Tanking post content patchFollow

Alright, so we know that the new talents will be coming out shortly, rather further in advance of the expansion than last time. Inscription will be coming with it, obviously.

What this means for Protection Paladins in particular could be quite significant; with the Stamina-to-Spellpower conversion talent that will then be available, will it be possible to stack pure Warrior gear and be a successful raidtank? At the current 30% conversion that gives the average post-Kara Paladin tank around an extra 350-400 spellpower without adding anything else on at all.

I'd like some opinions on whether I should just start forgetting about that Paladin tank spellpower gear and just go for the Warrior stuff with more Sta and avoidance on it.

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Ah not so, the change to Blessing of Sanctuary lets you regenerate 2% mana every time you Dodge, Block or Parry. For a Protadin that equals a very great deal of utility and mana regeneration.

you're right that avoidance will have added usefulness. however, considering haveing a certain level of avoidance (i.e. 102.4%) will no longer be a matter of life and death stam and str can be stacked in place of some of your avoidance, block especially since it mitigates the least amount of damage. avidance will always be impotant for a tank. tanks tank because they don't take so much damage. however, if i let my avoidance go down by 10% block to give me more stam and STR (threat) i'm not risking crushing blows anymore and now i have more health to deal with casters and more threat to make sure i don't lose any mobs to dps/healers. i'm not saying avoidance will be unimporant, just not as much so as now. besides, if i dodge i get 100 mana (with a 5k mana pool). if i get hit for 1k instead i can get healed for 1k which will get me 100 mana...on pulls with softer hitting targets avoidance will be more mana, but on most bosses getting hit will still be the most mana regen. we just need to make sure we have enough avoidance and stam that the healers can keep up with the damage we take. these numbers are at 70... i'm pretty sure at 80 our HP will scale much higher especially with warrior gear than our mana will. healing mana return will end up way ahead of mana return from avoidance... BoSanc isn't better than being healed. its merely a way to help better geared tanks not hurt so badly from mana/rage/runic energy starvation. that said i'm very glad they redesigned it to this :)

honestly, i'm not exactly sure if BC bosses will still crush or not. either way though starting to collect warrior tanking gear doesn't mean needing to vendor off our pally gear. getting a stam set doesn't mean we can't have an uncrushable set also. at the very least we'll be better prepared for instances while lvling agan in WotLK if we start collecting now.

Answering my own question - according to the Prot Paladin discussion on elitistjerks, the change in crushing blows should be part of the content patch. And the talent tree hasn't changed as much as I'd feared, so it looks like pallies can concentrate on the changes with threat mechanics without worrying overmuch about changes in avoidance mechanics.

But yeah, we don't see much warrior gear sharded even now, but I will be making sure that it's even less in the coming weeks.

From what i remember the reason pallies should stack strength is shield of the righteous. Str adds to block value, block value adds to damage, damage adds to threat. As far as crushing blows are concerned they aren't completely gone they just moved up a level. Currently on live they are used by mobs at least 3 levels higher than you, which all raids bosses are. In wotlk they will be used by mobs 4 levels above you. I've seen no mention of raising the level of raid bosses, so who knows if this mechanic will come into play at all.

yeah, 1 str will be worth .65 BV with shield specialization which will mitigate damage and add threat via our shield slam (shield of the righteous). it wil be worth .30 extra damage on SoR, i forget the coefficient for SoV. it will be worth .08 damage per tick on consecration. and of course, just to add one more thing, our melee damage will also increase (.14 dps - about .25 damage per swing with our typical weapon speeds). and of course it will add .76 damage to judgement. this last one i'm not sure about. if someone can correct me if i'm wrong that the AP component is 38% of our AP that'd be handy. all together str may convert to threat nearly as well as SD will. maybe even better. keep in ming kings will add 10% more str and 3% more AP if you have the glyph... ShoR and our blocks will be 10% more than my numbers here and SoR, SoV, Consecration, melee and judgements will all be 13% better than the numbers i have here.