Shield of the Templar change didn't go through

So i suppose the last changes posted by GC on the Holy tree didn't either.
Can you confirm this ?

I feel the largest difference between warrior tanks and paladin tanks now, really, is DPS.

At 70 there seems to be no comparison. My warrior counterpart in the guild is smiling over his 3600 damage shield slam last night when solo'ing Durn, and our ShoR not scaling to the extend their slam does adds to my misgiving about then fun we'll have solo'ing things, off-tanking, or even generating DPS while tanking.

Is there an issue to be addressed here, or do things even out somehow by 80?

Yep, the build that has the 3% avoidance and Holy changes was 9064, and the build that went live was 9058.



Answering an older question, scribes only get shoulder enchants and craftable BoP off-hands as perks (maybe a good amount of gold too).

Shield Slam scales 1:1 with block value, same as Shield of Righteousness. It does, however, have a much larger amount of bonus damage, which is downplayed by modifiers:

Both abilities get 10% damage from 1hw spec, and both classes get 30% extra block value from talents, so I'll disregard those.

Warriors get 6% extra strength, Paladins get 15%.
Warriors get 10% damage, 15% crit chance from talents, paladins get a straight 30% damage.
Warriors get Sword and Board refreshes, whereas Paladins get Holy (rather than Physical) damage.

All in all, Shield Slam hits more often, ShoR hits harder.

I was wondering if there had been any discussion on what type of weapon to use now that Hammer of the Righteous is live. Currently I'm using Merciless Gladiator's Gavel, which has really awful damage. With the changes to the class, I find my self having no mana issues and being able to spam Hammer of the Righteous as well as Holy Shield, Judgments and Consecration with no problems. All this makes me think that the spell power and hit is still worth it over damage. Has anyone done any math on threat per second and different main hands becuase 400 damage Hammer of the Righteous seems like it could be better.

[Quickening Blade of the Prince] and [Breeching Comet] are also solid, high dps, choices that are very, very easy to get. Depends on what your defense looks like with the change to Anticipation.

Just for the sake of correctness, re: the shield slam vs shield of the righteous discussion, it's important to remember that warriors get massive slams out of a shield block to shield slam combo.

[Ghetto edit!]

Thanks a lot. I would say Prot Palis get screwed now that they have to share drops with rogues, but daggers are better now so everybody wins.

I'm not sure how anyone's really getting screwed, since ideally you're going after tanking weapons and thus only competing with prot warriors. If you do try to grab a more dps oriented weapon for lack of something better you're competing with about the same number of people. Don't forget that before we were 'fighting' with casters, now it's melee.

We're actually in a better position now for weapon itemization than before. It used to be that were an outlier: A spell damage dagger is usable by all casters except Paladins, which frequently leaves us with inferior choices, as evidenced with [Sunflare] and [Scryer's Blade of Focus].

And no, we wouldn't necessarily be sharing drops with the Rogues either: Threat is so high that if we have to choose between an x DPS weapon with tanking stats vs. an x+20 DPS weapon without tanking stats, the former is still the better choice. A difference of less than a hundred TPS is not going to break the bank if your TPS is already in the multiple thousands, compared to the survivability you'd be giving up.

We did a quick ZA last night as half the guild still hadn't managed to fix their UIs for sunwell and I tanked along with our Warrior MT. I swapped to [The Brutalizer] (unenchanted at present) along with a little gear switching to get to 490 again and I must say it was really quite fun. Getting 3 HotR crits simultaneously for over 2k holy damage each was just rediculous. Even with me DC'ing quite alot (about 7 times on dragon hawk alone) I still had as an average about 800 dps for the instance even with 2 mages obliterating packs with Blizzard. I suspect once I get to grips with the changes and things stabilise I could easily be pulling 1k dps if our dps classes dont kill things so quickly that I get more than 1 swing in. On bosses with AW up and just spamming buttons without any real rotation I was doing over 2.2k TPS which once I get myself comfortable will no doubt go up when I start to remember to use things like AS and HoW.

