I'm not sure why you're talking about OTs taking Divinity in their tanking spec if they're dual-spec with a secondary Holy Spec. Under what circumstances would you end up getting the healing benefit from having Divinity in your tank spec?

If you want to debate e.g. Divinity vs. Ret crit talents, I think you probably want the Holy thread.


One possible benefit for Divinity would be to boost JoL if you don't have a dedicated Ret Pally in the raid. 5% extra on the splash raid healing during AoE-heavy encounters (e.g. Sapphiron) can actually be a substantial boost. That's the main use I can see except for gimmick encounters like Loatheb where you only get very limited healing windows, and usually those gimmicks mean that the tank damage is tuned to a Paladin's advantage anyway.

Andris,

You're quite right. Divinity would be useful to a prot pally off-healing with holy gear in his tank spec, and his dual-spec is irrelevant. I'll take out that point.

Sacred Duty = 8%
Combat Expertise = 6%

So the total should be 14%, not 12%.

EDIT: I'm in the process of leveling my paladin atm, but I'm glad I found this guide before I got to 80! Currently in the nice 60-70 grind, and am really looking forward to that guide to gearing for 70-80 Great guide, "it's nothing to sneeze at."

Specifically, it would be a 14.48% increase.

Heh. Patches > me.

I've done a full pass through the guide to update everything for 3.1 and fix other outdated stuff. Let me know if you notice anything still amiss (I'm sure I've overlooked things.)

It's still incomplete, but I'm getting close. Once I get all the material written I'll organize it into some kind of semi-logical order, and then begin the process of turning it into a think tank article.

[edit] Also added a bit to the gear section, with notes on some "unusual" items that I've found useful for tanking. Suggest others if you've found an unorthodox use for some piece of gear or other.

You still have 9% listed as the hit cap in a number of places (the stat reference, and the "Burst threat" section under "Gearing for threat" are the two i've noticed so far), which should be 8% without a draenei, 7% with.

With the (PvP) change to Enlightened Judgements no longer affecting Judgement of Justice, does it make sense to add a brief section describing the priorities of various judgements in different groups of paladins with the changes in 3.1?

If you're the only paladin, you should judge either Wisdom or Light, whichever provides the most benefit in the encounter. In a group with several paladins, the paladin with the highest combined AP and SP should judge Light, as the healing from Judgement of Light has an 10% coefficient on both stats. In most cases, a retribution paladin will have the highest AP+SP, followed by protection, with Holy having the lowest combined value. Judgement of Wisdom's mana returns are based on the attacker's base mana, so it does not scale with any stats.

If you're in a group with two paladins, the above priority makes it easy to determine who should judge which judgement. The complication arrives when in a group with 3 or more paladins, one of each spec. Assuming that the protection paladin has specced into Judgements of the Just, it's important that the protection paladin's judgement is not overwritten on the mob. Holy Paladins will be judging at least every 60s in order to keep up the Judgements of the Pure haste buff, and the range extension on their judgements only applies to Wisdom or Light. If you're tanking in such a group, you should communicate with the other paladins to work out who will use which judgement -- two possible approaches are:

• Holy judges Light once every 60s, and Ret judges Light as often as possible; there will be a 0-8s period every minute with reduced JoL healing (in a 25-man raid, you might lose around 200 * 19 * 2 => 7600 raid healing each minute in opportunity cost)
• Holy judges Wisdom every 20s (to keep up the buff), Ret judges Light and Protection judges Justice; this requires 3x the judgements from the Holy paladin of the first approach, but has the advantage of always maintaining the optimal healing from JoL.

JoW can occur multiple times on your target now. Since they all provide the same return on mana, no mana return will be lost, and you should never lose judgement of the just, even if all your paladins are judging wisdom. (I think light has some screwyness where the most recent judge is the one healing (like beacon), not necessarily the strongest. But I might be wrong.)

In general I always judge wisdom, as even if I were the only paladin, mana return to mana classes is alot more important than some minor healing done. I let my ret paladin use light, and I'm pretty sure all of our holy paladins use wisdom as well.

Wow, I'd never heard about that change, and I had to dig into the DK threads to find confirmation. Thanks, fixed now.

I'm not sure what change you're referring to; the talent has always applied to all judgements, not just justice. But yeah, I'll put a little blurb into the guide about judgement assignments.

