Hey guys! How viable are Prot Pallys in raiding and BGs?
(No I will not go holy… Dont ask…)
crap in raiding. gimped in BGs.
You can carry a flag!
Very close to unplayable in a raid environment, very good in 5 mans, very average in BGs. As an above poster said you can carry a flag, but a druid is about infinity times more better than you will be. Prot does okay guarding flags in AB too, but again you’re outperformed by druids and rogues and hunters.
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In pvp, a paladin is a support class. You will fulfill a multitude of roles, however you won’t be the main choice of guarding a flag. Warriors can get up to 50% more mitigation against melee, higher health, and don’t have a limited resource pool. Druids have high on demand mitigation + high mobility that let’s them “dodge” damage. A prot paladin has 2 things going for them: reckoning and a high amount amount of additional utility for a whole group. That said, you can be an extremely “thorny” tank. So if the enemy is only sending groups of 2-3 to try and assassinate you, you will definitely be better than a warrior in helping to repel them and your cleanse makes it more difficult for enemies to overwhelm you with DoTs. Just remember that this is classic, you will die faster than in any expansion on average.
For PvE, your survivability isn’t as bad as what others make it out to be and your limited mana pool can be nullified with coordination with your raiding druids and other methods. The only negatives are that you can’t tank on the very few tank swap fights and you have less max health, but you can still heal or provide really good Nightfall uptime when you can’t tank.
but not as good as others.
Raiding they have their niche if your other tanks can’t aoe tank.
Pvp they’re “meh” or godlike depending on how the reckoning talent actually works.
sorry bro, its great to play with a small group of friends for open world or dungeons. Any big group content it is near worthless
If you gimp yourself by not using all the skills the class has, you will not be a good player.
Protection paladins didn’t really exist in vanilla. They couldn’t do anything, so no one played them. Even as a 5 man “tank” you were going to have a lot of talents from the holy tree so better off just going holy.
Just need a thunderfury
Others have summed up the high level items, let me re-iterate them to start:
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Raiding - NO, you might have a niche fight that requires consecration for AE tanking, but otherwise, you are not a strong enough single target threat generator to let your dps go all-out, and no taunt to recover when they do.
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PvP - yeah this isn’t retail, so there is 0 place in PvP for a deep prot pally. Not even as a flag carrier IMO, because honestly, you are slow and prot in PvP doesn’t give enough survivability in this version of the game to make the difference. Ret or Holy with a splash of prot (for Kings) is where you likely need to be.
With that out of the way, let’s talk PvE leveling and 5-man dungeons.
Leveling: Prot is not great at leveling, but it is also not overly terrible. It’s like the tortoise - slow and steady. Played properly you should have almost 0 down time. But don’t expect to kill mobs at a pace greater than 1-2/min. Even if spec’d prot, I would recommend questing with a 2H just for the extra white damage throughput. With non-Ret paladins you are playing the long game (non-burst) for dps. I have leveled my character as Holy mainly and encounter many of the same ‘slow-n-steady’ issues, with a little help from STR boost and Seal of Righteousness buff (only 1 point though hehe).
5-man dungeons: This section will be a bit more nuanced. Important to note that paladin tanking relies on Holy damage + melee white damage to generate threat. Let’s break these down:
Melee: boosted by strength and 1H mastery at later levels. Main source of 1:1 threat generation starting from level 1 through 60
Seal/Judgement of Righteousness: This is your main dps increase, gets the benefit of Righteous Fury (at 16+) and enables judgement of righteousness. This is your primary single target threat generator for all cases.
Blessing of Sanctuary: This can generate a small amount of ‘volatile’ holy damage. Not consistent as it depends on blocks which means you will have ~5% per swing change of getting this, with some help from Holy Shield later, and getting crit earlier on with the talent.
Holy Shield: This is a good source of Holy Threat as it comes with built in 20% increase which stacks with Righteous Fury. It is however ‘volatile’ in that with it on you have a ~35% reactive chance - so you still don’t really control this.
Consecration: 11 points into the Holy Tree required, but this is your main holy threat generator. I always wished it were part of the prot tree personally, because that is where it makes the most sense from a gameplay perspective… That being said, consecration will deal roughly equivalent damage each second equal to your Seal of Righteousness on a 1H weapon. And it hits everything.
Retribution aura: Outside of consecration, this is your main ‘AoE’ threat generator, subject to Righteous Fury increase threat generation. From 16+ you should likely tank with this on ALL of the time.
Blessing of Salvation: At level 26 you get some help! This should go on all of your primary DPS dealers. Typically blessing of wisdom on yourself and healer, but if you extra squishy you might need to Salvation your healer to keep agro too (be flexible).
Seal of Wisdom: At level 38 the whole game changes for Paladins. Seal/Judgement of wisdom comes online, and suddenly your mana problems are now manageable.
All of this context to call out my thoughts on pally tanking:
Paladins who wish to tank should likely start with 11 points into Holy for Consecration, in my opinion. This is VERY mana intensive, so keep your water up to date (or marry a mage!). From level 20 (consecration) till 38, blessing of wisdom is your only mitigation item, and learn the 5 second rule so you get natural regeneration of mana to help it along. Cast in BURSTS, Seal/Judge/Seal of Righteousness, Consecration to open… then AutoAttack. Between thorns and consecration any secondary targets should have a good enough agro lead when you switch to handle it. Judgement of Righteousness plus your attacks should keep you ahead in threat. Blessing of Salvation is your FRIEND. It is NOT a waste, so post 26 use it!
So, I sort of went into a mini-guide. But all of this to say that in 5-man dungeons a paladin can not only work, but can be nearly the best. A good build is 14/31/6 or some permutation thereof. classic wow-head site + /talent-calc/paladin/AszQBDzfAekBNA.
I hope this helps shed some light on viability - and some good insights on tanking strategies. FWIW, I am currently 31 points in holy, and I Main tank our RFD and SM runs with no issue - so deep prot is not required to tank as a paladin. That being said, the build I linked above is the one I will shift to when we have level 51 available (as that is the first point you can get consecration + holy shield).
I hope this is helpful!
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Raiding ?
As a third string OT at best. A Palladin Tank is much better suited to Dungeons than Raids.
Offtank in raids
Tank 5 mans
In pvp you guard the flag that rogues can’t kill
It’s a fun build
A 20/31/0 build gives you everything to heal at least decently and gives the necessary tanking talents to be a machine in the open world, dungeons, and as needed raid AoE tanking. You can also shine in PvP because enemies die by hitting you.
“but not as good as others” is literally all that needs said, but anyone and everyone in this thread.
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If we wanted easy, we would play retail.
We play Protection Tanking Paladins not because it is easy, but because it is hard!
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Sounds like you should just roll a warrior
protection paladin is hard the same way driving a car with 3 wheel is hard…
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If you’re the best player in the world, you’d be getting rekt in PvP by casuals and benched over PUGs. Really should consider avoiding it entirely if you want anything at level 60 other than being laughed at and avoided 90%+ of the time…