Halazzi is more or less a, “tank n’ spank gear check add fight”. Have your off-tank pickup the Spirit of Halazzi immediately, have your melee DPS focus on taking down the totems as soon as they pop, and have healers keep both tanks topped off because Halazzi does major damage.

Tanks: Halazzi’s most annoying ability is Saberlash, an 18k cleave that splits between 2 people (not unlike Nalorakk’s Brutal Swipe). Both tanks need to stand on top of each other for the entire fight. At 75% and 50% HP, he will split into two: Halazzi and Spirit of Halazzi (kitty cat). You need to pick up the Spirit ASAP, without moving off of the MT (soaking a full Saberlash = insta-wipe). Halazzi does not crush.

DPS: Totems will spawn throughout the fight. All melee DPS must take these down in seconds, they kill. The totems will spawn more frequently after Halazzi hits 25% health. When he splits, ignore the add. Hunters can tranq shot off frenzy.

Healers: Keep the tanks alive, it’s not unreasonable to need 3 or 4 dedicated healers. The MT will take a ALOT of burst damage.

Tankadin note: Halazzi has a very fast attack speed, it’s not uncommon for your TPS to break a steady 1k or so! The screenshot (which is sort of large, didn’t shrink it down…) has my updated UI, I’ll make a separate post about that at some point.

0 Holy/49 Protection/12 Retribution

This build is specifically for raid tanking, as everything is built around maximizing health/mitigation, easing uncrushability gearing and threat generation. There are plenty of great protection builds for more hybrid healing or DPS roles, but this isn’t one of them lol.

Protection (49 points)

I dropped Reckoning because it’s not really useful for high level tanking anymore. It doesn’t proc much at all because I avoid roughly half of all attacks. Doing more attacks is not necessarily a positive thing anyways because of the way Parry works for mobs. Other than that, I maximized mitigation, avoidance and threat.

5/5 Redoubt

Damaging melee and ranged attacks against you have a 10% chance to increase your chance to block by 30%. Lasts 10 sec or 5 blocks.

Great for AoE tanking, marginally useful in a raid tanking situation. It is however, a prerequisite for Shield Specialization (besides, Imp Dev Aura is trash).

3/3 Precision

Increases your chance to hit with melee weapons and spells by 3%.

Being able to hit a mob more with your attacks and spells means more threat generation (and DPS :P).

5/5 Toughness

Increases your armor value from items by 10%.

Scalable! Toughness will increase a well geared tankadin’s armor by around 2,000 to 3,000 AC. Good talent, take it.

1/1 Blessing of Kings

Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing total stats by 10% for 10 min. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.

BoK is one of if not the best player buff in a the game. Unless you are 100% certain that you will always have another paladin to be the BoK slave, you might as well take this. 10% all stats means more health, more mana, more dodge (from agility), and more love from group members.

3/3 Improved Righteous Fury

While Righteous Fury is active, all damage taken is reduced by 6% and increases the amount of threat generated by your Righteous Fury spell by 50%.

Almost doubles your threat and reduces ALL damage taken by 6%. A staple for all paladin tanks.

3/3 Shield Specialization

Increases the amount of damage absorbed by your shield by 30%.

Paladins are block heavy tanks; Much of the high level tankadin gear is heavy on Block Value. Shaving an extra 100 off of a 3,000 damage hit may not seem like much, but it adds up. Taking less damage = the healers won’t hate you as much.

5/5 Anticipation

Increases your Defense skill by 20.

Even though Anticipation doesn’t scale, 20 is a LOT of defense skill. Remember that at level 70, 2.37 Defense RATING = 1 Defense SKILL. This talent is equivalent to having a piece of armor with 47 defense on it.

2/2 Spell Warding

All spell damage taken is reduced by 4%.

With Imp RF, that’s a total of 10% spell damage mitigation. Not bad. If you are aiming for raid tanking, take every single bit of mitigation possible.

1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary

Places a Blessing on the friendly target, reducing damage dealt from all sources by up to 80 for 10 min. In addition, when the target blocks a melee attack the attacker will take 46 Holy damage. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time

Decent buff, though highly situational and rarely used unless you have like, a bazillion paladins in the raid. It is though, a prerequisite to Holy Shield so take it.

2/2 Sacred Duty

Increases your total Stamina by 6%, reduces the cooldown of your Divine Shield spell by 60 sec and reduces the attack speed penalty by 100%.

The Divine Shield buff isn’t really useful from a tanking standpoint…but MORE STAMINA IS!

5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization

Increases all damage you deal when a one-handed melee weapon is equipped by 5%.

This was semi-recently changed: This talent will increase ALL of your damage by 5%: Consecration, seals, judgements, white damage, ALL. More damage = more threat.

