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.

I have been considering the effect the changes to block and block related skills will have on paladins and have come to several conclusions.

Its quite a technical issue so I'm going to throw some numbers at it:

At 3.1 -
A paladin in SBV gear will have a average SBV of ~2000 buffed and with [Libram of Obstruction] up. Assuming the paladin has near base spell crit which I will round to 10%; SoTR will hit (on average including crits) ~3750dmg as holy damage, which has a 1.9x multiplier, therefore producing ~7125 threat (1187.5 TPS)

At 3.2-

On an average ULD protadin's SBV gear there will be around 600+ SBV. This will be doubled to 1200 resulting in a net gain of around 600SBV - which is surprise surprise a 30% increase in SBV.

Allowing us to mitigate that little bit more damage off those big ULD hits without making paladin threat unmatchable. Very clever move by blizz imo.



On a less relevant note greater block value only really re-enforces our role as an AoE add tank - which is lame cause I love MT'ing but due to the changes in AD (which I haven't looked at properly yet) it might give raid leaders the will to have a Pala MT again on those predictably harder hitting bosses

If anyone wants to see the mathematical specifics - PM me; would be nice to know if I'm on the right track.

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?

If the [Libram of Obstruction] is going to be buffed to 352 BV for 10 seconds, which ostensibly would give it a 100% uptime given a 9 second Judgement, wouldn't that make it quite a bit better than the [Libram of the Sacred Shield]'s 272 BV, which gains nothing from this buff?

Even if the LOSS's BV buff isn't tied to Holy Shield and won't go down early while taking out trash, it still doesn't gain anything since you'd already be at 100% uptime pre-patch anyway.

EDIT: Slight nit, but Arcos, that talent build you posted doesn't have Vindication, which is going to be a mandatory talent now since it's our version of Demoralizing Shout.

>THIS< is probably going to be the baseline Prot talent build.

Those 3 points in HOTC and 1 point in Imp BOM are just fillers to get to Ret tier 3 and Vindication, with 6 floating points for 2/2 Spiritual Attunement, POJ or the various threat talents.

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.

Very important we don't forget this, as items with block value and no block rating are very rare.
I have a whopping 0 items with passive block value on actually.
Here we go, made a wowhead filter of items with block value, no block rating and at least ilvl 226: Plate Armor - Items - World of Warcraft
results: [Conqueror's Aegis Handguards] and [Greaves of the Stonewarder] . Both itemised with parry rating (bah). I'll probably pick up tier gloves till freya hard mode ones drop now, but that's all this change does.

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.

Just be glad you can pick another one up for the modest sum of 15 heroism emblems?

I agree with Petrus in that on the fights where we care the most about mitigating as much as possible, our upped BV's still don't cut it. It seems it's still best to stack stam for progressing and hope to high heavens our healers can keep up with the damage, and the DPS down the boss as fast as possible. Good thing the epic gems will have 30 stam a pop.

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.

Things I can see from this:

Ardent Defender 'Cooldown'. Whilst this makes AD a no-brainer, it also makes tanking brainless. I already find tanking as a warrior much more challenging (in a good way) than as a paladin and having another automatic thing seems slightly.. demeaning? slotting us into the role of the easy tank.

Exorcism: No more Exorcism pickups . However, HoR now does the same thing (but better) than HoR+Exorcism did before. Still, we lose a tiny bit of pulling power or ability to pick up multiple adds.

Blessing of Sanctuary: Why can't this just be sorted out? This still isn't a good solution, as it STILL makes for awkward blessings. Make Sanctuary a passive effect on the paladin only. Make BoKings by a Prot pally reduce damage by 3%. Solved.

Block: Threat should stay roughly the same, but I shudder to think how mindless Naxx or Heroics will become soon. You probably won't need a healer in them anymore.

Seal of Vengeance: Threat buff! This will make reckoning and seals of the pure (relatively) much better talents now.
Seal of Righteousness. Can remain a tanking seal? Really? I haven't used it for tanking since early BC.
Seal of Command: ? Need some hardcore theorycrafting for Ret paladins here. Not that I'd tank with it, but it will be interesting to see what DPS each seal will now be capable of.

Couldn't it be that they'll add the same hp bonus to BOS as commanding shout?

On the subject of Ardent defender, I just can't see it go live under these conditions. The talent is simply amazing if it actually reduces every hit that would bring you below 35% hp by 30%. Perhaps they'll change the % by which it reduces incoming damage, they don't mention the 30% in the patch notes. It would have been more challenging and fun if they gave us an active clicky instead of the extra passive effect but you can't really look a gifted horse in the mouth and I remember seeing somewhere that they are still clinging on a bit to making paladins an easy accessible class.

edit: I fail at reading the patchnotes, BOS gives 10% stamina now, I must have missed it the first time I read them.

