Hello,
I'm considering a respec that involves Reckoning. The reason I would do this is to get a slight increase in threat, to compete with my t6 geared guildmates dps.
I consulted other paladin tanks on my realm about this, and I was told that reckoning procs more parries. Now, on trash i don't mind being hit more, but i'm also tanking the first Sunwell boss (wich we have downed with me maintanking in rotation) and that's one fight were you can't mess about with being hit more then usual, I have scrolled through the forums, but I have yet found an answer to my questions.
Anyone have experience with Reckoning build in? (1/5 or 5/5)
Did you find out that it triggers more parries, thus taking more damage in return?
Your personal opinion about Reckoning?

Thanks in advance

Here is a post I made a good while ago on my experience with Reckoning on a Void Reaver kill. I don't address parries, as I was more interested in the threat benefits on a fight like VR where the boss hits like he is wielding a wet noodle.

It proc'd 7 times for 33 extra hits in a 352s fight, and was worth around 50 TPS for me. I suppose that would mean 33 extra chances for a boss to parry my attack and shorten or rush his next attack, over an almost 6 minute fight.

p.s. Check Elitist Jerks - Announcements in Forum : Class Mechanics for good tips on forum posts. EJ discourages post signing, and as much fun as seeing your name in the banhammer forum would be (I love that forum), its good to follow the rules. Friendly tip, and cheers.

Does anyone have any advice for tanking Bloodboil? When he's on me, and the debuff stack is high and I need to lose aggro, it's very hard for the other tanks to get him off when he's bashing against Holy Shield/BoSanct so fast. But if I don't cast Holy Shield, he crushes me and that plus a high debuff stack gets me killed. Then when he's on the other tanks, I just can't keep up with them. I run out of mana in 30 seconds trying to generate threat on him. I've tried stepping in for some cleaves to take extra damage, but that just gives me a debuff stack of 4-6 to start out with, and starting from 6 debuffs when he switches target to you is suicide.

I would have thought that as HS has twice as many charges per 5s when compared to a warrior's shield block, parry hasting is not such a concern for paladin tanks, except for the small downtime between HS refreshes. Additionally, warriors will typically be interweaving instant attacks (sunder armor, devastate, revenge) between white hits, which means that warriors will have significantly more chances to be parried than a paladin with or without Reckoning (although Reckoning is obviously a lot "burstier").

This is not to say that Reckoning is a no-brainer - you always have to weigh the survivability cost, however minor, against the threat benefit - but it's worth bearing in mind that any fight where you feel Reckoning is too dangerous will be even more so for an equivalently geared warrior tank.

Disclaimer: My prot pally has yet to tank a raid boss, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :P

@Meglomaniac: Mathcrafters over at the Tankadin forums derived that the most bang for your Reckoning buck comes at 3/5 points; the last 2 points don't yield significantly better uptime.

I've tried a Reckoning build and found that Parry-gibbing was never really an issue. Our only Parry-able attack is autoattack, compared to a Warrior's/Druid's autoattack plus a special every GCD.

Without Reckoning, we're Parried generally half as much as any other tank, but we're only 1 expertise behind a Warrior (and 5 expertise ahead of a Druid). So no, I wouldn't worry about Reckoning's extra attacks killing you.

Bubble to force an aggro swap + clearing your stack at the same time. Don't go super crazy generating threat on him either. You don't want to be 20k ahead of the next tank. When you're OT'ing, hunters can put a MD on you. You shouldn't be running out of mana in 30 seconds though. When he does Fel-Acid breath, try to eat that. Also if you lead off tanking and get a MD at the start, consider not using Avenging Wrath. Save that for when you OT and need to catch up.

My two cents on a few recent topics here:

"Un-uncrittability": Many of the rumors of "always being crittable" are based on someone's experience soloing Teremus the Devourer, the elite dragon that wanders Blasted Lands. Teremus has a base 10% crit rate, rather than the usual 5%. I think he's unique in this regard; certainly no known raid boss has a base crit rate above 5%.

Reckoning: Regardless of how much it impacts your survivability, I think the biggest reason most raid-tanking paladins don't take the talent is simply because they can't find the points for it. Given the large number of "required" talents in prot and the mandatory 10 points in Ret for Deflection, Reckoning tends to be one of the first corners cut. (Which is a shame, because it's really one of the most interesting and fun talents in the tree.)

Bloodboil: This probably goes without saying, but in addition to what everyone else has said, you pretty much have to chain-chug mana pots. Drink one as soon as you've burned 3000 mana, and then chug another one every time the cooldown finishes.

