[MoP] Protection Paladin Guide

[Splosion]

Guess it's convenient they're making Sacred Shields from different paladins not overwrite each other, since Eternal Flame kinda sucks for us now, perhaps unless they let the HoT benefit from Bastion.

But I suspect that might elicit naughty things happening to SS since as far as I can tell there was a fairly decent reason for not letting it stack several times on one person.

Depends how much the absorb is from retribution. I can imagine 1-2 rets, 1-2 holy paladins + a prot paladin (which is still quite a lot of paladins in a raid) having thebuff stacked would be like having a permanent CD on the tank. It was still necessary, as we'd have less use of what potentially is our best talent from that tier.

[Malthanis]

Stacking SS shouldn't be too much of an issue (I hope). The encounter design that they seem to be going by now is that everybody is taking some kind of hit on a relatively regular interval, so the entire raid should have some kind of need for SS. The kind of situation that would call for multiples of the buff on a single target tends to be a singular burst of damage, so you'd maybe get one or two shields to actually matter against it.

That being said, when 5.0 hits, I'm taking my build back through all three raid tiers of Cata, just to see how the new class mechanics mess with the old encounter mechanics. The entire 'healing' tier should be interesting to see on Chimaeron.

[MerinPally]

Updated the original posts to reflect that Eternal Flame has been nerfed and that Sacred Shield now stacks Still looking for some opinions on stat priorities otherwise I'll have to go with what has been posted which whilst I trust splosion and myself, might be correct for the wrong reasons or just incorrect entirely.

I'll give it a bit longer and then if still no more suggestions (this is actually the hardest bit, just not as time consuming as others) then afterwards we can sort gemming/reforging rather quickly.

[Deleted]

Sweet buffs to word of glory, eternal flame and holy avenger.

Damn, Holy Avenger is one hell of a cooldown now.

[judgementofantonidas]

I have played my Prot Pally in beta and come to the conclusion that it really does not matter. Although you can feel you have made the right choices to be a tank, the talents are so similar and uneeded that you could simply not choose them and still get by.

[Deleted]

I have played my Prot Pally in beta and come to the conclusion that it really does not matter. Although you can feel you have made the right choices to be a tank, the talents are so similar and uneeded that you could simply not choose them and still get by.

That's the whole point. They're not asking what kind of spells you want, they're asking how you want them to work.

Now imagine having to choose between a raid CD or a personal CD. The choice is kinda unfair and very dependent of the situation. You don't have to give up on anything with the paladin tree, you just get to pick what is the most adapted to your playstyle.

[judgementofantonidas]

never in six years of tanking have I not been where I needed to be when I needed to be there. the "need" for movement enhancement that drives so many tanks is just ludicrous.

[Deleted]

never in six years of tanking have I not been where I needed to be when I needed to be there. the "need" for movement enhancement that drives so many tanks is just ludicrous.

T14 raid encounters are tuned around having mobility tools. You "will" need to move.

[MerinPally]

never in six years of tanking have I not been where I needed to be when I needed to be there. the "need" for movement enhancement that drives so many tanks is just ludicrous.

Hence why in DS, we dropped Pursuit of Justice And in Firelands we kept it due to things like Rhyolith and Alysrazor and Ragnaros - whilst not 100% necessary, it was nice and on those fights, Consecration was limited so the points were better for the boost you don;t really notice.

I always agreed and never felt I really needed PoJ but hey it was better than the alternatives

[Deleted]

I'll try to plow through EJ forum and then Theck's forum on the issue of stat weight.
Though... honestly, tanking is more of an art than DPSing.
With thread being a non-issue, most of our work is just planing def CDs and, largely less important, average ability rotation to minimise damage intake (aka: help healers help us).
Effective Health would help in the first case, hope i'll find some stat weights here that are different than "stack stam" again for the ...4 th expansion in a row ?
average mitigation stat weight will be only relevant on the second issue, and i'm guessing will probably have a very different stat weight.
10m tanks will probably have to aim for a different balance between the two weights, since they take less constant damage and often smaller spike damage compared to 25m tanks.

will be back in a few hours, wish me luck ! XD

[edit] well, that's convenient lol !
on a side note: the article confirms some of the previous link rating conversion 885 for parry and dodge and 600 for mastery. So... pretty sure that table is accurate.

