Eir

I find Prot leveling a little overrated. Sure it's great for grinding, but do you really want to grind all the way from 70 to 80? Most likely you will be doing a majority of the quests anyway and finding yourself having to kill single mobs. Prot sucks pretty bad at killing single mobs. It takes forever and you will need to drink after every fight.

Prot AoE leveling was much better pre-Outlands and before the big quest exp buff.

In order for AoE grinding to be more effective than just normal questing, you need to have perfect mobs available. Lots of melee with weak fast attacks. Debuffs or special attacks will screw you. As will too many casters. I don't know enough about all the WotLK zones yet to know how many places have AoE-friendly mob spawns, but several zones in Outlands were pretty skimpy on choices. I remember trying desperately to find AoE opportunities in Zangermarsh and ending up just killing solo mobs slowly instead. And on WotLK release you'll have to fight for even individual mobs.

My reccomendation is to level as Ret and switch to Prot once you get to 80, but that's just me.

 

Palados

You could lvl in instances as a tank. Pros:

1. No need to fight for quest mobs
2. Raise your rep and then easily reach exalted with questing
3. Quite good exp/hour, beats questing in the first few most crowded days/weeks

 

Denogran

Wait, what? Last line first - paladin gear in Kara was nonexistent. My threat sucked, and was only somewhat offset by the fact that everything was undead. Compare that to Brutallus, a fight where I easily outthreat warrior tanks.

I'm not logged out in my standard tanking gear, but I sit around 1850 stamina raid buffed without an imp, and around 615 spell damage with oil. (Also if you check the stamina on [Myrmidon's Treads] and [Tide-stomper's Greaves], you'll notice they're identical ). That's about 550 more spell damage in my current get-up. So there's basically no way that I'll end up with less spell damage in WotLK tanking gear than in my current tanking gear, unless they don't plan to increase stamina on items at all. And even then, I'd still be pretty damn close.

As to leveling prot, personally I've never been too big of a fan of the AoE approach, I find quests to be far more satisfying than mindless grinding. That said, I imagine we'll be awesome 5-man tanks like usual, and I'll be leveling prot primarily for that reason.

 

Aeverius

Um, Bog Lords/Giants/etc? I didn't particularly grind while levelling, but I had to kill a lot of these guys to get my PLG, so I happen to remember it pretty well. There were also the ogres in the NW portion of the map, you could grind those as well if you felt like it. I always found it faster to do quests and just AoE whatever mobs they wanted me to kill. Casters die in Consecrate just fine too, you've just got to get them grouped up. The only real annoyance I remember was those damn Hunter-type mobs in BE and Netherstorm which snare you, run away, and shoot at you. They're a bitch to AoE, but everything else burns pretty nicely in my experience.

Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:

 

• frmorrison

Wowhead says for the spell effect: [Apply Aura]: Mod Debuff Resistance % to the three types, so I think it only includes debuffs.



Someone earlier asked about imp LoH, since it has a 16 minute cooldown it is unusable in Arenas (the cooldown must be shorter than 15 minutes).

 

Eir

Stacking disease debuffs make them not particularly well-suited for AoE. :P

In any case, you can level fine as Prot, but I think all the posts boasting of Prot's awesome AoE potential greatly overstate it's abilities when it comes to leveling. The AoE abilities shine later when you're max level and need to farm for drops or rep.

 

tachycardia

if that is true, then yeah it's not that great.

 

◊ Cathela

Like Denogram, my experience progression-wise is exactly the opposite. I've really had very little trouble keeping ahead of our dps in threat generation.

In my standard screwing-around high-threat/AoE/etc gear I have 584 unbuffed spelldamage (this is with "paladin gear" as you put it in all eight major armor slots, as well as the spelldamage shield off BT trash) and 1670 stamina with just Fort/Mark/Kings (no food or imp). If the WotLK talents were to go live and all that spelldamage were to vanish at the same time, TbtL would give me 501 spelldamage in that gear. A loss to be sure, but not a big one. The extra threat from HotR/SoR plus the better threat scaling on seals/judgements (from AP) would push me quite a bit higher (which will of course be needed with the removal of Salv).

