I'm under the impression that the complaints against BoSanc have little to do with the 3% dmg reduction--it's that warriors and dks feel that their threat is inadequate w/o the energy return.

I'm also under the impression that BoSanc (in its current incarnation) was designed to help with the issue of becoming more mana starved as gear improved. I think this is working perfectly, for us. No, it doesn't work in a pack of casters that mana burn--if it did, mana would cease to be part of the game for us.

Concerns were raised in the 3.0 PTR that the rage return was too high, and it appears that those concerns were valid. I suspect that we're not looking at a major mechanic change here; Blizzard will likely just adjust down the rage & runic power returns on BoSanc and adjust warrior/dk threat generation if they feel it's necessary.

I believe that Death Knights feel they are ineffective without it, if I understand the issue correctly. Paladins/warriors/druids don't necessarily feel it's a mandatory buff for bosses.

Still, I don't really see a big problem with it, but maybe that's because I don't tank as a DK?

Forgive me, it was late when I did both :P But as you can see, we both messed up originally.

Regarding BoS: Any change that removes the 3% damage mitigation essentially makes us the worst mitigated tank. We're already low as it is, and the change was put in place to put us more "in line" with the other two tanks (since DK's have stupid amounts of magic mitigation... damn you kahn!)

I don't understand this statement. You're indicating that BoS is to provide us with 3% mitigation, and that we'd thus be ~3% mitigation under other tanks without this buff.

But it's a buff that gets put on the other tanks as well. Which, by your logic, would mean other tanks would still win.

Can someone explain my why in gods name you would take reckoning? If I run the pro's against the con's then it just doesn't add up.

Pro:
- Helps with soloing lvl 60/70 raid content because you get more light/wisdom procs.
- A very small aggro increase.

Contra:
- It's hardly ever up.
- Aggro isn't a problem, and if it was, reckoning wouldn't help.
- It doubles the chances you'll get parried and get a parry haste swing from the boss.

So why would you recommend this talent to anyone?

Especially when you consider that you could be spending those points on kings or Divine Guardian - Spell - World of Warcraft instead

Reckoning adds to your DPS. Especially in multi-mob situations.

Most of our threat comes from holy damage. So a talent that increases physical damage has very little impact on TPS.

Some tanks take it thinking it increases the proc rate of seals, or otherwise benefits holy damage. This is not true.

So invest points in Reckoning in situations where DPS is more important than TPS or Mitigation. Which is pretty much never for an endgame raiding paladin. (At least as endgame stands right now.)

While Reckoning is nice for leveling and farming, it is a non-talent for raiding tanks. And that's okay, because I love speccing into it whenever I level or farm.

Not at all; good to have you. The only thing you seem to be doing wrong is quote-splitting (see the infraction on your second post) but that's not really impolite per se, just a nuance of posting etiquette here.

I'm planning to add some links to Maintankadin, Tankspot, and whatever else once I get the guide more or less finished. I haven't done this yet in order to keep this guide "original" (i.e., if I see another guide and say "Wow, this is exactly the way to do it!" then either I have to write mine a different way that I now consider substandard, or write mine as a carbon copy of the "awesome guide.")

I'm not going to quote you (see above ) but my thoughts on your comments (and believe me I'm happy if I can get anyone to agree with 80% of what I say, much less 90%):

SoB: Like I said, overgeared content. I don't think you're really disagreeing here much. Let's just split the difference and agree that SoB is terrible for any serious tanking, and you can use whatever you want when you're running your friends' alts through normal-mode UK.

Meta gems: Yeah, the end of that paragraph was all kinds of messed up; thanks for catching that. But my math shows a 2% armor increase to be a 1% (relative) reduction in damage taken if you start from 50% armor damage reduction, and the value of a fixed-percent increase in total armor increases as your armor increases. There's a table in the OP in the section on the armor stat, and I can share the math if you're not convinced.

Talents:

Added your comments on DG to the guide with attribution and modified the Reckoning entry to account for the "You need 25 points to pass this sign" factor (I've always gone with Imp HoJ for those, so that was kind of a blind spot for me.)

