Paladin Tank

WoW Classic WoW Classic Hardcore
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Classic has more viable tanks than any expansion.

Warrior, Druid, Paladin, and Shaman can all tank groups easily. Hunters can tank groups with some effort. Even Priests and Warlocks can tank with significant effort.

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WoW has 6 real tank specs in modern WoW. All are considerably more viable across a wider array of content than vanilla tanks, even if the meta for mythic raiding or over 20+ M+ content is super specific.

Nobody really tries that kind of thing in sub max level content since you just have a role queue for normals and heroics, but if you wanted to do that in a pre-made, pets are also much tankier in modern WoW than classic. A number of DPS specs could probably tank sub-max content pretty easily as well.

I am sad that the Warlock demo tank thing only existed in WoD though. I blame Demon Hunters.

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How many level 60 dungeons you tanking on your shaman, hunter, or warlock?

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So here’s a quick guide to paladin tanking in dungeons/raids (I tanked all the way through BWL before going full-time on my Horde character…AQ40 was just too hard to farm on 2 characters on different servers and factions):

Ideally in dungeons, you want to maximize your spell power and use a mix of decent mitigation and spell damage gear. At 200 spell power, your Rank 3 Seal of the Righteous will do as much as a Rank 8 for significantly less cost. Max Rank Consecrate costs a lot, usually only use on pull and switch to Rank 1. Max Rank Holy Shield is about 300 threat per block. Between the blocks, Consecration ticks, and Retribution Aura (at higher gear levels or if your healer is trustworthy) you’ll only really need to auto attack and swap around to the other mobs and toss a few Judgements out here and there.

When you pull, you should always try to use LOS to your advantage. Range and spellcaster mobs will especially become easier to manage if you are pulling around a corner. Fun fact, you can also use walls to avoid damage from a spellcaster/range mob, but careful of LOSing your healer. If you are an engineer (recommended) dynamite works really well unless it is an UD mob then you’d just Exorcism. Never let a mob hit you from behind or let someone hit the mob from the front.

A common misconception is that prot paladins cannot tank in raids. We definitely can. We have a few advantages and disadvantages that like any tank can be worked with or around. Having no taunt is one of the things most people will point out, but ignore the fact that Kings does unbelievable amounts of threat in 40mans and most bosses post Molten Core are taunt immune regardless.

When you are tanking in a raid, group comp can help, but isn’t exactly a hard requirement. Ideally, you’d be in group with a Warlock using an Imp for their buff, a Holy paladin running Improved Devotion Aura, a Ret Paladin running Sanctity Aura, you’ll have Retribution and the 5th slot isn’t as dire as you’re not worried about attack power or crit typically.

You will want to use Judgement of Wisdom with Seal of Wisdom. This, combined with a fast weapon, will restore a decent amount of mana over the course of a fight. Ideally, you’ll want Flurry Axe for the second swing for extra procs, but you may need to swap to fast tanking weapons or even spell power when you’re comfortably ahead on threat and in a good spot with mana. On pull, you should drop a Max Rank Seal of the Righteous Judgemnet (JoR), Max Rank Holy Shield, and Max Rank Consecrate. That should be enough snap threat, but you can also just use JoR and start the Blessing of Kings spam for maximizing threat.

Blessing of Kings is your bread and butter for holding threat. It will do 144 threat per person on the .5 GCD. Typically, most 40man raids will be class stacking warriors which makes them the ideal class to spam on. Especially, as they are typically in range of you at all times as well. At the very minimum, you want to keep up Holy Shield for passive threat, Wisdom, and keep on spamming Kings. You’ll want to have 1500ish Symbol of Kings per raid, sounds goofy, but it works.

During intermissions like Onyxia flying in the air, you can ask your healers not to dispel you and use a Dreamless Sleep Potion for a bunch of mana (or full mana) or use a regular mana potion. Demonic/Dark Runes are also extremely useful as they don’t consume a potion CD and the damage is typically laughable.

Edit:

Here’s the “ideal” spec:

You could potentially swap 1H Specialization for Reckoning (which Reckoning gets worse as you get more gear). You can swap 1 point out of Deflection for full 1H Specialization (at the cost of avoidance) for a tiny threat increase. Kind of mix it up as you feel comfortable. This spec is meant for maximizing both your threat and avoidance.

Edit: Mitigation BIS example:

The BIS for paladin tanking is a little harder to pin down as needs can vary. This is for crit immunity at the 440 mark of defense. It’s not exactly a requirement in classic as bosses usually hit like wet noodles, but a string of crits/crushing blows can be scary. When you know a boss isn’t hitting you hard, less defense for more stamina can be beneficial. Typically hovering around 390-410 defense will give you enough wiggle room to get some spell power/additional stamina/etc. Tier 2 and Tier 2.5 are typically well suited for Dungeon/farm content as they offer a decent amount of health/spell power with decently good set bonuses. Tier 0, 0.5, and 1 are also in this boat, but T1 offers no spell power. ZG and AQ20 sets have some decent stats as well.

