ah thats good to know, as its abugger to be crit immune at 80 without res (pre heroics/naxx). Did a heroic and noticed know crits, so all seems fine

Staying uncrittable in Naxx is hard too. I replaced my blue crafted gloves and pants with Naxx10 drops and lost 13 defense, putting me at 532. I'll have to redo every gem to defense to make up the difference, and I'm a blacksmith with 3 extra gem slots...

Glyphed Judgement value, plus 10% global from 1HWS should end up at 3600. I accidentally counted 1HWS twice to get to 3960, whoops.

It's not at all random. Neither is it intended for tanking everything WoW can throw your way - instead, the idea is to devise a build with which a holy paladin can tank less demanding content while being able to reuse a good deal of their primary armor set. In particular, reuse those holy items that don't spend budget on mp5, but do spend it on spellcrit.

The main focus is on the use of Holy Shock, and of course instant-cast Holy Lights when those holy shocks crit. The rest of the points are spent on avoidance and mitigation in the protection tree. The purpose of Heart of the Crusader is not for dps (although your group's dpsers will surely appreciate it), but rather to boost the chances of a crit Holy Shock when it's used offensively.

It just looks very mishmashy to me. You're not as good of a healer as a real spec'd one, and you're definitely no MT, as you said. I suppose it could work as a trash tank that heals on bosses, but heaven help you if you come to a boss that takes several REAL tanks.

I think you misunderstand how shield block works for a warrior. The duration of the buff is indeed 10 seconds, but it only has 1 charge, it only blocks one attack and then its gone.

Slightly off-topic, because of this mechanic and the fact that SB if off the GCD, many warriors are using their SB cooldown for threat with a shield slam macro, pop SB, SS before you block an attack and you benefit from the +100% BV on your slam.

It's great mitigation and threat for one attack (one in and one out), but it is not up anywhere near 25% of the time.

Shield block no longer has charges, it will cause the warrior to block every attack for a ten second duration. Talented it will have a 40 second cooldown so if used on every c/d it will have a 10/40 = 25% uptime.

Can you verify that? Everything I've seen points to SB having 1 charge, same as untalented in live.

Shield Block - Spell - World of Warcraft look at the "buff" as opposed to the spell itself.

Edit: Also, as can be seen in this video. WarcraftMovies.com - World of Warcraft Movies Shield Block fades after one hit, so unless this spell has been changed in the last couple patches I think you're misunderstanding the mechanic as well.

I'd provide my own SS but my Beta is FUBAR atm.

It has been. Pretty sure it was even in the patch notes. Lasts 10 seconds, no charges.

Fair enough, I'd love a link if you can find it, cause I can't. That's a pretty big buff.

Edit: I found some references to this change on Warrior Beta boards, with this large a buff I would have expected to hear more about it. Thanks for correcting me.

I noticed last night that I could use Hammer of the Righteous through silence in Nexus.

With regards to the ability though, it's incredibly fun to use. Like really fun. The sound effect is extremely satisfying even if the graphic doesn't quite seem there yet. I certainly concur that it needs some sort of range on it though. It's hard to explain but it just feels awkward that you can't use it at a small range. Even 5 yards would feel adequate and logical without going overboard.

A Reckoning suggestion that came up recently on the beta forum: Change the effect from "extra melee attacks" to "melee attacks do holy damage". Same duration, proc rate, etc. (unless change needed for balance, or whatever).

This has a number of beneficial effects:

1) Increases threat.

2) Gives an additional incentive to use a melee weapon instead of a caster weapon.

3) Eliminates parry-gibbing concerns.

Cathela thats a good idea, another would be to make it simply add bonus holy damage equal to your weapon damage to the next 4 swings. That would give the extra damage and threat but wouldn't parry gib. They might have to play with it a bit to keep it balanced, maybe .7 x weapon damage, or not proc seals or the like.

Does anyone have experience tanking on the ptr yet? I'm kinda worried about how our threat will be without SotR with the reitemized tanking gear. How about tanking specs and rotations? I've been playing with the talent calculator for wrath for level 70 and got this which seems solid but there are so many good choices its hard to figure out whats best.

I'm going to gather up a group and do some tests tonight. I still think we should push for getting SotR earlier, because of how central it is to our threat at present.

I like this possible implementation, but it still doesn't address the inverse scaling nature of the buff... reckonning, in its current form, already increases our threat beautifully (in TBC through more SoR holy damage hits, in WOTLK with a quick way to stack vengeance/corruption on a nearby mob), what it doesn't do is scale this TPS increase as avoidance ramps up.

Adding incentive to use melee weapons may or may not be something the devs want to do. Currently a SP mace sits firmly atop the TPS weapon rankings over at maintankadin and this may very well be intended (though, granted, it wouldn't follow the new "merging" equipment philosophy).

