: 4.2
Figurine of the Colossus: 1.77 (block rating is good for avoidance against crush, but you still get hit. 7.9 BR = 1% avoidance of CRUSH)
Darkmoon Card: Madness: 4.25 (plus threat, whatever you decide that counts for)

Helms:
Myrmidon's Headdress: 9.8 (Stam socketed)
Oathkeeper's Helm: 7.5 before socketing, adding 3 solid stars = 10.5, for avoidance it's a lil less but still better

When deciding how to spend badges, looking for your greatest upgrade in terms of these points is where you have to crunch the numbers while making sure you dont fall short of your minimums.

Legs:
Unwavering Legguards: 14.55
Wrynn Dynasty Greaves: 13.03

Bracers:
Vambraces of Courage: 6.6 (hybrid socket gives more tr)
Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx: 7.8

Neck:
Brooch of Deftness: 5.73
Barbed Choker of Discipline: 6.16

Largest difference is pants, but because of cost (so many badges) you might wait. Do other ppl weight it differently?

But everyone does rate stats in this manner. Even you. Gear and experience defines what content you can access. During the ramp up (tank gear doesnt always drop), you have lots of choices in what you will choose to obtain/equip and how to socket/enchant it. While some people are concerned about simply being able to access heroic content and some people worried about the right stats for particular BT fights, the overall effectiveness of any piece of gear is quantifiable for a particular kind of fight. Stam (high spell/physical damage) or Avoidance (rapid attack speed/high physical damage) and the large majority of fights (including trash) are the former.

The Prince fight is something that a large majority of readers (of all skill and gear levels) can associate with. While many pally tanks will never get a chance to tank SSC, many will be able to get to Prince which is a prot paladin-favoured fight. Even with the best BT gear, an unlucky Prince fight will kill you near-instantly (as it is now). Is there some reason I should be talking about some other boss for the purposes of demonstrating how much luck matters over particular stats? I don't think so.

What does "credibility" have to do with known mechanics? I dont know. Protection and you! leads with posts about the basic stats and concepts. I'm suggesting you can quantify stats in a more useful way as our gear choices are quite varied nowadays.

Take a look at RebeccaB
versus
Lore

What do you notice about gemming? Stacked stam for endgame PvE. Warrior Theorycraft, long ago, worked out that stam is your primary goal and every other type of tanking stat can be equated to mitigation or avoidance (mitigation via luck). After kara, you dont have particular situations where you have to worry about minimum requirements (uncrit/uncrush) so paladins are often stuck in a place where they cannot be sure which piece of gear is more effective. The idea that there's this balance that can't be quantified, smacks of mysticism. Concerned tanks dont just "wing it".

I am serious. You linked a profile, so I looked it up.
Offset warrior gear - Things like Wrynn Dynasty leggings, Jade skull BP, etc. Gear with +sta/+agi/+str is typically warrior gear. Some pieces can take you so far, but if you rely on it, you're going to be hurting for aggro, or you are going to be "harder to keep up than the other tanks".

First of all, don't be so patronising. I've been tanking for far longer than you. I was offering advice, not that you have to take it. You could ignore it, but don't just call it cute, like I'm an idiot.

Stacking avoidance means you take overall less damage. On some occasions, this is not important. On most this is. Surviving burst damage, while important, is not paramount. Again, you can supplement spell damage to make up from the loss of holy shield. There are situations where you don't have the benefit of the mob beating on you, but still need to generate threat.

35 block value is not worthless. 24 int is not worthless. 27 spell damage is more than 1/2 of a weapon enchant. 17 stamina difference is a fair difference to be honest. But you have geared your entire set away from spell damage, which is going to cause you problems in the long run.

Likewise, if you were serious, you would already have grinded out the rep weapon. If you realistically think that 200 spell damage is going to be enough, you're already not taking your role seriously, or else you have yet to be in a circumstance where you have significant DPS.

You are not filling a warrior's role as a tank. You fill a tank role. This is a fundamental difference. You're not taking a warrior's job and trying to do it the best you can. You're taking a tank role, and filling it. We have DPS warriors tank crystalforge devastators in tempest keep because of spell reflect. That can be considered a warrior's role. I tank supremus every week. That is not considered filling a warrior's role. That is just me tanking.

