Unfortunately I wasn’t able to jump into Patch 3.1 last night, but apparently I didn’t miss much. The server itself didn’t come back online until like 7:30 eastern, and by the time my guild got its 10-man expedition into Ulduar, the raid server collapsed like a wet cake, stranding the GL’s toon in the nether between instances.

I’ll be able to hop on tonight to finally play with my new spec, buy dual speccing, and start hunting down the enchant/glyphs I need. I heard from a few people, Logan in the comments on another post among them, that Glyph of Divine Plea is impossible to find right now? If so, grrrr.

I hope Ulduar went well for anyone that managed to get in there.

I’ll report back tomorrow on what, if anything, I accomplish tonight!

Since the patch came out Tuesday, there’s been some questioning of Seal of Righteousness since the glyph for that ability was changed to offer a 10% damage buff. Would it be possible that glyphed SoR would be better than Seal of Vengeance/Corruption for tps generation?

The fine minds at Maintankadin did some number crunching, and as far as I can gather from this thread, it seems like the jury is still out on this. The two abilities come very close together in tps, yet with SoV/C still prevailing.

However, if one was expertise/hit capped, then with a high dps weapon (like Broken Promise) and frequent use of Hammer of the Righteous, SoR would come out on top. With Reckoning talented into this would give SoR more tps generation capabilities as well.

They haven’t settled this definitively, however. I’m looking forward to see what they come up with for the final numbers. It’d be nice to have some leeway in which seal to choose while tanking.

First things first, according to mmo-champion (and this could just a rumor, mind you) the 3.0.9 patch is supposedly dropping on Tuesday and will include an extension of all seal durations to 30 minutes. This would also be the patch that will be nuking Divine Plea’s utility for holy paladins.

Nominally this won’t hurt tankadins all that much, but the Divine Plea change is going to kill the usefulness of judging light in a raid while DP is up. In any case, the seal change is welcome albeit unexpected. Though it makes some sense, to reduce a major mana inefficiency for holy paladins and make it so they don’t have to recast a seal every two minutes to get the benefit from a glyph.

Anyways, moving on, I did some raiding this weekend, including a very fun drunken Naxx10 Friday night. I’m currently coping with the fact that as the only raiding paladin the guild has right now, the last two times I’ve been in Naxx I’ve left with only holy gear (e.g., Libram of Tolerance). /cry

Half the reason I keep getting screwed on loot is my terrible luck. I can get the stuff to drop, but when it comes to winning it… that’s where the process falls apart. For example, last night in 25 man Naxx, the Inexorable Sabatons and the T7.25 leg token dropped off of Gluth.

Guild policy right now is to do T7 first, and then normal loot. They didn’t, so rather that using my one main spec winning roll on the boots, I held on for the legs token. The warrior tank won the boots on a free-for-all off spec roll and then I went on to lose the leg token as well. It was such a tease too, a priest rolled a 4, I rolled a 28. Two seconds pass, a few congratulatory tells roll in, but oh boy did I know better. A warlock then rolled a 98. Denied.

Eh, c’est la vie. I’ll get all my T7 eventually, mathematically. Hopefully.

I can honestly say I did not see this coming. This is huge, huge news, and if 1/3 of these changes make it to the live servers I will be a happy, happy pally.

Here’s what was announced for tankadin class changes last night:

• Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
• Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.
• Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.
• Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.
• Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.
• Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

I need a moment to process the awesomeness.

Okay… okay…

One more second…

Alright, I’m good. Now, here’s what this all means:

1. We won’t have to dump 5 talent points into Blessing of Kings anymore. There’s a possibility they’ll make the  2% version baseline and you would have to talent to get it up to 10%. I really hope this isn’t the case, but at least that’d be a talent point freed up. The more talent points we have to spend the better.

2. Exorcism will not be very, very useful. Glyphed to cause the 2 sec spell interrupt, we’re looking at the pally version of Earth Shock. I expect Retadins to go overboard with this and get it nerfed. But if it survives to live… oh boy… look out.

