Wouldn't that give Prot pallies access to another substantial source of SP for a few talent points? I would swap it with Art of War since that is a pretty weak talent for 3 points that far up the tree. They could link it to CS to show it as a Ret defined talent rather than a random pally talent.

Thats why i would remove touched by light, so they only get SP from AP.

If they move SoL up building holy would be beyond boring, you take beacon by default and maybe juggle imp devo against conviction... I'm really excited about its current placement and I really think it's intended to be there. And even look at the talent, it doesn't give strength to spellpower it gives AP to spellpower meaning it works with buffs like battleshout, BoM, and the enhance thing, in other words where all the AP of a holy paladin comes from. If it was str to spellpower it wouldn't be nearly as exciting all the buffs you get are mark and kings which wouldn't amount to much on a holy paladin.

I disagree. Not only would that require every spec to spec at least 8 down ret (stupid crap, they learned from old Arcane requiring every mage to spec 11 for Evocate) but it removes the idea behind Sheath. Both the AP > SP and the HoT on Crit are supposed to help ret pallys. The AP > SP is so that they get decent scaling on mainly SP abilities and halfway decent offhealing and the HoT on Crit is so that the large quanities of crit on holy pally tier gear is not a completely wasted stat when a ret pally is stuck offhealing. That is it. Exactly the reason Touched by the Light gives extra healing on crit. It's not to make Holy Pallys happy and it isn't there for a TPS boost for tanks.

SoL should be deeper in the ret tree. Much deeper.

I realise being able to take both BoL and SoL makes talent building boring and variety in an ideal world is a good thing. However as it stands, depending on end game encounter design, there are two possibilities:-

1) Either BoL or SoL will prove to be far more powerful than the other. The most powerful becomes the standard raid spec, the least powerful becomes a novelty, and thus we end up again with boring talent building.

2) For some encounters BoL is more powerful, for some SoL is more powerful. This will lead to having to constantly respec from encounter to encounter which is an annoyance.

I do agree that in an ideal world, this variety is good, but in an end game raiding world, it's much more handy to make all key abilites attainable in one spec, and leave variety as a choice between an extra crit or haste etc.

Weaker as a strict percentage, but stamina is cheaper itemization-wise than intellect (though not cheaper than AP, obviously).

Under current scaling I think it's pretty clear that Ret will rule the roost for judgements, but the ordering of Holy/Prot is unclear. The real unknown is prot paladin AP, and that's pretty much all guesswork at this point.

I disagree, basically for the same reasons as levk. Remember that SoL was patched recently to allow the HoT to be rolled by successive crit heals; that's not really the kind of functionality an off-healing Ret paladin needs (though the talent is obviously extremely good for a Ret paladin, and obviously designed to be part of their build).

I think the placement on T5 of Ret is very deliberately intended to allow holy paladins to pick it up, but only if they're willing to forgo BoL. So they have the choice to spec for MT-healing (SoL) or for group-healing (BoL).

I do agree that the AP->SP conversion does seem pretty damn powerful in the hands of a holy paladin, however (at least looking at level 70 numbers).

But it's not like Ret paladins have tons of essential utility in BC, either. The only truly Ret-unique utility in BC is the CS judgement refresh, and that's largely a matter of convenience. We've been without a Ret paladin since our previous GM left the game, and we really don't miss it: I'm specced into Imp. Crusader as prot, and one of our Holy paladins has Imp BoM and keeps JoW up manually on fights where it's important (he does this fine even as a MT healer on Brutallus).

But even though we're fine without a Ret paladin, we're still trialing a Ret app who's at our gear level -- because his damage is good. He keeps pace dps-wise with the rest of the melee; granted he's a bit lower than the average dps for the melee group, but not by more than 10-15% or so, and it's worth the extra dps and that bit of convenience he brings.

The fact is that Ret paladin raidworthiness right now is based on high personal dps and rather modest raid utility, and I think flyingtoastr is simply pointing out (correctly, IMO) that that's not going to change much in WotLK.

Considering Shockwave, Imp Disarm, and some of the other new stuff, I could see it being fun (though perhaps not terribly effective) to run around playing the disruption role.

Well conversely, if Hammer is AP-normalized at 2.4s, then for a single-target situation it's going to boost your melee+seal damage by 40%, and your melee+seal threat by more than that when the innate threat bonus is factored in. If you can hit three targets, it's boosting your melee+seal damage by 120%.

Not saying that a sheath-tanking build is necessarily a bad idea, but dropping Hammer is a non-trivial loss.

Eh, if they're going to do that, I'd rather they just make the AP->SP conversion baseline and be done with it. There's no point in balancing every single tree around a particular ability and then requiring talent points just to get it.

(EDIT: In other words, what flyingtoastr said, though I disagree about where SoL should be in the tree; I think it's fine where it is.)

There doesn't have to be a single optimum for every member of a specific class/spec. There are plenty of raids in which DS priests and CoH priests coexist happily, for example.