Well recently i skipped Reckoning. On my last Teron Fight with Reckoning skilled it was approximately 95 tps worth. Reason behind kicking it was that i wanted to take Improved Judgement with my recently looted [Tome of the Lightbringer]. So I had to find the points somewhere and well, it was reckoning. Until that time my seal was Seal of Righteousness, now i use Seal of Vengeance.
With Reckoning: SoR > SoV, without SoV > SoR... at least if you manage to kepp up die full stack

Another thing:
Redoubt vs. Imp. Devotion Aura. I can't believe someone would prefer the aura. Not only that its kinda easy to put a holy pally with improved aura in your group, but also redoubt itself is a very good talent from the moment you don't need [Libram of Repentance] anymore to be uncrushable. But the most important part is you can't skill Shield Spec without it, and this is not good -.-

My guild is very close to downing this guy, so I've learned a lot in the last couple weeks about the fight.

First off, paladin tanks are godly for Bloodboil. The ability to bubble out of the stacking debuff is a massive advantage over druids and warriors. Given this, and that pally threat is pretty weak when not being directly attacked, I've been the leadoff tank for my guild and it's worked wonders. I will tank the entirety of the first phase 1 (barring an unlucky knockback or eject), then bubble out of the 10-12 debuffs I've accumulated once he focuses someone in the raid. This means the tanks have zero debuffs active which is a major benefit to the already-overstressed healers. [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch] is a great tool to slow down the stacking effect as well.

BoP is amazing to force tank transitions. Communicate with the other pallies in your raid to ensure you have a rotation in place for when it's needed. Again though, don't get too much of a lead above your other tanks or else he's just going to turn back to you after it wears off. He attacks pretty quickly so HS threat adds up in a hurry; keep this in mind. When I get too far ahead I simply stop dropping Consecration and turn off auto attack. I don't feel that the survivability risk is worth dropping HS, especially when the problem is that you are taking too much damage to begin with.

Make sure your hunters always MD the tank that's lowest on the threat list. That makes transitions much easier to manage, and it provides your DPS a significantly higher threat ceiling to work with to get the boss dead sooner.

One trick I've found as alliance is to stack up SoV during phase 2. The loss of threat from ramping it up means nothing with the Insignificance debuff, so wait for phase 1 to start up again then judge it and go back to SoR. That's a pretty major threat boost if you find yourself behind the other tanks, but again, be very watchful of your threat generation so that you don't get yourself killed.

The SoV idea is smart, I hadn't considered that before. As for starting first, you're really killing your other two tanks by doing that. Threat isn't that weak when not getting attacked, it's weak when you're not taking damage and run out of mana. I'd say a pally is the last tank you want to start Bloodboil, as the other two types of tanks will greatly benefit from getting some quick rage, whereas we can frontload and keep up pretty well. I also find that I like to have a reasonable stack of dots ticking on me during fel enrage. Our druids can just keep HoTs up, and my mana bar stays completely full.

Personally, I've always saved the bubble for when the stacks get really high( >20), basically as an o-shit! button versus a clearing button.

I see what you're saying regarding the other tanks, but we've tried leading with each of us so far and our best success has been with me taking the initial beating. This might be due to the fact that we run with a warrior/druid/pally tank trio, so we all get to play to our strengths. The biggest concern is that all three of us generate high levels of threat consistently, and when I spend most the fight offtanking I lose a major threat component from HS. And even with taking the initial barrage of hits I still find myself chain-chugging mana pots to keep up with the other two.

Whichever tank leads the charge is going to get a substantial lead over the others. I guess I see that it makes the most sense to have the tank who generates the least OT threat to be the first MT to get a greater overall balance. Our other two tanks are machines at OT threat, and I simply cannot keep up with just Consecration and seal/judgement combos.

I picked up [Antonidas's Aegis of Rapt Concentration] last night from my guild's first Archimonde kill.

Now, I know it obviously doesn't hold a candle to Bulwark of Azzinoth and Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart, or even Bulwark of the Amani Empire, but seeing as I was only using [Dawnforged Defender], I'm not sure how serious to take it. Even without a stamina enchant on it, TankPoints was telling me it's around 1,500 "points" better with higher effective health. I know not to take everything that states as gospel but, while I was at work today, I couldn't see a reason not to make it my main shield until I get something more appropriate. Considering the majority of what I do is trash tanking, 1% dodge seems a small price to pay for higher armour, block value and threat.

