Branar

While I question the extent of your laundry list (I mean, come on - are shield bash, disarm, and spell reflect really the things that get warriors picked over paladins for tanking?), there are certainly some very clear warrior abilities that give them huge advantages in the tanking arena.

Shield Wall and Last Stand:

Part of the problem is that other consumables - potions, healthstones, etc - simply don't have enough oomph when it comes to tanking anymore. When you take a nasty shatter, healthstones and potions can put your HP up to where it would be after a normal shatter. When you take a nasty hit from Gruul, a healthstone and a potion (heck, you probably can't even potion, you're chugging stoneshields) cover what, maybe 1/2 of the damage of a single hit? Hardly even touching the 2-3 back-to-back hits/crushings that you're trying to respond to. And, of course, druids can't even potion at all.

Last Stand and Shield Wall wouldn't be nearly as impressive if they weren't essentially the only emergency buttons left in the tanking game. I think it was Gurgthock who posted in another thread that Stoneshields should be changed to mini-Shield Walls anyway, since chain-chugging them is stupid...that's a great idea, and assuming it makes an effective choice for extending your survivability vs. physical damage (i.e. quite a bit better than a super healing potion), would go a ways towards helping paladins.

This is certainly part of the problem as well - everything has a need for high mitigation nowadays. Even looking back at Karazhan, most of the fights in there, when geared appropriately, are pretty strict tank checks - Moroes hits like a truck, Maiden has a rather long Repentance which disables at least some of your healers, etc. Curator's about the only fight I tanked for the first time where I definitely felt like 'hey, the rest of the raid's being checked for a change.' Aran too, I guess. And of course, the introductory 25-man encounters are definitely tank gear checks.

On the other hand, though, you have to question what to do about this. No one really wants to tank non-stressful, low-mitigation-requirements ALL the time. Just bump up paladin mitigation, and throw them Paladin Stand and Holy Wall? What's the difference between the two classes, then?

Yeah, this strikes me as a rather obvious imbalance that paladins need some help with - give Seal of Justice an attack speed reduction component, or maybe tweak Avenger's Shield into something else. Won't really help their raid tanking game any - since presumably you could have other debuffers there - but it's holding them back a lot in small group content.


Anyway, without going into more details, I agree with a lot of what you have to say.

Like I said in my original post: I don't think the status quo is really desirable for anyone. Druids and Paladins deserve a shot at tanking raid bosses as well, and Prot specced warriors who aren't tanking shouldn't be automatically swapped out until the next fight that requires 4 tanks comes up.

Lol. Hopefully people have had some time at this point to put it into perspective. Of course, scrolling up, you may be right.

 

Jebraltar

Yeah. What I was trying to communicate with the laundry list there is that Warriors have a wide variety of abilities that neutralize/minimize boss abilities - a Warrior is a much better tank for Mag channelers, a Warrior is a much better tank on Julianne, a Warrior is a much better tank on Attumen, etc. It's not as pronounced as the all-too-common dragon-style "Fear Ward, Warrior, or GTFO," but it is a serious irritant that is rarely seen in reverse. Apart from differing aspects of mitigation, there are very few encounters where you would explicitly benefit from having a Paladin/Druid tanking a mob. There are a few mobs with charges that Druids are better at, there are a few mobs with touchy threat, etc, but there honestly is not a lot that just screams "Throw the Paladin at it so the boss doesn't manage to get off his 8k heal or start hitting the tank for an extra 2k per swing." Even if they're only useful for 5% of encounters, that's 5% of encounters that become far, far more difficult with a non-Warrior tanking.

I completely agree with this - and, moreover, healing potions in this game have gotten ridiculously underpowered. The HP pool of most classes has doubled, so the effectiveness of a potion has gone up by less than 50%? Outside of a five-man or soloing, I rarely bother to use a healing potion - an instant heal for 2.5+ is always nice, but it's really not that significant when you have more than 14k hitpoints buffed and you're getting hit for at least 4k.

The biggest problem with Last Stand and Shield Wall is that they're "oh shit" buttons that scale far, far beyond the point that any other oh shit button has. A 30% increase in HP might have given you ~2400 HP pre-BC in fairly good gear, but it can easily give you upwards of 5k now. Last Stand has gone from comparable but usually somewhat better than potions to almost invariably superior. Should the potions really be hitting me for 20% or less or my HP in entry-level raid gear?