So chewed result is:
tank paladin lvl 90 will have an average of:
50k armor
30% avoidance (20% parry, 10% dodge)
5% hit
5% exp
5% haste (this one got me stumped for a bit until i remembered the raid buff )
20 mastery = 32,6% block
note: "Note that we lose 4.5% dodge, parry, and block against a boss, so we subtract 4.5% from each of those numbers " ~ Theck. (Except armor)

So here are the stat weight
4 points of armor (just as 1str =1.5stam on gems, 1 rating = 4 armor on equipment pieces. As such a clock with green armor will lose [extra armor]/4 in rating) = 1.1528
dodge = 0.4308
parry = 0.4335
Strenght (remember str gives a nice chunk of parry rating now)= 0.4235
mastery =0.4029
hit =0.2496
expertise =0.1604
stamina =0.1732

Theck's conclusion first, since it is by far the most important:
What’s interesting about this result is just how close the top four stats are to one another (ignoring armor, which is far and away our best stat).
Dodge and parry are neck and neck, and which one takes the lead will depend on your dodgearry ratio.
Strength will always trail parry, but only barely.
Mastery isn’t very far behind in terms of TDR, though its value depends fairly significantly on hit and expertise (it’s considerably worse at low hit/exp, and gets better as we approach the cap).

Hit, expertise, and haste all fall behind a bit in TDR calculations, though it’s worth noting that the interdependence of these stats has a big effect.
I’ll talk more about that in the next blog post, in which I’ll be analyzing what happens as we change the initial conditions.

As a side note: mine
I'm disappointed Thecks goes with "only" 5% hit/exp, and yet goes on telling how heavily those stats influence the rest of the stat weights... though i guess a full stat weight with variable hit/exp would be a tad heavy to digest. Maybe latter when MoP goes live and he gets easier access to vast data though his own character... or maybe next blog post ?
Now, seeing how hit is valued up to 1,5 exp, we will probably want to get a bit more hit than expertise, so definitively not the 5%/5%, but more a 6%hit/4%exp.
And since hit also significantly falls behind p/d/zigma/m (only 60% value) we will probably want to reduce our "touch stats" to something like 4% hit and 2.5% exp or maybe a tad above.
I'll note here that this is only for optimum average physical damage reduction, and only that ! Those touch stats mean something like 10% less holy power generation compared to hit/exp capped (...i think) and also ~15% chance of having a CS miss when you really really need that last HP... but that kind of falls into the spike scenario (where Effective Health, skill and CD mastery is king)
Damn, now i really want to see the stat weights for 0%hit/0% exp and 7.5%hit/7,5%exp !
Also : BTW ARMOR GEMS !!11!one!

Anyway, on the statweights themselves, they seem pretty close together, which is sweet i must admit.
As some previously said, pure avoidance is arguably the way to go, and mastery has fallen from being the King stat to being just a viable option
note: once again, dependance on hit/exp since those affect mastery via SoR uptime.
I strongly suspect that at hit/exp cap mastery just edges above avoidance. AND there's the issue that mastery gives both a extremely strong flash CD (single SoR would trivialise madness' empales or morchok's lover kiss stomp) and a potencial gamebreaking long CD with holy avenger (which would trivialise ... say H hagara frenzy). Meaning on spike subject mastery is pretty huge, and would give a very strong reason to go mastery stacking again. A minimum of 70% dmg reducting SoR, in BiS, is very very tempting !

Gemming for average physical damage mitigation:
red = pure parry, str is not considered since parry nets you twice the rating
yellow = pure dodge since it's more effective than mastery
blue = stat weights say forget the bonus and put red or yellow... but realistically we'll obviously go with pure stamina or bicolor stam& dodge/parry (remember stat weight is only half the story, there's EH left were stam is generaly king)
Gem socket bonuses: those do not seem to be balanced yet: they do not have the "rating are twice the value of primary stats" as gems do.
If it says as current (doubtful), we'll want to always follow our gem socket bonuses: helm socket (which has for some reason triple value) is a given, 2 gem bonuses when one is either yellow or red (which means pretty much every 2 gem socket bonus lol). Still need the EH for blue sockets value, but i very much doubt stam will go so much under avoidance ratings that we'll want to avoid gemming stamina even in bicolor gems (which give 120stam + 60rating socket bonus for 160 rating)
If socket bonuses are updated to follow the gems weights (meaning one gem socket = 90stam or 120rating instead of current 60) then it's even less of an issue and we'll always follow socket bonuses, period.

Reforging:
Try to keep dodge = parry
reforge mastery into dodge = parry
reforge hit into dodge = parry -> mastery
reforge exp into dodge = parry -> mastery -> hit
And if you want to get hit/exp capped, you'll want to reforge mastery into them and not touch your dodge/parry.

note: going from "optimum" 4%hit/3%exp to hit/exp capped will mean an extra 2720rating invested into those and missing from mastery (-4.5mastery) or from avoidance which is 3% before DR.

