Tankadin core talent spec

I've been seeing a lot of 'is this spec viable' threads, and I keep answering the same thing - as long as you have the core talents, you're going to be viable. But what are those?

Here's my list:
Holy (0 points)

None

Protection (43 points)

5/5 Redoubt
5/5 Toughness
3/3 Improved Righteous Fury
3/3 Shield Specialization
5/5 Anticipation
1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary
2/2 Sacred Duty
5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization
2/2 Improved Holy Shield
1/1 Holy Shield
5/5 Ardent Defender
5/5 Combat Expertise
1/1 Avenger's Shield

Retribution (10 points)

5/5 Benediction
5/5 Deflection

Note a few things here. One is that because of the way the tree works, you must spend 3 points after this:
Protection (22 points)

5/5 Redoubt
5/5 Toughness
3/3 Improved Righteous Fury
3/3 Shield Specialization
5/5 Anticipation
1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary

in order to get to the tier 6 talents. That means you need to spend 3 points in precision, reckoning, spell warding, and/or blessing of kings. This is not true of something like ardent defender, however, and you can in theory skip that and still get to CE/AS without it. We've already got a topic on whether or not you should use AD though, and it's considered enough of a core talent of a prot paladin that I left it in.

That means, in practice, you have 8 points to spend as you want. 3 of which must go into reckoning, precision, BoK or spell warding. The other 5 can go anywhere. And - this is the important point - none of these points will make or break you as a paladin tank. They are not essential. They're good, but they're not so good that you'll miss them or people will look at you funny. That doesn't mean you should go for suboptimal builds with things like stoicism or improved dev aura, but it does mean you have some choices without having to keep asking 'will this work'. If you have the above skills, it will work.

The generic choices that I see that you can use those 8 points on are (in order of my preference, but it's really not that big a difference):
BoK
Precision
Improved Seal of the Crusader
Reckoning
Spell warding
Pursuit of Judgment
Improved judgment
Seal of Command

Personally, I find BoK to be a defining characteristic of paladins, and if you don't take it you should have a very good reason for it. Precision is the best all around threat talent as it also increases your taunt chances as well as upping TPS. Improved SotC is a great raid buff, but is not needed if you have a ret paladin. Reckoning is great for farming and a good threat talent in general, marred slightly by adding more parries. Spell warding mitigates damage against a paladin's toughest foe, but not so much that you can rely on it. Pursuit of judgment avoids spells entirely, but even less reliably. The run speed is nice. Improved judgment is great when not able to AoE tank but is not as good a threat boost as the other skills listed. Seal of Command is okay when not tanking and if you're alliance.

Any other skills you'd recommend? I thought about putting in guardian's favor, but the times when it would be useful are so small that it seems pointless.

Well written post, and I think you've done a good job of capturing the essentials. I'm gonna wait a little bit to see how other people respond/if they have suggestions, but this deserves a sticky.
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WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

I'm not sure if we can consider precison a flavor talent anymore.

I mean, b4 the patch it was a simple threat increasing talent.
Now beside the fact it becomes stronger with the spellhit addition, it affects one of the most important tool for a tank: taunt. Let's remember we have the longer c/d for one only odd taunt, so to not miss it vital.

Opinions?
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I think kalbear pretty much nailed it.

Soltyr, while I personally nowadays recommend that any protadin worth their salt do a 0/49/12 build with absolutely no flexibility in points spent and enchant Boar's Speed on their boots without fail, it's not absolutely necessary to do so. Being hit capped as a paladin tank is not crucial, especially considering the role in which a prot paladin finds him or herself in most encounters.
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I am the light that brings the dawn.
http://e4ae.blogspot.com/

Great Post, the only thing I would change is I would put Avenger's Shield in the optional category. An engineer pally can pull with other means and without blowing mana.

I have Avenger's Shield and love it, but I *could* live without it and be a good tank.

I thought about that too, but honestly - it's a 41-point talent for a reason. It gives a totally unique ability, adds a ton of threat, acts as a ranged pull and is a great way to get aggro back without waiting. That isn't true of the rocket launcher; the rocket launcher doesn't actually do that much aggro (the rocket is the thing doing the damage, so the only aggro you're getting is basically from doing a hostile action against a mob and nothing else) and it has a long cooldown and a long cast time.

It's really a defining talent of a prot paladin and in many of the fights is an expected ability to have for use. It doesn't pass my test of 'if someone came up to you and asked you to pug, would they expect you to have X' litmus test. Yeah, you can survive without it and tank without it, but you can do that without CE as well, and I wouldn't recommend not taking that

Before CE I could see leaving AS off the essentials list, but since there's 42 points of "required" Prot talents anyway, it'd be foolish not to spend the 1 extra point for AS.
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WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

Yeah, that's true too. It's one point to get a good skill that you spent a bunch of time allowing yourself to get anyway. It's hard for me to envision you using that one point in such a way that your gain would outweigh the loss of AS.

Agree 100%, nice post!
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armory | youtube | pally stole my bike

Ok, enough feedback

Stickied!
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WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

I took the liberty of slapping this into wowhead's talent calculator. I put the 3 points mandatory by the talent trees work into Precision. This is personal preference, but seems to be very accepted.

Here is the build:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sZVhxIx0zMgqtV0x

That leaves a fellow tankadin with 5 points to play with. Potentially 8 if they remove the points out of precision and put it in the prots 5th tier or above.
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5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization

That's more of a threat talent, than a tanking talent.
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Menoch

Wow, I fail at noticing threads.

I wouldn't call Deflection and Anticipation "required", I drop points from one or the other (usually deflection since defense can be rough) frequently depending on what I'm doing.
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Station wagons are my favorite things.

As I said in the EJ thread, if you can reasonably drop anticipation (or deflection, or toughness) to gain something else because of your high levels of gear, this sticky is not for you. That means that you have a good handle of what your gear can take, what you can do in an instance and have the gear to balance out shortcomings. This is more of a 'does my random spec stand a chance in Kara'. For that, it's a bit less forgiving. As I said, as long as you have the core talents you're going to be viable. That doesn't mean you're not viable if you don't have them.