In what way is Divine Protection (our shield wall) being nerfed, so that we do 50% less dmg while it is activated? Where has Blizzard stated this?

I think that it is quite certain that they are changing BoS fundamentally. Either removing it altogether (and implementing the 3% mitigation in other talents or are we supposed to manage without it altogether?) thus making kings our first hand choice tanking blessing. Or they keep BoS for the protpalas to choose between 3% mitigation and kings, but still remove the mana/rage/rp return effect of the blessing. The latter would be stupid, why should we be forced to use a blessing that only increases mitigation and nothing else?

However, now that they are making Kings baseline there is reason to hope that their idea is to remove BoS altogether, base our mana regen on that Divine Plea refreshed automatically through Guarded by the light talent.

The Guarded by the Light buff will indeed up our pvp and offtanking viability but also our soloplay in general.

The only thing I'm worried, as other has poited out already, is what are they planning to fill the gaps in? They are cearly optimizing every prottalent but much is becoming empty. We still need to actually spend 50 points before getting our Hammer!

It does look like BoS is going to die in 3.1. In addition to the continuous divine plea, you have this for warriors: "We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries."

With at least 6 and perhaps 8-10 points coming out of the prot tree, one wonders what they'll add. I'm guessing that a 3 second silence on ShoR is dead on arrival. The other things could put prot paladins close to prot warriors in terms of lock down capabilities.

I would be happy with an interrupt effect at the least on ShoR, because it feels like the skill itself lacks today due to the fact that only deals dmg/threat. Having Arcane Torrent on a 2 min cd and 1 min HoJ feels like paladins indeed need more ways to prevent spellcasting. However, they might need to tweak the Shield of Templar talent so they remove the silence effect on AS, at least.

Having a standard 30 sec CD on HoJ (3sec silence), 30 second CD on AvS that could theoretically silence up to 3 targets for 3 seconds each, 15 sec CD on Exorcism (talented it would provide 2 sec silence) and 6 second cd on ShoR that silences for 3 seconds. It seems overkill and a bit imbalanced to be honest.

Also, it would be nice if they consider changing HW the same way as Exorcism. Perhaps lower the spell power coefficient to reduce its dmg (it can indeed hit/crit a lot!), reduce the stun duration. Basically make it a Shockwave-like ability, same function but not as good as Shockwave itself since our would be baseline whilst warriors have to talent for theirs. The tradeoff for changing HW is that it of course would be a major nerf to its usage versus undeads but for overall tanking it would be an awesome aoe initial threat builde/cc. (Yeah, we have Consecrate but warriors have TClap and still get SW!)

Remember, these are not all the changes, just a preview. They might have changed HW to work like exorcism too, just didn't put it in the preview.

Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

So, what happens when we need to LoH ourselves? This talent would be better if it removed the healing reduction as well.

If it stays as is, it would probably require a macro to remove DP and cast LoH.

Since Ret and Holy has low damage mitigation (no holy shield or lots of stamina), I am sure even with the nerfed SA those specs tanking will have lots of mana from taking so much damage, assuming they live to use it .

I tried tanking as ret (read: ret spec with my normal prot tanking gear), and took a shit load of damage. Granted, I only had to do this because it was VoA 10 man, and they didn't want to worry about picking up an actual OT. Whatever, shield macro + taunt= hold for 10-12 seconds, switch back to 2h. Wasn't terrible, but did need a bunch of heals

If you're worried about the DP 50% healing effect, just macro a copy of all your heals with "/cancelaura Divine Plea." That was the plan back when it was a 100%/50% debuff in beta.

I'm quite curious as to exactly what the changes are with SA. Just limiting the return? or if it will take the form of the *present* regen state of BoSanc (return mana on block, parry, or dodge). That would limit the benefit that Holy/Ret gain from it....

Is it just me, or is the silence on Avenger's Shield a little bit rubbish? Paladins are still going to have to pull casters with LoS because with the daze effect mobs just won't be able to crawl to you before the silence wears off. A lovely change for PvP, but... yeah.

Exorcism being cast on everything will be a nice chunk of threat to help pick up adds when AS is on cooldown. And it'll be even nicer if [Glyph of Exorcism] stays as it is.

Well, it isn't 100% perfect, but the key upgrade there is that, casters won't start casting immediately when you pull and will run for those 3 seconds. That will speed up the LoS pulls because if you get out of LoS before those 3 seconds are up, then they will not stop to cast until you are in LoS again. Otherwise, casters would stand there casting for a few seconds before deciding to run after you.

Again, not a perfect thing, but definitely a plus.

