A look at Graimerin

Hey everyone! Hope everyone is enjoying Wrath and getting used to the new skills, talents and all around goodness that I see in Wrath. Figured that now that I have reached level 76, and will not be getting any new skills either through talents or spells. I'd take a look at what I think protection pally's will be doing and how we are gonna be doing it.

The biggest single change to the paladin tank class in my opinion is the fact that now we have a single target threat attack Shield of Righteousness. While we have been the best AoE trash tanks in the game now we can go 1 0n 1 with bosses and push our tps ahead of our dps. Another bonus to this spell is its ability to scale and also crit so we wont be lagging behind as we improve our gear. If spec with redoubt we get 130% of our block value + 300. Now this damage is holy which is effected threat wise by Righteous Fury. The other aspect of this spell that works with our gear is the changes to how block value is computed 1 strength = .5 block value and that strength is now on our tanking gear as well; we can now use warrior tank gear or generic plate tank gear may be a better way of phrasing it.

Now that we gained a huge single target attack, how is our AoE gonna be affected. Again personally I think we have improved over all. In BC paladin crowd control was very simple we had our own "cc" continuous Consecration. The pre patch for Wrath included this awesome spell Hammer of the Righteous. What I do is use Seal of Vengeance after pulling a group with Avenger's Shield; then bang on the hammer. This applies the DoT aspect onto each of the mobs, up to 3 locking them down a little more than just the consecration. Why I like the added bonus is with the changes to our judgements is that as we move down the kill order I have a seal active on each of the mobs without needing to tab threw the kill targets. Another bonus to our AoE threat and a minor help to our healers is our Judgements epically Judgement of Light. This adds healing aggro to our tps and with a second pally in the group we can have both this and Judgement of Wisdom up. I love this combo on bosses and am lucky enough that I normally have a Holy or Ret in my groups. So we are building aggro offering some minor splash healing to our group and doing our jobs with much added group utility.

Now I'm sure none of this is new to most of the pally community and the theory crafters are working out great tps spell rotations that I will try to incorporate into my play style. I just wanted to add my 2 cents to the discussion. There are some awesome gear guides already out and the debate about being block capped has already started. I'm not going to worry about wadding into that discussion until I'm doing heroics and or raids where those things will become important.

In closing I just want to re state the obvious an expansion built around a Paladin gone bad has given protection paladins some interesting new toys and ways to play with them.