How important is Reckoning?

[Zonzede]

Reckoning is a good talent for threat. 4 extra swings on each proc is a period of greater threat, which I cannot think of a time where as a tank thats bad.
But how important is it really? I've been thinking, my threat really hasn't been an issue thus far, even where Exorcism is not an option. And even then, it's wholly luck based weather it does anything or not. Do I really need that little bit of a chance for bonus threat? my other threat talents (1h spec, imp judgment) are easily cut and measured in effectiveness.
If I did drop it, the extra points would be put into Improved Devotion Aura. Even if it's only 345 more armor, I've become more of a fan of the stamina/armor (meatshield) model for tanking than pure avoidance. Meatshield is steady and predictable, where eventually with the pure avoidance model, the game's RNG will tell you at a bad moment that it's time it purely fails you. Granted you can minimize that chance by pumping the numbers, but chance catches up with us all.

Ironically, the meatshield style works better with the way reckoning procs, and I'd be dropping it in favor of improving my meatshield defensive status. Go figgure.

Anyway, drop reckoning's chance at some extra threat for Imp Devo's small but wholly reliable mitigation consistency? Why or why not?

In conclusion, I think blizzard would make many tankadins happy if they removed Shield Specialization's reliance on Redoubt. Which was the other thought I had, sac redoubt for imp devo, but I really like shield spec.

[kvark]

in my personal opinion, I dont see it as important talent. It IS a bunch extra agro, something you can't get too much of....but lately I see this proc rarer and rarer as I get more and more avoidance.
I feel it's getting as useful as redoubt imho.

[matchbox]

instead of imp devo look at weapon expertise its pretty good

[Alixander]

In general I dislike Reckoning. It provides an approximately equal bonus in threat generation compared to other similar talents, such as Improved SoR and Improved 1H, but at the cost of only activating when you're hit (and by that I mean hit and said hit does damage), and by increasing (albeit a minor one) the chance that the enemy will parry.

My biggest beef has always been the fact that it's a "I must take damage for this ability to activate" type abilities. To me these are bad because as you continue to increase your gear quality your overall avoidance will probably go up. The more avoidance you have, the less times you are hit for damage, meaning fewer chances that abilities like these will activate. I would rather have something that gives a smaller bonus full time than something that activates pretty much at random.

As for Weapon Expertise, the jury's still out on whether it actually lowers enemy parry chance, but I figure it's worth it just for the increased chance to hit, since the current belief is that Avenger's Shield is based on your physical to hit chance, and it's always really bad when AS misses.

[Thels]

It kinda depends how you gear. If you rely on Sta/Armor/BV then you don't reduce the chance on Reckoning, so it's still ok.

I got IDA at the moment, but I'm thinking about returning to the cookie cutter build for Reckoning. Helps a huge lot on grinding as well, and if combined with SoL/JoL, it might actually net me less damage on AoE packs.

[Baelor]

Personally I think that Reckoning is a much better choice than Improved Devo Aura, if only for the simple fact that you'll probably have a holy paladin in the raid, and that holy paladin will probably have it as well, so you'll get the aura without spending the points. Interlocking raid specs for the win! Strength in numbers, my friend.

If there was another talent you were considering, it's worth discussing, but if you're tanking and you've got a 41/20/0 paladin standing around, throw 'em in your group and you've just freed yourself 5 talent points.

[Zonzede]

If there was another talent you were considering, it's worth discussing, but if you're tanking and you've got a 41/20/0 paladin standing around, throw 'em in your group and you've just freed yourself 5 talent points.

Aye, that's probably what I'll end up doing. Unless I get my wish of a competent ret pally who doesn't mind not having windfury in my group =D in which case sanctity and crusader will more than make up for reckoning.

[Odius]

If you're keeping good aggro I'm all for dumping reckoning for something else. Would I dump it for Improved Devo aura? Probably not.

I don't think it's part of the core prot build but unless you're putting more into holy for PvP on the side or something I think it's a good way to spend the 5 points.

[Igrado]

I take reckoning for the following benefits and reasons...

--) AOE farming.
--) Free Seal of Righteousness procs in Riad on trash and most boss fights.
--) Free SoL procs when melee tries to gank me and I try and survive.
--) Free SoR procs when I have a 2H out for whatever unknown reason.
--) Better for me than Precision. I'd understand if Precision's better for more progressed tankadins, but I'm just into Kara and find the points better spent on farming.

[Alixander]

I'm a bit outside the "norm" in that I don't really view Shield Spec as worth 8 talent points. Now, don't get me wrong, if it didn't have a prereq I'd buy it in an instant, but I think spending eight points for a three point talent is a waste. And while yes, many healadins have Improved Devo aura, it's rare that I get paired up with them (and until recently we haven't had any Holy Paladins in my guild...). Since I won't spend the points on a talent I deem almost worthless (Redoubt) that leaves only one option in the initial row of talents, which is why I get Imp Devo Aura.

[Buttertoast]

reckoning + big mace + gnome warlock = puddle. though, i can certainly see why many advocate skipping it.

[Demiblade]

Personally, I want to give it a shot too; to drop reckoning for weapon expertise. Now I am noticing that my threat ceiling is never a problem for my DPS team even when reckoning does not proc. And we almost always 1 shot prince without ever having to hold back on DPS.

Most probably, I will go for a respec and move 5 points from reckoning into weapon expertise once patch 2.2 goes live. That will give me a better chance of getting 5 stacks SoV and still use JoR in between.

As of 2.1. I just find it too messy to JoV, SoR, JoR, then SoV again and hope that my SoV procs again within that 3~4 seconds. The stacks are just not reliable enough with 12sec window of SoV right now to use together with SoR, and hence no compelling reason to drop reckoning for weapon expertise yet.

[Girard]

Spec'd out of Reck this weekend for WE instead. I'm enjoying the more steady threat that it provides as opposed to the random proc of reckoning.

I feel it's more of a 5-man than raid talent; 5-mans don't need a lot of avoidance to survive and odds are you're pulling large groups anyways so redoubt/reck will be up often. In raids, you're generally only taking on one mob at a time.

[Lonso]

Reckoning seemed to never proc when it mattered. When I was tanking a boss or boss add it wouldn't proc or would hardly proc at all. When I was tanking trash it would proc all the time. As my avoidance got higher it would proc less often. When I started using SoV rather than SoR for longer fights (longer than a typical trash mob) it became pretty worthless. So I had 5 points to move.

I play a human pally so I already have +5 weapon skill for most weapons. At put 5 points in the talent as well. What I found looking at WWS stats versus Void Reaver was there wasn't much difference when I had those 5 points. I was parried 8% without them, 8% with them. Not a huge data sample but enough for my purposes. The numbers indicated by a blue poster some time ago don't seem to be accurate. I am starting to believe WoWWiki's take on +5 being the sweet spot and anything over that being almost worthless. Since I get +5 from a racial, this gave me 5 points to put elsewhere.

Currently I have 3 of them in Imp JotC. This left 2 points and nothing really good to get with them. I stuck them in Imp Devo but am thinking about moving them to the ret tree.

[Everlight]

I looked over a whole Kara run in WWS, and Reckoning only procced about ~3% of all the attacks I received. That's really dismal. As such, I bit the bullet and specced out of it for this week, into 5/5 Weapon Expertise.

We'll see what difference that makes. In particular, I'm expecting it will help a lot in scenarios when I'm not the aggro target or in single-target scenarios (ie bosses) which attack slowly.