World of Warcraft®

Okay, so here's the issue I've been having:
In my current guild we're 11/12 heroic 10-man (only intend to be a 10-man guild come Cata), and are working on LK. Our MT is a bear, in almost comparable gear to my own(he's about 100 or so GS above me) but the difference in tanking ability is uncanny. He has 57% dodge, and is usually top or near top damage done in each encounter. On Heroic Putricide the raid wipes, bear is still alive and tanks the boss in Phase 2 for a good 2 minutes while half the raid is laughing, and the other half is telling him to hurry up and die, and he even goes into cat form and lasts another 30 seconds before finally turning around so he can even die! He can pop on Thorns and turn around (he calls this porcupine form) and obliterate aoe pulls, without even coming close to dying despite soaking every hit. His threat is obscene, his survivability is obscene, and post-patch I don't feel my paladin can even come close. I'm reforged into mastery, making myself avoidance capped with 43% block at the cost of only losing 3% dodge and 2% parry. I have only about 3000hp less than the bear does, yet I am incapable of tanking many things which he does with ease.
Example: On Lady deathwhisper, his threat is so insane that even with 10 stacks of the threat reduction(100%), he still holds aggro the entire duration, I can't rip it off him no matter what I try, and neither can any DPS(despite some doing 10-14k dps). In contrast, any bosses which he has me maintank, I have to constantly tell the ret paladin, warrior, Deathknight and rogue to watch their threat, use Salv on them, or taunt back because they grab aggro. Also, any tank rotation bosses where I have to taunt off the bear, he has to actually do into cat form, cower, and then still wait about 5-10sec because if he doesn't he will just take threat back immediately(even if I taunt and use avenging wrath!).
Example 2: We're working on downing heroic LK, and the usual strategy is to have the OT tank the shambling horrors between the MT with the LK and the ranged. The Horrors, while enraged(we didn't have a class who could un-enrage at the time) ripped through me, I couldn't tank more than 1 and still survive with any sort of reliability. So the tactic we now adopted for phase 1, and now get through phase 1 reliably so we can wipe on phase 2(this was our first day doing heroic LK, our second time in ICC as a guild) was to have the bear tank -everything- and I stand with the ranged and dispel the disease for the entirety of phase 1. He can tank 3 shamblings, the pack of ghouls, AND LK and still survive with ease.
Example 3: On the 3 princes in blood wing, the bear tanked both melee mobs while a ranged did the orb-collecting boss, and I stood around hitting kinetic bombs with my shield and judgement, simply because him tanking both was easier on the healers than us each tanking one, and my dps is more of a nuisance than a help since the empowered vortex require us all to move apart and we are pretty melee heavy dps-wise already.
Prior to the patch I took significantly less damage, never had threat issues unless dps started unloading single target into something I wasn't hitting on an aoe pull, and could do a comparable job with the bear. I had much greater survivability due to ardent defender going off when I actually needed it to, rather than having to guess within 10s of dying and wasting it if my healers saved me, and divine protection was 50% before compared to 20% now.
What are all you other protection paladins doing? Are you feeling the hurt also? Are other bears outshining everyone else also? If others have found a way to fix these new shortcomings, what can I do?

I realize that I need a slower mainhand to up my threat and am trying to get one to drop, but honestly I can't see it making the difference between the 3-4k dps I do in ICC, and the 6-8k our bear does. I've also tried several different specs and they all made minimal, if any, difference. But feel free to suggest certain talents I may have overlooked all the same.
TLDR; Bear is OP, my paladin sucks, what do?

(I apologize if this double posts, last time I hit submit it just refreshed the create thread page, and my thread did not appear.. o_O )

Edit: I feel I should also note that the main concern here is this:
While I -can- survive, and I -can- hold threat at satisfactory levels, the bear can do both of those tasks to such a high degree more effectively, that it makes me -feel- like I cannot do them well enough to be viable in comparison. I.E. A second bear would be far superior to what I can offer the raid.

put some dps gear on and use a dps one hand your threat will be insane
i pull 8k dps in ICC as a tank now on some fights i can get 10k+

Pallies are missing tools that are more important to them than the tools a bear is missing at 80. Wrath content is no longer the current content for balance so trying to push it, while admirable, will be much more difficult.

I realize that I need a slower mainhand to up my threat and am trying to get one to drop, but honestly I can't see it making the difference between the 3-4k dps I do in ICC, and the 6-8k our bear does.

It makes a huge difference. Additionally, unless the new Armory is mistaken, it's showing you below the hit cap by a small margin and well below the expertise cap. Expertise is one of the best threat stats for Paladins, you will want to reforge gear to get the last eleven Expertise you need.
As for bear survivability, yes, it is noticeably higher than other tanks but that has been addressed on the Beta.

Edit: Whoops, meant 11 expertise.

You are missing the other half of the problem - my survivability compared to the bear. Wearing DPS gear would make that part of the equation even worse. Holding threat is not productive if in order to do so I lose more survivability and thus cannot effectively take the damage anymore. I also notice you have berserking on your weapon - that would further compound the problem of sacrificing survivability for damage.

I am fully aware that if I wear DPS gear I can do higher DPS.. but If my raid wanted another squishy DPS class they wouldn't take an OT, now would they?

