I want to play a Prot Pally, but the earliest iteration I’ve played was late TBC and I vividly remember soloing Zul…the dungeon in Tanaris; and fighting a lvl 40 ret pally to a stalemate (I was the same level).
Are prot pallies just as good in Classic?
Prot pallies do a lot more damage then ret in vanilla, they have the best defensive capabilities of any class and can heal in a pinch. Your job is to outlast the other player and prot can and will do that.
However, unless your tanking people would rather take ret over prot in a dungeon if you’re rolling dps, because prot needs to block to do more damage. You can solo a lot better in prot then ret as well, but in the case of ranged pvp you’ll need to use corners and los to gain any kind of advantage.
You have no taunt and no mana as a prot paladin in Vanilla/Classic. While you can tank most group/5-man content with few issues, that will essentially be the capstone of your effectiveness, and extremely few will be considered for raid membership.
Not saying don’t do it- I’m likely to go bear tank myself. Just be mindful of their very real disadvantages.
Prot pally leveling is imho the fastest way to level as a pally. World content will be easy for you as long as you pack food and water, and dungeons will also be pretty easy to tank after level 20 (consecration). Just keep in mind that you will have to drink water about as often as a mage.
Prot is great for 5 mans. You probably won’t be doing ubrs but everything else is fair game. It takes a little more finesse than as a Warrior (which pretty much comes out of the box with all the tools required to tank everything) but it gets the job done.
My advice would be start your own dungeon groups as a tank. I guarantee people will join and nobody is going to turn down a dungeon group simply because a Paladin is tanking.
This sounds promising so far
I leveled this guy as a tankadin. No taunt was hard, and no ranged pull was tricky. In vanilla CC was more important, so had to face pull. I redid my professions to get engineering, using bombs to pull carefully without breaking CC. The worst part about it was gear and talents made your damage spiky. Its the complaint I heard most from healers. And watching my health bar was intense sometimes, i’d even flash heal myself sometimes out of worry. But for the most part it was fine in most 5 mans.
Don’t they have Blessing of Sanctuary to take care of the mana problem? Or was that in TBC?
For pulling at range:
https://classic.wowhead.com/item=1399/magic-candle
Blessing of Sanctuary is a damage reducer/damage reflector.
Oh. I totally remembered that ability wrong.
Which spell gave you mana everytime you dodged or blocked a melee attack?
I know for sure it was in wrath, but its not in Classic?
IIRC it was a passive that turned healing received to Mana.