Has anyone else noticed a sudden drop in their health? While I was playing today I noticed that for some reason I lost 1K unbuffed health without making any gear or talent changes.

Yes there has been a nerf. A pally tank I know lost 131 stamina.

Yep, stealth hotfix. Pallies down 4%, DKs up 2%, druids/warriors unchanged.
Tank health hotfix | StratFu

For where it came from, Sacred duty is providing 2% per point instead of 4% and Frost Presence is providing 8% instead of 6%.

Funny story. While I did take note of the AC changes in the t10 chest and gloves, I didn't take note that it came at the cost of all its defense rating (I figured they just increased the budget, silly). So for the past week I've been raiding with only 531 defense (I'm using the crafted legs as well).

Whats interesting is that throughout the whole fight in my 10man (Every boss including 9 wipes on sindragosa) I only got crit 3 times totally only 11.6k damage and I'm going to assume that damage came from the 2 dogs. World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis Theres the log. I wasn't able to find out who did the 3 crits though, maybe someone more familiar with WoL will be able to shed some light

I'm using the PvP shoulder enchant but even with that I would still be below the crit cap. I'm surprised with such a large sample I was crit so few times (or not at all if the crits did in fact come from the dogs, 11.6k total crit damage over 3 hits is moot)

Block can remove crits off the combat roll table, but you are playing with fire to not be crit immune. I think with PvP enchant you can do 537 defense.

That you experienced so few crits is hardly surprising; at 531 defense, you're only going to be crit .36% of the time, and the pvp shoulder enchant drops that to roughly .2%. You were subjected to roughly 2300 melee swings, so the expected number of crits would be less than five, and considering a large number of those swings are from trash, and (as frmorrisson noted) block will push crits off the table when redoubt and holy shield are both up, three is an eminently reasonable number to see from the complete log.

Obviously you don't become crit immune to mitigate the 35k critical damage you took. Frankly, even festergut at three breaths doesn't hit hard enough on 10m to make a crit a serious tank threat. I realize you're not advocating skipping out on crit immunity, but it's a bit silly to try to make something of these data, besides perhaps the dearth of tank-taxing fights in ICC10.

As for determining the actual source of the crits, I clicked through the details page for each boss and found that two of the crits were from Sindragosa; the third was probably from a dog or something since it was only worth about 7k damage.

Funnily I dont think those crits were on me. The Dk in the raid taunted sindragosa twice on different attemtps but managed to survive 1 hit. 22k per hit sounds about right, it did take him to a slither of health.

Oh my intent wasn't to make anything out of the logs, I thought maybe there was something wrong with the data or a bug with the instance.

Had to re-gem my cloak and legs to get back to 536 :P

Also, don't forget that the crit cap for trash is lower than that for bosses, and so you are even closer to the cap for the majority of the mobs you fight.

I have been playing my pally for about 2 years. I leveled as ret and then switched to holy at level 65. With the exception of prot/holy spec for PvP; I have not played a prot pally. I was wondering if someone could private message me a screenshot of your bars/ui just for a general idea of how an actual tank is set up.

PM'd

I'm Prot with a Ret offspec, and my UI's are virtually identical for both. Grid off to the side for raid monitoring (I tend to RL a lot) and cleansing, my health/mana and the target's on my HUD, couple timers for my cooldowns/trinkets.
I set up a mini 6-button group just below my character showing the 5 spells for my 96969 rotation plus HoW which I have on a mouseover macro. Handy when cleansing, dropping a Hand on someone, or w/e takes me out of rotation, can see at a glance where to get back into the cycle without taking eyes off the playfield.

With the amount of threat transferring available now due to retooled Misdirection and T10 rogue bonus encouraging Tricks on cooldown...seems to me that a Prot Paladin is better off speccing 5/5 Divinity and giving up some Crit or Dmg.

Chill of the Throne and healing challenges presented in ICC have changed the dynamic of tanks receiving massive overheals, I find many instances where I am simply behind on heals despite mashing Holy Lights @ 4.2k spell power and not due to the tank ping ponging from 100% to 20%.

On fights like Princes or Sindragosa, I can't guarantee at any point in time that you'll be receiving heals from anyone...it becomes the job of the (possibly) single healer in range or LoS of you to top you to 100% and try to keep you there.

Last week on 10m Sindy for example, our other healer was being plague with Unchained Magic. My Holy Lights crit for 21k, but when the health deficit on the MT is 30k or more, I need all the firepower I can get.

Anyway, my view on the subject is that Divinity can prevent a wipe or a tank death. Conviction/Crusade/Whatever can't.

