Blood Elf Paladins and Seal/Judgement of Blood

So, I got into a discussion with another Blood Elf Paladin who is convinced they can tank everything with warrior gear and Seal/Judgement of Blood and no spell damage.

I'm a firm believer that if he's using that combo and not using sp damage, he's holding his dps back. Am I wrong for feeling that way or is it true?
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Nah, you're pretty much right. He's holding DPS back. He'll learn that if he tanks Void Reaver, and fails to hold aggro for any real period of time.
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Yeah the discussion ended with him calling me an asshole who didn't know shit about Prot Paladins.
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Actually, I've been messing around with SoB vs SoR recently and haven't found there to be a huge difference for me. However, I'm in mostly Kara gear, as is all of our dps so I probably have not hit the level of spell damage necessary for SoR to clearly out threat SoB.

I was one of those people who used to think SoB tanking was stupid and if you weren't using spell damage then you had no idea what you were doing, but after trying it, it's not as bad as I thought.

It is not bad and JoBlood for starting makes sense since the chance to miss is much lower.

But as soon as you can get your hands on paladin specific tanking gear (aka spelldmg) SoR becomes far superior regarding aggro. If you have enough aggro, continueing with SoB and avoidanceweapon could be a good idea, too.
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Cauze blizzard begins to let healing suck.

Judgement of BLood is quite useful sometimes since it cannot be resisted.


It is true that we can use SoB with a warrior weapon and no spelldamage, but this works for Kara and heroics. After that, since the raid has a high increase in DPS, the threat generated by SoB swings is simply not enough to counter the raid threat due to the lack of spelldamage. I've been using SoB+Sun Eater until we got on Vashj, then i wasn't making enough threat anymore.
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Was using SoB last night during BoSW on the rogue add during Illidari Council and was just appalled at how little TPS it did (yes I swapped out for higher weapon dps choice while doing this). I was amazed that this was ever a workable choice.

The threat captain, she is too low!
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Lansky BE Paladin Mannoroth
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mannoroth&n=Lansky

Seal of Blood used to do a large amount more threat than it was supposed to. That got fixed a few patches back, and I haven't used it for any real tanking since.

It's still on my bar though, since JoB always hits.
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Despite all my rage, I am still just a Paladin tank.

Yeah, I used to tank with it until I got some spell damage and since I've gotten around 200+ sp damage I use S/JoR and almost always start of with JoB.
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Since all sources of threat scale with spelldamage for a paladin, I'd imagine it's better for a paladin. If you like, use the simple equation of 1 SD = .5 TPS and compare it to the threat output of SoB sword.

Seal of Blood does 35% more holy damage based on normal weapon damage that is not affected by spelldamage on each hit. Presumably it is affected by AP.

By losing out on spelldamage, you lose:
5% on Holy Shield per shield hit
9% on Avenger's Shield
96% on Consecration
73% on SoR (but this is moot given that we're gaining it on SoB)

How much damage on a sword needs to make up for this damage? Well, let's take a nice round number for spelldamage - 200. Also assume a 2.0 speed weapon and assume 3 HS charges used per 8 seconds. Assuming you have the same rotation and do the same spells (except for SoB/SoR), you get something like these numbers for holy damage lost:
Spell Coefficient SD duration total holy damage
Consecrate 0.96 192 8 24
HS 0.05 30 8 3.75

The judgment does 31 holy damage/second compared to 36.4 holy damage/second with a JoR that has 200 spelldamage. We'll use that as the difference.

JoR-JoB 0.73 146 10 5.4
SoR 0.18 36 2 18

For a total of 51.15 holy damage lost per second, or 97.185 threat lost per second.

Thus for SoB to be equal, you need to be producing at least 97 TPS from SoB. For something like a sun eater, you'll be producing another 40 TPS from the white damage increase. (that's not entirely accurate given that you'll be missing, but it's a rough estimate; it's likely you'll be closer to 30TPS). So using the 40, you need another 57 TPS. Since it's holy, we only need 30 DPS. Assuming a swing speed of 2, this means we need the seal to do 60 damage, and that means we need to do 171 damage per swing with the weapon.

In other words, as long as you do 171 damage with the weapon (roughly) you'll produce equal threat on a single target.

If you bump spelldamage up, this changes. At 250, your weapon needs to do 252 damage. At 300 you need to do 338. At 350, you need to do 424 per swing. At 400 spelldamage you need to do 511 per swing. To me, those numbers sound fairly high. 171 damage doesn't sound so bad, but 200 spelldamage is about the minimum you can expect (and that's with consumables). A better comparison is 300, and there it seems like 338 damage would be tough to do regularly.

Now, there are some neat advantages with this system. With this you get better defensive stats from a tanking sword, meaning that your itemization is a bit better overall. You also can massively stack avoidance, since you'll be taking damage and thus do not need as much mitigation in order to restore mana. That's kind of cool. The spelldamage on later gear is not entirely wasted; it does help the JoB some as well. However, it's going to be hard to get good AP on this.

My conclusion is that it's potentially viable at Kara type levels of tanking, but hurts tanking multiple mobs due to the loss of damage on consecration and isn't sustainable, gear wise, as you progress.

I have been encouraged by my guild raid leader to use SoB instead of SoR - so experimented with it in BM last night. I didnt have a warrior type weapon so kept my pally sword, but did notice I actually had to taunt more than when I use SoR. Also losing all that spell damage would really hurt as I do a lot of AOE tanking

edit: meant SoR not SoJ
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Seal of Blood is not affected by spell damage. It is a base of 35% of the top end of your weapon's damage or something similar. Only the judgement is affected by sp damage.
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