The number shifts between +1,000 spell damage and +1,400 spell damage, depending on whose numbers you look at, but under this number, Seal of Vengeance will always outperform Seal of Righteousness, given that you can keep all 5 stacks up. I rarely drop a stack at all, possibly due to my spell hit and melee hit gear I use on single targets, so I always favor SoV.

Reckoning will only proc when you take damage from a melee or ranged physical attack. It will not proc on Miss, Dodge, Parry, or Full Block. It will only proc on Partial Block, Hit, Crit, or Crush. As your gear scales up, you eliminate more and more of the hits on yourself that would proc it.

1hws increases all damage however, including fire shield, thorns, retribution aura, holy shield, avenger shield, seals, judgements, consecration, and white damage. The increase across the board from this is hard to ignore compared with the diminishing returns from reckoning as you gear up.
However, at the highest current gear levels, there are more and more circumstances where increasing all damage is a bit less important than keeping that SoV up. I am not at that point yet, so others here may be able to answer you better.

I haven't seen many specs that go with both Reckoning and 1hws, though if you were to drop 5 points for reckoning, then the best place would probably be to pull them from Deflection, since Deflection specifically decreases the chance for reckoning to proc. The only time Ardent Defender is worth dropping is if you are getting hit for 36% or more of your health per hit, which is very rare, and normally a warrior or bear would be tanking instead.

Hi
Well I'm just curious if anyone has noticed any issues with threat generation. In particular is there a TPS cap?
I typically out TPS anyone in my raid, I even can pull agro off our MT after he has initial threat on it. Meaning he's already been taking hits and I pull mob off without RD or HS threat.

However lately I've been having a harder time and my DPSers are often agroing off me and I have no reason why!
I even have a ret pally in my group generally, I've added 2% threat to my gloves and had some upgrades to my gear. Which says to me I should have less and less problems generating threat and holding mobs on me. In particular I'm noticing problems on single target adds.

Is this a bug?

my only other idea is that our tanks are getting better since I'm out performing them in threat and thusly they needed to step up their game and/or our DPS classes have gotten use to my threat generation and are thusly DPSing sooner then they should. (which I know happens, nothing worse then a pyroblast when your Judgement of Righteousness misses).

Incidentally, does anyone know how to see TPS from wowwebstats?

With your ~630 spell damage, you shouldn't have any trouble holding aggro. MY gut tells me that it is the Righeous Fury bug cropping up for you. Try re-casting Righteous Fury before every fight like I do now. See if the problem goes away or diminishes.

Doing this has eliminated the bug for me, and with ~500 spell damage, I easily hold threat over my BT geared DPSers, though the gap IS slowly closing. There is no reasonable reason why your DPSers would be passing you in SSC/TK gear with your level of spell damage.

Thank you for the quick response. I did here about the RF bug and I do always make sure i have it rebuffed before bosses. However I don't necessarily do it before every trash pull. I wonder if Blizzard has confirmed this to be an actual bug.

Hmm going to have to check some TPS meters to see if I can narrow the problem down. I was concerned there was a threat cap I didn't know about.

I'm quickly levelling a tankadin as an alt for usage in 5-man heroics/10-mans, as within my guild and group of friends there seems to be a dearth of tanks willing to run these (all our 25-man tanks log off/respec the moment Hyjal and BT are cleared for the week). Admittedly I've never played a tanking class before, and as a healing lead the majority of my understanding of paladin mechanics only relates to their healing and utility capabilities, but I'm doing my best to educate myself so I can be ready to jump right in at 70.

However, I have a couple of questions about some observations about tankadins I've seen, and theorycrafting I've seen posted on other paladin boards.

The primary question I have is about gearing for Mitigation vs. Avoidance as a tankadin, and closely related to that, the usage of Reckoning. I was shocked to find that hardly any high-end pally tanks spec for Reckoning, as I was under the impression that this, along with Righteous Fury, was the single most powerful threat tool in the tankadin's arsenal. I thought the whole point of foregoing CC in order to hold threat on multiple mobs in instance pulls was to be able to get as many creatures beating on you as possible and therefore proccing Reckoning as often as possible, allowing you to easily build threat. As such, I figured that the best gearing strategy for a beginning tankadin, once Defense cap is met, would be to gear towards block rating and block value; parrying and dodging weren't really in my best interest, as I would actually WANT to get hit, but of course try to soften the blows of these many hits through Stamina, AC and block rating/value.

However it seems that most tankadins are gearing for avoidance instead of mitigation, and dropping Reckoning altogether. Is this a strategy that only becomes necessary in 25-mans with extremely hard-hitting raid bosses, and for the sort of content I'm planning on using my tankadin for, Reckoning + mitigation gear is going to serve me well? Or is it silly to gear/spec for mitigation even in heroics and 10-mans?

It's not that high end tanks don't want Reckoning (Trust me I miss it while soloing. Dishing out 2.5k damage in one swing as prot? ), it's that all things considered there's better places to put your talents. Most people have chosen either Reckoning or 1-handed spec for their threat points.

Reckoning excels in two places. The first is with a fast hitting boss, like Prince in Kara. The second is when you have a lot of things beating on you at once. The problem with the second, is that when you do have multiple mobs hitting you, Reckoning's threat increase will only affect the one mob you're attacking. 1-handed spec affects all sorts of threat sources, like consecration, holy shield, etc.

Mitigation gear will serve you well in heroics and 10-mans, although you'll notice you want to up your avoidance a bit for places like ZA. I also doubt you're actually seeing a lot of paladins gearing up specifically for avoidance. Most of the banter in this thread and the ones it replaces leads me to believe that most pallies gear similar to protection warriors a lot of the time. Less emphasis and hit and expertise, with that devoted to spell damage instead, but pretty similar.

About wanting to get hit. Turns out that this is only really the case for when you overgear someplace. On any progression content (even if it's only progression for your alt...), you should get plenty enough mana returned from SA, even if you're gearing a bit not to get hit. And once you get overgeared, then you can do things like removing your shield (yay Al'ar's adds...), or turning your back, in order to take more damage.

Whats the righteous fury bug that affects threat haven't heard about it yet.

Its not 17k actually, a 2 second gap is enough not to add it in my opinion.

To me this looks like your shield broke during the fight actually.

About the hits, I think the double MH is explainable by Trash (the ability), cant really explain the extra MH hit right after the OH though.

No, my shield wasn't broken. I was at about 75-80% dura here after just having repaired before Chess. The SS was of the third wipe, this happened three times in a row exactly like this.

I counted it as 17k instantly because I was sitting at 19k health with mark, fort, imp, com shout, and well-fed. I happened to be watching my health meter when I died, because this had happened twice already, and I went from 80% to dead in one frame.

EDIT: Finally remembered to log in my prot gear. Armory - Durindal

Prince Malchezaar has the ability "Thrash", which is a chance on hit to instantly get another two hits. He also typically swings his main and off-hand at the same time in phase two. In this case his main-hand procced Thrash, creating two extra hits, and his off-hand hit you too. That happens and there isn't much you can do about it if you're unlucky and get hit by all blows.

I'd ask about the lack of blocks but I know from experience that dual wielding mobs can go through your Holy Shield charges pretty quick if you're unlucky.

Keep reading the forums. All the questions you're asking have already been answered in some form or another.

The short version is that you are ignoring defensive stats in favor of threat. Until you're knocking on the door of 102.4% avoidance you should not be socketing or wearing items with spell damage over those with avoidance stats (except for your weapon). Respec and take Deflection. Buy the [Libram of Repentance]. Keep reading the forums.