I see no reason to assume that it would not be split evenly between all targets in the same way as healing threat.

The testing done on the matter involved a single mob, with a paladin casting SoR a number of times and then seeing how much damage was required for the mob to be pulled off. That is the extent of testing done to my knowledge, so any further testing involving multiple mobs and/or Righteous Fury would hopefully be able to answer these unknowns.

How is this going to be more of an issue in WotLK than in TBC? If anything I think it's going to be less of an issue in WotLK, since you can boost your threat at the cost of mitigation by adding either healing plate (spellpower and int) which you'll have around for healing, or dps plate (str/crit) which you'll have around for soloing.

I mean, I'd be perfectly happy if there was some mechanics change that let you easily tank a normal-mode five man in third-tier raid gear, but I don't really see the current situation as a problem, and there are other issues I'd much rather see addressed.

I agree. The "outgearing 5-mans" issue is so easy for us to fix on our own that I don't know that Blizzard needs to change any abilities or gear mechanics to address it. If you're not taking enough damage to maintain an adequate flow of SA mana, you have the following options:

- Stop using CC if you were
- Pull more mobs
- Replace your mitigation pieces with pure threat pieces. Presently, this amounts to using caster items with heavy spell damage and no mitigation stats, although in WotLK it will likely be DPS plate as you say.
- Start casting AS or Holy Light to take a large amount of damage, as you can no longer dodge, block or parry.

The argument as to why this is a gameplay mechanics issue is always "But we shouldn't get worse as we get better gear" but I feel it's really just a matter of "As a tank, you will always need to gear appropriately for the content you are tanking." I would never sacrafice significant amounts of threat to be uncrushable for Hyjal trash, because that's simply not gearing appropriately for the content. Similarly, I don't insist on using extreme amounts of mitigation for heroics, as it just works so much better to swap in some caster gear.

I think you're reading a confrontational attitude into my posts that was not initially present, but regardless. I did provide some anecdotal tests at first, and asked if anyone had greater experience. But I'll do some more scientific trials here, sure.

Initial testing, using the first pull in hellfire ramparts heroic. Tests to see how much healing is required to pull a two pull off of my paladin (auto attack off, devotion aura and righteous fury only buffs) at various levels of Seal of Righteousness cast.

Heal spell of choice is lifebloom, I am never allowing it to bloom. The healer in question has the -20% subtlety talent, but does not have salvation.

Test #1: 2 mobs.
0 casts. Result: The first tic of lifebloom pulled aggro.
1 cast. Result: Roughly 2000 healing of lifebloom pulled aggro.
2 casts. Result: ~3000. It's quite possible these numbers are off by a tic or so due to the fact I'm using a hot and the human error of me checking healmeters when I see aggro swap.
10 casts. Result: 12000 healing to pull aggro.
30 casts. Result: 32000 healing to pull aggro.

Test #2: 1 mob.
10 casts. Result: 12000 healing.
30 casts. Result: 38000 healing. This is a bit of an anomaly, and my first thought is that I procced reckoning and redoubt a LOT on this test, and they might have some small innate threat of their own.

Seems to stack linearly, so just going to use the 10/30 cast methods to minimize human error.
Test #2: 3 mobs.
30 casts. Result: 31000 healing to pull aggro.

Test #3: 12 mobs (swapped to non heroic).
30 casts. Result: ~35000 healing to pull aggro.

Final test: 2 mobs, no righteous fury.
10 casts. Result: 5500 healing to pull aggro.

Conclusions: Threat is split the same as healing. It takes roughly 800 points of non threat reduced healing to equal one righteous fury'd Seal of Righteousness. Righteous Fury does work.

Relevance: Chain casting it will indeed outaggro casual healing on a fight like felmyst, as healers are unlikely to be doing the ~1100 hit points per second that is required to outaggro it with salvation/threat talents during the skeleton phase, particularly when coupled with power gains and reactive heals. It is not, however, a replacement for the actual threat of consecrate in any way.

