Hallo all. I've lurked these boards for a long time, and now finally chose to make the leap into posting. Yesterday I made a post on the official EU WoW-forums regarding protection paladin itemization. Since the anything posted on the official forums tends to be buried pretty fast, I ask you to provide me with your thoughts on the subject.

• Executive Summary

Paladins have the potential to become viable maintanks in raids alongside the other tanking classes. However, player feedback shows that the itemization (and possibly talents) for protection paladins needs to be improved for the paladin to be a viable maintank in raids. Protection paladins require gear which provides more damage mitigation and more health points ("HP"), while still providing spell damage for threat generation.

Currently, protection paladins simply cannot compete alongside other tanking classes since they take too much damage and do not have enough health to withstand hard hitting mobs and bosses. Protection Paladins do not require more intellect or mana per 5 seconds since Spiritual Attunement fulfills that need.

• Stats which protection paladins are asking for
  - Stamina
  - Defense
  - Spelldamage

• Stats which protection paladins are not asking for
  - Mana per 5 seconds ("MP5")
  - Intellect
  - Spirit
  - (Strength)

• Protection Itemization Feedback

From my experience, and from the information gathered by listening to more experienced paladin players, I think its safe to say that paladin tanking faces a number of challenges. While our threat generation seems to work out fine, especially in undead-rich environments like Karazhan, we won't be able to main tank in raids and the like. Why? Because even though we can hold aggro, we take too much damage. Either we die too fast from sudden damage spikes, or the healers run out of mana while healing us.

I have excellent people healing me while I tank (among others a disc/holy specced priest with more than +1,500 healing). When compared to the protection warrior that tanks Karazhan with me all healers have commented on the fact that I take a lot more damage, and I have a lot less HP, despite roughly similar gear. I hold aggro well, and abilities like Righteous Defense and Blessing of Protection are working wonders when tanking so threat management is not really an issue. Nor is mana, since I never run out of mana while tanking, simply because Spiritual Attunement gives me back more mana than I can spend.

Normal 5 man instances are fine. But when it comes to Karazhan and Heroic instance tanking all is not well and good. In several fights I have been two- or three-shotted by bosses, while the protection specced warrior is happily tanking away next to me. At level 70, he has over 1,000 base HP more than me, and the gear he can pick up is decidedly more suited to his role in the raid. The stats he needs are all available om the same pieces of equipment. Whereas the paladin tanking gear seems to be schizophrenic and trying to give stats for all three talent trees. Now people are telling me that the paladin Tier 4 dungeon sets are being tweaked on the PTR:s, with stamina being removed and MP5 added. This is completely contrary to the feedbank provided by the paladin community.

INT AND MP5 IS NOT WHAT PROTECTION PALADINS ARE ASKING FOR, NOR WHAT PROTECTION PALADINS NEED.

While a protection paladin tanks, he/she will not be able to heal for any significant amount of healing. (I'm sorry, but that is just the way it is.) If healing is required, a good protection paladin will simply put on a healing set with MP5 and +healing. But then he won't be tanking. A deep-protection specced paladin is a lousy healer, so its not as if this will work very well regardless. Please, dear item developers, do not try to make the protection paladin gear into a protection/holy gear set.

Protection paladins need more stamina, more defense, and more spell damage (more spell damage is needed to cope with threat generation increase from DPS classes). To be honest, it may be that pure +block and +stamina is actually better than +defense, since a lot of the paladin threat generation is based on the paladin actually getting hit. If a blow is dodged or parried, some of the paladins threat generation will be lost since holy damage is returned back to the mob when a blow lands.

Although protection paladins benefit from strength when blocking blows, strength is less valuable for us than it is for warriors. Warriors need the extra strength for extra attack power to do more damage, thus generating threat. Paladin threat is gained through doing Holy damage, which is not reliant on attack power, but spell damage. Instead of strength, give us block value and block rating!

Thus I want the item developers to take a new look at the protection paladin items and, after listening to the community, tweak them so that the survivability of the protection paladins is made equal to that of the protection warrior. Together with this, protection paladins need enough spell damage to generate enough threat. If our gear is not adjusted, then our talents will need to be. Perhaps a mix between the two would be the best (Weapon Expertise?), but gear goes a long way.

• Support For My Claims

Well, I'm sure that you won't just take my word for all this. But I am not alone in my views, far from it. Please click here for a compilation of quotes from other players who, in my view, have expressed thoughts, arguments and ideas which support my contention that protection paladins need a better itemization.


