The Actual Changes to Prot in 3.1

[Kandrassan]

I'm tired of seeing all this horrible wrong information, so I've decided to start of collection of what the average Prot Paladin will actually see changed. This will be focused on a tanking perspective for raid instances, and I will be ignoring the PvP oriented buffs/nerfs.

Changes:
*Shield of the Templar (Tier 10) no longer increases the damage of your Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield and Shield of Righteousness spells. Instead it gives your Avenger's Shield a 33/66/100% chance to silence targets hit by it for 3 sec.
*Holy Shield's (Tier 7) damage slightly increased across all ranks.
*Avenger's Shield's (Tier 9) damage has been increased across all ranks.
*Shield of Righteousness now deals 130% of block value + 520 at the highest rank. It no longer causes a high amount of threat. (Previously increased damage by a set amount)


Shield of the Templar's bonus damage has been folded into their base abilities, as shown above.The added silence buff is a nice addition, due to the fact that non-Blood Elf paladins previously had no way to get caster mobs to engage/follow them into melee.


*Guarded by the Light (Tier 9) now reduces spell damage taken by 3% and gives a 50% chance to refresh the duration of your Divine Plea when you hit an enemy. (Previously reduced the mana cost of your Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield and Shield of Righteousness spells by 15%.)

This change has changed how our mana efficiency is maintained. A protection paladin always has Divine Plea up now, as long as they are actively attacking something, but to balance this out, our spells now cost more mana. Overall, this is a slight buff for PvE (if you're Glyphed into it), due to the fact that most protection paladins shouldn't have mana issues in a raid environment.

*New Talent Divinity:Tier 1 protection talent, increases healing done by and to you by 1/2/3/4/5%.

This is a new talent that I frankly don't see most prot paladins putting points into over Divine Strength. With the change to Ardent Defender, you may see the need to drop 1 point in here to move from Tier 7 to Tier 8 on the talent tree. Also, always a good choice instead of Reckoning, due to the relatively useless nature of Reckoning for TPS.

Buffs:

* Enchant Weapon - Blade Ward *New Enchant* - Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

Finally, a real tanking enchant that provides actual, straight avoidance/mitigation. This is another buff that will help bring warriors and paladins back in line with their DK and Druid counterparts, as DKs will still likely opt for their class specific enchant, and druids inability to use parry.

*Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous *new* -- Your Hammer of the Righteous hits 1 additional target.
*Glyph of Divine Plea *new* -- While Divine Plea is active, you take 3% reduced damage from all sources.
*Glyph of Shield of Righteousness: Reduces the mana cost of ShoR by 80%.


Finally, protection has glyphs worth getting besides Glyph of Seal of Corruption. With the HoR change, we've even more claimed the spot as the best AoE tank, bringing the number of targets we can keep high threat on up to 4. With new change to Guarded by the Light, Divine Plea will have almost 100% uptime, meaning that Glyph of Divine Plea basically give straight 3% damage reduction.
Edit: There is an idea floating around that this will not stack with Blessing of Sanctuary. I for one hope this is not true. In which case, Glyph of ShoR will kill any mana issues you could possible have, though, perhaps other Glyphs will still be more useful.

*Exorcism can now be used on all targets, but is now a guaranteed critical strike vs Undead and Demon type mobs.

This gives protection paladins another pulling tool, and an extra ability to throw into your rotation if you stray from 969 due to any number of reasons (movement, aggro drop, having to taunt, etc.) It also increases our offtank threat generation when Holy Shield cannot be used for threat generation.

*Blessing of Kings is now a baseline ability. Trainable at level 20.
*Improved Devotion Aura (Tier 4) now increases the amount healed on any target affected by any of your Auras by 2%. (Previously only worked with Devotion Aura active)
*All paladins auras had their range extended from 30 yards to 40 yards.

These changes give us a little more flexibility in what we can do for the raid. We can now more freely switch our auras to resistance auras without worrying about losing the 6% healing buff to the raid. With the nerf to Blessing of Sanctuary (discussed below) adding Blessing of Kings as a baseline will give us a buff to put on the raid if not enough paladins are available in the raid.


*Glyph of Hand of Salvation *new* -- When you cast Hand of Salvation on yourself, it also reduces damage taken by 20%.

