Protection Paladin Rotation Revisited

Today's new beta build proves that the developers are taking the protection paladin rotation in a very different direction than I imagined. First, the design of Holy Shield has changed again. It's now got a fixed 15s duration and it's possible to refresh immediately, for 100% uptime. But holy power now affects the magnitude of the block chance effect; you get 5% block chance per point of holy power. Moreover, Holy Shield is now exclusive with Inquisition; you can't have both buffs at once.

This means that, like the 969 rotation of WotLK fame, our Cataclysm rotation will be designed around maximizing Holy Shield uptime and effect. While there may be situations in which we prefer to spend holy power on Inquisition, those situations will not be raid tanking situations. If we need Inquisition to be competitive in generating threat compared to other tanks, this will be a reason to use those other tanks, who don't need to make the same survival for threat trade-off.

This means that we need to generate 3 holy power every 15s. Essentially, this forces us to cast Crusader Strike on cooldown. Well, not literally on cooldown if the cooldown remains 4s, but every third global cooldown, i.e., every 4.5s.

The protection paladin rotation will then look like this, I fear:

1. Holy Shield as soon as holy power = 3, and then every 15s after that.
2. Crusader Strike every third global cooldown.
3. Roll face.*

I find this disheartening. I was looking forward to a priority queue in which we needed to generate holy power, but this was largely taken care of by procs and other random events that would change up a rotation that otherwise consisted of the abilities that protection paladins know and love. Instead, it seems we will need to prioritize Crusader Strike in order to ensure maximum Holy Shield effect and uptime, which means de-prioritizing all of protections cool, role-defining spells like Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous, and Avenger's Shield, making them into "filler" spells that you cast when you have a spare second, rather than "awesome" spells that you want to cast on cooldown. This is not exciting, fun, or dynamic in my opinion.

As I conclude in a post I made over on the official forums:

Tacking holy power onto CS makes it mandatory, but it doesn't make it fun for prot. This is the fundamental mistake I feel that the developers are making with the current prot rotation design.

*For those readers who may not be familiar with this idiom; the retribution paladin spell rotation in WotLK was often described as "faceroll," the idea being that, since it made only a small difference which spell you prioritized casting if two spells ended their cooldown at the same time, you might as well just roll your face on the keyboard to get a perfectly adequate rotation, rather than actively making choices.