Paladin talent choices

[TheDragoon]

Thats actually one area I'm kind of curious about...how much spell damage is needed. As a healer, the biggest difference I've noticed between paladin and warrior tanks has been the stamina difference. As a rogue I've not really noticed aggro issues with either. So this makes me think that my priorities should follow the order of:

Stamina
Block Rating (since blocking does soooo many things for a pally)
Defence (though still wanting enough to be crit immune even though I don't have it as top priority)
Block Value (figure that since blocking is so good, blocking for more should be good too)
Spell Damage

So while I'm not wanting to ignore spell damage, I'm really wondering how necessary it will be. It seems like its the last in the line of priorties and that just the random amounts of it I can pick up on gear with other stats will be enough. This may just be something I have to figure out from actually playing with people since its kind of a fluid thing. I think that was the basic thinking behind my gear choices. I'm going to have to go back over them and compare to the items others have listed here.

I found that when I hit 70 on my pally tank that I was able to hold aggro just fine with 100-150 spell damage. However, that often meant that I was spamming all of my biggest threat moves constantly and I had to rely on salvation a lot more. Nowadays, I generally am tanking with 200-300 spell damage and I can literally spam out threat at the start of the fight and then slack off for the last 2/3rds of the fight. In endurance fights, it really, really helps to have the higher spell damage because you can throw down holy shield and consecration while having judged and used seal of wisdom to regenerate mana.

Thus, for bosses I usually start out at full threat and pop Avenging Wrath on my second cycle and continue to spam threat for those 30 seconds. Then I usually have a gigantic threat lead and I judge wisdom, cast wisdom and just keep consecration and holy shield up. If people get close, then I might start using seal of righteousness again, but that is usually only for very high threat groups (like groups with insane shadow priests).

As for tank priorities, I think you're pretty good. Stam > all for non-raid tanking, generally, shield block is amazing for paladins, defense will get you uncrushability and decent avoidance, shield block rating is ok and spell damage will help lock down aggro and let you use wisdom more to help chain pull. :)