I'm not quite sure what the plan of your prot/holy build is, but if it is healing, you should post it in the holy topic (but do read the topic first, builds like that have come and gone alot there).

As for your more traditional tanking build, you'll want full deflection, no reckoning (waste of points), imp devo aura (unless you have a holy/prot pala with it), JotJ (unless you can be 100% sure other people keep it up for you, always).
Anyway, nothing in your post is new or relevant to 3.2, talent discussions in current builds should be done in the old prot pala topic (which you should read first as well, since there have been multiple posts about optimal builds there).

This is to be a Prot/Retri build ment for PvP survibality/dmg in Arena. Same goes for Prot/Holy which should be ment for the same, with more bias forwards healing.

I had 100% uptime over 15 minutes on the training dummy with the dodge libram.

Simply autotattacking on dummy, my combat log of blade warding shows 42 procs out of 1001 swings, for a proc rate of 4.2% ish, which is, I believe, significantly higher than on live. For reference, 1.6 speed weapon, no haste.

There's something suspicious going on with it though, insofar as it produced signficiantly higher stacks than I would expect for that rate ( out of the 42 procs, 10/4/1/1 were 2/3/4/5 stacks respectively ). I'll do a longer run, but I suspect that having the buff up increases the proc rate.

You're still trying to compare things in a vacuum. You can't just take stam % talents and gear and then pretend that those are the only two things affecting the balance between pallies / warriors.

What about Last Stand? A % health scaling cooldown increases the value of stamina for warriors, why haven't you factored that in?

What about holy shield vs shield block? A paladin's BV can be counted towards his physical damage EH, while a warrior's can't. This is a reasonably significant difference and yet you're not attempting to factor it into gear.

How about set bonuses? Gear isn't exactly the same for both classes, warriors have access to 4T8.5 which is significant when used vs abilities like Plasma Blast. Does that mean that Paladins need a libram item that produces a similar effect on top of what it already does?

What about threat and how it's generated? Warriors place much higher emphasis on expertise, for instance. Should they get it free on gear then?

You're not trying to homogenise the classes here; if your goal is perfect equality then forget it right now, because that would be a boring game. There are countless differences between Paladins and Warriors and you can't simply ignore some of them, yet use others as a justification to disregard stats on a gun like that, it's flat out dishonest, and as others have said, holds no weight whatsoever.

I don't have Rawr, but I did a little fooling around with WoWhead's item comparison tools and TankPoints. Here's the stats for an unbuffed human prot paladin in the modified version of the high-blockvalue gear set from this post. This includes standard enchants and gem choices to activate all socket bonuses with stamina (first priority), defense rating, and dodge rating.

33,564 hp
21,171 armor
543 defense skill

8.75% miss (these are all vs a level 83 mob)
19.35% dodge
18.89% parry
22.07% block
30.92% hit (which will drop below 30% with minimal buffing, i.e., kings)

3309 blockvalue with libram and T8 4pc bonus active

This is assuming the +armor meta, not the +blkval one. It also assumes you have both of the massive-stamina trinkets from Ulduar-10 and -25 (worth roughly 1.8khp each with buffs).

Somewhat difficult to assemble, and it's kind of skating on the edge of crittability (though I went with the +armor enchant to cloak; you could squeeze out a little more breathing room with +16 defense). It's also somewhat lower on pure avoidance than some might prefer. Still, I'd gladly trade away ~5% dodge to get that kind of blockvalue.

Whether it exists in reality and whether it's a valid design vision are two different things. Personally I agree with you that prot warriors are getting the short end of the stick right now, but that's not really the point. The point is that tanking librams have been "overbudgeted" relative to prot-warrior stat-sticks for awhile now. Given that kind of consistent pattern, I'm not sure what conclusion one could draw other than that the devs like it that way.

Assuming Ardent Defender enters the game as is, we're going to have some interesting options when it comes to what's our ideal maximum health. The number of hits that we can take until death goes down from 3 to 2 if a hit is between 58% to 65% of our maximum HP. Therefore one can increase the number of hits taken before death by avoiding this HP region.



