[Lore]

This is a collection of what I feel are the last few tweaks the Protection Paladin needs to be "finished." This is based largely on my experiences in Beta, both as a tank and as a DPS.

Mitigation
I'm only going to mention this briefly, as Blizzard has stated several times already that they're working on another mitigation pass. Prot Paladins are ever so slightly on the low end of the mitigation spectrum at the moment. We only have 6% built-in physical damage reduction from Improved Righteous Fury, compared to the Warrior's 10% from Defensive Stance and the Druid's 12% (15%?) from Protector of the Pack. If Block is meant to be how we are to make up that difference, our Block needs to be increased by a fair bit, as we barely break even with Warriors in overall damage reduction from blocking.

We're also falling behind a fair bit (along with Druids, I believe) on the spell mitigation front. We simply can't stand up to Death Knights and Warriors against caster mobs, especially where Spell Reflect is available. I like seeing Spell Reflect usable more frequently, and Death Knights have suffered through enough nerfs already, so it seems the best option here is to boost Prot Paladin (and possibly Feral Druid) spell mitigation a little. Personally, if we're to be the "block tank", I'd like to see some portion of our block value applied to spell damage somehow.

Reckoning
Wrath thus far is shaping up to be the final nail in Reckoning's coffin. With no real threat modifier on physical damage, internal cooldowns on Seal of Wisdom and Seal of Light, and Seal of Vengeance/Corruption becoming our primary tanking seal, extra melee swings really aren't that useful anymore. They're definitely not worth 5 talent points for a 10% chance on hit. Something needs to be done with Reckoning to make it worth consideration, or it will be dropped from the Prot Paladin build entirely. It doesn't have to be anything amazing; a good fix might be to just make the extra swings do Holy damage.

Taunting
Righteous Defense is an awesome tool that works well until you have to work with another tank. The Paladin's lack of a single-target precision taunt requires a substantial amount of extra coordination out of Warrior, Druid, and Death Knight tanks working with a Protection Paladin. Worse, it's nearly impossible for a Protection Paladin to work properly with another Protection Paladin in multi-target situations like trash packs, or even boss encounters like Four Horsemen where tanks have to taunt bosses off of each other. One Paladin ends up with everything, while the other just whacks away trying to build enough threat to peel the mob they're trying to get back. The end result: Prot Paladins are annoying to work with. We need a single-target taunt of some sort, even if it's on a long cooldown or shares cooldowns with Righteous Defense.

Righteous Fury
Warriors don't have to rebuff Defensive Stance, Druids don't have to rebuff Bear Form, Death Knights don't have to rebuff Frost Presence, Paladins shouldn't have to rebuff Righteous Fury. The fact that it's dispellable occasionally causes problems as well (first few packs in Blood Furnace, final boss of Old Hillsbrad). I'd really like to see this made more along the lines of Shadowform or Hunter aspects, as an undispellable "Lasts until cancelled" buff. I'd even take just a duration increase at this point. I'm tired of losing aggro because my 30-minute buff wore off in the middle of a fight and I didn't notice.

Blessings
The Paladin class has 3 unique buffs that stack with everything (Wisdom, Kings, Sanctuary). Two will likely be considered required for min/max progression (Wisdom and Kings), and the third (Sanctuary) is a second blessing from the Prot tree which will not likely be castable in many situations (as the Prot Pally will probably be the one with Kings as well). Holy Paladins sacrifice a lot to pick up Kings (at best, they lose 5% spell crit). Ret Paladins can pick up Kings fairly easily, but will probably want to buff Improved Might instead. This is problematic for raid composition.

My suggestion would be to make Blessing of Wisdom not stack with Mana Spring Totem (they're nearly identical in function), and to slightly rework both Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild to be identical -- Add the armor and possibly the resistance bonus to Kings (resistance bonus doesn't stack with auras anyway, so that might not be necessary), and make Mark of the Wild 2% stats baseline with a 10% bonus at full Imp MotW.

Direction When Not Tanking
The Protection Paladin seems to be somewhat torn at the moment as to what its role is supposed to be when you just don't need another tank. Warriors, Druids, and Death Knights are all being pointed towards DPS as the non-tanking utility, largely because it serves the new "Tanks as DPS" direction the game is taking quite well. Protection Paladins are being mostly pointed that way, with our two new offensive spells and all-around DPS increase, but we still have one talent deep in the tree that gives us a Spellpower bonus from Stamina as well as increased effect of critical heals. We're currently taking it for the little bit of threat increase it gives, but the healing bonus seems misguided. Having Prot Paladins off-healing simply doesn't fit well in the overall scheme of things. We need to be put firmly in an off-DPS role when not tanking.