3. A ranged silence. I’ve been looking forward to this change since early TBC. ShoR getting a silence too is just a thick frosting of awesome of the woot cake (apologies for the terrible metaphor, irrational exuberance abounds). This change will kill one of my favorite strategies, LOS tanking, but at the same time will make my life that much easier when I can worry less about a warrior charging right into a pack of casters rather than waiting behind the pillar with me.

4. The ranks reduced note confuses me, only because we don’t know if this means we’re getting the same bang for fewer points, or if they’re nerfing the effectiveness of each talent. For example, would One-Handed Weapon Specialization go from 10% damage at 5/5 to 10% damage at 3/3, or would it go to 6% damage at 3/3. Have to wait and see on this, though I suspect the former. Er, strongly, the latter would be an uncharacteristically large nerf.

5. Ghostcrawler was talking about how he didn’t want tanks to have to have Blessing of Sanctuary on at all times, and would prefer to fold the mana/rage/rune regen into baseline talents or abilities, so tanks wouldn’t have to choose between Sanc and Kings. The change to Guarded by the Light seems to be the reaction to this statement. Now instead of getting mana from avoidance/blocks, we’ll be getting it from using our normal abilities. Seems like a fair trade to me. Although, along with the announced nerf to Divine Plea that reduces healing to 50%, that would make Judgement of Light pointless to keep on a target.

6. The Judgements of the Just change confuses me. Stuns are nice, but this seems like a tad overkill. I can’t imagine this will make it to the live server, or else we’ll start seeing Stunlockadins in pvp.

All in all, I am very excited about these changes. Hopefully they emerge from the PTR unscathed. And hopefully Ret doesn’t ruin this for us …

Ah, just kidding, I love you guys.

It’d be appropriate if patch 3.0.8 was released two days before Christmas, because it’s definitely a huge wet kiss for tanks in many ways. Alas it’s still plucking away on the PTR, but every updated build does bring us exciting news about new tools or items we’ll have at our disposal soon enough, so there’s some consolation in that.

But anyhoo, here’s what prot pallies in particular have to look forward to (of course this is all subject to change, it is still in testing after all):

New Enchants

Enchant Weapon - Titanguard – enchants a one-handed weapon to increase stamina by 75. Costs 5 Abyss Crystals to learn. Mats for the enchant are 12 dream shards.

Enchant Bracers - Major Stamina – enchants a wrist-slot item to increase stamina by 40. Costs 5 Abyss Crystals to learn. The materials for the enchant are 4 Greater Cosmic Essences, 4 Dream Shards, and 4 Abyss Crystals. Ouch.

Plans: Titanium Plating – adds 40 block value to a shield. This plan can be purchased from Horde Expedition/Alliance Vanguard when exalted. Mats are 4 Titanium Bars and 4 Eternal Shadows.

Better Equipment

The Tempered Titansteel Helm is getting a nice boost – a meta and blue gem slot. More about that in this post.

New Spells

Hand of Reckoning – a ranged single-target taunt that does holy damage. Sweet.

Spell Changes

Judgement of Light no longer causes threat based on heals it does to party/raid members. Kind of crappy in the sense that it provided a nice threat boost when main tanking anything. However, the flip side of this was when off tanking you’d have to judge wisdom, or you’d eventually rip aggro of the MT by accident.

Divine Protection and Divine Shield have been retooled so that both no longer cause an attack speed penalty, but rather that they halve your damage by 50%. Unlike previously, you cannot talent out of the reduction.

Talent Changes

Sacred Duty no longer affects the penalties of Divine Shield/Protection, but the stamina increase has been upped from 6 to 8%.

Profession Changes

I think it’s a fair assumption to assume that most prot pallies have mining as one of their primary professions. Well, the health bonus from Toughness is being changed from increasing straight hp to increasing stamina, with the last rank providing 50 stam instead of 500 hp. This is a pretty nice bonus. With the change to Sacred Duty and the already existing +6% stamina bonus from Combat Expertise, Rank 5 Toughness will give 572 hp. Moreover, that additional stamina will convert to spell power as well. Not too shabby.