If this entire thing isn't some bizarre bug, than Judgment of Light/Wisdom/Justice should have their names changed to a new naming system (like say Mark of Light/Wisdom/Justice) and their respective seals could gain some entirely new effect when using Judgment (like party healing and mana back with Light or Wisdom, and spell interruption with Justice) because right now the system is very confusing.

Also I trees being bloated isn't a bad thing, it means you just have a lot of nice talents to pick from.

I can't see scaling all our spells off AP instead of spellpower, I really can't. Especially not when you figure that Ret is also getting spellpower buffs. Besides, there's no reason not to have a solid spelldamage weapon and fill in the rest of your gear with "generalized" tank drops that cater to warriors and DK's as well. We can get some spellpower on our token-based Tier gear if it seems necessary to the designers, although probably not a whole lot. The healing bonus that deep in the tree is bizarre to me, really- I guess it means we're expected to heal when we're not tanking? Obviously if it were anywhere higher in the tree Holy builds would be designed around it, but still. I can't say I care all that much though, a stam -> spellpower conversion was certainly on my wishlist.

I've noticed a lot of classes complaining about too many vital-looking talents to choose from, and I certainly agree that some talents should be lesser in number. I'd like to think that beta testing will address this and tighten up the trees a little bit, but I really only want about five more points. That won't get me every talent I want, but my current 49/12 doesn't either.

I would even suggest un-linking Seals and Judgements entirely. They're about 90% of the way there already.

Don't require an active Seal; use a GCD; J* adds the correct debuff and and does some damage. The Seal loses the unleashed component, and becomes just a buff that lasts for 30s.

Right now, the only link between the active Seal and the Judgment is the amount of damage that is done when you hit a J*. (At least that's what we think.) Blizz could just make a J* do X amount of damage, scale with AP and/or SP.

I am not sure if is clear to people, here is how Seals work:

After you judge of X, you don't have to re-cast the Seal, so the Seal stays up the full 30 seconds, a nice mana cost reduction.

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.

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

Well, block rating doesn't have to disappear. We might not find it on boss-drop bracers, but I still expect to see it on shields, and probably from librams as well. I haven't seen anything mentioning Defense at all yet- that would still be a source of block rating, although I have this odd feeling that Defense got removed entirely and I just missed the patch notes on it. I'm also not sure how committed they are to making things usable by multiple classes- I mean, a 1h tanking sword is only going to be good for 1/5 of the classes, that's just how it is. I can't see stats homogenizing to the point where I'm rolling on a sword along with, say, a prot warrior, a fury warrior, and a combat rogue.

I agree Deflection would be great in the first tier (and there's my 5 points), although I think the big thing about the prot warrior tree right now is that a lot of their new talents just aren't very good. Warriors are arguing about if Critical Block is worth taking at all, whereas all paladins seem to agree that our new prot talents are good- they may not address certain issues that we wanted, but I haven't seen anyone suggesting they're worth skipping.

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.

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.