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Q u o t e:
Something to consider is that vindication might be a very useful talent for tankadins in 3.2.

Also exorcism will no longer be usable in rotations (unless there are changes before 3.2).

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Yeah Vindication could be somewhat viable although In raids no paladin tank will take it as a Warr will provide it or a Retribution Paladin will. Better to grab the extra threat point.

And yeah exorcism will no longer be useable in rotation. but perhaps as a pulling too for 1mob.

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Q u o t e:
Yeah Vindication could be somewhat viable although In raids no paladin tank will take it as a Warr will provide it or a Retribution Paladin will. Better to grab the extra threat point.

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Assuming you have one of them - which is not necessarily the case in 10 man.

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With the gems, by skim reading you missed the important part at the start where I explain that whilst we can consider them we should only use them if we need a particular stat Expertise is viable if we have not reached the 26 Expertise value needed as a soft cap (26 with Glyph of Seal of vengeance active). Also The 8Agi/12 Sta and 8 Dodge/12 Sta gems were on the list jsut were written under the purple gem section since that's their colour.

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Expertise is overall around same threat that pure AP even before soft-cap, it also shares color with strenght which is our best threat stat and which also gives mitigation (not much, but some BV). Expertise gems are never viable.

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Q u o t e:

Mongoose has NEVER been very good for a protection paladin it relies far too much on us using melee hits and half our casts in a rotation are "spells". 26 Agi is viable I guess so will add but don't want to suggest people really go down that route. Accuracy is the real deal for threat and sure Agi gives a little dodge / armor but it's pretty negligeable we should maximise hit as prio. I've added more info on Baldewarding that I've read about from theorycrafting sites and moved it to the bottom of the list to be seen as a last choice enchant.

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Mongoose gives overall More avoidance (thye're really close though) even to us prot pallies than the +26agi. They're pretty much as good, the other one just gives it's effect more in "bigger lumps". Both give more avoidance than bladewarding.
Accuracy is the Best Threat.
Agi/mongoose Best Avoidance.
No "Agi is best/ Accuracy is allways best!", it depends on which one you need more.
Hodir being a #!%## thanks to all the damage scaling to casters? accuracy rocks.
Doing a hard hitter and boss is spanking you silly like GM's on dope? Avoidance is cool.

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I'm not adding +18Sta to the list. It's a poormans' Enchant and Suggesting taking it is lunacy for many reasons. Sure we don't "need" extra threat, however we should have it, the higher your TPS the faster and harder your DPS can nuke which will speed up boss fights and lead to more success. It also helps you sto stay more competitive on fights where you are off tanking and need to be 2nd on threat. and Armsman also adds the avoidance from parry as well as the threat increase.

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If no one is being threat capped (or more than 1 actually since if it's just one mad mage at hodir you can salvation him), no TPS does not speed boss fight at all.

Sure, if you need more threat, Armsman is the first enchant to get for threat (accuracy would be 2nd).
If you do not need the threat however, it is absolutely useless bar the small parry, where as more EH can allways save your ass (i've personally been at 9/41 000 health in ulduar, +227 hp is not lunacy).

Another choice here could be agility to gloves since it gives nice amount of stat points (20 agi vs. 18stam. over half more itempoints really).

Anyway, need to see how next patch works out, it can significantly change the relative values of threat stats and also affect what specs we roll out with (i personally will grab vindiaction for instance).

i.e. How big part of our damage will be SoV dot then? (no crit scaling), How much of our tps will be from SoV overall (sotp won't beat crusade, but might start beating conviction by margin if someone goes only 10-15 points in ret). strenght loses some threat power (shor goes from 130=>100%), while BV gains (double tps w00t).

Will our overall threat go up (less need for threat gems/enchants and if zomg ownage threat, can even go imp. LoH spec.) or down (need threat gems and enchants and spec)

Will reckoning finally become viable again thanks to SoV-5-stack-damage (now we'd start want tank weapons with slower speeds, last over 2.0 speed tank weapon was broken promise iirc).

And if reckoning becomes viable again, would it and AD make Blood warding even better than now (nothing wrong with it really allready), how about Bladewarding, would it actually become better avoidance than the agi enchants?

Interesting times again. I might kind of wait it out on this thread for a week to see how things end up. I doubt all the patch notes make it through the PTR without tweakings.

Great posts! Cant say more .. keep up good work!

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Q u o t e:
Expertise is overall around same threat that pure AP even before soft-cap, it also shares color with strenght which is our best threat stat and which also gives mitigation (not much, but some BV). Expertise gems are never viable.

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I do agree although the point I am making is not about threat. You want the soft-cap of 16 Expertise rating before counting the 10 from Glyph of Seal of Vengeance.