As to the infamous "parry-gib", I was always of the opinion that the dangers of this effect we're greatly exaggerated, but my understanding of the mechanics we're that the true risk was that the hasted attack would reduce SB/HS charges to 0 therefore rendering the tank crushable for a time, leading to a large burst and death. With the disappearance of crushing blows, I really think it's time to push these "parry-gib" worries aside. Fast numbers are fun!

A few questions to ask. There is a lot of information here to go through. As I've not the time to go through the last 30-40 pages of everything regarding the new changes, I'm hoping someone might have some enlightening responses for me.

1) Is +dmg still viable on a weapon? I am currently using [Tempest of Chaos]. should I find a different weapon with +str on it?

2) The 9th tier talent, Touched by the Light, increases spell power ... does it help in tanking at all, or is this mainly for those protection paladins that heal when not tanking?

3) Has anybody come up with a decent "main tank" build yet? With all the new talents, it is sort of difficult to guage this stuff. I sort of feel like I'm being pigeon-holed into taking something like Reckoning (though, I managed to find a way around that). Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

So, does this mean that the gem slots do not take an enchanting slot on the items?

And does any crazy person out there have Leatherworking, to confirm if gem slots on bracers stack w/ Fur-lined stuff?

Because if you can stack an extra socket, fur-lining, and enchanting on a bracer.. that's one powerful bracer.

As I understand it, HotR is normalized around a 2.5 speed weapon. Which means that the speed won't make a difference for weapons. The relative value of Str to SP is high enough that the Caster weapons you find will be signifcantly better than the DPS weapons you find, due to the normalization.
If they weren't normalized, slow weapons would have an advantage in HotR damage/threat, and could possible break-even with spellpower weapons. It's not looking like they will now, as SP scales with all spells, and STR isn't as plentiful on DPS weapons as SP is on caster weapons.

Stam to SP is useful to everyone, as SP is the new Damage/Healing from TBC. Spellpower = more threat = good for tanking.

As (I believe) cathela said: Pick and chose your talents until Sanc, and pretty much take everything after that. Reckoning *can* be worked around, but it depends on your view of reckoning. I personally prefer the talent, as i see significant threat gains vs. the relatively small chance of insta-gib parries. However, i'm not tanking high-end raid content.

The whole bottom half of prot is worth taking, and there are only a few talents that people will dis-agree on. Reckoning, Kings, Stoicism, to name a few.

This is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, HotR is currently normalized to 2.5s attack speed, but caster weapons have notably lower DPS than more traditional tank weapons. This is especially true at 70, but supposedly level 80 gear closes the gap a little. The bottom line is that base weapon damage comes into play and the "caster" weapons won't hit as hard. Think of a warrior using Mortal Strike with a [Farmer's Shovel] -- even though it's a 3.7s weapon, it hits like a wet noodle because of the low base damage.

1) Spell Power you mean? Yes. Somewhere in here is a post by, um, I think PsiVen(?) listing the relative value of stats. The quick intuitive answer is that spell power is a middling threat stat per-budget, while strength and attack power are tops. However, weapon damage is very low on threat. And spellpower weapons tend to make cuts on weapon damage to increase the spellpower. Attack power weapons don't! It balances out reasonably well.

2) Surely, if you think about this for a moment, you won't need someone to answer for you.

3) Blizzard's design with the new talents are to have various essential talents, and then "filler talents" that you take on a whim. Taking these will not gimp you.

Question #2 was really in conjunction with #1. If the first question was answered with a "No, spell power isn't all that great for us anymore" than the answer to #2 would have been a bit different than what it is. But, since spell power is in fact useful to an extent, then yes, the answer to #2 is obvious, knowing the answer to the first question.

Thank you guys for the responses. Much appreciated.

Another current advantage of Wrath spell damage weapons is that they gain the appropriate spell damage relative to their ilvl like caster weapons do now, but retain much more of their white dps.

Picking up a Warrior Tanking weapon on the other hand can help you make up for the lost defense. They also have high dps (good for HotR) and are usually fast (designed for Heroic Strike spam) which helps us with SoV stacking and/or SoR damage.

On a sidenote, i currently use the badge libram that increase SoR/JoR damage for single target tps, seeing i'll likely switch to SoV, have any librams being changed to help with that?

Not really. You can go back to the [Libram of Repentance], since unhittability is still a good chunk of damage reduction with how much block value we gained from the STR conversion, and the avoidance DR changes may have reduced you below unhittability if you were just riding the line before.

The [Tome of the Lightbringer] is still good, for obvious reasons, but not as much as until we get SHOR, and of course it's not readily available to everyone.

The [Libram of Avengement] may be useful, since HOTR and Judgement (and later SHOR) can both crit, but Vengeance can't.

Personally, I'm using the Repentance and switch to the Avengement in an OT situtation.