The current incarnation of BoL doesn't stack at all; you can only get healing from one BoL at a time. Furthermore, the cast time is pretty short compared to the duration. If we assume for the sake of argument that the current BoL is useful in raids, it's still pretty clear that there aren't a lot of situations where two BoL paladins is going to be much better than one BoL paladin. So if you've got two holy paladins, your optimum spec setup is likely to be one with BoL and one with Sheath (assuming for the sake of argument that Sheath is also a useful raid-healing talent).

There are also externalities involved, like what spec your other healers take.

A few weeks ago there was all this excitement about switching between two specs, I guess it's not in the beta or maybe they are saving it for level 80; I think it works out for the best as holy to have a sheath build on one tab and beacon/prot on the other. I hope that idea didn't get axed.

And Torq, spellpower numbers don't really paint the whole picture here with tank abilities getting AP coefficients and tank gear most likely getting much more AP.

So what it really boils down to is what the coefficients are for the AP and SP on tanking abilities, and then how they compare to the individual scaling of SP from both trees.

I'd imagine if they don't want Prot pallies dipping into Ret that deep, that almost all the tanking abilities will heavily favor SP in their coefficients, but I'm not sure how they'd pull that off without them becoming increasingly more powerful for a Ret pally, who can essentially double-dip AP and SP with equal ease.

[E] Though, they have made mention that they want it to be "easier" for a class that can tank to actually tank without eating a respec. It seem like they're starting to tweak some of the prot trees (or the tanking talents in feral) to provide greater mitigation, and only a slight edge on threat; with most of the threat generation built into the class, rather than the spec.

Well, high-end prot warrior gear doesn't have much strength either. Block value is by far the better threat stat for warriors under current mechanics (but not in WotLK; the "strength is good for tanking" thing is a change for them, too)

You could perhaps look at the str-to-sta ratios on known WotLK tanking plate (there's a green "set" at level 70 and a blue "set" at 75) and then use that to guesstimate what kind of strength a T6-equivalent level 70 WotLK prot paladin would have.

Well, I think them putting more strength on tanking items only makes the imbalance even worse. Considering SoL allows a pally to essentially double-dip (for relatively low cost) into the scaling factors of almost all of their abilities, putting more strength on prot pally gear is only going to encourage them to turn each point of it into 66% (76% with Divine Strength) more SP and essentially just as much threat.

It looks like HotR is going to have to have a hefty threat component or the ability to scale heavily with SP in order to outweigh the massive threat boost SoL would give.

For a prot paladin though it's not just Hammer versus Sheath. Even discounting divine strength there are 63 good talent points in prot (and that's skipping divine guardian and guarded by the light... if you have a holydin with imp. devo aura and kings you can free up another 4 points). To get Sheath would require that you give up 15 of those, so in addition to losing Hammer you would also lose, for example, blessing of kings, imp. devo aura, reckoning, spell warding, and 3 points from toughness.

I guess if you assume the holydin with BoK and imp. devo aura, you could give up Hammer, reckoning, and 1-h spec to get Sheath. The question then becomes whether the threat from Sheath is greater than the threat from those three talents (and remember that this build doesn't have room for divine strength).

Going for Sheath does make it easy to pick up the useful-to-prot talents parry, improved judgement (1 point), heart of the crusader (assuming no regular retadin in the raid), pursuit of justice, imp. ret aura, crusade, and, for one more point sacrificed in protection, sanctified retribution (again if no retadin in the raid).

And of course it would prevent any possibility of picking up seals of the pure in holy.

Basically a protadin can make strong use out of more than 100 talent points, and only has 71 to spend... Sheath is an interesting option, but given how strained the talent points are I would hardly call it a shoe in. The comparison has to take into account far more than simply the loss of Hammer.

Looking jow at scaling, wouldn't something like this spec actually guarantee highest procs in absolutely any gear set, holy, prot, or ret, by taking both ShoL and TbtL? (and it also has jotw for infinite aoe grinding power and mana regen... not as much as ret but still pretty decent considering all extra spellpower you get)

With regards to creating a build to maximise threat, there wasa blue post stateing that threat management in wrath would be less of an issue. I think the quote was along the lines of not irrelevant, but more easily manageable.

I peronally don't think there'll be the need to build specifically around threat, and other defensive talents will prove of more use.

Sure, but I don't think a judgement-bot is going to justify a raid spot. The inflated spellpower might compensate or overcome the loss of Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of the Templar, Reckoning, and 1-h spec from a threat perspective, but you've given up some major mitigation talents in Spell Warding, Ardent Defender, and Judgements of the Just. (I would change your ret talents as well... Conviction doesn't do too much since many of a protadins abilities either can't crit or don't crit for 200% and you can probably ditch 1 point of imp. judgement because various other cooldowns will make a 9-second cycle efficient. Those points can go into Pursuit of Justice, which partially offsets the loss of spell warding and is handy for movement-intensive encounters and grinding, Imp. ret aura, which gives the build a useful aura to put up since it doesn't have imp. devo, and filling out the last two points in Crusade, helping to offset the loss of 1-h spec.)

