That's exactly what I was thinking, and these 5 points should probably be redoubt, unlinked from Shield Spec. Of course, the more - the better, with 10 points in off-tree vitally important (moving Deflection to 1st tier would also be welcome) and 19 points potentially desirable in both off-trees, contributing directly to our perfomance as a tank.

Speaking of points, we have 60 points in our tree (http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...10252155312321) which coud be deemed as essential, and contributing directly to tanking (usefulness of redoubt and BoSanct aside).

For comparison: Druids will probably deem 12 point in Resto (for 4% threat talent) as equally important; and they are at 59 essential tanking talent points in tree, considering talenting demo roar unneeded.

It seems that overfeaturing and making people make choices are in dev's minds. For paladin tanks proving themself at bleeding edge against the usual 'entitled' warrior's domination and new DK competition it may as well mean respeccing from tanking to tanking.

Is the Judgement still outside the GCD? So, if I am running Seal of Command and I cast Judgement of Wisdom, I get the Judgement of Wisdom effect, the Judgement of Command effect, and I don't have to re-seal Command?

The reason not to would be the horrendous top end damage of caster weapons. Seeing that we get an instant attack based on that damage, it makes sense to wear all "warrior-style" gear, (particularly if the rumor about the new STR->BV conversion is true), and use a slow high dps 1 hander for 1-3 targets. The only problem is since most of our threat gen abilities are still SP based, there's a large difference in the potential threat output of a SP plate wearing prot paladin and a tank-plate wearing paladin - that could be very difficult for blizzard to balance around. If consecrate/SoR/JoR scale off AP, then they don't have to worry about prot paladins, warriors, druids, and DKs doing, say, 2k tps, and prot paladins in SP gear doing 3k tps(made up numbers, yes, but you get the idea; if our threat scales much better with a stat we aren't supposed to be using, it can only lead to trouble).

I wouldn't be surprised if Redoubt turns out to be a lot better for boss tanking in WotLK than in TBC. It seems quite possible that block rating might vanish entirely from gear (since DKs can't use it) making it much harder to fill the attack table without Holy Shield. Crushing blows won't be an issue of course, but with block values increasing the extra mitigation from Redoubt could be signficiant.

Anyway, having played around with both the warrior and paladin protection trees, the most noticeable difference by far is the placement of Deflection. Both classes require you to do some picking and choosing of where to place points for maximum benefit, but with the warrior you can pretty easily save the five points you need to pick up Deflection, or even the eight you need to also get Imp. Thunderclap. With the paladin, you have to do a lot more skimping and cutting if you want to reach Deflection.

Having Deflection on Tier 1 of Ret would really help things.

Yes to all of the above.

It's kind of surprising that they haven't made that change yet. It would make protection builds a lot more flexible.

Heh. For the last couple years I've been whining about three things:
1) Spiritual Focus being too deep in Holy.
2) The Holy Shield cooldown-duration lag gap.
3) Deflection being too deep in Ret.

I should probably be more grateful that two of my pet peeves have been fixed.

It's not any weirder than rolling against a shadow priest and an elemental shaman for a mace, or rolling against a warlock and a mage for a sword. Personally I've always thought that having "tanking weapons" were a bad idea anyway. Let the weapon slot be for threat and balance around that. More inter-usability of gear is a good thing; it reduces sharding.

I was actually wondering about whether Defense was still around myself. Anticipation got changed from defense to dodge, and the druid anti-crit talent got boosted to 6%, removing any need for them to gear for defense at all.

Anyway, with the NDA lifted and beta invites going out, hopefully we'll have answers to these questions soon.

It really seems probable that block rating will be on shields/Tier pieces/Librams (transforming Libram in stat stick?), and rolling for a sword against warrior and rogue is entirely possible if your threat generation is better with weapon damage increase. Not to mention that these swords may have hit/expertise on them, and with precision gone it will have to come from somewhere. Of course, all will be moot if weapon damage scaling will turn out bad.

And yes, we do seem to be more lucky than Warriors in term of pure protection talents, but we will end up as only tank without dps boost while not tanking.

Overall I'm really happy with a what I've seen so far. The 51 prot talent in particular I think is great. Paladins have traditionally been terrible "fight for aggro" tanks on fights where we aren't getting hit (like Gruul, Bloodboil, etc), and that should change now. Being able to put up a full stack of Vengeance (corruption), switch to a 2h and swing away with blood (martyr) + the new talent should not only be great threat but also good self damage so we can get mana back from heals. Switch back to your sword + board when you need to step up as the MT and you're good to go.