One caveat of my testing process is that I was healing the paladin, so I did gain some mana back in the process.

I tend to think it would be easier to test this using damage instead of healing, as you won't run into the issue of SA aggro gain, nor of overhealing not producing any threat. And as it's very likely that Reckoning and Redoubt procs do indeed generate threat (perhaps even the same amount as a Seal gain?) it would seem the best results would be obtained with a 0/0/0 spec.

It's a fairly interesting subject, and one of those things I think we'll all been curious about. Thanks for taking the time to do additional testing.

Edited out an incorrect observation

@Vitae

Kudos for taking the time to run those tests. That couldn't have been a fast process. If you happen to get a wild hair to do more tests I'd love to see threat numbers for casting SoW and SoL.

Regardless, this reaffirms my tactic of spam-casting SoR after initial aggro on Hyjal trash, so I'll keep it up. More importantly though it shows that each cast of SoR buys about 1500 healing worth of threat, assuming your healers have salv up and they stay out of melee range, regardless the number of targets.

EDIT: Removed faulty math with bogus numbers

DOUBLE EDIT: The value of 1500 healing assumes you're the one getting healed. It's closer to 1000 if someone else receives the healing.

Interesting, thanks for doing that. Couple of questions. Was the healing listed effective healing? I'm assuming so, which would lower the value by around 5.5% (Spiritual Attunement causes threat equal to 1/2 the mana you're returned - 11% of the damage taken), so around 750 effective healing. I'm not sure that's going to out-aggro a healer - our shamans are throwing 2500 chain heals out there (or >1000k heal/sec), and that's not including any crits they get. Still certainly better than nothing though.

The redoubt/reckoning thing is an interesting question. I'll try to test later if I have a chance, although I might not have time tonight. I can't account for redoubt, although I don't have reckoning. Maybe I'll get a holy friend to test.

Yeah, that's the effective healing according to Recount.

Additionally Tilted, my healer was already out of melee range of the monsters for these tests. At least, after the first 0 seal insta aggro test that resulted in the elite mobs I was using two shotting him.

Shield of Righteousness is down to 200% on Test. Everything else seems 'about' the same except for the Guarded by the Light talent. Still trying to figure stuff out.

Oh, and summon mount takes no mana now. You can get locked out of holy w/ an interrupt, but no more 5sr just for mounting.

Edit:
Sorry, I forgot a few key changes from other threads, let's consolidate. Holy Shield is 6 charges base (though only talenting up to 8 atm, which I assume is a bug). Seals are 2 minutes long. Forbearance is now 3 minutes long. Divine Protection prevents 50% of damage (and does not deaggro) for the time period, giving us a ghetto shield wall on an extremely short cooldown. Still looking for more changes.

Edit2:
Judgements are on GCD now. So far nothing appears to be off it.

Could you elaborate? As far as I was aware Shield of Righteousness already was 200% of your block value as Holy damage in the previous build.

Formerly it was 230% of your block value, now it's down to 200%.

Yup, I'm a moron. Do ignore. Sorry, was not intending in any way to spread false info, it simply never occured to me that the tooltip for the spell would update in that fashion.

Ah, good point. Thanks for the clarification.

Using a rough average of 1100 healing per SoR cast, it looks like your tests show SoR to generate about 123 unmodified threat per cast. That's awful damn close to the 120 number that's been floating around this thread. It's always good when tests from different sources produce similar results.

Napkin math:

SoR threat = 1100 (healing that pulled aggro) * 0.5 (heal modifier) * 0.8 (druid subtlety talent) * 1/1.9 (Righteous Fury) * 1/1.3 (130% threat to pull from range) = 178.14 threat per cast - (110 mana generated from SA * 0.5 mana modifier) = 123.14 threat after removing threat from mana regen

Divine Protection and Divine Guardian function exactly as expected, which means we can't take that talent and use it as a shieldwall on any fight with heavy raid damage. Hopefully they'll address this.

