Oh, things used to be so simple. 53/18 was our max threat spec and you could get every utility talent you wanted along the way. Now, how complicated it all seems.

Blizz changed Seals of the Pure so that 15% damage modifier also applies to the 33% weapon damage bonus you get with a five stack up. This change means (as calculated by the amazing Theck) that 5/5 SotP is worth as much threat as the 3/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade (major caveat on this below) pairing that most of us are running around with today.

To summarize Theck’s findings, this brave new world of threat looks like this against non-Undead/Humanoid/Demon/Elemental mobs:

• 5/5 SotP == 3/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade
• 4/5 SotP is ~70 less TPS than the 3/5 + 3/3 pairing above
• 5/5 SotP + 3/5 Reckoning > 3/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade (by ~80 tps)
• 5/5 SotP + 3/5 Reckoning > 5/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade (by ~10 tps)

Ultimately, there are several specs that cascade from this change:

4/53/15 – This spec takes most of the mitigation utility talents plus the delightfulness of PoJ. It’s less threat than the standard 3.1 spec, but not by much.

5/54/12 — This trades PoJ and DG for the final point in SotP and 3/5 Reckoning. This spec is worth ~170 more tps, but you’re trading off 15% run speed and a buffed Sacred Shield for that extra oomph.

0/53/18 — I know everything written thus far implies you can ignore Crusade, but the problem with that is this: if you’re fighting any of the mob types that Crusade does 6% damage to, then this spec is worth about ~140 more tps than 5/5 SotP, but when you’re not getting 6%, this spec is ~100 tps less than 5/5 SotP.

Considering you’re going to encounter more humanoids/undead in 5mans and outside of instances (along with most of the encounters in the Coliseum falling into the 6% category), overall you’ll probably get more threat with the third spec.

If in Ulduar you’re threat goes down a little (and for sure, in the great scheme of things, if you’re doing 8000 tps, 100 tps isn’t that big of a loss) it probably won’t be the worst thing in the world, because you’ll end up with more threat in the Coliseum with Crusade than otherwise.

For anyone who follows my Twitter, you’d have seen this morning that I pronounced Crusade was dead. As I’m sure you all know by now, I tend to stack haste rating IRL, and that was probably a case of me greatly exaggerating Crusade’s demise.

Ultimately though the one absolute you can walk away with from this post from is this: you want Divine Guardian and you want Vindication. Survivability is always a higher priority than 100-200 additional tps.

Ardent Defender, our new cooldown

Our long national nightmare is now over, we finally have a second cooldown! And a real one at that, not some slap-dash, Mickey Mouse cooldown.

So sum up all the changes to the talent: AD has finally been fixed so that it is no longer leapfroggable (ie, any damage that applies under 35% of your health is mitigated), and it has a new effect that, if you are reduced to 0 hp, you receive an immediate heal to 30% of your max health (assuming you have 3/3 in the talent and 540 defense skill).

Once you receive that heal you get a debuff from preventing that save from occurring again for two minutes. Originally on the PTR that debuff also removed AD’s damage reduction, but that is a bug that has been fixed.

Dodge couldn’t avoid this nerf

Our avoidance is taking a nerf that will reduce our dodge across the board while presumably increasing parry. Overall this will amount to a reduction of our total avoidance. Rather than rehash the numbers, as I’ve done previously, just know the three take-aways on this are: (a) agility/stam gems are now junk for pure avoidance, (b) parry gems are not an immediate red flag for bad tanks, (c) defense is now, oddly, our best avoidance stat. There’s a lot more nuance in this, mind you, thanks to diminishing returns.

Sacred Shield is less awesome, but still great

Not as awful as I originally supposed in my post on Friday. I mistakenly assumed that the Holy Pally hot would only apply if their shield was on you, but any old SS will do. So, despite my earlier ruminations, still get Divine Guardian instead of 2/5 Reckoning. But anyway you slice it, only one Sacred Shield is disappointing.

Sweet, sweet Vindication

This is perhaps my second-most favorite change in 3.2, an attack power debuff to a boss that’s automatically applied. We don’t have to burn rage or gimp our dps/threat to get this up–nope, it comes just from us meleeing. This will be a great mitigation buff to us overall.