Okay... so that leaves the EH issue (in case you missed me saying it every two lines!). I don't think i'll find such an easy post to digest, but who knows, might get lucky twice in a row !
[edit]Holy shi... Wall-o-text NOT finished lol !
[edit 2] okay, either i can't find anything on stam and EH, or i'm so mentaly overburned i can't comprehend what the heck i am reading. Will try again tomorrow.
[edit 3] tip of the day: just like FL's scales of life trinket scaled very nicely in DS, Indomitable Pride scales incredibly well in MoP. Expect to see a lot of tanks geting into raiding still wearing it.

[Elathi]

Nice, Ayashi. Looking forward to Theck's findings on how far to push dodge/parry diminishing returns, also more calculations with a variation of stats. One thing I didn't notice included in the blogpost though is that strength contributes to spell power, which would contribute to WoG and talent tiers 4 and 6, as far as mitigation/healing.

But I don't really disagree with your analysis on gemming/reforging.

The SotR buff will be up no matter if the attack lands or not (Much like current DS), which devalues hit/expertise.

Forgive me, I know I'm pretty late. But this hasn't been my experience. No buff if it doesn't hit, but just like on live SotR doesn't consume the holy power if it doesn't hit. Kinda hope that's altered.

[Splosion]

I'm going to edit out Theck's stuff, since you copy pasta'd it from the latest sacred duty post anyway

But, I'm pretty sure the "s" from the original post is in relative to speed, thus haste, not stamina.

As a side note: mine
I'm disappointed Thecks goes with "only" 5% hit/exp, and yet goes on telling how heavily those stats influence the rest of the stat weights... though i guess a full stat weight with variable hit/exp would be a tad heavy to digest. Maybe latter when MoP goes live and he gets easier access to vast data though his own character... or maybe next blog post ?

They're only values. You could use the matlab file yourself, and imput stats with 7.5% hit/expertise, as well as 0% of each, and the thing would give you appropriate weights.

Now, seeing how hit is valued up to 1,5 exp, we will probably want to get a bit more hit than expertise, so definitively not the 5%/5%, but more a 6%hit/4%exp.
And since hit also significantly falls behind p/d/zigma/m (only 60% value) we will probably want to reduce our "touch stats" to something like 4% hit and 2.5% exp or maybe a tad above.
I'll note here that this is only for optimum average physical damage reduction, and only that ! Those touch stats mean something like 10% less holy power generation compared to hit/exp capped (...i think) and also ~15% chance of having a CS miss when you really really need that last HP... but that kind of falls into the spike scenario (where Effective Health, skill and CD mastery is king)
Damn, now i really want to see the stat weights for 0%hit/0% exp and 7.5%hit/7,5%exp !
Also : BTW ARMOR GEMS !!11!one!

If you look at the end of that same post, there is a discussion on the usefulness of TDR. Like cataclysm (where capping CTC as soon as possible then pushing stamina hard was arguably the best method), it's likely that going for more HP generation for more SotR casts will make for happier healers. It's perfectly possible that we'll want to reforge for hit/exp caps just to make that smoother.

Armor gems would indeed by nice.

Anyway, on the statweights themselves, they seem pretty close together, which is sweet i must admit.

They were fairly close in cataclysm, with the exception of mastery (and in mop weights, armor)

[edit 3] tip of the day: just like FL's scales of life trinket scaled very nicely in DS, Indomitable Pride scales incredibly well in MoP. Expect to see a lot of tanks geting into raiding still wearing it.

Meh, IDP's proc has varied usefulness, and I doubt it'll be worth the massive drop in stats, unless you're talking about extremely early 5mans (like 277s were in cata)

Nice, Ayashi. Looking forward to Theck's findings on how much dodge/parry to get before the diminishing returns start to hurt, also more calculations with a variation of stats. One thing I didn't notice included in the blogpost though is that strength contributes to spell power, which would contribute to WoG and talent tiers 4 and 6, as far as mitigation/healing.

I think WoG is meant more as an emergency button than anything else. Given that we'll get 60%+ of our AP (and thus, SP) from that, I doubt str increases will have much effect, and we'll be taking them for the parry more than the SP.

Forgive me, I know I'm pretty late. But this hasn't been my experience. No buff if it doesn't hit, but just like on live SotR doesn't consume the holy power if it doesn't hit. Kinda hope that's altered.

Aye, I didn't actually check that before saying it, but yes, it doesn't provide the buff if it doesn't land. Sicne I can't get at the beta atm, do you spend the HP if it doesn't? Or can you just cast it again (much like the current SotR)?