If you continue to gear the way you are, you're going to run out of threat as soon as your DPS learns to DPS. Even if you're OTing. I'm obviously not saying that your gear is not strong enough to do what you're already doing. But I was just offering general advice.

In short, all I was saying is: Take blessing of kings. If you are noticing the lack of 1 point out of reckoning from DPS, it's really just a symptom of the fact that you're gearing the wrong way.

You say you can do without kings. But then you complain about losing 200 health while gaining a greater than 10% increase to your spell damage. Kings is going to be like 1500 health generally, but apparantly it's worth going without.

Paladin tanks aren't inherently inferior to warriors. We are tanks, like warriors, like druids. We have different strengths, and different weaknesses, but by no means are we inherently inferior. And I think that's what you need to get over. You're trying to make your paladin into a warrior-lite. And if you continue to do that, that's what you'll be.


I have tanked nearly every encounter in the game now. And the few that I haven't, has been because I can fill another role better. And those that I haven't (rage winterchill, archimonde, naj'entus, morogrim, leotheras) I know that I could do fine, with the exception of archimonde. I have only once felt that I was not well equipped for the job. And that was while doing Supremus. And that was because "I took a lot more healing than the other tanks". And I looked at what was the difference between me and them. And the difference was, I stacked effective health, and they balanced their set with avoidance. I went back to a proper mix of health and avoidance, and all of a sudden I was easy to keep up again.

Credibility has a lot to do with the audience being willing to listen to you when you suggest things that go against the conventional wisdom we've already hashed out in the past 43 pages of this thread.

If your claims made sense in terms of known mechanics, you wouldn't be having a credibility problem. But they don't.

You claim earlier:

This short paragraph alone belies several fundamental misunderstandings:

1) The idea that Sanctuary provides a threat boost on par with the threat reduction from Salvation, which is not even remotely the case. Do the math, assume you get eight blocks every 10 seconds, and you'll still find the threat effect isn't even of the same order of magnitude as Salvation.

2) The idea that healer threat is even high enough to merit Salvation for most fights; it isn't. If you're free to consecrate a multi-mob pull and you're losing aggro to unsalved healers, something's wrong.

3) The idea that gear-swapping makes Sanctuary and Kings somehow equally useful. Sanctuary provides the same mitigation as roughly ~35 block value (less as your gear improves due to the fact that Sanctuary takes effect pre-mitigation), and threat equivalent to what you'd get from perhaps 40 spelldamage. That's not even in the same ballpark as getting well over 100 stamina from Kings, more as your gear improves (133 stamina for the profile you linked above).

4) The idea that gaining 1k+ hp from a buff is somehow trivial compared to the effect of gear upgrades.

Items 3 and 4 are even more bizarre given the stamina-above-all doctrine you're espousing everywhere else; your claims aren't just inconsistent with known mechanics, they aren't even self-consistent.

This is aside from the goof-up about BoL and priest heals, which isn't really relevant to the central topic of tanking. But it does serve to reinforce the impression that you haven't been playing a paladin for a terribly long time, and that you should probably spend a bit more time playing one before you start making these kinds of sweeping pronouncements.

I am self consistent. It is not the tank's job to spec for buffing himself. I understand if you want to discount my views because you dont like my attitude, but try to quote me when you reply to something I post so we can be clear on what is what. I have no idea where you got #3 from.

Dont suppose to tell me that my gear is lacking without some justification other than "i think so cause i play more than you". To be fair, I play my character more than you and it's fine for the content I access or I would boost it through the various tradeoffs available, which I've mentioned.

Prot paladins start in an inferior position in gear mitigation, gear stamina, and threat generation. i.e. Prot Warrior in Bold Armor with a grom'tors vs Prot Paladin in Righteous Armor w/ a mageblade. Even though Righteous provides more raw defense, a warrior's survivability is signifigantly better in a heroic encounter. If you AND your raid members have to work signifigantly harder and longer (in gear preparation) for you to effectively MT, you are inferior. Inferior != ineffective, but prot paladins fit the definition of inferior tanks. You are correct to say we are like druids in the realm of inferior tanks, but druids have the additional problem of no shield.