I now have to question how you are defeating heroic ICC10 in dps-prot gear that is worse than my pure prot gear, and actually surviving the encounters while tanking... Is the other tank in your group the MT and you dps mostly? Or are you surviving by the skin of your teeth? Perhaps my survivability only -seems- so bad because I am being compared with the bear, and not my own peers.

Pallies are missing tools that are more important to them than the tools a bear is missing at 80. Wrath content is no longer the current content for balance so trying to push it, while admirable, will be much more difficult.

Pallies are missing GoAK. Bears are missing Thrash.

@OP you aren't specced for threat and you're wearing a bad weapon.

also people have been tanking both the melee princes forever.

I should be hit-capped, unless I messed something up reforging(I was just spam-reforging to mess with my different avoidance stats today). I will re-investigate this. But thank you for bringing this to my attention.

EDIT: I know my weapon is bad - I even stated that I knew it was. I am working on getting a new one. I was simply wondering how much of a difference that would even be able to make.

Also: I tried speccing for threat, it didn't seem to make hardly any difference. I've respecced a lot lately, but I can try again if someone has more specific advice there.

P.S. My threat is not the primary concern, simply stating that somehow the bear can have the best of both worlds in comparison. I can hold the threat satisfactorily off of the DPS as long as said DPS actually use their threat reducing abilities and pay some attention.(whereas before they didn't have to watch anything besides the big numbers on their screen)

My main problem is just that I feel incredibly inferior to said Bear, and am left wondering if I should be or not.

Drop armsman, get exp to gloves. Change gem in helm to exp/stam. That will help a little. You are a little low on hit but not that bad.

I will give that a try, thank you.

P.S. My threat is not the primary concern, simply stating that somehow the bear can have the best of both worlds in comparison. I can hold the threat satisfactorily off of the DPS as long as said DPS actually use their threat reducing abilities and pay some attention.(whereas before they didn't have to watch anything besides the big numbers on their screen)

I've not noticed any threat or survival concerns on paladins. Vengeance has made everything fairly hilarious on the threat front. Fury and Feral tend to ride up but their hotfixes were hilarious.
Are you doign the correction rotation?
If anything Paladins are slightly OP right now with WoG.

EDIT: I'm skeptical that you failed to notice the 70% Crusader Strike damage you're missing though. With a slow weapon (like a 264 pvp thing) you're going to have significantly more threat.

My rotation, as far as I have investigated, is correct. (But that -could- be the problem if I do have it wrong?) Single target its crusader strike, with a filler spell in between, and aoe is HoTR with filler between. Filler being one of the other appropriate skills I have, which happen to not be on a CD, with more AOE type filler on AOE pulls (i.e. consecrate and wrath) and keeping my holy shield up via SotR as needed. Am I missing something in that rotation?

Edit: Ah. I see. A ilvl264 mace with 2.6 speed has over 700max dmg, while my weapon has 400. That is a far larger difference than I would have thought it was. I will replace my weapon sooner rather than later, thanks for the advice.

use holy wrath on EVERY THING even single target consecrate is meh but if you have the mana use it
your also missing a glyph take a look at what ones im using might find some more dps/threat there

but if im pulling 8k dps avg your doing some thing wrong im not that good

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/index.php?f=4&t=29728&rb_v=viewtopic

Read.
Learn.
Do.

My rotation, as far as I have investigated, is correct. (But that -could- be the problem if I do have it wrong?) Single target its crusader strike, with a filler spell in between, and aoe is HoTR with filler between. Filler being one of the other appropriate skills I have, which happen to not be on a CD, with more AOE type filler on AOE pulls (i.e. consecrate and wrath) and keeping my holy shield up via SotR as needed. Am I missing something in that rotation?

CS-Judge-CS-xx-CS-ShoR(WoG)

xx is either HW or AS if GC proc'd

Indeed, or HoR if an Aoe group, in place of Crusader Strike.

Judge>CS>AS>CS>Wrath>CS>HS>CS>Judge>on and on

I would rank AS over Wrath on single target mobs. Also I put the Judgement at the beginning because I am assuming time spent getting to the mob. If you are switching to a mob right next to you, I would open with HS or CS depending on HP stacks. Never use HS below 3 stacks.

Ah yes, I am aware I'm missing one of my major glyphs, the AH on my server was being retarded and they were ridiculously overpriced, so I was waiting to redo everything except my prime ones until the prices were normal again, but in the meantime forgot I hadn't done that yet. Thanks for reminding me.

@Mooclane&Abso - I see its more structured than just random filler, I will keep that in mind, thank you.

@Palisade - That is where I had gone in the past, but it may have updated since, I will look again.

But guys, the problem I am -trying- to address is that anything I can do, Bear can do better. While I'm not optimized, and I know I'm not, the difference between me and the bear is so huge, it seems ridiculous that anyone would want something besides more bears? Even if I -was- optimized, would I even realistically ever be on par with him?

this was fixed in the beta because it was true. Don't worry, you are more balanced in what is coming.

It all dpeends Syl. You are not going to be able to match them on multiple levels. At the current level, they are the better tank. Content is still geared towards EH mechanics and the "OMG OMG OMG my tank is going to die in .5 sec" ideal. In cata that will change and it will allow a bigger optimization of paladin strengths. One of our biggest strengths is our CD rotation and Block from Mastery Rating.

TL:DR - Not now. Maybe later.