[Deleted]

I'm a loyal reader of this thread thx for starting it
My thoughts based on playing in the beta - lvl 90 done few heroics but not much, I focus on fun stuff like farm dailies and pet battles I'm waiting for my guildies to reach 90 maybe then we'll do some more dungeons or raids.
Talents:
T1 Currently I use Laoftl for daily questing the sprint is very useful, for raids and CM I'll use PoJ I'm just used to it I'll test SoL though when MoP goes live. Thinking about boot enchants, I guess if I get hit capped from gear the master/speed enchant will be the one to take so SoL might be slightly more useful.
T2 FoJ reduced cd taken that almost all quest mobs can be stunned makes it very useful for dailies, I think I'll stick with it for raiding aswell but will alternate with repetence (depending on a group - wih guildies I'll stick with PoJ, going on LFD I'll take repetence)
T3 Sacred Shield I just feel it's the most useful for prot out of the three being really useful
T4 Unbreakable Spirit reduced cd? Yes please! It makes me a happy pally
T5 Divine purpose, and I'll stick with it it has a very good uptime, and is quite useful both for SoTR and WoG - fully charged WoG (3 hp and 5 stacks of BoG) heals me for around 25% of my hp which is really good - I have full pvp gear which is enough for heroics atm and have about 420k hp
T6 Execution sentence I just think it looks cool, does decent dmg aswell. I'll try out holy prism as it looks interesting.
Glyphs:
Major
Alabaster Shield more dmg (alternating with holy wrath seems situaltional)
HoTr - a must have IMHO
Consecration -I find it extremly useful, in dungeons aswelll
minor:
Pure fun
Winged Vengeance, Contemplation, Fire form the heavens - all just look nice, I think almost all of them are fun I'm definetely going to swap them form time to time

Overall I like changes in our class, tanking and playing it is just more fun than in Cata

[Deleted]

They're only values. You could use the matlab file yourself, and imput stats with 7.5% hit/expertise, as well as 0% of each, and the thing would give you appropriate weights.

Well, yes but i'm too much of a sloth to actually put my nose into matlab when Theck's going to do the work anyway

If you look at the end of that same post, there is a discussion on the usefulness of TDR. Like cataclysm (where capping CTC as soon as possible then pushing stamina hard was arguably the best method), it's likely that going for more HP generation for more SotR casts will make for happier healers. It's perfectly possible that we'll want to reforge for hit/exp caps just to make that smoother.

Absolutely. 200% agreement with going for hit/exp cap asap in MoP. I offer no contestation on the fact that it's better to convert as many 100k hits into 40k than fewer 100k's in 25k's. Reducing most spike damage to "confortably" survival damage is infinitively better than reducing a few spike damage to "negligible", but eating more spikes overall.
Side note:
that can also be a reason for mastery stacking: 1mastery=1% is only 600rating with no DR, compared to parry/dodge 885 rating=1% and eventual heavy DR
Meaning mastery is ~33% more effective at CTC coverage point per point BEFORE avoidance's DR !
(btw dodge cap is @65%, parry cap@225%. These caps being the point were 1extra rating gives an increase in %score infinitively close to 0. In other words the point were DR has killed dodge and parry increase. We probably share the same caps with other plate tanks. Bears and monks are most probably NOT subject to the same dodge cap)
Spikes are what kill us, can't remember last time a tank died from normal boss damage instead of a skill+melee hit combo (meaniing just healers going oom on the tank). I mean, we have 15min fights and healers can STILL go on! (sure they'll do so complaining, but whatever :evilgrin: )
Also, as shown in theck's blog, SoR buff uptime = Holy Power Generation (per second) and Divine Power talent gives an extra flat 25% bonus on top of that. DP + hit/exp cap will definitively make non-spike bosses a pleasure on a rotation point of view.

Meh, IDP's proc has varied usefulness, and I doubt it'll be worth the massive drop in stats, unless you're talking about extremely early 5mans (like 277s were in cata)

point is, just we lose in stam (only heroic dungeon stam stinket has 1270stam), but the effect stays current. I remember a MoP raid boss that sends quite regularly 500k shadow dmg kicks in the tank face ... just saying

Nice, Ayashi. Looking forward to Theck's findings on how much dodge/parry to get before the diminishing returns start to hurt, also more calculations with a variation of stats. One thing I didn't notice included in the blogpost though is that strength contributes to spell power, which would contribute to WoG and talent tiers 4 and 6, as far as mitigation/healing.

I suspect Theck when with a full 100% SoR rotation for TDR stat weights. I belive that SoR uptime wouldn't be HPGeneration if we used 17% of our HP on WoG
Not 100% real ingame behavior ? Probably. Still, most relevant to TDR mastery weighting.

