As for professions, I felt that I have been jipped as an armorsmith. Get a moneymaker.

As for tankadin loot, the "Warr" chest is far better than the pali one in my opinion, but I think that they are some nice upgrades if you are still with Kara/T4 gear.

According to the patch notes from today:

Right. Unfortunately, that doesn't actually mean that the change will be present when 2.4 goes live.

It's live today, thats what the notes said while installing the patch. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

It's true that historically the patch notes released with the patch are usually a couple builds old and do not reflect any changes made just a few days prior to the patch going live. But people are reporting in the 2.4 thread that AS still does not target CC'd mobs, so it looks like we're good.

Well I do actually hope I'm wrong because it seems a really good change, the post I quoted just screamed of naivety.

I would hardly list Anticipation as "mandatory". Surely nice, and a good use of talent points. But you can always ask yourself "Do I need 20 more defense?" and the answer might be no. Toughness, sure, that's mandatory. You never want less armor, but it's not strange to think you can spare some avoidance. Especially once you get past t5 gear and it's absolute dearth of avoidance.

5/5 Anticipation gives you:
0.8% -crit, -hit, +parry, +dodge, +block.
In total, 2.4% avoidance, .8% block, .8% crit avoidance.

5/5 Deflection gives you:
5% avoidance.

If you're crit immune anyways and you have to choose between deflection and anticipation for example, Deflection is a better use of points.

However, the issue really comes from the fact that the only talents that I want but don't have the points to get, is improved SoR in Holy. But you can not get away from spending at least 43 points in Prot, regardless of how you spend your early level talents. Because what is necessary is HS, Imp HS, AD and Combat Expertise. I would say that AS is near mandatory for myself, but I'm sure some people can get away with not having it.

But all in all, that means if you do get iSoR, you spend 10 points in holy, 44 in prot, 7 in ret (I would consider imp judgement mandatory for threat) you must cut out Deflection anyways. By this point, you're losing almost 8% damage reduction via avoidance to get 15% more SoR/JoR threat. To me that's a very hard pill to swallow.

Ignoring iSoR however, gives you nearly all the points you need to have a solid build. I would always recommend a 0/49/12 build. In my opinion, if any points float, they should float between anticipation and reckoning. You can start to move points to reckoning when threat starts becoming an issue because of the avoidance present on your gear.

If I wasnt relying on the anticipation for flames tanking, I would move those points into reckoning right now. But the tree is incredibly top heavy since you pretty much need the top tier talents. If I could make one change, it would be to switch the position of Anticipation and Redoubt. Redoubt is all but useless, except for as a prereq for shield spec.

It's pretty much a necessity to have 12 in ret, which leaves 49 in prot. There are exactly 49 points that I feel are useful in a general tanking sense in prot, but in order to get them you need to spend 54 points, as 5 are spent in redoubt.

Reckoning is the first to go early on, because threat gen is the least of your worries early on. Later on though, avoidance is less of an issue than threat, so I find it worthwhile to drop anticipation for reckoning.

For what it's worth, I consider 1hws pretty much mandatory as well. But Imp Judgement in general will give a larger threat boost than 2 points in reckoning.

The quoted post said anticipation was mandatory.

I said it is recommended for lower gear levels, though at a certain point you can change it out for other talents.

Likewise, I wanted to note that point for point, deflection does more to put you towards crush immunity than anticipation does.

Crit immunity was never difficult for me to reach, even pre-kara. But if it is something you are struggling with, yes, take the talent. My point was not that it is a bad talent, but that it was not a mandatory talent.

0/49/12 is my recommended build. Put 5 points into anticipation and 0 in reckoning when you need the defense. Take them out of anticipation and put them into reckoning if you start to need the threat more than the defense.

On the subject of 2.4 badge loot: I plan on getting the [Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor], the [Ring of the Stalwart Protector] and 2 [Nether Vortex] for a [Belt of the Guardian].

The Legplates are slightly worse off than the Unwavering Legguards in terms of mitigation, perhaps most noticeably with the lack of Block Value, but I feel it's worth gaining spell damage in that slot, as well as trading off the Shield Block Rating for some pure avoidance via Dodge Rating.

The Ring is a rather obvious choice, with the armor, the load of STA and more pure avoidance, although some gear juggling may be necessary depending on how much the lack of Defense Rating will affect me.

I consider both the [Blue's Greaves of the Righteous Guardian] and the [Shattrath Protectorate's Breastplate] to be inferior to their 2.3 counterparts, the [Sabatons of the Righteous Defender] and the [Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian] because they spend way too much item budget on spell hit and not nearly enough on more relevant tanking stats.

Is there a point to having spellhit now? JoR/V resists, Holy Shield Resists, and the occasional resist on the first tick of Consecration are all I can think of since RD got moved over to melee hit. I appreciate the +spellhit in Precision, but it really seems hugely wasted on gear. Maybe this is just another case of the itemization team being a few months behind the class devs.

On another note, has anyone verified the default implied targeting of RD (i.e., you can cast it on a mob without a macro and it works the way you'd expect), and that RD can now be cast on friendly NPCs? I forgot to check that in Hyjal tonight.

I'd have to agree with you there. There's nothing in our spell hit arsenal that demands so much, and I'm willing to bet raw spell damage is going to improve TPS better than spell hit over time.

Even if we consider resist-sensitive situations (initial pull, post-aggro drop), Avenger's Shield is controlled by melee hit (and Blood Elves have Judgement of Blood).

One can also consider that they simply chose spell hit as the one to waste itemization points on, since I think it's quite a well established pattern of making these 2.4 badge rewards inferior to actual MH/BT despite their ilevel by virtue of bad allocation. That being said, they certainly could've picked something else: Parry Rating, Shield Block Rating, or even plain STA might be suboptimal without being quite as useless.

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On the subject of Professions:

I heartily recommend Engineering: The [Tankatronic Goggles] are excellently itemized and might be seeing use well up to Archimonde, along with their healing and DPS counterparts. The 45 STA trinkets are a little sidestepped with Commendation of Kael'thas being available to the mainstream, but served me very well up until now.

Finally, the [Zapthrottle Mote Extractor] is an oft-ignored aspect of this Engineering, but in my opinion is one of its biggest strengths. This little gadget separates Engineering from all the other crafting professions by letting you harvest material without a harvesting profession. As a Paladin with a single-mob killspeed measured in minutes, being able to snag a Primal Air in-between BG queues pays off huge dividends in the long run.

Enchanting is another great profession, and the second one I took. Ring enchants are a great and inimitable bonus for any non-enchanter at the same gear level, and again provide benefits for all three Paladin specs.

I've also been heavily considering Alchemy in the light of the new epic stones, but I've never had any particular problem with tank trinket itemization (whereas tank helm itemization is pretty meh). True, I've been running a double [Blessed Book of Nagrand] setup for almost a year now, but I can just chalk that up to bad luck on Black Morass runs.

Tanking has always had nice trinkets available, so I really don't feel the pressing need to drop either of my current professions for a buttload of Defense. Yes, all that might come in handy for someone just getting into the game and trying to achieve uncrushable ASAP, but that's the only unique benefit I can see Alchemy providing.

I wouldn't go with Blacksmithing at all. The only Tankadin-tailored item in BS are the [Boots of the Protector]. The [Belt of the Guardian] is BOE, and can be bought completely via 2.4. The BS-specific weapons are nice for Ret, as are the new Sunwell recipes (I think they have 2 healing items in there too), but not worth the potential Tankadin gains in other professions.