eternalsinners

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the biggest TL;DR on the entire RK forums.

It should stop coming to me as such a surprise that people ask me how to tank. I’ve been doing it since Jeroen was in the mid-50s and I realised that the small group that I played with most needed a tank, and I was probably it. And then it turned out to be really fun, so I kept doing it I’ve done it in raids, and I’m doing it now in the 25-man raids, so based on that, people seem to assume that I know what I’m talking about

It took me a long time to learn how to tank. There’s a ridiculous amount of both theorycraft and practice involved. Now, I’m a firm believer in using enough theorycraft; too much of it runs into a wall of diminishing returns pretty quick, but to manage to scrape efficiency out of a hybrid in a specialised role, you need to have a firm, if not necessarily perfect, understanding of how things work and why.

HOME TRUTHS

A couple of necessary truths follow about being a Protection paladin. Read them before you blow the gold on the respec; they are important.


You can tank

Protection paladins can tank. Guilds around the world are using them in particular roles. I've seen videos of them tanking Kael'thas and Vashj, and read reports of them tanking Archimonde and the Big Winged Dude himself. Even if your dreams aren't that grandiose, you can certainly tank in 5-mans, heroics and the Tier 4 and 5 raids. You will still encounter some people who say "LoL tankadin n00b, stfu and heal1". I suggest the best thing to do is to not bother debating with them, just get on with it and out-tank them. Read the rest of this guide to find out how


You cannot tank as well as a warrior "out of the box"

The flipside of the above is this. Frankly, this is working as intended; warriors are pretty much the primary tank class. They get an excellent suite of tanking tools useable regardless of what spec they are. Protection paladins pay for their hybridisation; you need to spec deep into Protection to be a viable tank, and you need to work twice as hard as a given warrior to get up to the same tanking standard, both gear-wise and skill-wise.

That effort isn't impossible... it's just necessary. Everyone here has doubtless partied with a warrior tank who didn't really know what they were doing but still just about got away with it. (To see the difference between that and a warrior tank who does really know what they're doing, watch Lacrima and Aneland and learn, learn, learn. Even if their abilities don't work the same way as yours, their tactical skill is unsurpassed here.) Paladins cannot do that. You can't just respec Protection, strap on a couple of pieces of crafted tank plate, walk into a Heroic and start kicking ass. You definitely cannot jump straight into raid tanking with understrength gear, as even the weakest encounters will eat you alive.

Fortunately gearing up to Kara standard is relatively painless if you get the right drops in dungeons, and even more so now there's some ace gear from Badges of Justice. (In fact, a lot of the guild's currently existing tanks have nearly every drop they could ever want from Karazhan, so if you're running it with them as not Protection spec some of the tanking plate will make it down to you regardless.) See the Gear section later on for some advice in that regard.


You will be healing

This is important. If you constrain yourself to doing nothing but Heroics, you'll be tanking all the time, and that's what you may enjoy. However, in a raid environment, even a 10-man, there will be more than one tank, and sometimes the encounters will not require more than one tank. If there is ever a situation where a choice will be made between a deep-spec Protection warrior or a deep-spec Protection paladin performing an off-spec role, then more likely than not - barring a specific factor that makes a paladin tank the optimal choice in that situation - you will be the one temporarily healing. It's nothing personal or a conspiracy against paladins of any sort, it's just that you bring more to the table with off-spec healing than a deep-spec Protection warrior does with off-spec DPS.

This happens moreso in 25-mans, but even in 10-mans you'll have to slip off the tank plate, pick up your Gavel of Pure Light and remember what action bar you put Flash of Light on. Yes, this applies even when you're main-tanking sometimes; good examples are the Maiden of Virtue and the Shade of Aran in Karazhan, encounters where you're far more valuable throwing heals than building threat or attempting DPS.

This is part of the joy of playing a hybrid, and in fact comes with two positives. Firstly, if you gear up decently for healing, you can still throw out respectable healing as Protection. We're not talking about giant heals allowing you to single-handedly MT heal, but you can set it up so you've got enough mp5 and +healing to drop four-digit FoLs on the whole raid all night without slowing down. Secondly, this ability to fill more than one role makes you an excellent off-tank, especially in 10-mans; where every ability you can cram into your limited raid slots counts, taking one Protection warrior and then either a Protection paladin or a Feral druid makes a lot more sense from the raid leader's perspective than taking two Protection warriors, one of whom is left with not much to do on single-tank bosses.


It’s going to be hard

Tanking is more or less the most stressful and most difficult job in the game; immensely fulfilling but still hellishly tough. It’s tough as a warrior, the class that the tanking mechanics have been designed around, so you must understand that if you’re going to be a Protection paladin, a hybrid class trying to live up to those designs, you have a very hard job ahead of you, especially if you’re doing it in raids. You’ll get a lot of support, because a raid can live or die on the skill of its tanks (and the healers and DPS too, but work with me here), but you have to be at the top of your game nearly every single moment, because your mistakes have the biggest knock-on effect to the other players.


It's going to be seriously expensive

I cannot overstress how much being Protection is going to cost you. You're going to have to pay insane repair bills, you're going to have to buy crazy amounts of consumables, and you're going to have to spend inconceivable amounts of cash gemming and enchanting your gear. And to fulfill your hybrid responsibilities, you're going to have to do all that above at least twice - gems, enchants and mountains of consumables for your tank gear, your healing gear (and don’t expect people to be happy if you’re slacking on your healing gear), your resistance gears, non-raid tanking gear with more mana lastability... if you ever reach a point where you don't have to spend any more money, well done. I'll be surprised, because even after your gear is all terrifyingly over-the-top you'll still be chugging down mana potions, elixirs and wizard oil like it's approaching its sell-by date. Get used to cramming in daily quests where you can, because that money is your lifeblood.


Hence this guide. It’s a condensation of more or less everything I’ve learned, hopefully into a format that makes it easy to understand, and I post it here for consumption because I believe that even if they don’t tank, paladins should know how to tank. Paladins are a hybrid class, and ignoring one- or two-thirds of the abilities that you get is a real shame when you’ve got so much flexibility at your fingertips. Plus, I believe that as a Class Rep it’s my responsibility to advise and to teach, and this should be a helpful reference for those occasions.

Because Raven Knights are primarily an end-game guild, this guide is focused on Protection at level 70, for use in dungeons and raids. There isn’t much advice on how to level Protection, although a lot of the information is non-specific and can be a help at any point, and the Gear section contains as much as I could include on gearing up suitably on the way to 70. Also, a fair proportion of things like the Core Advice and similar are aimed at people who literally have no idea what they are doing with regards to tanking, so if you’ve done some tanking and got some gear before, the parts of this guide that are aimed at people levelling up alts and aiming to go Protection in the future may not be applicable to you. Hopefully you can bear with me on these bits, pick some diamonds out of the rough and find something useful to what you are doing.



CONTENTS

* Home Truths
* Strengths & Weaknesses
* Essential Theorycraft
* Abilities
* Talents
* Core Advice
* Advanced Advice
* Gear part 1
* Gear part 2

STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES

(All of the comparisons here are going to be drawn between paladins and warriors. This is not to denigrate the marvellous job of Feral tanks, but warriors are the core dedicated tanking class, and the baseline to which everything else is compared.)

It used to be that the gap in survivability between warriors and paladins was pretty huge; particularly in terms of Health; not only did paladins get less base health, but they had to split itemisation between caster stats and ludicrously-stacked Stamina. The talent tree retool in 2.3 has fixed that health gap somewhat, allowing warriors and paladins to achieve comparable mitigation and health, and making it easier to see the basic differences between the two.

Once warriors and paladins are geared up equivalently (which takes a lot more for the paladin as stated above), the difference between the Protection paladin and the Protection warrior is one of specialisation, and the fundamental lynchpin of that specialisation is laid out here for you in black and white:

Paladins are better at generating threat, warriors are better at surviving.

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification; Lacrima, for example, can burn out ridiculous threat, but that might just be because she's godlike at tanking, just like a suitably godlike paladin tank can eke out that extra bit of survivability. (If you find one, let me know ) Said gross oversimplification is based solely on the default tools available to the classes, not how they are used.

Let's look at some of those tools...


Threat

A Protection paladin's threat is all spelldamage-based, and it keeps on scaling upwards theoretically infinitely as long as you keep stacking more spell damage on your gear. It's easy to rebalance threat generation vs. damage absorption for a particular encounter by just swapping a few bits of gear around.

You can generate threat fast. You get a ludicrous aggro-spike pull (sometimes too dangerous to use, but otherwise good). You start with a full "Rage bar", so you can unload a massive crapton of threat right at the start of the fight, and if you're willing and able to go all-out balls-to-the-wall, you can outpace even the maddest DPS in situations where you need to get things down at ridiculous speed.

You can generate threat on a lot of targets You can hold aggro on a theoretically infinite number of mobs at once (assuming your healers can keep you alive) using Consecration spam, and your reflective damage abilities put more threat on them the more they attack you. You can even pull silly little pro tricks like drawing global aggro with healing.


Surviving

You are less survivable than a warrior even when both of you are completely naked. They get the aforementioned larger base Health pool, and you won't start to catch this up until you buy all the Stamina-increasing talents and stack silly amounts of Stamina. A warrior in Defensive Stance takes a base of 10% less damage from all sources, with a further 6% reduction of spell damage with the Improved Defensive Stance talent. A fully-talented Protection paladin with Improved Righteous Fury and Spell Warding mitigates 6% of all sources plus 4% from spell sources.

Once you start gearing up there are still some differences; warriors don't need to spend itemisation on caster stats, and they don't need to spend as much itemisation on avoidance to stay uncrushable (see below in the Theorycraft), so they have more of their item budget to spend on more Armor and Stamina.

Beyond that, warriors get more "not dying" abilities. Paladins have no useful active equivalent of Spell Reflection, Demoralising Shout, Last Stand, Shield Wall, Berserker Rage (depressing list, isn't it?) You get Divine Shield, the best NODAMAGEKTHX ability in the entire game... but apart from some very specific circumstances, you cannot use it while tanking without killing everyone around you, as it drops all your threat while it's active. You can also Lay on Hands yourself, but that's a) once per hour b) eats all your mana c) all you get. You're also fully vulnerable to fear effects, which whilst no longer an automatic wipe are very dangerous, especially in fights involving careful positioning.

With these two things borne in mind, it becomes obvious that for a lot of raid bosses, warriors are the premier main tanks, because the difficulty of most of them comes from the ridiculous amount of damage that they kick out, which warriors are far better placed to survive. Sometimes encounters need speed threat, and the raid leadership are not reticent to pull out the paladins then, but for the most part, the added invulnerability of a warrior is needed to make the raid encounters more bearable.


Other good stuff
Oddly enough, you will actually figure relatively highly on the damage meters in instance situations. All your threat comes from actual damage run through a threat multiplier; you don't have any "phantom threat" moves like a warrior does, so as you're pushing your threat you're pushing actual damage 100% of the time; nothing compared to what a pure DPS class is kicking out, but a reasonable contribution nonetheless, especially in situations where you can tank a lot of mobs with Consecration. This makes you good at grinding as well, at least in specific grinding spots where you can tank half a dozen mobs at once, because you kill things damn slowly, but you kill eight things at more or less exactly the same speed at which you kill one, and you can survive being beaten on by those eight until you can steal their money and lewtz

You're good at saving people's backsides in an emergency. Your Blessing of Protection doesn't stop working while you're tanking so you can save someone's life while you regain control of the mobs, and your taunt is quite impressive; you can taunt at range, meaning you can stay focused on your tanking target while saving a caster standing at the back. (The Abilities section has more useful information on how to get the most out of Righteous Defense.)


Other bad stuff
Casters are your bane. You get one "interrupt"; a stun effect (so may be immune) useable once per minute. You can't kick or counterspell, so the only way to get casters to come into melee range with you is through creative positioning (or the aid of friendly mages), and you need an interrupter along with you to keep casters locked down on fights like Dahlia the Doomsayer or Romulo and Julianne.

Not just that, but if you ever encounter anything with anti-caster abilities... you're screwed, basically. Silence effects can be worked around if you're smart or have quick debuff cleansing on the go. Mana drain or mana burn... well, good luck, because if you get chain-burned you're essentially reduced to autoattacking and crying. Anything with magic immunity or spell reflection can cause you to have a bad day while you're at it (although as a counterbalance, as long as you keep your Unarmed skill well-trained, Disarm has very little effect on your threat generation)

Protection paladin and single-target DPS. I don’t think I need elaborate at all here.


What it essentially comes down to

Paladins are a support class, and their tanking abilities are no exception. You are unlikely to be the top-flight main tank in the high-end raids, bearing the brunt of the onslaught from the big bosses, unless you exhibit mad skillz the likes of which would make grown men weep.

But you can hold aggro, you can take the punishment if not forever then certainly long enough, and your skills synergise well with those of a Protection warrior; the two together are a pretty much unbeatable tanking combination, each supporting the other where they fall down.

ESSENTIAL THEORYCRAFT

It took me months of reading to sort out all the theorycraft behind paladin tanking, of which there is a lot, and it made my head hurt. As such, I have attempted to simplify it and condense it into a more clearly readable version.

So as such, there are two things that a tank must do in order to be a successful tank:

1. Generate threat faster than the DPS and the healers
2. Not die

In the name of usefulness, however, this is not as condensed as I chose to make it. Let’s look at these things in more detail:

1. Generate threat faster than the DPS and the healers

A brief summary of Threat mechanics for the slow
While I do not think that anyone reading this guide would not yet have an understanding how the mechanics of threat and aggro work, to make sure we are all working on the same page, here is a summary:

What looks like complicated enemy AI where mobs prioritise targets and break off to attack the healers isn’t. Every mob simply has a table connected to it running behind the scenes. Actions performed against that mob generate points of threat which are constantly added up during the combat, and all sources of threat are arranged on this table in order. For argument’s sake, let us say that by default, 1 point of damage against a mob = 1 point of threat. Healing, on the other hand, causes 0.5 points of threat for each point of healing done against all mobs in combat. There are other actions that cause a small amount of threat; buffing is one (so you will generate some global threat whenever you cast a Seal on yourself).

Nominally, the person with the most threat is at the top of the table and has aggro; the mob will be attacking them, and should any other person take their place at the top of the threat table, the mob will aggro onto them instead. In practice, you have a small safety threshold; a mob will not change targets until someone reaches either 110% of the current target’s threat (for characters in melee) or 130% of the current target’s threat (for characters at range). Of course, once they do this, the tank then has to beat their threat by that 10%/30% margin to get the mob back, and given that the new aggro monkey will have that lead over them already, this may cause problems. The lesson here: don’t pull aggro.

(There are of course some exceptions to the above. If someone body-pulls a mob, that doesn’t actually generate any threat, so the slightest bit of threat caused – even the aforementioned buff aggro from casting Seals – will pull onto you. Bear this in mind when you’re the off-tank. In addition, some mobs have specific attack patterns that cause them to cast spells at or attack random targets, healers, the person second on their threat list… but for the most part, the above is true.)

Taunt abilities, such as Righteous Defense, effectively set your threat on the taunted mob to equal that of the person at the top of the threat table, and then give you aggro straight away without having to beat the 10%/30% margin. It would be wise for the DPS/healers to slack off a bit at this point to give the tank breathing space. (Be thankful this is all you have to do; pre-Burning Crusade, taunts set your aggro to equal the threat leader, but you then had to make up the 10%/30% margin yourself before the Taunt debuff wore off.)

Of course, the default values above do not often apply. Nearly every DPS and healing class has a way to make damage or healing cause less threat (e.g. the Fanaticism talent in the paladin Retribution talent tree reduces all threat caused by 30%), and tanking classes have ways to boost their threat (e.g. Defensive Stance increases all threat caused by 30%). Warriors, in particular, have moves that cause flat amounts of additional threat in addition to their normal effects; for example, a rank 6 Sunder Armor reduces armour by 520 per stack and causes no damage but causes 310 threat even though it deals no damage.

Essentially, your job as tank comes down to this:

* Keep aggro away from everyone else and on yourself
Relatively simple to understand; you’re there to take the beatings so someone else doesn’t have to.

* In addition, put out sufficient threat that the healers and DPS can do their jobs without worrying unduly about aggro.
Everyone has a responsibility to watch their own threat, but it’s a two-way street, because if you’re not putting out enough threat then the other people in your party or raid are going to have to slow down their own threat generation to stay behind you. Your main worry here is the healers. Setting aside the fact that they are the most likely to explode into chunky salsa when hit, they are generating global threat, which means that you need to maintain at least enough threat to overcome their healing threat on all the targets in a combat, not just on the first guy in the kill order. In addition, while DPS can slack off as much as they like to give you some breathing room, healers have to heal enough to stop you, amongst other people, from being splattered completely, so there’s a definite minimum amount they can go down to without letting people die.