That's the problem that they've run into with three tanking classes, I think...trying to balance the three. Unfortunately, in my view, they seem to have opted for "Warriors tank most stuff, Druids can tank stuff that hits absurdly hard and they're great offtanks, Paladins tank the little guys that come a thousand at a time" over a more elegant approach. Obviously, the first two are fairly easy to balance - Druids and Warriors generally aren't too far from each other in terms of mitigation...but how do you add the third one without giving the middle finger to anyone without a Protection Paladin?

Exactly. I want my guild's MT to stop being poor because every time he goes out farming, he has to make at least 100g to pay respecs to make up for the fact that he has DPS that makes mine look good...and not only would I like to tank - I'm pretty sure that my guild would like to know that they have four reasonably equally viable tanks - not a Warrior, two bears, and a Paladin who does fine as the offtank on trash and Moroes. This particularly worries me as we come closer to the point where we start our second Kara group - I don't know whether I can tank Kara if I were to go in as the MT for the second group, and I'm especially unsure about whether or not I could tank Kara without a Warrior serving as my TC + Demo Shout slave. Recruiting is hard enough without needing to limit it to "Class: Warrior; Spec: Protection"

 

Crowl

The difference would be that they were equal on raid bosses and the pally continued to destroy a warrior when it came to aoe tanking, net result prot warriors would become obsolete.

At the end of the day, both pallys and druids offer a number of advantages and a lot more utility than a prot warrior so unless that imbalance was also addressed there is no call to address the minor imbalance in MT'ing ability that a prot warrior has over a druid tank. I won't comment on a pally tank as we don't have any in the guild, most of ours seem to like healing except one that is retri.

As far as the most advanced guilds still using prot warriors, maybe its simply the fact that those are their most experienced tanks who have been tanking stuff since wow came out and they haven't found a compelling reason that has forced them to change from their most experienced tanks just because other classes of tank are now viable?

Anyway, if you read the thread on the theorycrafting board, druids are already better at mitigating damage, so any changes should be to buff the poor suffering warriors.

 

NicotineJones

You don't think the utility that thunderclap, shouts, and sunders offer is comparable to the utility that a blessing, an aura, and possibly a judgement offer?

 

Jebraltar

That speaks of problems on both sides of the fence that need to be fixed. Honestly, though, I think that you're being irrational about this. A Warrior is flat-out superior (Horde-side at the least) on any boss that fears. He has a better interrupt for any boss that casts interruptible spells. He has Last Stand and Shield Wall - amazing "oh shit" buttons. In addition to abilities like that, right now, a naked Warrior gets over a thousand health more than a naked Paladin. (I apologize to the Druids, by the way - I use Paladins as examples because I know far less about Druids.) His itemization is far more flexible, particularly due to only needing 25% total avoidance/block in order to achieve uncrushable with Shield Block up. A Warrior can generally ignore Shield Block Rating - a Paladin needs extremely good gear to avoid that need. A Warrior can focus on stamina/armour over avoidance - a Paladin will lose his only mitigation advantage, Holy Shield's ability to absorb more attacks without crushing blows, if he does so. A Warrior has 10% damage reduction on all attacks compared to a Paladin's 6% - 16% spell reduction compared to a Paladin's 10%.

Why does this need to be double stacked? Why does the Warrior need the most versatile toolkit and mitigation that demolishes the Paladin's?


A Protection Paladin when not tanking can heal - they aren't good at it, and they absolutely cannot do it in the same gear as they tank in, but they have a limited capacity to do so. They aren't much better at this than Protection Warriors are at DPS. Buffs are comparable between the two - Challenging Shout and Battle Shout are buffs with a huge impact - you don't want anybody tanking without Challenging Shout if the mob hits hard, you don't want to forgo Battle Shout in your DPS group if you can get it.

The problem that you are raising is that Protection Warriors aren't sufficient in the DPS role. Why not fix this instead of incapacitating two other classes?

I could certainly see this argument being the reason that Death and Taxes would continue to use a Protection Warrior, at the least for their main tank. However, there are a few things to keep in mind...One is that they are using four Protection spec'd Warriors - ignoring the flexibility that you say Feral Druids or Protection Paladins bring to the raid. Why would they do this? They were certainly quick to pick up Shadow Priests, and to shift main healing roles primarily onto Paladins and Druids.