Benediction: I can agree that it's not a necessity, and it's not even high on the list of nice-to-have's, but I'd still call it better than "useless". For a fulltime MT it's a bad idea, granted, but if you find yourself dps'ing on a regular basis it's quite worthwhile. (Haven't read your work yet, as per the above concern about keeping mine original, but I will once I get this guide finished. If you've rebutted my argument there already, then you'll have to let me be wrong until then. )

PoJ: (Out of order, but anyway) Strongly disagree here. Considering how much moving around and mob repositioning tanks are called on to do, having your own 15% speed boost is invaluable. I could name a whole list of TBC encounters where I was glad to have PoJ. I can see Tuskarr as a viable substitute, but it's only half the value at a stamina cost (admittedly small).

It also helps that I don't see anything else particularly compelling to do with the points. I'd rather have PoJ than SotP, for example. Even if you completely discount any value for Benediction (or anything else in T1-2 of Ret beyond the mandatory 6) and call PoJ a 6-point talent, I'd consider it more raid-critical than the TPS/DPS boost of SotP.

Thanks for the math on SotP vs Conviction. I'd still take Conviction for anyone who heals with any frequency, and I stand by my claim that Conviction is still more fun .

Builds: Reading your comments, I think there's something of a groupthink effect going on here on both sides of the fence. You guys have come to one conclusion and we've come to another, but I don't think either of us really is in a position to speak for the entire prot paladin community. (If you have data extending beyond your forum's posters, please do share; I'd be interested.) So I've watered down the general build paragraph to something more generic.

Kings: Including every argument on BoK in the OP is something I might do at some point, but it's not a trivial project and it's not going to happen soon. In any event I think any particular person faced with the kings-or-no-kings decision is best off examining their own raid or group and the paladins within it and coming to the right answer for their particular circumstance. In my case, I'm frequently the only prot paladin and we always have at least one ret paladin, frequently two, so it's a no-brainer. If your typical raid has two Prot paladins and no Ret, that's also simple. I don't think we'd disagree on those.

Probably the only case where you and I would disagree is the 1Prot/0Ret/1+Holy situation. I'd argue that getting Sanct and Kings on all the tanks is more important than a 3% crit boost for one Holy paladin, and so in that case one of the Holies should bite the bullet. I don't know if you disagree with that, but I'm surprised at the number of people who insist that a Prot paladin should always take Kings over a Holy, and I really don't understand the reasoning behind that.

(I'm assuming, by the way, that all of this discussion is aimed at content that's actually difficult for your current gear level. Obviously if you're in full T7-25 gear, you've got a lot of freedom to do suboptimal things without endangering the raid.)

As for heroics, I'd agree that it can be useful, and if it's helpful for the point you're at, take it. Personally, I've never found that I wanted it, and given that your guild and mine seem to be roughly comparable in terms of progression (in TBC at least) I'm kind of surprised you find it that important.

Thank you again for the comments and feedback! I'll try to return the favor soon.

It is worth noting I'm somewhat blinkered and highly opinionated. As a heavy poster over on Maintankadin, people are used to my bias & style (and my FAQs spell it out): I'm a progression oriented MT

Thus: I heavily discount (or ignore entirely) anything to do with OT/DPS duty of prot-healing. Especially prot-healing - with the changes to tank-DPS I think we're a lot better off just doing DPS rather than pathetic heals. JoL heals for more than I ever would anyway.

I'll let you be wrong on Benediction But once you're not worried about plagiarism, go read the advanced FAQ over on MT or my highly balanced and non-confrontational Maintankadin :: Benediction Sucks thread. It actually gives the math on mana-returns on benediction.

It's possible I discount PoJ because I have an Unholy DK in my guild. I'm using stam on boots, 0/2 PoJ, and have never missed the run speed (other than CoT:CoS), and I've cleared everything. The only time I've missed it in-raid is (believe it or not) the Thaddius jump. I now wear my rocket skates just to avoid looking like a tard by failing at the jump (yet again).

I'd agree that you last 7 points after 0/58/6 are largely meaningless. There's nothing compelling to get. Before all the seal/judge nerfs, SotP was compelling. Now? Technically better than the alternatives, but still a crap talent. "Conviction = fun" is the best counter argument to "SotP is better". That or "I off-heal a lot for my guild". Both have come up on MT, but you are trading a % or two of TPS in exchange for fun/utility.