[Amabar]

To take your idea on blessings one step further, you still have blessing of sanctuary as a completely unique prot pally only buff. As blizzard has stated, they want parity of ALL buffs so that one class is not brought just for that buff. It was said on the forums before that some guilds may even go so far as to buff BoSanc with an alt pally and log them off for the raid (my guild uses blessing bots for sunwell all the time so I KNOW this can/will happen).

If it's impossible to gain parity for all three of those blessings, I'd say blessing of sanctuary is the one that is most in need of it. Wisdom isn't a problem for any holy pally to buff, and you can easily afford two retadins to have kings and might. Of course, the ideal situation would be to alleviate the paladins "buffbot" designation entirely, and give them the joy of full parity that all other classes are, heh, "enjoying".

Oh by the way, first time poster, long time reader. You guys do great work, keep it up!

[Lore]

Well, the thing about Blessing of Sanctuary is I don't believe it's so amazing of a buff that min/max guilds are going to say "We need to get a Prot Paladin to buff Sanctuary so we can beat this encounter".

The largest problem facing Paladin blessing management is hidden in your solution: You need 3-4 Paladins in the raid to get all of the "required" Blessings. This is directly opposing Blizzard's intention of making classes more interchangeable. You should be able to get all of those buffs with only one Paladin in the raid, or even without a Paladin at all.

The Blessing system is simply not designed in a way that is amenable to the changes in Wrath. It's an old system that was created back when raids contained 40 people and bringing 5 Paladins wasn't anything special. It needs to be adjusted or removed entirely.

[Alent]

You forgot "We need a movement based skill."

Charge, Dash, Teleport to consecrate, something, anything.

[Muggs]

I miss my old school chargadin from diablo 2. Without adding stances, I don't see how it's going to be possible to get rid of righteous fury -- they'd have to significantly boost the innate threat of moves and they've been moving away from this.

I also agree reckoning's time has come and gone, I haven't used it in a serious tanking build since I had 8 procs in a 7 1/2 minute fight :s

[Muggs]

Darn news post edits... I also want to say that Blessing of Sanctuary is going to be a huge boon in instances you over gear, I'm looking forward to it for 5mans and heroics (as I hardly get him in them these days, it'll happen in wrath too) but it will lose it's luster once we get to the heavy hitters (Arthas et al.) because of the massive incoming damage on the tanks.

[Bullwerk]

As a Protection Warrior that has spent a lot of time tanking alongside a Prot Pally I must say I have to disagree with your view of Righteous Defense. I completely enjoy tanking with a Prot Pally because we both have strengths and weaknesses that play off one another and together we make a formidibale tanking duo. Not once has it bothered me to have to pull a single target off our Pally when Righteous Defense is used. The two of us know how to work together and can time our abilities to feed off the differences in our classes.

Lets not forget that Blizzard may want more parity between tanking classes but they do not intend to take away our unique play styles. Being able to work with and maximize your effectiveness in a multi class group is a skill. A skill I would hate to see disappear from the game in the name of "complete" parity. Make me and my pally buddy the same and you have just destroyed half the fun of WoW tanking for me and probably many others. And to reiterate, I think Righteous Defense and it's unique mechanic is part of that.

Your other arguements and suggestions seem reasonable though the BoS discussion I think is a bit of a dead end. Every encoutner should be doable with one or two buffs missing. I think it should come down to a choice sometimes for the Prot Pally to say "Do I want BoK or BoS for myself on this fight?" The Pally then must make that determination. Warriors, Bears, DK's and Pallies can all survive without BoS or BoK. I find myself often having to choose between Battle Shout and Commanding Shout depending upon the fight and group make up. I don't think I have ever wiped based upon that decision. It will be much the same for you guys. Lets not go down the road of taking all decisions out of the game. Be happy that you have multiple tools to use and realize that the mark of a good player is knowing which tool to use for the job at hand.

Lonan

[Lore]

Source: Alent You forgot "We need a movement based skill." Charge, Dash, Teleport to consecrate, something, anything.

I don't think we need that at all. I never found lacking them to be difficult in Live, I've seen nothing that makes them more important in Wrath. If anything, instant cast Avenger's Shield makes them even less important.

[Lore]

Source: Muggs I miss my old school chargadin from diablo 2. Without adding stances, I don't see how it's going to be possible to get rid of righteous fury -- they'd have to significantly boost the innate threat of moves and they've been moving away from this. I also agree reckoning's time has come and gone, I haven't used it in a serious tanking build since I had 8 procs in a 7 1/2 minute fight :s

I wasn't saying get rid of it, I was just saying make it undispellable and last until deactivated. Think Hunter aspects, or Shadowform.

[Bonerot]

Paladin tanks not having a single target taunt makes me a sad panda



I don't want to just taunt off of you, I want you to be able to taunt just one thing off of me. Having a single target taunt even if it has to share a cooldown with the multitarget taunt would make for more fun multi-tank encounters.