I think the SoR glyph is intended more for holy paladins still, seeing as we'd give up 10 expertise for a minor bit of damage. Could be nice if CC was a worry though, since they can't seem to get SoV/Avengers shield behaving correctly.

My concern with the DP cancelaura macro, that is assuming you have mana to use. If they are buffing it this way because they want to remove SA entirely, cancelling divine plea will then seize our mana regen. Especially since they are taking away the mana cost reduction. In a single target I've still been occasionally mana starved with SA, BoSanc as it is, nuking divine plea for a quick LoH would just kill the day. Assuming they do something about the healing reduction, being able to shield slam a boss while providing flash heals while in Holy gear I don't think is OP at all, One would completely lack illumination, the spell power, the massive bonus crit, beacon, cleanse talent, and holy shock a holy paladin would provide.

Also, I was wrong earlier, I thought divine protection got nerfed with the change of Divine shield giving the 50% damage nerf. (yay tooltips!)

Why not just combine BoSanc's effect into the Righteous fury talent? Makes it feel like a much more 3/3 point worthy talent, and also fixes ret and holy's tanking mana regen problems. All those specs would be tanking are many light hitting mobs anyways.

I'm not sure what your problem is. If you need to drop a LOH or whatever big heal on yourself, cancel the Plea first, then do the heal, then recast Plea. Nine times out of ten, it'll already be cooled down since the constant Guarded by the Light refreshes mean you've only cast it once before, at the beginning of the run.

Going 15 second without a shield slam or avengers shield means plea drops. If you're tanking an add across the room and dont get another one off you have to re-pop it. Add comes out, you drop low, healer is OOR, etc.

Im not saying its LIKELY, mainly just that it COULD pose a problem.

We don't know how it's implemented exactly, but the line in the pseudo-patchnotes seems to imply that all the spells formerly affected by GbtL would trigger the DP refresh. That would include Holy Shield, letting you keep perma-DP up even out of combat.

That said, I really don't think they're going to nerf SA all that severely; it's a baseline ability because it's supposed to let all paladins tank, and if they weaken it too much it undermines that.

It's also the culprit that made paladins actually viable in sunwell because of raid damage(Which blizzard specifically noted as the cause of the changes). A 4-8% mana buff similar to BoS folded into Righteous fury just seems like a much more elegant (And logical) solution, albeit somewhat gimping Ret.

I know many people here got to do twins, and relying on a sear to heal a fight is NOT very fun.

As of today after patch Divine Plea does not affect LoH or heals from JoL on other players. Also, the SoR glyph doesn't increase damage enough to compete with the AP scaling on JoV.

Looking forward, how neatly (or messily) would the 15s Exorcism fit into our 96969 rotation, assuming the Undead/Demon limitation is indeed lifted and it becomes a standard weapon against everything?

I suspect it'll see as much use as it currently already does in Naxx: Not much. It's not powerful enough as an ability to outdo either Hammer of the Righteous or Shield of Righteousness, so those two are out already. Holy Shield is also something you don't want to replace normally, though it'll be useful as a replacement on a boss which only spams non-interruptable spells. Judgements have additional benefits to using and are nearly as strong in damage done so are unlikely to be dropped for it either.

That leaves Consecration, Consecration is more powerful on average if the mob in question will stay within it's effect for the full 8 seconds, but on a boss which this isn't guaranteed to be the case it could be a useful replacement. The cooldown on Exorcism means you'd only be able to replace it once every other Consecration however. Grobbulus is a good example of a current boss in which you would be better off alternating Exorcism and Consecration.

It will definitely be useful on something freshly pulled though, since you can usually get in both an Avenger's Shield and Exorcism in that time, which is a nice headstart on threat.

Exorcism does have an additional downside compared to some of our other abilities in that it uses the spell hit rate and not the melee hit rate. It'll thus still have a small chance to miss even if you are melee hit capped.

Finally, there's the obvious utility aspect with [Glyph of Exorcism]. It'll still be an interrupt on the GCD, but it's an additional interrupt we can use on anything which can be very handy at times. That is of course assuming that Glyph remains unchanged for the new Exorcism.

I am getting misses/resists on the seal of vengeance dot. Is this eliminated/mitigated by adding more hit?

I went over 7 or 8 WWS log parses, and couldn't find any resists on the DoT, so if you can share one that would be great. What I found was that the misses that come up on the summary are for applications of the DoT, and have no practical effect on threat generation.

Partial Resists cannot be mitigated, it is caused by having 15 less weapon skill than the boss. I am not sure about misses, likely hit gear helps with that. However a miss doesn't affect much if you refresh the stack on the next hit.