Kings: Frequently Argued Question is Frequently Argued. Real answer is "make sure it's present in your raid". Agree that Kings is more important than one raider having 5 talent points. We have a Holy priest who is 51/5/15 for exactly this reason, even though we have two ret pallies AND I'm 5/60/6. Overkill. Prot+Holy I'd ask Holy to pick up kings for 25-man. 10-man, would depend on what I was doing. I tend to find that as a pally I need either Kings or Sanc, not both - I want both, but can cope without. Warrior and DK tanks do need both, especially for things like Sarth+3[10]. Threat loss for drake tank not having BoSanc is substantial and important. Kings is also pretty much mandatory for Sarth-tank, and drake tank is going to cry without it.

For heroics I never want Kings personally, always BoSanc. But I have a lot of healers & DPS who prefer Kings to Might/Wis now, because they're past the point where raw stats scale better than flat bonuses. Of course, they're just being pedantic, it isn't like
heroic content is hard in full 25-man gear.

Builds: I'll try and dig up a cite later. The "70-80% of prot paladins spec 5/60/6" quote came from someone who looked it up on one of those Armoury parsing progression sites, not a /poll of Maintankadin.

Oh, and I misunderstood some of your point re the Armour meta. First post of this thread is correct (after wording change). I had it my head that you were tanking about Armour and Avoidance at the same time for some reason.

• Edit •
Citing some build stats

Armory musings :: Tankadin

1,072: 5/60/6 (two variants, one 2/2 DG, one 2/3 Imp HoJ):
418: 0/58/13 PoJ variants. Benediction slightly more popular than HotC/Imp Might

4:1 number must have come from classic 5/60/6 with DG, which is 858 compared to the rest of the "top 10" in the 175 -> 245 range.

What's more surprising is the two 0/66/5 builds without 1/2 Imp Judge. 483 people with no clue...

Sample size is 30k prot paladins. Top 10 builds only account for 2,7687 people.

TalentChic :: Tankadin

First PoJ spec comes in at 14th. Top 3 are 5/60/6 variants with a few points moved round.

Interestingly, TalentChic comes down much more heavily in favour of 5/60/6 variants, but it also weights by gear. Armor Musings is straight stats, TalentChic says "people with good gear have a more important opinion" and it also splits PvP vs PvE somehow. How the weightings are done is not disclosed, as far as I can see.

I'd tend to discount raw stats (the Armory-Musings) stuff, and I don't believe in "The majority is right". Of course, TalentChic don't explain how they weight builds...

Anyway, it's some data.

That 5/60/6 is more popular than 0/58/13 doesn't surprise me at all.

Point 1: if you have a regular unholy DK in your raids, then you clearly will choose 5/60/6.

Point 2: some people will not value run speed. I disagree with them (strongly), but there will always be these people, even at high levels of content.

Point 3: even if you don't have an unholy DK, and you do definitely want the run speed buff, there is still tuskarr's. What that means is that you are actually weighing the difference between SotP and Conviction vs. 7 sta. So the real decision is what would you rather have? The 1-2% extra threat of SotP (regurgitating numbers I've seen here--I don't know much about it myself), or the 7 sta that you save by taking PoJ/Greater Vitality? I suppose it's still a valid question, threat vs. EH, but 7 sta is just not that much nowadays, and I love TPS like it's delicious candy, even when I don't strictly speaking need it.

PoJ is 15%, Tuskarr's is 8.

I find Sotp to be very unappealing and like Cathela would probably spend five points on a talent that did nothing for access to PoJ. As it stands however, you can get HotC and have some change or get Benediction. No, they aren't the best talents but PoJ is just so good in my eyes that it's irrelevant.

The DK argument strikes me as similar to tclap and Judgements of the Just. You could, theoretically have someone else always provide the buff for you and you would be fine, but otherwise you lose your bonus. The DK buff is a bit different, obviously, because it's an aura but you still need a DK to provide it which could be problematic in 5 or 10 mans.

SotP is about 3.5% extra damage/TPS. Maybe 4%? I'd have to dig up the numbers, I have "0.8% per talent point" in my head as what I worked out last time.

This is:
• Con: Bad value when a decent talent is supposed to be about 1% per point.
• Neutral: More TPS when TPS is not a major issue.
• Pro: Extra DPS. More DPS is always nice.

Overall? "Weak but Acceptable Talent". It isn't great. But if you want a DPS/TPS talent, it's the best we have out of a set of bad choices.

