You need to separate out Bosses from Trash. Mixing them up will give incorrect results since they have different miss/dodge/parry rates.

Take Patchwerk for example:

ShR: 2.4% Miss
HotR: 0% Miss, 2.4% Dodge, 9.5% Deflects
Melee: 0% Miss, 1.6% Dodge, 12.6% Parry
Judgement: 0% Miss

Considering I am neither hit capped nor even expertise soft capped, those results are pretty close to what is expected. ShR doesn't have a much higher miss rate. As a matter of fact, having 0% on the others means that I was just lucky (not hit capped after all). In a larger sample size, I would see misses for those.

The important thing here to note is that ShR only misses. It isn't parried or dodged. Dodge and miss will be close in my parse due to my hit and expertise levels.

EDIT: The other issue is that these are small sample sizes...only like 30ish ShR hits for example. The numbers could vary a lot in either direction. You really need to collect a lot of information from one source (make sure it is all on level 83 bosses, so trash rates won't dilute your result). You have to make sure you have an idea of the %hit and %expertise for more accurate pictures.

Since seal damage is pure holy damage the SoV dots threat is scaled with 172%. Isn't that really really good since you HotR puts upp your seal on more than 1 target. At 5 stacks it produces alot more tps than lets say consecration.
If so, shouldn't 15% extra damage give a great threatboost aswell and when the patch hits, judgement of light won't give threat anymore which means I need all the threat I can get.

Am I wrong?

I would say yes, you are wrong. As to threat, I don't use light or the 2nd shield and I produce more threat than any other tank in our guild, so threat shouldn't really be a problem. But seal and judgement damage are still a small part of your overall threat. That said, if you do find you need the small threat boost this talent will give, you can probably easily find 5 points to put over there. Personally, I find Pursuit of Justice and Benediction more useful myself.

Why ? My pala in ilevel 213 gear do 5k->13k tps sustained ( considering different raid composition etc ), and only dps warrior and untalented threat reduction mage/lock can get up with nasty tps on the 5k/6k mark, so why you think the JOL change it's affecting us so bad ? ( btw allot of my time tanking is spent in JOW )

It's only now mage and other dps need to drop some DPS for some more threat reduction.

I'm more concerned of our problem in TPS when we get more avoidance gear, because now in ilevel 213 gear we get on a boss level the right 45->50% probability to be hit but 100% to block ( with holy shield ) so we generate like 30% of our TPS on holy shield, the problem is we're gonna loose TPS from now on because HS become less reliable.

The Kings Dilemma Revisited

While we're on the subject of "worth the points" talents, I thought I'd bring this up since it's something I've been thinking about lately. Back just prior to 3.0 when the WotLK trees were released, the community as a whole pretty much agreed that ret paladins were the only paladins that it made sense for them to pick up Kings, given the new 5-point investment as opposed to the previous 1-pointer it used to be. Now that I have some time under my belt at 80, I can personally see my own viewpoint has completely changed, specifically in regards to prot builds.

When I first hit 80, I respecced out of my ret leveling build into an instance-grinding prot build. Since I was planning on tons of heroics, I picked up Kings (largely at the expense of Benediction and SotP) knowing it's a good buff for those zones. Fast forward a week or so into 10-man content and I find I'm often the only paladin in the raid, and if there is another pally it's usually one of our holy guys. Knowing that I didn't bother changing my spec, since Kings is still useful. Now that I've been doing 25-man stuff for a few weeks though, I don't know that I'm going to drop it. At best I will either fill out Benediction or Seals of the Pure, with 1 point to spare. I can't see grabbing Imp. BoM since I am almost always guaranteed to be in a raid with a DPS warrior. Conviction is fun, but on paper it's a smaller threat increase than SotP so the points would logically go that direction anyway. Threat is a complete non-issue right now -- yes, I frequently cheat with ShoR, but even playing fairly it rarely takes more than 1 HoSalv cast to solidify my spot at #1.

I guess my question is this: am I missing something? Prior to WotLK we were pretty much convinced that no prot paladin in his right might would ever spend 5 points on Kings, but experience at level 80 tells me different. Is there any reason to give up the flexibility of an extra blessing for a relatively small boost to damage (threat) or mana reduction on our instant casts?

My current spec, for reference, feel free to rip it apart: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

In my opinion that should be the standard tank spec. You don't need the minuscule threat buffs from other talents, and you *will* find yourself casting kings rather often even in a 25-man raid. Standard would be 2-3 pallies. With 2 pallies you'll definitely cast kings, and even with 3 you'll be using kings on classes that need both wisdom and might from the holy and ret pally, while tanks will get sanc from you, kings from the ret and might from the holy, who should actually have it improved if he goes 51/0/20 which he should if you raid with a ret pally (or any 3rd pally with kings) regularly.