Sincerely,
/Fat kid wearing "Fat kid" t-shirt

From my experience, my mitigation is fine. I just have to ignore Blizzard's attempts to itemise for me, and take warrior gear. The only warrior tanking itemisation that doesn't do me much good is that with sizeable amounts of Str on, which I would see swapped for +spelldmg ideally. I also need to stick a +spellhit gem or two in my gear perhaps, rather than a warrior's +melee hit, to limit Judgement/Taunt resists.

Currently, the only pieces of gear I am using which are designed for paladin tanking are my weapon (Greatsword of Horrid Dreams), and the Righteous Breastplate and Shoulders (ie, the only 2 pieces which don't waste stats on the horribly inefficient +mana/5). The two Righteous items waste a few stats on Int, but that's more than made up for by -15% cost on Consecration, and a bit of +dmg instead of Str.

I see no harm in gearing up in pure warrior gear. A spelldamage weapon gives me all the extra threat I need; Paladin threat is excellent, particularly at the point where it matters most, at the start of the fight, or right after an aggro reset, thanks to excellent burst threat with Avenger's Shield and Judgements. Also, unlike a warrior who needs to switch targets a lot on multi-mob pulls, we can stick to one target and allow our AoE and reflective abilities to generate aggro to keep the extra mobs off healers, and given a few seconds, off our AoEing allies.

Would I like it if my Tier 4 and 5 sets weren't badly itemised, and would be preferable to non-set tanking loot? Sure. But the current "progression" of itemisation is such that each tier is at best a very slight upgrade from the previous one... so sticking with the Eternium Greathelm, or even Felsteel Helm rather than being able to use the Crystalforge Helm, isn't a real problem.

If Blizzard do go ahead and give Tier 4/5 of all classes a buff to make them clear progression items, THAT is the point at which attention needs to be given to making Paladin tank sets more efficiently statted.

Yeah, warriors have been asking for pretty much the same thing for 2 years now, and that's yielded us nothing, so lemme know how that goes for ya.

yeah, I agree. I don't have any ambitious main tanking concerns, but just occasionally tanking 5 mans as 41/20, I'm wearing almost entirely warrior tanking gear over the intended paladin stuff.

I also found it extremely lame our 5man set was tanking oriented and mostly poorly itemized at that.

Another thing I'd like to see: easily available +spellhit gems, rather than just having 3 - all epics which only drop in heroics.

There is no point throwing your hands up in despair and giving up tanking unless you've nothing to do bar 25 man raiding, which is the large minority of people. Paladins are perfectly viable for Heroics and Karazhan, and by the time I'm left with nothing but 25 mans to do, hopefully our tanking will be a bit buffed. If not, well I can swap to healing then... it's not like Plate +healing gear has a lot of competition for it, so I'll have a fair bit of it by then.

Wouldn't this be better on the class forums?

It doesn't exactly help that our tanking tree has realistically *no* 35-40 tier talent. Weapon Mastery wouldn't even have been good if it still reduced glancing. And the 41 talent being useless for anything but pulling and oddball pvp situations doesn't help either.

Prot Paladins have a long way to go on the road to being noteworthy tanks.

Agro is seldom the issue with a paladin tank. The fact that vindication doesn't work on most heroic mobs, is single target and in the ret tree is one of those issues though. Demo shout/roar are pretty huge when it comes to 5-man tanking. The 1~2k hp difference between warrior and paladin tanks is another.

I'd like to see vindication become a relatively deep prot talent, proc's on all holy damage, lasts a little bit longer and reduces damage similar to demo roar/shout.

Not the most imaginative solution, but one I feel is much needed, at least for 5 man heroics. Maybe put it in place of one-handed weapon specialization. Something like "Your holy damage spells reduces the victims attack power by 50/100/150 and chance to hit by 1/2/3%"

Also replace weapon specialization with a talent that allows 10/20/30/40/50% of your parry/dodge/block to continue even when spell casting.

Those two changes + fixing itemization (intelligence + mp/5 no thankyou) would go a long way I think to making paladins a viable end-game off tank at the least. Last Stand and Shield Wall are still so huge it isn't funny.

Paladins should have some sort of "oh shit" functionality that isn't Ardent Defender. I know Paladins are all reactionary 'n' such, but they should have some way to be proactive when they feel that they may not get healed any time soon. Even Bears can heal themselves.

Yeah, I love Moroe's Pocket Watch beyond belief for the simple reason its at least something I can do to stop myself from dying. "Dodgewall"

This is my experience exactly. I don't take significantly more damage than a warrior, and actually take fewer crushing blows. I feel that the perfect balance would be achieved given an even moderately useful 35-40 talent, and properly itemized tier armor.

There is certainly an opportunity for synergy here -- remove the mp/5 from tanking sets and add a talent that gives significant mitigation stats from Intellect, for example.