Sure Expertise means you are dodge / Parried by less which is threat, the more important factor here is that it adds mitigation by stopping the Parry-haste attacks from bosses that occur when you get parried and the bosses swing-timer is reset. So sorry but I believe they are viable if you have not got Expertise Value needed from your gear.

I understand what you're saying about mongoose. But I think the problem is that it works far better for Warriors than it does for Paladins. The other serious problem is that it's a proc so whilst it provides more agility per second than the +26 Agility, it's in a lump value or "spike" now the issue with this is that you cannot control when this spike occurs so it might not be at the same time as the "spike dmg" you recieve from the boss, this imho make +26 Agility a far more certain and attractive proposal.

And yeah still waiting more info on the patch and test-servers for mroe info. It'll be very interesting to see if we're actually recieving a nerf or not. On paper Vengeance being buffed looks great as It should help with AoE threat, but unfortunately still not snap aggo threat spell (Consecration being pretty terrible these days). The nerf to Hammer of the Righteous might prove to be very significant too.

More info / updates will occur when I've got more information to give you after the patch goes live.

Hmm, I though the How To Paladin movies explained the class well enough.

Nah, just kidding, nice work

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Q u o t e:


I do agree although the point I am making is not about threat. You want the soft-cap of 16 Expertise rating before counting the 10 from Glyph of Seal of Vengeance.

Sure Expertise means you are dodge / Parried by less which is threat, the more important factor here is that it adds mitigation by stopping the Parry-haste attacks from bosses that occur when you get parried and the bosses swing-timer is reset. So sorry but I believe they are viable if you have not got Expertise Value needed from your gear.

I understand what you're saying about mongoose. But I think the problem is that it works far better for Warriors than it does for Paladins. The other serious problem is that it's a proc so whilst it provides more agility per second than the +26 Agility, it's in a lump value or "spike" now the issue with this is that you cannot control when this spike occurs so it might not be at the same time as the "spike dmg" you recieve from the boss, this imho make +26 Agility a far more certain and attractive proposal.

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If boss parries, it doesn't reset his swing timer.
It hastens the attack he's currently doing by 40%.
Now, this can happen when boss is just starting the hit, or when he's ending the hit allready.
a parry averages out to around 20% hasted attack.
Now, every parry basically makes us take 0,2 extra attack. (actually wowwiki states it at 0.24 so i guess that's right, forgot the "if under 20% left of attack" part).

For comparison on how dangerous parry haste is, currently we take something like 1% more damage thanks to parries. That's with it expertise soft-capped..
(Think it this way, 10% parry chance to take 24% of boss attack damage, so overall 2.4%. except we also avoid our normal 55-60% of these thanks to avoidance=>overall we take some 1% extra damage).
so if you remove 1% parry from boss, you effectively decrease damage taken by 0,1% or so.

If it's mitigation/damage avoidance that you want in red sockets, it's stam+agi/stam+dodge what you're looking at.

Next patch will buff expertise threat for us thanks to the attacks after SoV-5-stack causing holy damage so the damage from our melee hits gets buffed. Haven't yet calculated that out though.

Also, agility has better ratio towards dodge and crit for us than warriors.
Sure, we proc mongoose/+agi less than they do, but we also gain more avoidance than they do for every proc. And the "chunk of dodge at once" is RNG as you say. But having that dodge chance all the time from +agi is also just rng chance to dodge. Personal preferrence which one anyone likes imo since the overall avoidance from them is quite similar.

Anyway, don't take my arguments personally, i just play devils advocate to improve the guides. I just feel it's not useful to confuse starting paladins with list of too many gems for example, when the ones that are generally best are (in no particular order):
stamina, stam+def, stam+dodge,stam+agi,stam+str., in order of EH, avoidance, threat.

Gz, on the blue, i hope you keep updating this. One of the very few nicely detailed prot guides i've seen. Also ill make sure to get this bump from time to time so newcomers to pala tanking know what to do :D.
Also on another note im giving pala tanking a break and rerolling horde ( still havent decided what do get, maybe another pala :O). 3.2 if its stays like this will be the Era of the paladin MT. Even thou we lost exorcism i think SoC, will make up for it in the long run. Peace and keep 696 :)

Forgot on last post:

would you add a "If using this glyph, you may want to use it with a macro of:

/target >YourCharacterName<
/cast hand of salvation
/cancelaura hand of salvation

to only use it for short duration attacks where you need quick mitigation for short time."

