Reading tankadin forum posts before the patch was like putting out a cigarette in your eye and then eating it. The eye, not the cigarette.
A bit exaggerated, perhaps, but I'm going to stand by it. With the joyous cries of ret paladins in the background, the prot pally community became divided into the "QQ" team and the "Sucks to your QQ" team. The former was convinced that they were losing their AOE tanking niche to warriors, arguing that since warrior mitigation trumped pally mitigation unless the pally had Sanctuary on and the warrior didn't, the era of the Prot Pally was over. The latter pooh-poohed the concerns, saying that come Lich King, they and not their guild warriors would still be main tanks because they were better and the warriors had no interest in tanking. Neither side liked to be relegated to being "specialty" tanks -- you don't spec prot because you want to tank adds, you spec prot because you want to tank bosses, dammit. The issue remained hotly debated up to patch day, and then everyone was running around trying to figure out where all their defense went, and in the end it didn't matter anyway because all the paladins specced ret.
Updated tests done by the maintankadin community found that paladin and warrior mitigation remained comparable at end-game, which was also confirmed by beta testers. Although the concerns of the tankadins were valid, at this point it's beginning to look like a nonissue. There's a huge difference between being the best man for the job and simply being allowed to do the job because there isn't anyone else. However, it's looking as if the new Blizzard design philosophy is to make all tanks equally valid at everything. It's a nice idea, but I have my doubts. Warriors and paladins might be more or less equal, but druid tanks seem to be getting the short end of the stick, with no matching AOE tanking ability. And the role of death knights remains up in the air, since they must have amazing dodge and parry values to make up for their lack of block. We'll see.
Overall, I would have to say that I'm very pleased with the prot changes. For one thing, aggro issues are a thing of the past. I even traded in my spell damage weapon for King's Defender, to help with the damage output of Hammer of the Righteous. I don't really have any strength gear, so with Touched by the Light, my spellpower comes to only 363. No impact on threat at all -- if anything it's far, far better than before. For another thing, I don't have to waste a GCD of my threat rotation on refreshing a seal, now I just pop one at the start of every fight. Lastly, I've a new spell to work into my threat rotation, which at the moment isn't so much a rotation as simply mashing the buttons as soon as their cooldowns are up.
Improved Devo Aura is a nice welcome change, and I anticipate that it will become the prot pally's aura of choice. I've been putting up such amazing damage numbers with Ret aura, though, that most of the time I still leave that on. Its damage has been increased and now scales with your spellpower. I discovered this quite by accident when I was dueling a rogue. He was used to simply out-damaging me, but I won the first duel easily. For the second duel I just stood there with Ret Aura up, and by the time he finally brought my health down to 1% (I still have a lot of avoidance), the ret aura alone had brought him to a third of his health.
The new Sanctuary is admittedly very nice -- in a melee instance the amount of mana regained leaves me with almost no downtime between pulls. Hammer of the Righteous, however, remains my favorite change. It's a great 51-pt talent -- a talent actually worthy of the investment. Now, paladins will want a hard-hitting main hander (which means, thankfully, no more tanking with mage swords) and will be able to dps a bit better as prot, as well as offtank more easily for those (hopefully rare) times that you will be called on to play wingman to a better tank.
If death knight dps is anything like what people say it is, hopefully we won't see an overabundance of tanks at level 80. Even so, my guess is that good, experienced tanks will always be needed, especially Horde-side. Tanking is a lot more fun now that I don't have to constantly be pulling aggro back from someone, that's for sure. Most of the time I even out-dps one of the dps!
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