EDIT: Gotcha, thanks for the clarification below. Also, got the food correction; thanks.

In 3.1, Enlightened Judgements doesn't apply to Judgement of Justice any more, so unless your Holy paladin is in melee range, they can only apply Wisdom or Light.

I think the best thread explaining this (and also covering expertise) is in the Rogue forum: Retesting hit table assumptions

I think they also had a high confidence result that expertise is actually continuous, even though the number on the character sheet is rounded to an integer value.

Crusade is always effective (3% + damage). It's just twice as effective on certain types of mob.

After playing with RAWR a bit, I'd have to say the big revelation for me is how good +AGIL has somehow turned out to be. At any weighting of Mitigation over about 85% (before which its #3, with STR as #2), its solidly the #2 stat behind stamina in overall weighting, and at 167% actually passes stamina (depending on how hard you have the boss hitting). Survival always makes me a little widgey as a measurement category, so in the options I tend to crank up the weighting of Mitigation to 200% or so (at which point its pretty much always ahead of +stamina, up to the 50k hit max, which actually doesn't seem hard enough, from what I've read about Hodir and others).

Yes, yes, I know. Everyone has different gear, the scores that come out of RAWR are a tool rather than a measure of absolute value. Plus, there are lots of different tanking roles which require different things.

Still, it makes sense. Each point of +AGIL packs 90% of the avoidance of a point of Dodge, ~12% of the "Survival benefit" of a point of stamina (from the armor), plus a little added threat to boot. What's not to like?

I'm a little surprised people don't talk up the value of AGIL more when discussing itemization or gemming (if you're not a JC, you're gonna have to work in a red/purple gem somewhere, and +AGIL/+STAM seems like the obvious best choice), especially if you're looking at general purpose tanking rather than a specific niche like AoE tanking.

Yeah, you're right actually. I'll probably go back and make a few changes. Agility actually is very nice for exactly the reasons you say. (Probably one of the reasons it's overlooked is that people don't always think about the BoK factor.)

I've added a section comparing professions. As usual, I'm sure it's filled with a ton of mistakes and omissions, so please point these out to me if you find them.

Comparing STR vs. AGI
Playing around in rawr... if the mob hits for more then 30k unmitigated (so 8-10k preblock), then agi becomes a superior survival/mitigation stat BUT str is far superior (4-5x)* for threat.

* after including judgement/white crit chance which is currently bugged in rawr v2.19. BUG: TPS of these abilities are unaffected by crit chance.

I've always thought agi was good... too bad there isn't a good way to get it out of gear. Because agi is only this good for pallies (war/dk's have lower dodge values), don't expect to see it on tanking gear, ever. Everywhere I would enchant it - but the weapon, there is an armor or stam option. This leaves just a couple red gem slots where purple gems or prismatics fit.

What are you using for your str vs Agil comparison? Avg DTPS? In that case you definitely have to present your assumed Armor, Avoidance breakdown and BV levels. For physical damage in a worse case scenario, str will hold the upper hand for quite a bit longer. This is not to belittle the value of agility which deserves a hard look at but to better determine it's true value.

Since Prot doesn't use Exo much (for Sanctity of Battle), for threat 1% more damage is better than 1% crit.

So your second option appears to be more tps.

This Maintankadin thread goes into great detail about talent specs and threat.

Anyway, just wondering if anybody can help me out with some confusion I am having.

Conviction says: chance to get a critical STRIKE
Sanctity of Battle says: chance to critically HIT

Is there any technical reason for the different wording on them, or do the abilities do the same same thing? Do they stack?

Oh one more question.

Now that we going to have divine plea 100% of the time up. Is there any reason to put points on spiritual attunment?

Thank you for your time guys.

Have a good day.

The Strike/Hit part is just semantics. Both do the same (and stack).

As for Divine Plea, if you bothered to search this topic, it has been proven a while ago that DP is not even close to what we need to maintain a full TPS rotation.

Vorda's comments are true, but the math I've seen while searching this thread strong suggests that DP takes a big bite out of a prot paladins mana needs. So much so that that 1 point into SA will be more than enough for MTing and probably enough for OTing as well. Obviously, every raid is different so YMMV, but depending on your role and raid anywhere from 0 to 2 points in SA may be adequate.

