The point is trading <AD with more threat and therefore less tanking stats on the gear> for <a survivability gear with more EH and avoidance and threat specc> (which is 40/21, not 41/20, btw).
I, personally, take rather better survivability on the gear for all the time than a talent that hopefully will do what it's made for, but doesn't help much if you sum it up.

Spelldamage on gear costs us lots of tanking stats. With 40/21 you can sacrifice much of it without having trouble with threat.

Try going back to the macro next time? I never stopped using the macro and I've never had a resist/non-taunt on Nalorakk (did him most recently ~2 weeks ago I believe). I don't see why the macro would give different behavior than just casting RD on the other tank, but between your experience and mine that's the only factor I can see that could plausibly make a difference.

I get that you're shifting more of the threat generation into your talents so you can have less on your gear; I just don't think you're gaining anything by it in the end. Very, very few bosses will one-shot or even two-shot you from 35->0 in appropriate progression gear; while it's certainly unrealistic to think that AD will always give you the best-case +15% effective health, the situations where it counts for nothing are equally rare. Brutallus is the first boss I've seen where I'd even consider dropping AD.

I guess what it comes down to is that either build can put on gear to reach a state where threat and mitigation are roughly evenly balanced. The 0/40/21 build can put on spelldamage gear and generate super-high threat, the 0/48/13 build can put on mitigation gear and be extra-survivable. In my experience the second option is more useful than the first.

(Making a new post for purposes of topic separation)

What are people interested in seeing in WotLK for prot paladins (both baseline tanking abilities and talents)?

My thoughts:

• Feral druids are getting a fear break at 51 points; prot warriors are getting two AoE threat generators (one base, one talented). The general idea seems to be that the tanking classes should be more freely interchangeable. Accordingly, I'd like to see us get:
  • Some kind of fear break on a reasonable cooldown (<1 minute)
  • Some way to deal better with PvE silence effects. Making Holy Shield physical rather than Holy would be a step in the right direction.
  • Some kind of proactive oh-shit button (that doesn't cause mobs to de-aggro). The rumored idea of a short-term buff to massively increase block value could work here.
• A bit more streamlining of the talent tree. It's incredibly bloated right now. Specifically:
  • Far too many points in the tree, most of them in 5-points talents that could be reduced to 3 or 2. Easy candidates for this are Ardent Defender (could be 3 points), Reckoning (Could be 2-3 points), and One-hand spec (2-3 points at 2% each). Improved Holy Shield really should just be folded into base Holy Shield; I'm mystified as to why this was even a separate talent in the first place.
  • Having both talented blessings in the same tree is bad. There are several ways to solve this; making Kings baseline would probably be the most straightforward. On a similar note, Sanctuary needs changes; right now it's one of the last blessings used in a raid. Adding extra block value to it could be nifty, and would give prot warriors something to enjoy as well.
  • Deflection needs to be more accessible. It belongs in the Ret tree certainly, but prot warriors can get access to it on the first tier of Arms, whereas paladins needs to plow 10 points into Ret just to get this staple taking talent.
• Finally, prot paladins need something useful to do when not tanking. Improving our healing might help a bit, but I don't think it's really the answer; most times it will just mean that the prot paladin will be the first healer benched. The rumored Judgement of Protection (-5% to all damage dealt by the target, I think?) could work here, although of course nobody wants a situation where one spec of one class is required for an optimal raid.
  
• It sure would be fun to get an ability to toss people around. Call it "Grip of Justice" or something like that.

But where are you going to make that sacrifice?
In T4 content a spell damage weapon and a suit of warrior gear is enough without Sanctity.
In T5 most of the best upgrades come with spell damage built in.
In T6 the only situation I can imagine is if you want to wear both the Illidan helm and the Akama legs and not worry about the threat loss from breaking your set bonus.
In Sunwell you'd really have to try to get rid of your set bonus...

It seems to me that the effect of your spec has a far larger impact than changing your gear around, at least until you start putting on caster gear. 0/40/21 in full mitigation is always going to be worse at it with better threat than 0/49/12.


I'd like to see a focus on increasing block value and consolidation of talents as well some sort of fear/silence/burn immune mechanism. Perhaps a 51-point talent that simply gives a passive immunity to silence + mana drain, along with a baseline fear-breaking ability.

Cooldown management is pretty strange at the moment, as Consecration, Holy Shield and Judgement all tend to line up together. As much as I don't want to see Holy Shield get the treatment Shield Block has seen in Alpha, I suspect that's what will happen. In this case we definitely need more variety in tanking spells. Exorcism, Holy Wrath and Avenger's Shield all have potential to be reworked into standard tanking abilities, but a brand new offensive ability would spice things up nicely.

