Continuing the discussion from Midnight: Curse of Ula’tek PTR Development Notes:
Love this, and all the buffs and all the buffs for prot, thank you.
Please pick one. You already made a blue post saying that you want the focus to be on Templar Strike and less on Crusading Strike, but as it stands right now, there’s a significant dps loss when playing Templar Strike. Crusading Strike is not fun. Watching your character auto attack for half of your rotation is bad game design, and not fun to play at all. Templar Strike is a button that feels good to press.
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A lot of other people like Crusading Strikes, idk what to tell you. This isn’t 2004 where our entire rotation was nothing but auto-attacking and occasionally casting other spells. The alternative is having to spend every single GCD on something that generates Holy Power, making the rotation feel overstuffed with no room to cast utility/healing spells.
That’s what it should be, you should always have a button to press. Every other spec always has something to press, why not us? You are right, this isn’t 2004, we shouldn’t be auto-attacking for a significant portion of our damage
you should always have a button to press tho.
the only time you have downtime with csaa at this time in the pve season is when you fumbled your rotation.
thats what i dont understand about you guys, the spec has 0 downtime and you should always have a button to press.
also, stats doesnt matter, some paladins legit have sub 10% haste and still are gcd locked with proper rotational management.
The spec has a ton of downtime. You’re also contradicting yourself so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say
the spec has 0 downtime.
the only time the spec has downtime, is when your bad at the spec.
thats not a contradiction, thats the bare minimum of a skill ceiling thats somehow enough to hard gate alot of you.
If you’re playing with Crusading Strikes, the spec has a lot of downtime, where you’re just watching your toon auto attack, and it makes up a significant portion of your damage. That’s the part that’s not fun. We should always have a button to press
this is false, you dont have downtime with csaa. like at all. like ive stated for the last 2 times. you only have downtime with csaa if you are bad at ret.
your not watching your toon auto attack onnly, while yes it does proc things like artof war and the apex. thats hardly new.
you always have a button to press rotational due to how ret functions. you have 2 charges of judgement which has a chance to get refunded due to final verdict, you have boj which gets reset with auto attacks, you have csaa to get your enoguh hopo to use spenders. if you actually play the spec, you realize that there is no downtime, you always have something to press. the only time you dont have something to press is only when you fumble your rotation and wasted alot of holypower
if anythign ts gives you more downtime with proper play because your subjected to its own cd whlie you just keep swinging with csaa.
To everyone in this thread defending the current state of tanking and the 12.1 PTR changes: you are completely missing the forest for the trees. This isn’t a “skill issue” or a debate about being GCD-locked; it’s a fundamental crisis of class identity that Blizzard is refusing to fix because of sheer design laziness.
Right now, every single tank specification is being homogenized into a watered-down, low-tier Blood DK clone. The core philosophy of what a “Tank” should be has been thrown out the window. What is even the point of carrying a massive shield as a Protection Paladin anymore if our active mitigation feels completely hollow, and our survival relies strictly on doing a mediocre DPS rotation and spamming Word of Glory / Blessed Word absorbs?
Look at the data and the current PTR direction:
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Homogenization of Sustain: Replacing the core fantasy of armor, block values, and physical mitigation with passive absorbs like the new Blessed Word talent is literally just copying Death Strike and Blood Shield and giving it a Holy skin.
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Lazy Rotational Flow: Forcing players into Crusading Strikes (and now buffing its auto-attack speed by 15% to band-aid the build) just proves they don’t want to design an engaging, active rotation. Watching your character auto-attack to passively generate your main resources while playing as a low-damage DPS is uninspired, passive game design.
Stop settling for poor design just because you can technically fill every GCD. Having buttons to press doesn’t mean the spec is fun or well-designed. They completely abandoned the logic and the weight of being a shield-bearing protector just to make balancing easier for themselves against the current encounter damage spikes.
csaa isnt a prot paladin ability.
My guy, you literally do have downtime. I don’t know what else to say to you. There are times where literally every button is on cd. With a good rotation or a bad one. If this is the hill you’re going to die on, please move on, we don’t need it here
no, there is no downtime
there is no hill to die on.
your basically trying to excuse your poor rotational play. according to your logs i can see why you think you have downtime.
stop spreading misinfo and then ill leave
Dude, get. out. of. here. BYE 
Take your low IO with you
again io carding when your highest parse is lfr where your doing 70k at 277 ilvl is crazy
instead of using all this time for misinfo, you could be using it to improve at the spec so you can stop seeing downtime as ret.
the fact your having downtime in KEYS where your even MORE gcd locked is crazy and very telling at how you are at the spec
From the guy that can’t even spell much less get KSH. BYEEEEEE
you can say anything you want to make yourself feel better dude
but the truth is, the spec doesnt have downtime especially in AOE. you only have downtime if your bad at the spec. gg keep sucking at keys
Lmao, it’s astonishing how stupid you are. Bye 
again your logs tell a different story.
Because we have other stuff to press that’s not damage, we’re not a pure DPS. We’re a hybrid class and we have plenty of heals, defensives, and support buttons we can press to rescue allies in combat or otherwise manage the battlefield. That’s what the extremely small windows of downtime are good for, breathing room. Almost all other DPS classes/specs have maybe one or two defensives and an interrupt.
When I compare current paladin design to 2004, I’m talking about how almost our entire rotation was the auto-attack. I’m sure we all remember the infamous post on the original WoW forums talking about how Vanilla paladin gameplay was so slow that you could, uh…multi-task by tabbing in and out of the game (nobody had multi-monitor setups back then) and not lose any damage. That version of paladin gameplay is extremely far away from CSAA. And CSAA is not moving anywhere in that direction.