I guess I'm looking for someone to tell me why it's a bad idea to do this.

It's not. It's a very good idea, picking up 1500 armor and 19 block value is more than sufficient to drop avoidance stats. I'd probably use that shield over the ZA one too. Armor is a very good mitigation stat. The fact that it's the best threat shield out there as well is icing on the cake.

I switched to [Antonidas's Aegis of Rapt Concentration] from [Dawnforged Defender]. I actually have [Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart], as well as several other shields.

I do alot of trash tanking, getting the AOE tank pulls down in Hyjal and BT. I need as much spell damage as I can get. Pulling that mostly from my Main hand and shield. For hard hitters and boss fights I throw on [Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart].

Some people wondered why I got it. But show me a better shield for pally trash tanking

Eh, it's really dependent on the tanks in question. Our group does Bloodboil with the warrior tank taking it, and it usually takes a couple cycles before the paladin catches back up. But me (a feral) takes almost no time, and most of the time I'll have to hold back on threat so that everyone's on the same page. If you have a feral tank or two in addition to the pally, and you have a couple of hunters, catching back up isn't so hard. I really wish we'd let our pally lead; we'd have him hold aggro for a long time, which makes it easier on the healers.

But yeah, paladins on bloodboil are a big win.

It's a great idea. Gaining 1500 armor is a huge gain in overall damage reduction, especially when tanking trash in Hyjal.

What the others said. So long as you remain uncrushable, you're fine on defenses, and it's a hell of a lot more armor and block. Not only that but by the time you begin to get a lot of T6 stuff you're swimming in avoidance anyway so losing the anorexic avoidance on your shield slot won't impact you much, whereas +42 spell damage is a hell of a lot. So yeah, keep and use the Aegis for pretty much everything.

It's a damn good idea. Shields are to armor what threat is to weapons: the best slot to get a whole bunch of it. The sheer value of an extra 1500 armor (pre-Toughness, no less) is going to have a far greater effect than the avoidance losses of using a non-tanking shield.

The huge amount of armor on shields basically means that anytime you have a gap of more than 10 ilevels between shields, you should go with the higher level one unless there's a really compelling reason not to.

So being a prot paladin on Bloodboil and getting the Fel Rage is OMG Awesome. 60k health, armor capped, tons of avoidance. Its like giving your healers a nice 20 second break

I am wondering how valuable expertise is to us. I am expertise capped as ret and love it (and also saw a massive dps boost because of it), so it got me thinking. I am looking specifically at sunwell pieces to upgrade (near) full t6; cloak off twins, muru trinket. These are pieces that have no spelldamage on them anyways, i would be sacrificing some defensive stats (SMI, badge cloak) but i currently can't see a reason for me to get them over our feral our prot warrior, or even at all.

Failing those 2 drops, i also have my ret trinket (shard of contempt), and am wondering which is more valuable for threat - the shard, or the timbal's crystal. I can currently push about 750 spelldamage raid buffed if i really wanted to, but am still having problem competing with 2500 dps warlocks and such. I'm talking about single target (boss) tanking of course, and yes my spec is not optimal for that (specced for m'uru right now).

Timbal's Focusing Crystal's proc doesn't do holy damage, so not much threat help there. Might as well use a Darkmoon Card: Crusade, Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone, Battlemaster's Audacity, Icon of the Silver Crescent, or something like that. I especially like the Darkmoon Card... every time you refresh your judgement on a target with autoattack, it counts as a harmful spell and stacks the spelldmg buff (in addition to casting judgement, avengers shield, exorcism, the first tick of consecration, etc etc).

As for expertise, well, I can't imagine it being too useful threat-wise; it only affects Seal of Righteousness.

P.S. cute avatar ^_^

From what I read on maintankadin, I believe someone went through the math and showed that expertise is actually our second-best threat stat, behind spell damage. The fact that it reduces parry gibs is a double bonus. I use the SSO exalted tanking neck as part of my threat set, though perhaps I should find myself a nice caster neck since the SSO neck has exactly zero avoidance and I'd probably be better served with the additional spell damage.

Second-best doesn't exactly mean anything. Spell damage is by far and away the clear decisive winner in terms of threat. Everything else is far far distant. Additionally, let's look at the compitetion for other threat stats:

Spell Hit
Spell crit
Haste
Melee Hit
Melee DPS
Expertise
Shield Spikes
Other random item properties

With that list, its very clear that even the "second best" is still pretty neglible.