Besides that, there is a more fundamental problem with your proposal: This isn't just the old guard bleeding-edge guilds. How many guilds use Protection Paladins as main tanks in 25-man raids? How many guilds attacking high-end content use Protection Paladins or feral Druids extensively in the tanking roles at all? Even newly formed guilds are still generally going with Warrior main tanks for content past Karazhan, and I am literally unaware of a Protection Paladin tanking any content past Magtheridon. Does this seem like a situation where there are advantages and disadvantages that balance each other out?

 

◊ Lord BEEF

We use one or two bears in every raid. They're good at tanking and they're useful during the fight after whatever they were tanking has died.

Multiple protection warriors would likely work out alright if you're willing to have them swap in and out of a lot of fights.

As a healer I don't see a dramatic difference between our high attendance bear and warrior main tanks. I feel if they die it's because I fucked up not because of class balance issues.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Jebraltar

True, I was saying more than was reasonable there and I apologize. Bear tanks are very close to Warriors with mitigation. Paladin tanks are the ones who suffer most from the mitigation deficit - bears mostly suffer from lacking abilities like Last Stand, Shield Wall, and the use of potions.

 

Crowl

What's irrational about saying that if you gave a pally all the oh shit options of a warrior, that people would always go for a pally, you have taken away a warrior's advantages and the pally has kept his and would thus be far more flexible and useful. (Note, I think you might have missed the bit I was replying to with my comment, they mentioned paladin stand and holy wall and I was responding to that)


Incapacitating two classes? While there do seem to be issues for a pally, if you played a feral druid you would know that they very clearly aren't incapacitated.


Shadow priests offer a clear advantage over the status quo with their changes for tbc, if the changes that made pallys and druids viable tanks didn't offer a clear advantage they would simply stick with the experienced tanks they already had and just minmax things by swapping out prot warriors when their dps harmed the raid on fights where they didn't need to tank.

Whats so different about normal guilds, they are just as likely to have had the same tanks for quite some time, so why would they throw away all that experience just for the sake of change, you make changes when they benefit you e.g. whenever possible our OT in raids is a druid because quite frankly they absolutely destroy a prot warrior for usefulness in that role if you do not intend to minmax and bench unneeded tanks on certain fights.

 

Jebraltar

I was considering the bumping Paladin mitigation aspect up moreso - but even including the Paladin Stand and Holy Wall, there are still a number of abilities for either class with no corresponding ability for the other - fear still means "use a Warrior." What would be nice, however, would be if "boss doesn't have a 1.0 attack speed" didn't mean "don't bring a Paladin." The mitigation advantage, and, to a lesser extent, the "oh shit" buttons, make it far less viable to bring a Paladin on an encounter where heavy mitigation is needed - and preferable to bring a Warrior over a Druid.

Last Stand and the mitigation differences are not even close to the only reasons to bring Warriors as tanks over Paladins. They're a great deal of the reason that you would almost certainly never choose a Paladin as a main tank over a Warrior, certainly. They alone do not define the extent of Warrior abilities. Sunder is useful. Thunderclap is useful. Demoralizing shout is useful, and the only out of those three abilities that is duplicated by other classes. Challenging Shout is enormously useful. Battle Shout is useful. Are these Protection-only abilities? No, they can be provided by DPS Warriors as well...but consider this: What does a Protection Paladin bring to a raid that any other Paladin does not? (Apart from filling a tank spot rather than a healing spot.) What does a Feral Druid in bearform bring that any other Druid could not?

Why bring a Warrior over a Paladin when the Paladin can AOE tank and rival him for single target mitigation / HP? Let's consider another angle: Why bring a Paladin over a Warrior when the Warrior can Shield Bash a heal and rival him for single target mitigation / HP? Why bring a Paladin over a Warrior when the Warrior can avoid a fear and rival him for single target mitigation / HP? Simple: Because it usually doesn't matter. AOE tanking situations are at least as rare as fears, interruptible spells, reflectible spells, etc. They are not the primary concern when selecting a main tank - having a flexible tanking corps will obviously benefit you, but your main tank isn't chosen by gimmick fights. If he is, then good luck choosing a main tank who combines all of the gimmicks into one class.

