Just a note to the OP:

Righteous Defense is now based on melee hit%, not spell hit%. You may want to change that in the first post.

I run the 0/48/13 build for everything, and my only pain is when im not taking enough damage. Even healing, I have a mix of mail and plate healing gear, all of it chosen for +int and mp5 once past the +healing, including gemming. As a result, I only have about 12% crit, +1450 healing. I am clearly in the back of the healing meters, but no one expects me to be a rockin healer, just to help ease the strain on the healers. More specifically, the role I end up taking (especially on aoe-damage fights) I make sure that I get heals off on our holy paladins before they can heal themselves. I figure that my contribution to healing isn't normally keeping the MT or OT up, but rather by healing the holy pallys, I lend them my mana pool through spiritual attunement conversion.

When that is not needed, I generally dance all over the board trying to heal who I can, and stick to flash of light even though it is widely considered as 'not the best option', just to give someone a fast 2k health when they are REALLY low so they have time while a much bigger heal from a full time healer is incoming.

I still generally end up with around 35-45% overhealed.

Slightly tangetial, as it doesn't have to do with raiding specifically.

Speaking of 13/48/0 vs. 0/49/12, I'm wondering if anyone here has had any success running a 20/41 or 13/48 variant on an arena team? My palladin recently hit 70, and it's unlikely I'll have the gear set on him to MT anything raid-wise for a while yet. In the meantime, I'm trying to up my healing viability by doing a 5v5 with a bunch of friends' alts. Since we're all undergeared and generally underskilled, we pretty much suck, but one thing I did notice is that even in my "healing" gear it took forever for the other team to kill me.

On thing that really hurt healing as prot in an arena was the spell pushback. I couldn't get any heals off whatsoever if I wasn't bubbled. I've been thinking of respeccing 14/47/0 - picking up enough talents in Holy to eliminate spell pushback and help healing a bit. (Imp. concentration aura is a threat tradeoff with Precision, but it would help in arenas a good bit.) If I'm just running 5-mans at the moment, does anyone see a problem with this spec in terms of threat or tank viability? Has anyone tried it in that setting?

I have a question about gemming up my gear. I generally go for the socket bonus on all my gear. And, since Elderin is already at 490+ defense, I don't get defense gems. I generally get INT gems.

The reason I do this is for more mana. Yet, I get a lot of comments that I have too much INT.

In my current get up, I've tanked everything up to and including Gruul (successfully). So, I'm not convinced I'm doing anything wrong with my current gear set.

Anyone have a good explanation?

I'd be one of the peopel questioning your sanity. Mana issues are solved via many ways. Judge wisdom. Get a shaman for WF and Mana Spring. Drink potions. Those are my main ways of upping mana regen. A shaman in particular cannot be undervalued. With a shaman my mana longevity seems to go up remarkably between WF giving me extra JoW procs and mana spring.

Additionally 490 is crit cap, not when defense stops helping you. An eight defense rating gem gives you 3 1/3 defense. This translates to .1 1/3 dodge, parry, miss and block. That's .4 avoidance and some block percent. As a tank your job is number one to live and number two to generate threat. You can drink mana pots if you avoid too much for a while and need mana. If you get hit too often and you die due to lack of total health and/or avoidance there is no pot to help you. I generally gear myself for mass stamina as this allows me to absorb an extra few hits while upping my Ardent Defender range. I don't wish to get into Effective Health theories here or how avoidance ties into this however as it is covered very well in other tanking threads in this forum.

Additionally this may be cruel but I have no doubt I could tank Illidan without using a weapon. My threat generation would suffer a ton and drag the fight out, but I could do it no sweat. Same goes for not using lets say a breastplate. This doesn't mean my gear choices could not be viewed as odd or wrong.

Typically, we don't have a Shaman in the tanking group, but I can look into it. As far as defense helping you, it becomes a lot less efficient when you're uncrushable (as Elderin is). Remember that any additional block rating is useless when you are uncrushable (unless you get a corresponding decrease in dodge or parry). While Defense will increase your miss/dodge/parry, it will do nothing for block if you are uncrushable. Thus, a single defense gem (+8 defense rating) will increase your total avoidance by 0.4%. IMO, defense gems are pretty useless if you're already uncrushable.

Elderin doesn't get hit a whole lot (stacked dodge so it's at 23% unbuffed) and when I use him to tank Gruul, he has over 18000 health and armor. I've been told that I take a lot less damage than most other tanks in Gruul's Lair but I don't know if that's true.

I could go for Enduring Talestite for Defense and Stamina.

Here's a good explanation. An 8 INT gem is worth 120 more mana over the course of any fight -- this is the same amount of mana you gain with any heal of 1200 cast on you. Your max mana pool is completely irrelevant -- if you're having mana issues, socketing with gems is NOT going to fix it. Get a BoW put on you, judge wisdom on the mob, quaff mana potions, all of those are actually useful. By gemming with INT, you are throwing away a lot of possible hp/avoidance/threat options.

edit: I'd agree also that defense gems are largely useless, unless it's an enduring talasite that you're using to hit a good socket bonus. Generally I try to keep my defense slightly over the cap, and look to make tradeoffs as I push over 500 from a new piece of gear.

You significantly outgear T4 content, and should be able to tank Gruul with no difficulty even if all of your gem slots were empty.

I've done 12/49/0 and 0/48/13 and variations thereof, and my experience has been that the smattering of points in Holy really almost never makes a difference in your healing ability. Your primary source of mana is still chain-chugged pots, and 12% bigger heals from an off-healer isn't likely to make or break anything. The only thing I ever really miss is Spiritual Focus (assuming you go for that instead of Imp. SoR), and even that rarely.

However, one could also argue that the extra parry from a prot/ret build makes very little difference on Hyjal trash, since the situations where your life is threatened (focused shadowbolts from Necros on a pull, or being smacked up after getting knocked over by an Abom) are the situations where parry makes no difference.

Well, Gruul is a T4 boss, and you're wearing 5 pieces of T5 gear, all of them in fairly significant slots. I'm not trying to minimize your accomplishment, but having strong base gear can overcome sub-optimal gemming.

Intellect is not always entirely useless; having a decent mana pool on Voidreaver is nice, and tanking Al'ar adds definitely requires me to chain-chug those nethergon energy pots. So I appreciate that some of our gear has the occasional "afterthought" intellect thrown in. But it's not so broadly useful that it's worth gemming or enchanting for intellect.

The chain-chugging point you make here actually hurts the int argument rather than helping it. Having more spell damage instead means each potion you chug is that much more threat you can crank out. A base mana pool of 8,000 vs 6,000 is probably closer to 28,000 vs 26,000 on these fights.

More spell damage on VR means your burst threat from the 20-second AW window is more potent, and your overall threat generation is higher.

For Al'ar's adds, you don't need to constantly dump threat into them. You only need "enough" to keep them off of the DPS. You'll still need to chain-chug the pots, but again, higher spell damage makes each potion you use that much more effective.

Really though, this topic has been beat to hell in this thread. At this point I'd encourage Elderin to read the entire thread when you get a chance, as pretty much every argument for and against int has been brought up and discussed already.

EDIT: I don't really have the time to do a detailed analysis, but I contend that all pally tanking gear would be better if the int were dropped and re-itemized into spell damage. It would require us to play smarter to take advantage of the different stats, but is that really a bad thing?

This is one of the Paladin quandaries. To quaff health or to quaff mana.

I'm going have to get Super Rejuvs, I guess.