But you cannot rely entirely on the DPS being able to cut back either. There are some fights where speed is of the essence, but even if you don’t see an Enrage timer ticking away on your boss mods, eventually on any fight your casters, both healers and DPS – and you – are going to run out of mana, which means you can’t tank, the DPS can’t DPS and the healers can’t heal. Death will follow shortly thereafter, so you need to be able to hold aggro while the DPS… well, DPS.


What this means for you
The key ability – the key ability – for paladin tanks is Righteous Fury, and the tooltip contains everything you need to know about how paladin threat generation works:



In fact, the tooltip is slightly misleading, because it applies to Holy effects – this includes all spells in the Holy tree, including healing spells, and any effect that deals Holy damage, even when it is a Protection or Retribution spell, or even from an external source such as Darkmoon Card: Vengeance.

(Untalented Righteous Fury is worth +60% threat, but Improved Righteous Fury 3/3 increases the threat output by 50% (that’s 50% of the +60%, so another +30%) and anyone who is even thinking of tanking should have that talent.)

Paladin threat generation is relatively simple like that. There’s no complexity or mystery to it; instead you just pump out Holy damage as hard and as fast as you can, and Righteous Fury provides the big threat multiplier.

This does mean that you’re going to have to break away from conventional thinking on threat generation, at least as it applies to warriors. One of those things is that your white damage makes a relatively insignificant contribution to your threat compared to your spell damage output. As an example, with his current gear Jeroen’s melee attacks hit for ~80 white damage on mobs, for ~80 threat per swing, while his Seal of Righteousness hits for ~130 Holy damage, at ~250 threat per swing – and this is to say nothing of the threat generated by Holy Shield, Consecration, Judgement of Righteousness… all Holy damage based. As such, you need to sacrifice itemisation based on physical damage for spell damage instead. The whys are covered here; the hows are covered in the Gear section.

The mathematics on the multiple interactions of resistance formulas and the spell coefficients of all your different spells together are too complicated for me to list here (assuming I would even know how to add them together), so from experience I will say: in 5-man dungeons, to hold aggro from the party while being able to use all your tools and still let the DPS have their way, you’re going to have to be bringing around 200 +spell damage minimum. (You’ll then need to be adding more as you get into early Karazhan so that the DPS don’t have to pull up occasionally.) To be able to hold aggro from a raid-geared party going all out with DPS and healing while not being able to use Consecration due to crowd control – which is what you will have to face on trash in Serpentshrine Cavern and the Eye – the safety point is around 400 spell damage fully buffed, but this will let you output about 600TPS just using Seal and Judgement of Righteousness and Holy Shield, allowing you to trash-tank in complete safety. It is also the point where you can safely off-tank a boss, which is something that paladins traditionally have problems with, because Holy Shield is such a massive part of your threat generation and is useless when not being attacked by your tank target. 400 +spell damage allows you to maintain offtank-level threat using only Seal and Judgement of Righteousness and Consecration.

Similarly while +hit is a consideration for keeping your damage and your threat up, you need to focus more on spell hit rating than on melee hit rating, but it isn’t particularly essential. The basic chances to miss a mob with a melee attack, assuming maxed-out melee weapon skill, are:

vs. lvl 70: 5.0%
vs. lvl 71: 5.5%
vs. lvl. 72: 6.0%
vs. lvl 73: 9.0%

(The spike at level 73 is due to the calculations on Miss chance against mobs changing once a mob’s Defense skill gets more than 10 points higher than your weapon skill)

Similarly, the base Miss chance for spells against a mob is as follows:

vs. lvl 70: 4.0%
vs. lvl 71: 5.0%
vs. lvl. 72: 6.0%
vs. lvl 73: 17.0%

(Note that there is no Spell Resistance available against Holy spells; holy damage spells can only hit or miss with no partial resist, so this table is all you have to worry about.)

However, the Precision talent increases your hit percentages with both melee attacks and spells by 3%. This pretty much negates the necessity for both kinds of hit rating against mobs up to level 72; 3% is an “acceptable” miss chance given the need to itemise for other things as a tank, and some of the high-end paladin tank gear has spell hit rating on it anyway.

Against skull bosses you are left with a 6% melee miss chance and a 14% spell hit chance with Precision, plus any small amounts of hit rating you have accumulated. +Hit will help here, but it is not worth sacrificing too much mitigation to achieve. Other tanks are in the same boat, and your naturally fast threat generation should help to make up for it. You are also helped somewhat by the fact that most of your attacks and abilities are fast; Consecration ticks once per second while it is up, Holy Shield reflects damage as fast as you can block, and you are likely to be using a weapon with a fast swing speed (less than 2.0). This means that even if you get more than one miss or resist in a row you will not be subject to any long “dry period” without threat building on your target; another tick will come along in a second. Admittedly a long block of this may hurt your aggro generation, but other tanks are in the same boat when they see a gloom-inducing string of Miss-Dodge-Parry-Miss-Parry.

Melee is also helped by the fact that Combat Expertise gives every paladin tank at least 5 Expertise; that’s a total of 2.5% of your opponent’s avoidance against melee attacks that you don’t have to worry about.

You can also generate threat with healing. It seems useful because the threat effects all mobs at once. However, paladin healing generates even less threat than normal healing does – estimates place it between 0.25 and 0.33 points of threat for each point of healing, precisely to stop paladins from stacking up to uninterruptible spells (no longer possible alas) and tanking purely by spamming heals on themselves. It can still be used in the odd situation, and is great when you can work it in to your overall combat strategy (q.v. Morogrim Tidewalker), but overall Consecration is far more efficient.




2. Not die

The simple part of not dying involves a) making sure to have all the damage reduction talents and abilities active, including Improved Righteous Fury, and b) stacking on a metric assload of Stamina and Armor. That doesn't need any theorycrafting, really (aim to begin with at the low end for at least10k Heath unbuffed and 50% Damage Reduction from Armor). The difficult part involves Defense and avoidance, and how much you need and why. The key is that the numbers are relatively easy to get your head around once you realise how melee attacks are resolved by the game client.

(NOTE: For convenience's sake, for the purposes of this section, when I refer to a "boss" I mean a "skull boss"; one whose level appears as a skull regardless of what level you are, as opposed to just an instance boss. These bosses have fixed amounts of HP and damage output, but for the purposes of any calculation involving attack, defence and resistance formulas, they are always treated as being three levels higher than the character they are attacking or being attacked by.)

Essentially, there are seven different things that can happen when a mob attempts to attack you, and they are:


* Miss: your opponent flubs completely. Mobs have a base 5% chance to miss players, modified by Defense skill.

* Dodge: you nimbly avoid the attack. You take no damage. Your base Dodge chance as a paladin is 0.65% plus 1% for every 25 Agility you have, modified by Defense skill and Dodge Rating.

* Parry: you intercept the attack with your weapon. You take no damage, and counterattack; the swing timer on your next autoattack is reduced. Your base Parry chance is 5%, modified by Defense skill, the Deflection talent and Parry Rating.

* Block: you intercept the attack with your shield. This does not completely negate the attack; instead, you take 100% of normal damage, reduced by your total Block Value. (mouse over your Block percentage on your Character pane to find this out) This can absorb all the damage from an attack, but more likely will only suck up part of it, leaving you to be hit by the rest (still, some is better than none; if you're being hit for 2000 white damage and have 200 block value, that's a not bad 10% damage reduction). Your base Block chance is 5%, modified by Defense skill and Block Rating.

* Critical Hit: The attack deals double damage. Mobs have a base 5% chance to crit players, reduced by Defense skill and Resilience.

* Crushing Blow: The attack deals 150% normal damage. Crushing blows can only be scored by a mob with an attack skill 15 points or more higher than your Defense skill (and only your base Defense skill is counted here, with no bonuses from talents or gear); for simplicity's sake, at level 70 this is only bosses, who have a flat 15% chance to crush you.

* Normal Hit: Does 100% of normal damage. Initially this will be most of the hits that enemies make on you.


Not getting crit
The most obviously dangerous out of this list is critical hits; you really don't want them to happen, especially when you're facing opponents that are hitting you with 3000 white damage purely on their auto-attacks. Now, however, is the time to explain all those references to "modified by Defense skill" above. For most characters, Defense is a skill you hardly notice, but it suddenly becomes pretty much the most important value on your Skills screen as you tank.

When you are attacked, your Defense skill is compared to the mob's attack skill (by default the mob's level x 5, so 350 for level 70s, 365 for bosses). Every point that your Defense skill is higher than the mob's attack skill is worth +0.04% to Dodge, Parry and Block chances, and the numbers on your character pane take this into account (assuming you are being attacked by an equal level mob; each of these numbers is actually worth 0.2% less per level that the mob is higher than you, and vice versa). Each point also adds +0.04% to your base 5% chance to be missed, and - importantly - reduces your chance to be crit by 0.04%.

At 0.04% per point, it takes 25 points of Defense skill to add 1% to each defence and your Miss chance, and to gain 1% crit reduction. This means that to become completely crit immune in PvE, including against bosses, you need a buffed Defense skill of 365 + (5 x 25 = 125) = 490. With the Anticipation talent accounting for 20 extra points of Defense skill, and a conversion rate of roughly 2.37 Defense Rating/1 Defense Skill, it will take 285 points of Defense Rating on your gear to become completely crit immune.

If you only ever plan to tank in normal or Heroic 5-mans you can stop here if you like; the next bit only applies to people fighting raid bosses. On the other hand, you've managed to get this far, so why give up here?


Not getting crushed
Dispensing with crits just involves ploughing into Defense Rating until your skill is high enough. Dispensing with crushing blows, on the other hand, is more complicated until you know how attacks are resolved.

Essentially, the values listed on your character sheet are not checked for separately one after the other. They are all added together on a table in the order listed above - Miss/Dodge/Parry/Block/Critical Hit/Crushing Blow/Normal Hit. Then the game makes a random percentage roll and looks it up on this table to see what happens.

An illustrative example:
Joe Tankadin is being attacked by a mob. His Defense skill is 490, adding +5% to his miss chance, making it 10%, and reducing his chance to be crit to 0%. He has a total of 15% Dodge, 15% Parry, 25% Block. His attack table looks like this:


01-10 Miss
11-25 Dodge
26-40 Parry
41-65 Block
66-100 Normal hit

The random number generator rolls 36, and Joe parries.

(Note that every item on this table has a fixed percentage chance to happen except normal hits; "Normal hit" just fills up all the space on the table up to 100% that isn't taken up by anything else. Also, if Joe's chance to be crit was anything greater than 0%, it would appear on the table after Block)

Joe suddenly remembers he is a tankadin and casts Holy Shield, increasing his Block chance by 30% while it is active, and his table now looks like this:


01-10 Miss
11-25 Dodge
26-40 Parry
41-95 Block
96-100 Normal hit

This is distinctly more healthy; he's getting at least his Block Value subtracted from incoming damage on all but 5% of his attacks.

But if this monster was a boss, the boss has a 15% chance to crush him. His base attack table now looks like this:


01-10 Miss
11-25 Dodge
26-40 Parry
41-65 Block
66-80 Crushing blow (ouch)
81-100 Normal hit

Joe may be in for a world of hurt here. But something peculiar happens if he pops Holy Shield for +30% block:


01-10 Miss
11-25 Dodge
26-40 Parry
41-95 Block
96-100 Crushing blow

The items on the table add up to more than 100%, but the roll is only made between 1-100, so anything that adds up to more than that simply falls off the top; it can't happen. (In fact, at this point, you may notice that any chance of Normal Hit has been pushed completely off the top).

Joe now has a greatly reduced chance of taking a crushing blow, but 5% still remains. Ideally, he needs to stack up avoidance until his combined chances of Miss, Dodge, Parry and Block add up to 100% and fill up the entire table, leaving a Blocked hit as the most dangerous thing that can happen to him. This is what the mythical “uncrushable” means.

Of course, this table is somewhat simplified; your defences (and the "dice roll" on the table) are accounted for to four significant figures according to reports from Blizzard as opposed to being nice round numbers (although you only see them to two decimal places on the Character pane), and because the numbers you see assume you are being attacked by a level 70 mob, which bosses most decidedly are not, and each of your defences, including Miss chance, will thus be reduced by 0.6%… (wait, this next bit is important:)

...you need to get the figures you see to add up to the magic figure of greater than 102.4% with Holy Shield active to never take a crushing blow.

To fully calculate your avoidance, simply add together your 5% base miss plus the percentage listed under "Decreases chance to be hit or critically hit by..." when you mouse over your Defense skill in the Defenses drop-down on your character pane. Add in your Dodge and Block percentages, then cast Holy Shield and add your updated Block percentage to round it off:



This is part of the "paladin tanks are harder to gear up for raids than warriors"; a warrior's Shield Block adds 75% to their Block chance as opposed to Holy Shield's 30%, so a Protection paladin needs to stack a lot more avoidance onto their gear before they become uncrushable, and this is initially done at the expense of armour and Stamina.

On the other hand, a paladin is more consistently uncrushable once they hit the magic 102.4%. Shield Block (with talents) has 2 charges on a 5-second cooldown, so it can absorb two blocks before it goes down. If a boss attacks faster than twice every 5 seconds, they risk slipping a crushing blow in past Shield Block. Improved Holy Shield, however, has 8 charges on a 10-second cooldown - twice as many over the same period of time as Shield Block, and there is currently no single boss in the entire game that attacks fast enough to smash it down. As long as you get the hang of recasting Holy Shield the instant it cools down, then barring you being hit by a crush during your client-to-server lag as you recast (or the occasional whoops-I've-messed-up-my-cooldown-cycle), you will never be crushed again.


The balancing act
You will notice from looking at the chart that some defences are strictly speaking better than others. An attack that Misses or is Dodged or Parried deals no damage, while an attack that is Blocked can still hurt like hell.

Ideally, of course, you’d pile on Parry Rating to jack your Parry through the ceiling, in order to become immune to attacks and get the speedy counterattacks. In practice, this is completely impractical, for two reasons.

Firstly, some defences are more expensive than others. It requires 23.65 points of Parry Rating to convert to 1% Parry chance, compared to 7.88 points of Block Rating for 1% Block chance – pretty much exactly three times as expensive, and initially, when you’re pushing up to your uncrushable threshold, you need as much avoidance as cheaply as possible. Block is initially the way to go.

Secondly, blocked hits are desirable to a certain extent. Holy Shield generates its reflective threat every time you block, and Spiritual Attunement only functions when you are healed, and to be healed you need to be taking damage. If you are barely getting scratched, your mana is going to expire in short order. To be blunt; pretty much never in a raid environment are you going to be thinking, “Wow, I wish I was taking more damage so I could get more mana back,” but it’s a concern in 5-mans, and many tank paladins keep a second set of less “hardcore” armour for going back and doing less dangerous instances and for soloing. (And before you think this is solely a paladin quirk, ask the warriors about tanking low-level instances in their epic tank plate, and the Rage starvation that ensues.)

Defense is a very expensive way to obtain avoidance; although it adds to Miss, Dodge, Parry and Block all at once, if you want to increase each of those by 0.25% (giving 1% total) you require 14.81 Defense rating (and more than that unless you’re buying in bulk, because the Defense rating-to-skill conversion always rounds down). This provides 0.75% of “pure” no-damage avoidance and 0.25% Block – getting 1% total in just Miss, Dodge and Parry would take 19.75 Defense rating, again subject to rounding. When you’re grasping for every percentage point of avoidance, the sheer cheapness of Block Rating is definitely the way to go.

As such, what you want to do as your first priority is to push your Defense up to 490 for uncrittable, the primary reason for boosting up your Defense instead of Rating stats – and then stick as close to there as you can, and start bringing in Block rating to boost yourself up to uncrushable. Once you reach that point, there’s no point stacking Block further as it’ll just fall off the top of the table (and unlike a warrior, you don’t need to push it up to cover the occasions that Shield Block won’t be up, because Holy Shield is always up.) That’s where you can start slowly swapping out your stacked Block for pure avoidance to help with your damage mitigation; most likely Dodge, as it’s the cheapest.

Further information on this delicate balancing act can be found in the Gear section.

