The 80 damage is before armor reduction, so in practice it's closer to 30 damage reduction (Which still isn't bad for situations with a lot of small hits). The extra 87.4 threat per block certainly can't hurt though, and it's easily our best blessing for threat. Whether that is because all the other blessings are worthless for threat or because Sanctuary is that good is an exercise I'll leave up to the reader.

I have at least 6 types of gear. Stamina gear, AOE Gear, Trash gear, healing, DPS, and resist gear (fire, nature, frost)
I have about 8 different trinkets. Some of them rarely get used. Specifically for my tanking role i use


Moroes lucky pocket watch

Scarab of Displacement


Tome of Fiery Redemption

Darkmoon Card: Vengeance

Figurine of the Colossus

Depending on what gear I have and what I'm striving for I will switch out trinkets. I almost always have on the Darkmoon card + Scarab of Displacement. For trash and AOE.

However out of all of them the Moroes trinket is probably my favorite. It is the best oh shit trinket I've ever used on my paladin. If I use it I'm pretty much assured not to die for 10secs.

Personally, on my Paladin, I find Blessing of Sanctuary most useful outside of a raiding environment, for:

1) Farming Demon Hunter Supplicants
2) Killing rogues who try to gank me

If I'm lucky enough to be in a group/raid with three paladins, I'd use it as a third blessing after Kings and Wisdom, or (if I'm in a situation where I don't need wisdom), after Kings and Light. Since I run mostly 10-man content on my paladin, this situation comes up only rarely.

For PvE it's extremely useful for phase 1 of RoS -- you can't heal at all for the entire phase, so 104 damage damage per hit off of the tank is pretty nice. It's also very handy for handling murlocs on Morogrim if your murloc tank isn't quite as well-geared as you'd like.

The key difference between Sacrifice and Sanctuary is that Sacrifice removes damage after all mitigation effects, so it's much stronger on a tank than Sanctuary.

The suggestion that there are better places to spend that 1 talent point than kings, given that in a 25-person raid setting you can all but count on a holydin having that blessing is a good one. The suggestion that any prot paladin who has kings is doing something "wrong" is just silly. It's clearly an easily defensible choice - in any situation where you don't have a holydin with you (heroics, Kara, ZA - my paladin is an alt and this is the content I run exclusively) kings gets you more survivability than that point will get you anywhere else (10% increasted sta versus 2% armour? Versus 2% less spell damage taken? Versus 4 defense? 2% chance to proc four additional weapon swings? 5% stun resistance?). When you first hit 70 and enter heroics survival is going to be your biggest issue by far, and kings helps more than any of the alternatives if you don't have a paladin healer in your back pocket.

That said, my paladin doesn't have kings. Once your gear is reasonable you certainly don't need it (and I prefer sanctuary for threat purposes).

Don't be silly. Take kings. There will be times I'm sure where you will be short on paladins, or the only other paladins in the raid will have improved might and wisdom, or they wont have kings for whatever reason.

The marginal cost of 1 talent point, out of spell warding or something is not really going to hurt you. But if you're ever in a circumstance where you don't have kings... that is.

Likewise, you're not filling a warrior's role. I challenge you to break a fear every 30 seconds, or spell reflect a deaden. You're speccing to fill a tanking role. And you can do that quite well, and most people do, with kings. As well, you're hurting your raid more if you're forcing them to have unimproved might or wisdom because you have to give it to them, because the paladin with the improved talents is giving them kings.

Looking at your profile, I would say that your issues if anything come from a lack of spell damage. You can be crushed as well, which hurts, but doesn't matter if you can't hold aggro. Get some more traditional paladin tank gear (t4 is pretty good for a good mixture of avoidance and spell damage, for instance). Tone down your hard-on for HP stacking. Some more avoidance and spell damage gear would really do you a lot of good. Start actually gearing like a paladin, stop focusing so much on the warrior-centric offset gear, and you probably wont feel so stretched on talent points.

i have been trying to do some research on the direction i should take my pally, currently he is only 45, but i figured i should get the research done early. i have found this thread very helpfull and informative. but one thing i missed is what weapon enchants should a pally tank be looking at. i'm sure its probably in there, i just missed it. from my reading i have found that a lot of warriors like the mongoose enchant, but i am unsure that this would be good for a pally. the enchants that come to mind are BattleMaster (i've herd it is affected by + healing) and Major SpellPower. can someone please point me to this info? tyvm in advance

Almost always the correct choice is Major Spellpower. You should be maximizing the amount of damage you're getting off your weapon. Mongoose could be an option for an avoidance weapon such as Sun Eater, King's Defender, et al., but I've never needed to use one of those.