Lores on the right path with these changes though, I think the pallys need this even if I chose to tank with a warrior.

[Muggs]

Source: Lore I wasn't saying get rid of it, I was just saying make it undispellable and last until deactivated. Think Hunter aspects, or Shadowform.

Undispellable might work, but then we'd get qq from the other classes in the arena somwhere along the lines of "Omg, nerf paladins, he has 6% damage reduction and we can't get rid of it"

On second thought... I vote for undispellable

[jere]

Paladin Taunts: I don't just taunt you; I taunt your whole family!

[phaze]

Source: Lore Mitigation I'm only going to mention this briefly, as Blizzard has stated several times already that they're working on another mitigation pass. Prot Paladins are ever so slightly on the low end of the mitigation spectrum at the moment. We only have 6% built-in physical damage reduction from Improved Righteous Fury, compared to the Warrior's 10% from Defensive Stance and the Druid's 12% (15%?) from Protector of the Pack. If Block is meant to be how we are to make up that difference, our Block needs to be increased by a fair bit, as we barely break even with Warriors in overall damage reduction from blocking.

12% via PotP, for Druids in a full group; but also no damage reduction from Block.

I've commented elsewhere on the DPS side of pallies, but I'm still concerned that having access to a full-immunity ability (clearing almost all debuffs, nullifying an incoming one-shot style spell) is holding paladins back. It definitely has a large impact on PvP, and paladin tanking numbers may be suffering for it as well.

But as mentioned earlier by GC, another mitigation pass is coming soon, so maybe I'll be proven wrong. =)

Taunting We need a single-target taunt of some sort

Yeah, some sort of change is needed.

From a design perspective, not having the default taunt tool seems to be the core issue. Having circumstances where RD can't function properly means you either have to restrict encounter design, or leave Paladins less viable for some fights. Neither is an ideal solution.

I still think flipping Pallies (and Druids) over to a standard 8s Taunt is the simplest fix, albeit at the cost of the multi-target/ranged RD. But I don't play a Paladin, so I have the luxury of not being attached to existing behavior.

Righteous Fury Paladins shouldn't have to rebuff Righteous Fury.

Agreed. Make RF non-dispellable, no duration.

Blessings rework both Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild to be identical -- Add the armor and possibly the resistance bonus to Kings (resistance bonus doesn't stack with auras anyway, so that might not be necessary), and make Mark of the Wild 2% stats baseline with a 10% bonus at full Imp MotW.

Imp MotW is just 2/2 talents, so there's a mismatch in talent cost to consider there. 4% or 6% fully talented (and dropping the Imp BoK point cost) would probably be more likely?

I think the root problem is one talent tree adding 2 blessings, however. I'd rather see the avoidance-based power gains from BoSanct doled out to each of the tank classes (new/modified talents or baseline), and then convert Blessing of Sanctuary to Beacon of Sanctuary, with behavior closer to Vigilance (single target buff on one group/raid member, for reducing their damage taken).

Direction When Not Tanking Having Prot Paladins off-healing simply doesn't fit well in the overall scheme of things. We need to be put firmly in an off-DPS role when not tanking.

I agree; Tanks switch best to a DPS role, rather than extra unneeded healing.

[Lore]

Source: Lonan As a Protection Warrior that has spent a lot of time tanking alongside a Prot Pally I must say I have to disagree with your view of Righteous Defense. I completely enjoy tanking with a Prot Pally because we both have strengths and weaknesses that play off one another and together we make a formidibale tanking duo. Not once has it bothered me to have to pull a single target off our Pally when Righteous Defense is used. The two of us know how to work together and can time our abilities to feed off the differences in our classes.

The issue only comes up when tanking with a non-Paladin tank if the other tank's taunt is on cooldown. Not usually a big deal on trash, but if the Warrior taunts before the Paladin on Four Horseman, it gets really messy.

The big issue is, as I said, when you have two Paladin tanks. I see no reason that Paladins should be the only class that can't function properly when there's two of them.

Note: Having a DPS taunt first is not an answer.

Lets not forget that Blizzard may want more parity between tanking classes but they do not intend to take away our unique play styles. Being able to work with and maximize your effectiveness in a multi class group is a skill. A skill I would hate to see disappear from the game in the name of "complete" parity. Make me and my pally buddy the same and you have just destroyed half the fun of WoW tanking for me and probably many others. And to reiterate, I think Righteous Defense and it's unique mechanic is part of that.

I think it's very possible to keep Righteous Defense as the preferred taunt while still resolving the problems that arise due to our lack of precision taunting.

