Chardev.org is what I use, but it does tend to be a big buggy as well.

As for max hp, Im at 39.7k buffed currently with 1 upgrade left and JC/Enchanting. I'm guessing that 40-41k is the max we're going to see pre patch. (maintaining crit immunity of course)

How much stamina are we gaining next patch actually?

A couple of quick questions/comments regarding the OP:

-- Has any testing been done to establish that taunt works off of spell miss? To be best of my knowledge it was changed to melee hit in Patch 2.3 and I seen anything to indicate that it was reverted to spell hit in WotLK.
-- A number of melee DPS threads (I've seen it in Rogue/Retadin so far) indicate that melee hit cap is now 8%, not 9%. OP should probably be updated to reflect this.

Based on the current PTR notes on MMO-Champion:

Sacred Duty no longer reduces the attack speed penalty on Divine Shield and Divine Protection. Rank 2 now increases total stamina by 8%. (Up from 6%)

To my understanding the first rank of the ability still only does a 3% bonus, but I'm not able to find anything to confirm that at the moment.

The 2% boost should see roughly a 20-30 stamina gain for an average lvl 80 protection paladin tank (I apologize for not having more precise numbers, don't have time to do the research at the moment). A few more points as well for those with max mining.

There'll also be another 115 (Or 103 depending on your current bracer enchant) extra Stamina available from new enchants. And Mining, if you have it, is changing to 50 Stamina from it's current 500 health, which is also a small boost.

It basically comes down to ~2.3% extra Stamina due to the talent change. As well as another 12 Stamina extra if you're a miner, and 142 or 127 extra Stamina from new enchants. For me it comes down to an 194 increase in total Stamina, with Blessing of Kings, but before Power Word: Fortitude and Mark of the Wild, which is pretty nice. It'll be somewhere in between 170 to 195 for most Paladins I guess.

That's not that hard to see really. Stamina/(100+6+10+6)*100*.02 is the increase in stamina you'll be seeing, to know by how much your hp's will go up you will need to do current stamina/(100+6+10+6)*124*10 - current stamina/(100+6+10+6)*122*10

So if you have 3000 stamina when specced prot and with kings buffed then:

+ the new enchants and the mining change.

Rawr should be able to help here, though I have only edited existing items to reflect PTR changes, not created new ones (should be possible though, or just edit some piece of gear to match the new item exactly).

I recommend dialing the value of Threat down to zero on the options tab, so gear is only ranked based on what Rawr calls "Mitigation" and "Survival", the exact definition of which I am unsure of (be nice to know which stats each takes into account in its calculations and to what degree).

Last night I used Rawr + the in-game mod Tankpoints to evaluate a couple of gear upgrades (mostly how to spend 77 valor badges I've been saving up but not bothering to spend). With Tankpoints be sure to set the expected damage done by bosses you are concerned with so the tankpoints calculation reflects it.

One nice plus to tankpoints - the formulas used are clearly defined in the help.

(I ended up just buying the boots so far, though the platinum mesh looks like a decent upgrade until I get a [Cloak of the Shadowed Sun] drop).

It means exactly what it says: spells now benefit from increases in both spellpower and attack power, rather than only spellpower.

[e] and no, there's nothing roundabout going on. Our spells are directly improved by attack power.

Ok so if i'm getting this correctly, it's setup somewhat like this:

Spellpower total = spellpower (on gear) + spellpower (30% of stamina)
(And this number is displayed on the character sheet, under "spells")


damage ability = base damage + total spellpower (a) + attack power (b)
(Is that right?)
(a) Is spellpower divided if the ability is instant cast, like for casters?
(b) Is attack power plainly added to the damage output, or is it divided too?

As an example, I could have 1000 strength and 2000 stamina, which would give me 2000 AP and 600 spellpower:
What can i expect to be my total damage boost?
And do all abilities get the same boost from each stat? (i read that HotR scaled particularly with the weapon's dps, is that in addition to the AP/SP?)

thanks again for the anwser, smithist.

It's actually:

damage = base + SP_coefficient*SP + AP_coefficient*AP

As an example Holy Shield has a base damage of 211, an AP coefficient of 5.6% and an SP coefficient of 9%, so its damage would be: damage = 211 + 0.056*AP + 0.09*SP

For 2000 AP and 600 SP, that would be 211 + 0.056*2000 + 0.09*600 = 211 + 112 + 54 = 377. Of course all of that is before talent modifiers, etc.

EDIT:
Some abilities only scale from one stat, but most scale from SP and AP.

HotR == AP and Weapon DPS only
ShoR == BV only
Judgement of Vengeance/Righteousness == AP and SP
Seal of Vengeance/Righteousness == AP and SP
Hammer of Wrath == AP and SP
Exorcism == AP and SP
Holy Shield == AP and SP
etc.

I don't think it was ever established that it worked only off of melee hit or that it was changed from 17% to 9%. I think the change was simply to allow melee hit rating to also count towards the total. Maybe someone else remembers different though.

What makes you think it was completely changed to only melee hit?

There was actual testing done on the miss rate of the Warrior Taunt ability, which still stayed at 17%, from there it was reasonable to assume that the same applies as well to Righteous Defense.

