From what I've read on the PTR notes..

I foresee Vengeance/Corruption being the premier seal for both Ret and Prot, unless the overall damage from Command is more than Chance to do 10.35% of SP + 45% MWD combined with the "substantially less judgement damage."

Hand of Reckoning will work just fine and provide some initial threat as well.

Prot-relevant portions of the patch note, copied from MMO-Champion:

• Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
• Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
• Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied.
• Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target's armor.
• Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
• Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.
• Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage.
• Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%.
• Talents
  • Protection
    • Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Currently, any damage taken by the paladin while at 35% health or below is reduced. Instead, any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced. In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead set the paladin's health to 10/20/30% of maximum.
  • Retribution
    • Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout.

EDIT: Can anyone think of a good reason why they don't just make BoS buff all stats by 10%? Adding the stamina buff will make it better, no question about that, but it still leaves us dealing with annoying cross-blessing situations. (Think your Ret paladin buddy wants 3% damage reduction instead of +10% strength?) And it still means that a Prot Paladin can't bring one of his raid buffs (3% damage reduction) without giving up another blessing.

I know I've beaten this horse to death, but I simply don't understand why the devs are afraid to go all the way and let prot paladins do BoK+BoS as one blessing.

Rolling BoK into BoS would be better. But the solution to your first problem is simply to greater bless kings on paladins and bless sanc on yourself. I'm not going to terribly miss the 11 agility, but the 100 strength might suck to lose.

My guess is they want Kings on everyone, but Sanctuary only on tanks unless you have another paladin. If you made Sanc give 10% to all stats you'd bless sanc on the whole raid. Currently it takes another paladin in the raid to do that.

With this situation you'd bless kings on the raid and sanc 10m on yourself, and lose 50 bv and 200 ap but gain 3% dr and the mana return.

Well, that's my point, or at least one of them.

Sanctuary shares a "raid buff slot" with Renewed Hope, the Discipline priest talent. Aside from the mana-regen "feature" of Sanctuary, RH is superior in every way: it's cheaper, faster, and easier to apply, and it doesn't require the priest to sacrifice one of their other raid buffs.

If the 3% damage reduction on Sanct is supposed to be one of the "raid perks" of a prot paladin, why are they making it so ridiculously inconvenient?

(If the 3% damage reduction of Sanct is not supposed to be a prot paladin raid perk, then why did they give priests a way to quickly cast an equivalent non-stacking buff on the entire raid?)

In other words, why not Sanct on the whole raid as a substitute for Kings? Change the icon to a shinier helmet or something if you like, but I don't see how this would be a problem.

The question that I am asking is: will the changes to bv gear make it mandatory? Will 4 set bonus become better than avoidance gear? The changes to BV is welcome... but honestly; it's a little to late. I've geared towards avoidance and trying to get a BV set is going to be pain.

What do you mean by "too good for one buff"? Does it matter whether the effects come in multiple buffs or in a single buff?

Or are you saying "Letting a prot paladin give a 10% all-stats buff in addition to a 3% damage mitigation buff on the same target(s) at the same time would be too powerful?"

(Assume for the sake of argument that if BoK has been around in its current state since the game's release and has gone from a talent to a baseline ability, the devs probably have no issues with it.)

To press the attack further (playing too much WC3 with rexxar) what about 3% damage reduction in addition to 10% more stats on non-tanks is over powered for kings? or 10% additional agility and str on tanks is too powerful to be part of BoSanc for tanks?

I can't see this being the case. The practical effect of Blessing of Sanctuary is the 3% damage reduction. For anyone who isn't a Protection Paladin, the other effect is for survival the same as Kings, and is in all cases worse for throughput or regeneration. Now I'll admit that 3% less damage taken by your entire raid is a nice thing to have, but it is not nearly as powerful as the other three blessings are in effect; unless someone really doesn't need anything else, you don't buff Sanctuary on them. It used to actually be better when the rage and runic power generation on avoidance was still in, back then it was a potent blessing for all tanks.

As it currently stands however, the blessing is pretty weak for anything that isn't a Protection Paladin. The new changes don't really do anything about that either.

The minor buff to Blessing of Sanctuary doesn't change a thing. When I'm running ten mans as the only Paladin, everyone will get Kings and I'll still be lumbered with Sanctuary for the 2% mana return, exactly how it is now. I don't understand why they stand defiant on not just rolling the effect into Spiritual Attunement.

So far i ignored tier 8.5 shoulders and gloves and kept using my tier 7.5 because of pure avoidance and hit. I am currently sitting on %54 avoidance and 1200ish block value. would it be viable to drop %4-5 avoidance and get me a chunk of more block value? ( Precisely Signet of the Earthshaker and Tier 8.5 shoulders&gloves for 4 set bonus )

I think Russta has it right here; I don't know that I'd call it "underwhelming"; I think it's enough to make blockvalue a useful gearing stat, but not enough to mandate stacking tons of it.

