I suppose I'm just biased against the talent. Even in the situation you present there where it saved the tank's life, someone screwed up for that situation to exist in the first place because a heal should have been landing before the second hit occurred. But you are correct that the question should be whether I find the talent worth 5 points. For me it isn't worth it given the utility I'd like to have in my spec and given the fact that I don't end up main tanking more than 40% of the current encounters in the game at current. Then again, I guess I could always have two tanking specs with dual-spec.

Divinity basically scales with time to live - combined with minimizing # of healers (low overheal).
If in a fight you die in 1.2 seconds without more then hots landing, divinity plays a tiny role (say 2k of hots... 100 HP more effective health)
If in a fight you have a single healer, they heal you for 5 seconds for 7k HPS without getting you to full HP, divinity is worth 1.750k effective health.

I've found that 25 content typically looks like burst death (dedicated healers to all tanks and dedicated raid healers), while hard modes of 10 man content are basically slow deaths because healers have to multitask instead of pure tank healing.

Have you died to a lack of throughput in a raid in wotlk? I sure haven't. I haven't seen any tank die to it, I haven't heard of any tank dying to that. What I have heard of tanks dying to is heals not landing in time, heals not coming at all, not using CDs (maexxna, patch last 5%, etc), not removing debuffs (maexxna again), not being topped off (subset of timing). I have yet to see or read documentation of an appropriate tank and healing team experiencing tank death due to a lack of throughput.

In regards to healers picking +healing % talents, all the talents are 2-4 times more powerful per point than divinity, are used to get further up the tree, and/or are requirements for later talents.

As for the argument that healers can drop spell power to get better regen, they can't do this. They aren't going for spell power enchants and gems as it is. They're going for mana regen or haste (tank death chance due to timing lessened). They get all the SP they need from what comes on their gear.

Finally divinity is in no way EH. EH is the amount of raw unmitigated damge a player could take before death. Heals don't factor into effect health. Shields can but this talent doesn't affect shields.

Let's say, for argument's sake, that your raid assigns you to be the add tank (not an unheard of proposition for a paladin tank and there will be quite a few fights with add tanks in Ulduar). In my experience, add tanks usually don't get their own dedicated healers (unlike the main tank). They instead rely on general raid healing coupled with maybe some HoTs and a stack of lifebloom. Of course, in that situation, raid healers are likely to be splitting themselves amongst a large number of smaller amounts of damage while spending a little more concentration on the add tank. In situations such as these, throughput is going to shine because the healers as a group will develop a feel for how much extra attention they need to pay to the add tanks and how much they can spare for the rest of the raid taking damage. So increased throughput on the add tank will free up the raid's healing resources to be spent elsewhere. (Sarth 3D when twilight torment is up is a great example of this)

This is just one of many examples I can think of off the top of my head where increased incoming healing can be very useful. I'll grant that 5% more dodge is a more useful overall talent pickup than divinity and, given a choice, I would be happy to take more dodge. But I just don't understand the insistence that divinity has de minimis utility for tanking and can therefore be ignored in favor of threat talents.

And I guess it's worth adding that tanks die all the time due to a lack of throughput in 10-man content, for what it's worth. And that some heals such as Prayer of Mending, Earth Shield and Living Seed are very very close to adding to EH and those spells are affected by divinity.

I have some questions about the 3.1 Tankadin. What about Devine Sacrifice? Would you take it or what else would you specc?

Another question goes for the glyphs. ATM on live-server i have Rightous Defense, Seal of Vengeance and Judgement. Up to me i think, with 3.1 i will throw Judgment out and take Hammer of the Righteous-Glyph. Mostly i play my Tankadin as an 5-man and 10-man Tank.

Now we're getting somewhere. You've proposed at least one plausable use for Divinity but there is a lot more work to be done before we can begin to weigh the value of divinity.

On 10 mans raids are the tanks really dying to low throughput or is it divided attention? Divided attention is far more likely of a culprit.

Why don't your add tanks have semi-dedicated healers? If you have more than one raid healer at least one should have a main focus on the add tank and helping with the raid when the tank is not in need of healing. How often are there add fights where the tank is slowly whittled down and 5% more healing would save them? Would not AD not save them? Why isn't a holy paladin using BoL?

