Last month I had the unique opportunity to lead my guild's raids while the bulk of the officers were out on vacation, buying houses, and just generally being unavailable. I hadn't led a raid for over a year, so it was a pretty steep learning curve trying to apply all the knowledge I'd been accumulating about group composition, healing and tanking assignments, and yelling into my microphone.

What really bugged me, though, is that I came to realize just how much unnecessary crowd control...

Theras

Wrath of the Lich King appears to be dramatically overhauling the way that our Seal and Judgement system functions, to better accommodate our new shared equipment with Warrior and Death Knight tanking specs. Of particular relevance to Protection Paladins are the changes to Seal of Righteousness and Vengeance.

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Seal (and Judgement) of Righteousness have been changed such that they scale not only with spell power, but with attack power as well. The currently...

Theras

My very first impression of the Protection Paladin in WotLK was that the talent tree was absurdly bloated. There are 87 points worth of raid tanking relevant talents (including requisite filler points) in reach of a Protection build – 70 of which are in the Protection tree itself – and there's only 71 points for us to spend. That's a hell of a lot of points, especially compared to some of the almost perfectly streamlined Holy and Retribution builds I've been able to construct. I wouldn't...

Theras

Sunwell Radiance has gotten me thinking: if our Dodge chance gets reduced by 20%, why do we have so much Dodge on our Sunwell tanking set? Let's make a gear list:

[Helm of Uther's Resolve]
[Collar of the Pit Lord]
[Spaulders of the Thalassian Defender]
[Crimson Paragon's Cover]
[Heroic Judicator's Chestguard]
[Lightbringer Wristguards]
[Lightbringer Handguards]
[Lightbringer Waistguard]
[Judicator's Legguards]
[Lightbringer Stompers]
[Ornate Band of Accuria]

...

Theras

At this stage in the game, most of us get a good laugh at the almost assuredly awful Protection Paladins who run around using Warrior tanking weapons. They're usually the type that can only do Slave Pens and the Mechanar – but not Nethermancer Sepethrea, because she's "hard". We cringe when we join a group on our alts and we get one of them, because it invariably means that your connection is going to "drop" before the first boss, or that the police are at your door and you...

Theras