I’ve been noticing a lot of hits coming my way from people searching for talent builds for their prot pallies. I’ve already laid out how I’m going to spec in this blog, and in fact you can see my build here.

I figured it’d be best to point out for our new tanking brethren in a quick and dirteh fashion which talents you should grab, which you shouldn’t grab as much, and which you should avoid completely.

As an aside, I should point out, I tend to favor a threat-heavy build. Others might lean towards one that dips into the Holy tree. Honorshammer has a great build like this. If you want to see some big numbers, or be the kind of OT that nips at the heels of the MT, I recommend my spec.

Go only 1/2 into Spiritual Attunement. Between Divine Plea and Blessing of Sanctuary, only one point in SA will be enough to keep you rolling in mana.

Avoid Divinity. Reasonable voices may differ on this, but personally I think this talent is woefully underwhelming. 5% +heals isn’t as good as it sounds, and more often than not you’ll find that extra percentage will end up being overheal.

Stoicism is a pvp talent. Sure, it sounds useful, but you’re really only going to encounter stuns and dispells in pvp. It’s a waste of points in pve.

Get Divine Sacrifice/Guardian if you’re an offtank. If you’re MT, you won’t be popping these enough to justify the 3 talent points.

Reckoning is weak. It’s our weakest threat generating talent by far. You’ll be better served putting those points into the Ret tree where the real threat gen talents roam.

Seals of the Pure is also weak. 5/5 SotP is as much threat as 5/5 Conviction, and points in Conviction allows us to get Crusade for even more threat. Skip SotP, get Conviction.

Only go 1/2 Improved Judgements. I don’t want to get into a whole spiel about it, but our best threat rotation is 969 (more info here). Having a 10 second or 8 second Judgement throws off the rotation. One point is all you need!

Crusade is good, very good. Even when you’re not fighting humanoids/undead/etc. Crusade is a huge threat boost. You want this talent, trust me.

If you have any speccing questions, feel free to ask them in the comment to this post or email me at rhidach [at] gmail [dot] com. I don’t mind answering emails.

Happy tanking!

I’ve seen a really dopey idea being discussed in certian quarters regarding how to spec when 3.1 drops. We only have one real “oh shite” cooldown to use, the argument goes, so the solution suggested is to create a new one with the Improved Lay on Hands talent. The spec to make such a “cooldown” is this.

This is a bad spec, don’t do it.

Here’s why: as a tank you have two primary jobs. One is to stay alive as long as possible, and the other is to generate enough threat to keep the mob on you. Just out of curiosity, how does spending valuable talent points on increasing your heals by 12% help either of those?

The ultimate goal with this silly idea is to turn Lay on Hands into an 11 minute (with the new glyph) +50% armor value boost.

But, as always, the devil in the details, and the details bear out that Imp LoH isn’t as great as it seems.

To use myself as an example, I have 23391 armor, which provides 60.6% damage reduction. Physical damage reduction. Keep that in mind, the word physical here is key.

If I popped Imp LoH I would boost my armor to 35086, and my damage reduction would jump to 69.7%. A gain of 9.1% damage reduction. And even if you had more armor, damage reduction from armor is capped at 75%.

Once again though, this is all physical damage reduction. Say what you want about Pallies, we are not hurting in the physical damage reduction department. What’s primarily keeping us from being ideal Sarth 3d tanks is magical damage, which we are just about defenseless against.

All this spec does is saddle us with unnecessary talents for a weak “cooldown” that doesn’t even help where we hurt the most.

I want a new cooldown as much as the next guy. Gimping ourselves is not the way to do it.

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.

Long story short, here’s the build I’m currently rocking: 3/52/12.

Primarily I’m acting as offtank for my guild in Naxx right now, in addition to running a multitude of heroics, so there are some “must have talents” I basically designed this spec around:

Pursuit of Justice: For running to pick up my target, not getting melted during Heigan, etc. I honestly don’t care about the reduced disarm, it’s all about the 15% run speed increase.

Heart of the Crusader: Awesome for heroics, great for Naxx if there are no ret pallies (which 75% of the time there are not in our runs). Adds some group utility.

Divine Guardian: A potential life saver in a raid when you’re all taking an obscene amount of AoE damage. Loatheb is a great example. If you don’t need to hold threat, it’s helpful to pop bubble and take 30% of the incoming damage of the table for 12 secs.

And yes, I know, no Kings. Why? Personally, I object to the presumption that I should spend 5 points on this, when it makes much sense for ret pallies building their way up to Improved Hammer of Justice. Of course, but not taking it, I was forced to put 1 point in IHoJ, and had 3 leftover points for Seals of the Pure. Embarrassing, I know.

Honestly, I’ll probably be respeccing and… ugh… picking up Kings in the near future. To accomplish this I’ll drop the 3 points in SotP, 1 in IHoJ, and 1 of the 2 in DG. Inelegant–but I really want to keep PoJ that badly.

You underestimate how fun it is to be able to outrun others.