1/1 Holy Shield

Increases chance to block by 30% for 10 sec and deals 185 Holy damage for each attack blocked while active. Damage caused by Holy Shield causes 35% additional threat. Each block expends a charge. 4 charges

The bread and butter of paladin tanking. The threat bonus is awesome but the true beauty of this spell is the 30% block bonus. Absolutely necessary for uncrushability.

2/2 Improved Holy Shield

Increases damage caused by your Holy Shield by 20% and increases the number of charges of your Holy Shield by 4.

It’s very easy for a fast attacking boss to use up all 4 Holy Shield charges before you have a chance to recast it. 8 charges means that it is almost guaranteed to stay up. More holy damage = more threat.

5/5 Ardent Defender

When you have less than 35% health, all damage taken is reduced by 30%.

AD is more useful than it seems, it’s saved my butt quite a few times. 30% reduction isn’t as much as 50% (how it used to be), but the increased threshold to 35% means that it kicks in earlier and reduces the chance of a big hit leapfrogging AD and instagibbing you.

5/5 Combat Expertise

Increases your expertise by 5 and your total Stamina by 10%.

MORE STAMINA! This talent boosted my unbuffed health by around 1.2k or so…

1/1 Avenger’s Shield

Hurls a holy shield at the enemy, dealing 494 to 602 Holy damage, Dazing them and then jumping to additional nearby enemies. Affects 3 total targets. Lasts 6 sec.

The 41 point talent, the crown on the king’s head, the showcase of the protection tree. At first glace, Avenger’s Shield appears to be nothing more than a pulling spell. Upon further inspection it is so much more:

• 
  Frontloading threat: With imp RF, an average AS hit will yield approximately 1,000 threat. Judge SoR, recast SoR, throw on a Conc. That is easily several thousand threat in a couple of seconds. The more threat you frontload, the sooner your party can start DPS. Being able to generate buttloads of threat within seconds is one of the advantages of a paladin tank.
• 
  The daze: AS is the paladin equivalent of the warrior’s intercept. Same effect (minus the distance closing part :P), same cooldown, same range and deadzone (approx). The daze lasts just long enough for the other party members to CC. Did CC break midfight? The mobs are aggro’d on you already, they won’t run to the clothy. Can’t taunt and a mob starts running to someone on the other side of the room midfight? No problem: Toss a shield, daze, clothy has time to run away while you gain massive threat.

Retribution (12 points)

5/5 Benediction

Reduces the Mana cost of your Judgement and Seal spells by 15%.

I go through mana pretty fast, even with Spiritual Attunement. The better geared you are the less healing that I need, the less healing that I get, the less mana I get back.

2/2 Improved Judgement

Decreases the cooldown of your Judgement spell by 2 sec.

Faster Judgements means that you can generate holy damage faster.

5/5 Deflection

Increases your Parry chance by 5%.

Pretty much the reason for a tankadin to place any points into retribution. Invaluable towards raising your avoidance/mitigation to 102.4%.

The trash: The eagles and the trolls don’t stop spawning until you kill the Amani’shi Tempest, who is located on the stairs. So just keep pulling

Akil’zon is a, “pay attention and move” fight. You have exactly 8 minutes to down him before enrage happens and people start dying (8 minutes is way more than enough time). Make sure that everyone in the raid is on the stone platform before you pull. Anyone on the stairs will get shut out of the encounter by a magically invisible door.

MOST IMPORTANT POINT: Every 45 seconds Akil’zon casts Electrical Storm: An 8 second channeled spell. Electrical Storm is cast on a random player, a cloud will appear above that player, anyone not under the cloud will take mega damage and die. So for that reason, everyone should run to and collapse onto the main tank before Electrical Storm is cast so that everyone will be under the cloud.

• The new Deadly Boss Mods has a timer for his abilities. I usually call out and have everyone collapse onto the tank 8 to 10 seconds before Electrical storm. You can manually time it too but I loathe doing that.
• Once Electrical Storm ends, spread out immediately. If you stand too close to someone, both of you will take mega AoE damage and get a debuff.
• Around a minute or so into the fight Akil’zon starts summoning eagles who will swoop down and randomly hit people. They are near impossible to target and respawn when they die, so just heal through them. Have a paladin put up Concentration Aura to help the casters, make sure that everyone is topped off health wise.

…as long as everyone pays attention and MOVES when they need to this isn’t a really difficult fight. I don’t have the specific details on Akil’zon’s abilities.

Edit:

1. Be wary of being overly dependant on the DBM timers or any mod timers. I’m not convinced that they are accurate at all.

might compile a ZA guide at some point. Nalorakk is a dual tank fight. He rotates between a troll form and a bear form every 40ish seconds or so; a tank is needed for each form. Nalorakk is tauntable and doesn’t deal any Crushing Blows (go wild with odd gearing :P). The encounter is resettable by running down to the base of the stairs.