The fact is, saying that Paladins should be inferior to Warriors as tanks because they have so much more utility is rather ridiculous. The benefits of having a Paladin in the raid over a Warrior are not pronounced, and they are less pronounced with each Paladin that you add to the raid. (Salvation, Kings, Wisdom/Might for DPS/healers; Kings, Wisdom/Might, Light for tanks; What other buffs make a big difference? Many guilds cover those buffs with their healing Paladins alone...)

True, I do have certain melodramatic tendencies.

What I was attempting to emphasize by saying "old guard" guilds was that even newly-formed guilds are leaning towards Warrior MTs. With the amount of guild turmoil that's taken place in BC, shouldn't there be at least a few guilds in SSC formed post-expansion with Paladin MTs if they are viable? There are some Druid MTs - though they're rare compared to Warriors - but there are no Paladin MTs. (Or so few as to be effectively none - similar to the old number of feral Druids tanking in BWL...)

 

Crowl

Newly-formed guilds will go for a mt based on the same criteria as anyone else though, they will decide based on skill, gear and experience, if the first two are fairly equal then warriors will tend to win quite easily on the 3rd one and thus its logical that there are far more warrior MTs than druids. The absence of paladin MTs doesn't automatically mean they are not viable, but it would seem to imply there was no compelling argument to choose a prot paladin over a warrior or druid.

One thing however, being the most efficient healer in the game prior to 2.1 won't have helped the cause of prot paladins, many guilds will lack healers a lot more than they lack tanks. I am not saying paladins are fine or anything like that, they do seem to have mitigation issues, but overlooking all the other factors affecting things would be shortsighted.

 

Touf

As a little aside, would people please stop using raid debuffs/buffs as reasons warriors are better? If you don't have a warrior MT, you'll have a dps warrior who can do Sunder/TC/Demo. Otherwise it's like saying warlocks are better dps because of COE/COS, or priests are better healers because of fort. Would you do any serious raid without those? No, you bring at least one warlock and priest no matter what because the spells are just that good. Same with warriors. Granted, imp TC is probably the #1 debuff you want up there, but it's not hard to get.

Personally, I think paladins/druids should be adequate substitutes for warriors, make it so you can only have 3 slackers instead of 5 or whatever. Or, just make it so protection paladins are required/really really desired somewhere, it's that way for warriors right now anyway. Druids are the ideal offtanks right now, I think that's okay.

 

Branar

Well, let's be clear here. Guilds like Death and Taxes are always going to min/max - you don't want to balance the tanking game around them. Things like "flexibility" are of little value to them - they can attract enough quality players that if they have to have 4 protection warriors one fight, and replace three of them the next, it's no big deal. If one of their protection warriors doesn't like it and quits, they can almost certainly get another - and they don't recruit people who quit over that sort of thing in the first place, really. Unless you've got evidence that they bring 4 protection warriors to every single boss mob (which frankly, would be impressive - even D&T has to deal with the enrage timers liberally sprinkled throughout TBC), it's probably not worth discussing.

Well, come on now. Most mobs that you're tanking who require interrupts can be interrupted by a rogue, a mage, or someone else...or be dispelled by someone if the effect buffs them. Heck, for Mag's channelers (the only mob that comes to mind where you're probably tanking mobs that can't be easily interrupted by someone else) our feral druids don't get any interrupt assistance...the fact that there are only 2-3 people in range of the shadowbolt volley means that its damage is relatively trivial. They aren't really harder for our bears to tank at all, despite the volleys getting through. And if they were, we'd assign rogues, DPS shaman, or whatever to assist them. I'm sorry, but I don't see the ability to interrupt mobs as a very integral part of the warrior tanking advantage.

And to be honest, I think that's an example of the sort of advantage tanks SHOULD have over each other: something that's easily compensated for. If you're a paladin, yeah, maybe you need one of any of the 5 or 6 other classes with an interrupt ability to stop a mob's heals...but if that's all that's wrong, it's perfectly tankable by a paladin. And a warrior can get by without one of those 5 or 6 classes.

