When I look at 60s on Alliance Defias Pillager, I see a TON of warriors and few pallies. If I wanted to tank 5-mans and level as Prot, would that be viable? E.g., 11 holy and then down the prot tree?
Every HC classic guide focuses on Ret and I did not play pally in Vanilla. Or should I just go warrior and become one of the herd?
HC Classic guides focus on Ret as that is the primary leveling spec for Paladin and hardcore guides mostly focuses on solo leveling.
As far as can you play prot for dungeons that is viable just you do have the issue of 1 lockout per day of each dungeon on hardcore servers.
That’s fair, maybe a more solo spec makes sense until a point where there are a number of instances to do around the same level band.
Many pallies i see do cloth and holy spec. It is difficult and I see more of that then prot warriors. Many warrior who use 1h and shiled at low levels but that are not prot specced.
Self heals in fury. Can tank better in it for solo tanking as no need for aggro holding
Arms has better damage and debuffs better burst damage. Prot you dont take damage but you also do not do damage so and up wasting enough time to kill certain npcs that they begin sawing around you faster than you kill them.
But have a pocket heal then you become unstoppable as prot. Without that, you are not going to make it to 60 as prot. Either die of boredom or die too much in game because of silly stuff where you could not take them down fast enough so they spawned quick.
Prot needs pocket heals in HC at some of the lower levels. And at 60 ish you might find yourself pulling massive groups very easy sometimes while other times you struggle with one or two elites when you shouldn’t. Use it for groups. Not for solo play.
Prot is fine to level, your hard part will that overall paladins are just a low damage class, so you will kill slowly. You will also find tanking a bit more difficult because you don’t have a taunt As most HC players tend to be a bit smarter and do dungeons at normal levels this shouldn’t be an issue, BoP is an ok option to get agro back off someone, specifically your healer, unless its another paladin.
While it seems counter intuitive, you will probably want to put 5 points in divine int, 5 points in spiritual focus, then get consecrate, after this for tanking, assuming your going the sword and board route, look at the protection tree if you want to be a bit more defensive, or the ret tree if you want to kill stuff a bit faster and have higher threat, if you go the ret path, you will probably rely less on consec where you might want to flip to divine str.
I wish Paladins had a taunt as Prot, because i keep hearing their AoE threat is pretty good. but if everyone’s attacking a different target it becomes really sketchy
Not till about 20 ish do they start to do good as tanks in HC.
I tanked Deadmines, and it was just miserable. I forgot that spiritual attunement is a TBC addition, and the amount of drinking you have to do to tank is maddening.