I've been tanking Nalorakk every ZA CD for the past two months. He hasn't once resisted a single RD since I began tanking him; I've come to think that he isn't even capable of resisting taunts.

Also, I used to use the RD macro but haven't once used it since 2.4. And again, no resists.

I've tanked Nalorakk a lot and I have never seen him resist a taunt. I have had my taunt fail however - Nalorakk still on my OT and RD on cooldown. I believe this happened because I taunted right as he detargetted the tank for a moment during his phase shift. Since then I have always waited for him to begin meleeing my OT post-phase shift before taunting and have never had an issue (though once he did his mangle as like his first move of the troll phase so my OT got mangled... so I just let the OT take subsequent troll phases and I picked up the next bear phase).

Ive been reading and trying to look up if people and blogs regarding 5/5 reckoning vs 3/3 precision.
Only thing i keep coming across is that precision helps for the taunts.

Im currently 0-49-12: The World of Warcraft Armory

The way i was thinkin the paladin armor build was focusing on avoidance since majority off the bosses i tank are hajal and BT. the idea of having high block rating/value seems more useless when dealing with hard hitting bosses (just my opinion) I stack as much avoidance while keeping my spl dmg 400+.
But im just wondering if having 5/5 recking gonna be usefull when a paladin is rellying on avoidance tanking.

Put more effort into spelling.


Anyway, reckoning is really useful for leveling, but not for avoidance tanking plus it increases your chance to get parried.

Precision makes your Taunt, AS, and Seal/Judge of Righteous hit more often.

Precision > Reckoning for tanking.

We're just getting to him (yay Brut dead!). Wondering if you had done this successfully (or anyone else), and had any comments on this strategy. The folks in my guild won't like this strat (MT not in for the fight?!), but I'd be interested in hearing if it worked well.

I tank the skellies for our guild and the best thing I've found is simply to stand in the middle (we use the middle-north area) and spam consecrate. I toss my shield at the first three that spawn and I try to taunt or exorcism them if I see them loose, but basically there's no way you can gather up that many mobs spawning from long trails all over the place - it's up to your raid to bring the skellies to you. You (or your raid leader) need to hammer it into your healers' heads that they must keep your consecration between themselves and the skellies and must not allow themselves to get gibbed (and they have to call for BoPs if they're going to need them). Use earthbinds, traps, and piercing howl to slow them down and help with the kiting-to-you.

The protadin basically stands still and simply keeps as many skellies in his front arc as possible until they're all gathered, and then spams consecrate a lot while being prepared to strafe to avoid the breaths (don't let them hit you from behind - once you have the whole pack they'll kill you pretty fast if you lose all your avoidance and block). We make AoE wait until after the first breath and threat is a non-issue (as is DPS on the skells - even with just three AoEers they're dead before she lands easily).

I don't have the gear to tank Felmyst herself yet but as soon as I saw the fight it did occur to me that the most efficient way to do the fight would be for one protadin to tank the whole thing. Paladins aren't the best for handling corrosion (it really favours either a huge health pool or cooldowns) but that's a comparatively easy part of the fight (and you can bring an extra healer anyways since you're carrying one less tank). Threat may be a concern - she has a pretty slow swing speed (though the larger "rage" pool will let the paladin gain more out of her heavy damage during corrosion and weak damage outside it, since a warrior or druid quickly rage-caps while she's hittng for 9-11k and then is rage starved when she's hitting for 5ishk). You could also hit her with exorcism as she flies overhead during the breaths - not a lot, but it's more than a druid or warrior could do during the air phase (wouldn't try that until you're comfortable moving the skells around and not getting MCed though... and watch out for the box boss!).

I have to be honest. I find it hard to believe that a paladin could be out TPS on a demon single target.

Between seal of vengeance, exorcism, consecration, avenger's shield, avenging wrath, judgement, holyshield, and sanc! I just.... no... Your paladin is doing something wrong.

Even quite aside from the range issue you mentioned, which can be overcome with the [Goblin Rocket Launcher] if you are determined, I find the snap aggro of a well-tossed shield to be invaluable. My DPS are all well aware that they should be watching the holy frisbee on the pull. To me, there's nothing more satisfying than back-to-back shield/JoR crits to give yourself a good 5k threat lead even before that annoying aggro-whore boomkin drops a 5k starfire crit.

I've got a quick question for all out there, How does Block Value effect a Paladin's threat generation and TPS?