I think you've basically got it right. The argument against Kings isn't really "you need those points elsewhere" because as you've pointed out it's not hard to dig up five points to put into Kings without hurting your tanking utility at all.

The argument against Kings is that the people who need Kings most are the tanks, who are also the people who need/want Sanct. On truly difficult progression content (i.e., T8+) if you have a prot paladin you're going to want to Sanct on the tanks (that's one of the significant perks of having a prot paladin in the raid) and you're also going to want Kings on the tanks. Therefore it's not terribly useful for a prot paladin to pick up Kings because one of your other paladins is going to have to bring it anyway for the tanks, and as long as that person has Kings, he might as well put it on everyone and let you spend five points somewhere else.

Basically:

• A ret paladin who picks up Kings loses pretty much nothing that's useful in PvE.
• A holy paladin who picks up Kings loses 3% spellcrit (Sanctified Seals).
• A prot paladin who picks up Kings loses probably just about nothing, but if he's the only prot paladin in the raid then you lose the ability to have Kings+Sanct on tanks, which hurts in any fight where tank survival is a concern.

Hence, I'd set the rules like this:

1. If you have a Ret paladin, he picks up Kings.
2. If you have no Ret paladin, but you have two or more Prot paladins, one of them picks up Kings. (Unless you want two Divine Guardians in the raid, or something specific like that.)
3. If you have no Ret paladin, and only one Prot paladin, then a Holy paladin picks up Kings (assuming you have one) because an extra 3% crit for one Holy Paladin is less important than getting Kings+Sanct on all of your tanks.

Needless to say, this just reinforces the point that the current placement of Kings is dumb. My new pet fix for this is to make Kings a one-point talent in the third tier of Ret (because pretty much everyone wants to go 10+ in Ret these days) and make Seal of Command baseline.

Outside of Sanctuary there was also another factor that made most of us think that Kings was a bad idea to pick up at level 70. Paladin threat was already balanced around having Shield of Righteousness in 3.0, meaning our threat was (until WotLK's release) relatively weak compared to the other tanks. That created a bias at the time towards making sure all talents you took would increase your threat and survivability.

As people got to level 75 however, it became clear that Shield of Righteousness made a huge change to the amount of threat you generated, and if you were spending your time tanking multiple instances every day while levelling, you quickly lost the idea that speccing for maximized threat is what you needed to do since you'd consistently see yourself much higher on threat than any DPS would get. I personally respecced to pick up Kings as soon as I hit level 80 after that.

---

Regardless the current placement of Blessing of Kings is a bit odd, but as I've said previously in other threads I think that this is also partly because there are simply too many useful Blessings compared to what you'd normally run (Only Blessing of Might having an alternative option available through Battle Shout), which then further gets confusing by the talents which improve them.

Has anyone here actually found a need to gear for threat? Lately I've just been throwing on whatever TankPoints says has the best mitigation/TTL score without even thinking about keeping something for a threat set, but then again I've barely set foot in any 10-man raids either.

Keep in mind that DPS classes that use kings+might+wisdom will want you to put kings on them, as they will want improved might from the ret and improved wisdom from the holy. If you're running 2 paladins only it only gets worse, as if the 2nd is holy he either won't have kings at all or will want to wisdom casters and have you buff them with kings, and if the 2nd is ret he will want to use his improved might and have you buff kings on DPS.

Kings isn't just a tank blessing, it's a useful the the entire raid, and non-tanks will not want your sanc and will not want your non-improved might/wisdom if they have a choice.

I only find need for threat on fights that involve DPS getting a boost. Such as Malygos and Loatheb

Just one quick nitpick - the DPS boost on Loatheb also gives the attacker zero threat for the duration, so your personal threat should be through the roof compared to everyone else. We found this out the hard way when DPS waited too long to kill a spore and the tank got the buff... You can probably do the math on how well that went over.

In regards to Improved Blessing of Might, I've personally found that keeping DPS warriors in charge of this makes life much easier. Yes, the duration of Battle Shout is significantly shorter than BoM, but they should be used to shouting every 2-3 mins anyway so it's no big deal. It's technically a DPS loss, but we're talking about 2-3 GCDs in a typical boss fight so it's nothing to sweat over. This frees your pallys up to diversify the buffs a bit and most likely results in a net gain for the raid as a whole, even if it means you giving everyone sanc for the 3% damage reduction.