Edit:
However the Divine Guardian buff IS removable. HMMMMM. That makes things a bit more interesting.

There was a blue post today that said the devs plan to change TBC gear for classes that got major changes (Prot Warriors/Paladins and Enhance Shaman).

Note that will not help with Prot Paladins favoring "warrior" weapons, so you still want to pickup one of those.

Easy way to use it...

Today I have a macro that casts DS then I can hit it again to cancel it. In the new world just make a macro that casts Divine Protection, then cancel Divine Guardian with the same macro. This gives you the option to pick and choose if you want raid-wide damage coming your way or not.

Wait... I just re-read the talent description of Divine Guardian and it specifically says Divine Shield in the tooltip. If it actually works with DP that might be a bug.

On beta, and on earlier calculators, it listed divine protection. So hopefully they'll just make it ignore DP, like the newest revision of the talent calculator. Currently it certainly hits DP, but since that got yanked from the talent calc I'm hoping that won't last.

Heh.

The problem I can see is that a macro like this:
will require two presses to cancel DG, and will only do that after your client gets word back from the server that DG is actually up. Your client won't send the cancel command if it sees that you don't have the buff you're trying to cancel, so you'll go through one latency cycle before the cancel goes through, meaning you'll be vulnerable for a brief but non-negligible time.

I'm guessing they just included DP out of habit because it's the "low-level DS" and you can get Divine Guardian before you get DS. I'm sure once they think it through they'll remove DP from the talent (at least, I hope so.)

Why would a Prot Pally get Divine Guardian talent?
It gives nice utility with Divine Shield, but how often would you use the DS when tanking?

Linking Divine Protection and Divine Guardian helps a 51/20 Holy Pally.

Prot paladins aren't always tanking. Non-tanking utility is always good.

You need more than one tank on Magtheridon for channelers, but afterwards all but one of those tanks are sitting on their butts clicking cubes. DG can be a huge help on the raid damage burst at 30%.

You could use it on Gruul during one of the late shatters, even if you're the MT; just click off DS after the shatter and get aggro back.

You can't tank Aran, so use DG when the elementals pop out.

You can't tank Netherspite during banish phases or for half of the non-banish phases.

Most guilds use 2 tanks on Vashj; you can use DG during the sporebat phase.

You need more than 1 tank for Kael; use DG during phase 4 to cushion the huge flame nuke.

If you're tanking adds on Al'ar, use it if someone screws up on a quill and the raid takes an extra tick of the flame debuff.

If you're tanking Anetheron adds, use it when there isn't an add up.

Use it during the kite phase of Supremus.

Use it if a mage/priest gets Fel Raged during Gurtogg.

Use it on whichever phase of Illidan you're not tanking.

Use it on Kalecgos while you're waiting for your turn to taunt or waiting for your portal.

Use it on Brutallus when the other tank has aggro.

Use it on Felmyst during a ground phase if you're just there to skellie-tank.

To me, DG is actually one of the cooler new aspects of prot in WotLK, and I'll be making it a standard part of my tanking builds except in cases where I'm mini-maxing for one specific fight. (Assuming the DP thing gets changed.)

I don't think anyone is going to question its usefulness, but it's awful hard to find even 2 points to spare to pick it up, especially when many holy builds will tend to gravitate toward improving Concentration Aura over Devotion. As pally lead for my guild, I'm going to most likely encourage healadins to pick up Divine Guardian so I can have more points for the more-bloated-than-ever prot tree.

FWIW, in my current DS/cancel macro I have the cancelaura line first, then the shield as such:

/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

On the first click the cancelaura line does nothing, then the next line casts DS. On second click it cancels DS then tries to cast it again, but it's on cooldown so nothing happens. This gives the freedom to have it active for as long (or as short) as I want. My guess is you'd need to do the same sort of thing for DG if you pick it up as prot and still want to be able to use DP for the damage reduction. This of course assumes the devs don't change it to match the new tooltip where DG only works with DS and not DP.

Too many acronyms anymore.