ABILITIES

If you’ve gotten this far you should have a fair idea of what you are supposed to do, and in the “Core Advice” section below we get more into how you do it. This section is largely concerned with what you do it with.

It is a running gag (and a hilarious one, ho ho ) that healing paladins only need three buttons at most. That aside, it is true that Protection paladins use a whole raft of abilities that they don’t make much use of as Holy. Some of them come from talents, yes, but others are ones that every paladin gets but sit languishing on an action bar somewhere until the time finally comes for you to dust off the sword-and-board, and some of them are commonly-used ones that just need to be used differently.

So here is a selection of advice on getting the best out of these abilities, including some very helpful macros that you shouldn’t be without (including the infamous Righteous Defense macro that everyone asks about). Those abilities that every paladin can train are covered first, with Protection talent abilities coming later.


CORE ABILITIES



Righteous Fury
The paladin equivalent of Defensive Stance or Bear Form, and equally important. Fully improved with talents (and it should be), this increases threat from Holy spells and effects by 90%, and reduces damage taken from all sources by 6%.

If you have gotten this far in the guide you may feel I have been belabouring the point about Righteous Fury a little, but that’s for two reasons. One: it really is that vital. Two: it’s important to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. It’s a buff and it can expire. Unlike Defensive Stance or Bear Form, your action bars don’t change when you buff yourself with Righteous Fury, and you definitely don’t shapeshift. It is more than possible for a paladin to wade into combat without realising that his buff has run out, or that they forgot to renew it after they died etc. (and every Protection paladin from the complete nebbish to the veteran of Black Temple has done this at some point, including the author of this text. It’s not an exclusive club.)

If you do not have this buff up, you have made your job 90% more difficult and your healers’ jobs 6% more difficult. If there is the faintest chance it might expire before the combat ends, recast it before you pull. If you somehow lose it mid-combat, get it back up.



Spiritual Attunement
A completely passive ability, it will never appear on your action bar. Most paladins forget they have it, and most non-paladins don’t even know about it… but this ability’s arrival in patch 2.0 is what makes being a viable paladin tank possible.

For the uninitiated, Spiritual Attunement gives the paladin mana equal to 10% of the healing they receive. It’s that simple. If you get hit by a 4000 point Greater Heal, you recover 400 mana. It’s as easy as that. (Well, almost; certain passive sources are exempt, overhealing doesn’t count, and you don’t get the mana from self-healing, only external healing.)

Prior to 2.0, the big problem with paladin tanks was essentially that once their mana was gone, it was gone; mana potions weren’t enough to keep you fuelled. Now paladins can effectively guarantee continuous mana regen as long as they are taking damage and getting that damage healed. However, mana from Spiritual Attunement only comes in so fast. Unlike a warrior you start off with a full power bar, but it doesn’t (usually) refill anywhere near as quickly as a Rage bar. The skill involved in making Spiritual Attunement work is balancing threat generation with mana recovery; you need to throw out sufficient threat to maintain aggro on all your tanking targets without overspending and blowing all your mana in one go right at the start, then finding yourself with a giant threat lead but unable to cast Holy Shield, taunt, pick up adds…

In some situations this won’t be an issue; if you’re tanking in a heavy damage fight (including some instance bosses and even raid melee trash) you will be taking so much damage so fast that the healing you will be receiving will be regenerating your mana pretty much as quickly as you can spend it. Most of the time, however, you will need to exhibit a little more care.

It is perfectly acceptable to end a fight without any mana. The key is ending the fight without any mana and not running out halfway through. How exactly you pace yourself is beyond the scope of this guide; depending on your personal stats this will differ from paladin to paladin. More Intellect means more spells; higher +spell damage means having to cast fewer spells to generate the same amount of threat. Your casting balance is for you to find out, and it’s going to take time and repair bills for you to find out (and it will change over time as your gear improves). Some of it is reliant on your group’s DPS, too; the faster they kill, the less time you have to get mana-screwed, although of course their damage is limited by the threat you put out, so this become self-balancing too.

The other part of Spiritual Attunement is that if you’re not taking damage and not getting healed, you’re not regaining mana. If you’re not directly under attack, e.g. when off-tanking a boss, you’ll need to supplement your expenditures with mana potions (not that you won’t be doing that anyway, but here you’ll be just popping them every time they cool down). If your healer gets silenced, it’s worth breaking your cooldown cycle to Cleanse the silence off them. And if you take your top-end raid gear into a normal-difficulty 5-man instance, or just daily questing, you’re going to run into mana difficulties because your mitigation will be just too good; you will take so little damage that your healing will in no way provide enough mana to cover what you’re spending.

A knock-on effect of the need for careful mana management (although a minor one) is that in high-level encounters you’re going to be behind the warrior tanks on mitigation still, because you cannot drink Ironshield potions; your potion cooldown must be saved for mana pots. (On the other hand, missing out on that 2000 Armor means more damage taken, which means more mana from healing… and so on.)



Auras
Given the number of options available to you, this section is small and simple. Use Devotion Aura. Your healers will love you for it, as the armour is actually worth at least another 1% DR, even in epic tank plate, and if you’re in a raid that applies to the other tanks in your group too. Retribution Aura is a lot more situational; there are some situations (such as when attacked by tiny mobs that would be one-shot by the reactive damage, or when AoE grinding) where it might be beneficial, but 26 damage is virtually nothing, even with the threat boost from Righteous Fury, and if those mobs hit even slightly hard then the benefits of the additional Armour from Devotion Aura will exceed it.

You’ll know when you need to use Concentration Aura; your casters will be asking for it, because they know when they’re being interrupted. Give it to them; reduced interruption for your party is more important than your 1% armour DR. Similarly, “when to use a Resistance Aura” is not hard; it’s whenever you’re fighting mobs that deal heavy elemental damage and you don’t have another corresponding resistance buff at 70 (especially fighting most elementals, as armour doesn’t apply against the damage from their attacks).

Remember that changing auras costs nothing except a global cooldown, so if you need to change it in the middle of combat feel free to do so.

Crusader Aura’s icon is missing from the list above. This is because it goes without saying that if you are using Crusader Aura in the middle of combat then you are a goddamn idiot. Especially once you actually stop riding to the instance and go inside the instance. Fairness requires me to disclose that the author has actually reached the first boss in Shadow Labyrinth before finally (and shame-facedly) switching Crusader Aura off.



Seals & Judgements
The basic mechanics of Seals and Judgements are so fundamental to playing a paladin that if you have not grasped them by now you should shut this guide down and go and reroll immediately (seriously, you get Judgement at level 4 and your first Seal that causes a persistent debuff Judgement at level 6. What gives?). Here is a discussion of which Seal to use when and why:


Righteousness
Your bread-and-butter tanking Seal. This is your primary source of threat generation on single tanking targets. Apply it at every opportunity and keep auto-attacking with it up unless circumstances dictate that you use another Seal. Judge it as often as you feel you need to; with 400 +spell damage and Improved Righteous Fury, it hits for around 1000 threat. On most mobs, judging it once every 10 seconds (even if you have Improved Judgement), to keep the cooldown in sync with Holy Shield, is enough without burning too much mana, although if you have Improved Judgement you can and should pop it whenever your Judgement cooldown comes up in speed-threat situations.


Crusader
Mostly a no-brainer if you need to generate threat quickly, as the max rank gives you an additional +190 spell damage from Holy spells. Using it as a Seal is more or less pointless as a tank, but apply Judgement of the Crusader at the earliest opportunity after you have a threat lead; either with your first Judgement if you have been able to pull with Avenger’s Shield, or your second Judgement if you needed to body-pull and apply Judgement of Righteousness with your first Judgement cooldown. As Judgement itself isn’t on the global cooldown, it’s best to cast Crusader pretty much immediately before your Judgement comes up, judge it and then switch back to Righteousness afterwards.


Justice
Again, Seal of Justice isn't much good for using as a Seal. The stun proc is completely random and subject for diminishing returns, down to complete immunity after the third proc. The Judgement, on the other hand, is excellent. You get less use out of it in the higher-end dungeons because there are fewer mobs that flee (virtually none once you get into raids), and any other method of preventing runners (slowing effects, Curse of Recklessness) is preferable because it lets you make use of a more useful Judgement, but it's a damn fine tool to have in your arsenal, especially if you time it right - you can apply the Judgement just before the fleeing threshold while still getting the benefits of Crusader or Wisdom for the rest of the fight.


Light and Wisdom
Both are used the same way, so both will fit handily in one section.

Crusader is your debuff Judgement of choice for speed-threat; for endurance purposes, Wisdom and Light are the key contenders. If you are not tanking (say if you are off-tanking and your target has died, or it's only a single-tank encounter) then apply Wisdom if casters are going to have mana problems (e.g. on boss fights where casters need to go all-out constantly, like Void Reaver) or Light where even the littlest extra bit of healing is appreciated (e.g. Morogrim Tidewalker's murloc trash groups once you start working on the warriors). If you personally are tanking, Wisdom is always best for endurance; your healers can help with the healing but you will be scraping every second for mana.

Occasionally it is possible for you to forgo the threat from Seal of Righteousness and use Seal of Wisdom as your main seal alongside the Judgement. You can do this either when you have a massive threat lead, or when the threat from Consecration or Holy Shield is sufficient. (e.g. tanking Tidewalker's murloc adds, where the DPS has to pace itself to your Consecration threat alone; here you may as well use Wisdom to help with the massive quantities of mana you will be burning on max-rank Consecration) This is also the tactic you use for grinding as Protection; pull everything, put up Consecration and Holy Shield, double-stack Wisdom and repeat until everything else is dead.


Vengeance
Vengeance is a strange Seal. For those paladins who haven't yet reached level 64, it works like this: when it procs it places a stacking debuff called Holy Vengeance on a target that deals 150 Holy damage over 15 seconds (ticking for 30 damage once ever 3 seconds, stacking up to 5 times for a base 150/tick, with a spell damage coefficient of about 17% applied to each tick). The duration of the debuff refreshes if it procs again, and if it procs while the target already has 5 stacks it deals another small amount of Holy damage (about 15). The Judgement deals a base of 120 damage per stack of Holy Vengeance on the target.

Seal of Vengeance looks like it should be an excellent tanking seal; ticking for persistant threat even when you're not attacking that mob, with the option of hitting for massive snap-threat with the Judgement. In practice it's less impressive, however.

Essentially, under optimum conditions, Seal of Vengeance puts out more threat than Seal of Righteousness - about another 100 threat per second in similar circumstances with similar spell damage. (This gap closes as your spell damage starts to increase, but not by much.) However, those optimum conditions are not always available. Firstly, they assume that you've already reached 5 stacks of Holy Vengeance, and in a situation where you need to generate threat quickly your DPS cannot afford to give you the head start you need, especially if you're unlucky with Holy Vengeance procs. Secondly, it's worryingly easy in practice for the debuff to fall off; all it takes is an unlucky dry period on procs, or a gouge/stun/silence/banish/any sort of crowd control that keeps you from attacking for just those vital few seconds, whereupon your threat generation from Vengeance is gone, and you have to start building the stacks up from the beginning.

As such, in my opinion - yours may differ, but I have used Vengeance a lot to try it out - Seal of Vengeance isn't worth the trouble. It may have potentially more raw threat output, but Righteousness is more consistent, allowing you and your DPS to plan better and avoiding unpleasant threat spikes.



Consecration
Ah, AoE tanking, one of the paladin’s big strengths, and here’s what lets you do it to the maximum extreme. It can hit a theoretically infinite number of targets, as many as you can get to stand within the area of effect – and that’s as many targets as you can maintain threat on. It also scales phenomenally well with +spell damage; it has a 95% spell damage coefficient, divided evenly among the 8 ticks. The only downside – and it’s occasionally a pretty big downside – is that it works very, very poorly with crowd control of pretty much every sort, so you have to be very careful with your positioning. On the other hand, the AoE effect is quite broad, so you can use it to pick aggro up on things just as they move past you; a mob that isn’t using a Charge ability of some sort cannot move across the Consecration area without taking at least one tick of damage. Here are some examples of clever places to use it:

* In front of one of the portals in Black Morass, directly between the portal and Medivh. The trash will spawn, cross the Consecration to get to Medivh, take a tick from the Consecration and move back to you.
* Attumen the Huntsman in Karazhan. Drop it just as Midnight is about to reach 95%. As Attumen spawns he should aggro onto you as the Consecration ticks.
* Underbog Colossi in Serpentshrine Cavern. Using it throughout the fight will kill any Serpentshrine Parasites (with their almighty 1hp) that spawn, before they cause problems. In addition, the Consecration will (hopefully) pick up any adds that spawn as the Colossus dies before they go and attack the raid.

In summary, consecration is worth gonzo amounts of threat, and should be used whenever it is safe; the places where it is not safe are a) where there is the slightest chance of it breaking a sheep, and b) where mana conservation is important.

Spamming Consecration is quite expensive; the way to get round this is with careful downranking. Because Consecration has such a massive spell damage coefficient, even with the downranking nerf a lower rank can prove sufficient. Rank 4 Consecration is generally enough for instancing while maintaining a balance between threat and mana cost. Rank 6 is only really necessary when every point of threat is vital ASAP (e.g. massive AoE tanking on newly-spawned mobs, like in Morogrim Tidewalker or High Astromancer Solarion). I personally have my action bars set up with two ranks of Consecration; rank 4 assigned to button 1, and rank 6 assigned to Shift-1, so I can use different ones as the situation warrants.



Righteous Defense
The paladin taunt, and it’s peculiar as hell.

Righteous Defense works backwards from warrior and druid taunts. It has to be cast on a player, not on a mob, and it takes up to three mobs that are aggroed onto that player and taunts them on to you. (As stated above in the theorycraft on threat, this sets your threat on those mobs to equal that of their current target and switches their aggro to you.) You have no control over which mobs come if there are more than three, and no control over how many come if you don’t want all of them (e.g. the main tank has picked up an add, which you want to taunt off. You can’t take only the add and leave the MT their target; your taunt will pick up both, and the MT will have to taunt their target back.)

Also backwards from the warrior taunt is that it operates at range; up to a rather impressive 40 yards. This makes it ideal for rescuing casters from mobs, as you can stay where you are, fighting what you’re fighting, and your taunt target will come running back to you. Conversely, if you cast Righteous Defense on an enemy caster they will simply stand there and throw fireballs at you from wherever they happened to be standing at the time. Because taunt effects only equalise your threat you will need to generate some threat on a target like that, else it will snap aggro back to its original target as soon as they cast another spell or something similar.

The way to get the most out of Righteous Defense is to use a macro so you don’t have to go through the fuss of finding out which of your party the random mob is targeting, select them, activate it… instead, you want a macro like this:

#showtooltip Righteous Defense
#show Righteous Defense
/cast [target=target,help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget,help] Righteous Defense

For those who are not up on macro syntax, this displays the tooltip and icon for Righteous Defense on the macro (assuming you’ve selected the “?” icon for the macro), and then casts Righteous Defense on your target if that target is “help”, i.e. a valid target for beneficial spells, or if not, on your target’s target if your target’s target is “help” (so this will be on whatever the mob is targeting at the time, which 99% of the time will be their aggro target unless they have temporarily shifted to throw a spell. Be careful with this sort of thing if you know a mob does that, because you may end up blowing your taunt on the wrong character.)

This is the default macro. However, if you have the raid frames for it, you may want to use a macro like this one, which is my own personal one:

#showtooltip Righteous Defense
#show Righteous Defense
/cast [target=mouseover,help] Righteous Defense; [target=target,help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget,help] Righteous Defense

What this adds is a “target=mouseover,help” condition right at the beginning. This means that if I am currently hovering my mouse over a valid help target, Righteous Defense will be cast on them regardless of what I am currently targeting.

Why? Well, Grid, my raid frame AddOn (and it should be yours too ) displays a little red indicator on the bars of any character who has aggro:



See? (The little green indicator notes an incoming heal, useful for healers, and the blue indicator a magic debuff, but I digress.) Because I can cast Righteous Defense on a mouseover target, when Grid tells me that someone who shouldn’t have aggro has aggro, I can just hover my mouse over their little box and press my hotkey for my Righteous Defense macro. Voila – one successful taunt with little effort, and useful when you’re busy focusing.

(Similar aggro indicators are available for Pitbull, for 5-man instances. Any sort of aggro indicator mod is very useful for a tank, and is highly recommended.)



Hammer of Justice
A handy spell to keep to hand but not 100% useful, given that the further on in the game you get, the more often you encounter mobs that are immune to Stun effects.