I've been trying to figure out how the new Blood Draining enchant works with Ardent Defender. In general, I like the idea of a heal that gets auto-triggered at some low amount of health, and generally I don't give much weight to all the arguments about "X is bad because it can push you out of AD". But in this case, it's a heal that actually happens the instant AD turns on.

So, here's some napkin math. Suppose the boss hits for x damage every time, and suppose when blood reserve gets triggered it heals you for y. Let's look at the following chain of events:

1. You get hit for x damage, which pushes you below the AD threshold.
2. You get healed for y by the enchant, which may or may not push you above the AD threshold.
3. You get hit again for x damage, which may be reduced 30% by AD if you're still below the threshold.

That first hit leaves you under the AD threshold by an amount between 1 and x, depending on how much health you had before you got hit. I'm going to treat this as a uniform probability distribution, meaning that it's equally likely you'll end up anywhere between 1 and x points under the AD trigger.

If you don't have the enchant at all (and assuming no other heals come in), then the next hit deals 0.7x damage.

If your health after that first hit is more than y points below the AD trigger (that is, your health is below (35% of total health minus y), then the heal leaves you with AD still active, so the next hit still deals 0.7x damage. The chance of this happening is 1-(y/x), and in this case the overall effect of the enchant on your health is a change of y (i.e., healed by y)

If your health after that first hit is less than y points below the AD trigger, then the Blood Reserve heal pushes you above the AD threshold, so the next hit deals the full x damage. If the heal hadn't happened, it would have only dealt 0.7x damage, so the net effect of the heal is to change your health by y - 0.3x (which may be a net positive or negative number depending on the size of the incoming attacks and the size of the heal). The chance of this happening is y/x.

So, adding up the health changes for each case and weighting by the probability of each happening, the expected health change from this enchant when it triggers is:

(1-y/x)y + (y/x)(y - 0.3x) = y - y*y/x + y*y/x - 0.3y = 0.7y

So, if you get no other healing between the hit that triggers the enchant and AD and the next hit, then the two important facts are:

• On average, the net effect of Blood Reserve is to leave you with a gain in hp of 70% of the amount it heals for.
• If you get unlucky, the net effect is that you'll gain the amount of the heal, but lose 30% of the damage of the next attack due to being pushed out of AD range. The chance of this happening is equal to the amount of the Blood Reserve heal divided by the damage of the incoming hits.

If the incoming hits are smaller than the heal size divided by 0.3, then the enchant never hurts. For a 5-stack of Blood Reserve the average heal is 2k, which means the incoming blows need to be above 6667 damage for the enchant to ever have a chance of harming you. Hence, for AoE tanking and other small-hit situations like Patchwerk, this enchant really has no downside.

For larger hits it become somewhat more questionable. I'd much prefer that it triggered at 30%, but even as it is I'll probably still take it.

[Edit:]

As long as I've still got the bottom post in the thread, two thoughts about the patch:

[Edit 2:] Okay, three thoughts.

1) With the new tanking libram (+blkval when HS is up) you're going to have the option to skip some judgements if you're hit-capped. Skipping every second judgement in a 69 rotation lets you very neatly slip in Exorcism every 18 seconds. Potentially if you have two other paladins covering JoL and JoW and someone covering a slowing effect, you could skip judgements entirely and replace them with a rotation like Exo-AS-Exo-SacredShield.

2) What are people's thoughts on Divine Guardian? I was pretty skeptical of it as a tanking talent at first since a Holy paladin's Sacred Shield is always going to be better even if the prot paladin has the talent and the holy doesn't. But with the new restriction on Sacred Shield to one target, it's less likely that you're going to have a holy paladin SSing you, especially in multi-tank encounters where you're not the MT. The strength boost to SS and Divine Sacrifice both seem kind of meh, but I like the duration increase as a way to make it easier to keep SS up.

3) Regarding the how-many-points-in-SA question, I think that's really going to come down to personal experience more than anything else; it's one of those things that can't really be theorycrafted all that well, circumstances are going to vary enough from one tank to the next that there won't be one "right" answer for everyone, and you're probably not going to know what your answer is until you've spent some time playing with the new mechanics.

So, the easiest thing to do in my opinion is to start out with 1/2 SA and just leave one talent point in reserve (i.e., unspent) until you get a good chance to evaluate your mana situation in combat. It's not as though your 71st talent point is going to make or break your spec; you can live with one fewer point in Divinity or whatever for a few days.