This one is... interesting. The plus side, is that it grants you a miniature shield wall effect. The downside is that your TPS gets nerfed by quite a bit if you're using it on every cooldown. In all honesty, once aggro is established, I usually end up at nearly twice the threat of the rest of the DPS in my raids. If you have no problems whatsoever holding aggro, this is a great mitigation choice. In fights where you're offtanking mobs that aren't being attacked (Read as: Kel'thuzad phase 3 mobs), this can be a real lifesaver.

*Divine Sacrifice *New Talent* (Tier 3) - 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin's health). Instant, 2 min cooldown.
*Divine Guardian re-designed: Now increases the effectiveness of Divine Sacrifice by an additional 5/10% and increases the duration of Sacred Shield by 50/100% and the amount absorbed by 10/20%.

A new interesting talent, will allow us to soak some AoE damage off of the raid, or perhaps another tank, this talent basically casts Blessing of Sacrifice on your entire raid. Note though, when used during abilities like Vortex, this will be another 'kill yourself' button, giving paladins two now. The second part of Divine Guardian is clearly more for Holy Paladins who have come into the tree, but, with a 1 minute sacred shield, keeping it up on yourself is a lot more viable of a choice, and free mitigation if no other Holy Paladins are in the group.


*Divine Protection cooldown has been lowered to 3 minutes.
*Forbearance reduced to 2 min duration.

With Sacred Duty, our Shield Wall is now on a 2 minute cooldown, down from 4. Finally, DKs aren't the only ones with Shield Walls they can pop whenever they feel they might need one. This is one of the biggest buffs we received this patch, though warriors received a similar buff, so in relation to them, we've stayed the same, but has brought us more in line with DKs and Bears.

Nerfs:
*Blessing of Sanctuary (Tier 5) now only grants 2% of maximum displayed mana when the target blocks, parries, or dodges a melee attack. (Previously granted 10 rage or 20 runic power or 2% max mana)

This is not a nerf to us directly, but to our usefulness to the raid. Since warriors and druids have had similar effects folded into their talent trees, we are slightly less valuable as buff placers.

*Hand of Sacrifice now lasts 12 sec or until the caster has transfered 100% of their maximum health.

Hand of Sacrifice now has a maximum amount of damage it can soak. Makes it less useful for things like 3D, where improper timing can make you not have any of the damage reduction still left when the flame breath hits your bear or DK.

Spiritual Attunement: There was a blue post announcing that Spiritual Attunement would receive a nerf. There is still no patch notes or PTR data that reflects that yet though, as far as I have seen.

Summary:
Overall, for paladins running a talent spec along the lines of 0/56/15 or 5/56/10, you'll see 3 more talent points show up to spend in the Retribution or Holy tree. The reductions in talent cost for One-Handed Weapon Spec and Ardent Defender grant us 4 more points, but the Ardent change to 3 makes it so you must spend an extra point higher in the tree to move from Tier 7 to Tier 8 (probably 1/3 Stoicism, 4/5 Reckoning, or 1/5 Divinity.) With the new glyphs, you will see your AoE DPS/TPS go up on the 4th target, and you'll see a slight increase in your mitigation from Divine Plea (if you Glyph it instead of getting Glyph of Judgement, assuming it's not a minor Glyph). Pulling casters will be easier with the new Shield of the Templar talent. Overall, your single target DPS/TPS should stay about the same that it was in 3.0.8.

Edit: Also: New AoE Divine Sacrifice and 2 minute shield wall. And a tanking enchant! Can you feel the Blizz love? I know I can.


If you have any comments, ideas, something I missed, or just don't agree with me, let me know and I'll try to update this post as I see fit.



EDIT 3/10: MORE BUFFS! YAY!

[Iselian]

The new Hand of Salvation glyph might be worth noting. I'm still betting that a misdirect and wings would be enough to keep threat well ahead, assuming the full duration of Salv lasts; no one said you couldn't click it off. And let's admit as tankadins, 20% damage reduction is -amazing-.

[Kandrassan]

Thanks, I added it =)

[lepact]

You will also have to get used to hitting Divine Plea every 15 seconds, which might wreck havoc on 969 rotations.

As long as we melee we got 100% uptime on Divine Plea, 100% chance on refreshing the duration when you hit a mob.

[Kandrassan]

Oh, I totally read that as it refreshes the CD of Divine Plea. My bad, thanks.