Can't say at this point whether that's going to be enough or not, but it seems like they're in the right ballpark.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Amera

I've never really gotten the prot thing for leveling, either. It just requires mobs to be very situational. That being said, if I were going to do that, I'd do it as Holy. If you have T6 holy gear, it takes a ridiculous number of mobs to actually threaten you in any way, plus you have vastly more mana and regen than a prot paladin. And then you can burst casters with shocks very easily.

 

rozetta

AOE mob grinding was good for pre-Outlands, but it's really situational, especially with the dailies. For only a few of the dailies it's good (like the one to find the Sunfury plans). For most of the dailies, ret is better. For Sunwell Isle, it's so bad, I stopped running those quests. Ever tried grinding for Primal Mana as prot? Or, for that matter, almost any primal. The fact is, the prot efficiency is just not there for a good 90% of mobs post-58, and I can't imagine that will change in Northrend (and this is why I'm asking). I also wanted to hear is prot's PvP viability has been affected at all (aside from the WSG flag running or tanking Vandarr).

 

Wilken

From what I heard a lot of War/Druid/Pally tanking spells have been reworked as to allow for higher threat, and also DPS classes spells have been reworked to provide lower threat.

If the Dev's have done their homework, and I am sure at least one or two of them have, then until we start seeing the actual play of people doing dungeons with threatmeters you can read, or how gear is post lvl 77 you can not really say if it is enough spelldamage or not.

Based off of the comments that I and several prot pallies on my server have discussed, we might be getting Spellpower weapons to complement our stam->spellpower

Example you are starting the first 10 man in WoLTK and you have
2200 stamina raid buffed (quite a bit and just a guess)
thats 660 spellpower

Add on top of that a 350 spellpower mace(which in comparison to the Hyjal trash one I don't think is overestimating it)

you have 1010 spellpower

This is all just a guestimate, but with the addition of strength I would like to see how our tanking spells are affected by AP as well, and maybe they are, but no one has realesed any data on this, and maybe no one has significant strength gear at the moment to make conclusions on this, but it is a wait and see, and if Paladin's can't keep aggro vs warlock/Mage AOE similar to what guilds would do to hyjal trash groups then well the dev's will have to figure something out on the drawing board, and during beta Now is the time

Another problem is that I don't think the Omen/KTM mod authors have beta access, I am going to keep a eye out for the omen one on my server and maybe we can raise some awareness if they do not, as I think for their hard work with Omen a beta key is at least something they should have for their work as it is almost now the defacto Threat mod for most raids.

 

Prinsesa

Have you read the thread?

SoR, SoV and their Judgements now have AP coefficients in addition to their SP coefficients.
Hammer of the Righteous scales with weapon damage, which scales with AP
The STR to block value ratio has been changed from 20:1 to 2:1, while Shield of Righteousness scales directly with block value.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

chimtas

Wonder if they would change the hand of salvation for prot tanks to get the aggro dumped from the one he used it on to him. That would make a nice boost for them in threat.

 

bellator

Beta dps spreadsheet can be found here: jwhalley Profile, jwhalley Details - FileFront.com

More info about it in ret thread

 

Smurrf

Now there's an idea...that'd probably have to be a talent, however. Perhaps make BoK baseline, and put that in its place? Even 50% of the threat lost by the target converted into +threat for the caster would be a great tool. It would also help tremendously in 5 mans, where mana concerns may still be an issue.

 

• frmorrison

BoK is not becoming baseline, to limit the force multiplier that the blessing gives to a group.

Threat from Beta reports isn't as issue.

 

◊ Cathela

How would making BoK baseline change anything, aside from removing the requirement that you have to have a paladin with 11 points in Prot?

Raid content is tuned assuming the presence of BoK; while that's not a big deal for 25-mans, it's going to cause issues if they want to create a tightly-tuned 10-man progression. If it's too powerful to make it baseline, it's too powerful to have as a shallow talent, and in that case they're probably better off just removing it altogether.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Plaisted

"The seal does damage per second equal to 5% of Attack Power plus 10% of Spell Power. (Damage per swing scales with weapon speed, so dps is constant across weapon speeds.)"

So it is correct for all the new seals (single rank) that they have no base damage at all? IE a level 10 character with 200 AP using SoR would have a 10 DPS SoR?

 

Eir

I'm really surprised they limited HotR to 1-handed melee weapons only. If they opened it up to 2-handers, that would give a nice boost right there for Prot soloing.