Unless SOR has had its coefficient increased or SOV's DOT has had its coefficient decreased, there's no way SOR is going to be better than SOV DOT+33% weapon damage.

As well, unless SOV's DOT has had its coefficient decreased, there's no way SoComm's 36% weapon damage is going to be better than SOV DOT+33% weapon damage, especially since JoComm's damage was mentioned as being reduced.

It seems that their new plan for Seals is:

SOV: Ret PvE Seal, since the DOT makes up for SoComm's 3% weapon damage advantage, and only a raid boss is going to sit still long enough for you to build up 5 SOV stacks to actually access the weapon damage procs.

Also the Prot tanking Seal, since it deals the most damage.

SoComm: Ret PvP Seal, since you can't rely on a target sitting still long enough for SOV to burst reliably. Reduced Judgement damage also means reduced PvP burst potential.

SOR: The odd-man-out yet again, to be replaced by SoComm as soon as a leveling Paladin hits level 20. Its mention as a tanking Seal sounds like someone misspoke about not being up-to-date on mechanics on the same scale as the Naxx-25 Prot Libram being a spell power boost to Consecration. Again, unless there's some massive as-yet-unveiled buff.

Do you happen to have a Rawr profile with that setup? I'd be interested to see what (big?) amounts of avoidance and possibly HP you're loosing with this setup.

The way I read it was that any hit that would bring you below 35% is reduced by an unspecified amount. The 30% refers to the amount of health the paladin would be "reset to" after a hit failed to kill if they have AD fully talented.

Updates (I do not know if it is appopriate to post the latest updates like this; but here goes nothing):

# Paladin T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Class: Paladin) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Righteous Defense ability by 2 sec.
# Paladin T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Class: Paladin) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Divine Protection ability by 30 sec.

# Paladin T9 Protection Relic (Hammer of The Righteous) (Class: Paladin) -- Each time you use your Hammer of The Righteous ability, you have a chance to gain 200 dodge rating for 18 sec.

Awesome 4P bonus and it looks like the other tanking classes are getting similiar set bonuses.

The new relic pretty much says it all. It is nice that Blizzard is finally adding some real choices in what relics we can use depending on the encounter and not the same old block value inspired itemization.

And while we are talking block value and block-sets:

One of the new trinkets found in file digging has a 450 strength/agility procc (your highest stat is chosen), and depending on the passive stats, it might become a nice addition/alternative to Greatness - even for prot pallies from a mitigation/threat point of view.

450 str would be ~370 BV (assuming it's modified by redoubt talent, which I believe it is). Not a huge amount of mitigation, but potentially significant threat, depending on the passive bonus of course. It would likely go to DPS first though.

4T9 seems potentially very powerful, while 2T9 seems relatively useless unless we're required to taunt >2 times in under 8 seconds. The relic also looks quite good, although I'd assume that it would be quite a low proc chance (10-15%), since >50% uptime on 200 dodge rating is a very significant bonus for the ranged slot.

Is it also going to reduce Forbearance?

I think we can all agree these changes are totally in the right direction for paladins being more accepted as tanks. (I think most players that visit this forum have convinced people no problem, but I think the general population still needs some convincing.

On Ardent Defender: "Hell...It's about tiiime." AD has always been one of those talents that while you might not be reluctant to take, in the back of your mind you think "it looks better than actually is". The leapfrogging I think puts a great deal of tanks (and healers) at ease. Though I still think that this buff (while it's a great buff) is going to be an interesting execution. I haven't been on PTR so maybe someone can provide more information.

With a 2 minute CD on an ability with no icon, I can see this as sometimes causing confusion, or just simply becoming the victim of another "RNG" mishap. Mainly I talk about those situations with a boss wailing on you and heals being spammed that maybe, instead of hitting your binding for DP (that your finger has been on top of a majority of the fight) you hope for your AD to kick in. Now that's all well and good when it works the first time. But I'd like to be able to see a "ARDENT DEFENDER" buff appear much like Cheat Death (and I hope it does). Though still, now without a timer to see (I imagine a mod will have to be created or something) I think it's problematic to know when maybe it will be up again unless you or someone else is keeping a timer.

Basically what I'm getting at, someone had mentioned earlier that it becomes no-brains tanking. An ability that is beyond your control can be both a blessing and a curse. I compare it to cheat death, because it's a similar ability. I wouldn't say it's all that crucial for a PVP talent for a DPS class to be that important to keep track of. If anything it's a nice buff in a situation where you think could go south.

But for tanks in PVE I don't think the same kind of ability will translate. Now I certainly like this bonus, but that's all I see it as, a RNG bonus that can sometimes help you, but can't be relied on, by player activated abilities like DP, PS, GS. etc. I think the leapfrogging is the better side of the change, albeit this isn't a bad one.

But maybe that's just what they are going for, a non gcd conscious ability. Time will tell!