The only drawback to the changes I can see so far is the sound HotR makes when you use it. I can see it getting very old very quickly.

I have to say I like the new protection tree a lot and what math already proofed, has been confirmed by play testing - Spell damage weapons are a thing of the past for tanking Paladins.
Some more weapons out there, that should be considered (this is from a Human Point of View):
[Mallet of the Tides] is very nice and is easy to obtain. I've not done the math as I got lost in the spreadsheets (I mean the part where and how expertise affects Holy damage and the chance to hit with our different Abilities - using 3 different hit tables) but it should be very close to [The Brutalizer] for Humans, beaten only by [The Unbreakable Will]?

Overall I am a bit lost because nobody seems to have accurate numbers on expertise, our new skills and Paladin tanking.

Also on the topic of Paladin tank enchants, has anyone seen an enchant on current 3.0.2 or on the Wotlk Beta Server that is stronger than [Enchant Weapon - Potency] (+20strenght). All I have found was an AP enchant (which seemed to be weaker overall - no BV and not affected by BoK/DS).

I just thought I would share a few things I noticed yesterday in our first 3.0.2 raid.

I've been using [The Unbreakable Will] with a potency enchant and have found it works very nicely. Also tried a [Rising Tide] with the same enchant, but with a few points in reckoning at present I preferred the former.

Threat issues don't really exist any more. On undead bosses I was able to hit 4-5k TPS, and that's without a concrete rotation sorted out yet, and no numerical cool-down timers.



The main thing I noticed, which seemed to be doing the most for my threat, was Judgment of Light. The healing is directly attributed to you, it now heals for more, and if the healing is effective this causes threat globally. Your other paladins can do Judgment of Wisdom, but keep Light for yourself, from what I could see it gave huge amounts of threat when raid damage was occurring. An example was on Naj'entus, tidal shield goes up, raid AOE damage, TPS spikes to 6k+.

On my protection paladin, I wouldn't even dare think of going to MH/BT to get a tanking weapon, with 3/4 Kara gear and the badge legs. My holy priest is my main, and after succesful and satisfying respecs on both my priest and my combat rogue, I have to say I feared respeccing my paladin the most.

I can't offer any numbers, but even with my current gear and using [Mana Wrath] as weapon, I felt a lot more powerful after the respec (and getting used to pushing different buttons). I went to Black Temple to mow the field of dual wielding non-elites as I sometimes do, and finished with full hp/mana bars. Then the elite, that I soloed before but took me ages. Not only was my damage a lot higher, I ended the fight with full bars yet again.

I guess subtle changes to spec and gear will matter at a higher level, but although I have yet to tank something properly, prot paladin changes sure feel like a huge improvement.

Do keep in mind that since Judgement of Light's procs still scale off of the judging Paladin's AP + SP, it may be preferable for the Ret Paladin to do it, assuming you run with one and can keep up with the threat.

I actually love the sound from HotR. I'm fully aware that I'm in the minority here, but it's satisfying to hear that sound and know that three mobs just got their collective noses crunched.



I'm looking forward to tonight's BT run. Over this last weekend on the PTR, in my prot spec, I managed to do things that simply wouldn't have been possible before. Soloing Ony to phase II, soloing SH to the first boss (note...Death Coil on a short cooldown with only one target sucks if you're the target), soloing Ramps in about 20 mins and taking my time at that, and soloing UB to the 2nd boss in a similarly speedy fashion just felt so nice after TBC's glacial killing speed of targets (and yes, I'm aware that other people have gone beyond that to do other, better things...but it's a giant leap forward for what I was able to accomplish before.) It's also given me a lot of practice in getting my timing down, and while I'm nowhere near perfect yet (and won't be for a while), all of that practice has shaken out a lot of the 'where the hell is this skill on the bars' and started the muscle memory to kick in.