Another example of 'acceptable' tanking advantage: Attumen's curse that increases your chance to miss by 50% for 10 seconds. It's a curse, so it's not a huge deal if it hits you, since it can be dispelled. And even if it isn't dispelled, it's hardly an insurmountable threat loss. Warriors can reflect it, which gives them a slight advantage in the mitigation department; but paladins are impacted by it landing even less than warriors, because a high percentage of their threat is non-melee (holy shield + consecrate). A great balancing situation, IMO - anyone can tank it, warriors have a slight advantage, and the paladin mechanics mitigate their disadvantage so it's managable. Druids probably fare the worst of all, but it's hardly overpoweringly bad, since there's always the final solution of simply dispelling the curse.

If you're talking about the curse, see above. If you mean because he can be disarmed...it's 10 seconds out of every 60. I really think it hardly qualifies warriors for "much better tank" status. And, as far as I know, it's the only boss fight from Kara onward where disarm is functional (Moroes' adds, I guess, but since they can be paladin feared you'll have a hard time convincing me that paladins are at a disadvantage on that encounter).


Again, let me reiterate: Paladin tanks need help. But I don't think that the very situational warrior abilities - some of which only help on a few mobs, some of which are easily replicable by other classes - are really the problem here.


Agreed. Super Healing Potions are, I think, perfectly adequate along with healthstones and bandages for healing AOE/environmental damage. But tanks need something more at this stage of the game.


Sunder is replicated by Expose Armor.

Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout are certainly useful, true. But I think your comparison of warrior core abilities with paladin core abilities is a bit skewed.

Think of it this way - if you're a protection paladin, what percentage of the holy paladin's healing do you think you can put out? Assume a fight where you can wear whatever gear you like (e.g., you're not required to tank something beforehand), and the other healers let you handle whatever style of healing is most optimal - for a prot pally, I *think* that means spamming FoL on the tanks, since they'll almost certainly have blessing of light. Are you 80% of a healer? 70%? 50%? I've honestly got no idea, but I suspect the number is probably well above 50%, varying some based on fight.

A protection warrior is simply not going to put up numbers even remotely close to a fury or arms warrior when everything is taken into consideration. There's maybe one or two fights - Aran, for example, where low armor and liberal doses of rage thanks to the RSTS spells helps even the playing field - where you can be competitive with the right gear, but overall if you're a protection warrior DPSing, you're a wasted raid spot. TBC melee DPS is built around group synergy. You don't bring Improved Battle Shout for the rogue group, you don't bring Blood Frenzy for the physical DPS, you don't benefit from windfury like an arms warrior would...in short, you're just not pulling your weight anymore. Better to let an arms or fury warrior do thunderclap, demo, and sunder - which they can do as well as a prot warrior - and sit the fight out for someone who's bringing something to the table.

Heck, BEEF says it:

Protection warriors simply aren't any good if they're not tanking. Sunder, Demo Shout, and TClap justify *one* warrior, DPS or Prot.

 

Eir

A Paladin with no talent points spent can heal better than a Warrior with no talent points spent can DPS. A Warrior with no talent points spent can tank better than a Paladin with no talent points spent.

This is, I believe, the crux of the issue and why it's so hard for Blizzard to balance these different classes which have differing strengths without any talent points spent.

 

◊ Cathela

I agree here. I've never quite understood why some paladin tanks are always hung up on utility stuff like shield bash.

Having switched back and forth between Prot and Holy in the last few weeks I can say the number is between 50% and 60%. You lose a fair bit of throughput and you lose a ton of longevity. I'm certain that an intelligent Prot warrior who's doing dps in a raid situation can perform more than comparably relative to an arms/fury warrior.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

◊ Cathela

The problem with the comparison is that nobody plays the game with a blank talent spec, and a prot warrior's talents help a bit with dps while a prot paladin's talents don't help at all with healing. An 8/5/48 warrior does substantially more dps than an 0/0/0 warrior (one-hand spec, vitailty, focused rage, devastate), but an 0/49/12 paladin might as well be 0/0/0 when he's healing because there's nothing in that spec that improves healing at all.

So yes, baseline paladin healing is better than baseline warrior dps, because it has to be.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

• Morsexy

I just dont think it will ever be balanced or work right, ever.

Someone will lose, and there is no way you can balance these three classes, and my honest opinion is that we will all be playing the next MMO before they or anyone gets a grip on that fact.

