Protection Paladin Question for Old Blizzard

Wrath baby here, and i’m for sure interested in classic.

Todays stigma is that only prot warriors were perceived as ~the~ tanks and that guilds would be fools if they ever took a prot paladin over a prot warrior for raids.

Why were paladins given the protection tree,but without a taunt? what was their intenteded purpose through leveling dungeons and end game raids?

How did we come… to be…

P.S. i wanna be a prot paladin , i saw towelie able to do it in classic dungeons… but someone is gonna make me wear the healing holy skirt…i just know it.

Private server stigma. Classic isn’t a private server.

Most tanking doesn’t require a taunt.

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However vanilla or pservers unless the warrior is trash you will be hard pressed to find a guild that will bench a warrior tank in favor of a pally tank full time for raids.

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Most tanking does require high, steady TPS, however. Something paladins sorely lack. Troll warriors with TF can hardly keep threat off top end rogues or warriors come endgame.
This doesn’t even include their mana problems, or horrific itemization.

Though i have nothing against them doing 5 mans or aoe tanking.

You’re not even forming a raid without a core group anyway. This is a false situation anyway. If you have a tank for MT, why would you bench him? Doesn’t make any sense.

Point I am trying to make is that stigma was long before pserver its been that way since the days of vanilla blizzard servers. Pally tanks just have to many weakness to be a #1 tank in raids, and OT sure but a good portion of guilds will be wanting a warrior tank to lead the way and even a druid as a nice OT or behind the warrior. Pally are the dungeon tanks mainstay for the most part.

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It isnt the job of the MT to “keep threat off” but the job of the dps to operate within the threat of the tank.

Either your making this up, it’s a private server issue, or you had bad dps that likes to go splat.

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They initially were suppose to have a tuant but it never made it to the core game. A lot of things didn’t make the cut come the release of vanilla. That’s why out of pretty much every class in the game: Paladins got the most abilities added to them through out the progression of Retail as they were getting the abilities they were ment to have back in vanilla.

You’re quite correct, but it harms your argument that you said it. Most groups could function with a prot pala MT, but most will not. Because throttling everyone’s dps down to such low numbers makes boss kills insufferably long and only raises the risk of the non-def capped paladin dying to a CB or going oom.

My theory is that they were worried that nobody was going to want to heal. So they designed endgame so that every hybrid had to become a healer or reroll. And they made the hybrids so much fun to level that a lot of them did, only to get to endgame and realize that they had to heal. It was an elaborate trap to get more endgame healers for raids.

I would guess that very few hybrids knew in 2004-2005 when they created their characters that at max level that was going to be their only role available when they got there.

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Maybe in some progression guilds due to content clearing requirements.

There were Paladin tanks and retribution Paladins in raids. There were retribution pallies even in Naxx. Anyone saying there wasn’t is full of crap.

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Anyone who thinks a single taunt was the issue for pallies I find hard to believe did any good amount or even high end raid tanking with them, even if they said here a taunt it doesn’t solve the other issues.

It is the job of the tank to generate enough threat that you don’t hold back the raid from doing a reasonable amount of DPS.

Warrior tanks are threat machines and DPS still need to be careful.

Paladin tanks run out of steam when they run out of mana, and they do run out of mana.

The old game is not about “bring the player on whatever sub-optimal abomination of a spec they wish to play”, it is about operating within the constraints of the game such that you field a raid that can clear content with a reasonable effort. I’m sure you can raid as a pally tank but you’re not going to be anyone’s first pick and you won’t perform better than a warrior tank aside from a few niche fights.

Piling work onto the backs of your team mates so that you can RP as a holy warrior of the light is rude at best.

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If you want in raids as a pally you’ll be healing and cleansing, period…no tanking, no ret dpsing.

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That’s not the question at hand, we have all established there is and have been pallies of all kinds, the question was would he get passed up for a warrior and the answer is almost mostly likely will be probably, with some exceptions. However the taunt argument is null because a taunt would not have fixed the issues pallies had as a prot.

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Taunts weren’t even really an issue because raid bosses were completely immune unless there was a tank swap mechanic. In the later case, paladins could potentially do it by BoPing the other tank but it was hard because paladins dealt a lot of threat through reflective damage so you had to be very careful about being 2nd on threat.

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I don’t see that question anywhere. The “question” was about the stigma of looking like fools for using a pally tank over a warrior. Read the OP.

Fact is that situation isn’t the stigma. The stigma is that prot Paladins simply can’t tank raids.

This is a known falsehood perpetuated by private servers and people digging up old websites from progression guilds.

It all really boils down to itemization and the fact that they put off finishing the Paladin talent trees and abilities until TBC.

Hell, the class design leads main was a retribution Paladin. I wonder what he would think.

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These sort of threads always amuse me when players of the spec being discussed rush to defend their existence in raids.

Because they were intended to be able to tank, but never really reached that point.

Blizzard addressed the biggest issues prot paladins faced in TBC, and lo and behold, they became the best tanks.

If you only care about tanking dungeons, you can probably play whatever the hell you want and have reasonable success.

prot paladins will bring to the table some utility but to be absolutely honest your guild is probably going to ask you to heal due to paladins amazing healing capacity

not saying you cant do it. But without a taunt for swapping paladins fall by the wayside except for really quick trash clearing

actually paladin got their finished trees in mid-vanilla. Shaman was the class whose overhaul was cancelled completely due to several delays. Even the rogues only barely got their class review done before the cut off (and a lot of them complained it was rushed and actually made them worse than they were before).