Every Prot paladin who wants to MT is a warrior-lite. There are no prot paladins that gear as a rogue-lite. A prot paladin isn't going to be choosing Agi over Stam or Crit over Defense. Prot paladins are going to follow traditional tank stats, (replacing spd for str where possible) and having to reach much higher minimum defensive stats than a warrior would to effectively tank an encounter. Even the introductory sections of _this_ thread, from enchants to gems to trinkets talk about the importance of stam foremost after reaching your minimum uncrit/uncrush. The constant string of replies from paladins claiming stam isnt the primary stat when it's stat that has the highest % increase in EVERY piece of gear that a progressing prot pally obtains, makes me shake my head. Does anyone really think that Protection Warrior : Stamina vs Mitigation applies to one kind of tank more than another?

I'm not entirely certain he's not trolling at this point.

To clarify, which of these two shields do you find better:
[Crest of the Sha'tar]
[Shield of Impenetrable Darkness]

And Prince is a bit of an odd case in numerous respects. How about Nightbane, Gruul, or Maggy? I tanked progression kills for all of these bosses in considerably worse gear than is available at the Kara level, before the 2.3 changes when stamina was much more relatively important. Prince has an undenyiable randomness about him, though even for him there's a certain point where block value is strictly better than stamina, or higher avoidance avoids the Sunder (which is what results in the big hits). Not to mention AC as related to block as related to stamina is flat out not a direct comparison that you can make, because AC decreases the value of the max possible hit (increasing relative hitpoint pool in a %-scale) and block value is removed from the direct final attack.

The avoidance vs mitigation issue is not one we're ignorant of, and in fact in most cases I tend to come down upon the statics (AC, hp, blockval) when compared to the chances (dodge, parry, to-be-missed). But dismissing all other stats in favor of pure HP specifically is certainly no way to gear a tank, and setting up point evaluations at a static value across multiple gear levels is...not a good idea. Even setting up fluxuating gear levels it is fairly unwise because it's a situation of absolutes in a situation where relative value changes fight to fight.

Speaking of, 'credibility' comes across because you are stating absolutes (stamina is god!) without a whole lot of backing (Prince hits hard), and being condescending in your replies. Your first post came across as flame-bait or an insult to people who are in different situations than you, without the slightest possible thought that perhaps it is your perception? Most people in this thread started in Kara, and most of us (I think) have various friends and guildmembers who are still at the kara level (I'm certain I know of 4 people I speak with on a regular basis, in guilds working on Gruul, who disagree with me about weightings and gearing and specs). To pop along with 'Well you're wrong this is the the valuation that's correct' is a bit...off putting.

Hell, if you think that everyone replying to you and potentially disagreeing with you agrees with each -other-, you're anything but right. If you think we're dismissing what you say out of hand because of the tone you present it in, you're likewise incorrect (and in fact, because I'm certain of my Illidan spec and illidan raid, I have dropped Kings from my weekly respec for that, though I'd never run without it in a standard spec). But you're bleeding our desire to listen to what you have to say because it's pretty obvious you haven't read, you know, the entire thread, and assume we're just ignoring you while, in fact, ignoring our counterarguements in favor of what you'd prefer. In short, it feels like you think you're posting on the wow forums.

Oh, and for the record, I detest the T4 gloves. But not for the reasons you listed. I give no value to Int, I give a -ton- of a value to block value because I've seen far too many pieces of math, discussion, and the like. I don't like the +damage on T4 gloves becuase I think Maiden stomps them into the ground due to pure stamina, even at the cost of the higher AC on Felsteel. The set bonus is nontrivial, but frankly since I value T4 shoulders over T5 I'd go for helm/helm. I also tend to like the Badge helm because it lets me equip stamina trinkets and drop subpar (key word) avoidance trinkets- for example, I'd wear Moroes' watch on Prince but pure stamina for something like Curator (well, frankly, I'd go +damage instead of stamina for Curator, popping AW and Icon to ensure that my dps could burn like he has a 3 minute enrage). I'd probably wear pure stamina for Nightbane though.

In addition, one last note. The reason you put stamina in everything (and I do agree, EVERYTHING) is because when taken in the context of 3 sockets, it is -massively- overbudget. The ilvl budget system basically means that for 8 int, 12 stamina is equivilant. When taken in 24, -30- stamina (or thereabouts) is equivilant. Then let's add that onto the base stats of the item and presto there's one of the big reasons that the socketing system is pretty far out of whack. Of course you stack stamina, it's the biggest bang for the buck in a pretty dramatic sense. And in fact, stamina is always one of your primary stats, but don't assume just because of gems that that is the 'best' stat in all situations.