Not unless they were willing to just make everyone the same. Full t6 everyone has 19k armor, has 7 abilities, doing an average of 500 threat or whatever. Takes the same damage, Bears have a 15 second 'rageofthepandabears" and all damage is reduced by 75% etc etc. Paladins gain Power of the Furious Justice and only gain this righteous anger when they hit a mob or take damage.

Then I see everything working out. Or give warriors mana, that could work too.

 

Narugh

I think most bears are satisfied at the moment, the OT role feels perfect and personally I think bringing 1 resto and one feral to a 25 raid fits nicely if you look how on the popularity of the class. I think Nihilum usually brings that, so I assume feral off tanks are doing pretty decent in end game.

Only fear is of course if we can keep that role when we start to hit the armor cap.

 

PsiVen

For our Vashj kill last night, we used one of each tanking class. Same for Leotheras earlier this week (plus a bear). There are some annoying mechanics, but really I'm more surprised than anything by how few guilds seem to be using paladin tanks. The bottom line seems to be that you have to be an acceptable substitute as MT to be treated seriously in any other tanking role.

About the crushing blows thing, I found the comment in the Stratics chat to be completely out of left field and doubt very much that anything would change with the mechanic. There would have to be massive changes to all three tanking classes, which means we'd be purely speculating on possibilities.

 

Umph

I agree with this. I think a lot of the perceived problems with feral Druids is that many don't realize the best role they can play is that of an off-tank/DPS - everything suggests that this is our intended role, from our tiered gear to our talent trees and shape shifting. Certainly we can main-tank, but it is painfully obvious that this is not what we excel at.

Paladins on the other hand...

 

Exewut

I think it's going to be impossible to get a better summary of this threat than this. On all accounts Bears are very useful as an OT (having the choice to lower migation for threat), and in some limited cases as MT (big yellow non crushable hits), which can still be handled by a warrior without a problem most of the time. Paladins on the other hand...

On removing crushing blows. I believe the idea of crushing blows right now is to enable diversification between tanks. Perhaps the streakyness of the damage is unintended. Changing it so curshing blows to happen 30% of the time for 1,25% of normal damage would be a "change" which hardly changes the interclass balance.

 

Crowl

If you look at recruitment posts, the lack of pally tanks is probably down to one simple thing, guilds tend to lack healers and most people would tend to prefer to raid in some manner rather than demanding to be a prot pally and a raid getting cancelled.

 

Jayde

I think you've touched on a big factor here that's more or less on the dime.

There seem to be a lot more encounters were you want to shelf your excess tanks for DPS than for healing. While a Paladin could toss on healing gear and backup, that usually isn't the issue. Most encounters are balanced for a fairly static amount of healers, with a variable number of tanks vs. DPS. Druids are good at this because they can swap to DPS gear and do pretty well. Paladins aren't, because they can only swap to healing from a practical sense--which you probably already have enough of.

Warriors don't really "stack" well, and I think Paladins suffer from a similar plight. Druids are a lot more flexible, so they have less problems with the current encounter design.

The main thing an extra Paladin tank does afford, however, is another blessing...which can be pretty nice to have. They also generate very high amounts of threat from my experience, and are quite adept at multi-mob tanking. (When we're on AE packs and I'm on my Mage, Paladin tanks actually make me feel secure that I'm not going to get splattered.)

 

Branar

I would have thought more, especially given how little the 20+ holy talents benefit Flash of Light spam, but I'll take your word for it.

Yeah, I guess the bottom line is that situations where you want to trade a tank for a healer going from one fight to another are very rare. That's a very good point...paladin flexibility is almost totally useless.

While I agree with you, I don't that's a reason to say "well, things can just stay the way they are." Just because they can't be perfect doesn't mean they can't be better.

I would be very surprised. Fury and arms warriors benefit hugely from group synergy - LotP helps flurry uptime, arms warriors get a larger benefit from Windfury than just about any other class (maybe Ret paladins, I guess), etc. It's not just "Oh, the prot warrior does less damage, so when you give him the same force multipliers you end up with a smaller total", it's that prot warrior mechanics simply don't benefit from force multipliers the way arms and fury warriors do. So there's less incentive to stick him in a DPS group, and when you do he benefits less. As someone requested earlier in the thread though, some actual maths are probably required at this point in the discussion.

 

Jebraltar

Consider also that a Protection Paladin and a Warrior in equal gear have stats that are nowhere near equal.

