Notes vaguely relevant to prot paladins as of June 18:

My own commentary:
- The sanc change is nice, but the minor bit of dodge, threat, and block value will still make Kings necessary for a full min-max.
- The exorcism change, while negated by Art of War in ret, effectively removes exorcism from our skip-HS rotation, and even more importantly makes it useless as a cheap, short cooldown ranged pickup.
- Hand of Reck now does 1500 holy damage, which is nice for keeping a target stuck to you. An odd change, but hey.
- JOL's heals on me in a raid would now be around 800. Since JOL is fixed proc rate, this seems like it mildly favors a fast weapon, and is a small indirect buff to Reckoning.
- The LOH change I assume refers to the holy talent, but if it does not, being able to call up mitigation on demand is nice, if on a really long cooldown. If it's the holy talent, this is probably designed to remove the effect of the armor cap with +% armor effects, but should also be a buff to block (since the same change was made to Ancestral Fortitude/Inspiration)
- Toggleable RF! \o/
- The new sacred shield mechanics need clarification: it is only the casting paladin who gets the FOL bonus? Is it the 30-second buff, or the 6-second shield that gives it? Does the FOL heal include overhealing?
- SOV is a fair threat buff. 33% weapon damage is, for me, around 120 dps unbuffed, more like 160-200 in a raid depending on available buffs. Presumably the ShoR change is meant to counteract this, as well as the massive amount of BV that it will now be possible to stack.

The first point I really want to bring up for analysis is Ardent Defender. From the looks of it, the damage reduction effect does not suffer from the internal CD that the DK version does, making it very powerful for any boss that hits for 70+% of a tank's HP regularly. The really crucial change is the new Guardian Spirit-type functionality, on a shorter cooldown than GS at that. This will save a tank through many of the "I had a heal hit right as he died" scenarios, although I don't see it saving lives much outside of that (a boss that hits hard enough to kill you also hits hard enough to kill you again from 30% if the healers aren't on the ball).

The other major point is BV as a threat stat. With double the amount on items, this goes from our fourth best threat stat (after strength, expertise to soft cap, and hit to cap), to possibly being our best. Despite the ShoR change, BV will be roughly 53% better than it is now.

lórienas: Shield of Righteousness uses your melee crit chance, and the paladin threat modifier is 2.717 (1 * 1.9 * 1.43) due to the 43% extra aggro that was "baked in" to all tanking stances.

The new ardent defender seems almost too good to be true honestly, but I will leave the speculation of what Blizzard will/won't change to the dung heap posts. What mostly concerns me is the ability to tell when it procs. I'm hoping it will have a decent animation and/or combat log entry so I can have an addon tell me when it procs, otherwise keeping track of a 2 minute passive cooldown will be interesting.

I see these changes as nothing but pure buff for us.

* Yes, you're still going to want both Sanc and Kings to max out your stats, but this change was probably leveled mainly at heroics and some 10-man comps with only one Paladin. Even then, those bosses don't tend to hit hard enough for you to really miss the extra dodge and BV anyway.

* Yes, we did lose Exorcism as a viable Prot spell, but then we could never fit Exo into our rotations in the first place. The Hand of Reckoning change more than makes up for it.

* Yes, the change to LOH was towards the "Improved" talent. It makes side-speccing into Holy a little bit more tempting, especially given how Seals of the Pure is going to synergize with the redesigned SOV.

* On that note, I absolutely love the SOV redesign, as it now properly scales with Bloodlust / Windfury / other haste.

* Sacred Shield change: Just to clarify, if Paladin A casts SS on target X, whenever the 6 second actual shield buff procs from target X taking damage, Paladin A also gains a 6 second buff that increases the crit chance of his next FOL by 100%. All this change does is to make that guaranteed-crit-FOL also place a HOT.

If you have Sacred Shield running on yourself, then yes you will get the FOL buff, although as a tank I doubt we'd be able to use it.

I'm also not so sure this is going to be as useful though. In my experience, the Sacred Shield proc is removed so fast under a tank taking big damage shots that I almost never get to exploit the crit-FOL, especially if it procs in the middle of a Holy Light cast and I need the shield to stay for another 2-3 seconds (not to mention that I'd probably follow-up with a second Holy Light if the tank is getting smashed enough to need the first HL anyway).

* Threat-wise, we should see an increase, since anything we lose from SHOR being nerfed to 100% is made up for by the increased raw BV, which means the SOV change is all gravy.

EDIT: I agree that the only nitpick I have is the visibility of whether AD is already on cooldown or not. I'm sure someone will write an add-on to track it assuming Ardent Defender's healing proc is its own spell ID/combat log entry. Just have something scan the log for "Prinsesa's Ardent Defender Effect heals Prinsesa for xxxx."

For prot paladins, these changes seem very desirable; my question is, does the change to Seal of Corruption/Vengeance (i.e. 33% weapon damage after 5 stack) redeem reckoning as a source of threat?

That is, would a talent spec like this, incorporating SotP and 4/5 Reckoning, beat out the current favored builds for threat generation, builds that incorporate Crusade and 3/5 conviction?

