That seems somewhat low. Make sure he's using spell damage food and Superior Wizard Oil along with that Wrath of Air Totem. Flask of Blinding Light would be preferred for him, since I'm assuming your healers can keep him up with BT on farm. (alternatively, using a Mark of the Illidari for just a Supreme Power flask would work) Personally I sacrifice a bit of mitigation for damage when I find myself surrounded with T6 people, as I assume the survivability is less of a concern.

He may want to tweak his spec to a 0/51/10 for tanking bosses if having threat issues, in order to ensure he has Reckoning, if he does not have it already.

As the prot pally in our SSC/TK raids (just killed Vashj, for progression information), this is my big question. How much mitigation is enough for different fights?

Just because I manage to live through a fight with a certain mitigation level, doesn't mean its a good one. Maybe my healers just rocked that night, but next time it'll be trouble.

I admit I spent some time reading the prot warrior first post the other day, despite head-hurting calculus, and it really just made me wonder even more what a good mix of gear is.

Aside from the how much +dmg vs. mitigation to use in t5 and t6 instances for different bosses, I am having some trouble finding any common wisdom around at what point shield block rating should be deferred in favor of dodge/parry or even armor.

i.e. Once uncrushable (it is unquestionable that shield block rating is supreme for quickly becoming ucnrushable), should my entire goal be to start replacing block rating with dodge/parry...should I value shield block rating less or even consider it useless outside of AOE tanking situations once uncrushable?

Well its really difficult to generalize, so the best thing you can do is to know the fight and know what are u going to be tanking, lets put an example if you are tanking multiple weapons in Kael, first thing you need to know is which weapons are you gonna tank, what abilities do they have , and how much damage do they do, knowing that you can then make up a gear plan, in my case for example when Im tanking 3 weapons, usually mace, swords shield, those things can hit pretty hard, so I use my mitigation gear, but with a spell damage flask to balance things out and to have good threat.

So the idea is just to inform you, or if you are learning an encounter for example you could just use your threat gear for the first tries and then add some mitigation if needed, trial and error since you are still learning the fight it really doesnt matter, you just gotta perfect the job you are supposed to do.

Jamor:
I am going to assume the Pally in question is Megor, as his gear sources seem to point more to being a main than the other Prot Pally I found in your guild. He is sitting at 512 spell damage, which is just shy of what it should be against T6 DPS. Flasking/Potting + Oil + Food should put him well over +600 spell damage, which is into the range that he needs. Adding a shaman for Wrath of Air is something all prot pallys pray for, and would definately give his threat a significant boost.

If he is cycling his threat correctly or even close to correctly, but still having threat issues, then have him re-gem for less stamina and more spell damage. Your healers should be able to keep him up with as much as 2k less health.

If this can help you gauge what kind of threat he should be generating, last night I did some testing against my guild since I noticed that our DPS was slowly catching me at buffed +489 spell damage as the raids progressed. I re-geared re-gemmed slightly to put me up to +635 spell damage, with Tome of Fiery Redemption proccing me to +925 frequently, and I was leaving our DPS in the dust in threat, even when they would open up as I engaged. (MH 5/5, BT 5/9)

If he can get to these ranges and is still having trouble, then point him here so we can chat with him to figure it out.

Make sure he or some other paladin is keeping JotC up as well. That's another +219 spelldamage.

Here's the deal.

I wore what I consider to be my average tanking suit for Najenteus that night (what you see in my current armory) because it was my first time ever tanking him. Mana was not an issue (although I did pot), yet the end result for that fight was poor TPS (600-800).

On the other hand, in that very same gear, I have no problem sustaining 1300-1400 TPS (with frequent 1700 spikes) on Teron and 1100-1200 or so on Supremus. Parsing the threat from Exorcism, undead and demonic targets only grant me another 115 TPS on average, so Exorcism is not a magic wand for paladin tanking undead/demons (besides the insane initial and ranged burst). I run the exact same rotation on all of the above mentioned bosses (with Exorcism being the only exception, of course), and yet the massive contrast of threat I am capable of out putting from one encounter to another is staggering. My only theoretical explanation for this is Holy Shield. Against mobs that tend to eat up five or so blocks per cooldown, my TPS is easily over 1k all the time at a minimum (one good example is the sustained 2k TPS I can put out against the Malicious Instructor mobs in Shadow Labs).