 

GSH

Correct. They seem to have replaced the base constant term with the AP term. This is most obvious with Seal of Vengeance. If you have 0 SP, SoV does the same damage with 1 debuff as with a full stack of 5.

 

Zaroua

I'd like to elaborate on the topic of leveling as Protection when WotLK will come out. The idea is to gain as much experience as possible inside dungeons. This gives decent XP/hour, high quality loot compared to quest greens, a big head start on being geared up to start the lvl80 dungeons/heroics and so on.

Pros:
-A lot more rep for the dungeons that will give reputation
-If Championing is implemented before Wrath goes live, it will also greatly increase rep gains
-Good loot for all three specs, leading to an easier time to start off in heroics
-Better knowledge of instances and how pulls/bosses work, leading to easier heroic runs/less time wasted at 80
-A *LOT* more gold due to the level cap gold conversion, every XP gained in an instance will mean more gold once your character goes back to do all the skipped quests at 80


Cons:
-Usually slower XP/h, especially with pugs
-Potential frustration/waste of time of having to deal with bad players



What makes it potentially good is the fact that a lot of Prot Warrior/Paladins will be respecing to DPS oriented specs and won't spend as much time instancing. In turn, this will create a greater demand for tanks while the masses level up to 80 which will make it quite easy to join or form instancing groups.

If I do get in the beta, I'll probably try to level my own Paladin as Prot inside instances to see just how viable it is.

Dogma also claims that God has a sense of humor and at times presents Him as a joker of sorts, thus again lowering Him to human level. While I am certain God has a "sense of humor" since He gave it to us, I find it most difficult to believe He finds humor in sin since He will cast the unforgiven sinner into the lake of fire for eternity. Not very funny at all.

 

Wilken

Another Pro of doing instances is you meet people you havent before and learn who to avoid and who you can coerce to join you on another run.

Once you do a few runs and find people that are on leveling the same time as you, you can make a solid group to attack instances, and just like in raids once your group is well oiled to take on different types of pulls you can really speed up how fast you go through places.

Basically its the idea of a leveling party similar to how a lot of people level in FFXI, you get a core group of people usually 3-4 that fill the rolls needed (Tank, healer, CC) then you pug up the last spot or two and just run with it. You can usually swap up some nights if not everyone is there and you really do start grinding places faster.

I started doing this awhile ago for about 3 months straight with some friends of mine, basically we would hit up the Daily heroic 4 times a week every week. Sometimes we would do other dungeons like the Champion of the Naruu ones, but either way we would usually on average do 4-5 heroics a week. Take that with the WoLTK dungeons are designed to be done in an hour and you can see your group doing 4-8 instances a week maybe more if its during the holidays.

And while your LFG you can always do quests.

 

Russta

Thinking that leveling as Protection is just AoE grinding mobs to level with no purpose is really missing the point.

When I was leveling as Protection through TBC, I got on with my quests while constantly being flagged for the zone's respective instances. By the time I got to 70 I had every single quest in Shadowmoon Valley, Netherstorm and Blades Edge left to do and half of Nagrand remaining. My reputations were through the roof and the relationships I built with people last until this day. In fact, meeting one person in particular pretty much pushed me through to T6 content having re-rolled on a new server knowing nobody. It's not a method for everyone but it's certainly something to remain open minded about.

 

◊ Cathela

It would have been nice, but I can understand why they didn't want the "survivability" spec to have a cleaving armor-ignoring 2-hand strike on a short cooldown. Against 3 or fewer enemies it would be arguably better than Divine Storm -- no healing, but shorter cooldown.

Also, I never really found solo leveling as prot a problem in TBC. A two-hander and reckoning worked fine for most mobs. It was a bit inconsistent, but when Reckoning procced it would absolutely smash a mob. (It was a bit like to original SoC that way.) Not as fast as leveling Ret I'm sure, but it worked well enough that I never found it onerous.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

• Avitus

I have to say at the moment leveling as Ret seems to be very comfortable.

It's a completely different animal than what it was during TBC leveling, specifically due to how well SoL/SoW scale during solo play as well as due to Judgement of the Wise.

There's no fight -> drink -> (bandage) -> fight -> drink anymore, you can just stick up SoL and do some whirlwinds (divine storm) and get back to full health very rapidly.

As a matter of fact, it's quicker to go fight mobs and get mana back through judgments than sitting down and drinking, there's virtually no downtime at the moment.