The model you put out is nice and simple for ease of maths Worldie which is fine for TBC fights like Supremus or Mother Sharaz. Has anyone done the maths on something like a Bloodboil scenario where you may start as the OT but have to put out max threat and take on the MT role at some point?

Would HotR/ShoR and Judgements be enough to stay on par with a warrior/druid in terms of threat? I would assume not as otherwise we would be a bit over powered as the MT threat wise when we used a full rotation.

No tank currently creates more threat as an offtank than a main tank, due to either rage-feedback mechanics or reflective damage differences (or both). In scenarios where threat matters as an offtank, like Bloodboil or VR, there is often some sort of threat drop or threat reduction ability applied to the main tank which enables the off tanks to catch up a bit. Paladins are still able to keep up now ok with just seal, judgment, and consecrate. With the addition of HoR and SotR, I see no reason that paladins wouldn't still be able to keep up ok.

Mana starvation could be a problem, certainly, but it isn't likely to be all that different than rage starvation for other tanks. Worst case? Start using Seal of Blood/Martyr to generate some self-damage and create some mana input.

In case of mana starvation also, most if not all the fights in TBC past Kara had some raid damage, you can just go get yourself into a AoE for additional mana (exhamples, VR had the Arcane damage Aoe in melee, Bloodboil cleaves and uses a cone breath and you can eventually ninja a blood boil, on Moroes you can grab a add or two and tank them, etc...)

I don't really see mana while OTing as issue at the moment. And worse by worse as Left said, pop SoB/M, which with the new STR on tank gear will still put some semi-decent threat, self damage, and steal some additional mana

ShR and HotR are huge for offtanking because not only do they produce a lot of threat, they also cost relatively little mana (6% base mana for HotR, 4.25% for ShR with talents). On top of that, judging no longer requires you to reseal, which is a huge mana savings.

We'll have to see how it all shakes out once it gets implemented and tuned, but right now it looks like it's going to be a lot better than in TBC.

Thankfully, I've got an hour free right now.

Our naked stats at level 80 are as follows:

How I've discovered that base mana is actually calculated is as follows:

[(naked mana) - (int * 15)] + 280

I don't know why there's a + 280 there, but that's the way things are. For example, at level 70 a Human Paladin should supposedly have a base mana of 2673. The mana cost of Cleanse is 6% of base mana, which should be 160 if you assume that to be true; yet its cost is 177 mana. If you assume your base mana is 280 higher - 2953 - it works out. The Armory will display this if you take a look at the tooltip for Intellect, too.

So level 80 base mana is 4394. That makes the mana cost of our abilities as follows:

220 - Judgement
264 - Shield of Righteousness
264 - Hammer of the Righteous

ShoR and HotR can be used on cooldown, and Judgement will be forced to a 9 second cooldown, so mana consumption is going to be 112.4 mana per second. Now to figure out what Judgement of Wisdom will restore.

I'm going to assume AI (60 int), iMotW (52 int), and Kings (10% int) for this situation. That'll put our raid buffed mana pool at 7919 mana. I'm also going to assume regular JoW procs at 5 second intervals (restoring 31.7 mana per second). I'm also going to assume you've got replenishment (restoring 39.6 mana per second). So just propelled by nominal raid buffs, we'll be consuming only 41.4 mana per second, which would take us 3 minutes, 5 seconds to reach the point at which we don't have the mana to use a full rotation.

Adding in Improved Blessing of Wisdom and Improved Mana Spring Totem would bring us up to infinite sustainability, too. And that's assuming we never get it. And if we don't, I would question why you need an offtank at all.

Well our offtank/prot dps cycle (as in dps once your mob is dead for fights like karathress/keal) uses about 1.2% of our base mana per second as worldie calculated. So to stay mana neutral we need to take about 12% of our base mana as damage per second to regen through spiritual attunement. I recall seeing that paladins will have about 4.5k base mana at 80 but for the life of me can't find it. Going off 4.5k base mana that works out to be 540dps. For an off tank that takes damage thats not bad at all considering BoS will be returning a good amount as well, but if you are just dpsing thats a fair bit of fire to stand in, although not as bad as I was fearing. If you are really hurting for mana you can stop using one of judgment, SotR, or HotR and be almost mana neutral while still doing reasonable damage and having some buttons to hit which is a huge improvement.

edit: Mostly beaten for the mana consumption. Using Theras' numbers (which look right to me) thats 412 dps we need to take to stay even, or 230ish with blessing of wisdom or mana spring totem. That works out pretty well for us. Taking reasonable damage we can even drop consecrates from time to time.