I do agree that SotP is largely a crap talent in design terms. Buffing a low DPS ability by lots still leaves it as a low DPS ability. I put this down to the seal system being poorly designed overall leading to high difficulty in balancing the various specs once they merged AP/Spell scaling and re-itemised Ret/Prot gear. The easy fix would have been to limit Blood and Command to 2-h and Vengeance/Righteousness to 1-h, then make them scale to suit their specs. Nerfing judge/seal DPS To the Ground, Baby in order to fix Ret burst issues had impacts on Holy/Prot that are probably both Off-topic and boring, so pretend I didn't raise them. I do feel sorry for soloing Holy pallies though.

Other ret options:
I value Benediction at zero because I never go OOM. I tend to consider "OOM issues" for prot as a sign that people haven't learned to manage mana vs TPS (is that a polite enough way to say "L2P" ?). It is worth admitting that I can't remember the last time I was stuck with "lolProtDPS" duty in a raid. Closest I come is add-tanking at KT, where I don't DPS KT himself because we already have too many melee chaining Frost Blast (go go standing around like a wallflower for 60% of KT's health-bar). This is also the only time I ever cast a heal in a raid.

I rate HotC poorly as we have two reliable ret paladins in-guild. Imp Might is pretty poor for me as well (two ret paladins, multiple shouty-warriors). If you don't have ret in-raid 100%, HotC and Imp Might go from terrible to very good. But given how common Ret is now, and the fact that it's actually a very nice spec to have in-raid, my attitude to fixing lack of ret paladins via speccing 12-ret as prot could best be summed up as: Fix your recruitment issues

The difference between JotJ and PoJ is that every fight benefits from JotJ (except Aran - noting else comes to mind), while PoJ is fairly situational. There's what.. Anub, Hiegan, & Horsemen in Naxx where it provides a benefit. And none of those would I rate as critical. Sarth+3 add-duty, perhaps, but it's an even smaller deal. The vast majority of 3.0-era tanking is very static. There's nothing like Felmyst in-game right now, where we made the entire raid have speed enchant or talents, no exceptions.

The fact that PoJ is two talents points for self-only, and you have to grab some talents that are probably filler, where Unholy DK is raid wide +15% for same 2 points.... Get an Unholy DK?

I would sum up all this as "Last seven-to-twelve points in your prot build don't matter much" Kings / DG / SotP / Conviction / PoJ / HotC are all highly optional and really say more about the rest of you guild and raid makeup than anything else. Pick what works for you & your guild!

I do find it very interesting that so many good tankadins say "I could not live without PoJ" - I'm trying to work out why I don't notice having +0% run-speed (0/2 PoJ and too cheap to buy Tuskarr's until 3.0.8.)

Either I'm just used to being slow, or I have talented Unholy Aura on me a lot more that I realise.

Malygos, Sapph and Sarth+3

Not pointless... just very situational for a heavy-MT-duty person.

Eh, situational like you say, and would guess depends on the difficulty of the content and what role you're doing specifically. I'll have to see how Ulduar goes on PTR before I change my spec to include DG.

There's probably also a lot of I specced X/Y/Z for "Progression Week"; cleared everything, and am now working on achievements until Uldaur, why bother re-speccing? going on with the hard-core tanks.

EG: Me being too cheap to get run-speed enchant, or remove some of the green-quality gems from my gear. We killed Sarth+3[10] before guild JCs had the rare patterns I wanted... why would I spend money optimising gear even further?

Once I have best-in-slot for every slot, I'll utterly optimise a couple of gear-sets for the Ulduar server-first races. Meanwhile... there's an element of "Who cares?" going on, I think.

Exactly my point. While it's not exactly "optimal" since it doesn't have Kings, DG, or PoJ; I don't gimp myself by doing it either. With the content being so easy at the moment, there seems to be a lot of "Who cares?" being tossed around.

I find it to be the same deal as epic flappers: flight paths are enough and you don't feel the need for the epic flapper -- until you try one.

I do find it more useful in heroics than in raids (a lot more movement fights there), but besides the movement fights, I find the PoJ to be a quality-of-life talent. It's easier to gather up trash with it, you're slightly faster at positioning things, etc etc. I can't provide more than anecdotal evidence supporting PoJ, but I'd still like to say it's damn nice.

