Nerds at Play

There had been some speculation early on that Prot Pallies would go through a radical change in itemization in Lich King. It was hinted that Paladins would be intended to share gear with Warriors and Death Knights - suggesting that the old reliance on spell power over attack power would be gone.

With the latest beta build and the items available for perusal on Wowhead, this is abundantly clear.

Abilities Scaling with Strength

It seems that at least five main abilities will scale directly with attack power in Lich King: Seal of Righteousness, Judgement of Righteousness, Avenger’s Shield, Consecration, and Hammer of the Righteous. The first four also scale with spell power, and the Hammer ability is solely reliant on attack power as it contributes to weapon damage.

In the case of Seal and Judgement of Righteousness, spell power contributes somewhat more to the total damage. Spell power contributes twice as much for SoR and ~60% more for JoR. However, in Avenger’s Shield and Consecration, spell power and attack power make equal contributions (7% and 4% respectively).

Take into account the relative “cost” of Str/AP and spell power, and it becomes clear that Strength will contribute the bulk of a Paladin’s threat through itemization. Compare two green quality red gems introduced in Lich King: Bold Bloodstone and Runed Bloodstone. For the price of 12 Strength (24 Attack Power), you get 58% as much spell power - 14.

Since SoR currently values spell power at twice the rate of attack power, they will contribute roughly equally in terms of item level to the SoR damage. However, attack power will be slightly “cheaper” in terms of purchasing threat on JoR, and it will vastly outshine spell power on Avenger’s Shield and Consecration.

You’ll also want to note that Strength is superior to attack power for several reasons. First, it scales with BoK and Divine Strength (which may now become a requirement for Prot Pallies). Second, it contributes to Block Value at a rate of 2 Str : 1 BV. This helps improve your survivability and also increases your threat generated by Shield of Righteousness.

Do We Still Need Spellpower?

It seems that in terms of itemization, no. You probably won’t find any plate gear with spell power, and it would be silly to equip rings, cloaks, etc that boost your spellpower. If you want to increase your threat, equip some melee DPS rings with Strength or, to a lesser extent, attack power.

There seem to be only two abilities that continue to scale solely with Holy Spell Power - Holy Shield and Retribution Aura (according to Elitist Jerks, this has a coefficient of ~6.6%).

Spell power is thus helpful, but not a reason to itemize differently. It seems that the main (only?) source of spell damage for Protection Pallies will be the new talent Touched By the Light. I’d see this as another mainstay Tankadin talent, since this allows your threat to scale directly with Stamina, and the threat will be well worth three talent points. At level 70, a Tankadin should be looking at least 1000 Stamina, yielding 300 Spell Damage, and a well geared, raid buffed Tankadin should have 14-1500 Stamina - or 450 extra spell damage. That’s sacrificing a lot if you skip over this talent.

Unfortunately, it will be impossible to go all the way down the Protection tree for Hammer of the Righteous and simultaneously snag Sheath of Light from the Retribution tree. It might make an interesting, max-threat hybrid build to sacrifice some of the Protection talents for that.

So What Gear Do I Wear?!?

Unfortunately, this means that most of your current Tanking gear will be near useless in Lich King. You’ll have some spell damage, so you’ll be able to put out some ok threat - but it would be much better if your gear was itemized for Strength instead. To make matters worse, there is almost no tanking gear with Strength on it - short of the Warrior T5 and T6. Boo…

Introduced in Lich King is a non-set of craftable Plate armor with Strength, Stamina, and Defense (see: Cobalt Chestpiece and similar pieces). It would be wise to pick that up as quickly as possible.

My other idea is to grab up as much Retribution Gladiator gear as I can. These offer a nice array of stats - Strength, Stamina, and Int (maybe not the best for tanking, but helpful for Protection farming and questing). The resilience will also help you become uncrittable, so you don’t have to continue to wear purely defense gear when you could be wearing damage/threat causing gear.

I’m still trying to figure out the best balance of Lich King tanking, BC tanking, and Ret gladiator gear to go with. In the meantime, I’m going to try to gather a full set of Merciless and perhaps some other stuff. I’ll probably re-spec to Retribution for the last month or so before Lich King anyway, so I can sort the gear out later.