[Sarkan-ZdC]

The new Hand of Salvation glyph might be worth noting. I'm still betting that a misdirect and wings would be enough to keep threat well ahead, assuming the full duration of Salv lasts; no one said you couldn't click it off. And let's admit as tankadins, 20% damage reduction is -amazing-.

We are talking about 10% of you're total threat. On Patchwerk yesterday I had 1,4 Mio threat by the end. If I had to use this on say 1 Mio Threat (15% HP of Patch or so), I'll loose 100.000 Threat in 10 Sec. Or -10.000 Threat / Sek. No.. Wings and Misdirect do not make up for -10k TPS *g* (well.. ok, to be fair, right now they do. But wait for 3.1 and more TPS on our DPS Classes)

[Oursaviour]

In my opinion I think the new Hand of Salvation glyph is more for retridins so they have an "oh shit"-button when they managed to pull aggro off the tank.

[Kandrassan]

Yah, if it's a Major Glyph, like I think it will be, I won't be picking it up personally. I just figured I'd mention it for completeness's sake.

Edit: Just for the record I think most (me included) Prot paladins will run something along the lines of Seal of Corruption, Divine Plea, and Hammer of Righteousness for Major Glyphs.

[PapaNasty]

nice summary

Although, I would be VERY surprised if the 3% dmg reduction from Divine Plea Glyph stacked with blessing of sanctuary / vigilance

I'd say it's there as an option for if you don't often tank with another pally present to give you kings (So you can do kings on yourself instead of sanctuary, and rely on divine plea/spritual attumenet for mana)

[cappytoi]

RD glyph is still viable also if you are way below the hit cap.

[Requu]

nice summary
all in all you can be quite satisfied with the prot changes
considering every single change, it is _rather_ a buff than a nerf

[Apollumi]

*New Talent Divinity:Tier 1 protection talent, increases healing done by and to you by 1/2/3/4/5%.

With the changes to mana regen. and the nerf to holy pallys threw DP this talent may be a way to help realive so of that stress off the holly pally and other healers in general.

[Lumidar]

we're the only tanking tree getting this buff to incoming healing. i don't think it's needed for balancing reasons. I'm personally not getting it.

[Kandrassan]

we're the only tanking tree getting this buff to incoming healing. i don't think it's needed for balancing reasons. I'm personally not getting it.

I've argued about this talent for quite some time with another protadin. It seems that the only real use of Divinity is not having to take Reckoning, if the parry haste from Reckoning intimidates you. With 3/5 reckoning and 50% avoidance, bosses parry you about once extra time every 3 minutes, or two parries per 6 minute fight. Personally, this is not a big deal to me, but it does technically reduce your survivability by just a hair, while Divinity is nothing but pluses, so I won't be getting it either, but it is nice having an option for working from T5 to T6 and from T7 to T8 on the talent tree.

Although, I would be VERY surprised if the 3% dmg reduction from Divine Plea Glyph stacked with blessing of sanctuary / vigilance

I have to disagree with you here. Blizzard, as far as I know, has never given a class two buffs that don't stack with each other when both are cast on you. The stacking issues usually only show up with cross-class buffing.

[Lumidar]

I'm sorry but reckoning is useless for tanking too... an extra white damage hit is barely nothing for threat.

i'm getting stoicism to reduce stun duration. i found there were acutally quite a few trash/encounters that stun the tank and it's annoying.

[Kandrassan]

To be honest, it's also a bit of an epeen thing for me, because another tank in my guild (a bear) and I compete on DPS meters, just due to the fact that the current content is just so easy and boring, throwing tank DPS meters in there is fun from time to time. Hell, I even took off my parry trinket for mirror of truth once or twice when it was really close.

[Apollumi]

we're the only tanking tree getting this buff to incoming healing. i don't think it's needed for balancing reasons. I'm personally not getting it.

You do know they said they are going to nerf SA right??

[Lumidar]

and the change to SA is going to change what about the amount of healing we're getting? we won't have a mana issue in 3.1 with Divine Plea running all the time, and with the extra 3% damage reduction from the glyph you won't need as much healing either :P

[Offhand]

The new tier 1 talent will likely become part of the cookie-cutter for tanks. The extra healing done to you far outweighs taking imp HoJ (which I use) or reckoning to get further down the tree. Pumping survivability by any means necessary is priority one.

[TheJ3ster]

In my opinion I think the new Hand of Salvation glyph is more for retridins so they have an "oh shit"-button when they managed to pull aggro off the tank.

Pretty valuable PvP tool too.