You do have Divine Sacrifice in your build, right?

If not, and you raid often, you should. Primarily, the reason why is that Divine Sacrifice (DS for the purpose of this post) has the potential to be a raid saver at several occasions (especially in Ulduar) and gives a better return on that one talent point investment than any of the other “bridge” talents that bring us deeper into the Prot tree. That is, it’s better than shaving 20 secs from an interrupt, or Reckoning, for obvious reasons.

Admittedly, the spell is much more flexible while offtanking (one of the ways that Blizzard has been subtlely reaffirming tankadins as trash tanks), but as I’ve mentioned before, in 25man I tend to offtank more often than not. As such, here are times when I typically pop DS in Ulduar:

XT-002: During the Tympanic Tantrum use Divine Sacrifice to reduce the damage everyone takes from 80% of their total health to only 56%. This was a much bigger deal when Tantrum did 120% of everyone’s health, and DSing reduced damage to 84%, but your healers will still thank you. This is also probably one of the few times you can get away with bubbling while maintanking, as XT stops meleeing during a tantrum and will only turn to face the highest aggro. You just need to be careful to remove bubble asap once the tantrum is over and make sure you have XT’s attention.

Assembly of Iron: If you kill Brundir last, whenever he goes up the air to follow people around, run nearby and pop DS if too many people get caught under the lightning storm.

Kologarn: This happens quickly, but if you’re fast enough you can probably use DS to eat 30% of one Shockwave, which can do up to 16k nature damage to each raid member in 25man.

Auriaya: Assuming your group is stacked up well you’re going to still take some heavy damage from Sonic Screech (on Heroic mode I would say between 5500-6500 damage is a good split). Give your healers some breathing room by shaving that down a little.

Hodir: Frozen Blows does raid wide frost damage. While this should be mitigated somewhat by Frost Aura/resist gear, it’s still helpful to shave off some raid damage.

Freya: The only major high-raid damage part of this fight is when the main little adds spawn and explode when killed. Sometimes the dps gets a tad overzealous and can wipe the raid by killing to many lashers at once. DS makes that zeal a little less threatening.

Mimiron: In this case you’ll want to use DS to help out whoever is tanking Mimiron during the plasma blasts. You can use Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice on two different plasma blasts to help the maintank live through those very high damage instances. If you have the abilities off cooldown, you might also want to use them during Phase 2 when there’s no aggro and the potential for some nasty hits is a huge possibility.

Handy macro! Lastly, I have my Divine Shield macroed as:

/cancelaura Divine Sacrifice
/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

(I can probably combine lines 1 and 2 with a comma, I suspect.)

When I intend to pop Divine Sacrifice, I hit my bubble macro first applying Divine Shield. GCD ticks and then I hit Divine Sacrifice. When I want to drop bubble/DS/both I hit the bubble macro again and both are cancelled. I never want Divine Sacrifice active without Divine Shield, so this makes sure both are off at the same time.

Now I turn it to you guys. Any times you pop DS in Ulduar that I didn’t list here?