State of the Protection Tree - The Rambling

Ok, to quickly answer Ghostcrawler's question I'm going to list talents that I consider to be "fun", "not fun", "essential", "not essential". This is from the perspective of someone who MTs 25-mans now and will continue to do so hopefully between 3.0 and Wrath's release.

Fun, Essential

Holy Shield
Anticipation
One Handed Specialization
Blessing of Sanctuary
Hammer of the Righteous
Avenger's Shield
Combat Expertise
Divine Strength
Judgements of the Just (aka, Thunderjudge!)

Fun, Not Essential

Touched by the Light
Improved Holy Shield
Reckoning
Improved Devotion Aura
Blessing of Kings
Redoubt
Shield of the Templar

Not Fun, Essential

Sacred Duty
Toughness
Improved Righteous Fury
Ardent Defender

Not Fun, Not Essential

Shield Specialization
Stoicism
Guardian's Favor
Divine Guardian
Improved Hammer of Justice
Guarded by the Light
Spell Warding


All in all, not a bad ratio, 16 "fun" talents vs 11 "not-fun" ones and more than twice the number of "fun, essential" talents than "not fun, essential" ones. Now some qualifications, be warned folks, this will be a long one.

Two Blessings: Protection is the only tree with talented Blessings and we've got two of the feckers, both of which, thanks to the awesome new Blessing of Sanctuary changes darn-near essential.

Blessing of Kings is one of the best buffs in the game for raiding. A flat 10% boost to all stats that stacks with every other buff in the game. It's also the only buff of it's type in the game.

Blessing of Sanctuary on the other hand is basically the tanking buff that every tank's wanted ever since the first T2-geared Warrior tried to help their mates through Scholo. The 3% mitigation and ability to regain tanking resources on a successful block/parry/dodge is going to be an incredibly desirable ability for almost every fight.

The added wrinkle to this (and I know I'm stepping outside Ghostwalker's brief as I mention this) is that Holydins are less likely to get Kings in the expansion. Most Holydins I speak to are aiming to go 15 points into Retribution for Conviction at least, which will make it unlikely they'll also be willing to go 11 points into Protection.

Therefore, Kings will be only available to Protection Paladins and possibly the occasional Retribution Paladin who specced deeper into Prot for off-tanking. In practical terms, tanks will have to choose between Sanctuary and Kings for most fights. That's one spec with two powerful buffs, only one of which it can do at a time.

My preferred solution would be to make Kings baseline. Or failing that, move it to the Holy Tree, possibly in the place of Aura Mastery (which seems out of place with the new fray-adjacent Holydins). Other people have suggested making Sanctuary a self-buff (or folding it into Improved Righteous Fury), but it's too nice for other tanks imo.

Redoubt/Shield Spec: Redoubt's always been a weird talent. It's reasonably useful in massive AoE situations, and the odd time it allows you to stay uncrushable in between Holy Shield refreshes. That said, if you ask most Tankadins why they take it and the answer's usually "because it's tied to Shield Spec".

Shield Spec itself has taken a hit thusfar. The fact it only works on +block value from items is ignoring the massive swing towards BV from Strength in WotLK itemization. I can imagine that Blizz may be worried about double BV scaling from both Divine Strength and Shield spec, but unless there's a massive amount of +BV itemization in the Wrath endgame, I can't see this talent pulling the weight of the 8 points you need to spend to get it.

The Upper Tiers: Well this is a mixed bag isn't it? On the one hand you have the lovely threat/hybrid talent that is Touched by the Light and "it took you this long to give us it?" awesomeness of Judgements of the Just. All this is capped with the itemization-redefining glee of Hammer of the Righteous.

And then we have two talents that reduce the mana cost of some of our powers... Two. Seperate. Talents.

Ok, so originally Guarded by the Light was the kind of buff that Blessing of Sanctuary eventually became, a talent designed to help us out in overgearing situations without depantsification. And I'll admit that Shield of the Templar also boosts the damage of our shield spells, so it's not as terrible as it first appears.

That said, Guarded by the Light's still underwhelming for a talent this deep in the tree. What I'd like to see, and I'm hopefully not alone in this, is a talent that reduces the duration of silence effects. Currently silences are the major weakness we have compared to other tanks, and it would be nice to see this mitigated.

Well ok, that's my rambling over. If any nice Colonials with access to the Beta forums over there feel like cross-posting this to there, I'll be grateful for like 2, maybe 3 minutes.