I am not crushable when I dont need to be crushable. Nobody has 1 set of gear. This is standard badge farm gear. Be
serious.

"Offset gear" What are you talking about?

The advice is cute, but I dont suffer from a lack of spelldamage or I would get more spelldamage (glove enchant to start). Stacking avoidance, just means you generate less aggro from holy shield blocks. Yes you take less damage, but the mitigation + HP is what MTs ultimately rely on. Avoidance MTs are a losing strategy unless you cannot get better mitigation+hp gear in which case you last 3 minutes into Prince (or any other fight where mitigation > avoidance), get unlucky and just die in 1 second. The lucky pocketwatch is fine for avoidance but ultimately a crappy trinket (for non druids who oft rely on Oh Shit! trinkets). You get more avoidance from just defense stacking like an adamantite figurine. HP stacking is what paladins are forced to do from the time they turn 70. I'm surprised the thread doesn't focus more on it since blizzard even revamped the talents with 7 pts specifically giving us 16% more hp. That's how much it matters. It's not an HP hard-on, it's a necessity. A previous poster went so far as to mention kings is a crutch for not being geared, which is true when you're constantly told to wear the terrible paladin gear by people who dont understand you're tanking. I certainly don't fault level 69's for not having the libram, I'm not gonna fault tanks who start with Kings. Kings is a crutch, ultimately a crutch for other people's bad choices or you not being geared. In either case, it doesnt apply to a proper Prot Tank (uncrushable 13.5k hp).

While I've seen the gloves drop multiple times but never gotten to roll on the T4 helm (which I would take in a second), please explain why the T4 gloves are a good idea?

T4 Justicar Armor Gloves -
34 Sta
24 Int
27 spd
35 Bv
23 Def

Versus Felsteel Gloves -
27 sta
25 def
B socket
Y Socket
3 parry socket bonus

24 int is worth less than 1 consecrate (max level consecrate).
35 Bv is worthless as MT and OT
felsteel has better sta (socketing)
felsteel has better def
felsteel provides some minor avoidance
I lose 200-280 hp, some def and avoidance for 27 spd and some armor on 1 piece of gear. Terrible choice. If I needed more spd I can enchant for it or just grind out a rep weapon that has better SPD. Even some kara healing drops have more spd (just bad luck never seeing a heaven or shard i guess). Grinding out lower city rep will give me access to 25 more spd too, but it's not necessary for me. Your glove choices are 8 def (if yur undergeared trying for uncrittable), 10 sta if you need sta, 2% threat if you need threat. The felsteel is the best choice in almost any gear configuration. The felsteel helm as well (until I replaced it). The badge hat is good but I dont need anything else to tank all of kara, I rather save badges for 2.4

While a Paladin cannot effectively MT certain bosses, there's no downside to gearing for MT instead of some crappy tank hybrid. The goal is always to be able to fill a warrior's role as tank, you specced for it. You dont need to stack spelldamage if you're OTing, you dont need to stack avoidance unless you're OTing multiple, and by the time you're worried about OT avoidance, your gear is well past Kara and you can easily have run enough to pick up avoidance gear or have enough HP to be able to enchant/gem avoidance while having the traditional tanking gear still in your inventory. I carry 3 sets of equipment. 1 for dps (gorehowl etc), 1 for avoidance tanking, 1 for MT (mitigation + hp). Spelldamage isn't a factor in avoidance OTing so it's a simple enough task to pick up 2 of some of the same gear. I use Ogrila Aegis with dodge gems for avoidance and Shatar for tanking along with other gear suited for those roles. Buying avoidance gear from rep vendors and AH is something blizzard has made (probably) unintentionally easy.

Don't put words into my mouth, please. Nowhere did I use the word crutch - I said that once you have reasonable gear you do not need kings to tank heroics and ZA (okay, that last bit was implied since I stated that my paladin only runs that content). That said, in cases where you do not have a holydin present, you will be a better tank with that one point in kings than if that point is elsewhere.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your post, but casting Blessing of Light if your being healed by a Priest is pointless, they don't receive any benefit from BoL whatsoever.

Stacking stamina only (which you seem to be advocating) is a really poor choice for any sort of tank. There's plenty of data to support different gear depending on the scenario you are in - Graphing Tank Damage / Life tables provides some data to back this up.