Fully buffed I run with around +600 spell damage (oil + spirit, WoA is not always made available to me). I generally flask up with fort to increase my survival against most BT encounters (including Teron, Supremus). Obviously, I will have to re-think Najenteus next time and try a flask of blinding light instead to see how far that pushes me. I will also attempt to aquire a pair of T4 or T5 legs and gloves as soon as possible in order to deal with this TPS issue in any way that I possibly can. I have deliberately avoided T5 in the past as there was never any logical reason to use it for the poor mitigation and health it offered in previous T4-5 guilds where TPS was never an issue for me.

The very frustrating outcome of this conclusion, however, is that I am never in direct control of the quality of my TPS once combat has initiated. In situations where I equip extremely high spell damage gear (hitting +600 in gear alone) in effort to resolve the issue of my "horrible TPS" on trash, I often end up dead on the floor as the spike damage I can suffer in such gear is outrageous. Ultimately, my formulating opinion on paladin tanks is that we are only truly reliable on AoE trash and a small handful of bosses that inately make the most out of Holy Shield. I do not see the point of sacking my mitigation to such an extreme degree for a boss like Najenteus in which a warrior could simply mitigate better while pushing the same TPS.

I've got a couple of questions about mid-to-late BT tanking. (We're at 7/9 and working on the Council.)

1) Is anyone else noticing that while offtanking Voidreaver took a fair amount of effort (had to flask for spelldamage, chain-chug mana pots, etc), offtanking Gurtogg is almost too easy? The first time we tried this I used threat consumables and ended up generating just insane amounts of threat. Even after switching to fort/stam consumables, I still had to watch Omen very carefully to make sure I could pass off aggro before the bleed stacked to unmanageable numbers.

Anyone else had similar experiences? And if so, do you think this is due to mechanics differences between the two fights, or is it a result of some kind of insane gear-scaling?

2) Any particular tips for tanking Veras (the rogue)? I read in the IC thread here that he only moves 20 yards or so during stealth; is it possible to position him in such a way that you can drop a consecrate in the right spot at the right time and have a high likelihood of picking him up with it?

Does AS count as a physical or magic attack? (i.e., which blessing do I have to worry about?) I picked up [The Decapitator] on a Karazhan speed-run earlier this week thinking I might need it as a physical alternative to AS.

1) On Gurtogg I have noticed the absolute same thing you are talking about. OT'ing VR is a mana drain fest in complete contrast to Gurtogg. For one, the stacking debuff forces a ton of healing on all the tanks, which keeps our mana topped off almost non-stop (besides when we reset our debuff, but it VERY quicly comes back). Secondly, Gurtogg has several "drop aggro" moves, which greatly help in keeping the tanks close to one other on threat as well. Thirdly, I also believe that he hits fairly fast and thus makes good use of our Holy Shield on top of all that (comparitively to VR's constant de-targeting for "pounding").

2) AS scales with spell damage yet is melee hit based-- a true modern marvel (/smirk). I wear as much melee and spell hit (for JoR) as possible in order to insure safe pick-up each and every time. That said, however, if and when he gets Blessing of Spell Warding, you are entirely screwed. At that point, the only hope we have is to call for a ninja MD ASAP and hope that it give us enough threat to hold him until he ceases to be magic immune.

Veras only gets offtanked (at least in most standard strats) so threat is really a non-issue. I was planning to keep it equipped the entire fight.

Okay, so spell warding makes him immune to AS? That's exactly what I'm thinking the Decapitator would be good for.

I'm pretty sure the on-use abilities have a 30 second cooldown, not the equip bonuses.

Yup, immune. Decapitator would work, but that would be your ONLY option. No other TPS unless you add in a MD.