Forgive me, I know I'm pretty late. But this hasn't been my experience. No buff if it doesn't hit, but just like on live SotR doesn't consume the holy power if it doesn't hit. Kinda hope that's altered.

Currently bugged. SoR is suposed provide the buff on cast, and only have it's damage affected by hit/exp.
Related side note: Grand Crusader procs on CS hit, and you get the HP from AS's cast. Meaning if you miss/dodge/parry CS you don't get the proc, if you miss proc'ed AS you still get the HP but deal no damage.


More random notes :
# haste is valued pratically identical to hit. GC and friends pleaded the argument that hit was going to be a tank stat. Therfor Haste is now a paladin tank stat! You first heard it here !
Now, go troll your guild with the new prot tank gear. STR gem socket bonus ? Not a problem, STR is even more valuable than mastery for us !
# ever felt jalous of alchimist and their free flask thingy ? Well you don't have to anymore ! Insane, right ? Works even better with healers and casters
# We've seen that TRUE CTC capping will not be possible (100% block rate requires something ridiculous like 55k mastery rating), that mastery soft capping (100% physical dmg reduction on SoR buff) could be possible at the end of t16 with heavy rating inflasion since it "only" requires around 37k rating and possible as low as 32k with t14 4p bonus.
Now we see an other mastery soft cap : 100% SoR uptime, which amusingly is not dependant on mastery rating, but on hit/exp/haste.
The 1million dollard question being, how much haste rating do we need to reach 100% SoR uptime with DP talent, 5% raid but, 7.5% hit and probably 15% exp ? (expertise may or may not be required: remember haste has more stat weight that exp in Theck's exemple)

[MerinPally]

I'm so happy that someone else is doing the maths so that I don't have to

[Splosion]

that can also be a reason for mastery stacking: 1mastery=1% is only 600rating with no DR, compared to parry/dodge 885 rating=1% and eventual heavy DR
Meaning mastery is ~33% more effective at CTC coverage point per point BEFORE avoidance's DR !
(btw dodge cap is @65%, parry cap@225%. These caps being the point were 1extra rating gives an increase in %score infinitively close to 0. In other words the point were DR has killed dodge and parry increase. We probably share the same caps with other plate tanks. Bears and monks are most probably NOT subject to the same dodge cap)

Not disagreeing, but we won't reach DR on dodge/parry, ever. Last time that happened was TBC, and even in cataclysm the DRs on avoidance didn't reach silly levels, we just didn't have access to as many secondary stats on gear as we did in wotlk (Go make a set using full 277s for a level 80 on chardev, we'll have around 25-30% avoidance before str/agi conversions easily, when the gear had reasonable amounts of secondaries). We'll likely still value avoidances before mastery, even past the CTC cap.

Oh, and parry cap is ~232%, just gonna get that bit in ;P

point is, just we lose in stam (only heroic dungeon stam stinket has 1270stam), but the effect stays current. I remember a MoP raid boss that sends quite regularly 500k shadow dmg kicks in the tank face ... just saying

What good is a physical damage absorb to 500k shadow ticks? The trinket's proc is fairly weak (because of the threshold it procs at mostly), and 500 or so stamina is definitely worth the trade.

[Elathi]

The 1million dollard question being, how much haste rating do we need to reach 100% SoR uptime with DP talent, 5% raid but, 7.5% hit and probably 15% exp ? (expertise may or may not be required: remember haste has more stat weight that exp in Theck's exemple)

Forgive me if I'm blatantly missing something, but don't we get 10% haste from raid buffs (assumed in Theck's post he just meant the test paladin used had 5% haste on gear or something)? Assumed anyone else's mentions of 5% were a confusion from when our Sanctity of Battle was affected by spell haste.

Anyway, it's not possible to get 100% uptime, without exceptionally lucky procs, I guess. Assuming the 1 second gcd minimum is still in place (someone correct me if I'm wrong), it'd take 9 seconds for one rotation cycle (CS, J, X, CS, X, J, CS, X, X), and each cycle generates only 5.6 holy power. Factoring in a tier 5 talent doesn't bring it up enough.
Edit - Yeah, sorry, I'm an idiot, just about totally wrong. It'd just take enough haste to get Judgment to a 2 second cooldown, but I'm not smart enough to know how much haste that is.

Also, with the strength to spell power thing before, what was mostly on my mind was Sacred Shield.

[Deleted]

Don't confuse Diminishing Returns (DR) with dodge/parry cap as I used the therm in my post.
#DR kicks in pretty early and reduces the effectiveness of each d/p rating point. I think it's around 10% dodge/parry on 4.3 live.
If you prefer, going from 14% dodge to 15% dodge costs a few rating points more than going from 8% dodge up to 9% dodge.