Then again, if you typically run with 4+ pallies, you may as well have one buff imp. might, so YMMV.

I pick up kings to be flexible. Most rets I know take kings, so if there's one present, they can greater kings me and might themself (which lasts 30 mins with a glyph anyways.) Then I greater sanc us, and kings the ret pal. I take kings for 5/10 mans where there may not always be multiple paladins. In the case of 2 paladins where the other is holy or ret, you want them casting talented might/wisdom on people, so having kings allows me to cover for that.

It also doesn't hurt that those 5 points aren't a huge deal anywhere else at the moment.

Not that I'm advocating not speccing fully into Kings, but is 3% less incoming raid damage really that easy to toss aside for progression encounters? Sanctuary is an awfully powerful buff, (depending on the encounter) with no alternatives, to sacrifice for a talented might when a Battle Shout or untalented might could do. We've always had 3-4 paladins in raid through Wrath so it hasn't come down to a decision, but I could see potentially forcing a holy paladin into kings and out of his 3% crit for it, maybe even only with two paladins.

My prot build easily contains Heart of the Crusader, so no one is giving up 3% raid DPS (nor is 3% raid-wide crit equivalent to 3% more raid DPS, but that's another topic).

He's actually arguing for Sanctuary being 3% less damage taken by the raid, not less damage done by the raid.

I don't think Sanctuary is really noticeable in that regard though, I view it as a low priority in almost all cases. 3% less damage taken is good for a tank, but it's pigeon feed for raid damage taken, unless the raid damage taken is unusually high. I'd suggest checking out how high the actual damage bursts your raid takes are, how much 3% would save from that, and if your people topping off are in fact already overhealing. You'll find that 3% less damage taken by the entire raid isn't as good as it sounds.

Actually, I was speaking of losing the Sanctuary buff raid-wide. 3% less incoming raid damage. Not the 3% critical damage from Heart of the Crusader or the 3% personal crit from Sanctified seals.

I guess with most Wrath encounters involving pretty minimal raid AoE damage, it's not as much of an issue. I guess I had the SWP type encounter in mind where there's significant amounts of raid damage going out all the time.

As far as the Kings vs. no Kings argument, for pure min/maxing it's best not to take Kings. If you skip Kings, you can do a 12/54/5 spec which gives you another good mitigation cooldown in Imp LoH. You lose some threat from not having Imp Judgments and only 3/5 1H spec, but threat is so high it really doesn't matter.

Actually you'd probably be better off doing this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This close to completely skips on threat talents, but does give Improved Lay on Hands, Blessing of Kings, and a single point in Improved Judgement so you can still use the 969 rotation. I have my doubts it's really worth it though, while Improved Lay on Hands is a pretty good survival button, it's relatively weak for the cost, and at least currently I can't imagine needing a second such button next to Divine Protection. It also skips Improved Hammer of Justice, which is really one of those talents which I can't find any use for in a PvE spec: If interrupts are that important, your Hammer of Justice will not really matter regardless of whether you have a 60 second or 30 second cooldown, that's still far too long in between interrupts.

It's worth considering for later content if it turns out to be needed, though I personally have the feeling DPS threat will eventually catch up on tanks again.

Just did some extensive calculating and testing -mostley the second ring being either defense heavy or armor heavy- and came up with chardev.org - a World of Warcraft Character Planner - x as my perfect tank gear profile (almost there!).

Just throwing this on here in case someone has a better alternative.

ps: I know the patchwerk shield would probably be a better option but Im too tired to consider changing a truckload of gems around that shield right now
edit: this assumes alch/enchanting as professions, having jewelcrafting might tip the scale more to the defense rating ring, since you can give up certain color gems (like the chest) for pure sta and still keep your socket bonus.

Dunno but TPS from DPS in my guild already catch up and they are starting to use Vanish/Invisibility/Shatter, and in some event we're threat capped like sartharion 10 man 3 drake on first drake when you need to kill it first of the second hatch.
Were are you people in content to talk to be so free on TPS ;-) ? Or really you got so bad DPS person?

I'm enjoying the JoL and double shield slam bug so much I'm getting sloppy in my rotation but I must admit that the whole 'threat is no issue' story changed a lot the last 2 weeks in my guild as well. I still have a more than decent lead on them, but dps tps increases much quicker with item upgrades than ours.

I wouldnt ask too much about progression though gouldukat, as WoTLK is extremely easy (even sarth+3 is not much imo) and this is EJ.