Tier 3 has a lot of stamina on the gear, but really lacks anything beneficial outside of that.

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Benefits of a prot paladin tank:

  • Holy Shield is 30% block on 4 charges that typically last longer than the CD so you will greatly reduce the chance you’ll be Critically Hit or receive a Crushing Blow. It also reduces the incoming damage, giving healers a little bit easier of a time to heal you.
  • Priest can use Holy Shield on you with little drawback. The only thing you’ll lose out on is the tiny bit of threat that Fire Shield/Thorns/Retribution Aura cause.
  • Can fully remove any debuff or avoid a nasty damaging attack through bubble (You’ll want to make sure the raid is prepared for this)
  • Threat cannot be resisted, dodged, block, miss, parry via Blessing of Kings.
  • You can use mana to Cleanse yourself, saving your healers mana.
  • You will never be Rage starved (though mastering mana usage is it’s own battle)
  • Your DPS will rarely, if ever, need to chill on threat.
  • We don’t sacrifice Mitigation for Threat. You can wear full tank gear.
  • BoP can be used as a mini-taunt on the highest threat as long as you or another tank is 2nd on threat.

Disadvantages:

  • Mana in Classic is a commodity. Proper mana management is the key to success. You make need to get an Innervate until you master it or if you have a moment of forgetting what you’re doing.
  • We do not have Shield Wall. Having a big CD on demand can be very useful. The Zandalari Charm of Heroism (I believe it’s called) is fairly useful alternative for us, but you can’t fully compare it.
  • We do not get an inherit 10% Damage Reduction via a Defensive Stance.
  • There is limited tanking gear. Our options are off set items. This sadly limits our health pool compared to late game full mitigation warriors. Warrior can reach over 7k unbuffed while we would be sitting around 6500.
  • The more mitigation you have passively, the worse Redoubt is. Redoubt is a huge passive for an additional 30% block. It triggers on being Critically Hit and a Crushing Blow. The higher your defense, the less likely it is you’ll get that additional 30%.
  • Our added DPS to the raid is essentially non existent. At very best, you’ll be pulling around 300 dps. It is offset by DPS not having to hold back, but it sucks.
  • Figuring out the right combination between Mitigation and Threat (Spell power) gear in HC is probably a little more scary, but that goes double for warriors.

A blessing and a curse is that Kings will do threat to ALL mobs you are in combat with split evenly. This means that on multi-boss/mob fights, if you are spamming too hard you’ll pull threat off the other tank, if there are a lot of mobs (Onyxia P3), you’ll be doing less threat overall. Trash packs can be a little funky due to this. It’s ideal to be tanking the second/third target.

You can tank every single fight in the game, but fights like 4 Horsemen need a lot of extra coordination since you can never reliably taunt (granted taunt CAN miss). You’ll need to make sure you’re high enough on threat to be ready to take off the other tanks while also not pulling threat on the other tanks.

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How ever you choose to spec tank as pally.

Just make sure your group knows how pally tanks operate and it should be fine.

Have fun!

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I’ve actually tanked all max level dungeons on my Shaman. The only one where you really want a Warrior or Druid helping is UBRS (Drakkisath drops threat so taunt is extremely useful here)

Even tanked most of them as Resto. No special gear or talents needed. Just class set gear and a good shield.

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Thx for that, most complete post

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Cool.

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In b4 the “shaman tank is bis” guys show up. But yeah don’t skip your best skill.

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You’re too late.

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I’m all about tanking on multiple classes, but spreading misinformation is not helpful either.

Just wrong. Holy Shield does not eliminate crushing blows in Classic, unless manage to find an extremely specific gear set and sacrifice all of your other stats for it (Naxx/AQ gear does not get you there).

Holy Shield is also always worse than talented Shield Block from a Warrior (Shield Block improves block chance by 75% on 2 attacks every 5 seconds; Holy Shield improves block chance by 30% on 4 attacks every 10 seconds - both block the same number of attacks over a 10 sec period, but only Shield Block provides enough block chance to actually make you uncrushable/uncrittable for its duration in normal gear).

Paladins are group tanks, not raid tanks. Holy Shield is just a bad ability in Classic.

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Good joke. Play with any semi competent DPS and it’s warrior or you don’t get to push your buttons. Try again.