#These caps being the point were 1 extra rating gives an increase in %score infinitively close to 0.
This caps are the highest possible point to get to. Even if a GM gives you a shirt with 2'564'814'512'000 dodge on it, you will NOT get over 65% dodge, because DR will have reach a point were each dodge rating is giving you +0.0000000(repeating fro a long time)0001% dodge. Meaning none at all.
The 232% parry cap means the same for parry, with the parry version of that shirt you'd have your dollsheet stating 232% parry. You'll parry every physical hit trown at you, even if the monster has 20levels over you (i think), and even if it has some kind of buff like Halion that increases his touch chance up by +50%. Heck, to be precise, by up to +127.5% if it's a raid boss.
The points of those caps is that dodge and parry are no longer on the same DR curve as now on live where they are equal, meaning you want dodge%=parry% right now. In MoP that will no longer be the case because parry with have lighter DR, you will want more parry than dodge. What ratio is unclear right now. (at least to me it's unclear, at least I'm pretty confident it's NOT just a parry/dodge ratio of 232%/64%)

What good is a physical damage absorb to 500k shadow ticks? The trinket's proc is fairly weak (because of the threshold it procs at mostly), and 500 or so stamina is definitely worth the trade.

You got me there on the physical dmg bubble XD
I will however present you an conter-argument:
500Stam is around what, ~8k hp ? compared to the i'd say minimum of 400k raid tanks have it's a 2% increase.
on the other hand IP trinket procs every min, and 56% of an average boss white melee hit is roughtly 100k form the handful of WoL logs with paladin tanks i've seen. Sometimes a bit more often a bit less, in hc is pretty much always a bit above 100k.
Lets go with 100k it's a nice round number.
So... we have a 400k+ tank eating 100k white hits, there's a pretty decent chance of having a 56k bubble every minute, which is fully absorbed by the following hit. Meaning around 933 damage absorbed per second. Actually now that i think about it, 56k abs on100k hit is kind like having one critical block every minute or a nice buffed up free WoG per minute.

Heck, lets say it doesn't proc that often and nerf that value by 15% and get 800 per second. 800absorb/s vs +8k health. Seems obvious to me that the stam loss is no big deal compared to the trinket proc.

I'll stand by what i said, it's looking like a pretty sweet trinket @lvl90. Sure it's no mirror, eventually you'll want to remplace it, but it'll last you at the very least until you are finished with normal mode t14 (so only remplace it with 489 or 502 trinkets)

Forgive me if I'm blatantly missing something, but don't we get 10% haste from raid buffs (assumed in Theck's post he just meant the test paladin used had 5% haste on gear or something)? Assumed anyone else's mentions of 5% were a confusion from when our Sanctity of Battle was affected by spell haste.

Anyway, it's not possible to get 100% uptime, without exceptionally lucky procs, I guess. Assuming the 1 second gcd minimum is still in place (someone correct me if I'm wrong), it'd take 9 seconds for one rotation cycle (CS, J, X, CS, X, J, CS, X, X), and each cycle generates only 5.6 holy power. Factoring in a tier 5 talent doesn't bring it up enough.

No worries, i made a mistake so i'm develop on it a bit. Haste decreases CS, J and AS cooldown and our GCD thanks to our passive.
Raid buffs (10% melee haste and 5% spell haste) do not affect us (at very least not at the moment, can't remember if a blue said if it was a bug or not). Hense, either we benefit from the 5% raid spell hast in the beta, are supposed to in MoP and PTR is bugging, or Theck assumed we'd have 5% haste from rating on our gear at lvl 90, which would be somewhat curious.
Haste rating does however lower ours HPGenerators cds.
At level 85 (data from the PTR)
At 0 rating we have 4.5s CS,6s J, 15s AS (but as cd is meaningless since the proc makes it useable). Our base GCD is 1.5s so a complete cycle would take 13.5s and generate on average 5.6HP. So 0.415 HPgeneration meaning 41.5% SoR uptime without DP, 51.9 with DP.
At 1003 rating we have 4.17s CS, 5.56s J and 13.9 AS
At 2002 rating we have 3.89s CS, 5.19s J and 13s AS
At 2528 rating (the most my toon current crapgear can get on ptr) we have 3.76s CD, 5.01s J and 12.5s AS. At that rating I estimate the GCD to be down to around ~1.25s (very very roughtly) so a complete (CS, J, X, CS, X, J, CS, X, X) cycle will take 11.25s. HPgeneration would be around 0.498 so 48.9/61.1% SoR uptime.