So here's another subject: Ghostcrawler has said that defensive stance and the like have gotten a bonus to threat baked in to make up for the lack of salv. Have we seen this with RF or our abilities yet? I'm not in beta and I don't remember seeing any patch notes or the like about it but I may have just missed it.

Second are seals and RF still dispellable? Considering that seals are much more expensive now and RF has always been expensive and is both our threat and mitigation stance its a real kick in the junk that they can be knocked off rather easily. Its looking a bit like prot could be fun in bg pvp but being unable to seal and losing mitigation so easily is a real pain. This is even worse for holy since it can be pvp viable but can't pick up sanctified seals. Also some bosses love to purge RF like in old hillsbrad which makes tanking as a pally a real disadvantage until you outgear it, and now that seals are 14% base mana its even worse. I forget if HS is dispelable but that would add insult to injury. Druids and warriors don't need to worry about getting knocked out of bear for or def stance, or even worry about it running out in mid fight,. The fact that we do doesn't add any balance or interest to the game, just frustration. Changing these to be undispellable would let blizzard try new things with bosses that dispel without seriously dicking over paladin tanks.

Has blizzard given a reason why RF isn't a stance or is dispellable? It seems to be one of those things like weapon skill thats sticking around for no good reason other than that its always been that way.

Also 2 mins on seals seems like its there just to be there. Its a very small mana cost over its duration (.117% of base mana per second) so any sustaining build will be able to afford it. It strikes me as roughly akin to a shaman's weapon imbues where it should last a long time and not be dispellable.

And yeah I think everyone has forgotten to redo RF before a pull or had it run out mid fight and and had some sort of horrific wipe where the healers are constantly pulling agro.

Blizzard never gave a answer to why it's dispellable.
The only reason i can think of is because holy and retri can use Imp RF for PvP.

Blizzard did not want to make a "stance" for Protection at the beginning (Paladin used Seal of Fury to get aggro then), and Righteous Fury was added in the Paladin patch to cover the removal of Fury.

Since then, they didn't want to mess with spell, since the magic buff Righteous Fury is helpful in PvP and the devs like that players have to rebuff every so often.

The problem with OT mana is that you can't just use HotR+ShoR+Judgement. Holy Shield alone matches the rage starvation situation for druid/warrior tanks. We need to keep Consecrating to have anything approaching normal aggro generation, which means we will go OOM in under a minute.

It is quite realistic to have a situation where you don't take damage for that long but still need to be #2 on threat. Divine Plea is an excellent way to have six DPS pass you on the threat table, and you only get one potion that you won't want to waste on mana. The only solution right now is to rely on Sacrifice and Spirit Link which we don't even know will work on tanks.

You have any numbers to show that we need consecrate to do decent threat? By the look of it HotR, SotR, and judgment will do the majority of our single target threat. All of those scale very well with strength and by the look of it strength will be abundant on tanking gear.

Well 80% threat while not being hit doesn't seem that bad. Anyone have numbers for what warriors/bears/dk can do while they aren't taking regular damage?

Also what level gear are you wearing to get those numbers? 80 blues or SWP purples (and new or old version of BC gear since its a pretty big change)? 182 tps for HotR is pretty lackluster for a 51 point talent that doesn't have any secondary effect.

3k tps without salv is the same as 2100 tps against dps with salv. That seems like a believeable increase from 70 to 80. (I haven't looked at my actual tps in quite awhile, but 1500-ish sounds about right.)

Also, are these numbers with the new SoV/SoR coefficients from the latest patch? (each nerfed by roughly 40%)

No, I haven't yet taken a look at any changes to coefficients in the last build or so.

Rasczak: Updated SWP gear with a few blues and 6 80 epics. I'll try and get some proper raid buffed figures to go with when I find the new coefficients.

By the way, a recent blue post stated in passing that the next revision of Divine Plea will be "more like Blood Rage than Evocation" which may be exactly what we're looking for here.

I find quite interesting that if we are doing over 3k TPS, we are actually also generating 1500+ DPS while tanking.
That's not exactly "low".
And since our TPS depends on damage, i expect our DPS going up even more in later tiers. A rather amusing change from the horribly low DPS we do at the moment.