You might be able to get away without it in a min-max situation. It's too early to tell, but I imagine it will be something that ret picks up, depending on how things flesh out - since SoTP becomes so much better than speccing down to Divine Guardian, it frees up some points for a 3.2 talent build. However you do lose the buff if you're in a situation where you're split from the ret paladin - ie: Thorim hall/arena (if you are indeed split from him). It's something to consider anyways.

New AD seems stupidly nerf-worthy. They already slapped a 15 second CD onto blood DKs' WotN, now we're getting a double strength version with no CD and the added bonus of an inbuilt guardian spirit?

The power of this talent will be heavily contingent on encounter design, but there hasn't been a single raid zone in the game yet where a talent like this would be borderline OP for any tank on at least some fights. It may be that the CC just doesn't have any hard hitting tank-spanking bosses in it, but I find that difficult to believe.

That said, rereading the talent, the amount by which hits taking pallies sub-35% will be reduced isn't stated, while the 10/20/30% health 'GS' effect is obviously representing the 3 various ranks of the talent. Perhaps it might be changed to a static 5%ish bonus, which would be much more balanced. Shaving 30% off any hit larger than 30k though is just ... insane. I simply cannot envision the talent going live in that iteration.

The rest of the changes seem quite minor, comparitively. Certainly all are quite nice, but nothing quite like AD.

The JoL for raiders with ret paladins are nerfed by this chage as rets were easily getting 900 low end JoL procs and up to 1100 peaks. It's no more a reason to pick up reckoning than before. Imp LoH is roughly unchanged as long as you could have used all the extra armor. It was just under a 23-24% reduction in physical daage before the change. As such it's not more of a buff to block than before in fact it's frequently a little worse than before. Since it's only physical damage it's no more of a reason to go deep holy than before, a little worse actually barring effects like tantrum assuming it works on those.

We don't know what the coeffeicents for SoV's DoT will be in 3.2 so it may or may not be a threat boost and it may or may not be the preminet tanking seal. What is know is if it is our prime tanking seal then the value of hit and expertise go up.

Shield tanks aren't running ulduar in full SBV gear so for progression the threat value of ShoR is decreased. Most ulduar progression tanks are running with as little BV gear as possible. For ShoR's value to remain unchanged on a 3.1 tank with 1,600 BV raid buffed they would have to have 370 BV currently straight from raw BV on gear which is excessive for them. Remember this BV doubling doesn't affect shields or BV from str.

As mentioned above imp LoH is not more viable, and before the new coeffeictents for SoV are know and if it is even still affected by SotP we can't determine if that talent lost or gained ground. Deep holy still suffers from wasted filler points, something that deep ret doesn't suffer as badly and will even less with the vindication change. We'll have to see on that.

I doubt they would implement the HoT from SS change as badly as you are suggesting. Considering the parnet buff that produces the sheild is also called sacred shield it is far more likely that as long the parent buff is on the target, rather than the secondary one, the HoT will be produced. There is also a decent chance for the HoT function to be holy only from talents rather than baseline as it would make ret very powerful in their self healing department from dual HoTs.

I'm sure we haven't seen the end of AD but it is important to remember that the reduction coefficients weren't given and that some are interpreting the changes to mean that only the portion of the hit that is below 35% is being reduced rather than the whole hit.

This is true, and very unfortunate. In my block set (which includes about half of the Ulduar BV pieces and the rest Naxx or lower) I have 2283 BV, which will go up close to if not above 3000 in 3.2 when I get the last three Ulduar pieces I need (T8 shoulder, Auriaya chest, Badge legs).

I'm getting 764 from gear right now, so add another 5% from my meta to get 802 BV. Add to my current 2283 block value in block set and the total is 3085, or 35% more than what I have now. So ultimately if you're in full BV gear (full best in slot BV gear, at least theoretically) it should be around 5% more than what ShoR did before, a slight buff in damage but large buff in mitigation.

...I still don't see it being as useful on progression fights. If anything it makes the non-BR pieces with BV better than they were, though I'd probably rather have another stat instead of the BV taking up itemization.

The patch notes specifically mention [Libram of the Sacred Shield] in the "duration increased" category with Obstruction. I have absolutely no idea how you can get around that (increases SBV for 20 seconds after using Holy Shield?), but I'm kicking myself for deleting my Obstruction after getting the GV libram.

As I said, yes, the LOSS' buff duration is getting increased as well, but going from a 10 second duration to a 20 second duration brings nothing to the table except if we're silenced.

Even then, once Holy Shield runs out halfway through the LOSS buff, you're no longer blocking every hit.

It could also be a typo and they intend to double the SBV on SS libram though. Overall, they have managed to make relics an upgrade for most specs (I think certain DK specs use the old one, holy pala does, etc) and I would find it hard to believe if they will fail at balancing out two libram with the exact same stat benefit (SBV).
PTR will give us more info on this.

Again, I just hope that 3.2 will hold a bunch of dodge rating/def/sbv items, compared to the 2 (!) SBV items we have now, which even have parry.