The Current State of Protection Paladins in WoW: Forever

Like many other specs, the Protection Paladin had a slew of changes to turn the class into a viable spec in Forever when compared to its Classic counterpart. We've already seen a ton of adjustments to the spec over the course of the beta, with the last round of updates delivering sweeping changes to how we approach the Protection Paladin and its place in a raid roster.

Changes affecting the Protection Paladin:

• Paladin
  • Seal of Fury is no longer overwritten by Power Word: Shield.
  • Blessing of Salvation and Greater Blessing of Salvation have been replaced with Salvation and Mass Salvation. These are applied in the same manner as the blessings were, but are not exclusive with blessings.
  • Paladins now also learn Revoke when Salvation is learned. Revoke removes the target party or raid member's Salvation or Mass Salvation.
  • Judgement of Righteousness and Judgement of Fury now have the correct spell power coefficients for instant cast spells.
  • Fixed an issue causing Seal of Righteousness to gain almost twice as much benefit from Spell Damage than intended.
  • Fixed an issue where Judgement of Righteousness had an incorrect Spell Damage coefficient.
  • Consecration's Spell Power Coefficient per tick has been changed to 0.042 (was 0.095).
  • Righteous Fury's Holy damage threat generation increased to 90% (was 60%).
  • Seal of Fury Rank 3 is now correctly available for training at level 26 (was incorrectly level 25).
• Protection
  • Shield Specialization Mana restored to the Paladin lowered to 4% with a 3-second internal cooldown (was 6% with a 3-second internal cooldown).
  • Reckoning: This talent has been adjusted so you gain a charge of Reckoning each time it triggers. Your next melee swing (auto attack) will trigger all accumulated charges for 1 extra attack each. You may have a maximum of 4 charges.
• Retribution
  • Champion of the Light now increases your spell damage by 10/20/30% of your Intellect (was 20/40/60%).
  • Sanctified Judgement's Mana restore effect no longer generates threat.

While all of these changes affect the Protection Paladin in some way, let's go through some of the outliers and what it means in terms of gameplay, both while leveling and at the endgame.

How does it affect the paladin?

TL; DR: Quite a significant nerf compared to where they stood before, but it means little without knowing the full context of the endgame and potential changes to the other tanks. With that said, as it's the only reference we have, some of the points below will make comparisons to other tanks in their current state.

Buffs/Favorable Changes

Salvation now losing its blessing tag means that it no longer competes with buffs like Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom, or Blessing of Might. I think this is a phenomenal change, as there was always a bit of friction when it came to which blessing to choose, particularly in a dungeon environment. There were few things more frustrating than having a Mage pull threat while AOEing, already having Salv, then getting the whisper "Wisdom pls" to thoroughly cement the Mage as the new tank of the group.

There are some drawbacks to this change for people who were looking to set their raid spot in stone, as previously, having at least 3 Paladins in your raid was all but a requirement, whereas you now have a large diminishing return when it comes to the value of the third Paladin, adding only Blessing of Light and Judgement of Light to the raid. I think this is perfectly fine, however. Especially with a lot of the party-wide buffs becoming raid-wide.

Righteous Fury was brought back to a 90% Holy damage threat modifier, up from 60%. This was initially changed during the beta when Protection Paladins were making threat all but an afterthought with the heavily buffed spell power modifiers of Consecration and Retribution Aura, which have since been nerfed. This is more of a compensation than an outright buff, particularly when it comes to AOE threat. That being said, it does lend some credence to single-target threat-focused builds that incorporate Holy Shock in their rotation, which may see some use if the raid ends up being threat-capped.

Reckoning was very janky previously on the beta, essentially serving as a proc that finished your auto-attack swing timer. Now it functions more closely to its Classic version, but with the added benefit of being proccable through blocking attacks. This introduces some interesting gameplay possibilities, like macroing /stopattack modifiers to store charges, particularly before engaging a boss encounter. It procs seal effects, as usual.

One aspect of the Reckoning change that I think is rather interesting is the ability to store up 4 charges of Reckoning before a boss, swap to a two-hander, and unload the Reck-bomb before swapping back to a sword-and-board. Weapon swapping does incur a 1.5 sec GCD, but can be combined with other abilities, like using Holy Strike before swapping back to a shield.