Xav recently posted in a Naxxramas thread that he was doing 1300 DPS while tanking and the full Sunwell geared DPS were at 10-20% of his threat. In another, he said, self buffed (read: with Battle Shout on) he was about to put out 4000 TPS on a five man boss and guessed that in a 25 man raid environment he could hit 6000 TPS.

I know this is in regards to Warrior's and not Paladin's and, to a degree, conjecture, but it should give a little indication of what we can expect to do if they're really going to keep us as balanced as they say.

I agree that it does seem excessive but he also added that it made tanking feel fun. To use his terminology, building threat didn't feel like a "sub job"; mobs were just on you and you had fun using abilities outside of TBC's strict threat rotations without worrying that someone was going to leap frog you on threat.

Remember that Blizzard said they want you to be able grab some random tank you don't know and not have to worry about whether he's going to hold threat in a Heroic PUG. The numbers do seem at the extreme end of each spectrum but I have no doubt that truly exceptional tanks will always have ways to shine through even if things stay as they are now.

Part of that is just the fun of seeing big numbers on your screen while you're tanking. They've said they want to increase tank dps, and it sounds like they have, and I think it's a good thing. Making tanking fun that way will hopefully encourage more people to try it.

That said, you don't need to be doing five times the threat of your dps to be able to have fun.

I strongly suspect what's going on here is that they've both boosted threat generation modifiers to make up for losing Salv and increased tank DPS. The double dipping is overkill, but this gives them (as they like to say) lots of knobs to turn for tuning it.

Are you saying he was generating 5-10 times more threat than his DPS? As in, they were at (for example) 2000 TPS and he was at 10000 TPS? (This is what it sounds like you are saying, but it seems absurd.)

Or, are you trying to say that he was 10-20% ahead of his DPS on threat, as in they were at 2000 (for example) TPS and he was at 2500 TPS? (This would seem to make more sense.)

5x the dps' threat is pretty absurd and will probably be fixed. Remember there are some classes that are doing about 4x the dps of other classes which blizzard has said is unintentional. I don't think a major patch has come out since they started their dps balance pass. I figure we will see numbers going all over the place for a while before they get into a final state, and I figure they won't even bother with tanking until they have dps in a place they like.

I think thats whats more important is the general mechanics and feel of prot at the moment, and from what I've heard I'm optimistic about it. I've been bringing up off tanking/dps since thats what I've been worried about but its looking rather solid. The change to divine plea is also promising and could mostly eliminate our mana issues. I'm content to wait for the next major push before dong any more bitching.

My open question now is how does HotR actually play? By PsiVen's numbers it seems rather underwhelming. I'd love to hear some feedback from people who have actually run around and used it in different situations. Does it need a damage buff or some kind of secondary effect? As it is its a lot like cleave that ignores armor which is good but not really in the spirit of 51pt talents being heroic and something that makes you go wow! Any thoughts on reasonable changes to make it better?

I believe that heroics in general have become a lot more forgiving and are more of in between level 80 5 mans and naxx. It makes sense that a moderately intelligent tank would be able to handle that assuming there wasn't a massive gear disparity since dps won't need to be pushing the limit of their threat and healers shouldn't be pulling agro just keeping the tank alive. Once you get into naxx+ we can expect encounters that are much more tightly tuned and that the raid will have to squeeze out every drop of dps that they can so the difference between a moderate tank and an exceptional one will be evident.

It really shines for multi-target combat. When you're fighting 3 mobs it's really nice to get a hit plus a seal proc on each. The damage feels kind of meh; with a 112dps and 2.8-speed weapon it's doing 500-600 a hit for me right now at level 79 wearing mostly the "new" T6 gear with two pieces from Sunwell. Right now it really feels more like a seal-triggering utility than something that has a significant punch on its own.

At the very least I'd prefer to see it be 120% weapon damage at 100% threat, instead of vice versa like it is now. An outright damage buff to 150% or so would be even better. I guess it depends on how much they intend for it to feel like a serious damage tool by itself, and how much it's supposed to just be a tool for hitting three mobs at once with SoV. I've also been wondering about using it with SoJ in caster packs, or even in some of the large scrums in PvP (AV especially).

It does feel worth taking in its current form, so it's good enough to meet that test at least.