Considering simulationcraft, prot paladin is actually the tank that takes the least upfront damage, even better than prot warrior. Their healing is also the lowest, but not by a lot, it’s quite close to Guardian Druid.
I understand logs =/= real gameplay, but is the difference between sims and real dungeons/raids that big?
It’s just that I’m considering rolling prot pal (or Blood DK), but I have heard that both of those tanks are very squishy and wanted to double check before I decide to roll one of them.
PS, According to simcraft, Blood indeed is the tank that takes the most damage, so no doubts about that I guess.
With SotR up, my paladin has 63.94% armor, and 8.4% mitigation from Consecration. So a 10k hit gets reduced to 3303 damage.
At about the same ilvl, my warrior has 56.45% armor, and with SB up is guaranteed to prevent another 38.61% of any melee hit, reducing the same 10k hit to 2674.
The remainder of the difference is from SB uptime and mastery. But paladin block and warrior crit block is RNG avoidance rather than guaranteed mitigation, and while Shield Block doesn’t have full uptime, in practice it might as well - in M+ you can kite when it’s down, and in raids you have tank swaps to let SB recharge.
While Ignore Pain is counted as healing in logs/recount, in practice it’s mitigation too. As a paladin I can bank a WoG to heal back up after a tankbuster, but the healer sees my health bounce up and down; as a warrior I precast two Ignore Pains and the healer sees my health hardly move. Indomitable doesn’t literally prevent damage, but since it’s in small frequent ticks rather than big chunks of healing, it also contributes to the perception that a warrior’s health bar only moves smoothly instead of bouncing around.
Also, a warrior who gets caught without anything up still has 56% armor, while a paladin who lets SotR drop for a moment will be much worse off. So in the worst case, it’s easier for a paladin tank to suddenly die, especially since we have lower HP in the first place.
imo SOTR could do with a slight scaling buff. But compared to my other tanks, save for BDK and Guardian druid, I feel as if my life is mostly in my own hands. Being a prot warrior and being at the mercy of your healer is just an awful feeling that I would never want to deal with regardless of how good it is as mitigating damaging.
IMO it falls on reliant of SoR being your armor compared to say Prot Warrior. Prot Pally is the most squishy but you have to also remember all of your utility and you can also survive fairly well if your healer bites it.
Truly the only big issue I had going to Pally from Warrior is the tanking is more about SoR uptime and healing yourself where Warrior you shield block and Rage dump ignore pain and you are good most of the time. This is of course not the whole just basic.
As for blood DK I honestly think they are the absolute squishiest but their style of tanking is playing with death by getting hit big to heal it back up. Not sure about guardians because I’ve not touched one in forever.
Once you understand how to flow properly with your defensives and utility Prot pally is a lot more fun and I feel has more influence than a plain hit me tank. Can’t tell you how many times a well placed lay on hands and bubble has kept my healer up and kept us from a wipe. People that understand how to cycle this stuff properly have more survival than other tanks not for their selves solely but also the group.
Raids though I will say I’m not super keen on pally tanking just feels I have to play like a weird DK pally hybrid.
Our defensive’s are very powerful, but if something goes wrong and you have to blow all your CD’s to stay alive, you’ll have nothing going forward and while we’re not paper, we do just eat damage and have to give up active mitigation to heal.
Warriors and VDH’s have more consistent tools to deal with overwhelming danger, Monks have stagger and can get away like a boss (although I’d give them the award for feeling squishier than pallys so far in shadowlands). BDK’s don’t feel that squishy to me and they have CD’s that are up about as often as VDH.
Just play high keys. Prot pallys die so fast it’s not even funny. Wars have been the easiest for me to heal, then druids and monks, and then pals/dhs/dks.
The only reason I can think of is our block chance is so low currently because of the lack of mastery. Once we get a lot of stats in the near-end of this expansion, we actually may be a top tier tank because of our top dmg next to wars.
In all seriousness, Paladins are only squishy and HP will yo-yo if the player doesn’t know how to effectively use defensives and Holy Power. I have run into so many healers who have straight up told me I take no damage and so easy to heal. Keep in mind, I don’t kite either. Even in +19, I am face tanking almost every pull.
Ion said it best, it’s a skill issue. Prot paladins are very easy to pick up and run low keys, but it is difficult to do well.
Squishy? Funny. In the time I’ve been doing 15s, of all the tanks I’ve had, paladins were the easiest and most relaxing to heal.
Dhs on the other side are meta only for their kitting ability and sometimes they even fly out of my range too fast and die. They are good at keeping mobs ON them (agro) and AWAY from them (kitting), but I find that it takes more effort to heal them if they are face-tanking.
Historically, prot paladins are designed around having less health and weaker constant mitigation, but in exchange they get a lot of buttons that just feel like cheating on some bosses. They are particularly bad at patchwork type fights where it is nonstop heavy white damage.