Protection just flows so much better now, and the Seal/Judgement system is so insanely better now than it was before, once you get used to it. It's *much* more adaptable to what the player needs, and switching things around on the fly just works now. No workarounds, no cussing and waiting for *something, anything* to come off of cooldown, just go bash face. Now I get to go see how it all works in a raid environment for the first time, and I can't wait.

Having a Pally for the AoE grind-up (@lvl 60) and using Reckoning, this comment surprised me.
-> Your former weapon, being 1.6s, would actually lose DPS over the 8s of Reckoning in any model
* e.g. 'longest use' it proc's on a new swing start, active for 6.4s - 'shortest use' approaches 4.8s
-> weapons >= 2.0s basically work the same [or at least used to] where damage basically normalizes over the duration
* the dmg of each extra swing, provided a similiar DPS weapon, is obviously more than the quicker weapon
* e.g. here you'll always get 3 'bigger' swings, 2.6s even has the possibility of still sneaking 4 in - approaches 7.8s

The 8s cap *but 4 swing* is significant, and is why a 1.0 wpn << 2.0 wpn == 3.0 wpn
-- faster one dishes out lower damage faster, but [effect] duration is that much shorter
-- even a 2.0 can 'finish early' but keeps pace with slower weapons as it *always* gets 4 swings in
-- slower weapons hit even harder and thus pace with their occurrence variability and lost swings, because of that

Thus *over time* with Reckoning, you lose some return as you drop below a 2s weapon, but any 2s+ works the same

I only bring this up as this
* certainly seems to be the place to min-max
* I'd like to know if I'm wrong/something has changed

Now faster weapons can ramp up Seal returns (but no longer JoL/JoW returns if I have that right) and there certainly can be other reasons to use faster weapons.
However again, unless something has changed or I'm off base, Reckoning isn't one of them.

The jury is still out for me on the sound from HotR. My friends noted that it sounded like I hit the mobs with a frying pan every time I used it, though, so they were entertained.

Either way, the changes to the seal/judge system (specifically Wisdom), the changes to Blessing of Sanctuary (mana return), and the changes to spell pushback kept me going from about 18% to 10% on Onyxia when my DPS and Healer died (after which point I managed to get knocked back/feared into the whelps enough times that I died). Things that just weren't viable before are viable now, which is really fantastic.

My only issue is with AoE tanking that I haven't tried yet - I'm eager to do the old warrior tab-targeting method with HotR while supplementing it with Consecration and see if it provides any better threat.

Is anyone else really frustrated with the HotR mechanics? In AOE tanking situations its rather hard to figure out if the mob is behind you or too far away or whatever. I think if they doubles the range it would be much more useful and predictable.

This has been discussed plenty in the past, and your claims aren't exactly true. First, in the context of AoE grinding you mentioned, faster is just better. Reckoning is up 100% of the time, and more hits = more light/wisdom procs. In the context of actual tanking, the uptime isn't usually 100%, so you want a weapon that falls at or just below 2.0 or 2.6 *after haste*. You'll have ~23% melee haste from windfury + swiftret in a 25man raid.

That said, the impact of reckoning on tanking right now is nil. We never lose aggro, so reckoning is weak for raiding (slightly increases damage taken through parry-hasting to add unnecessary threat.)

1.6 is optimal speed for reckoning.

With a 1.6 you can have it proc a split second after a swing, and still fit in all 4 extra swings.

Faster is fine, as its the seal procs you want not so much the white damage.

Slower is worse, as you only get a couple of the 4 swings in, and so the seal damage is lower.




Reckoning however scales badly with gear, as avoidance increases, it's proc rate drops, and thats why I only take it because I need to spend 3 points to reach the next teir, and not because I actually value it.


Edit:

To elaborate on the mistake I believe you have made: For optimum speed you have to take into account that you need to fit in 5 swings in reality, as it can and will proc just after a swing has landed. So, 8/5 = 1.6s timer.