Positioning
Tank him at the base of his platform, have everyone else spread out in a semi circle.

• If you are concerned about surge, have someone with a high amount of HP stand slightly further from Nalorakk than everyone else to soak the charge. Honestly though, it doesn’t do a whole lot of damage as long as everyone is spread out to avoid splash damage.
• We have both tanks standing on top of each other to divide cleave. However if one tank dodges, the other tank will soak all 14k damage. To make sure this doesn’t happen, we had a third raid member standing with us playing Cleave tampon (a healadin).

Troll Form
Mangle: All bleed effects cause 100% additional damage
Surge: Charges someone (pretty sure it is whoever is standing furthest away from him) knocking them back and hurting anyone in the vicinity (around 1.5k on plate 3.5k on cloth)
Brutal Swipe: A cleave (frontal damage) that does 14k damage on plate, divided evenly among up to 2 people.

• He doesn’t do a whole lot of damage in troll form, so have your healers conserve mana.

Bear Form
Lacerating Slash: Bleed for 1735 damage every 2 seconds for 18 seconds
Rend Flesh: Bleed for 2335 damage every second for 5 seconds
Deafening Roar: AoE, 2 seconds silence and around 1k damage to everyone (don’t know the range).

• He does A LOT of damage in bear form. Keep the bear tank topped off, the AoE silence sucks.
• Whoever is tanking the bear needs to taunt him off of the troll tank ASAP to prevent Mangle + Cleave. If taunt fails for some reason, have a paladin BoP aggro off.

It’s pretty much a gear check. Your tanks, the bear tank in particular needs to be well geared as do the healers since this is a pretty healing intensive encounter. So summary: Keep the tanks alive, spread out, make sure that each tank grabs aggro when Nalorakk changes to their assigned form.

Edit:

• I’m not 100% sure how the cleave mechanics work. Specifically, I’m not sure that the full Cleave amount gets pushed onto one tank if the other dodges/misses/parries.
• Bear tank: save your potions for a double bleed + silence. If you get all three effects, there’s a good chance that you will die.

So patch 2.3 came and the server didn’t crap out and die to my utter surprise (not kidding, was assuming that we would crash out of all instances). Zul’Aman is fun, it reminds me of Zul’Gurub, which is a good thing because ZG is one of if not my favorite raid instance in WoW. From what I can gather based off of the little bit that we tried last night, it definitely picks up where Karazhan leaves off, boss difficulty wise. Since there’s not a whole lot of literature online yet regarding strategies, bosses are taking a bit of trial and error. It’s a refreshing change; learning is fun!

Most of my mods work except for Deadly Boss Mods which continuously throws out errors every couple of minutes. I think there is a patch update out, but I didn’t get a chance to check or download it yesterday since the site was under heavy load. I can officially ditch the CT Mail Mod (I hate CT) because there is a mass mailer built into the UI. Also, pressing ALT + Z to remove the UI for screenshotting now automatically removes name tags. Nice!

I respec’d my paladin into 5/5 Combat Expertise for the stamina buff. It’s an overall 1.2k ish increase to my unbuffed health. Nice! WTB 10 more badges 🙁

Beyond the basic paladin tree changes and gear announcements, I honestly haven't looked much into the 2.3 nuances because I have been busy (and "busy with my on-and-off love affair with Steam :P). Patch 2.3, which has a confirmed release date for November 13th, is introducing Weapon Expertise, a combat mechanic which will be replacing Weapon Skill.

Expertise Rating has the same conversion rate as Weapon Skill: 3.9 Expertise Rating to 1 point of Expertise Skill at level 70. Many of the other affected mechanics also remain the same unless I am mistaken (probably am).

• Each point in Expertise Skill also reduces your target's chance to dodge and parry your attacks by 0.25%
• Expertise isn't limited to one particular weapon (unlike Weapon Skill).
• Every level a mob has over you, its dodge and parry will increase by 0.2%

The expertise cap
In other words: how much Weapon Expertise you need in order to become immune against a boss mob's parry and dodge. From a tank perspective, having all of your melee attacks land means more threat generation. Recall that at an equal level, a mob has a base 5% dodge and parry. So a level 73 mob would have a 5.6% dodge and parry (3*0.2 + 5). At 22.4 Expertise Skill and 88.36 Expertise Rating, your attacks can never be dodged or parried.

What about the attack hit table?
To my knowledge, the uncrushability calculations remain the same, but I am not 100% sure since I haven't looked into the new changes in depth. I need to update the guide since Weapon Skill was nixed.