Based on gear I've got in the bank right now (I'm a blockvalue fetishist) I can theorycraft reaching 4k steady blockvalue in T7 and T8 gear if you're willing to wear the two level-70 blockvalue trinkets: [Item not found!] and [Coren's Lucky Coin]. (That 4k figure includes [Libram of Obstruction] presumably having 100% uptime in a standard 6/9 rotation after the patch.)

Those two trinkets are worth a total of 322 blockvalue including talents and the blockvalue meta-gem (after 3.2, of course). If you trade those for, say, [Royal Seal of King Llane] and [Heart of Iron], you have a more reasonable 3700-ish blockvalue and ~4k more health.

That's as compared to probably a bit more than 2k steady blockvalue in the same gear pre-patch? We'll see how this plays out (after all this is only the first set of patch notes) but at first glance it looks to me like your current gear will be fine, though you might want to keep the patch in mind as you make gear choices between now and 3.2.

EDIT: Other random thoughts on patch notes:

Taken together, I think the HoR and Exo changes are a net buff for us, or at worst a net break-even. For situations where you'd use HoR+Exo now, you get the same effect with one less GCD spent (and in multi-target tanking I'm frequently fighting to squeeze out every GCD) and the whole thing is on an 8-second CD instead of Exo being on a 15-second CD. What you lose is the ability to cast Exorcism on something that's already targeting you while you're getting beaten on by something else. Overall I think we come out ahead.


The LoH change is a nerf. Most T7-8 tanks get about 65% damage reduction from armor; at that level a 50% increase to armor from the old LoH gives roughly a 30% relative damage reduction, compared to the 20% relative damage reduction from the new LoH.

This might not seem like a huge deal since LoH is a temporary buff, but Inspiration and Ancestral Healing are getting the same nerf (+25% armor changing to 10% physical damage reduction) and usually you count on having those up just about all the time when you're tanking something nasty. Basically you can count on taking probably 5-6% more physical damage with Insp/AH up after the patch. This goes for all tanks, but depending on when the new damage reduction is applied it might actually be even worse for warriors and paladins due to the favorable synergy between armor DR and blocking.


The RF changes: I hate to sound like an ungrateful jackass, but this really doesn't accomplish much. No mana cost for RF? Great, but my mana pool is still too small to fully bless a raid and activate my seal without drinking. Unlimited duration for RF? Great, but if I stay alive for 30 minutes in a raid I'll notice my seal and blessings expiring anyway.


I included the Sacred Shield change in my post above, because this is conceivably something you could use to generate a bit of extra threat on a pull, especially for AoEing (like a feral who puts HoTs up on himself before pulling).


The SoV change: Assuming the DoT value stays the same, this means more threat. It also potentially makes Reckoning a useful tanking talent, and Expertise a useful tanking stat. I don't think it makes Reckoning something you want for a standard tanking build, but it might be good for high-threat single-target tanking.

Spiritual attunement scales with DTPS. Sanctuary mana return scales with time and number of attackers. They both serve to return mana, but do so in very different ways by design for some very specific reasons.

Well, HoJ and SoJ both stun, but for different durations and under different conditions, but both are still buffed by a single talent.

Regardless, I think Russta's point was more about rolling the mana-regen effect of BoS into some other talent (i.e., unlinking it from a specific blessing) rather than about SA specifically.



Also, I'm curious to see the exact wording and behavior of the new Ardent Defender, because as it's written in the patch notes it sounds extremely powerful. Will of the Necropolis (3-point Blood DK talent) has the same effect (minus the auto-last-stand) but only reduces the damage by 15% and has a 15-second internal cooldown. I know it's not kosher to compare talents one-to-one across classes, but in this case the difference is so big that I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Best thing about this patch? No more arguing with people about why they need AD. It's obviously a given now.

I would be surprised if it's left intact in it's current state as well, especially due to the fact that without a cooldown it's not unlikely to be reducing two hits in a row. Specifically what we're looking for here are blows that would reduce you below 35% normally, but don't do so when Ardent Defender activates itself.

I'd say that it's fairly normal for hits to do around 35% of your health in Ulduar, and when going from full with the new Ardent Defender, assuming no healing in between, that actually would end up going: 100% > 65% > 40.5% > 16% health. Obviously some variation applies based on the boss in question, but in most cases where a boss would need three hits to kill you, the new Ardent Defender would, without a cooldown, actually allow you to take five hits in a row without dying, and that's prior to the new "guardian spirit" effect. That's a very large increase to your survival in a worst case scenario.

Since some of the hard modes do include bosses that hit closer to 50% of your health, I should probably take that into account as well. In this case the talent probably functions closer to the way I'd guess it's intended to be: 100% > 50% > 15%. This way the damage reduction simply allows you to take an extra blow you otherwise wouldn't be capable of taking, while still making it so that same extra blow would kill you.