Who said that people don't take divinity in favor of threat talents? There's the 12/53/6 build to consider. There's also Imp HoJ and DS/DG to pick up instead.

PoM and living seed but Not Earthshield (is a chance to proc rather than a given) could be interesting to factor into EH considerations but they do have issues. In single huge blasts they are ineffective. They are only active for one hit. They may not be up for the burst event due to being consumed earlier (living seed is especially finicky due to it's application not being controllable).

Finally there is the matters of tuning and probability to consider. If a paladin needs this to survive and encounter then in many situations any other tank would have been unacceptable. Especially when considering a paladin's ability to be block capped. What are the chances of divinity saving a tank? Are there any non-contrived examples of tank's the would have been saved by this talent? Does the tank doing more dps reduce the chances of death through shorter fights, than divinity?

Patch, and in ulduar thorim (last phase, gruul style stacking damage buff), are the fights where divinity is at its best, there are very few encounters which test healer sustained HPS, these are them. I think of divinity as the difference between 4.76% mitigation and 5% more HP. For surviving something like maxxenna's wrap, where the healers are disabled, that difference is minimal. For something like hateful strike tanking on patch where you're eating a crapton of sustained damage, it's pretty huge.

Thorim is a great counterexample to the "if paladins need divinity, how would another tank handle it" argument too, with large hits lowering the mitigation % of block, and other tanks having more cooldowns to chain when the damage starts stacking up. In that particular scenario divinity isn't so much making other tanks inferior as it is making paladin tanks possibly viable.

But it's chance to prevent a death is no where near 1%. I will be measured in hundredths of a percent if not smaller units.

You have yet to show how 5% more healing would save you from a fatal blow in a raid situation.

With small blows it means that there is an unrealistically low throughput from healers, with larges ones you're dying from spike damage that slightly larger heals don't fix, being topped off does and you need spammed heals to consistently survive.

Divinity could never be worth 2k hp with a 40k health pool. 40 - (40/1.05) => 1.904k at the maximum. That is if you would have been healed all the way from 1 hp to 38,095 hp without divinity but all the way to 40k with 5/5 divinity.

By the time HPS are being outstripped by Maximum DTPS the hit are taking out huge, spikey chunks of the tank's hp pool. We would only make use of divinity in a situation where HPS are being out paced DTPS and with current healing output that point is far past the point where we are facing gigantic spike damage.

I haven't heard of tanks dying to any of those things outside of PuGs, or perhaps the first attempt or two for any reasonably experienced raiding guild. I also haven't heard of anyone having issues with tank threat or tank dps except with undergeared tanks etc, etc. I don't know how many times I have to say this, but the content we have in the game right now is easy. There are a lot of talents you could skip, including many of the "core" talents, without you or your healers noticing the difference on any of the current content.

Will a 5% increase in healing throughput on a prot paladin be useful in T8? We don't know. My personal take is that given the other choices available, the upcoming regen nerfs for healers, and the repeated statements by the devs to the effect of "healers will have to watch their mana", it seems likely to be useful. But that's just my guess based on the very limited information available at this time. Neither I nor anyone else can back up our claims on this point with evidence until we've actually seen T8 content. Because right now, we don't know.

Is anyone aware if Divinity and Grace stack in 3.1?

Your Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Penance spells have a 100% chance to bless the target with Grace, reducing damage done to the target by 1% and increases all healing received from the Priest by 2%. This effect will stack up to 3 times. Effect lasts 8 sec.

Yes, they stack. The only affects that don't stack are raid-wide buffs, like Tree Aura and Imp Devo Aura (for the healing effect).


To the glyph question, I would do RD or Seal of Vengeance, Hammer of Righteousness, and Divine Plea as a 10-man tank.

Divinity is basically equivalent to picking up some decent amount more spellpower. If you are at some point where you would want to gem for spell power, might as well pick up Divinity to ease that concern. If (most healadins I guess) you prefer gemming for int, haste, or crit, spend the points in ret.

EDIT- and this is NOT the healadin thread. Ignore this. /sigh.

