You seem to be arguing that adding hit is worthless unless you can cap everything under the sun. There's really very little point in capping HoR, since capping RD is much much easier, and sufficient for pretty much every boss taunting situation.

As for the second part of your argument, again: time. If you're building threat on a mob, every ability that misses (with the exception of RD, which doesn't use the GCD but also doesn't actually build threat) sets you back 1.5 seconds and gives your dps that much longer to pull aggro with an unlucky crit string. Adding another few points of hit is going to do more to keep your raid alive than adding strength.

I wouldn't count on that. Assuming a Ret paladin goes 17 points into Prot for DS+DG, they'll have 4 points to spread between PoJ, Imp.BoM, and Vindication. PoJ is individual survival, so I'd hope that would be the first choice. Between the other two, I'd argue that Imp. BoM is more important: three classes already have -AP debuffs, but only one other class has a +AP buff, and Battle Shout is much less convenient and harder to maintain than BoM.

Aside from that, there's a real value as a tank in having debuffs that belong to you, because you can count on them always being there, even if the rest of the raid is on the other side of the room killing something else. In other words, the same reason why picking up JotJ is much better than counting on a warrior to Tclap, etc.

Obviously this comes down to the fights you do and the particular people you raid with, so nothing is a hard-and-fast rule. But I would say that if you want to skip Vindication, a much better choice for a stand-in would be a warlock with 2/2 Imp.CoW, since that would be realistically useful for off-tanking situations.

From where you are thinking of cutting points to get Vindication in 0 53 18? Conviction/PoJ? Also one more thing; if Reckoning/SotP becomes better tps how are we supposed to have Vindication? Thanks in advance.

Blizz swapping HotC (or Imp BoM) with Vindication would make life a lot simpler.

If you're prot and trying to spec into Vindication, and you have a ret pally along, Benediction, as nearly useless as it is for a prot pally, is by far the best place to sink the 3 (or 4) points you need to get to Vindication. HotC and Imp BoM will absolutely be taken by the ret pally, so taking either would be nearly the same as leaving the points unspent. I absolutely adore PoJ and the ret threat abilities, but if SotP and Reckoning are even in the ballpark of Conviction in TPS, I'll have a very hard time convincing myself to waste the points on HotC to get to Vindication/Conviction/PoJ.

Swapping the talents really makes a lot of sense, IMO, and I've started a thread on the tanking forums to advocate it.

I disagree. As prot I've been in far more situations where I've been without a ret pally (10 mans, solo'ing, 5 mans, rare 25 mans where ret couldnt make it, etc) than I have where mana has been a serious issue (trying to solo the occasional 5 man group quest or old-world content). Although with the advent of dual-spec, speccing for a single specific situation to the detriment of others becomes more plausible, I'd still be hesitant to take benediction over HotC. At the very least, HotC provides redundancy in case your ret dies, or if he's on a different target to you (eg Thorim P1 raid split, Yogg P2, etc), while Benediction should ideally have no positive effect on your performance in progression raiding.

Still, choices like this are highly irrelevant for the most part, and I certainly support your suggestion to alter the lower tiers of the ret tree to accomodate vindication in tier 2.

I find HoR superior in several Ulduar encounters, since RD has the often unwanted effect of taking three adds, while you may only actually want one. Examples: Freya, Thorim Arena, Yogg-saron p1 and p3.

But in the cases where you only want to taunt a single add, the add is invariably level 80-82, which only requires 6% spell hit chance maximum (160 ish rating) - which it is difficult to avoid having in Ulduar gear. Only level ??? bosses require 17% to fully cap. Something which I've not rated particularly highly since we have two functional Taunts, and Bubble/HoP in the very rare event of both failing.

I'd definitely agree. Agi is a poor threat stat for us, especially since it isn't reliable. For our threat, nothing beats strength after hit cap.

As for the survivability it offers though, I'll still go for it if I feel the need to switch my dodge gems.

Nothing beats str before the hit cap anyways. And in 3.2 BV will be a very close second to STR and hit still will be inferior to str. Do not dismiss the worth of the threat component to agility. If you have ever taken any survival reduction for threat in your gearing then agility is something to be looked at.

Hit is more than simply a threat stat. Although I believe most of us are in agreement that for burst threat nothing beats hit capping. In addition to that I would believe that most of us only have problems with threat during the initial threat phase, thusly more burst threat = hit capping > str. Once I have a mob of any kind on me it's not leaving. I never worry about strength, ever, as a tank. However I do worry about initial threat build up and I worry about my taunts missing. When going for hard mode achievements I can not be slow to build up threat and I can not miss taunts otherwise it's likely going to be a wipe.

