Sacellum of Nordrassil

Glyphs

There’s a little bit of room for customization here, but not much.

Mandatory Glyphs:

Glyph of Divine Plea – 3% reduced damage taken when Divine Plea is active.

This synergizes with the deep protection talent that refreshes Divine Plea’s duration every time you melee someone(!). Read again: for practically all situations, this is an absolute 3% damage reduction. Must have.

Glyph of Seal of Vengeance – Gain 10 expertise while Seal of Vengeance is active.

Unbelievable. SoV is already your primary tanking seal for most situations, so this is can be treated as a 10 expertise skill (yes skill, not rating) gain in most situations. And yes, this glyph is grossly unbalanced: most expertise giving talent something like 1 or 2 expertise skill per talent point. In those terms, this glyph is worth 10 talent points. Between this glyph and tanking talents, you can reach 16 expertise skill WITHOUT EQUIPPING ANY EXPERTISE. Get this.

Good glyphs:

Glyph of Judgement – 10% increased damage from judgements.

Free threat, no downside. Not a bad choice.

Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous – Your Hammer of the Righteous ability hits an additional target.

Can’t complain. Cleave more targets, outstanding on trash, useless on bosses (aside from adds).

Go with whichever you feel will be of more use to you. They’re stronger in different situations, but the delta isn’t so big that it’s make or break.

Ew glyphs:

Glyph of Consecration – Adds 2 seconds to duration and cooldown to Consecrate ability.

This glyph raises your consecrate cooldown to 10 seconds, making the 969 rotation impossible. Stay away.

Glyph of Exorcism – Your exorcism deals 10% more damage.

There is no way for a protection paladin to have instant exorcisms anymore. No valid use.

Glyph of Seal of Righteousness – Increase the effect of your seal and judgement of righteousness by 10%

You won’t be using Seal of Righteousness enough (if at all) to warrant this. These days, this is PvP only.

Glyph of Shield of Righteousness – Decrease the mana cost of Shield of Righteousness by 75%.

Nice for PvP protection (As an aside, PvP Prot is supposed to be rockin right now. HUGE SotR numbers, high survival, silence/daze/stuns, etc. In my limited experience with it, the limiting factor seemed to be mana. I can write something up when I get a chance to play with it a bit more. But I digress) Not worth using in a tanking role. Between Spiritual Attunement, Blessing of Sanctuary, (near) 100% Divine Plea uptime, and Seal of Wisdom in emergencies, mana should be a non issue in raid situations.

Glyph of Avenger’s Shield – Increase the damage dealt by Avenger’s shield by 100%. Only strikes one target.

Meh. Technically a tps upgrade on a single target encounter (assuming you’re weaving in AS), but there are a couple knocks against this.

First, AS is one of your two spell interrupts. Permanently placing AS in your TPS rotation removes this as an on demand interrupt.

Second, AS hitting 3 targets can be very useful for trash or picking up adds.

Third, you can only sub an ability out for AS every 30 seconds. Assuming 969, that’s only every 3 judgements.

If you really need more single target threat, Glyph of Judgement would likely serve you better.

Situational Glyphs:

Glyph of Hand of Salvation – Reduces incoming damage by 20% while Hand of Salvation is active.

It’s nice to have an additional mitigation cooldown, but it carries the obvious drawback. Can be useful in situations where you have a HUGE threat lead (Steelbreaker burndown on IC+2, Freya, Anubarak phase 3).

Glyph of Holy Wrath – Reduces the cooldown of Holy Wrath by 15 seconds.

Potentially valuable for trash, particularly in places with a lot of undead (ICC).

Minor Glyphs:

None are really gamebreaking. However, a few have perks.

Glyph of Sense Undead - Increase damage dealt to undead by 1% when tracking Undead.

I can't recall if this is actually what it's called, but I do know it is a free 1% increase in damage vs. undead. Meaning a free 1% increase to TPS. Hard to argue with that, especially in 3.3.

Glyph of Lay on Hands - Reduce the CD of Lay on Hands by 5 minutes.

Even though it now causes forbearance when cast on yourself, still can save you in a tight spot.

Glyph of the Wise - Reduce the mana cost of Seal of Wisdom by 50%.

When you're low on mana and Spiritual Attunement/Blessing of Sanctuary/Divine Plea isn't enough, SoW will get you back up pretty quickly. Cutting down the mana cost on the ability that will refresh your mana can be very helpful.

Glyph of Blessing of [fill in here] - If you buff this a lot, I guess you could use it.

My glyph package right now consists of:

Major: Divine Plea, Seal of Vengeance, Holy Wrath
Minor: Lay on Hands, Sense Undead, Seal of Wisdom

EDIT:

Another setup I see some tanks going with is glyphed Seal of Command. With the added cleave and mana returned upon judging, this creates additional multi-target threat while keeping mana regen high, possibly making a potent trash clear setup. The downside is the need to spec for SoC. Of course, this has situational uses outside of trash, such as maintaining your mana pool in a fight where you are the permanent offtank and aren't receiving enough mana from SA (read: damage) to maintain any semblance of a rotation.

Note: Glyphe of SoC still returns mana in fights where most other regen is impossible, i.e. Vezax. Could be a work-around to facilitate a General Vezax HM kill?

As of 3.3, a LOT of Protection Paladin abilities are now subject to dodge/parry, most notably Shield of Righteousness and Hammer of the Righteous. This elevates Glyph of Seal of Vengeance even higher than it was before.