There's so much overheal on these fights because if healers attempted to heal reactively, 3 non-avoided hits in a row would mean death. Heal spam is necessary because sustained tank damage is high, so heals which land during avoidance streaks are 100% overheal. Tanks in these fights don't die to spikes at all, unless you take spikes to mean something other than "large amount of damage concentrated in sufficiently small an amount of time that a heal cannot be guaranteed". They die because they fail to avoid several attacks in a row, and their DTPS during these attacks is lower than the HPS they receive by enough to erode their health pool. There are very few fights that target this much sustained damage at anyone, but a single hateful tank on patch is one such example (though if healing falls behind it tends to be someone else who dies), thorim sounds like it'll be another, at least during progression.

Incidentally, even though you didn't mean to post in the prot thread, you bring up a good point. Divinity is essentially just extra spellpower for healers when healing that specific target. Now, my alt Dekkar is a protection paladin, and my main, Ariakasz, is a holy priest (or disc, depending on my mood). I find that when I'm healing, any gemming for spellpower and enchanting for it is -not- for single target throughput. I gem/enchant for spellpower for multi-target throughput (ie: bigger PoM, CoH, PoH, Binding Heals). Rarely am I in a situation where I find my throughput on a tank is lacking (and if it is, it's because the other tank healer was dead), nor am I in a situation where I feel I have so much throughput that I could drop that second healer altogether (I might feel that way if I had a 30-50% bonus on healing, but not 5%).

In either case, Divinity just doesn't seem to stack up. I don't value single target throughput at all, and were I solely tank healing, I'd gem strictly for regen, crit (for Inspiration and the new Holy Concentration procs), and haste (for reduced cast times to react to burst or having to move out of the fire, not necessarily to increase throughput).

Thus, for me, I find the value of Divinity marginal from both a priest healer's and paladin tank's point of view. Druid healers may possibly beg to differ, however.

I am not sure how I can convince myself that Divinity is worth it. First of all, comparing to any talent point for point, it seems completely weak. For 3 points we get 6% healing to the whole raid, and an armor buff to one of our auras. I know it is a little further down, but it isn't that great.

Also, I know it isn't MAJOR, but lets not forget that the best way to help healers with mana issues is not to make their heals do more to you, but is to end the fight sooner. I know that we aren't topping the DPS meters, but TPS is not just keeping threat. It's also dmg to the mob, and the more dmg we are doing, the faster the fight is over. If we are taking threat talents like Conviction and Crusade, we are even on a small scale ending the fight sooner. Add the dmg into keeping up threat, and it seems like I would almost never want to take Divinity.

I think the Divinity discussion has just about played out. Calculating its exact effect on survivability and effective health is extremely complicated, but I think we've covered enough ground that we can say, very generally, when its worth taking Divinity.

Summing up the discussion on Divinity thus far, at least for Prot pallies, it feels like this is a talent that's probably worth it for paladin OTs and not so much for MTs. Yes, yes, I know. MT is a BC concept, not a WotLK concept, use the right tank for the boss, blah blah blah. But you're gonna have one tank who ends up tanking like 9 or more of the Ulduar bosses and the other tanks will share the rest. Whoever has the 9-12 is the MT. No, that doesn't necessarily mean they're the best tank. Its a role, not a statement of worth.

Why is good for OTs vs MTs:
Heal Size
OT: more heals come from hots and quick heals which are less likely to overheal
MT: more heals come from big hitting heals (critting HLs for 18-20k) with high overheal %

Off-heal?
OT: if for some reason you find yourself healing while in prot spec, it would boost your weaker healing ability, as noted below this isn't relevant if you have a holy-dual spec you'd be using
MT: less likely to heal during fights

Threat required
OT: depending on fight, threat might be less important. If you take divinity, the RL can just put you on whatever dies second and your loss of threat talents probably won't be an issue. Sure, you're probably missing out on a couple hundred dps, but if that's really a major concern, you'll probably lose your job to a DK tank who will out-dps you regardless of how you spec.
MT: Looks like more serious dps races coming up in Ulduar. Sure, keeping threat over dps was cake in Naxx, but the good dps is starting to get into our ballpark and will just get closer as everyone gets t8 gear. Losing those +threat talents is going to start to sting once the dps gears up in t8.