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If you read what I said, it was “greatly reduces” as you always have a 15% chance to receive Crushing Blow until you’re around 85% avoidance. A blocked attack cannot be a Crit or Crushing. At 440 defense, which is possible as a paladin, you cannot be crit. When you add in a holy shield against a level 63 attacker, your chance to receive a Crushing Blow is diminished to 7.88% per the table listed on WoWhead. With World Buffs, Elixirs, etc you should see that number decrease further due to this. Cutting Crushing Blows to nearly half before buffs is correctly stating that it “greatly reduces” the chance.

Shield Block for warriors gives you 2 attacks to be fully Crushing Blow immune since you’ll have other defensive stats. Holy Shield will get you near or over that as well. If Redoubt is procced (again on Crushing Blows) it’ll add another 30%. Having 60% block on top of your defensive stats is will easily put you over the 102.4% threshold for the whole 10 seconds. Not to mention, Critical Strikes and Crushing Blows from bosses aren’t very scary often. Most bosses even on a crit won’t do over 5k damage which is a pretty easy amount of health to get even pre-raid.

You can say it’s “misinformation” but the math stands to prove you wrong. Paladins are viable raid tanks. They have a few drawbacks, but warriors have to tank in DPS gear or be Fury/Prot to hold threat. I know because I tanked in a speed clearing guild on Horde that was the 23rd guild in the world to clear AQ40 without buffs and under an hour.

You’re delusional if you believe that a warrior who is typically dual wielding 95% to 100% of most fights is less likely to be hit hard than a paladin in mitigation gear with a shield on. While also doing more threat without sacrificing mitigation.

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It doesn’t. You need the best gear in the game from Naxx and AQ, mixed with a few specific blues, to get anywhere close to uncrushable on a Paladin. Then 440 defense for uncrittable.

Warriors are uncrushable and uncrittable naked.

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It doesn’t. You need the best gear in the game from Naxx and AQ, mixed with a few specific blues, to get anywhere close to uncrushable on a Paladin. Then 440 defense for uncrittable.

Warriors are uncrushable and uncrittable naked.

Uhh…what? You can reach the 440 several different ways with a mixture of gear. Again, you don’t need to be at the 440 cap to tank regardless either. I literally linked a set of gear that has gear from AQ20/ZG/AQ40/Naxx/crafted gear/BWL gear that would get you uncrittable and reduce you to 7.88% chance to receive a Crushing Blow with just Holy Shield up and no other buffs. That is just one set of gear that is the best full mitigation and not exactly ideal either. If you take into account Elixirs/World Buffs, you’ll easily clear the Uncrushable level.

Warrior cannot be uncrushable naked either. That’s preposterous. You’re clearly trolling. If you even put on just Face of Death, specced for mitigation, you would have 310 defense, 23.20% avoidance with 75% chance to block 2 attacks at 98.2% avoidance. You’d still be able to be crit and and crushed because you’d not reach the 102.4% for uncrushable NOR would you reach the 440 defense to be uncrittable.

Please just stop when you don’t actually know how to tanking works.

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“Just clear every raid in the game and then you can maybe get a set of gear that still leaves you vulnerable to crushing blows 8% of the time”

Holy Shield is a bad ability. Naked Warriors are uncrushable and uncrittable with just Shield Block.

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Just to prove you have no idea what you are talking about:

Paladin set you can achieve with a little bit of time and gold. Not a single item from anything that is difficult unless you believe that UBRS is too hard. Which you might considering everything you have said.

I even took out the bracers from the Warlock mount quest which would be better, but didn’t want you to go on about how hard that is and it would be or something goofy.

With this set, you’d be at less than 1% chance to be crit. If you have Holy Shield and Redoubt up (15.72% chance to be crit/crush with the 30% chance to trigger Redoubt) would put you at uncrushable at 104% avoidance. The bosses hit table would be 10.41% chance to hit you fully, .72% chance to crit you, and a 15% chance to cause a crushing blow. A block would occur 41.28% (Holy Shield Only - 71.28% if you had Redoubt as well) of the time. This is unbuffed and without Mark of the Chosen procced which it is up nearly 100% of the time over the course of a fight.

You could mix in Vigilance Charm for more upfront mitigation. You could wear Valor/Lightforge/Soulforge items for higher stamina/other stats and forsake a little defense.

There are lots of options. You just don’t know what you are talking about and I am done responding to a troll who is backed in a corner and is decidedly making false claims because he got bullied by a paladin as a kid.

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You haven’t mitigated crushing blows at all with this gear set. You only have 76% avoidance with Holy Shield active (need 102.4%)

It’s a bad ability in Classic.

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I feel like OP was probably talking about like 40-59 as high level rather than max level content.

Max level content is irrelevant to 99% of HC players.

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