The biggest things I'd like to see addressed are:

first - making Kings a baseline spell (seems like several other classes got abilities made baseline and we didn't get any). It's an integral raid buff, in fact THE most integral buff we have now that salv is gone, and forcing pallys to spec into prot to get it is really unfortunate. This is made even worse by having BoSanc further down in the prot tree. It may not happen a lot now, but I think it would be pretty common to see situations where the only pally in the raid with kings is also the only pally witch sanc, forcing a prot pally to not be able to have both the blessings that benefit him most because the other pally in the raid went ret/holy or holy/ret. Kings very much needs to be made a baseline buff at level 20 or 30. Moving Holy Shield down into it's place at 11 points to make tanking AoE trash as a Ret or Holy pally easier wouldn't be bad either, but as long as kings goes baseline I really wouldn;t care what went in at 11 points in place of it.

second - a baseline 30 yard single target ranged pull of some kind. For the entirety of WoW we've been the only class without a basic ranged pull and there's just no reason for it. No need to add an additional spell or anything here, just cut the damage of exorcism in half, make it usable against all targets, and let it do double damage to all it's current target types. voila! Hell, even if you made it do 1/4 of the damage to other target types, we just need some sort of baseline 30 yard single target pull.

other than that probobly the biggest thing is mana regen:

I'd love to see something like this (use the kneeling animation with it as the pally kneels down to pray for additional mana), but I think you can help alleviate the problem in another way too. The devs ought to remove Mp5 as a stat and instead just change spirit to allow all classes to regen a certain % of health and mana in combat. This % would obviously be much smaller than the normal amount regenerated outside of combat, and the % could even vary by class. If you want priests and druids and mages to still benefit more from spirit than other classes, give them a higher return %. All items with Mp5 would get changed over to an amount of spirit, and you'd have another streamlining of gear with pallys and shamans and locks no longer avoiding gear with spirit on it as a wasted stat. This might not solve all our mana problems, but it would certainly be a good thing, both for us and for the game as a whole.

There are some other smaller things they could do (pruning the prot tree down a bit, moving precision down to T1, making the improved auras easier to pick up for a full holy spec, still missing a lot of pvp utility tools like root or interrupt, etc), and hopefully they will. But if they changed those three major things and made a few tweaks I'd be THRILLED with what we got.

I'm not sure what they plan to do to make spirit better for paladins and shaman, but warlocks already got changed to benefit from spirit. The datamined top rank of lifetap costs x health for x mana, where x is 710 plus 3 * Spirit. Their stamina talent that used to be "+15% stam, -5% spirit" got changed to "+stam equal to 15% of spirit". Plus, they get 30% of their mana regen while casting on Fel Armor instead of the +20% healing effects they used to get, which was moved to Demon Armor.

I'm quite confident they will find a way to make spirit useful for paladins and shaman, though. I just have no clue how they plan to, and haven't seen anything about it anywhere.

I think everybody wants to see mp5 removed and give all/most classes 30% via an early talent or a self buff.
Aaaanyway.

Do you think think JoW's scaling with AP and SP will reduce your mana issues?
And if JoW scales, SoW may probably scale as well, so that running SoW for one duration (30s) might restore a significant amount of mana.
Like a semi-passive Evocation, sacrifice some damage to gain some mana. Numbers/tuning will tell whether it might be worth it.

Link, screenies with a copied level 70 paladin, no further info given on AP/SP.
WoW Forums -> Further analysis in the Judgment System

Retribution aura strikes for 127 for that lvl 70 pala. Not that bad to be honest. Could easily be more than 200 at lvl 80.

Wrong. You will WANT to judge every 20-25 sec - if there's a Retribution Paladin in the raid or not to trigger "Judgements of the Pure", which is a scaling 10% haste buff = HPS increase.

Overall I see us Holy Paladins being a lot more mana intensive as we are at the moment: HS on CD, super-fast-or-instant HL and the "Beacon of Light".

Regarding the last mentioned spell, I'm not quite sure if the mana cost are final, since they seem to be a bit inconsistant:

Rank 1 (lvl 60): 780 mana / 990 heal = 1:1.27
Rank 2 (lvl 65): 945 mana / 1120 heal = 1:1.19
Rank 3 (lvl 70): 1040 mana / 1280 heal = 1:1.23
Rank 4 (lvl 75): 1970 mana / 1725 heal = 1:0.86
Rank 5 (lvl 80): 2330 mana / 2000 heal = 1:0.86

On the other hand, the mana cost development for HL (etc.) is also not very consistent and decreasing with higher ranks.