Or word it some other way. We do rock on threat, but letting that spell run its whole course is not good practice. Preferrably leave that macro right under the glyph or refer to the macro with a "also consider using a macro to cancel the spell after you don't need the damage mitigation critacally to not lose excess threat."

also on formatting/nitpicking part:

noticed the BV and AP from old potency were off abit, we only get 15% talented strenght so 20str=46 ap, and thanks to that same strenght talent and redoubt, the BV is off too.
Prob. better to just state the raid buffed values since we can supply the buff that scales it ourselves anyway.

Other thing would be you list gems as sockets:
i.e. there's no such thing as orange sockets, there are orange gems, the are red/yellow sockets where they match. maybe change those.

On gear, rings: Signet of Winter is an Ulduar BoE. Expensive, but I bought it anyway, and a few of the items you've listed are far more expensive anyway ;)

I may be wrong here, but I think you avoided the craptastic Tempered Titansteel Treads among your feet armour. However, these are in reality a very common item to get for a beginning 80 as they're at least better than what you'll expect from a normal difficulty five-man.


On enchants. I believe that scribes have a profession perk that gives them better than Sons of Hodir shoulder enchants.

Minor nitpick on the talent-advice. The main argument for taking 2/2 Divine Guardian (and I'm with you on it being an optional filler for mandatory talents further down) is that it 1) adds a minor mitigation for SS, 2) doubles the duration for SS, thus making it meaningful to selfcast prior to a pull and 3) "inferior" SS stacks with a holydin's specced SS, so you can have BOTH your own shield AND the shield from your holydin tank-healer.
Now as arguing that a some extra ten thousand hp mitigated over a minute is important in Ulduar 25 is about as retarted as stacking BV there I'll abstain from that. However, that extra mitigation can make or break the run for a green 80 just heading into heroics. They can always respec later down the road.

wat.

Big text but realy good info.

stiky plox.

... and you can has a cookie (:

Thanks for the info.

What would be extremely appreciated, however, is a sub-guide for the levelling tankadin. It's all well and good, for example, having 0/5 Divinity as a raid tank but it's really handy for smaller instances where you don't have several very well-geared healers, for example.

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Divine Sacrifice 1/1 - Redirects 30% of all raid Damage to the Paladin upto a max of 150% of their HP. Its a raid DPS saver for when a lot of raid healing needed. It can be used with Divine Shield to mean you actually take 15% but save the raid from the full 30%. It's optional but nice to take. Can be used also with Divine Protection to mean you take 0% Dmg while saving raid from 30%, but this causes temporary aggro loss so very situational.

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Think the abilities (in bold) need to be switched in position, good job on the guide though :)

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Q u o t e:


Yeah Vindication could be somewhat viable although In raids no paladin tank will take it as a Warr will provide it or a Retribution Paladin will. Better to grab the extra threat point.

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Any protection paladin worth their salt WILL have Vindication in their build.

It's the best attack power reduction debuff in the game.


Retribution does not have points to pick 2/2 Vindication in 3.2.

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Q u o t e:

I do agree although the point I am making is not about threat. You want the soft-cap of 16 Expertise rating before counting the 10 from Glyph of Seal of Vengeance.

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you get 6 expertise from talents (combat expertise i think it is, right below ardent defender).

Great guide.
I'd like to add Greater Inscription of the Gladiator (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44957) to shoulder enchants. It's purchasable with 10,000 honor from an Officer Accessories Quartermaster in SW or OG.

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Q u o t e:


Any protection paladin worth their salt WILL have Vindication in their build.

It's the best attack power reduction debuff in the game.


Retribution does not have points to pick 2/2 Vindication in 3.2.

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Nice to see you lurking here Worldie!

Yeah have to agree, the vindication suggestion came just after details were announced as upcomming changes and before anyone had the chance to test the changes on the PTR.

I will of course be updating the Talent spec and picture to show the changes when all kinks have been ironed out and the "optimal spec" has been fully agreed upon over at Maintankadin.

Personally I'm still playing with specs trying to work out how to fit Vindication into my spec, likely I'll drop to 1/5 Conviction and keep 2/2 Pursuit of Justice.

I'd much rather see it as a tier 2 talent as we already have 1 talent there that we use as a throw-away just to move onto tier 3 in retribution.

Keep info and comments coming all!

Apollya

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Q u o t e:
Great guide.
I'd like to add Greater Inscription of the Gladiator (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44957) to shoulder enchants. It's purchasable with 10,000 honor from an Officer Accessories Quartermaster in SW or OG.

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Added

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Q u o t e:


you get 6 expertise from talents (combat expertise i think it is, right below ardent defender).

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Yes you do, although 6 Expertise is not the 16 you ideally want before 10 is added from the glyph of Seal of vengeance.