I really don't understand Reckoning. It's a threat ability, but only for primary threat (no hit, no threat). It's multi swing based, and you can't turn it off, so Parry gibbed is still a concern, especially with a very fast weapon. It's also a proc, which means that even when you want it, you can't count on it.

Maybe I just never really got it, but I used to think I understood it. It gave us the ability to generate significant single target threat - but now we have much better abilities to handle focus threat as well as secondary (aoe) threat. Five points - just seems a bit much.

I always felt that reckoning should have been retooled to a 10% chance on crit to proc double-attack for a few seconds in ret as a dps talent and something new added to prot to compensate.

Personally, I wish if they would remove damage ranges form weapons entirely and just give everything an AP value instead.

Ah, interesting. Scaling with block value would have been more "appropriate" but this works just fine.

I guess part of it just comes from the history of Reckoning.

In its original form (free swing when you get crit) it was mostly something you used with a two-hander in PvP.

In TBC it's become a decent threat buff for tanking, and a decent dps tool to use with a two-hander when you're not tanking.

In WotLK, they've given us so many new ways to deal damage from a sword-and-board setup there's really not much need to even have a two-hander in your bag. And melee swings now account for an even smaller portion of total threat/dps, so its value there is reduced too.

I still think it'll be nice to have, but it's definitely a talent whose usefulness has degraded just due to changing circumstances.

History is a great reason to remember Reckoning, but not really to keep it. I remember bombing folks in my light forge back in the day. I knew, even then, it wasn't the spirit of the talent, but I did it. It's half way through the tanking tree, it was obviously a tool to generate threat with our crit happy tree, back when the prot tree was completly upside down.

Well, one thing it isn't is 5% dps increase. It's not mitigation, it's negative mitigation, actually - at some point it's not just weak, it's a bad idea.

Unless something has changed since the last Beta build I saw, Imp Expose Armor no longer offers any additional benefit over sunders. EA and Sunder both reduce armor by exactly the same amount now, and Imp EA extends EA's duration energy cost but does not increase it's effect.

EDIT: Sorry, they changed this again. The latest iteration of Imp EA reduces energy cost. The point still stands; it doesn't increase the armor reduction effect.

This is a significant change in 3.0, and more or less means that a rogue will never be asked to run EA as long as there is a prot warrior around to keep sunders up instead.

Just a small clarification, Imp. Expose Armor now reduces the energy cost of Expose Armor instead of extending the duration.

I think Reckoning is a fun ability.

However, it is too expensive for what small dps/threat it gives, so reduce it to 3 points or add something else to the ability.


Regarding no tanking stats on caster weapons, DKs currently do not have tanking stats on their 2H weapon and DW tanking is a bad idea.

Well, I guess I was just explaining the background, not so much justifying it. (And man, the way our talent trees were in 2005, I didn't see any need to feel guilty about violating the spirit of the talent for PvP. )

I guess the greater dynamic at work here is that the components of our threat generation are changing in relative importance. HotR and SotR are adding a huge chunk of new threat. It's not unreasonable to expect that those two abilities will account for 50% or more of our level 80 threat generation (including the extra seal damage from HotR). So the total value of all the old stuff is being cut in half. Since Reckoning only affects autoattack and seal damage, both of which are in that "old stuff" category, it's becoming a lot less important in WotLK simply because the things it affects are becoming less important.

And as I pointed out earlier, in TBC Reckoning can be very nice when you're using a two-hander, but in WotLK there's no longer any reason why a prot paladin would ever want to use a two-hander (that I can think of, anyway) so that benefit is gone too.

It does have other uses: SoW and SoL can leverage it nicely, and this actually improves in WotLK because those seals are stronger. Overall though, it's still losing quite a bit of its power. History is passing it by, you might say.

You bring up a good point. I was thinking the issue was that you can't really avoid taking it in an MT build, as small as the increase would be it would still be better than any other option (when not speccing kings). However, the introduction of the new 11pt talent should solve that issue.

While the Imp EA talent was changed, the EA skill was also changed.

IIRC, it got buffed to something like 3600-3800 ArP from what it is. Either equivilant or a slight reduction from what the talent did. So Rogues will still be asked to, assuming that sunder doesn't gain an additional level to match EA, and that EA doesn't gain an additional level to out-perform Sunder.

From the warrior glyphs, it's clear that they want them to be using sunder. Double sunders on devastate, sunder applies to a second target, both glyphs point to heavy sunder usage.

Actually, we're not, at least, not in terms of the actual amount mitigated. I don't want to sound like I think the sky is falling, but we've lost our health advantage and any mitigation advantage we once had through blocking. I'd really like to see some Naxx parses and compare warrior to paladin mitigation in actual settings. I would suspect there would be a significant difference.

Ehum, what exactly would be the point of that build?
You just took random talents without a specifical aim. That's just a mix of DPS, healing and tanking talents.

I totally agree not all talents need to be raid talents. But, then, what's the value of a leveling talent? The problem with leveling prot has one very simple solution, which also makes a lot of sense for the class - give them SotR earlier.

Reckoning is kind of fun. That isn't lost on me, I guess if that's the niche then it makes sense - I just tend to look at talents more in the role of end game. I'm definitely monocharac, so the game really begins for me at max level - and I don't see that for a farming build, a tanking build, a ret build, or a holy build.

Either way, you're totally correct in that I don't have to take it - it may end up being just the most useful talent ever. I'm just commenting that I think it's anachronistic.

Sure, the average amount blocked comes out more or less equal. But the paladin still mitigates far more reliably.