It might also make gem and gearing choices somewhat more interesting, though I'd expect stamina gemming will remain the norm. The new Ardent Defender has certain sweet spots where it might gain you an extra hit you wouldn't have been able to take otherwise. For example, anything hitting in the ~50-57.5% range of your total health will always end up needing three hits, while anything above that would always two-shot you. Or another example, anything that hits for less than 50% of your total health will be reduced to deal less than 35% of your health in damage, it should be fairly obvious why that is good. This could result in the net survivability increase from stamina peaking up until you get enough health, and after that dropping down a bit relatively, potentially making gearing and gemming for avoidance past that point the superior option. That isn't an entirely new thing of course, but the talent does give a fairly obvious treshold where stamina becomes relatively weaker.

It does become slightly weaker for lots of smaller hits, but I'd guess that's compensated by the block value increase you'll probably be seeing, especially if you have a special block value set for fights like those. I'm also working under the assumption here that the amount of damage reduction was not changed with the new functionality.

The auto-last-stand function is our second cooldown -- Eyonix said as much. But that's not what I'm talking about; I'm treating that as a new ability the devs decided to shoehorn into an existing talent.

What I'm talking about is the fact that the new AD, if it performs as advertised so far, is going to be much more powerful than either WotN or the current AD --in fact, better than both of them put together. It'll outperform either one in any situation you can imagine.

Look at it this way: leaving aside the cheat-death thing, suppose the damage-reduction part of the new AD was replaced with "Your total health is increased by 5/10/15%." That would actually make the talent weaker.

Edit: Please delete. Unintended double post thanks to login.

The new physical damage damage mitigation on various healing spells is going to be interesting to see how it interacts with reduction effects like AD. Obviously it would be too much to hope we'd be able to negate damage entirely, but even the likely scenario of half-of-half damage so to speak would mean we're still getting damage reduced by quite a bit. With the new increased block values I'm hoping a block setup could actually be viable and ease the demands on the healers. Our Holy friends might not actually need to spam us with Holy Light like before.


Edit: Given the various reduction effects we have, does anyone know how the heck final damage is calculated?

The percentage based reductions are all multiplied with each other, so if you have Divine Protection, Pain Suppression and Hand of Sacrifice all at once, you end up taking 79% less damage.

One interesting thought is when the new Ardent Defender (AD) would trigger in interaction with other effects, is it based on hits that would take you below 35% prior to percentage based damage reduction effects? Is it based on hits that would take you to below 35% prior to absorption effects? Or is it based on hits that would take you below 35% after any other damage reduction effects have taken place? It's most likely the last option as that's the least powerful.

Also of interest is this graph I made showing the minimum health you'd need to survive another blow with the new AD:



Note the interesting effect from 35% to 50% of your health taken per hit, anywhere in this range you need at least 35% of your health to survive another hit. Past 50% it starts increasing again, though at a rate of 0.7% more health needed for each 1% more damage taken. Also note that something needs to hit for more than 140% of your health to be able to kill you from full health with the new AD.

Finally, another interesting effect takes place when something hits you for just over 65% of your health. While you still need at least 45.5% health to survive another hit then, when something hits that hard, every single hit you take will be reduced by 30%. This could be of interest for Vezax, especially since in the ~65-70% range of damage taken you actually end up needing three unhealed hits in a row to die, while in the earlier ~60-65% range you need only two hits in a row to die. In other words, if you can modify your health total so that your damage taken always falls within the ~65-70% range pre-AD, you end up taking the lowest damage on average. This effect also actually applies at lower amounts of damage taken, but would require you to be kept at your health % taken per hit plus 35% to make all damage taken reduced by AD, which is more complex to arrange, and also doesn't net you the oppurtunity to swap in other stats than health.

Lower damage ranges do still offer better over survival though, the above mentioned 35-50% range is probably a better goal to shoot for, anything lower is still better but this range provides a good decrease in the minimum health (and thus healing) you need. The range is also large enough to be more likely to be able to cover both normal and special attacks.

This is all under the assumption the damage reduction mechanic works like Will of the Necropolis except without a cooldown.

I have two questions that a little math may help answer.
1) Will the change the change to seal of vengeance make the talent seals of the pure better than conviction?
2) How much difference is there in putting 1 point into the new ardent defender and putting 3 points into it?

Sorry to post so quickly after a set of questions, but I also have some questions regarding the Seals changes.
Assuming Seal of Corruption (Horde) is kept viable for tanking, and that SoR is not even better,
1) Will Reckoning become valuable, given the % of Weapon damage as Holy Damage? I ask, because the more "strikes" we have, the more of these special hits will occur
2) If Reckoning does become valuable, will the risk of being parry-gibbed increase? In fact, does Parry-gibbing still happen? I have not experienced it in my less-than-complete Ulduar adventures, but personal anecdotes are not guarantees.

Thanks.