For 100% SoR uptime with DP we would need 80% uptime without DP, so 0.80HPGen which means a 5.6hp cycle in 7.00s, or a 7.77 CDG.
Considering 2k5haste gave us a 0.25s GCD reduction we would need around 63k haste rating to get the 6.25 GCD reduction needed for 80% SoR uptime... at level 85. Not looking very good indeed.
And that is even if the 1s gcd cap is removed or does not affect us.
fun : 2.5k haste is ~19.70%haste... 63k would be close to 500% haste !
Of course my mesure of the hasted GCD is vastly innacurate, but even if it were 20% less, 50k haste rating at lvl 85, or ~400% haste is completely impossible. 400% haste at level 90 is also completely impossible for a tank (maybe a haste stacking dpser with a enconter specific mecanic like alicerazor could do it, with procs and lust/hero, short of that ? no way lol)

[you may consider that i just gave myself 1'000'000$ even for an awnser that's most certainly highly innacurate]

More relevant: seems like at lvl 90 haste hardcap, GCD down to 1s, for us will be at 50% effective haste, which would be around 21k haste if raid buffs do not affect our passive. Which is a 62.2% SoR uptime (77.7% with DP).

Also, with the strength to spell power thing before, what was mostly on my mind was Sacred Shield.

SS also scales with SP (by 117% of SP) so it will be buffed my STR a bit, and VERY significantly by Vengeance.
There's a blue post were GC says he expects a tank to have 63k vengence ap in a normal mode 10m raid fight.
=> SS gets to be a bubble a bit over 37k bigger just due to vengeance. I'm expecting up to 50k bubble every 6s while tanking

[note] EF's HoT scales with 5.85% of spell power so... a 50k SS bubble would mean a ~85k total AP and at ~25k hot every 3s.
Seems SS is pretty balanced with EF in output, but absorb is better than healing anyway so, yeah.



[note 2] After some argument it seems like mastery stacking will definitively be viable:
- first on a pure TDR point of view mastery is 1) decent by itself, 2) best stat if talented into DP (25% more weighting than avoidance point per point and before DR)
- On a pure Magical damage point of view, our defencive stats are hit, haste, exp (for HPGen) and mastery (buffs WoG healing via SoR). We are missing mastery value when only WoG healing is considered, but there already good argument going on already being hit/exp capped regardless so only haste and mastery would remain as stats that we can increase for magical damage. And haste is pretty horrible compared to mastery on physical damage. Would stand to reason to stack mastery to cover both physical and magical damage at the same time instead of stacking half mastery half haste. (though... the idea of stacking mastery and haste has some appeal)
- On top of that we have SoR effectiveness as a flash CD and Holy avenger effectiveness as a borderline gamebreaking cd (21s long, up to 70-74% physical damage reduction, 2min cd!) At the cost of significantly reducing mastery effectiveness for the rest of the fight by not having DP talented (DP increases mastery value by 25%!)

[Splosion]

Don't confuse Diminishing Returns (DR) with dodge/parry cap as I used the therm in my post.
#DR kicks in pretty early and reduces the effectiveness of each d/p rating point. I think it's around 10% dodge/parry on 4.3 live.
If you prefer, going from 14% dodge to 15% dodge costs a few rating points more than going from 8% dodge up to 9% dodge.

I'm not confusing them. I just slightly adjusted where you had them is all. But really, there isn't a magical "DR will suddenly punish you if you have more than this" value for dodge and parry, that's a numerical fallacy that gear (and it's available secondary stat budget) gave us in cataclysm. It kicks in past around 8.5% if I recall, where points cease to give you more value for dodge than you gained from the previous point.

#These caps being the point were 1 extra rating gives an increase in %score infinitively close to 0.
This caps are the highest possible point to get to. Even if a GM gives you a shirt with 2'564'814'512'000 dodge on it, you will NOT get over 65% dodge, because DR will have reach a point were each dodge rating is giving you +0.0000000(repeating fro a long time)0001% dodge. Meaning none at all.
The 232% parry cap means the same for parry, with the parry version of that shirt you'd have your dollsheet stating 232% parry. You'll parry every physical hit trown at you, even if the monster has 20levels over you (i think), and even if it has some kind of buff like Halion that increases his touch chance up by +50%. Heck, to be precise, by up to +127.5% if it's a raid boss.

Where'd the 127.5% chance come from? Isn't it only 4.5% per avoidance (so 13.5% for a paladin) from raid bosses in MoP?