Essentially this is useful for three things: mitigating incoming damage (e.g. stunning a mob as it enrages, denying it 6 seconds worth of beating-on-your-ass time), giving you some breathing space to generate some threat (e.g. a taunt-immune mob breaking away from you) and interrupting casters. Save it particularly for this last category, as you don’t have Shield Bash or anything similar; this is your only interrupt and should be treated as being accordingly precious.



Avenging Wrath
Both fun and useful, Avenging Wrath gives you a substantial threat boost with that flat 30% damage increase. It can be used deliberately (for example, when you need to build crazy threat at the beginning of a fight so that the DPS can go nuts – especially when you have to pull without Avenger’s Shield), but in many fights is best reserved for emergency use (e.g. bad adds, accidental overaggro from a string of crits etc.); taunt or drop Consecration, and then fire up the wings to get a threat lead quickly. As you will not be using Divine Shield while tanking (ahem), getting Forbearance is a non-issue.



Lay on Hands
This massive oh-shit heal takes on a new meaning when you are a tank; in the absence of Shield Wall or Last Stand, this spell is your one and only panic button.

To get the most out of it, make the following macro (possibly putting an un-macroed Lay on Hands somewhere else on your action bars) and bind it to a relatively out-of-the-way hotkey:

/cast [target=player] Lay on Hands

Now you can frantically hammer this hotkey once per hour to boost your health back up to full at the cost of all but 900 of your mana (although if you have less mana than this through regular spending or mana burns, it’s a handy bonus there too).

If you have time, check with your healers so you can avoid wasting this spell, but don’t let a lack of response prevent you from using it to stop a wipe-causing tank death.



Divine Shield
Well, here it is; the spell that pretty much defines a paladin, the spell that, in fact, our PvP balance is almost entirely centred around. And for you? More or less useless. Why? Because of the very same reason why it’s so good for non-tanking paladins – your aggro drops off entirely when you bubble, and the game is sometimes very cagey about letting you have it back.

However, it does have one use still; nearly every debuff in the game will drop off when you trigger it, so here’s a very useful macro:

/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

Stab this macro twice in rapid succession. It will activate your bubble, causing those unpleasant debuffs to fall off, then on the second press will immediately deactivate your bubble, allowing you to get aggro back ASAP. If you’re lucky. Spamming Righteous Defense may be a good idea at this point

(Disclaimer: This is a serious pro tip. I mean it. Screwing Divine Shield up during any sort of fight can and will lead to many, many deaths in the group. Use this macro sparingly, and make damn well sure it’s safe to do so, especially on untauntable bosses)

A comprehensive list of “places it’s safe to use Divine Shield” is beyond my available space, but here are some examples of good places to use it so you can get the idea:

* You can pop it on Moroes to remove the Garotte… but Moroes is untauntable so you’ll lose aggro on him. However, if you wait until Moroes has Vanished and do it then… he technically doesn’t exist in the game world, so the aggro-drop effect won’t affect him and he’ll come straight back to you as long as the bubble is down when he respawns.
* Use it to get rid of the Static Charge when fighting Lady Vashj, as the other tank will be able to taunt Vashj off you. This allows you to stick in close for when she next stuns or roots.
* And use it at the end of boss fights with bosses that place evil debuffs on you, like Rokmar the Crackler’s Grievous Wound bleed and Ghaz’an’s Acid Breath, to stop the embarrassing “victory death” that can sometimes occur.

Remember, Divine Shield is very, very dangerous when tanking. Use it only when you’re absolutely sure it’s safe to do so, or when there are measures in place to protect you and your group. Don’t forget you still have it when you’re off-healing, though.


TALENTED ABILITIES



Holy Shield
Vitally important, but there are no funky tricks to using it, so it doesn’t need much mention here (and why you should use it is covered more than adequately in the Essential Theorycraft section). Simply get used to recasting it every time the cooldown clears to keep up your Block chance, nullify Crushing Blows (hopefully) and generate lots of lovely threat. Note that the reflected threat is actually quite impressive; a max-rank Holy Shield with 2/2 Improved Holy Shield and Improved Righteous Fury reflects approximately 420 threat on each block, before any +spell damage is taken into consideration. With some additional +spell damage, a Holy Shield proc causes roughly equivalent threat to a max-rank Sunder Armor from a warrior in Defensive Stance with Defiance 3/3 (approx 450 per application). It is a substantial part of your threat generation and should be treated accordingly.

Remember, however, that there are times when it is silly to use it – when fighting many elementals (including e.g. the first boss in Mana-Tombs), their attacks are magical-melee type, and cannot be blocked, only dodged or parried. As such, Holy Shield does nothing here except waste mana.



Avenger’s Shield
Simultaneously incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous, this spell is remarkably easy to both a) use and b) get wrong. It’s simple in situations where everything is laid out correctly for you, but otherwise can be a tricky little bugger, and a perfect shield pull is the mark of a good paladin tank.

Remember, the golden rule of Avenger’s Shield is:
If you’re not absolutely sure it’s going to work right, pull some other way!

To summarise: Avenger’s Shield hits your current target and will bounce off that target to up to two additional targets if they are within range. You have no direct control over the bounce; the shield will jump to the next nearest target to the primary target, and then will jump to the next nearest target to that. It hits each target for 6-700 damage, resulting in a nice spike of 1000+ threat on the initial pull, and (assuming the targets are not immune to snare effects) applies a 3-second Daze effect, slowing down the rate that the mobs will come into you.

Getting Avenger’s Shield right is an exercise in applied geometry, which may occasionally force you to make unintuitive decisions. For example, observe the following wonderful pull:



The primary target is obviously the spellcaster in the centre with the giant skull over his head. However, the shield will then bounce to one of the mobs on the end… and then may be too far away from the mob on the other end of the line to bounce again. If you throw the shield at the X, however, it will skip right along the line and catch all three.

This pull, on the other hand:



When you have a giant pack of mobs like this and you’re not sure which way the shield will bounce (e.g. because they’re all in a tightly-packed square), but the DPS needs to be able to unload on the skull straight away. In this kind of situation you’re best off just going for the main target and then dealing with the other ones rather than leaving the most important target to the vagaries of bouncing.

Avenger’s Shield can miss, and miss chance is applies for separately against each target; the shield can, for example, miss the primary target and still hit the bounce targets or vice versa. This may occasionally make the spell animation do strange things (e.g. I’ve seen the spell miss the first two targets and hit the third; when that happens, the shield animates straight from your hands to the first target it actually hits, making it look like I threw the shield in a completely different direction from the one I was facing). It’s up to you to watch your combat texts for the Miss announcement. This should be shouted out over Vent ASAP so that the DPS and healers know to give you some space to build threat, because effectively you will only have body-pulled.

The ultimate skill is getting Avenger’s Shield to work with crowd control, and advice on how to do so is provided in the Core Advice section.

Avenger’s Shield has a 30-second cooldown, but it can still be used during a fight. It’s a little too expensive to use as a threat generator for the most part (and you have to have quick reactions to slip the 1-second cast in between your opponent’s attacks) but it can be done. It’s also good for using as a makeshift Intercept (except you don’t go to the mob, they come to you); that 1k threat spike may be enough to get a mob off the healers and on to you, and at least the Daze effect will slow them down enough for you to charge up and try a more permanent measure. (This is especially true if you have a mob or boss that does an aggro reset, such as Leotheras the Blind – especially especially if they do it as a timed ability, and you can see the timers on your boss mod, so you can start casting just less than a second before the ability goes off.)

As a final cautionary and irritated note: critters, for some unknown reason, are valid targets for Avenger’s Shield bounces, so you may end up shielding two mobs instead of three whilst scoring a four-digit crit on an unfortunate cockroach. If this happens you’ll have to cope with it as best as you can, but be aware that it does happen. Especially in Shadow Labyrinth. )



Blessing of Kings
This is included here for completeness, as it’s an ability that comes from a Protection talent, but there’s no mystery; just an excellent buff, one of the best in the entire game, and unless someone needs another Blessing specifically (e.g. Salvation, Wisdom), use this one.

Why? Well, because it boosts everything, so it’s good for generalists, but the more you specialise in something, the better it gets. As an example, Jeroen has, in his primary tank gear, 1175 Stamina unbuffed. Blessing of Kings provides an additional 117 Stamina – over 1000HP from one buff, and it gets bigger and bigger as you add food, Power Word: Fortitude, and so on. If you’re the only paladin in a party, this is the Blessing you should apply to yourself unless you’re soloing or doing a low-level dungeon where you need the mana from Blessing of Wisdom to compensate for the lack of Spiritual Attunement (see above).



Blessing of Sanctuary
A useful spell in places. A good choice for a third blessing on a tank (after Kings and Light, assuming a paladin healer), and an excellent choice for anyone in an encounter where the main source of damage is lots and lots of small amounts of damage. (As an example, I used this to great effect in the Aldor/Scryer quest “The Deadliest Trap Ever Laid”, where your damage-dealer has to absorb small hits from hundreds of arrows.) If there are limited Blessing slots, however, do reserve it for the tanks, because half of its utility comes from the reflective damage on blocks.

TALENTS

Talents are very important to a Protection paladin. If you want to be a tank in top-end instances you need to spec very heavily into Protection to get a lot of tools that other tanking classes take for granted.

As such, I’ll be looking at the Protection tree in all its bloated glory, and will be rating each talent using the following handy ranking system:

A – You must take this talent and are an object of ridicule if you do not.
B – This is a pretty damn good talent.
C – This talent is OK, but there are more important ones available. Rank C talents are not necessarily bad… it’s just that there are better things to spend the points on, and these are probably the ones to cut to save points.
D – A complete waste of points, avoid like the plague.

Do not take this list as gospel (apart from the A and D-ranks, obviously ); try things out, and see if anything here works better for you than my suggestions.

Because it is bound to be asked, and in case anyone just wants a talent spec to copy if they find themselves suddenly tanking, Jeroen’s tanking spec of choice is here.


PROTECTION TALENTS



Tier 1

Improved Devotion Aura – C: Devotion Aura is your most used tanking aura, and the armour from this is useful, but this talent is far too expensive for what it gives to you (336 Armour with max-rank Devotion Aura); the 5 points are far better placed elsewhere, especially as most Holy paladins take this talent on their way to qualifying for Blessing of Kings, and in a raid situation can supply you with the superior Aura.

Redoubt – B: Although not as controllable as Shield Block, Redoubt will serve you well through lower levels, and has two uses at level 70. Firstly, it is handy as an emergency backup for when you screw up your global cooldowns and lose Holy Shield temporarily, or get silenced and cannot recast it. It has no consistency in this regard, but may save your bacon in a pinch. Secondly, it allows you to qualify for Shield Specialization, and being as you have to put 5 points somewhere on this tier is thus a much better investment than Improved Devotion Aura.



Tier 2

Precision – B: 3% to both melee and spell hit is an impressive boost to your threat generation by any standards (in fact, quite a lot of classes would love a generic “+3% hit to everything” talent). This basically adds up to a flat increase in threat, as well as reducing the number of times your Righteous Defense is resisted, which is always embarrassing.

Guardian’s Favour – C: Again useful, especially if you are the only paladin on a regular basis; however, it’s very rare that you will be sufficiently compos mentis to throw that Blessing of Protection whilst tanking like mad anyway, and on the occasions that you do the reduced cooldown will not be a deal-breaker.

Toughness – B: An excellent talent that increases your survivability, and unlike some other low-level talents it scales infinitely; the more armour you have, the more useful it gets.



Tier 3

Blessing of Kings – A: You may be tempted to drop it to squeeze an extra point in there somewhere… but don’t. Go on, have the greatest buff in the game at your disposal constantly, you know you want to.

Improved Righteous Fury – A: I would say I’ve stressed this point enough, but I can’t. Narrowly pips Holy Shield to the post as the most important talent in the tree (i.e. you should have both, but you’d be in a lot more trouble with Holy Shield but without this than the other way round). Max this out and enjoy the benefits.

Shield Specialisation – B: Paladins don’t tend to strive or itemise for Block Value, so while their Block chance is high, their Block Value tends to be a bit pitiful. This talent helps, and like Toughness it scales upwards forever the more Block Value you stack on.
For the maths: If you have a base 150 Block Value (easy to obtain), this talent is worth another 45 Block Value on top of that. Against a mob hitting you for 600 damage, that’s 7.5% of the damage mitigated by this talent. Even if the mob is hitting you for 3000, it’s still 1.5%. As your Block Value grows, this talent becomes even more worthwhile.

Anticipation – B: That 20 Defense skill is worth 3.2% avoidance by itself alone; however, the main reason to take this talent is that it makes it easier to gear up for your uncrittable at the beginning of your tanking career; it gives you a nice little head start on that 140 additional skill you need to obtain through Defense Rating, and is worth it for that if nothing else. (It would take 47.4 Defense Rating to account for this much Defense skill.) It may be possible to swap it out later once your Defense reaches stratospheric levels, but you’re better at that point keeping this and trading Defense on your gear out for Stamina, +spell damage and other useful things.



Tier 4

Stoicism – D: 10% Stun resist is very little in the grand scheme of things, especially given the number of “stun” effects that are actually Disorient effects and are thus unaffected. Similarly, having your spells dispelled is mainly a PvP concern and not really necessary for tanking.

Improved Hammer of Justice – C: A decent talent given that Hammer of Justice is your only interrupt, but runs into the aforementioned so-much-crap-is-immune-to-Stun problem. Also, it gets most of its utility in 5-mans; in raids, there are too many other available sources of stuns and interrupts for you to get most use out of this.

Improved Concentration Aura – C: Again very situational to use, and you personally will most likely be providing Devotion Aura or a Resistance Aura to the tank group (or just yourself in a 5-man) or too far away from the casters. While you will be switching to Concentration Aura on the odd occasion when you need it, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth investing 3 points in something only used “on the odd occasion when you need it”.



Tier 5

Spell Warding – B: A flat 4% reduction in all spell damage taken is nothing to sniff at; it all adds up, especially when combined with Improved Righteous Fury (and especially given that you have no access to Spell Reflection or other active ways to stop getting hit with magic damage).

Blessing of Sanctuary – A: By itself this buff is worth taking; in a 5-man it’s a good situational buff, and in raids (where you will be able to get Kings and Light as well) you should have it on yourself wherever you can. Not only that, but it’s a direct prerequisite for Holy Shield. There is no reason not to take this.

Reckoning – C: Now here comes the controversy. For anyone who’s levelled as Protection, Reckoning was absolutely the winner, and it’s still useful for hardcore AoE grinding. As a tanking talent, unfortunately not. Firstly, it procs as you take damaging hits, and while Blocked hits count as “damaging hits” (even if your Block Value negates them completely), Missed, Dodged and Parried hits do not, so as your avoidance creeps up this talent procs less often – this talent is a less worthwhile investment the better your gear becomes. Secondly, the additional attacks provide an additional opportunity for mobs to parry, gaining the swing speed increase and dealing you additional damage.
Reckoning isn’t an inherently bad talent, but the threat generation from it is spiky and it feels more like wasted points as you’re improving the things you need to improve. When I had to find 5 points to take Combat Expertise in patch 2.3, it was hard to say goodbye to it, but this was the talent to go.
If you still want to use it – and it’s great if you’re building for AoE grinding, just not tanking – make sure you are using a weapon with a Speed of less than 2.0. If you don’t, you risk not being able to use all four charges of Reckoning, as the buff only lasts for ten seconds and can wear off before you make four weapon swings.



Tier 6

Sacred Duty – A: The Divine Shield cooldown is neither here nor there, except when you’re soloing, but 6% Stamina for 2 talent points is crazy good and should be invested in ASAP. Combat Expertise may give you a big fat 10% but they stack, and all sources of extra Stamina should be welcome.

One-Handed Weapon Specialization – A: The real genius of this fantastic talent becomes apparent when you look closely at it: increases all damage dealt by 5%. All of it, including that output by spells. And this applies to the base damage, to which Righteous Fury is applied afterwards, so this talent actually equates to almost a 10% increase in threat from Holy spells. It’s consistent, it’s simple, it’s powerful, and it’s well worth the 5 points for it.



Tier 7

Holy Shield – A: To make sure that everything gets an explanation, even the seemingly obvious talents, it should be stated that without this talent you are nerfing your tanking abilities an unfeasible amount. You will find it harder to tank in 5-mans and Heroics, as you are missing a large amount of damage reduction and threat generation from this spell. You will find it impossible to tank in raids, because you cannot avoid Crushing Blows without this ability.

