You're also missing out on Divine Strength, which is a non trivial amount of mitigation and threat boost, and losing out on 15% to holy shield, avenger shield, and shield of righteousness. Crusade is also not directly comparable to 1h spec, as it is limited to certain mob types. How much that matters depends on what we're fighting. Basically that spec seems like someone trying to hold on to tanking BC style.

It also seems as if holding on to this mode, pouring most of your hopes for threat into consecrate could leave you far more mana deprived than a paladin using HoF and SotR.

Better than 300-400 extra spellpower on Consecration and Ret Aura, and 50% extra damage from ret aura? I'm not so sure.

Number of 10 AND 25-man TBC raid instance bosses not affected by Crusade: 1. (Void Reaver) Well, actually it's two, but RoS is conveniently not tankable by a Paladin anyway. Ok, I don't know if that's also going to be the case in Wrath, but from what we know how Crusade affects basically everything.

Remember that Judgment of Wisdom scales with spellpower, and Sheath of Light means you get more mana back from it. That could make up for the loss of mana reduction talents.

I have hard time believing that it'll make it to live. As Ghostcrawler puts it, it is "so useful, that you could just about put a brick on the key you use for [it]". He was talking about shield block, but effortlessly building and rolling 3 SoV stacks is just the same.

Sheath is an attractive talent. I merely wanted to point out that it competes with more than merely Hammer, and protadins are already having to make choices within prot even going only 11 into ret.

Moral of the story: bloat. A protadin does not have enough talent points to get everything s/he would want, and must make some tricky choices.

Entropius is a demon, isn't he? You don't "tank" M'uru.

Straight from the Paladin patch notes:

Hammer of the Righteous, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm all proccing Seal effects is working as intended.

What about Maiden of Virtue, Netherspite, a few of the random mobs in Opera, Curator, Doomwalker, The Lurker Below, Tidewalker, Al'ar, Void Reaver, RoS and Kalecgos?

In every one of those cases (I might have even missed a few) Crusade is flat out worse than 1-handed weapon spec.

Why all the Sheath hate? Speccing into something besides the traditional BC Holy/Prot or Prot/Ret builds isn't exploitation, it's simply a different choice. The fact that it might be better than the traditional cookie-cutter indicates at least one of two things:

1. The developers are fully aware of all the ramifications and intend to create new and different builds, and/or
2. The 51-point talents suck.

The careful placement of Sheath in Tier 5 leads me to believe in number 1, since you can't have both Sheath and 51 in Holy or Prot. And much of the theorycraft here and *shudder* on the official boards also alludes to number 2. So where does the problem really lie, and how to fix it? If you just dump Sheath or move it down to Tier 8 or so, does that make Holy or Prot any better off? Yeah, it restores the traditional cookie-cutters by dint of making anything else stupid, but does that help the class as a whole?

Fix up BoL and HotR first so that they're suitably appealing, then make an informed judgement on alternate builds.

I think people are seriously underestimating what a tanking build will lose by stretching for Sheath.

Dropping Redoubt + Shield Spec costs you, at a minimum, a 30% bonus to your Shield of Righteousness threat. At, say 300 pre-ShieldSpec block value (easily achievable with level 70 raid gear), Shield Spec is accounting for an extra 57 tps even without Shield of the Templar, and even if we assume there is no extra threat multiplier. (And actually, I agree that this is probably the most efficient place to trim points out of Prot if you want to go for Sheath.)

Dropping HotR costs you, at a minimum, the innate damage of your weapon. A 100-dps 2.4-speed weapon will do 40 dps with hammer, or 76 tps before any damage multiplier like one-hand spec, and even if we assume no extra threat multiplier. This is ignoring the actual str->threat scaling of HotR, and ignoring any seal damage that comes with it.

Right off the bat, just by dropping Redoubt/ShieldSpec and HotR, you're starting off 133tps in the hole, even under the most favorable assumptions about the threat properties of ShR and HotR. How much faster are you expecting SoL to scale your threat? Because it's going to have to scale a lot faster to come out on top.


EDIT: And honestly, it beats the hell out of me why people are so down on HotR. If a cleaving, holy-damage weapon strike that generates bonus threat and triggers seals isn't good enough to be a 51-point talent, what is?

It seems like sheath-o-mania is just a trend at the moment. Prot tree was always demanding, if one likes to perform efficiently, but with this new scaling conversion everywhere it's just natural for people to want to try something new. HoTR is perfect for 51-pointer, even without proccing seals; with it it's just insane. Furthermore, no sane tank is going to give up 2/2 Judgement of the Just, and Shield of The Templar.

In this light, I'd suggest to limit sheath-builds to main holy tree, untill new Bacon of Light is revealed, at least.

I thought I'd just drop in my 2 cents about prot specs. To me, there seem to be a few, but one of the most solid ones looks to be:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Paladin -> Talent Calculator

It took me a while to put this spec together, mostly due to frustration about the bloat. Here are some notes:

- I've personally never seen Spell Warding as a talent useful enough to get on it's own. I pretty much never pick it up in any of my prot builds. In fact it's puzzled me to see it in a lot of recently posted builds.

- One Handed Weapon Spec is a talent I used to have points for, but with the suspected lessening on need for Consecrate Spam, I can't honestly justify the point expenditure anymore. It seems some of the new talents provide a better bang-for-the-buck in terms of threat generation. Anecdotally, I run with some pretty well geared DPS and I found that these points in the past were the difference between being able to hold aggro or not. But again, this was mostly picked up for it's boost to Consecrate. One Handed Weapon Spec needs improvement to be worth it. It's simply not worth 5 points in tier 6.

- Guarded by the Light is really bad. A tier 9 talent to marginally reduce the mana cost of 3 niche spells was a no-brainer to exclude from any and every build. Nice to see we're already getting useless new talents.

- HotR just seems too good to miss. It has a lot of synergy with our other talents now that we know for definite that it will proc seals on targets. This is the reason I also saved points to pick up Seals of the Pure.

- It goes without saying that Blessing of Sanctuary was a point I spend _only_ to get Holy Shield. This is plain wrong.

- It also goes without saying that Improved Holy Shield is something I really don't feel like we should have to spend points on.

- If DKs and Warriors can get Parry from a Tier 1 talent, why can't we? It would vastly change the way I spec if I didn't have to spend 5 additional points to get it.

- Redoubt is something I can honestly say I'd like to have the choice of leaving out. I hate the fact that it's linked with Shield Spec.

- The Reckoning talent is simply dead in the position it's in. Tanks don't want to take it due to the fact that it scales inversely with their gear and can also cause problems if you're not stacking enough expertise to prevent boss parries. It's still not a whole lot of threat. I'm still going to stand out and say this needs to be moved to an early tier talent so ret spec can pick it up. If not they might as well just get rid of it completely.


Again, I reiterate that creating this spec was not a fun experience. Having to choose between a variety of ways to gimp myself is not something I really enjoy doing. Besides, didn't Blizzard promise to make prot specs slightly more viable for soloing and PvP? I don't see a single hint of that change to the prot Paladin's spec choices to be frank.