As someone who would REALLY like to run Kings on myself 100% of the time, I'd like to find out if 100% Divine Plea by itself is enough to take care of our mana needs, even with the loss of the 30% mana cost reduction, but I'm not sure how to math out the problem. Perhaps someone could try their hand?

It's not. Going full rotation, the DP change isn't enough to keep us in anyway full. Dropping Consecration would go a long way to providing that the DP change works well. I tested this out about an hour or two ago on the PTR. Did dailies with kings on, pulled 5-6 mobs, did normal rotation, went oom pretty quick.

Ah, that might have been it, the video in question had the player in question managing to hover around 25-50% mana maintaining a rotation, but consecrate might very well have been dropped. It was difficult to watch which buttons were getting hit and the ground wasn't shown, so. As for the numbers, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what a full rotation costs (51% base mana as far as I can figure, with DP giving back 15% max mana over that time...)

I can make a quick video of it and post it, for comparison sake. Atleast the quality of mine should be pretty much "in-game".

edit: dp-ptr.wmv Download File on FileFront Here's the video of me pulling the first pack of trash in Shattered Halls. Using Kings, Righteous Fury, Seal of Vengeance, Devo Aura. DP is on cooldown and the talent keeps it ticking. There's no sound, it's about 1:30 long, pretty good quality. You can make out the text, buttons, etc.

edit2: That isn't my normal combat text. Apparently MSBT isn't working for the patch.

Totally agree with that, personally I'd favor it being merged into our improved aura Talent.


But the protection tree seems to be unfinished when looking at current patch information so there's still hope we get something that will help us with maintanking difficult content next to them removing the Blessing minigame.

Well you were missing out on several mana regen raid buffs:

Buffs I'd always have:
-Imp. Blessing of Wisdom
-Replenishment

Buffs that are possible to have depending on raid setup:
-Mana Spring Totem
-Revitalize (Resto-druid rejuv/WG)

Keep in mind that you were also missing +int raid buffs that would further the mana return from DP as it acts on total mana pool. I find that my raid-buffed mana pool is roughly 30% larger than unbuffed.

Missing int buffs:
-Arcane Int * 1.1 (kings)
-Imp. Gift of the Wild * 1.1 (kings)

That requires a Frost Mage (lowest dps spec by 200-400 dps) and the Druid (I thought the Resto buff was different, which is why it got a new name) is giving something else.

In addition a Destro Lock (lowest dps spec by 200 or so), SPriest, or Surv Hunter can bring it, so still loads of options, but two have downsides.

Sacred Duty (Tier 6) increases stamina by 4% now. (Previously was 3%)

This is from the MMO-Champ patch notes, and so I was expecting a slight boost to my health when I copied over to the PTR. However, it is exactly the same. Is this a bug, or did this change not make it to the current PTR build?

This change is actually just to the first rank of the talent, making it a more logical 4/8% instead of the current 3/8%.

No no, what I said was you can't expect to have MotW, AB, Wisdom, Kings, and replenish unless you bring a 2nd paladin, a druid, and a mage. If for some reason you're the only paladin in the raid, and you have no mage/druid/2nd paladin, then replenish is probably the ONLY ability that you can conclude to have (spriest, lock, hunter all have it). Granted, this would only happen in a 10 man, never in a 25. If so, you better start recruiting!

Am I missing something, or are you also discounting Spiritual Attunement regen?

They don't, really - but if you're not needing things like Argent Defender (their logic not mine) then Reckoning and crit will produce a dps increase (and thus a tps increase) however minor.

I made this point on my guild forums the other day - when you are practically unkillable in current content and your threat is fine, what else is there to focus on but personal DPS? Patchwerk seems to be the benchmark and there are protection paladins stacking STR and BV pulling 3500-4000+ DPS on Patchwerk.

Until Rawr changes I would not recommend it for gear changes.

If you never get close to dying (you have great healers), why not do more dps?

Considering Blizzard's reasoning behind not including the stam echant on weapon, I doubt they'd do this as well. A raid wide 3% damage reduction would simply mean that they'd have to boost all bosses with 3% damage. By keeping it as a blessing, it's way more situational and not something you can always count on. Even though Kings is baseline now, it doesn't mean we'll never have to choose between sanct and kings.

Also, further on the block issue. When going over the block cap (102.4 avoidance), will the total avoidance get spread out? For instance, if I have 112.4 avoidance, will my 20% dodge actually be 20/1.1 dodge? And if so, wouldn't getting more block actually reduce your parry and dodge even more? The only way to benefit from block rating with such high avoidance would be if the block was so ridiculously high that it mitigated more than a boss ever could hit, right?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm a tad sleepy.

The combat hit table doesn't work that way. I forget the exact order, but Dodge, Parry and Miss all take precedence over Block i.e. when Dodge + Parry + Miss + Block are 102.4%, additional Parry, Dodge or Miss will push the extra unnecessary Block off the table.

E: Rereading that it's not very clear what I mean, so an example:

Say you currently sit exactly at 102.4% mitigation and have 25% Dodge 25% Parry 25% Miss 27.4% Block. If you add 5% Dodge (ignoring DR), your effective mitigation becomes 30% Dodge 25% Parry 25% Miss 22.4% Block.

Why would you ever use Sanct over Kings on anyone but yourself? Kings is three times as good as Sanct when it comes to keeping people alive through raid damage. Even on yourself, if you're tanking challenging content, Kings is still better than Sanct.

Remember how it was before 3.0, when Sanct was the blessing you only used once everyone had all the "real" blessings they needed?

New patch notes are out, but only a few Paladin changes I saw:

Note the first is a mistake (that is for Warriors), but the second is not.
Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 90 sec.
Glyph of Shield of Righteousness: Reduces the mana cost of Shield of Righteousness by 80%.

Protection:
Divine Protection: Cooldown reduced to 3 min. I am not sure if that is useful when Forbearance is still 3 minutes.

So just to clarify, when getting to this avoidance cap, stacking block rating is useless?

Also, is there some super magic formula which shows how much higher your dodge can be than your parry before the DR makes stacking parry more beneficial?

Once you reach it, yes.

Well clearly, they're going to have to change Forbearance, or remove Divine Protection from the list of things that cause it, since it was originally designed as something to prevent paladins from going immune twice in a row (even if the second time was only to physical attacks). It seems like Forbearance on DP is a relic left over from the days when DP used to be the inferior Divine Shield.

At least the ShoR glyph makes more sense now. I'm not sure how useful it is though since it's not a mana hog like Consecration or Avenger's Shield are.

Do we actually know for sure that the ShoR glyph is major? If it is, it's worthless, but if it's minor it'd be worth taking over what we have available to us now. I don't even think it's that overpowered in the context of Paladin's mana issues (or lack thereof).

I don't know if Glyphs are in the build (I checked the AH and only existing glyphs were there), but I have failed twice to learn any new Minors.

I still have about 20 existing Majors to learn before I can't learn anymore, and I tried to learn a new glyph on the PTR but just learned an existing one.