Improved Holy Shield – A: Similarly to the above, there is no reason you would not want a talent that vastly improves one of your other most vital talents. The only reason I could see anyone taking Holy Shield but not this is that they are attempting to go for a peculiar 30/31/0 or 0/31/30 off-tank spec, but even so it would probably be more useful to take 2 points out of their off-spec tree(s) and buy this talent instead.

Ardent Defender – B: Paladins are somewhat lacking in active panic buttons, but sometimes forget about this entirely passive one. A 30% reduction on all damage when at less than 35% health doesn’t sound a lot, or like it happens very often, but I can assure you that if you have ever been raiding with Jeroen for a reasonable amount of time, this ability has doubtless saved you from an even more expensive repair bill, as there are times when his health does hover dangerously within this critical zone, and the 30% reduction has saved his life and prevented wipes. You don’t realise how worthwhile this talent is until you spec out of it and realise how much work it had been doing.



Tier 8

Combat Expertise – A: The 10% Stamina increase should be enough to tell you why this talent is so important; that’s a lot of Stamina, and is what helps to bring you on par with warriors for health. The 5 Expertise is worthwhile as well, as it reduces the chance your attacks will be Dodged and Parried by a total of 2.5%, which means more melee hits and more threat from Seal of Righteousness. Definitely worthwhile.



Tier 9

Avenger’s Shield – A: An exceptionally useful pinnacle talent, although it would be hovering at a B if you never main-tanked anywhere and never got to pull (or, for that matter, if you main-tanked purely in 25-mans where you couldn’t really pull with Avenger’s Shield). Certainly worth the point for giving you the ability to pull from more than 10 yards away.


OFF-SPEC TALENTS


While it is possible to spend all 61 talent points in Protection, it’s not recommended. In fact, there are a large number of support talents in other trees that you can go for, and some of them are damn excellent.

For reference, Retribution contains more abilities that would support you in a role as main tank, whereas Holy is the way to go if you are trying to produce a hybrid off-tank/healer build.



Holy

Essentially what you are buying in Holy here are talents that allow you to function as an off-healer, and are thus similar to a standard Holy build. If you are thrifty with your points in Protection you can reach Avenger’s Shield and still max out Illumination (and if you’re willing to skip Avenger’s Shield and be a pure off-tank, you can even make it to Divine Favour as well).

Getting up there I would recommend Divine Intellect over Divine Strength from Tier 1 (better for healing, and as you don’t get much in the way of threat from Strength, I’d say better for tanking to help with mana). From Tier 2 I would suggest Improved Seal of Righteousness; while Spiritual Focus is brilliant for soloing, in group play you shouldn’t be being hit and interrupted on those occasions when you’re not off-tanking, and Improved Seal of Righteousness’ 15% extra damage translates into nearly 30% extra threat when Righteous Fury is applied.

If you are off-healing then Healing Light is ridiculously essential from Tier 3. Your real choices then are either Improved Lay on Hands to boost your “panic button”, or Unyielding Faith if you are fighting through a lot of encounters that involve fear effects.

A possible example build is linked to here; this is based on the off-tank/off-heal build suggested above. Swap out Avenger’s Shield for Divine Favour depending on your chosen balance between off-tanking and off-healing.



Retribution

The meat of what you want on the Retribution tree is from Tier 2 upwards. To get there I highly recommend Benediction over Improved Blessing of Might; it helps a great deal to ease those difficulties with mana management.

Tier 2 contains 3 worthwhile talents, of which Deflection is probably the first and foremost; a flat 5% Parry is an excellent use of talent points. Improved Judgement is also useful; you won’t necessarily be making use of the reduced cooldown all the time (it can be quite mana intensive and screws with your cooldown management something rotten), but having it gives you the option to do so. And Improved Seal of the Crusader, while not a substantial buff for you, is a pretty damn huge buff for the DPS you are partied with, and unlike some of the other +Crit buffs (like Leader of the Pack) applies to the entire raid.

Tier 3 contains two items that you might consider. One is Vindication, which can be a useful debuff while tanking trash, but most bosses are immune to its effects. The other is Pursuit of Justice. The speed boost is good for fights where manoeuvrability is a concern (lots of them, and it’s twice as fast as a Minor Speed enchant or gem), but the 3% spell miss chance is also useful. The maths is currently confusing as to whether it’s a better investment than Spell Warding; any test figures are welcome.

You won’t have enough points for all of these, so here is the point where you actually have to make some choices. Experiment and see what works.

Note: Some paladin tanks have experimented with a hybrid Protection/Retribution build for 0/40/21 so they can get Sanctity Aura. Such a thing, while possible, is not advisable. The Holy equivalent split build suggested above is based on a division of labour between off-tanking and off-healing; however, the only reason for you to push up to Sanctity Aura is to boost paladin tanking threat; you are sacrificing survivability for threat generation, a trade-off that a paladin tank is already heavily on one side of. The only way I can see it being really viable is if you are off-tanking alongside another Protection paladin, who will benefit from your Sanctity Aura as well as from the various other support talents (Vindication, Improved Seal of the Crusader) that you would bring.

The standard Retribution-supported tank build is this one, which may look familiar to anyone who looked at Jeroen’s spec of choice.

If you wish to test out Pursuit of Justice as an alternative to Spell Warding, however, I would recommend this build.

A suggestion if you want to try out the Sanctity Aura off-tank build is this build, which contains most of the A-rank talents (apart from Avenger’s Shield) and all of the useful tools mentioned from Ret up to Sanctity Aura.

CORE ADVICE

When it comes down to it, you can read as much theory as you like, but the only way you’re going to find out what tanking as a paladin is like is to go into an instance and have a go at it. This section will hopefully deal with some tips for the essentials – actually pulling, getting your cooldowns right, dealing with common situations that come up and many other fundamentals.

Everything you read here is a guideline, however – the only way to find out what works for you is to try it out and give it a go for yourself.

With that in mind, let’s start from first principles.


Before you even pull – Action Bar setup

(Author’s note: before anyone jumps down my throat here for finally reaching insane levels of condescension, this section is based on practical necessity. I’ve helped Holy paladins take a crack at Protection before, and some of them were so used to spending their entire dungeon runs clicking that they weren’t used to having to juggle fifteen different abilities with precision timing, and the necessity of using hotkeys to do so. If you are not one of these special people, please know that I appreciate you for the beautiful snowflake you are, and merely read this as a series of suggestions for the most efficient way to arrange your hotkeys.)

Because so much of your tanking involves juggling cooldowns (see Spell Rotations below), it helps to have all the abilities you need at your fingertips on hotkeys as opposed to clicking them. You’re going to need to get to a lot of abilities quickly; you will also find that while keeping your fingers close to the WSAD keys to be able to move (and as a tank you will need to move), you cannot easily reach any of the keys beyond 5. The solution is to bind a second set of keys to Shift-1 through Shift-=. While this is easy to do with a bar mod like Bartender3, it’s possible to do with just the default Blizzard interface – make sure you have the additional action bars switched on in your Advanced Interface options, and the bar immediately above your main action bar can be bound in the Key Bindings with “BottomLeft ActionBar” 1 through =.

As an example, here are my default action bars:



I now manage to have the 10 most split-second-timing-dependant abilities on keys that I can easily get to (in fact, if you notice I have managed to cheat here by binding the key that would be Shift-6 to the G key, which I can also easily reach, even with my thumb in a pinch). The bar setup is:

1. Consecration (rank 4)
2. Holy Shield
3. Judgement
4. Seal of Righteousness
5. Seal of the Crusader
6. Seal of Wisdom
7. Seal of Light
8. Seal of Justice/Vengeance (see below)
9. Flash of Light
0. Holy Light
-. Cleanse
=. Divine Shield super-macro (see Abilities section for details)

Shift-1. Consecration (rank 6)
Shift-2. Avenger’s Shield
Shift-3. Hammer of Justice
Shift-4. Hammer of Wrath
Shift-5. Exorcism
Shift-6/G. Righteous Defense super-macro (see abilities section for details)
Shift-7. Turn Undead macro (see below)
Shift-8. Divine Intervention
Shift-9. Avenging Wrath
Shift-0. (Reserved for trinket)
Shift-–. (Reserved for trinket)
Shift-=. Lay on Hands super-macro (see abilities section for details)

The Seal of Justice/Vengeance macro on hotkey 8 simply casts Seal of Justice by default and Seal of Vengeance if I control-click it. The syntax is:

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:ctrl] Seal of Vengeance; Seal of Justice

The Turn Undead macro is used for when I am fear-tanking undead, e.g. on Moroes’ adds; it casts on my target by default and on my focus target when I control-click it:

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:ctrl] [target=focus] Turn Undead; Turn Undead

In practice you won’t be using hotkeys for anything beyond 6; it’s easier to click on them, but the less timing sensitive spells are on these buttons. The four most timing-sensitive spells, Consecration, Holy Shield, Judgement and Seal of Rightousness, are on the buttons nearest to your fingers, making it easier to pace your cooldown management.


Spell Rotations

Paladin tanking is not as frenetic as warrior tanking. You have no reactive abilities like Revenge, or ones that you will be leaping towards with a split-second window of opportunity like Shield Bash or Spell Reflection. The pace is somewhat more sedate and is largely all about timing; about cycling your cooldowns so that your abilities flow from one to the other with as few gaps for global cooldown in them as possible.

The main problem is that even if you get them spaced properly, because the cooldown on your most important abilities are different lengths, they are eventually going to cross over; the global cooldown is going to interfere with your cooldown juggling. If you set up the initial casts right, this isn’t going to happen for a while, but to get it working properly again you’re going to have to leave one of your abilities uncast for a while. The two big contenders for causing you problems are the two abilities you will be casting constantly – Consecration and Holy Shield, and you’ll have to choose which one to leave down for a few seconds. Picking is easy: If you are fighting multiple opponents, leave Holy Shield down and keep casting Consecration to maintain threat. If you are fighting a single hard-hitting opponent, especially a skull boss, leave Consecration down and keep casting Holy Shield to reduce damage.

(Where possible you should always cast Consecration before Holy Shield. If you don’t, then the cooldowns will naturally sync up; Holy Shield (10 seconds), 1.5-sec global cooldown, Consecration (8 seconds)… and then the two cool down at almost the same time, and you need to leave the global cooldown between them again, losing 2 secs. of Consecration on each cycle.)

A suggested spell rotation when you are the main tank and have a ranged pull ability available to you, is like this:

* Cast the Seal that will be your first Judgement – Crusader, Wisdom, Light etc.
* Pull, either with Avenger’s Shield or a Misdirection, or any other peculiar trick of your choice.
* Cast Consecration as the mobs close in (when it is safe to use)
* Cast Holy Shield
* Use Judgement on your primary target as soon as they get within range. At 10 yards this will give you time to cast Seal of Righteousness before they reach melee range.
* Commence autoattacking

At this point simply renew Consecration and Holy Shield as they cool down, remembering to let one lapse temporarily to space the cooldowns out where necessary. If you need to generate threat quickly then Judge Righteousness every time Judgement cools down. If you can afford to be more sedate, it is a good idea to just Judge and renew the Seal just after each Holy Shield cooldown to keep the timing simple.

Sometimes you are stuck body-pulling, mainly when it is unsafe to use Avenger’s Shield. This happens either when you don’t want to break static crowd control (see Crowd Control below) such as saps, or when you don’t want to generate threat on all the available targets; this happens mainly in raids, where it is rather bad etiquette to steal the Main Tank’s target with your spangly flying shield before they can get a solid aggro lock on them. In these cases you’re going to have to pull using the best single-target ranged attack you have – Judgement of Righteousness.

Cast Holy Shield and Seal of Righteousness as you run in. Hopefully your opponents will aggro onto you from more than 10 yards away; start back-pedalling at this point back towards the safe spot where you will be tanking, and use your Judgement on your primary tank target as soon as they get within range. If the situation is safe to use Consecration, don’t wait until you’re at your safe spot before you cast it; fire it off as soon as possible so the mobs you are kiting take a couple of ticks as they run over it; this should help you maintain aggro if you have to body-pull more than one mob at once, otherwise the first heal will pull them off onto the healers. Hopefully your party members will be sensible enough to slack off on threat generation until you’ve got your targets positioned in a safe place and built some threat on them before they open up. If you don’t think that’s the case, remind them before you pull.


Mobility & Positioning

You are the centre of any given fight. The mobs will move up to whoever has aggro, and will move with them if they move. If you need to reposition the fight, you are responsible for doing so. Being as you’re in control, you have overall responsibility for positioning and everyone else should move with you, so (mostly) ignore them when they complain. The only people who you should pay attention to when you’re moving are the healers; while they should also move it’s not a good idea to break line of sight to them when you’re in the middle of a huge melee and they’re trying to keep you alive.

There are four good reasons for you to move around. Firstly and most importantly, you don’t want any mobs to get behind you, because you cannot parry or block any attacks that come from the rear, meaning you are going to be taking a lot more damage than you should. In this situation you’re going to have to dance around a bit, because the mob AI for following people and getting back within melee range of you is a little bit screwy sometimes, and they won’t always move in the way they expect you to. Secondly, you may have to move because something unpleasant is about to happen or happening (for example, dragging the pack out of the Rain of Fire, or turning a mob round so that its Cleave doesn’t hit anyone else.) Thirdly (sort of connected to the above but important enough to warrant its own entry) you may move the entire fight to avoid aggroing something else; e.g. when you move in to pull something and then suddenly you see the horrible killer patrol coming along. Fourthly and finally, movement is good to break line of sight on enemy casters, which leads us on to:


Spellcasters

Damnit, I hate tanking spellcasters. If a caster is standing in an inconvenient spot, a warrior can run in, Shield Bash them, then as their spells are temporarily locked, kite them back to a better location. Paladins can’t do that, and have to be more creative in making the bastards come to you instead of smugly standing where they start off throwing fireballs at you all day.

Most of your hard work is going to have to be done with positioning. The easiest thing to do is line-of-sight pulls; you need to start developing an eye for good corners and obstacles which block line of sight for casters, whereupon you can be waiting just around the corner for them, where they will be nicely clumped up to stand in your Consecration. This gets easier the more you do particular instances, as you start to learn the best spots. Failing handy obstacles that you can hide behind (Hellfire Ramparts is probably the biggest pain in this regard), you will need to outrange them, which can involve running a long way back; if their spells have a 30 yard range, you need to back up to 30 yards away from where you want them to stop and then run back in towards them.

Your other options are (aside from simply tanking them where they stand, which is always a possibility):

* Have someone else do the interruptions. A mage, rogue or shaman can lock down a caster’s spells long enough to make them close in to you. A mage is particularly good in this regard because sometimes the reason you want a caster to close up to you fast is that you don’t want to aggro the next pack patrolling behind them, and a mage can counterspell from a nice, safe distance. Tell your interrupters that this is what you would like them to do.
* Have them off-tanked. Failing that, someone else can go and mix it up with the casters while you’re busy with the melee pack. Most casters hit like sissies in melee anyway, so a reasonably tough DPS character, or one who can stunlock, can keep a caster occupied for you temporarily until you’re ready to take them on.
* Passive threat. The giant threat spike from Avenger’s Shield is enough to protect the healers from aggro for at least the beginning of the combat. After that, you can pop Righteous Defense to hold their attention on you for a little while longer; the taunt effect remains regardless of any other aggro for the length of the Righteous Defense debuff. Also remember that you have a little bit of extra leeway, as a mob casting non-instant spells won’t switch aggro target until they’ve finished casting the spell.

Remember that you personally only have the one interrupt, Hammer of Justice. If you’re fighting a caster that has an unpleasant spell, such as a giant back-up-to-100% heal, save your Hammer for when you need it.


Disaster Recovery

Sometimes it’s all going to go wrong; there will be an aggro disaster. Sometimes this will be your fault, if you mess up a pull or don’t get the threat generation right. Sometimes this will not be your fault; your party may overaggro or you may be incapacitated in some fashion (Gouge and Intimidating Shout are serious bad-day fodder.)

Your jobs here are basically to stop the mobs killing the more fragile members of your party and get aggro back, which are often but not always the same thing.

Your best tool for this job is obviously Righteous Defense, which was made for the job, and benefits greatly from the provided macros and being stuck on a hotkey within easy reach. It doesn’t always work; some things are immune to taunt, it may be on cooldown, it may be resisted (ugh), you may have multiple things to collect aggro on and they’re not all attacking the same target, but 75% of the time it’s enough.