Just consider the "middle-ground" case of 50% m+d+p. During the 10 seconds Shield Block is up, the warrior is blocking every blow that lands, with a very high block value, which is fantastic mitigation. But once it expires, he's stuck at his base block rate (15% block, or 30% of all landed blows) and his normal block value (crit-blocks aside) for 30 seconds until SB finishes. Basically 25% of the time he's a brick wall, 75% of the time he's rather normal.

A paladin in the same gear has a permanent block rate of 40% (barring HS charge exhaustion and assuming no WotLK analog for the Libram of Repentance), meaning he's consistently blocking 80% of all incoming blows all the time. When Redoubt procs, that number goes up to 100%; overall you're looking at between 85% and 90% of all incoming blows all the time blocked by the paladin.

Now there's other factors to balance like the whole RF-vs-DS thing and all. But in terms of stabilizing the incoming damage against unpredicted spikes and such, the paladin's blocking is helping the healer far more than the warrior's blocking is. And the analysis above assumes the warrior is spamming Shield Block as often as he can, in which case he's forfeiting his biggest advantage in blocking, which is his ability to burst his blocking when needed. If he's actually using it appropriately, his overall blocking will be even less.

And interestingly enough, the very page you linked to also linked to this post.

Updated figures ( Maintankadin :: View topic - (Build 8926) WotLK TPS Weapons Spreadsheet )

The changes have significantly altered the relative threat of abilities. Here's where I stand right now in Beta with standard buffs (Kings, Might, Fort, Mark). Early Naxx gear.

Ability: TPS
ShoR: 1314
SoV: 526
Cons: 448 (280 Glyphed)
JoV: 326 (359 Glyphed)
HS: 261
HotR: 208
White: 160

Adding Glyph of Judgement and 1HWS, total TPS is 3600 with a full rotation, 3313 without HS (-8%), 2820 without HS+Cons (-22%). So with these numbers I would say the new Divine Plea will be able to keep us competitive at OT threat, however it's due for another tuning pass as DPS clearly are not approaching 4k TPS.

I'm still quite shocked at the level of tanking DPS. Tanks currently generate stupid amounts of damage, more than most part of the DPS.
With the numbers posted above, that's more than 2k DPS done by the tank.

By the way, nobody posted about it, and I honestly didn't know till I just logged onto beta to mess around some, but the new Divine Plea is a 1 minute cooldown for 25% of mana pool. It's prot pally bloodrage!

I was not happy when it was a 5 min cooldown- that's too long to be useful while running 5mans as a system for quickly regaining enough mana, or during an avoidance streak, or while OTing, but (and I assume everyone else who's talking about it knew this) at 1 minute it's highly attractive.

Yeah, it's sweet. I was tanking the Azjol-Nerub instances (at level 80, but my guildies all just got keys, so I'll be doing lowbie stuff for awhile) and popping that sucker pretty much every time it came off of cooldown. I miss the kneeling animation, but this is really just way way more useful.

And I don't think I really appreciated the coolness of HotR+SoV until these runs tonight. The ability to build and maintain SoV stacks on multiple targets is really just something else.

Ok, so I did a number of heroics the other day as prot spec and thought i'd give you all some feedback. My gear is crafted stuff and drops i've found. It's good but not great. 18khp unbuffed, crit immune (via a few pvp Res pieces), 35-40% avoidance, 900ish block.

First quick comment is difficulty of heroics needs to be ramped up. It's pathetics. Like normal but with better loot. Not even a touch on shattered halls v1. The only stupid thing is that a number of bosses seem to have crazy abilities which suddenly deal insane damage. A number of times, boss would be fine to 20%, then all of a suddent they would kill me in about 3 seconds, however being so weak raid would always finish them off without wipe. Trash and bosses need to be tuned up and some of their stupid abilities need to be tuned down.

Mana:-

Tended to use BoSanc through trash. This + JoW + Replenishment (we had spriest) meant I never had mana issues. Long gone are the pull pack, drink, pull pack. I was chain pulling. This feels good and should stay as it is.

Single target threat:-

Both tps and dps seemed a little insane. A number of times we would kills a boss without threat issues and i'd then realise RF wasn't on...oops. There is no way anyone in it's present form is ever going to pull a single mob off a pala tank without taunting it.

AoE tanking:-

Despite being on heroic, every pack we AoE tanked. We didnt use CC, and we didnt mark mobs. Often all three dps would go after 3 different targets. It didnt matter. A little tab targeting between mobs, sharing out the pain meant mobs rarely were pulled off me (very rarely)

Utility:-

The extra tools at our disposal ShotR, HotR, AS (since its instant), Exo/HW (since theres lots of undead) makes tanking a lot more fun, theres always abilities we can use. Judgement isn't our only active abilitiy, and it's great fun

Issues:-

2 or more casters/ranged in a pack is still a pain. We had a DK guildie with us who knows palas limitations so he handily pulled extra casters/ranged into my melee range. However without some silence/pull etc in the group such packs will always be annoying

It's still a little annoying that bears beat us on hp, warriors on mitigation and dk on avoidance. We seem to be the king of block. Hopefully with block levels increases as time goes on this will balance out our mitigation with warriors.

All in all, prot paladin is great fun. I do forsee some degree of nerfs coming, however as long as they arent too severe I think the class is really coming into it's own as a viable end game wrath tank.

AoE tanking:-

Every pack we AoE tanked, no crowd control

I'm pretty sure that they've implemented the "resilence doesn't matter in PvE" thing already so you were likely getting crit.

Really? Can anyone else confirm this. I wasnt looking for crit, but next time i go I will. Didnt seem to make a difference still steamrolled all heroics

The 'resilience doesn't work in instances' thing was a misunderstanding of a blue post. It was clarified later, resilience still works in all pve encounters, it just won't be necessary for druid tanks anymore because of talent changes.