My take on Paladin tanking changes

Looking at the latest beta build currently available at all the usuall places we see some interesting changes coming to Paladin tanking. I know alot of tanks are worried about the defense cap and being able to maintain crit immunity currently 490 defense rating. While I think we all understand that while leveling we dont need to be capped defense rating wise what about the time between 3.0.2 coming to live servers and the release of wotlk.

Blizz has reworked the stat allocation on tier gear(4-6) and some badge gear adding strength and lowering defense rating numbers. One of the things that I believe that is being overlooked by the players is how the mechanics of tanking are gonna change. With BoSac every dodge,parry,block with return mana to us; strength is now going to give us 1 block for every 2 strength, greatly increasing our block holy shield has 8 charges for ten seconds once talented. How I see this affecting the defense cap is that we may have to regem redo some of our enchants/enhancements on our gear. We have access to vindicators armor kits +8 defense rating to hands,legs or feet; steelweave for our cloaks +15 defense rating. An enchant where we can get +12 defense rating to our bracers and/or +15 defense rating to chest piece. Plus the new Isle epic gems which can be cut for + 10 defense rating.

Also as we quested to 70 we had access to trinkets for increased defense rating Dabiri's Enigma a quest reward from netherstorm which has +30 defense rating. Also the adamantine figurine which also has + 30 defense rating and is a drop from Black Heart the inciter.

Yeah if we have to change armor kits regem our gear and or change back to old trinkets we are gonna loose some stamina how much depends on personal gear level, gems, enchants etc.

But now for what I see as the good side of all of this. If we are blocking way more we are reducing incoming damage greatly, with the BoSac changes I already mentioned we will still see a decent amount of mana regen and dont need to take a hit to get it, so we should still have decent mana regen and lets hope less healer stress.

Earlier in the beta, we removed the Defiance talent. It was a mandatory talent since encounters were designed around the very safe assumption that all Prot warriors had it. So Defensive Stance ended up generating more threat.

More recently in the beta, we did a similar thing with Salv. We pulled Salv as a blessing some time ago, so we baked even more threat into Defensive Stance (and equivalents for other tanks).

If this makes it easier to understand, imagine that everyone except the tank always has Perma Salv up and every tank has Defiance as a core ability.

This makes me very happy because some of the tooltips were saying no longer greatly increase threat.

* Shield of Righteousness now deals holy damage equal to 240% of your block value. (Up from 200%)

Yeah a solid single target aggro maching that is gonna scale with the changes to our block

* Righteous Defense is now a 10 sec cooldown and cost no mana

just in case we do lose threat somehow.

So over all I dont see us being gimped between 3.0.2 and the release of wotlk we may have to re learn a couple ways we do things and adjust to a new rotation but we will survive this I'm sure.
We have had a insanely great run through TBC and now we have to relearn somethings but we had to when TBC pre release patch came out anyways