Failing that, you have to get your threat to exceed that of the current aggro target by the given threshold. There are two ways you can do that: either by generating tons of threat yourself or by reducing theirs. The first option is entirely down to you. Throw everything you possibly can as fast as you can. Judgement of Righteousness is the obvious contender, as is Consecration if you have space. An unusual but effective choice is Avenger’s Shield, which a lot of people forget that they have mid-combat, but is work more than 1k threat when it hits. Exorcism is a good choice if the mob is of the right types, and there’s always the option of chasing after the mob and autoattacking with Seal of Righteousness. All the advice provided so far about balancing mana conservation with threat generation is now out of the window; blow it all until you have your target back. Now is an excellent point to cast Avenging Wrath if you’ve been keeping it in reserve for such an emergency.

The second way is to get the aggro target to drop their threat. This isn’t entirely your responsibility – most classes have a way to help that they should at this point be spamming like crazy. Divine Shield (ahem), Soulshatter, Ice Block, Feign Death, Vanish; the important thing to remember is that most classes can do something about excess aggro, and the ones that can’t tend to be the ones who can take a couple of hits from whatever they’ve accidentally pulled. The way you can help, however, is to throw a Blessing of Protection on the poor sap. It will drop aggro on anything engaging them in melee (note however that as spells still affect a target under BoP, mobs attacking with magic will not be dissuaded), allowing you some breathing space to work with (especially as the person with BoP cannot attack and thus won’t be generating much threat).

Don’t forget Hammer of Justice at this stage; unlike many other stun effects it isn’t broken by damage, so you can cast it to knock a mob out and happily wail on them with threat while they are stunned; if you’ve done it well they’ll switch back to you as they recover.

The important thing, when it all goes wrong, however, is not to panic. You’ve got the tools to take control of the situation, you just need to make use of them. This is another of those situations where you won’t really know how to handle it until you have some experience under your belt. I don’t advise deliberately staging aggro disasters for the training, though


Crowd Control

Most tanks love crowd control. It makes their job easier. Paladin tanks can be a bit sniffy about it sometimes, mainly because of the way their abilities are designed; they work at best with the “Tank Fucking Everything” approach, where you just damn the crowd control and simply keep threat on everything at once while you’re healed through it. You have the tools to do this and do it quite well; warriors like crowd control in some places because it means they don’t have to maintain threat on quite as many targets, whereas paladins can maintain threat on however many targets they like.

You will still eventually come to appreciate good crowd control for two reasons. Firstly, sometimes that damage is difficult to heal through; if you’re fighting trash mobs that can hit you for 2-3k, it makes sense to make to avoid some of them hitting you at all if you can. Secondly, you might not be able to keep aggro on everything; sometimes you get mobs that ignore aggro to a certain extent, or a situation that just provides you too much to deal with.

The problem is that your best aggro-generation ability, Consecration, does not play well with CC; any crowd-controlled mobs in the area of effect will break, and as most CC abilities cause threat, a tick of Consecration may not be enough to save the caster. Your primary pull, Avenger’s Shield, can also be a pain in the backside, as you may break pre-applied CC with it, or make it harder for other ones to be applied.

For your purposes you can break crown control down into two types: simple and complex.

Simple crowd control is and ability that simply involves nothing more complex than “cast spell -> CC is applied” at all times, even if it needs to be reapplied later. This covers abilities like Shackle Undead, Hibernate and the granddaddy of them all, Polymorph.
Complex crowd control is anything where you have to do something other than that; something like Sap, which is easy to apply but impossible to reapply, or Freezing Trap, which has its own complexities.

Simple CC is the nicest to work with. Simply assign targets to each of your CCers and make the pull as you normally would. One of the benefits of simple CC is that it can be applied after you have pulled, as the mobs are on the way in to you, so you can safely make use of Avenger’s Shield without worrying about breaking something. (In fact, Avenger’s Shield makes a caster’s life easy for CC; the Daze effect gives them some more breathing room to get the casts off.) All you have to do then is kite the remaining targets back far enough from the crowd control to safely use Consecration, and to give the casters a little leeway to re-apply the CC when it wears off before the mob runs into Consecration range.

It is important to note that a lot of the time, once a mob gets into range of your Consecration you’re just going to have to suck it up and tank them. If there is an emergency situation where you want CC reapplied, tell the CCers this over Vent, as ones who have worked with paladin tanks before will be used to just going, “Screw it,” and busting out the DPS. Let them know when it’s safe to reapply the CC too, when your Consecration fades, and then kite your actively-tanked mobs to a safe spot to begin Consecration again.

It is also important to note that (and this is really, really important, so: ) sometimes the Crowd Contol is more important than your being able to use Consecration. As an example, the trash packs of Murkbloods and Naga in Serpentshrine Cavern contain targets that need to remain sheeped and be killed last, as they will hurl fireballs, arcane missiles, you name it, randomly at the entire raid with blithe disregard for threat. If you use Consecration here and it breaks a sheep, people are going to die, so you need to just to the best job you can here with just your single-target threat generation. Fortunately in these situations you will mostly only be tanking one target at a time.

Complex crowd control is not usually encountered in the 25-man raids (where normally you go for the simple expedient of having as many tanks as mobs, and then using simple CC to lock the others down), but a heck of a lot in 5-mans and occasionally in Karazhan. The key to complex crowd control is twofold:

1. You need to plan things a little more than you would with simple CC; you can’t just pull and hope.
2. The person applying the CC probably knows far better how it works than you do.

The three most common types you’re going to encounter are sap, Freezing Trap and fear effects.

Sap is simple enough; it incapacitates a target for 45 seconds, is broken by any damage, and can only be applied while stealthed, meaning you mostly can’t re-sap after combat has begun. Making it work is a two-way street; the rogue applying it needs you to give them time to sneak in, apply the sap and get back out to a safe distance before going crazy. The rogues, on the other hand, need some guidance from you because you might not want them to sap the intuitive mob. Mostly a warrior will want a rogue to sap the most dangerous target; in some pulls, you simply want them to sap the mob standing at one end of a line. This is because if there are four or more mobs in the pull, you can safely use Avenger’s Shield in the knowledge that it only hits three targets and the sap target will be completely safe. If there are less than three targets, sap is not usually worth it because you can easily tank everything at once; if this isn’t the case, however, let the rogue sap and go and body-pull everything.

Freezing Trap is a hunter speciality, and you shouldn’t worry about it too much because they’re much better at it than you are, and worrying about it is their job. The big concern initially is that the mob has to get close to the freezing trap, which means that they have to run towards the hunter… which usually means that the hunter has to pull aggro on that mob. Avenger’s Shield is usually a no-no here, as the hunter doesn’t want to have to overcome your threat to peel the trap target off you. Fortunately you’re not reduced to body-pulling here as the hunter will have Misdirection and can simply focus the other mobs onto you before doing the peel. After this, all you have to do is make sure that your Consecration is kept well away from the traps. The hunter will usually pull the trap target past you to a spot behind you, so you can run forward to engage the rest of the mobs and be confident there’s breathing space for the hunter to reapply his traps. Keep an eye on the trap target; if a trap is resisted, you may have to taunt it and tank it.

If your hunter is good (and ours are) you can be clever with the Avenger’s Shield pulls of the “throw it and hope” variety. The mobs hit by Avenger’s Shield will be dazed, so they will be approaching more slowly than ones that currently have no threat on them at all, which will be forging out ahead. The hunter can see which mobs can easily be peeled off from the pack in this way, and can select one at their leisure and trap it.

Fear is an unusual CC and not one you will need to worry about very often, especially with regards to Consecration, as most fears do not break on damage. If someone is chain-fearing a mob it simply pays to be paying attention to your surroundings, as it is entirely possible that a feared mob could end up running in a very bad direction and pulling some friends back with it.

ADVANCED ADVICE

Having read through the core tactics above, we now move on to some of the more esoteric possibilities. As they are not all equally useful or relevant everywhere (if they were, they would appear above), they are broken down into four categories:

* In 5-mans
* In raids
* In PvP
* For Fun

The fun category may seem unusual, but you have to get some entertainment after putting all this work in, surely?


In 5-mans
5-mans will be the core of your tanking experience for the most part; as an active tank you will never lack for a group.

You need practice first, especially if you’re just starting out, and the normal 5-mans are the way to go, especially if you have a well-geared group, as you can learn in relative safety. The best places to have a try are probably Mechanar (by my reckoning the easiest 5-man), Shattered Halls (the pinnacle of multi-target tanking; here is where you learn to maintain threat on as many mobs as you can at a given time), and Black Morass (the key entry to tanking at speed and under stress, and learning how to manage your mana).

It’s an unusual feeling if you’re not used to it, but most of the time, the tank is in charge in a 5-man group. You’ll end up with the party leadership anyway so you can mark up targets, and people will generally follow the kill order that you provide and do what you say. This can be a bit disconcerting if you’re not used to it (for example, if you have up to this point been a healer and are just used to entering a Zen state and just casting Flash of Light on everyone), but it’s quite easy as long as you learn. Because people will expect you to be in charge, unless you specifically palm the leadership off onto someone else, you’re going to have to know what order to kill targets in and what dangerous things a particular boss can do.

That more or less covers your duties as leader, but remember that as the tank you need to be keeping an overview of the overall situation… and most people will listen when you give orders, because they know you’re watching everything, so when you say “Fade now!” or “Pop Heroism now, please?”it will get done. As such, to be a fully successful tank you need to know your stuff; know which mobs are the most dangerous in which pulls, what to kill first, when is a good time to run and similar.

Once you have learned and geared up some in the 5-mans, you will probably want to start moving on to Heroics so you can begin grinding badges for your epic gear. The best place to start is Heroic Slave Pens, which is (again by my reckoning) the easiest Heroic. (Note that Mechanar is also quite easy, apart from Heroic Nethermancer Sepethrea, who is one of the most annoying and awkward bosses in the entire game, and something you want to put off doing as long as possible.) While you will want to grind out badges and the Heroic epics of your choice (see “Gear”), as well as reputation, of your choice, expect to receive a lot of invitations to Heroic Shattered Halls. This instance, which is a terrible meat-grinder for most groups, becomes relatively trivial with a Protection paladin AoE-tanking everything, and our current record stands at reaching and defeating Bladefist for the Trial of the Naaru timed run with twenty minutes left to spare on the first timer. This instance plays to all your strengths, and with a competent group is a real blast.


In raids

The first thing you need to grasp in a raid situation is what is different, and the first and most important thing is that you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) do it all yourself. There’s a much bigger team for you to work with, and even in a 10-man raid there’s going to be at least one other tank (and possibly some additional off-tank capable characters who can step up in a pinch to help you).

Essentially the difference is all about co-ordination. It’s not just as easy as saying “RAR I TANK ALL”, which can be a bit of a shock because it’s what paladins are best at and what you’ve been doing while you’re tanking 5-mans and heroics. Pulls mostly need to be thought out and organised beforehand. You will be given a tank target, and you should stick to it and concentrate on it. Don’t worry about the rest of the fight too much, that’s for other people to deal with.

Absorbed the above advice? Good, disregard it. Well, not entirely, but as well as focusing on your given tank target you need to keep an eye out for things going wrong. In raid situations, especially in 25-man raids, because they are tuned for a competent and organised group working together, if something untoward goes wrong then things can go to hell pretty quick. If there is something that you can do to stop people from dying, which mainly involves picking up untanked mobs before they kill people (or at least, as it commonly the case, before they kill any more people), do it. In raids, individually-dead party members are largely an inconvenience on trash, rather than the recipe for wipes that they are in smaller groups, so don’t give up on trying to salvage what looks like a wipe until everyone (including you) is dead.

There is one thing I will mention which is important, and that is that you should probably invest in a better raid interface. It goes without saying that you should be using CTRaidAssist or oRA2, and definitely Omen, but everyone should be using these. The main issue is that the default Blizzard raid interface is too big for a tank; you need to be able to see peoples’ health, yes, so you can see who’s getting beat on so you can go rescue them, but you also need to see what’s going on and they take up too much screen real estate to help with that. I cannot recommend the use of Grid highly enough, especially when you reconfigure it to make it easier to read and see. It’s a brilliantly flexible tool and works well with the mouse-over Righteous Defense macro previously mentioned.

When you’re in a raid, most of your tanking time will be spent tanking trash. The division of labour is easy in a 10-man – one goes here, one goes there, or one is main-tank, one is off-tank – but in a 25-man you will tend to find that an unofficial “tanking order” emerges, where they will generally nuke this tank’s target first, then this one, then… and so on until they get to you. Learn your position in the tanking order and learn which mark is yours. Be prepared to keep yourself alive until the DPS train catches up with you, but also – especially if you have difficulties with mana conservation – learn about how long you’re going to have alone with the mob to build threat on it.

There will be times when you aren’t tanking. This will happen occasionally in 10-mans (if you are the off-tank and your group are only fighting one trash mob at a time) and all the time in 25-mans. If this happens during a boss fight, obviously you should swap out to your healing gear and heal if the encounter won’t require you to tank at all. If it’s just a temporary thing as you’re moving through trash packs, don’t bother switching out, just make the best use of the tools that you have. If you have Improved Seal of the Crusader, judge that on the current DPS target and keep it up, else use Judgement of Light to make the healing a little easier. Be on your toes; if one of the other tanks meets an unfortunate end, the others will be occupied and it may be up to you to move in and pick up their target in case.


In PvP

The advice in this section is quite simple: don’t. No, seriously; Protection is a terrible spec in PvP. It’s like playing a Protection warrior, except that a) you don’t have infinite Rage, so eventually you’re going to run out of mana and be left with nothing but your autoattack, b) you don’t have any speed-increasing abilities like Charge and Intercept, so you can be kited to death by anything, and c) you don’t have any interrupts, so while a Prot warrior can mix it up with the casters and at least prove an inconvenience, you are basically a free Honourable Kill.

Your three options are as follows:

* Respec when you want to do PvP, either to Holy for healing or Ret for pure DPS.
* Put on your healing gear and heal. While a lot of your talents are going to be absolutely useless, the increased survivability from Protection may help keep you alive in exchange for raw healing power, and Avenger’s Shield can occasionally be useful to you. Only try this in battlegrounds, though, it’s a recipe for failure in Arenas. Trust me.
* Respec when you want to do PvP.


For Fun

One thing that you are really, really excellent is multi-mob tanking, and the lower level your opponents are, the easier it is.

You can gear up excellently well for AoE grinding. Simply use Retribution Aura, Blessing Sanctuary, and get the Petrified Lichen Guard from Sporeggar rep and a Felsteel Shield Spike. The amount of reflective damage you can kick out here is insane; just pull as many mobs as you like – the best ones are dual-wielding, light-hitting mobs, and the worst are casters – use Consecration, Holy Shield and Seal of Wisdom, and then just sit back and watch.

If you want to have fun with this, it’s relatively easy for you to kill the entire Stockades in a single pull. The real test, however, is the Cathedral wing in the Scarlet Monastery. The main body of the Scarlet Cathedral itself, where Scarlet Commander Mograine is, is full of non-ranged mobs who will happily stay in melee with you. Normally when you are doing this instance you have to clear the entire place before you engage Mograine, because if you don’t he will aggro everything left alive in the place. For our purposes, do this deliberately. Get your back against a pillar, fire up Consecration… and enjoy.

GEAR, Part 1

It can be tough to gear up as a Protection paladin, but that’s mainly down to the fact that you have to do it intelligently. You need different things than a warrior and so can’t just copy from any warrior tank you see, but on the other hand too much paladin-specific armour can leave you lacking in some important stats.

This guide covers everything up to Karazhan. I have deliberately left out the Tier 5 raids and Zul’Aman because we are effectively not farming those, and obtaining gear from them is nowhere near as easy as the items from the list below; what you see below should be perfectly sufficient to build up an amazing tank set, however.

To save the forums exploding this section has been divided into two. This first section covers stats you need, starting gear from quests – both approaching 70 and at 70, crafted gear, Reputation rewards and drops from non-heroic dungeons. The second part, available by clicking on this link, covers items from Heroic modes, Karazhan, badge rewards, augments (enchants, gems etc.) and consumables.


Stats you need

If you remember, the two things a tank needs are to a) build threat and b) not die, and to achieve these things you need a) lots of spell damage and b) plenty of Defense, Health, Armour and avoidance.

Right now people are probably looking for numbers they can aim for to be a “decently-geared tank”, so here they are: the minimum stats you should be aiming for to be able to tank reasonably well in heroics are 200 or more +spell damage, 490 Defense for uncrittable, 10k unbuffed health and at least 50% damage reduction from Armour.