Seal of Fury also had a bug fix to not override Power Word: Shield.

Nerfs/Unfavorable Changes

The most striking nerf to the Protection Paladin toolkit comes through the halving of the spell power coefficient of Consecration. In addition to nerfs to the number of targets affected by the Paladin's Consecration, the previous niche of being the dedicated AOE tank simply isn't there with the current tuning.

In terms of threat, this nerf is not that big of a deal, as with the change to Righteous Fury. It shifts the threat skew to be higher in low spell power gear and lower in high spell power gear, compared to the previous iteration.

Consecration Threat

Old Formula: Threat per tick = (base + 0.095SP)1.6

New Formula: Threat per tick = (base + 0.042SP)1.9

At Rank 5 (max rank), with a base tick damage of 39, you'd need ~162 spell power for the old formula to equal that of the new one, and every point of spell power added after that point would've benefited the old formula. With Forever itemization, this is a number you'll hit very early in your gearing process.

While the class fantasy has always been an extremely adept AOE tank, this change does make it easier to increase single-target threat without making AOE threat way too easy to maintain, which may have been a necessary change to balance the Paladin's single-target threat. With these changes, the AOE throughput is no higher than the other tanks, which seems like a flaw in the design. Tuning will tell how things will play out, but adding +1 target to Consecration's main damage seems like a good way to maintain the Protection Paladin niche of AOE tanking.

Shield Specialization was brought down from restoring 6% mana per block to 4%. As far as I can tell, this doesn't seem to have too much of an effect on our overall mana in the endgame, but it will make lower-level leveling more mana-restrictive, depending on which talents you run.

For reference, here's a mana breakdown of each individual mana talent in the Protection and Retribution tree while tanking a single target with a 2.0-second swing timer using a 1.5-second attack speed weapon at max level.

Improved Seal of Fury - 132.5 MP/5

Shield Specialization - 109.5 MP/5 (72,3 MP/5 after the change)

Holy Conduit - 137.7 MP/5 if using Consecration rotationally (179.2 MP/5 against Demon/Undead)

Sanctified Judgement - 86 MP/5

The value of Shield Specialization gets amplified by tanking multiple targets, even if it has a 3-second internal cooldown. I have a hard time seeing this change to drastically change the mana profile of the Protection Paladin, but it will be noticeable.

Seal of Righteousness (SoR) had a modifier that was too high on the beta, and I'm not too upset about this being changed, as it was looking way too strong and encouraged some unintuitive behavior. Now both Seal of Fury and Seal of Righteousness have a 0.1 spell power modifier on one-handed weapons, and SoR should be relegated to being a spell you use only when you want to avoid taunting your target with Judgement.

The outlook for Protection Paladins

Overall, these changes should make the threat situation in the early game slightly more manageable at the cost of AOE throughput and a slight mana reduction.

While I am wholly against dooming based on having incomplete information about where class design and tuning will end up, there are a few things that have me slightly worried about the outlook of the Protection Paladin when compared to the Protection Warrior and Feral Druid.

Question: Why bring a Protection Paladin? Based on the data we have currently, the Protection Warrior will be much more adept at dealing with boss damage, as they can reliably push Crushing Blows (and Critical Strikes) off the combat table with Shield Block, whereas the Paladin is unable to reach that point with Holy Shield. On top of that, the Warrior brings Thunder Clap (which was buffed in Forever to 20% attack speed reduction), Sunder Armor, and Demoralizing Shout.

While I fully expect changes to the Feral Druid toolkit, particularly Berserk, their high effective health pool (EHP), armor values, and ability to deal serious damage while not tanking mean the Protection Paladin has to bring something unique to the raid to compete for their raid spot.

Previously, that was AOE tanking. Currently, the condition to be brought is either a) the other Paladin specs not being desirable, b) encounters being designed in a way where Divine Shield provides considerable utility through removing non-dispellable debuffs, or unique utility through an 8-second taunt with Divine Shield + double Judgement of Fury using Swift Judgement, or c) your friends like you enough to not care about which tank they bring.

I'm hoping these concerns are completely unfounded, and as I mentioned before, I wouldn't put too much stock in where tuning currently is, but the changes we've seen over the course of the beta paint a picture that leaves me slightly puzzled as to what the identity of the Protection Paladin is supposed to be, and what role we're supposed to fill.

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