Let's say you have 48000 HP raid buffed and Vezax hits for 31000 during Surge of Darkness without cooldowns. The 58% to 65% range would be a hit between 27840 to 31200 damage. Therefore we could take two hits until death. If we increased our maximum HP to 53500, the number of hits taken until death would increase to 3. Similarly if we lowered our maximum HP to 47500, the number of hits taken until death would increase to 3.

There are a lot of variables that can throw this strategy off such as Inspiration, Sacred Shield, or Power Word: Shield. I doubt many people will regem or reenchant to an ideal HP with respect to a given 3.2 hard mode encounter, however it's not much of a problem to click off Kings, Fortitude, or Food if you're borderline between the 2 to 3 hit to live range. Another thing you could do is switch out Stoneblood for an armor/agi or defense rating/agi elixir combo. Or if you're really cheap, a Flask of Chromatic Wonder. Also since block value is applied after AD's damage reduction effect, another effective option would be to switch out your stamina gemmed avoidance gear for strength gemmed BV gear.

Gear makes a huge difference and you'll need to publish a lot more information to explain why your results contradict this mathlab work

EDIT: shouldn't trust reading comprehension while tired.

How is it contradicting? I'm saying Crusade still is the superior for threat, versus SotP.

I can only imagine fine tuning my total HP on a per boss basis if there wasn't so much variability in what that incoming damage will be. Going in block capped would let you predictlably rely on a specific hit per boss attack much more than leaving some unblocked hit on the table, but the item points you put into removing hit from the table are much better put into pure avoidance imo. So now you are talking about blocked and unblocked hits from bosses with different probabilities that you would have to weigh against your total HP size for AD calculations. [assuming AD absorb is after block reduction]
And if I read the ptr reports correctly, AD's 2 minute downtime after a save will make you all the more squishy. Admittedly, you ought to be dead so I ain't complaining, but I wont give up any EH just in the hopes that AD saves me more frequently.
Count me in for avoidance since what I really need after AD kicks in isnt more hp, but more *time* for heals to land.
I just chalk up AD as a much more reliable way to get through the RNG fail that is 2 hits in a row landing before any heals land.

Looks like they fixed the little Divine Protect/Forbearance issue with our tier bonus.

Definitely helps us on the cooldown department.

Can anyone on PTR tell me if SoV / SoC 33% weapon damage is actual spell damage or physical damage?

Also I personally think this will be one of the new prot pally specs for 3.2.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Take Divinity either though its a fluff talent but that's my oppinion, but you can move it around to Reckoning if you so choose, or take points from DS / DG and move it to Reckoning, or take those points and move them into Ret.

However a threat spec would probably be soemthing like this.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

In this spec you have a couple options, you can put the 2 points from DS and DG and put them into reckoning. You can put the 2 points into divinity. You can take a couple points from Crusade and put them into Seals of the Pure (Has anyone on PTR done damage comparisons between Seals of the Pure and Crusade?)

I'm not sure what to give up in order to get full Seals of the Pure, but I've played with reckoning a lot and you really only need is one point in it and you'll see it fairly often. Also we don't want as fast as possible weapon for the SoV weapon damage part. I forgot maybe someone can tell me the exact math about it, but for physical damage you want the slowest weapon possible when reckoning procs. For our holy damage we might just want the slowest weapon that can use up all the charges to reckoning for maximizing reckoning procs with SoV.

A Question to PTR guys: does the Seals of the Pure modify the damage Seal of the Righteousness deal when fully stacked? Ie. do the attacks generate 37.95% instead of 33% additional Holy DMG.

Cpnplanet: It's spell damage, 33% of weapon damage as holy damage once 5 stacks are reached.

New PTR build. Its buggy as shit! But a few nice tweaks.

Judgements of the Just has been split into its own seperate debuff (Like heart of the crusader), hopefully his should prevent the current nightmare of judgement coordination with other paladins (no more judging justice in raids, yay!). This combined with my current spec means that judgement becomes a remarkably powerful ability, applying the following debuffs:

Judgement of Wisdom/Light
Heart of the Crusader
Judgements of the Just
Vindication (Equivalent to fully talented demo shout/roar)

Also, hand of reckoning still does damage to targets who are taunt immune due to diminishing returns. I didn't manage to find a naturally taunt-immune mob as the instance servers were broke.