To tank in Karazhan, even to off-tank, the above are not so much a recommendation as mandatory. You will also need to be uncrushable if you want to tank the bosses; not being uncrushable will add a lot of additional work to your healers, and some of the bosses, such as Prince Malchezaar, will rip you apart if you’re not uncrushable.

For the 25-mans the sky’s the limit from here onwards. As a point of reference, Jeroen has 380 unbuffed spell damage, just under 15k unbuffed health, is uncrittable and uncrushable, has 60% Armour DR and about 50% “pure” (i.e. no damage taken at all) avoidance. (Fortunately, as you will see later, this is surprisingly easy to get.)

So your priorities:

1. Spell Damage
Getting the 200 spell damage is surprisingly easy. Any of the easily-obtainable caster swords come with at least 120 +Spell Damage. Add a +40 spell damage enchant and Superior Wizard Oil for another 42 and you’re there. Obviously the more you pile on, the better, but this means that you can start by picking up warrior-oriented tanking plate without worrying about where your spell damage is coming from. (You can add a little more with gems, of course, and a few pieces of hybrid armour, but my first tanking set had two pieces of hybrid armour, if that.)

Because you will be aiming mainly at spell damage from your weapon and mitigation from your armour, paladins should not be using “conventional” tanking weapons that would be fantastic for warriors. Paladins should basically never bother using Fireguard and its upgrades or the King’s Defender; there may be an argument for using the Sun-Eater as a mitigation sword (complete with Mongoose enchant) when you have a massive threat lead, but as a basic bread-and-butter tanking sword you should stick with caster weapons.

If you are a freshly-minted level 70 tankadin, or are literally just starting to build up your tanking gear, a spell damage weapon is the first thing you should aim for. The Continuum Blade is the easiest to aim for at 70 (or even earlier), or if you’re flash with cash there is the Crystalforged Sword, which is pretty much the best pre-Gruul tanking weapon for a paladin, and is a BoE, so is easy to pick up even for an alt.

If you’re getting together tanking gear, get the spell damage weapon first, because it’s necessary to tank even normal instances, so you can maintain threat.


2. Defense & Health
It’s important to start stacking health so you don’t simply get pasted by a string of big hits (although this is easier with Combat Expertise), but the next big target to aim for is 490 Defense. If you are fighting anything more dangerous than a normal 5-man boss, you cannot afford to take crits (and it doesn’t really help on normal 5-man bosses either). You basically need to stack Defense Rating at every opportunity; if you have Anticipation 5/5 you need a total of 285 points of Defense Rating to become uncrittable, and 332 if you don’t. Tanking trinkets such as Adamantine Figurine are a good place to find the Defense, as are gems like Thick Golden Draenite and Enduring Deep Peridot (and the Rare versions once you get epics to put them in). Vindicator’s Armor Kit is also a good way to sneak some extra in. Even greens of the Champion are an impressive boost.


3. Uncrushability
All your defences – Miss, Dodge, Parry, Block – must add up to 102.4% with Holy Shield active, and the cheapest way to do this is to stack Block Rating like crazy until you pass the threshold. Plenty of items to help you do this are outlined more in the gear suggestions below. When itemising for pure avoidance to avoid damage, go for Dodge because it’s cheaper, and you basically want as much of the stuff as possible, especially as the swing speed increase from parrying isn’t as much of a big thing for you as it is for warriors.


4. The Balancing Act
Once you have met the basic requirements, then comes the juggling part. You see, once you have hit these basic requirements you need to go back and start to shore up the basic essentials – more health, more Armour and more pure avoidance, to help you not die, as well as squeezing more spell damage in for additional threat. As more Block than the minimum necessary to hit uncrushable is pretty useless, Block Rating is what should go first, but do keep a balance of things.

Essentially this is going to require a lot of time sitting around with a calculator and a puzzled look on your face, adding up avoidance numbers and working out which gear would suit you best right now. I cannot help you more than I can with the gear lists below, because I don’t know what drops you will be able to pick up, but I will suggest this: any piece that you swap out, save it. DON’T sell it, you might want to swap it back IN later. This is pretty important until you’ve completely maxed your tank set; you might suddenly find yourself later thinking along the lines of, “I could swap in this fantastic new item I’ve found for that one, but then I drop below the Defense threshold…” and then realise you sold your Defense trinket when you replaced it. Other than that, I suggest looking at the lists below.


Items

Starter Gear – Quest Items

This list is pitched largely at new level 70s who need to get some reasonable gear before they dive into 5-mans; experienced characters who are building a Protection set will probably have done all these quests already.

In the below list, there are two key points: firstly, that two items may be provided for each slot, one aimed at spell damage/threat generation and the other at pure mitigation, and secondly, these quest items are taken from Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm for the most part, unless marked with an asterisk (*); check to see if you’ve missed these ones. None of the items on this list require entering any of the level 70 dungeons, but a couple come from quests from earlier dungeons.

HEAD:
* X-52 Technician’s Helm from Back to the Chief!

NECK:
* Scryer only: Thalodien’s Charm from Shutting Down Manaforge Ara
* Strength of the Violet Tower from Down with Daellis

BACK:
* Cloak of the Valiant Defender from Ar’kelos the Guardian

SHOULDERS:
* Aldor only: Kaylaan’s Spaulders from Aldor No More
* Threat: Uvuros’ Plated Spaulders from Wanted: Uvuros, Scourge of Shadowmoon
* Mitigation: Warchief’s Mantle from Return to Andormu*

CHEST:
* Threat: Leonine Breastplate from Showdown*
* Mitigation: Breastplate of the Warbringer from Forge Camp: Annihilated*

WRIST:
* Thadell’s Bracers from When the Cows Come Home

HANDS:
* Spiritualist’s Gauntlets from A Fate Worse Than Death

WAIST:
* Aldor only: Lightwarden’s Girdle from Deathblow to the Legion
* Starcaller’s Plated Belt from Arconus the Insatiable

LEGS:
* Threat: Kirin’Var Defender’s Chausses from The Sigil of Krasus
* Mitigation: Legguards of the Resolute Defender from Destroy Naberius!

FEET:
* Threat: Starcaller’s Plated Stompers from Escape from the Staging Grounds
* Mitigation: Flesh Beast’s Metal Greaves from Someone Else’s Hard Work Pays Off*

RINGS:
* Mitigation: Andormu’s Tear from Hero of the Brood* or Ring of the Stonebark from Exorcising the Trees*
* For threat I would suggest any conventional spell damage ring.

TRINKETS:
* Dabiri’s Enigma from Dimensius the All-Devouring
* Unless you had the foresight to take the Regal Protectorate from the Overlord quest in Hellfire Peninsula, I suggest that more or less any trinket will do, especially spell damage, until you can pick one up from an instance.

WEAPONS:
* Vibro Sword from Cutting your Teeth

SHIELDS:
* King’s Bulwark from The Twin Clefts of Nagrand.
* If you have a good group to work with, get the Netherwing Defender’s Shield from the chain that gets you neutral with the Netherwing. Don’t take the “pure tanking” version, the Netherwing Protector’s Shield; there are plenty of “pure” tanking shields available later on, but you won’t find a hybrid shield like this one again, seriously.
* NOTE: If you can find it on the Auction House, pick up the Shield of the Wayward Footman, a Rare world drop. It’s astoundingly good and will see you well into the level 70 dungeons.


Some notes:
Three items here that you really want are the Netherwing Defender’s Shield, Dabiri’s Enigma and the Flesh Beast’s Metal Greaves. The boots are pretty much the best pre-raid tanking boots you will obtain; I’d even take them over some of the epic boots from heroics for the insane quantities of Dodge Rating. Dabiri’s Enigma is a solid step on the road to 490 Defense; however, the same quest rewards the Starcaller’s Plated Legguards, the best pre-raid healing plate legs too. This is the first point where you’re really going to have to make a serious choice between healing and tanking.



Level 70 Quest Items

These rather excellent quest items are for when you’re ready to go and delve into level 70 dungeons, because the quests (or part of the quest chains) for these require you to go into said 5-mans.

* Summoner’s Blade from Varedis Must Be Stopped! (Aldor version/Scryer version). Part of this chain requires you to do Shadow Labyrinth.
* Myrmidon’s Headdress from The Warlord’s Hideout (Steamvaults). One of the earliest available helms with a meta socket.
* Mark of the Ravenguard from Brother Against Brother (Sethekk Halls).
* Sha’tari Wrought Armguards from The Soul Devices (Shadow Labyrinth).
* Sha’tari Vindicator’s Waistguard from How to Break Into the Arcatraz, which of course requires the whole chain to be completed first. This item is exceptionally imba; get it at all costs.
* Dauntless Handguards from Fel Embers (Shattered Halls).



Professions

There is plenty of ass-kicking tanking gear available from crafting professions, particularly blacksmithing, and lots of it is BoE so you don’t even have to be a smith.

To begin with, the Faith in Felsteel set – Felsteel Helm, Felsteel Leggings and Felsteel Gloves provide a great initial boost to Defense and Stamina. If you can’t get a good tanking belt, Khorium Belt will provide an excellent boost to your threat.

If you’re willing to pay big bucks for the epics, Oathkeeper’s Helm is a fantastic hat for you; but there are other hats available; what are not as common are bracers, and Bracers of the Green Fortress are an outstanding piece of kit that you won’t replace for a long time. Belt of the Guardian is a rather good belt, but the pattern drops in SSC and requires Nether Vortexes, and I don’t think anyone in Raven Knights has the pattern yet.

Outside of blacksmithing, jewelcrafting will net you the Chain of the Twilight Owl, a good option for threat generation, and if you can find a tailor with the pattern, Cloak of Eternity is a decent starter tanking cape.

When it comes to picking your profession of choice, you should consider what you can make for yourself.

* For blacksmithing, it’s Boots of the Protector, the plans for this seem to drop off every single trash mob in SSC in bundles of five, so they are not hard to acquire. The various specialisation trees for blacksmithing do not work particularly well for paladin tanks; they are too focused around raw physical DPS.
* For engineering, it’s Tankatronic Goggles. If you take these, given how terrible the Tier 5 tanking set is for paladins, you will not likely replace these until the Lightbringer Faceguard. Also handy are the Gnomish Poultryizer or Goblin Rocket Launcher, depending on your specialisation, for the massive Stamina boost.
* For enchanting, it’s the ability to enchant your own rings; I would probably recommend Enchant Ring – Spellpower.
* For jewelcrafting, it’s the BoP trinkets; Lacrima is still using Figurine – Dawnstone Crab, which should tell you everything you need to know about it.


Reputation Rewards

I’ll say this now: the first reputation grind any Protection paladin should do is Keepers of Time. Reaching Revered with the keepers gets you three outstanding items – Glyph of the Defender, the tanking head augment; Continuum Blade; an astounding entry-level spell damage sword; and the Timewarden’s Leggings, a set of plate legs so good that they make obtaining virtually any other non-epic tanking legs a waste of effort, even the Legplates of the Righteous. (Seriously, get these, ignore the Legs section in the dungeon drops list below. They are awesome; spend money on the Clefthide Leg Armor and rare gems for these babies, it’s a worthwhile investment.) Even a newbie paladin should have close to Revered with the Keepers just after having done the Caverns of Time quest chain; you have no excuses here.

After that, the factions with good loot for you are:

* Aldor: Vindicator’s Hauberk (requires Revered) covers your needs for a chest; the shoulder enchants for tanking are Inscription of Warding (Honoured) and Greater Inscription of Warding (Exalted)
* Cenarion Expedition: Strength of the Untamed (requires Revered), a very nice neck. The avoidance from the Dodge rating makes this your #1 choice for a neck outside of epics.
* Lower City: Gavel of Unearthed Secrets is a nice spell damage weapon, although a little too slow overall, and definitely to get the full benefit from Reckoning if you still use it.
* Netherwing: Commander’s Badge, the reward you receive for reaching Revered, is a fantastic Stamina trinket, but not a purchasable item.
* Ogri’la: While the Crystalforged Sword is not technically a reputation reward, it requires performing the Ogri’la quests with someone to get the shards to infuse it.
* Scryers: Gauntlets of the Chosen (requires Revered) are excellent gloves; the shoulder enchants for tanking are Inscription of the Knight (Honoured) and Greater Inscription of the Knight (Exalted)
* Sha’tar: Crest of the Sha’tar (requires Exalted) is the best pre-raid tanking shield for you; initially even better than the Azure-Shield of Coldarra, because you need to stack Stamina over Block Value. As an important side benefit, Gavel of Pure Light covers you for a healing main-hand for the healing you will be doing.
* Sporeggar: Petrified Lichen Guard (requires Honoured) is lame for tanking, but at level 70 is still great for AoE grinding, especially with a shield spike.
* The Violet Eye: Frankly, the healing ring from Violet Eye rep is pretty useless for paladins. You may as well take the Violet Signet of the Great Protector; it’s an excellent ring, and will serve you much better than the others.




5-man Dungeon Drops

Here I have attempted to provide a mitigation item and a threat item for each slot where available, or at least multiple options for each slot. Note that these items are from normal mode only; drops from Heroics will appear later. Beware – excluding blues from heroics means that there are no options for this slot, but there are easy substitutes from crafting, quests and reputation rewards.

Some items are marked as Winner! Farm for these ones as much as possible; they are definitively the best option at this level, and somewhat beyond.

HEAD:
* Threat: Helm of the Righteous from Pathaleon the Calculator, Mechanar
* Mitigation: Greathelm of the Unbreakable from Grand Warlock Nethekurse, Shattered Halls, or Warhelm of the Bold from Warp Splinter, Botanica

NECK:
Okay, seriously, there are no good neck drops for tanks in Normal dungeons, but come back later, I swear there’s better.

BACK:
* Devilshark Cape from Warlord Kalithresh, Steamvaults. Winner!
* Burnoose of Shifting Ages from Chrono Lord Deja, Black Morass

SHOULDERS:
* Spaulders of the Righteous from Laj, Botanica. Winner!
* Shoulderguards of the Bold from Murmur, Shadow Labyrinth.

CHEST:
* Threat: Breastplate of the Righteous from Warlord Kalithresh, Steamvaults
* Mitigation: Jade-Skull Breastplate from Nethermancer Sepethrea, Mechanar. I wouldn’t definitively call this one the Winner! but it is amazingly good.

WRIST:
No decent bracers either, I’m afraid. Such is the way of things.

HANDS:
* Threat: Gauntlets of the Righteous from Kargath Bladefist, Shattered Halls
* Mitigation: Thatia’s Self-Correcting Gauntlets from Dalliah the Doomsayer, Arcatraz. Also an option, especially if you socket it with Stamina gems, is Gauntlets of the Bold from Warlord Kalithresh, Steamvaults.

WAIST:
No decent belts either? This is getting ridiculous.

LEGS:
Note: If you are paying attention, you should ignore both of these in favour of Timewarden’s Leggings; however, for the sake of completeness:
* Threat: Legplates of the Righteous from Aeonus, Black Morass
* Mitigation: Greaves of the Shatterer from Kargath Bladefist, Shattered Halls

FEET:
No decent boots in non-heroic mode; however, the Flesh Beast’s Metal Greaves should serve you well past this point.

RINGS:
* Elementium Band of the Sentry from Harbinger Skyriss, Arcatraz. Winner!
* Ring of the Silver Hand from Warlord Kalithresh, Steamvaults
* Dath’remar’s Ring of Defense from Pathaleon the Calculator, Mechanar

TRINKETS:
* Adamantine Figurine from Blackheart the Inciter, Shadow Labyrinth
* Figurine of the Colossus from Kargath Bladefist, Shattered Halls. Winner!

WEAPONS:
* Greatsword of Horrid Dreams from Murmur, Shadow Labyrinth
* Mana Wrath from Pathaleon the Calculator, Mechanar

SHIELDS:
* Aegis of the Sunbird from High Botanist Freywinn, Botanica.
* Platinum Shield of the Valorous from Ambassador Hellmaw, Shadow Labyrinth.

RELICS:
* Libram of the Eternal Rest from Darkweaver Syth, Sethekk Halls

Last edited by Jeroen on Sun Jan 20, 2008 4:17 pm; edited 1 time in total

GEAR, Part 2

This post covers items available from Heroic dungeons and upwards. If you want to go back to the beginning, click here.


Heroic Mode Items

There are two tiers of items available from Heroics; level 70 rare drops from the new loot tables from the early TBC dungeons, and the epics.