Also @ only 1.5x multiplier, crit heals haven't scaled nearly as much this expansion as tank HP has. Coupled with the 20% dodge hit in ICC, I notice HL crits on my tanks aren't really all that impressive anymore. In Uld I could drop an 18k HL crit onto a 39k HP tank (46% heal, those Uld numbers are pulled from recollection though, I don't really remember anymore exactly how much HP tanks had halfway through Uld)). In ICC I can drop a 21k HL crit onto a 60k HP tank (35% heal).

Starting from a Prot/Ret cookie cutter of 0/53/18. Trying to free up 5 points for divinity would result in dropping 3/3 Crusade for a net ~6% decrease in DPS and Threat against DUH mobs ( most of ICC being U ). Next to drop would probably not be SoC even though it's a trash/heroic utility talent we won't be using against bosses. We need 2 more points so we would drop 2/2 pursuit of justice and go with speed boot enchant. [Dropping Vindication would only be possible if we are sure that we have it supplied by someone else with 100% uptime - otherwise we would start eating more damage from the boss if the debuff dropped.]

While that would result in no decrease in survivability, it would decrease threat generation noticeably (~6%) and slightly decrease mobility. Adding the points into Divinity would increase survivability by less than 5% since it only affects heals which do not fill us up. For arguments sake, lets say it was a 3% increase in survivability. Then we would be giving up 6% threat for 3% survival.

If you are not threat capping your raid, and you are dieing, then that is a very good swap.

However, to question the validity of the initial supposition on Tricks of the Trade, I believe rogues should be Tricks-ing each other in a mage-like circle jerk to increase their dps numbers as opposed to using it on tanks on cooldown for increased threat generation. The threat transfer winds up negating and it becomes a flat 4.5% increase in dps. At least after the pull whose application on the tank for snap threat generation makes some sense.

In the interest of accuracy, that enchantment swap would in fact cost us 7 stam worth of survival points. That might be 1/4th of a gem worth, but it's not 0.

Quick question, looking at a few things, With Ardent defender, the scaling it has with Def rating, can it exceed 540? - if anyone has the numbers, it'd be usefull, was wanderring if overcapping was acctually beneficial to this effect.

At 568 defense I still get 30% heal as far as I know.

Even if your group does have a way to remove enrages I have found GoHW to be excellent. I use it while dpsing, but without the glyph I can only hit every second enrage and with the glyph I can hit them all. It is really potent if your enrage dispeller is a little slow, there are two dudes who enrage together, etc. This is especially true because if the shambler does get off a single huge enraged attack all damage on the OT stops for 3 seconds giving the healers a chance to catch up and top them off.

Given the complete lack of parry hasting by 10 of 12 bosses in ICC I would consider the Holy Wrath glyph far superior to the SoV glyph. With the trash in ICC being susceptible to the stuns, and while the bosses are not they still take the damage portion its great for another spot in the rotation. I'm switching myself.

my expertise without SOV glyph plummeted to 9, not sure if I should replace that glyph with Holy wrath glyph for my tank set.
Although you do make a great point for discussion, regarding 10/12 bosses lack parry hasting vs add control. I will not give up my Divine Plea glyph nor Righteous Defense glyph, thus SOV glyph would be only contender. Side note, adds (i.e. lady deathwhisper) I tank with Seal of Command thenswitch to Seal of Vengeance for boss.

While the wide-spread lack of parry haste dramatically reduces the defensive value of expertise, its value as a threat stat remains undiminished. Theck has noted that below the dodge cap (26, I believe) Exp is our top threat stat, easily surpassing STR.

I agree that this may shift the SoV glyph from being a no-brainer to a more situational choice. For an individual tank, the question, as it often does, comes down to raid composition, role, current gear and preference. If the added threat is more valuable than the utility of HW (or whatever else), then great. If not, then also great. Personally, I'm likely to stay with it, because I can use much of the Exp before getting to the dodge-cap and I have some dps who hit like trucks while having severe trouble finding their threat reduction abilities. Every tank's situation is a unique snowflake.

This is a terrible idea. Expertise provides much more than just a reduction in parry haste, and below the soft cap it's our best threat stat. Swapping it out at any point below the hard cap for holy wrath is going to be a huge TPS loss against bosses. On that note, so much as using holy wrath against bosses is a TPS loss, as it deviates from the currently GCD locked 969 rotation.

Holy Wrath (and its glyph) most certainly have their uses in ICC, but extra threat against bosses is definitely not one. Also, while 10 out of 12 bosses don't parry haste, 2 out of 12 still do, and one of those still hits quite hard. In these situations, trading a huge amount of threat, plus a significant reduction in burst damage, for the ability to lower your threat more often, is in no way worth doing.

As others already said, expertise is a great threat stat. But you are already at 24 expertise (excluding the glyph), so you might as well consider it if you get another item that brings you to 26 or over.

PS: get a belt buckle, you're missing out on 30 stamina right there.