This all has led to them in many tiers often being your off tank or third tank (for three tank fights like Lady Ashvane), but usually not the main tank. Later expansions have tried to bring all the tanks closer in base mitigation because the off tank/main tank meta has become less and less of a thing, but the points I made above still somewhat apply.
You also have to account for the overall meta of raid comp: In the current tier, havoc are considered weak, so vengeance, an already strong tank, is even more convenient to take for its magic debuff. Brewmaster is similar, giving a phyisical debuff while allowing a raid to not need mistweavers (who are considered bad right now), and fill a hole if you have no windwalkers.
Ye i’d say PalaDIN is not terrible just much more unforgiving to play. Like I make a single tiny mistake like pulling a pack without being in my consecrate and having SOTR up or Ardent up and instantly die where I wouldn’t as any other tank.
I really like Prot pallies and Bears as a healer because I like knowing that if someone else is stacking greivous or stands in something they’re not supposed to, that I can take care of that without having to stress over my tank not being able to look after themselves for a few spellcasts.
Warriors are easily my least favorite tank to heal for for this specific reason. A warrior tank may have great dps and mitigate most efficiently, but if they struggle to endure the damage, the whole group suffers for it.
Overall a great analysis and perhaps some healers just aren’t used to healing Prot and their huge WoGs which makes HP spikes okay.
One of the things for me as Prot Pal is I hate the SotR mechanic and try to build a heavy passive mitigation with Block/Mastery. I mainly do this for PvP as I need to make a build to survive stun locks or CC and not die.
So overall I was curious on thoughts of a Mastery tank since Cons was buffed? Is that 8.4% with the 5% or what it says in your character sheet? Just got my Mastery to 33.5% so that is 51% block and starting too feel good which is 16.8% in Cons. Then divine toll and seraphim on big pulls raises it up to great levels where my HP don’t move.
Granted I haven’t done any M+ recently (quit in Jan. been playing some this week) just solo Torghast and PvP but wonder how the transition will go in M+ in a Mastery build. Regardless I guess I’ll find out as I need to do some M+ to complete my Mastery set for PvP and solo content. Prot just feel right in a Mastery set up for me though and the damage is soo nice.
Yea the above as I need huge passive mitigation for the content I do. Then run all passive defensive conduits, golden path, condensed, shielding. Curious how someone would do with enough gear in high M+ keys. Think the key for Prot Pal is many layers of absorbs and mitigation.
Prot Pallies are very situational, depending on rather you are Raiding or doing Mythic+. Since i’ve been doing more Mythic+ this EXP, i can tell you the biggest reason ppl assume they are “squishy” and how that came to be is: Shadowlands had brought lot of new players and old but due to pandemic we had abundance of newer. These players of course use lots of guides that are out there that are just for general purpose and to get players started off with current content.
With all that said, Mythic+ brought in ppl that dont have enough time to sit in raids and guild runs that are specific time and date for hours at tie. This was something you can get into and get out of with no penalties and progress and still feel viable. Keeping all the above in mind Mythic+ depends on LOT on DPS cleave to get past the trash as quick as possible and kill the bosses before timer runs out which in turn forces for larger pulls by the tank which take more dmg well Prot Pallie mastery: increases Chance to Block ,damage reduction, as well as attack power, (WHILE IN CONSECRATION).
I emphasize on WHILE in CONSECTRATION because when your doing big pulls and kiting you CAN NOT stand in your consecration let alone get SOR up…so you die. Because general public follow guides of pally tanks that do varies different content. Mythic+ you do not stack Mastery what u do is stack versetility and a lot of it to medigiate that dmg for you and HASTE so your GCD is lower and you can put out more SOR fast enough to get the proc up.
But means it was new EXP took while for pallie theory crafters to tinker with stats and so forth to figure this out while healers and others in party with a prot pallie could only see death, therefore are considered “squishy”.
Comparing all tanks, Paladins take damage on the lower end outside of cooldowns. Additionally, our cooldowns are very good.
The issue comes from our cooldown economy. We have AD and GoAK and that’s it. Every other tank pretty much has similar-strength cooldowns on shorter CDs or just more cooldowns in general. It also doesn’t help that our legendaries that interact with our defensives are more or less dog poop compared to other classes. Look at things like The Wall, Natural Order’s Will, Crimson Rune Weapon, and Fiery Soul.
-Block% is so low even with talents, so it’s heavily dependent on gear’s mastery (prot pals do better end game)
-armor is meh because prot pal’s base armor got nerfed pre-Shadowlands to compensate for higher uptime of Shield of the Righteous with the addition of holy power in Shadowlands
-legit that’s all for physical dmg mitigation which is low compared to a war or bear tank
-shields from the First Avenger is so weak because it’s dependent on its damage, only viable with Kyrian covenant (heavily reliant on borrowed powers)
+only good thing about prot pal is its high self-healing like a blood DK
+parry% a bit higher because of crit from Avenging Wrath
+imo best/2nd best in tank dmg next to a war/bear