WARNING, LONG POST. TL;DR at the bottom.
I have been messing around with Protection paladin talents and have found several things that could be improved in the Protection paladin talent tree to make some talents more competitive.
First of all, I realized that with Holy Shield, Inner Light, Barricade of Faith and 2 points in Faith in the Light, you can achieve an additional 50% block chance to play with by intentionally letting Shield of the Righteous to drop and by spot healing your raid/party members.
This means that having a build that revolves around blocking might actually be feasible with Holy Shield being able to block spells.
However, there isn’t any talents improving block value, which means you only can block 35% of incoming damage which, if I’m not wrong, is the base block value for shields.
So my first suggestion would be to change up the talent Improved Holy Shield to give an additional 10% block value. This would also help to compete with the talent, Sanctuary, as I believe that no one actually takes the current Improved Holy Shield that only increase block chance for spells by 10%.
Next, I feel that Hammer of the Righteous could be better suited to compete with Blessed Hammer as right now, its a dead talent.
So my second suggestion would be to make Hammer of the Righteous’ main hit give a buff that provides 10% block chance when standing in consecrate.
This is to provide additional options of talents that provide block chance.
Lastly, I feel that the talent, Light of the Titans, is quite underwhelming. Putting a small heal over time effect that is increased by 50% if you afflicted by harmful periodic effect is just too bland. Not to mention that it is the prerequisite to THE spot healing talent Hand of the Protector.
My suggestion would be to overhaul this talent so that when you heal a party or raid member with Word of Glory, a heal over time is applied to you for 50%/100% of the amount healed over 16 seconds. Word of Glory’s healing is increased to 120% if cast on yourself. This allows for the fantasy of protecting your allies by spot healing them without having to fear that you need to save the heal for yourself.
EDIT: After playing around with a block build for Prot paladin, I feel that they are missing some tankiness against AoE/ground effects and periodic damage due to Blizzard changing the way block works against these effects.
So I have another suggestion which is to bake the talent Faith’s Armor into the base SotR as its a boring talent that increases the armor of SotR by 10% and replace it with a new talent: Tyr’s Defender.
Tyr’s Defender: Increase the damage of Eye of Tyr by 50%. Each successful block reduces the cooldown of Eye of Tyr by 1 second.
This makes it so that Eye of Tyr will be the go to damage reduction skill for unblockable damage when SotR is down.
Some other minor changes I would suggest are:
-Bulwark of Order should be providing a shield value of 100% of the damage dealt by Avenger’s Shield.
-Focus Enmity should be increased to at least 200% or even 400% increased damage if it is to compete with soaring shield. Reasoning is cause if Avenger’s Shield by default hits 3 targets and when spec’d into Soaring Shield is hitting 5 targets, the damage dealt would be that of 3-5 Avenger’s Shield, so Focus Enmity should be doing the same amount of damage to a single target instead.
-Inner Light should make you deal a 8 yd AoE holy damage explosion on every block.
Final note: This is just a thought I have and is just for fun.
TL;DR:
Several talent change suggestions I thought up of to provide a different playstyle for Protection Paladin and to make certain “unviable” talents competitive.
-Improved Holy Shield: Increase Block Value by 10%.
-Hammer of the Righteous: Hammers current target for X Physical damage. While in Consecrate, grant an additional 10% block chance.
-Light of Titans: Healing a party or raid member with Word of Glory also heals you for 50%/100% of the amount healed over 16 seconds. Any remaining heal is added to the new amount. Healing is increased to 120% if cast on yourself.
Edit: Bake the talent Faith’s Armor into base SotR and replace it with a new talent, Tyr’s Defender.
-Tyr’s Defender: Increase the damage of Eye of Tyr by 50%. Each successful block reduces the cooldown of Eye of Tyr by 1 second.
There are other minor changes I suggested but I won’t put them here.
PS: Is Inner Light damage bugged, I don’t seem to see the damage in Details addon.
P.P.S Why is Word of Glory eating both Divine Purpose and Shining Light procs?