Your other arguements and suggestions seem reasonable though the BoS discussion I think is a bit of a dead end. Every encoutner should be doable with one or two buffs missing. I think it should come down to a choice sometimes for the Prot Pally to say "Do I want BoK or BoS for myself on this fight?" The Pally then must make that determination. Warriors, Bears, DK's and Pallies can all survive without BoS or BoK. I find myself often having to choose between Battle Shout and Commanding Shout depending upon the fight and group make up. I don't think I have ever wiped based upon that decision. It will be much the same for you guys. Lets not go down the road of taking all decisions out of the game. Be happy that you have multiple tools to use and realize that the mark of a good player is knowing which tool to use for the job at hand.

You'll find that on live, yes. In Wrath 5-mans, sure. Maybe even in a 10-man. In a 25-man raid, there is no way you will be without Commanding Shout and either Battle Shout or Blessing of Might. Any spec of Warrior or Paladin can cast it. That's easy for a min/max setup to work in. If I'm going to use my 21-point talent (which happens to be a requirement for any Prot spec), there need to be at least two other Paladins in the raid - and at least one of them needs to be specced Kings.

The problem isn't that it's a choice, the problem is that it isn't. I simply won't be able to cast Sanctuary unless I stuff the raid with Paladins.

[Kurgen]

For non tanking situations, paladins are getting a choice right now. Loldps or lolheals. As before we only really had 1 choice, strap on healing gear. I am sure with the stam/spellpower add it will help when the raid needs a lil extra healing nudge or dispeller/heals. Other tanks only have 1 option. Since I do not know the direction Raid encounters, but with Melee unfriendly fights its even a better bonus to be able to pull back and heal.

For BC I was Prot Pally main, Druid resto (dam healer crisis of 08), then War off nights. Now its back to War, Pally, Druid ALL TANKS! well hopefully.

[phaze]

Source: Muggs Undispellable might work, but then we'd get qq from the other classes in the arena somwhere along the lines of "Omg, nerf paladins, he has 6% damage reduction and we can't get rid of it"

Which brings up the other side to Bear Form and Defensive Stance: the reduced incoming damage is at the expense of reduced damage output, and limiting your available abilities. From that viewpoint, RF has no downside for tanking or PvP.

So make sure that's taken into consideration when theorizing the mitigation numbers.

[Kurgen]

Source: Lore The big issue is, as I said, when you have two Paladin tanks. I see no reason that Paladins should be the only class that can't function properly when there's two of them.

Yeah its hilarous trying to duo pally tank anything. They dont share anything at all, it pretty much is a binary situation, you have none or you have it all . A single taunt like the backup Mocking blow should help, it should be made to fit within the taunt cycle of horsemen (not sure what it is, I am a late wow adopter thanks to ffxi)

[Lore]

Source: Joanadark Oh and I completely disagree with you about the importance of a fast-movement skill. It's not a case of "I need threat on that thing over there", its a case of there being too many situations where "I need to BE. There. Now."

I have tanked every instance and every encounter in The Burning Crusade except for Kil'jaeden, and I can say with complete honesty that I have never found myself in that situation.

The reason DK's need Death Grip and Warriors and Bears need charge/intervene/etc is because they don't have a ranged taunt. They have to be standing next to the target to use their respective taunts. As it stands, I can think of no situation where simply casting Righteous Defense (or Avenger's Shield) and walking for two seconds is less effective.

[Lore]

Source: Joanadark You're comparing apples to oranges. Theres no reason for built in modifiers because we do the right amount of damage without one. Your class is balanced around it so that you do the correct amount of damage with one. Theres no unfairness here. Its just a threat stance.

The PVP considerations are for Ret and Holy. Both take Imp RF currently for Arenas.

I suppose I could live with dispellable if I had to. I see no need for the duration though.

[veneretio]

I really like the flavour of you guys getting a talent that lets you reduce magic damage by your block value in some way, shape or form. It's definitely got a nice paladin feel to it and while they'd possibly have to balance it around resistance, it could be a very cool way to give paladins that magic reduction element they direly need. (I agree too that Druids really can't be left behind here)

I can't agree more that a single target taunt would make playing with a Prot Paladin a heck of a lot more fun. I think you're onto something with it sharing a cooldown with your other taunt and if that was done I see no reason why it should have any longer cooldown than what your current taunt already has.

As to your role while not tanking, there seems to be a potentially unique experience in being able to both dps and heal simultaneously which could be very cool to an encounter. For simplicity of balancing though, I agree that Blizzard really needs to make up their mind and choose 1 off-role for you. Logically it's easier to balance you against the other 3 tanking classes by having you dps rather than getting you into this awkward role of offheals where there's really no other class/spec to balance you against. (I don't really feel we can count the likes of elemental shaman, shadow priests or balance druids in this case)

Anyway cool to see what you guys are looking for. Looks pretty reasonable from this Warrior's point of view.