You’ll probably want to shift two points from Conviction into this talent, assuming you’re running the 53/18 spec (and you better be! /shakingoffist).

BV is better, but still not better than avoidance

Block value as you know is getting a huge boost. Does this mean you want to start wearing your block set and slapping the Titanium Plating on your shield for tanking Ignis25? Er, no. You’ll still want a heavy EH/avoidance set. Considering most BV pieces also have block rating, you’ll want to continue keeping most of these pieces out of your heavy tanking set, but by all means, use them for trash.

Change is a blessing

Blessing of Sanctuary has been given a +10% stamina modifier (that doesn’t stack with Kings) in order to make it more attractive to Paladins. But is it? Sure, if you can have Kings as well. Kings gives avoidance (through agility) and mitigation (through strength) which between the two makes it the superior blessing for raid situations if you have to choose between the two (which hopefully you won’t). At least now you won’t have to bemoan the loss of Kings’ health while in heroics where the mana return of Sanc is critical.

Exorcism is not for tanking anymore

Exorcism has been retooled to make it a situational move for Ret Paladins. That is, Art of War procs and they fire off an instant-cast Exorcism, and the rest of us shlubs are stuck with a 1.5 second cast time. This change of course makes Exorcism unusable while tanking, because time spent casting is time you can’t avoidance any attacks (and pushback, oh the pushback).

They changed Hand of Reckoning so that it does a lot more damage if the mob is currently not targeting you, which is supposed to make up for losing the Reck/Ex pickup combo for a run away mob. It’s an annoying change overall, but one we can work around.

Expertise isn’t terrible anymore

With the change to Seal of Corruption/Vengeance to do an additional 33% of weapon damage with melee hits after a five stack is up, expertise becomes a valuable stat again. For example, this change makes the SoV glyph the second-best TPS glyph in the game now (and one I’ll happily swap into my spellbook after the patch now that I don’t need said Mickey Mouse cooldown anymore). You’ll probably not want to gem expertise or purposefully gear for it, but don’t shun any gear anymore because it has expertise on it. A junk stat no longer.

Other cool little things

Lastly, two dopey little changes I’m happy about are Auras reapply after your death automatically, and Righteous Fury lost its duration and mana cost.

All the patch news yesterday lead to the inevitable conclusion that some pretty big changes are happening to Paladin tanking when 3.2 drops. Finally we’ll have a second high-mitigation cooldown to help us roll with the new big-hits style of tanking. I am personally ecstatic at the redesign of Ardent Defender and can’t wait for the first time pink angels descend from the heavens to restore me to 30% health because the healers panicked and switched to raid healing during a flame jet, letting Ignis crush me under his iron boot.

I’m getting carried away though! The changes announced yesterday have some weighty implications on how we spec. Specifically these changes are:

• Seal of Vengeance/Corruption will also do 33% of weapon damage when a full five-stack of the dot is up. This would theoretically make Seals of the Pure a better talent for threat generation than it currently is. Could also be paired with Reckoning for additional threat.
• Improved LoH will now provide a 20% damage reduction effect, rather than +50% armor value, making it a more useful cooldown.

Right now the default spec I see for tankadins is something around 0/53/18, which is a high threat output spec, but this might change. Here are two possible specs we might see becoming viable in 3.2:

Lay on Hands Spec (12/53/6)

Yes, I know, the irony is delicious. I’m not super enamored with this spec just yet, though. One of my big concerns with it is having to dump 5 talent points into increasing our Intellect to reach Improved Lay on Hands. Total waste of talent points considering what a non-issue mana is for us. There’s also the question of whether it makes sense to trade the threat and utility of 6% crit, 3-6% extra damage, and a run speed increase for an 11 minute cooldown.

Vindication Spec (0/53/18)

This spec takes two points out of Conviction and puts it in Vindication for the attack power debuff. Right now I think this looks like a better deal. It’s a little less tps but adds survivability thanks to the Demo Shout effect. And you don’t have to waste talent points on ineffectual talents. And you can benefit from the target effect more than once every 11 minutes.