You got me there on the physical dmg bubble XD
I will however present you an conter-argument:
500Stam is around what, ~8k hp ? compared to the i'd say minimum of 400k raid tanks have it's a 2% increase.
on the other hand IP trinket procs every min, and 56% of an average boss white melee hit is roughtly 100k form the handful of WoL logs with paladin tanks i've seen. Sometimes a bit more often a bit less, in hc is pretty much always a bit above 100k.
Lets go with 100k it's a nice round number.
So... we have a 400k+ tank eating 100k white hits, there's a pretty decent chance of having a 56k bubble every minute, which is fully absorbed by the following hit. Meaning around 933 damage absorbed per second. Actually now that i think about it, 56k abs on100k hit is kind like having one critical block every minute or a nice buffed up free WoG per minute.

Heck, lets say it doesn't proc that often and nerf that value by 15% and get 800 per second. 800absorb/s vs +8k health. Seems obvious to me that the stam loss is no big deal compared to the trinket proc.

I'll stand by what i said, it's looking like a pretty sweet trinket @lvl90. Sure it's no mirror, eventually you'll want to remplace it, but it'll last you at the very least until you are finished with normal mode t14 (so only remplace it with 489 or 502 trinkets)

And what about the secondary stuff on said 5man/raid trinkets? Trinkets usually have more than just +stam, and half the value lies with the proc/on-use/whatever.

For 100% SoR uptime with DP we would need 80% uptime without DP, so 0.80HPGen which means a 5.6hp cycle in 7.00s, or a 7.77 CDG.
Considering 2k5haste gave us a 0.25s GCD reduction we would need around 63k haste rating to get the 6.25 GCD reduction needed for 80% SoR uptime... at level 85. Not looking very good indeed.

We'd just need to be able to cast 1 HP generator per second. With a base cs cooldown of 4.5 seconds, 50% puts it at 3 seconds, and the gcd at one second. Judgement has a base cd of 6 seconds, and 50% haste puts it's cd at 4 seconds. AS has a base cd of 15 seconds, 50% haste makes that 10, although fundamentally its cooldown doesn't matter, because only GC procs give HP.

If we want a 2sec CD on CS, we need 4.5/2 = 125% haste. 125% haste on judgement actually gives us a 2.67sec cooldown, which is enough to give 3 HP in 3 gcds, providing a 100% SotR uptime.

Strictly, that amount of haste is more than we need, but 125*128.05716 is around 16k rating. We might manage that on madness with BL and some haste procs (plus reforging), but it's rather unlikely. at 90, it's even more unobtainable.

This is naturally assuming a 1sec gcd cap, and a SotR duration of 3 seconds (or more), and with any luck you'd refresh it exactly as it ends.

[Deleted]

Where'd the 127.5% chance come from? Isn't it only 4.5% per avoidance (so 13.5% for a paladin) from raid bosses in MoP?

Well first i assumed you weren't wearing both shirts so i only considered parry as avoidance. 232% - 4.5% = 227.5% chance to parry , so even if the mob has a +127.5% chance to touch you you'd still have a full 100% parry. With an hypothetical +187,9% buff to his chance to touch you it would make your parry go down to 39.6%.
4.5 is for all raid bosses, regardless of where they come from, they all have +3level above you. Heck Ragy in molten core counts as a lvl 93 mob if your toon is lvl 90.

If we want a 2sec CD on CS, we need 4.5/2 = 125% haste. 125% haste on judgement actually gives us a 2.67sec cooldown, which is enough to give 3 HP in 3 gcds, providing a 100% SotR uptime.

Strictly, that amount of haste is more than we need, but 125*128.05716 is around 16k rating. We might manage that on madness with BL and some haste procs (plus reforging), but it's rather unlikely. at 90, it's even more unobtainable.

This is naturally assuming a 1sec gcd cap, and a SotR duration of 3 seconds (or more), and with any luck you'd refresh it exactly as it ends.

Er, what do you do after the 3rd gcd when cs and j are both on cd (cs->j->cs ->gap) ?
Do you rely on the two cs having given you a proc ? 20% chance of proc from each CS? When you get to the gap you have a 64% chance of not having had a proc form either CS.
Do you rely on DP procing off SoR too ? 30% chance of proc, 70% of not proc'ing. At the gap you'd still have a 44.8% chance of having had no GC procs from either CS nor a DP proc.

I think that changing the cycle will break the previous formulas, or rules on HPgen=SoR uptime and the likes.
For exemple, your cycle does not use J on cd, but only every 4s which is a terrible loss of HPgeneration.


[note] On the subject of EF vs SS:
taken from Theck (again):
I disagree with you on two of those points. ["those points" were basically someone arguing that EF could be equal or better than SS] [i] EF is fairly weak compared to SS because it has a significant opportunity cost (namely HP). You'd be wasting WoG and BoG stacks if you tried to maintain the EF buff full time, whereas SS costs you nothing in terms of survivability. [i]