Prot 2.0

[JohnnieRat]

Well, in my experiments PvPing with different Specs, I switched to prot today.

From an honor farming standpoint, it completely rocks. You get to live forever while everyone else kills everything. You don't really have to attack rogues since they kill themselves if you keep Sancuary and Holy Shield up. I get a 70% block rate when Redoubt procs plus about another 15% for dodge and parry. Avenger's Shield is extremely useful since it dazes 3 targets and hits for around 500-600 when used. Only down side is it's range of 8-30 meters so you have to open with it or use it runners. Reckoning is more useful since it procs off any sort of attack and having only 4 minute Bubble cooldowns is rather handy. The 10 remaining points put into Holy for Divine Intellect and Spiritual Focus so I get more mana and when I heal with Conc Aura up, it is over a 100% non-interrupt rate... again, very handy.
Link to Prot Build: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/paladin/talents.html?055000000000000000000502413302330152015010000000000000000000000

During my time as a Ret-Pally, I found that DPS went through the roof although it is still a lower than people (non-pallies) claim it is. I experienced more runaway damage than anything else. Basically, Judge Crusader, Throw on SoC, Swing, CS, Stun, Concecratee, Judge and hopefully they were about dead. Repentence when needed so I could get another uniterupted heal. Crusader Strike was nice but apparently the tree is getting the major nerf-bomb with cooldowns being lengthened and Vengeance only giving +10% damage rather than 15%.

Next Chapter will be... My ventures into the Holy tree.

[Whiterice]

I really liked tanking the 61+ instances in the xpac. a lot of people don't seem to like the capn america shield, but imo it's awesome. BoSanc - > Spikes Aura - > Throw shield - > Consecrate - > Holy shield and SoR/SoV and it'll take a serious amount of damage to pull something off of you. The only problem i had was proritising what stats i was looking for in gear.

Sta/AC/Def/Resilience/Block/Block% are all important... but you're going to need a moderate amount of spell damage and int or Mp5 as well. Spiritual attunement is nice, but it still helps to have a fairly large mana pool. Mark of Vindication helped too, but they nerfed that all to heck.

I went through on my paladin grabbing str/sta/int spelldmg plate, as Holy is a great tree for leveling, even moreso with the CS nerf. I thought about doing it again, but grabbing mostly tank armor, and just using jewelry/cloaks for the spell damage/int, but i never did get up the motivation to do it again. The 60 - > 70 grind sucks bigtime, but at least the numerous amount of quests make it a lot less tedious.

At this point, i'd seriously reccomend that no one go RET unless you're already super geared out for it. You're way more useful in a group as holy or prot, and there are just a boatload of yummy instance drops for paladins. other than the talent trees, we really get some lovin in the expansion.

[JohnnieRat]

I heard that Blizz is actually making armor in the Expansion which is actually good for Prot Pallies rather than us just stealing warrior stuff and sacrificing a few thousand mana. Any confirmations?

[dharq]

Right now, there are 3 versions of the tier 4 and tier 5 paladin armor in the item files.. one for healing/casting, one for protection, one for dps. Granted, each one still retains some hybrid utility, but they do seem to have better item/set bonuses for the different specs now. Same with druids and shaman. Even warriors have a dps and protection set right now. Priests also have a dps or healing set.

At least that's how it is currently in the tables. I don't know whether or not this will be the case in release or even the next build.

[Genoism]

it'd be a lot better if all those peices were interchangable like benediction....whats wrong with healing one day and dps'ing another....oh my god people could have fun?

[Whiterice]

I'd say a lot ot of the lack of utility in the new tier armors comes from the PvP side of things. Most die hard pvp'ers complain that even in GM gear they can get rolled by a raid group that hardly pvps but has T2/3. In this case, you'll probably grab the set that's best for your raid first Healing/Tanking/Etc. and not be able to switch effortlessly into PvP mode on a whim. It DOES make some crazy kind of sense that PvP'ers should get the armor that's best for pvp ^^

[dharq]

from what i've read, it looks like only the pvp sets will have resilience ratings on them.. more resilience = suffering fewer crits from all sources and minimizing dmg from crits that get through.. so pvp sets will definitely have an advantage for pvp (and probably become more practical for pve as well)