Ultimately all this hullaballoo is just speculation (har har har). I think a lot will change depending on how much tps the new Seal of Vengeance generates and whether it makes Seals of the Pure or Reckoning viable (it probably won’t). I’m finding myself inclined to agree with the speculation Theck laid out in this thread at Maintankadin:

As the trees stand now, people desiring Vindication will have to go at least 10 points into Ret, unlocking Conviction. If Crusade is still considerably better than SotP (and it will be), it’s likely that 1 Conviction + 3 Crusade will out-threat 5/5 SotP, and give you the added utility of Vindication and SotP.

That’s probably where we’ll stand when the dust settles.

I’m willing to give the new Divine Guardian a chance. I think I’ll be speccing this way when 3.1 drops.

Check out the amazing graph in this thread (first one as you scroll down). It breaks down six threat talents by the gain in tps and dps that a point would provide.

According to the graph, in order, the best talents for increasing tps/dps are One Handed Weapon Specialization > Touched by the Light > Crusade > Conviction > Seals of the Pure > Reckoning.

Against undead mobs Crusade and TbtL switch spots.

This solidifies my decision to spec 3/5 Conviction and 3/3 Crusade.

Update: I tweaked this spec a little. I’m going with this one now.

I think it’s fair to assume that the major changes to the Paladin talent trees have just about been fully rolled out and what we see on the PTRs is just about what’s going to make it to live. Now seems therefore a good time to start planning out how I’m going to spec when the patch drops and we’re all suddenly 0/0/0.

Here’s the build at Wowhead, 0/53/18.

Before I explain the spec you should know about my tanking situation. My guild runs 25 man raids and in them I am typically the main OT. I need basic survivability, and at the same time I need enough damage output that I can hang around 2nd place on the threat meter. So my choices tend to gravitate towards raid utility.

Now, in the Prot tree I took our bread and butter talents: Divine Strength, Anticipation, Improved Righteous Fury, etc. It’s pretty straightforward.

Special things to take note of are, for one, I skipped Divinity. This is mostly because the talent itself is garbage for Prot. 5% is not that much, and frankly I’m concerned more about whether a heal lands in time than if it’s 5% bigger. And 5% isn’t that much for so many talent points. I’m not even sure this talent is that worthwhile for Healadins, considering the overheal potential.

Moreover, I picked up Divine Sacrifice. I already have 1/2 Divine Guardian in my current build, and I like the idea of adding another 15% of raid damage soaking to my repetoire.

It might seem a silly talent at first, but there are some times when it is a major help to the healers for me to be able to shave 15-30% of the damage off the raid. Examples are when we were first learning the ropes on Loatheb, and more recently with Malygos’ Deep Breaths.

Moving on, you’ll notice I grabbed 2/2 Improved Hammer of Justice, which now synergizes quite well with the expanded Judgements of the Just talent. Basically, I’m going to have an interrupt on a 20 sec cooldown now.

Please note I completely avoided Reckoning. You should too!

Last big note in the Prot tree: I only went 1/2 on Spiritual Attunement. Honestly, between 100% uptime Divine Plea and Blessing of Wisdom, that second point in SA can be better put elsewhere.

Now, this is where the spec gets exciting. Thanks to Blizz somewhat “de-bloating” our tree we have some extra points to play with. I’m planning to use this bounty to dabble further into the Ret tree and increase my OT dps.

Keep in mind I went 1/5 Benediction purely as a stepping stone to further talents. I really had no other choice, and certainly wasn’t putting that point into Improved Judgements (making that 2/2). No sir.

So the big dps talents I’m focusing on in this tree are 3/3 Heart of the Crusader (a +3% crit buff to the raid assuming this focus my target), 3/5 Conviction (an additional +3% crit just for me, and 3/3 Crusade (+3% dmg all around with an extra +3% against certain mob types).

With my Ret talents I’m adding 6% to my crit chance and up to 6% to my overall damage. That is a major tps/dps boost!

I think this is a fairly standard build you’ll be seeing most tankadins rocking come the next patch.

Let me know if you have any suggestions/comments/complaints. I’m always open to making changes.