Prot - Why a fast weapon?Follow

I understand that protection paladins used to prefer a fast weapon when Seal of Righteousness was the tanking seal of choice. Fast weapon = more hits with holy damage = more threat.

With the 3.0.2 changes (specifically HotR and Shield of Righteousness) we're able to front-load threat on a main target very quickly. Seal of Vengeance needs to get up to 5 stacks and then it just needs to be refreshed once every 15 seconds to maintain the threat benefit. Since HotR is based on weapon damage, I'm wondering if anyone has tried using a slower 1h weapon and compared the threat they generate. From what I've seen, you'd be losing out on the potential benefit of defense and/or dodge and/or parry from a "tanking" weapon (all of which seem to fall into the 1.4-1.6 speed range0, but none of the tanking weapons I've seen so far offer so much by way of additional avoidance that it couldn't be made up for somewhere else.

Or am I just horribly delusional?

The only thing to be gained by using a slow wpn is fewer parries as you'll have fewer white attacks. But with expertise being fairly prevalent on the new tanking gear you should be expertise capped when using the glyph of SoV or so close it won't make much difference.

It used to be Righteousness for trash, Vengeance for bosses, but not anymore. With Vengeance stacking on every hit (including HotR - yes, all 3 targets) it's perfectly fine to use Vengeance on everything.

I don't even have Righteousness on my action bar anymore. The thought occurred to me that if I really needed to crank out some extra threat, I could stack Vengeance to 5 and then seal Righteousness (threat from Vengeance tick + threat from Righteousness proc). Re-seal Vengeance after 10-12 seconds to refresh the debuff stack and then back to Righeousness again. I'm not sure what (if any) benefit that would have, but I do know that it would be a very mana-intensive proposition. In reality, I haven't had any problems with threat that weren't caused by trigger happy dps, especially vs. single targets. It's something I might play with in the future, but I'm still working at getting 100% comfortable tanking with my pally after leveling 70-77 as Ret.

Not sure how people are still having threat issues... Only time I ever need Vengence is a rare occassion in raid content. Most of the time I sit a good 30-50k threat above the next person below me and that is true even with something like seal of wisdom... Only time I have had threat issues was with a ****** ret paladin who would run in with divine storm before I was even in range of the mobs -_- Though after a few deaths he realized he was doing something stupid and there were not any problems the rest of the run. My current weapon is a 1.6 delay tanking weapon (sta/str/def) I just find the seal use to be situational but I always judge wisdom since that helps the most people usually.

Blood with a 1H weapon really shouldn't be giving you any valuable TPS or DPS at all... In theory it should be less than Righteousness. I'll look into the mechanic and see if it's changed recently though.

As for threat issues and needing a threat seal... no -- I have yet to see threat become even remotely close to an issue (including running with DPSers who have nearly everything they want out of current content). You know what else isn't even remotely close to an issue? Mana while tanking. The most valuable seal for me while tanking is then Seal of Corruption because it provides me with the biggest boost to DPS.

Yes... DPS. Not TPS. I'm not even kidding when I say that contributing a valuable amount to the overall DPS is more important for the tank now than focussing on surviving or threat. It's easy to survive with a little pre-planning and threat is hardly an issue. It's an odd odd state of affairs, but it's the way it is.

As for a fast weapon. Weapon speed isn't a notable issue anymore. One the one hand, you get 5 stacks of Blood Corruption up a little quicker. On the other hand, you might get parried a little more. It's not really too much of an issue. I personally prefer faster, because it generates a slightly smoother stream of threat than a slower weapon (not MORE threat, just smoother -- and hardly noticable at that) but whatever, right?

The new seal system also means that judging SoV will deal a significant amount of holy damage even when there are no SoV stacks on the target. Prior to this, judging Vengeance with no stacks dealt no damage, which was why you "opened" with SoR, to frontload your burst threat, and then switched to SoV for bosses/tough mobs.

The way SoV works now is that the judgment deals X damage, and each application of SoV increases X by 10%. There is no actual upper limit on this, so if I had three paladins with a 5-stack of SoV each, the judgment damage would be increased by 150%. This is pretty neat, and another reason for retadins to juggle SoV into their rotation should mana allow. SoR is now totally redundant.

Using Martyr/Blood gives you no tangible advantage other than more mana from receiving more heals from permanently hurting yourself. Generally, you aim to take as little damage as possible, so I don't see what SoB would give you.