Just what I found, experiences may very... I guess

Frankly the chances of a catastrophic pick up failure are exceedingly low, especially when misdirects and/or tricks of the trade are taken into account and not worth gearing for.

Frankly, Counting on another class and their ability to play and do what's expected of me, when I'm fully capable and willing seems like inviting error. In a given raid I will save butts and avoid wipes with a quick taunt. I don't understand what the reasoning is for going overboard on STR to improve threat when long term paladin threat is not an issue for the majority of us, however building quick threat is absolutely needed for most hard mode achievements.

I agree, the only time I am worried about not being able to KEEP a mob, when I am using a full rotation, is when there is aoe trash running all over the place and I am frantically running around trying to pick every single one up. But when that happens i go to retribution aura and i stop having troubles. The most shaky part of a fight for me, threat-wise, is always the first 8 seconds or so.

As for using agil as an avoidance stat, i prefer stacking stamina, defense rating, hit, etc. Especially stamina. 2k stam is often the difference between the mt and the ot.

Last time I checked, retribution aura threat is attributed to the player being hit, not the paladin who put the aura up. Throwing ret aura up is the worst thing you could possibly do when trying to regain aggro on a bunch of loose mobs.

And since I'm posting here anyway: I side with the people who prefer to gear for long-term threat output / survivability rather than hit rating. Stacking hit does guarantee your initial threat generation, but a hunter or a rogue can also provide that functionality at little cost to their damage output. It's also reasonable to expect your DPS to watch their aggro at the beginning of the fight.

I have found my own survivability to be more of a limiting factor on hard modes than my initial threat generation. Gearing for the hit cap comes at the cost of survivability, so I don't prioritize it.

I don't think anyone said gearing for hit cap over survivability is a good idea. The conversation is about Hit capping vs more strength.

I'd prefer hit cap over str, mainly for taunt and more steady threat. That said, I would gem for stam or avoidance before either stat.

This is how I see it. There are situations where I'm tanking something for the ranged DPS while the melee is off whacking on another target, so it's nice to have HotC myself.

That said, we're at the point where both sides of this argument are using situational benefits to support their choices, so which one is "best" really comes down to which situations you find yourself in more often.

EDIT: And yes, I think everyone agrees that avoidance/mitigation/soaking is more important then either hit or strength.

I wouldn't ever spec Reckoning for tanking, because while it is important to generate threat, but there are many other talents that will add threat without using another melee attack.

See Blood-Caked Blade (a Death Knight talent in Unholy) for another example of a threat talent that is not great to pickup for a tank.

I'm planning to do a sweep through the guide to update it for 3.2 sometime this week. Until then, some things will be dated. Reckoning does seem more useful now, although still not really a "must have".

And I've really come to love engineering because bombs are really handy as a poor man's Death and Decay. They're fire damage, so they don't get the +90% threat modifier from RF, but they still get the +43% "anti-salvation" bonus. Obviously they aren't much good for sustained threat, but they're very nice for picking things up at a distance or when Cons is on cooldown somewhere else.

Very few options?

PoJ is a "must have" for ret--it is one of the biggest DPS increases in the entire tree for basically any fight that requires non-vehicle movement (i.e. almost all of them).

Imp Might is the superior alternative for long term AP buff, so it's practically a must have for them, unless there is some specific raid arrangement so that someone else is covering that buff. (I suppose maybe you could have a holy paladin covering imp might so the ret can take vindication so that you can spec something else . . . see how silly this is getting?)


There will be some people with very specific raid arrangements that don't take vindication, and there will be an unfortunate few who don't take it because they don't realize how good it is (perhaps because it's not much good in pvp). But if the tree stays the way it is now, then for "most" prot pallies, I am 100% convinced that taking vindication will be the correct choice, and it will absolutely be part of the "cookie cutter" 3.2 tanking build.

I didn't know that talent applies to raid bosses.

I hope you're referring to the 3.1 version that lowered stats. In 3.2 it will lower attack power, and will function exactly the same in that role as the other abilities which lower AP, and those do indeed lower the attacks of bosses. As is noted in various places on EJ, research is a must before coming here and posting.


Now to add something constructive to my post: Actually, there's nothing else I can really say that applies to prot right now. Time to readthrough the OP and see what was updated.

Must have missed that change.



While I'm at it, I have a question about tier sets: how important is it to have these items over non tier items of the same value? How valuable are the sets? I've heard a lot of different opinions over this.