Seal of Command Math for MT

Greetings,

I'm new here. My guild leader who also servers as our raid leader has asked me to respec my Paladin, who is already Prot. Spec (Not for 2.3).

He wants me to include Seal of Command. He, who also used to tank as a paladin, said that he never lost aggro and that it's a great talent to have.

However, I've looked any many of the specs of the poster on this forum and no one has it.

My GL is a pretty, "My way or the Highway" kind of guy so I want to come to him with number and people saying it doesn't work or it's not as efficient as other talents.

So, may I have some numbers and your thoughts on why Seal of Command isn't used widely by Paladin Tanks.

Also, I tried to search for past post but was unable to find in hard core discussion on it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The big reason: Seal of Command does damage based on the melee damage you're doing. Tanking paladins do not as a rule focus on doing melee damage, and the weapons they use for tanking tend to do a small amount of melee damage at the expense of adding spelldamage.

That, and protection paladins do not focus on strength as a primary stat, and their gear does not tend to have a ton of strength.

As an example: most caster weapons that a tankadin uses do (roughly) 120 damage per swing after stat bonuses are figured into it. 70% of that is about 80 damage. Seal of Righteousness does more than that, and it does so on every single swing automatically. SoC is a proc-per-minute ability so it doesn't always trigger - and the worst part is that it triggers more on slower weapons which aren't typically used by a tankadin.

So SoC does less damage, doesn't scale with spelldamage, and doesn't do it as reliably as SoR.

If your GL wants you to use SoC, tell him that you will either be doing about 50-75% less damage per swing and producing about 10% less threat, or you'll have to get a big, slow 1-h weapon without spelldamage, which will reduce your threat by about 50-70 TPS.

1. Seal of Command scales with weapon damage whereas Tankadins use spell damage weapons with low white DPS because all our other threat abilities scale with spell damage.
2. Judgment of Command has a spell damage coefficient of 43% vs 73% for JoR
3. Seal of Command is a 7ppm seal, meaning that with your average 1.8 speed Tankadin weapon it only has a 21% chance to proc each hit. you've got a 30% chance of getting no SoC procs in the first 7 seconds of a fight.

We call it Seal of Casino for a reason.

SoC is based off of weapon damage (therefore better for high damage 2h weapons), and is very unreliable.

A huge chunk of its damage also comes from judging, and is affected by whether or not your target is stunned. What raid boss can you stun?

SoR/JoR and SoV/JoV are better suited for tanking as they are reliable sources of threat, constant holy damage, and directly related to your +spelldamage ... not 70% of your weapon damage.

What's 70% of 45-178 or 35-114 compared to the amount of damage you'll be doing with 250+ spelldamage.

Do you stack +sd to up your holy damage ... or strength to up your white damage?
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Official thread killer

Your GM seems to be a dumbass.
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Cauze blizzard begins to let healing suck.

Never intended to say that you can't tank with SoC, but SoC sucks compared to SoR.. in almost every way. I can see someone's point when he is speccing SoC for farming, but speccing SoC for tanking is like getting Divine Purpose for tanking -> it is a waste of talent points.

To build on what the others have said:
(In my opinion,) our spell damage use starts with Consecration. A large part of our threat is from consecration, more so in an aoe situation. Upping our spell damage increases the threat from consecrate, so it makes sense to use spell damage for our other threat. The seals that coincide with that are SoV (alliance only) and SoR. The coefficient on SoC is zero I believe, and on JoC it's lower than JoR. Most use S/JoR.
Also as mentioned above, the proc-based SoC is bad because you can start a fight with no procs for quite some time. This makes your dps has to hold back that much more. This holds true throughout the fight as S/JoR have constant reliable threat, which is much more important than the random threat from SoC as it allows your dps to do constant damage.




On the other hand, I have heard of paladins using SoC through Karazhan with no problems. This isn't really a good estimate, because almost everything in there is undead/demon. Holy Wrath and Exorcism hack the threat meters!
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Zalaria
<Silent Watch>
Medivh-US

SoC does have some spell damage coefficeint, its 20% or 29% for holy spell damage I think. (Judgment of crusader definitely ups the damage)

SoC USED to do extra unintended threat beyond the damage it does. This was removed a couple of patches ago.

There is no reason to tank with SoC unless you are using a huge 2H weapon on an elemental damage boss where you cant block (hydross say, but you are probably better off using a green nature protection shield)
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one thing i would ask your GM is when he used to tank as a pala was he only lvl 60? As when i first used to tank as a 60 back in the Naxx days all my tank gear was warrior gear, tank spell dmg gear was not about so yes SoC was much nicer for tanking, but now days stick to spell dmg as you can get that gear now and use SoR.... only spec SoC if he wants you to use SoC and a phat 2h when your not tanking.
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http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bloodfeather&n=Erlata

Your GM is a dumbass.

And please, link him to this thread.
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I've gotta say, if your GM is a "my way or the highway" kind of leader (which isn't so bad) but his ideas are all similarly uninformed (which is very bad, an colossally bad when combined with the former trait), the highway may be a better place for you to go.

If he's in the habit of forcing spec/gear changes on people that impair their performance, progress will stall and morale will drop, whether it's from people fighting his decisions and suffering punitive measures, or people accepting his decisions and suffering performance reduction as a result.

If this sort of thing happens more than once, you should probably seek greener pastures.

it doesn't matter what the deal is.. if its your way or the highway, I'll choose the highway every time. I don't care if I'd do it his way anyway, given that ultimatum, I'll leave, lol.
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