If you want to make a grinding build that's another story, but Reckoning is an absolute must for that.

A build that looks like this-- 0/47/24-- keeps all of the mitigation talents from prot, other than redoubt, imp shield spec, and 20% attack speed reduction.

The attack speed reduction can come from a feral, a warrior, or a DK. If you have a DPSing feral, that reduction is essentially free.

Redoubt isn't a great talent anyway, although it's possible that in a world of high block values and no crushing blows it'll look more attractive.

You do give up some amount of threat this way, but which build winds up being higher threat seems to me to depend almost entirely on how valuable HotR turns out to be. This build will certainly have higher AoE threat, since it will have bigger Consecrates and a bigger Ret Aura (although your Holy Shield will probably wind up hitting for a little bit less, since I'm guessing 15% from Shield of the Templar is more than you'll get out of Sheath's spell power).

It's also a better healing build than deeper prot, both because you have higher spell power and because your critical heals leave a HoT.

Again, if HotR turns out to be really good, then you won't want to miss it, but if it isn't a big enough carrot then Sheath starts looking attractive here. It's similar to the situation the Holies are in, where the top of their tree isn't currently good enough to keep them away from Sheath.

edit: if you're willing to give up the mediocre Spell Warding, Reckoning, and 1H spec then this build even gets you back Redoubt and 30% BV. My guess is that you net a threat loss this way, but Shield Specialization gets you some of that back off of bigger Shields of Righteousness.

Also, Blizzard, can we please call our shield slam move something that doesn't share initials with Seal of Righteousness? Thanks.

HotR is really good. Once Beacon gets changed, hopefully it will also be really good that you don't want to miss it.

Only abilities that should not be affected by Conviction are Consecration, Holy Shield, and Ret Aura... most of them crit for 200% too (at least judgements and ShoR do).

TbtL-JotW build is interesting from perspective that it only requires gear swap between roles, kind of jack of all trades, though it's possible to customise it as you like in both ret and prot parts.

Fight requires high jow/jol returns and extra dps instead of tanking? Slap on your ret set (there is no ap increases in bottom ret, only damage increases, so you get higher jow returns all the time), 1h and SHIELD, and use Shield of Righteousness as replacement for Crusader Strike (which should be pretty decent damage with all extra block value from str AND shield spec); judgements of the wise are there to not get oom while in non-tanking position.

Fight needs one more healer to be trivial? Slap on your holy set, and get both extra crit healing, hot on crit (also increased by increased crit healing value), and more spellpower (which probably offsets loss of Healing Light)... downside is no extra pushback protection besides Conc Aura, and that you'll still rely on JotW for most of your mana regen.

Tanking... you only sacrifice top talents really, and everything else can be reasonably adjusted as you like... you might not get every mitigation talent, but you certainly can get all stamina talents to boost TbtL.

I could see it in the event that the pally in question is only expected to ever be a tertiary OT. With that in mind, having a bit more in the way of utility (in the form of the Ret stuff) as well as an increase in threat from having both TbtL and SoL for those rare instances where he actually needs to tank might not be bad. Certainly it would help if there ever needs to be a 'Grudgeful Slam' target, where he has to be 2nd on the aggro list.

That said...I'm simply hoping that they really do give us the option for dual-speccing, so I can be full prot where I need it, full Ret where I don't.

I admit to being baffled as to how you're getting all those goodies in one spec, even if you sink 56 into prot. Are you not taking Deflection?

0/54/10 + 7

The only real trade offs are Reckoning vs. Ardent Defender vs. Seals of the Pure and Judgements of the Just vs. Pursuit of Justice.

Right, but that spec doesn't get all of the things he listed, in that it doesn't get Reckoning and AD and Seals of the Pure at the same time.

I mean, there are real tradeoffs for going deeper in ret, but with the current bloated state of the prot tree we don't get to have everything from our main tree at once, in any spec.

Hopefully a future build will cut a few of our 5-point talents down to 2 or 3 pointers and we get to reclaim a couple of points. There would still be plenty of individual variation in spec with AD, 1H Spec, or Combat Expertise as 3-point talents.

By the way, it is funny. Both paladins and druids, provided with the new shiny thunderclap-esque talent, are seriously considering not taking it. Judgement of the Just is not really a tradeoff, it's a must have, because in 10-men you can never guarantee that there is someone providing you with speed debuff. Same in 25 men, when you'll be tanking teh horseman. Spell warding, on the other hand is far from mandatory.

The real tradeoff begins when you start weight Seals of The Pure and Imp. Judgements versus AD, PoJ and Spell Warding versus Imp. Devo, Divine Guardian and Kings. Raw might or tricks and utility or excessive surviability? That will be defined by what you have in raid with ya and what you face.

And Reckoning? Are we talking 5-men here?