Mind you, PoJ has killed me on occasion. I forget my healers don't have it, and chain pull without realizing the healer's out of range .

I decided to grab DG tonight when doing a 10man 3d sarth and found it quite nice. Since I was assigned to blazes/whelps, I wasn't too concerned about grabbing sotp and was focusing on talents to help the raid more.

A really great spot I found to use it was right after tenebron + whelps died and I had a good 12s of no blazes. Though semi lucky on the no blazes, it helped make the fight very much more controlled. Though this was on 10man not 25man, I normally could find at least 2 times when no blazes are up that I can soften the healer's job tremendously. I find that the fight is much more about control than dps/heals. I'd think if we had brought a holy paladin who specced into DG as well, this fight would almost be trivial.

Though very situational, I think DG is a nice talent blizzard implemented.(Though tbh, I'll be speccing out of it when I'm headed to do something else.)

On the note of PoJ:

I almost always have an unholy dk in any raid I do. And honestly even when I don't have one, I never find myself wishing I had more runspeed.

That happened to me yesterday...

But I find PoJ very useful in lots of encounters. As zombie tank in Gluth (something that I find a ton of fun), as slime tank in Grobbulus (how come I find OT-ing more fun than regular MTing?), in 4 Horsemen... I'd hardly call it "must have", but it's very nice, and as said, those last 7 points are pretty much a flavor matter, which is a welcome change from our pre-3.0 state.

Anyway, I came here to present a question, which I assume we may not be ready to asnwer yet until the patch hits... Does our new taunt benefit from the +8% to hit Glyph? A single taunt would make fights like 4 Horsemen much smoother, but if it comes with a reduced hit chance, I'm probably not going to take the risk (and while I aim to cap hit for Righteous Defence, capping an extra 8% feels like an itemisation waste).

Push comes to shove, you taunt, and if it fails to land you RD, then the other tank taunts his own mob back. Worst case scenario, your other guy also had issues and you have to wait for his taunt to come off cooldown, but that's what shield wall is for, right?

My alt is a prot paly and I've been off-tanking Nax-10 with my guild. Are there any good addons that paladin tanks should grab? This is basically my first tanking character so I have no clue about addons for anything other than dps and healing.

If you haven't already, I suggest you get pallypower and bully your guildy pallies to get it as well. Makes blessings management much easier. Plus, it can also be configured to have a box for Righteous Fury. Forgetting about RF is something that caused some woe for my dpsers back before I got that working...

Sorry to come in late in the conversation regarding Benediction, but I'd like to point out that 2% reduced mana cost is not equal to 2% additional time before going OOM. Because there is already so much regen, 2% reduced mana cost could push you from going slowly OOM to not ever going OOM. As a completely arbitrary example, let's say for a given fight you spend 2000 mana every 10 seconds and gain 1900 mana every 10 seconds (on average, incl. Divine Plea, etc). At a mana pool of 5.5k (roughly what mine is unbuffed), you have 9.1 minutes to OOM. If you spec 1 point into Benediction, your mana differential goes down to 60 and you now have 15.3 minutes to OOM. IE, the closer you are to mana neutral, the more longevity you will get out of Benediction. (Incidentally, 9.1 minutes seems laughably long for a fight until you decide to go three-man Molten Core with your friends. But that isn't content that "matters".)

I agree that on any content that "matters" you can basically ignore how much mana your abilities cost anyway, since SA and judging wisdom should cover all that you need. Content that "matters", however, is a matter of perspective. Most tanks on here are discussing 25-man content, which I understand is what these forums are about. However, I find that in 5-man Heroic content (which I'm still doing a lot of since I don't play enough to really raid regularly anymore), that 2% reduced cost can make the difference between judging Wisdom or Light and/or allow me to use Consecrate and SoV for faster kill times.

Not to mention, Benediction can be quite useful in situations where you are using a lot of abilities but not getting hit much (assisting with DPS on Loatheb, for instance, or kiting zombies, or slime duty on Grobbulus, or basically anything where you have to use Cleanse a lot). You'll go OOM a lot less fast.

That said, I only ever take Benediction as filler on the way up to PoJ, and I value Heart of the Crusader over it as well. There are plenty of better things to spend talent points on, certainly. I'm just trying to point out that Benediction isn't as useless as people are making it out to be, is all.