Maybe dev's want protpalies to be tank/heal hybrid, not tank/dps one? (same for retries seems very viable, their healing in retri gear would be much much better than druid healing in dps gear due to AP-spd conversion and that 60% hot on crit).

I don't think we're going to see any spirit on plate, what they have done is make spirit desirable for all cloth users instead of just a fraction of them. That way cloth itemization isn't split between those that benefit from spirit and those who don't.

All mail/plate users have no use of spirit already so such a split doesn't exist, there is no reason to change talents and abilities since they can just itemize mp5 instead of spirit. I also don't think the paladin/shaman style of healing plays very well with the 5 second rule since you're pretty much constantly casting.

I think you're better off arguing for a tweak of the mp5 stat/item budget cost if you can show it is underpowered compared to spirit, not asking for spirit gear/talents.

If I had suggested a month ago removing healing as a stat from the game and just converting everything over to spellpower, how likely would you have thought that was?

Removing Mp5 and tweaking spirit to perform its role is the same kind of thing: it helps streamline gear so that a single piece of gear can be more useful for more characters. With the way things are now you have 2 healers that do not want spirit at all and 2 healers that want it a lot. So every time you design a spellcaster (remember, no more pure healer gear) ring, or neck, or trinket, or weapon you basically have to either do 2 of them (one with spirit, one without) for optimization, or you have to just leave the stat off of all of them. Neither option is optimal. More items with very specific stats leads to more loot that rots/gets sharded, and just excluding the stat altogether when priests and druids rely on it now isn't fair to them.

The solution is to make as many of the stats as you can good for as many of the classes as you can. There are lots of ways you could tweak pallys and shammys to use wisdom. What if Illumination caused to to regenerate an extra % of your mana from spirit after a crit instead of just refunding 60% of the the spell's cost? What if holy had a talent that gave you extra spirit based on your int, the way that prot and ret have talents that give them spell damage based on their stam/ap?

Blizz is making some very bold moves in WotLK itemization and mechanics. If they're gonna do a bunch of overhauls, might as well have this one on their radar too.

Yes, that's correct. Or at least that's how it's intended to be as far as I understand.

Though from how it is right now I think you'll deal damage twice upon judging. Your Judgement of Wisdom'll deal some damage and a separate Judgement of Blood will deal damage equal to what it'd normally deal. That's most likely a bug mind.

I'd disagree with you about 1-h sword spec and Guarded by the Light. Getting into ret to get deflection will save you some mana with Benediction and the shortened judgements will also improve your threat slightly (depending on rotation, we'll have to work those out now that we've got two new things to do...). I'm thinking about thisp. PoJ and imp judgement can always be put back into those prot talents or even into Seals of the Pure.

I think you pasted the wrong one, this links to the same build as Ellerain.

For what it's worth, WoWhead shows Hammer of the Righteous as having a one-handed weapon requirement Disappointing, but certainly understandable; a cleaving holy-damage weapon strike on a 6-second cooldown that could be used with a two-hander would be dramatically better than Crusader Strike. So, no two-handed HotR.

The exorcism idea is very nice. It's also easy to explain lore-wise. There's evil in everyone, so exorcism can always do a little damage, but it's only really powerfully against seriously evil things like demons and undead.

It appears as though the only real time cost will be re-casting your seal every 30 seconds. Judgement isn't on the GCD, so you can slip that in between heals without serious penalty.

Not to be a know-it-all smartass, but I was expecting something like this. It's just the logical conclusion of the spelldamage buff to healing gear.

I can see how they might convert paladins and shamans to use spirit for regen, so that they could share cloaks/rings/weapons better with druids/priests, but it doesn't seem quite as compelling a case as what they've already done with the cloth-wearing classes.

If the speculation about an improved strength > block value ratio and an itemization shift towards more typical warrior tanking gear, then it would seem that Divine Strength could end up being another "essential" talent, which makes the 8 point expenditure for Shield Specialization hurt even more. The addition of Shield of Righteousness makes that extra 30% block value a lot more important.

A few tweaks like moving Deflection to Tier 1 ret and condensing redoubt to 3 points (or unlinking it from Shield Specialization) would at least open up the points necessary for a protection paladin to be able to pick up a few more useful talents, but you'll still have to pass up a lot of useful stuff.

I deeply disagree with this. We are defined by our weaknesses as much as by our strengths. The defining weakness of the paladin class is that we don't have any baseline ranged option. You have to spec for it, pay a price if you want a ranged option. It forces a paladin to play differently than other classes, to learn to body-pull, to often have to fight multiple mobs at once rather than pulling singles to a safe area.