No testing (that I know of) has been done on whether the ability is affected by both melee and spell hit, but I think it's reasonable to assume it's based on one of the two for two reasons: 1. Righteous Defense (And possibly other taunts) would be the only abilities in game affected by more than one type of hit rating, 2. If it was affected by more than one type of hit rating, it'd now automatically be double dipping as the hit ratings are now unified. The patch note that changed it is unclear though:

Righteous Defense: The chance for this ability to land successfully on its targets is now increased by hit rating.

Which can be read in multiple ways, if only that note had included either the word "additionally" or "instead of spell hit rating" that'd have been clear, but no luck there.

Do you know where I could find said testing?

edit -- nm, for those interested testing can be found here:

2.3: Miss rate vs Boss mobs?

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any testing post-2.3 to indicate whether Brutallus' vulnerability to taunts was a boss-specific feature or a change to the taunt mechanic in general.

I never have seen a RD resist while using the [Glyph of Righteous Defense] +5.79% melee hit. And I've done many bosses without a misery buff (and while at much lower gear hit rates). Unless double dipping is involved, I really can't see it still being spell hit with how long I've been tanking without a resist.

I'd assume RD went to melee hit making the glyph cover your entire resist rate, due to melee miss only being 8% now.
I can't think off the top of my head, but anyone know a really easy way to test a mass amount of boss taunts?
Sadly you can't just taunt a target dummy.

Keep in mind that your spells only have 17% base miss against bosses. Against mobs your miss is 4%/5%/6% against lvls +0/+1/+2 compared to your own, at least if it didn't changein WotLK (and doesn't seem to have change from what I've seen).

I have seen a RD resist recently. Several, in fact. Ironically, it was not on a level 80 boss. It was on Shazzrah while I and two of my friends were seeing how much of Molten Core we could three man. (Aside: three manning Molten Core is both fun and profitable; I highly recommend it.)

After he blinked and wiped agro, I got an RD resist on at least two separate occasions. I have the RD glyph and I was wearing about 90 hit rating, so between those and the Draenei Aura I should have had over +11% melee hit for the purposes of RD. So either Shazzrah has some funky mechanics that make taunts more likely to resist, or else RD is based on spell hit.

Well, one point here is that the conversion of hit rating is slightly different for spells and melee. 5.79% melee hit is roughly 7.24% spell hit, which means that with that plus the glyph, you'd only have a ~0.76% chance to see a resist on a boss that had 17% base resist.

This is all a very inexact science, since you need a boss to test it on, not all bosses are tauntable, and in the past not all bosses have had the same taunt resist rates (in TBC the bosses that required taunt rotations had their taunt resist rates set to 1%.)

If someone really wants to test this, I think the way to do it is to do what Left did and take a small group to MC and just spend a lot of time taunting one boss back and forth. (I guess Shazzrah would be the best bet?)

For some reason I was under the impression that was removed in WotLK. I need to see if I can find that or if I am just on crack.

It was indeed removed in WotLK -- the spell hit cap is at 17% (compared to 16% in TBC, with the last 1% being unavoidable.) You can now completely cap spell hit.

Of note is that equal amounts of hit rating convert to differing melee hit and spell hit percentages.

In case anyone hasn't seen this already, the Titanguard +Stam weapon enchant coming in 3.08 has been reduced to 50 stam from 75. Still a good, if uninteresting enchant. I'd really like to see a more interesting tanking oriented enchant - something like chance on hit to increase armor or something like that.

If anyone wants to figure out how much stam they will have come patch time, just use Rawr's tankadin module. I just added all the new stam I'm getting from the enchants and Mining change to a tabard. Then I divided my total stam by 1.06, then multiplied by 1.08 - you can use that and add your base health to get your new HP, or you can take the stam difference from before the calculation and after and just add it to the tabard.

With the improved Tempered Titansteel Helm that will be replacing my Arcane-Shielded Helm, the 2 enchants, the mining change, and the 2% buff I'm looking at about ~2500 increase in health unbuffed in Heroic/Naxx10 gear. Not too shabby.

Latest build got rid of Titanguard altogether

I don't know if I should post here or in the Sartharion thread but let's try here first.

I'm responsible for tanking all the blazes and whelps but I'm having a hard time doing it. There's 2 things going wrong at the moment and both are random, so I don't really know what to do.

First, there's the random blaze spawn. Sometimes none spawn, sometimes like 5-6 spawn at the same time all over the room. I don't know what to do when that happens, I can only grab the ones closest to me, taunt one that is far and toss an avenger shield on another one, then the others run loose and start killing healers.

I tried judging light on the drakes so its threat helps me pick up the blazes, but it doesn't always work. When a lot of blazes start spawning too, I need to judge the blazes and can't afford judging the drakes.

Second, I'm having a hard time catching the whelps when they spawn, it looks like if consecrate ticks the moment they spawn, I'm good. But if it takes just a second for it to tick, they start running around killing healers like mad. It feels that the area that they spawn is also larger than the consecrate radius. What's the best place to drop the consecrate?

Can you guys give me some advice?

Thanks in advance!

the whelp portal is annoying, you need to lay a consecrate then dodge a wave and their spawn area is larger than consecration's so you will miss a few. also sometimes they'll run off without getting hit by a single tick of cons. the easiest solution i've found: have a holy paladin put up Righteous Fury and dump a big heal on someone as soon as they pop. lay your consecration on that paladin. you'll spend a lot less time running around and holy paladins are a lot less likely to die than the other healers