I also have to totally disagree with you Zarcob, firstly having spent over a year tanking on my paladin I would confidently say that simply using consecration will never hold aggro from any dps focusing on something that is not your target. Consecrate simply allows us to easily out-aggro healers keeping them from getting squished, as I have seen on numerous large trash pulls with a warrior or druid tank. Our main threat production when aoe tanking comes from re-active damage caused when using holy shield, blessing of sanctuary and retribution aura hence we get a large portion of our threat from being hit.Originally Posted by Zarcob
You seem to think a transition to being able to easily use warrior tanking gear is problem through the "touched by light talent". I think it is great. When considering our main weakness as prot pallys is our lack of damage mitigation I found it incredibly annoying when choosing badge gear to sacrifice spell damage tanking gear for plate gear with the greater amount of mitigation and avoidance stats on it just so I could more easily MT raid bosses. This means we no longer need to sacrifice stam for improving our threat as much as we had too during TBC just one reason why warriors would have health pools 2k larger than ours.
Also you have missed two major points when you spoke of the problems of using a spell damage weapon with the new spell "hammer of the righteous". First the weapon damage it causes will be holy as such our righteous fury buff will still give a large amount of increased threat to it and second the description of the spell even states "This ability causes high threat", regardless of the damage on the weapon im sure we will still see hotr causing a large amount of threat. Considering we also have another new spell "shield of righteousness" which causes holy damage based on 200% of our block value we will now have many more abilities to use when tanking meaning we will no longer spend 6-8 seconds simply staring at our computer screens following the usual 'seal, holy shield, consecrate, judge, seal .................... repeat' spell rotation.
You also seem annoyed by the talent "divine guardian" and the critical healing improvement of "touched by the light" I really cannot understand why as these talents are quite obviously not designed to be used by tanks. Would you choose the "eye for an eye" talent in the ret tree for a PvE dps build? No you wouldnt because a lot of talents are designed to be used in different ways or in conjunction with different talent tree's. As you suggested a talent such as "divine guardian" is obviously designed to be used in either a ret PvP build or maybe a holy PvP or PvE build.
All together the changes to the protection tree have massively improved our single target threat production, however I still feel that the tree lacks any strong mitigation move. What we need is an ability like shield wall, I was hoping to see a talent along the lines off "reduces the duration of your divine shield spell by 50% but you no longer lose threat when it is cast" although that would probably be incredibly op atleast last stand is now a 20minute cd which gives us one regularly available wipe saving mechanic and depending on the damage of level 80 raid and dungeon mobs our other new holy spell "sacred shield" could prove incredibly useful when tanking.
As for the holy tree I really like most the changes especially pushing us to use seals more when healing which I look forward to attempting (im sure we will be seeing more holy/ret holydins now thanks to the changes to conviction and heart of the crusader), however beacon of light which is the spell I had hoped paladins would get for the last 3 years appears incredibly broken right now. Hopefully we will see it tweaked to work more effectively or a mana reduction to make repeated use more viable.
I wont even bother talking about the ret tree as I would hope we can all see how imba it looks right now
Rant over.