Remember Kara? Back when t4 was progression, we had 2 pallies and generally used Kings and Might/Wis because I did enough threat to hold aggro w/o Salv. Relatively early in t5 that stopped being an option, and by t6 it took work to hold aggro. The trajectory thus far feels very similar.

The whole discussion about divinity is a bit odd really. You shouldn't compare it to the good talents in the tree, because it's obviously not a superb talent. It's made so holy will get an incentive to go down the prot tree instead of the ret tree, while still making it appealing to prot paladins. What you need to do to value the talent is just look at the oportunity choices. As it is right now you can pick up every major tanking talent and then have a few free points. You could put those into more threat, divinity or a shorter cd on loh.
The only real options here are divinity and a shorter loh cd. On most content (barring some gimmick fights like malygos) threat should not be a problem at all, so extra threat talents really aren't an option for a tank class that has more than enough threat as it is right now. The only scenario where you can even consider the threat talents is if you stack full avoidance/hp and don't have a lot of BV while you're in a caster optimised 10 man group so your threat is lower. But even then you shouldn't have that many problems, your base threat with a max ilvl tanking weapon should be quite respectable already and now that they fixed BV items to have normal stamina values. You could make a good case to go for http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...5&version=9757 which picks up 3/5 divinity and 2/2 imp LOH, the lack of POJ in this build however hurts. (It's tempting to dualspec one build with loh and the other one as a standard spec with POJ http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...5&version=9757)

Again, to repeat for the tldr crowd, it's not about how useful divinity is, it's about how useful the alternatives are to a TANKING class, who's job it is to mitigate damage and keep the mobs on him.

Divinity mitigates no damage. Threat may not be an issue in early naxx but if the trends from the end of 3.0 continue, threat will be creeping as an issue again.

Ranjurm,

When did I say that all paladin off-tanks were expected dual-specing holy? I said for OTs there was a "decent chance of having a holy dual spec" vs a MT who was "less likely to use dual spec during raid", as in, the OT is more likely to be set up this way than the MT.

There are hundreds and servers and thousands of raiding guilds. Each player in each raid in each guild will do whatever makes sense for their unique situation, whether that's dual-spec ret, dual-spec holy, dual-spec a 2nd tanking spec, or not dual-spec at all. Generally speaking, OTs are more likely dual-spec holy and actually use it than a MT, and thus Divinity would be more useful to OTs. I'm in no way saying how people SHOULD dual-spec holy. Personally, I'll be dual-specing ret. But everyone is a unique snowflake.

Exewut,

Dismissing dps/threat talents out of hand misses the trends in tanking. Holding threat in heroics when even good dps is in the 2-3k dps range really isn't an issue unless people are over aggressive with AoE, and even then single target threat is never the problem. In 25-mans, when the good dps is up at like 5-6k dps, its less trivial and it looks like it'll just get worse.

You dismiss Malygos as a gimmick fight, but I can think of lots of other fights with dynamics that disadvantages threat generation. Ranged dps on Sapphiron when he's airborne, anything that needs to be kited (Heigan, Grobby), all make it relatively harder for the tank to maintain threat. Sure, the dps could back off, but that basically means the tank is failing to let the dps do their job as well as they can. As the numbers go up in Ulduar and the dps is expected to work harder than they do in Naxx, intentionally gimping tank threat will cost raids more dearly than it does now (when people can spec just about anything and still get the job done).

Glyphs for 3.1

Doing some spreadsheeting on Glyph of HoSalv and it looks like if you are going to Glyph HoSalv, it is better to use it towards the beginning of the fight rather than later on. Since it reduces your total threat obviously you are going to use a lot more threat if it is used far into the fight, unless the boss is tauntable. It might be good for big damage spikes where you can use a /cancelaura Hand of Salvation along with it.

Should be a good idea to Glyph for SoV in 3.1
However it depends if it is a major or minor glyph?

SoV will always be a major glyph. In fact, it is the most over budget one out there.

I'd use SoV glyph in 3.1, I hate parry-gibs.