No, as of the last test build it only applied to the DoT and Judgement.

So essentially Ivona, if I have a 500 - 700 (non-raid weapon damage) it should be 165 - 231 holy damage after 5 stacks is up?

That would correlate with my own results yes.

Going with your own values and using 198 average damage for the 5 stack hit, the extra hit is an extra 536.58 threat per swing. Happily blizzard have also changed the SoV dot application to use melee hit mechanics (Although it still can not be dodged or parried) so stacking up a 5 stack is even quicker. Additionally, the 5stack proc can not be dodged or parried. I'll test whether the 5 strike can proc off of special abilities tomorrow.

Has anyone tested whether or not using the Cheat Death aspect still puts the damage reduction aspect on cooldown as well?

Latest reports from the PTR are reporting that the talent is currently bugged so it will provide the damage reduction after fatal damage has been taken. Not only that but it seems that the buff is currently erroneously stacking with itself allowing multiples copies on at once and massively reducing damage.

Yeah, it's still extremely good. Though if you compare it to the current AD, the only real difference is the removal of the "leapfrog" effect, which I never thought was that big a deal.

Anyway, I think this definitely strengthens the case for Blood Draining as the weapon enchant of choice. It would be better if the BD heal triggered at 30% or 25% so that the heal would always keep you in AD range, but this change at least removes the "BD can kill you" argument.

EDIT: Also looks like the 2-piece bonus was changed now to a 2-second reduction on the cooldown of HoR rather than RD.

That doesn't seem incredibly useful to me (regardless of which taunt gets the effect) since between the two spells we pretty much always have one available anyway. Even in high-activity multi-mob situations like Thorim's arena, I don't think I've ever had a case where both RD and HoR were on cooldown.

Our level of "taunt availability" is already substantially higher than any other tanking class. Not necessarily without reason; if we're supposed to be the awesomesauce AoE tanks then it makes sense that we'd need a bit more taunting than others. But getting a set bonus to let us taunt even more is really not giving us much.

Without considering the fact that Seal of the Pure is a lower DPS/TPS increase than Convinction/Crusade even with the new SoV, you are leaving out Vindication, which any raid-tanking prot paladin should absolutely include in his spec.

The cookie cutter raiding Prot paladin 3.2 spec will be like the following
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
With the option to not take Divine Guardian/Sacrifice and take 3/5 Reckoning or 3/5 Divinity or Imp HoJ or whatever the player prefers, and one point in retri either for 2/2 Imp Judgement or for 1/5 Benediction or 1/2 Imp BoM.
The spec leaves 6 points to spend as the paladin prefers.




Set bonuses speaking, they are a bit underpowered. I'm not referring to Paladin ones, but to the tank ones in general.
All tanks get 2 seconds cd reduction on taunt... for what exactly? Are we going to require spam taunting in Coliseum? I certainly hope not.
The second set bonus is a reduction in cd for a mitigation tool... right after they said they want to move away from the cooldown fights.

Ah well... we'll see.

Taunt cooldown reductions seem odd, given the DR on taunts.

I very much agree. In situations where both tanks taunt, someone still pulls threat and the next taunt gets resisted you're pretty screwed. It sounds rare, but it has happened to me often enough to care. Also, afaik the DR affects the effect duration as well. Some times when I've been on taunting asssignment for p1 Yoggie, immediately after I taunt the mob stands still for a second, and all of us sudden the other tank's threat has gone up by way more than reasonably possible. Anyone else had this issue? (He was a DK, and mentioned the only thing he did was interupt the mob's cast.)

But yeah, back to subject. Even if 3.2 needs more pick-up taunting, I'd rather have a 2-set bonus that keeps excorsim instant. For me it feels like a huge nerf to have it with a cast time, not only because it's a nice part of a threat rotation, but also because the pick-up utility is excellent.

I'm thinking 0/51/20, with the option of taking the two points in PoJ into JotJ, depending on raid setup (for mages' TotW.)