New Shield of Righteousness

Q u o t e:
•Shield of the Righteous is back - Slam the target with your shield, causing 3198 plus 100% of your attack power per stack of Holy Power as Holy damage and refreshing the duration of your Holy Shield.

The actual tooltip says:

Slam the target with your shield, causing Holy damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to determine damage dealt:

1 Holy Power: 30% Attack Power
2 Holy Power: 60% Attack Power
3 Holy Power: 90% Attack Power

Shield Slam hits for 100% of attack power, but it's physical damage. On the other hand, it doesn't require a secondary resource.

Q u o t e:
And it's also usable every 6 seconds. Are there plans to improve the Holy Power generation of protection paladins? Despite having a 6s cooldown as well, SoR is obviously not usable at full power every 6 seconds currently.

It's not Shield Slam and it's not intended to fill that role. I was merely offering that so players would have a point of comparison for the kind of numbers their attack should produce.

We had pulled SoR from the beta because it was one of the things that, in our minds, made the Prot paladin and warrior feel too similar. We wanted to bring it back because paladins like the ability, but we didn't want to bring it back as a Shield Slam clone.

Q u o t e:
If the damage scales linearly with holy power (30% ap x HP), is there ever a reason to save it up to 3 HP before using it? If so, wouldn't this just become the "hit this whenever it comes off cooldown regardless of HP" because you wouldn't be losing damage from that?

If you use Shield of the Righteous with 1 stack, you hit softer, which may not be that big a deal since you can do it again after the next Crusader Strike / Hammer of the Righteous. However a 1 stack Shield of the Righteous only grants 5% block, which may be less than you want.

To add to my previous tooltip, here is Holy Shield. Remember it's a passive now.

Your Shield of the Righteous hits increase your block chance by 5% per stack of Holy Power consumed. Lasts 20 sec.

As far as the burst threat concerns go, use Avenger's Shield. It hits very hard in Cataclysm.

Q u o t e:
GC, I know you've said in other threads that "Well there will be times to use other things and it's not like you'd really notice the difference if it falls off, maybe you wouldn't have blocked", but you know in your heart it isn't true. If you're tanking you're locked into 3HP ShoRs, and then maybe a 1pt Inquisition or WoG. There will never, ever be a reason to lower Holy Shield in favor of WoG in terms of damage intake, and surely letting holy shield fall off would essentially make the tank's health continue to fall behind even if the heal were used in an emergency.

First, there is only darkness in my heart.

Second, we're talking about 15% block here, not 15% damage reduction. Sure over the course of a fight, you'd notice 15% block. But if you let Holy Shield drop for a few seconds you have virtually no way to know if that would even affect the next several seconds of the fight. Would you have blocked anyway? Great! You didn't need the Holy Shield. Would the boss have hit you even with the extra 15% block? Bummer, you wasted Holy Shield. If it's a dragon breathing on you, then the block does nothing.

We want Prot to be able to use Word of Glory sometimes and we're evaluating the best way to make that happen. We don't want a model where Prot uses the heal on cooldown because then we just have to assume it's up all the time and it feels more like something you have to maintain instead of something you can use for emergencies.

We're less sure about Inquisition. It's fine if Ret is designed around keeping it up nearly all the time because they're only spending Holy Power on damage attacks otherwise. With Holy Shield though it might feel like Prot needs to keep two Holy Power-based things running, which is probably two much to ask of a tank. In the prior model you could choose Inquisition's damage instead of Holy Shield's mitigation, but with the new Shield of the Righteous model, we realize that's probably not going to happen so we need to evaluate if that's okay.

Q u o t e:
I guess I just noticed the part I underlined. That seems to suggest that ShoR has no cooldown at all. That's a very good thing. It gives you more choice when to use it, since it's limited by holy power anyway.

Correct. It doesn't need a cooldown since Holy Power provides one. If you don't need the block you could choose quantity of shield smacks over quality.