I ask because I am learning the pros/cons of specing out of Recking and Block Value and into Imp Devotion for the 3 points in PoJ (or another talent) for situational boss fights. Block Value effects threat but I am unable to find any topic showing % or addressing this.

Does anyone know how much TPS I lose for the loss of 30% Block Value? Or is it just so small that it won't matter?

Block value doesn't affect threat for paladin tanks, it's only a mitigation stat.

In my opinion, the single greatest step towards homogenizing warrior and paladin tanking gear and bringing paladin threat up to par with a warrior at a similar gear level would be introducing a high-level Protection tree talent to convert a percentage of block value into spell damage. 20% seems about right.

I've been wondering how they were planning to fold prot warrior/paladin gear together. This seems like as good a way as any, although I think the conversion percentage would need to be a bit higher than 20%.

Yeah, when I tank on my warrior I'm always struck by how busy it is compared to paladin tanking. Part of that's just the nature of the classes; warriors have always been more "clicky" than paladins, but we do need something more to do while tanking.

I'm not so sure they're going to push HS down the same path as SB. The new SB seems intended to proactively block a known incoming damage spike; my guess is that we'll see a lot more mobs in WotLK with abilities similar to Illidan's Shear--special attacks with a cast time. Prot warriors might be intended to excel at neutralizing these, while paladin blocking is left in a more traditional vein.

We do know that the new prot warrior talents seem to be intended to disrupt the whole idea of fixed rotations, so presumably (hopefully!) we'll have more buttons to push with more variety.

I'm not sure if Spiritual Attunement + RF is accounted for in the threat mods either, but it was recently mentioned on Maintankadin that working some Righteous Fury recasts into available GCDs on infinite-mana fights would substantially increase TPS.

I fully agree with your other points, but this is totally baseless. Paladin single-target threat on demons is amazing, especially in Sunwell with fast-attacking bosses and mobs racking up Holy Shield hits. The problem is that our threat appears balanced on the assumption that we're always fighting Demons with Crusader up... Additional threat spells to work with would tip the scales for sure, but I'd be more interested in generalizing the whole Demon thing to every mob as that classification is more based in lore than gameplay.

Does the specific spell (or its rank) even matter? Whenever I have spare GCDs, I always recast SoR to get a little more "buffing threat", so I wonder if RF would produce more, and why, especially given its hefty cost.

EDIT: It just occurred to me, are you referring to using RF specifically because it costs a lot of mana? That is, in an infinite mana fight, you're missing out on TPS if you're mana bar is at full, thus you use your most expensive spammable spell (RF) so your mana bar is always missing a chunk, yet always getting refreshed by SA, thus producing more threat.

Did I get that right?

Yes, that's it exactly. I don't have the figures on threat from casting various buffs, but I'll repost for clarity from this thread:

Basically the conclusion is that on any single-target fight where your mana bar is staying full, there is significant threat to be had from tapping it for SA gains. If you can slip in 2 RFs every 10 seconds, you're pulling an extra 135 TPS.

Moreover, if you taunt Brutallus shy 6k mana, you will gain 5.7k threat as your mana bar fills. You won't even reach full mana if you continue cycling RF, so there's room to account for popping things on stomps and still yielding the maximum benefit of about 280 TPS over the treehugging mana conservationist who never spends extra mana and has 100% at transitions. I must admit that I'm guilty of this myself, as I often just hit SoW to regen while waiting in rotation. No more

Has testing been done on whether mana generation effects still generate threat even if they "Overenergize" you? I'm aware that overhealing does not generate threat, but has comparable testing been done for overenergizing?

I apologize if this has been covered, I read a few pages and didn't see it anywhere.

Last night out Prot pally passed on the Mallet of Tides. He currently has Hammer of Judgement. I understand that the Hammer is outrageously better when AoE tanking multiple adds, but wouldn't the Mallet be better for single target tanking? He said the Mallet was worthless and since it didn't have spell damage, he didn't want it. Is he correct? I am a nub as far as Prot Pally mechanics go, but I am trying to better understand all classes right now.

Thanks
-TGM

First off, don't sign your posts -- we know you who are from your profile on the left.

Your paladin is absolutely correct. Paladin threat can only be increased by spelldamage, so not using a spell damage weapon would really hurt threat even against a single target like a boss. You do gain a little bit of mitigation and other stats from the Mallet, but not even remotely close enough to justify losing over 200 spell damage in the process.

Note that this really applies to weapons by far the most, since you can get huge amounts of spell damage on them. Armor in other slots will not be "worthless" if it doesn't have spelldamage, a paladin has to balance out threat and mitigation, and occasionally will wear plate with no spell damage on it because it is a great mitigation piece and so on.