Rare items:

* Boots of the Colossus (feet) from Pandemonius, Mana-Tombs
* Crystal Band of Valor (ring) from Tavarok, Mana-Tombs
* Fanblade Pauldrons (shoulders) from Shirrak the Dead Watcher, Auchenai Crypts
* Girdle of Gallantry (belt) from Ghaz’an, Underbog
* Girdle of the Immovable (belt) from Quagmirran, Underbog
* Maladaar’s Blessed Chaplet (neck) from Exarch Maladaar, Auchenai Crypts
* Vambraces of Daring (wrist) from Vazruden’s chest, Hellfire Ramparts

As far as the epic sets are concerned, there are two sets of three interconnected pieces. The Dungeon Set 3 pieces are each made up of five items, leaving three missing “pieces” from each set; bracers, belt and boots. There is a heroic epic belt, boots and bracers for each D3 set.

Bold Armour:

* Bracers: Amber Bands of the Aggressor, Warlord Kalithresh, Steamvaults
* Belt: Lion’s Heart Girdle, Vazruden’s chest, Hellfire Ramparts
* Boots: Eaglecrest Warboots, Keli’dan the Breaker, Blood Furnace

Armour of the Righteous:

* Bracers: Bracers of Dignity, Harbinger Skyriss, Arcatraz
* Belt: Girdle of Valorous Deeds, Aeonus, Black Morass
* Boots: Boots of the Righteous Path, Kargath Bladefist, Shattered Halls

The other two useful items are Gauntlets of Dissention from Warp Splinter in Botanica, which aren’t that good, and Spaulders of Dementia from Talon King Ikiss in Sethekk Halls, which are.



Karazhan

Karazhan is in before the list of badge gear because it’s comparatively short. Trust me on this point.

Most of the guild’s main tanks are fully kitted-out in Karazhan gear, so you’re in with a fair chance of picking up the epics when they drop, and Karazhan is worth 22 badges so you’re always going to come away with something useful to put towards your tank gear.

Firstly, there is an entire eight-piece set of tanking plate, a recolour of the Bold Armor, dropping from various bosses:

* Head: Eternium Greathelm from the Opera Event
* Shoulders: Mantle of Abrahmis from Netherspite
* Chest: Panzar’Thar Breastplate from Nightbane
* Wrists: Vambraces of Courage from Attumen the Huntsman
* Hands: Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden from the Maiden of Virtue
* Waist: Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable from Moroes
* Legs: Wrynn Dynasty Greaves from the Curator
* Feet: Battlescar Boots from the Chess event


In addition, the following drops may be of interest:

* Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch from Moroes. A very nice tanking trinket if you have already hit the Defense and uncrushable caps and are swapping out Block for Dodge.
* Shield of Impenetrable Darkness from Nightbane. Once you have sufficient stacked Stamina, the mitigation from this shield makes it superior to the Crest of the Sha’tar. If you pick this up, half of the main tanks in the guild will shoot you and hang your corpse from the ceiling.
* Barbed Choker of Discipline from the Maiden of Virtue. All-round excellent.
* Shermanar Great-Ring from the Shade of Aran. Assuming you don’t need rings with avoidance on (like the Elementium Band of the Sentry) this provides a nice chunk of all the stats you need.
* Boots of Elusion; random trash drop. With 2% Dodge, these are more or less the best boots a paladin tank could hope for while trying to hit uncrushable. These are insanely good but also insanely rare.

The tokens for the Tier 4 helm and gloves also drop in Karazhan; see “Raid Armour” later for details.



Badge Reward Loot

Want to tank? Stop reading this section right now, go and grind 15 badges and buy the Libram of Repentance. Remember how important that figure of “102.4% with Holy Shield up” is? Well, this is worth 42 Block Rating when Holy Shield is up; that’s a massive 5.3% Block that you don’t need to find anywhere else. It’s the best badges-vs-benefit investment on the entire list, and you need to go and purchase it now. If you’re just starting Heroics, this is the first item for you to buy.

Anyway, there are plenty of things that are good for tanks that are available from the big glowing vendor-dude in the sky. Like the dungeon drops, particularly awesome things are marked with the big Winner! tag, and as such should be saved up for and purchased as soon as is humanly possible. The tanking-appropriate items are:

* Azure-Shield of Coldarra, 33 badges. For my money, because you don’t have to stack up Block Value as a warrior, this is a marginal upgrade at best over the Crest of the Sha’tar.
* Bonefist Gauntlets, 60 badges. Not a bad alternative to the Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden, although not with as much avoidance.
* Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx, 35 badges. A good upgrade from the Bracers of the Green Fortress, that Expertise Rating will be a good improvement to your threat generation.
* Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian, 75 badges. Winner! Go and buy this. Buy it now. Warriors buy this, it’s so good, ignoring the spell damage and spell hit stats. Blizzard have essentially gotten the itemisation on this chestpiece perfectly right, so it punches far above its weight. There is only one paladin tanking chest in the game that is better than this, and it’s the Lightbringer Chestguard. An investment in badges you won’t regret.
* Faceguard of Determination, 50 badges. Actually a very good mitigation hat if you don’t get the engineering goggles. Worth a purchase.
* Farstrider Defender’s Cloak, 25 badges. Not well-itemised for paladins. Save up for Slikk’s Cloak instead.
* Girdle of the Protector, 60 badges. A little low on Defense Rating, but otherwise exceptionally well-itemised, much like the Chestguard.
* Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600, 41 badges. A pretty decent item for warriors for threat generation for Shield Slam. For you, mostly a waste of 41 badges unless you’re really short on tanking trinkets.
* Iron-Tusk Girdle, 60 badges. If you are low on mitigation but OK on threat, this is an excellent alternative to the Girdle of the Protector.
* Libram of Divine Purpose, 20 badges. This is good for threat generation, but I would still personally use the Libram of Repentance. The amount of itemisation you would have to spend on that 5% Block chance can be much better spent on other things… including more spell damage that applies to all of your spells.
* Necklace of the Juggernaut, 25 badges. A reasonably good neck, and a minor upgrade to Strength of the Untamed from Cenarion Rep, assuming you can’t persuade the Maiden of Virtue to drop her choker.
* Ring of Unyielding Force, 25 badges. Another good alternative to a stubborn Karazhan drop, this one in place of the Shermanar Great-Ring (but not the Exalted Violet Signet).
* Sabatons of the Righteous Defender, 60 badges. These are pretty good boots, but they don’t have any avoidance on them, so you may want to give them a miss if you’re looking for mitigation over threat.
* Slikk’s Cloak of Placation, 35 badges. Winner! Cheap, and probably the best long-term investment on this list. Why? Well, look through the loot lists for Hyjal Summit and the Black Temple. What’s missing? Tanking cloaks. Not only is this an excellent item in its own right, this is literally the best thing you can get in the game right now.
* Unwavering Legguards, 75 badges. Winner! These items have so much stacked Stamina and avoidance on them, along with the three sockets, that regardless of the lack of threat generation stats on them they beat the Tier 5 legs hands down and rally for position with the Tier 6 legs. Better than the Timewarden’s Leggings, better than the Karazhan legs, these are an excellent choice for a tank.



Raid Armour

The two raid armour sets for tanks that the Raven Knights currently have access to are the Tier 4 Justicar Armor and the Tier 5 Crystalforge Armor. Tier 4 tokens are relatively plentiful, whereas Tier 5 are still rare and closely fought over.

I’ll let you in on the big secret first: the Crystalforge Armor is lame. It’s mostly badly itemised; individual pieces may be reasonable, but overall they do not stand up to the badge items (or, for that matter, particularly far above the Justicar set), and the set bonuses are some of the worst in any armour set you could hope to find. There is no point trying to fight hard for tokens of the Vanquished Champion; the only reason you might want one is if you cannot get hold of the Pauldrons of the Fallen Champion from High King Maulgar for the Tier 4 shoulders.

The Tier 4 armour is better, but the legs are a bit problematic; they have no sockets, which makes the Stamina-stacking hard, and the chestpiece and legs again suffer from comparisons with the badge rewards. There are still three pretty good pieces in the set; the Faceguard, Handguards and Shoulderguards, and having two of these pieces gives you access to the rather impressive 2-piece set bonus. It is not, however, worth sacrificing uncrushability to get this set bonus, so if you can't, don't.

The shoulders are more or less the best shoulders available to you at RK’s raid level, and there are plenty of excellent head items available for avoidance, so I would recommend taking the shoulders and the gloves if you are aiming for the set bonus, and wearing an avoidance helm. Alternatively, if you cannot get a shoulder token from Gruul’s Lair, find a plate shoulder for mitigation and wear the Faceguard and Handguards, the tokens from which are relatively easy to obtain from Karazhan.



Expensive Luxuries

If you are really serious about tanking, there are two items that will make your life beautifully simple. Neither are likely to be replaced until you are looking at Tier 6-level loot, and not necessarily even then. Both will set you back in the order of 2000g (that’s each by the way), but both are very, very worthwhile investments.

Darkmoon Card: Vengeance

Firstly, that 51 Stamina is actually 59 for you with your Stamina-buffing talents, so that’s impressive; it’s more than the Commander’s Badge, or even Spyglass of the Hidden Fleet from SSC. Secondly, you get the most out of that threat proc out of all the tanking classes; the spell damage coefficient on Vengeance is frankly piss-poor, but it gains the benefits of Righteous Fury for additional threat.

Obtaining this card is simply a matter of collecting the full Furies deck, and collecting that deck is simply a matter of watching the Auction House like a hawk. The early rush for the trinkets has died down somewhat, but there are plenty of people who want the deck, and invariably there will be a) speculators buying up the cards for money-grubbing purposes and b) one card that is failing to drop at all, making it extra-rare. Be prepared to pay over the odds for this, but don’t worry, you may as well put superglue in your trinket slot, because you are unlikely ever to replace it.


Merciless Gladiator’s Gavel

No, I’m serious.

This is the best tanking weapon in the game that you will reasonably be able to access. Hammer of Judgement and Tempest of Chaos both drop in Mount Hyjal and will doubtless be the subject of heavy competition, and the Season 3 upgrade, Vengeful Gladiator’s Gavel, requires a personal Arena Rating of 1850 to purchase. And it’s pretty damn sweet. It has an additional 100 spell damage over and above the typical spell damage weapon, which is an astounding amount, and the spell hit rating is a decent threat boost too. Even the resilience is handy on fights where you have to switch into resistance gear, to stay uncrittable.

And the worst part is that even if you’ve literally just hit 70, you can start working on it right then and never have to upgrade ever again

So how do you obtain this weapon for 2000g? Simple: cheat at Arenas. Oh, I don’t mean cheat at Arenas; that would, of course, be unethical and not much fun. What I do mean is find some likely friends to do 5v5 Arenas with you (and by “do” I mean “just go in and make silly faces until you die”, hence how you can start it as soon as you’re 70; you don’t have to win). Even if you lose ten games, 5v5 is incredibly point-efficient; you’ll come out with enough Arena Rating to earn about 320 points for the week. And then – and here’s the key – disband the team. Start a new one next week with an unsullied rating. Go into the arenas in your tuxedo and dance with the enemy. Who cares? Just get your ten games in.

The Merciless Gladiator’s Gavel costs 2719 arena points to purchase this season. At 320 points per week, that’s nine weeks until you have the most uber of uber-hammers, and you don’t have to respec or actually try and win, just participate. Forming nine 5v5 teams will cost you 1800g in charter fees, although in easily payable instalments of 200g per week, and you could even get some of your lazy teammates to chip in.

The simple question is, “Is this hammer so badass that I would save up 1800g to buy it?” If you are a serious paladin tank, looking at the biggest upgrade possible for them in terms of threat generation, the answer is, of course, yes.



Augments

This section covers anything that you use to enhance a given item as opposed to being an item itself. The most common one is enchants, obviously, but gems also count, as do all of the other weird and wonderful things that have come in since The Burning Crusade was released.

Fortunately this is much more straightforward than some of the lists above. There are only a few candidates for each slot, and they are relatively easy to choose between. There is a remarkably good stopgap, however, especially while you are just starting out or are grinding for a new enchant; Heavy Knothide Armor Kit. They provide 10 Stamina and can be placed on nearly all of your armour slots; in addition they are dirt cheap to make and are a trainer recipe, so all of the guild’s leatherworkers can make them.


* Head: Glyph of the Defender, Revered with Keepers of Time
* Shoulders: Your Shattrath faction’s shoulder inscriptions; Inscription of Warding and Greater Inscription of Warding for Aldor, and Inscription of the Knight and Greater Inscription of the Knight for Scryers.
* Back: Enchant Cloak – Greater Agility or Enchant Cloak – Dodge. While the Dodge Rating may provide more Dodge chance, it’s only 0.15%, and the Agility will scale with stat bonuses (such as Blessing of Kings) and also provide Armour, so I would personally take Agility. (This is a closer choice for paladins than for warriors, as paladins have a better Agility/Dodge ratio.)
* Chest: Paladins need decent scores in a lot of different stats. If you are still trying to gather up a decent Health score, you should choose Enchant Chest – Exceptional Health; however, once you hit a good Health threshold you should go for Enchant Chest – Exceptional Stats instead.
* Wrists: For Rare bracers, go for Enchant Bracer – Superior Stamina, as it’s a lot more common and a lot cheaper. When you’re polishing up the epics, however,
Enchant Bracer – Fortitude is the way to go; only Castro in the guild knows this, however.
* Hands: If you are still pushing for avoidance, choose Enchant Gloves – Major Agility, as this is worth 0.6% Dodge to you (more with Kings). If you are going for threat, you’re going to have to do a little research onto how much threat you’re already putting out, so keep an eye on Omen. If you can consistently put out 500+ TPS, you will benefit most from Enchant Gloves – Threat. If you cannot, you will gain more threat benefit overall from Enchant Gloves – Major Spellpower.
* Legs: Easy. For low-level legs, take Clefthide Leg Armor. If you have epic legs that will last you a while, invest in Nethercleft Leg Armor instead.
* Feet: In the same way as the chest, if you are still stacking Stamina take Enchant Boots - Fortitude, but if you think you have “enough”, go for Enchant Boots – Boar’s Speed instead. You will grow to love and appreciate the extra mobility it provides.

* Weapon: Again this is easy; Enchant Weapon – Major Spellpower is all you need.
* Shield: Depending on what you need, take either Enchant Shield – Shield Block for 15 Block Rating if you still need the avoidance, or Enchant Shield – Major Stamina if you don’t.

Gems
Gemming up gear as a warrior is easy; as the wise Aneland states on the warrior forums, “When it comes to gems to use for a tank, it’s all 12 Stamina all the way if possible; the stats on the gear will handle the rest.” This isn’t as applicable for a paladin, however; you need different stats for different things, striking a balance between health, spell damage, and avoidance – including Defense.

Essentially, there are three (possibly four) choices for gem slots depending on colour – and colour is a consideration; because you’re not just stacking Stamina, you may as well go for the socket bonuses.

* Red: Glowing Nightseye, or if you are lacking in avoidance you may also consider Subtle Living Ruby
* Yellow: Enduring Talasite
* Blue: Solid Star of Elune

When selecting a metagem, you have two main choices. Tenacious Earthstorm Diamond looks like a good choice for people who are low on Defense, but the best option is probably Powerful Earthstorm Diamond; it’s easier to activate and provides a nice, easy, chunky Stamina boost.



Consumables

There are only a few consumables you will need. The first and most obvious is Superior Wizard Oil, which any enchanter can produce for you. You should keep at least 10 charges of it with you at all times to make sure you can refresh it as it’s starting to run low, in case it expires in the middle of a fight.

Other than that, you have three other “consumable” slots to fill; your Battle Elixir, Guardian Elixir and Well-Fed buff. For the most part, I find it best to strike a balance between additional health and spell damage for threat.

If you are using Elixirs (e.g. in a Heroic or 10-man), you should use Adept’s Elixir and Elixir of Major Fortitude, and a Stamina food such as Spicy Crawdad. If, on the other hand, you are using Flasks (such as on a progression raid), your flask of choice should be Flask of Fortification or the Shattrath equivalent. Effectively now both your Elixir slots will be used on health increases, so you should switch your Well-Fed buff to a spell damage food, such as Blackened Basilisk.

There are a couple of other useful options. Most scrolls don’t stack with buffs from the appropriate classes, but Scroll of Protection V are always handy, and minor temporary buffs such as the Lesser and Greater Runes of Warding can save you in a pinch.

There a good bit of advice from a friend sorry missing the pics but good info.

Well written and well informed and all very useful, thanks for posting this. and i recommend people do read it even though its long!