If this were true, then why would Druid tanks be so enormously common, in spite of the continued usefulness of Druid healers? Druids are also still capable of filling the healer role - were this imbalance promoted simply by a preference for healers over tanks, one should not see enormously more feral Druids filling tank roles compared to Paladins. Also worth noting is that the Paladin is also capable of serving as a healer in any fight that does not require a massive number of tanks - I healed for Prince and Nightbane last week, in spite of being spec'd 0/49/12. A feral Druid is comparatively crippled in healing - meaning that it's the choice between tank/DPS on a fight that doesn't need a tank or tank/healer on a fight that doesn't need a tank, the choice is tank/DPS. I may be missing something here, but I'm not seeing how a lack of healers would lead to a preference for Druid tanks over Paladins.

The point is that the abilities others claim justify taking Paladins over Warriors are also literally baseilne class abilities. You want a third blessing? Well, bring a 41/20 Paladin. Aura for a group? Ditto. There isn't a single debuff or buff that Protection Paladins bring to the table worth having - their only niche is being able to AOE tank and having a limited ability to tank physical immune mobs. (They lose Seal damage, which is a sizable amount of threat.)

It's not an integral part - but it's yet another advantage. The point is, any time that a mob has an ability designed with a counter in mind, which class possesses the counter? Almost invariably Warriors.

Attumen's curse affects ranged and spell miss - it actually provides a double whammy for Paladin threat in that it can cause both melee swings to miss (preventing Seals from landing) and increases the resist rate on Seals. Probably not the best example.

Paladin fear is a 1.5 second cast - if the Paladin is using that fear, he's not tanking.

They are not the sole problem - but they compound it. Would you rather have a class that interrupts tanking a Mag channeler? Yeah, if it's available. Would you rather have a class that can disarm tanking a disarmable boss/mob? Yeah, if it's available. Where are the "bring a pally, it helps!" abilities? All we see is "if this mob hits more than twice every five seconds, a Paladin is less likely to be crushed." How many dual wielders are there, honestly, in the raiding game? How many mobs with flurry, etc? On how many of these is burst really the problem?

D'oh.

Generally around 60%-70%. If the fight involves heavy burst damage, since I lack the ability to use Light's Grace to throw out a quick Holy Light, likely less than 50%. (Also, Holy Light is not even close to efficient without Illumination, so it will destroy my mana pool.) If the fight tests longetivity, perhaps 50% - I can literally heal for more than three times as long without running out of mana as a Holy spec. Healing on Nightbane, I hit a potion on every cooldown in order to avoid running completely out of mana as Protection spec - healing as a hybrid of Holy/Protection, I hit a potion one to avoid running out of mana. As full Holy, experience suggests that it would have been a waste of mats for me to even have been carrying potions for that fight.

There is a massive difference between healing essentially forever with Super Mana Potions and healing for ten minutes with them. (There are more than a few occasions where I've noticed that my mana hit 60%, taken a mana potion, and only had my mana hit 60% again after the pot had cooled off.)

The Protection Warrior can do Thunderclap, Demo, and help stack Sunder faster, saving both DPS Warriors and the MT rage, allowing the MT to build more threat and saving the DPS Warriors from generating as much. Roughly the same reasoning as having a MT with Thunderfury in the age of 100 DPS 1h'ers.

I think that this is a problem that results directly from Blizzard's choice of continuing with their current gear mechanics - particularly, since Warriors and Paladins generally want the same gear, why give Paladins the gear to tank with when the Warrior OT can pick up the gear and be prepared if you later need a MT? Even with class sets, one needs to choose gearing up a Protection Paladin over gearing up a Holy Paladin or members of several other classes. Druids, t4 tokens aside, suffer less from this because Druid tanking pieces are rarely useful to anyone else. There's also the obvious fact that they are damn good at the OT/DPS role - far better than a Warrior.

This assumes that the need for healers is far in excess of the need for tanks.

The problem there is that a Paladin has to trade 5% parry, a large increase in threat (hard to quantify the 2 second decrease on Judgement cooldown without math'ing out a cycle), and a great deal of mana efficiency when in the tanking role in order to even pick up the first 20 Holy Talents...Sure, a 20/41/0 Protection Paladin has some tanking ability - I OT'ed for a while as 30/31/0 in Karazhan. They still sacrifice quite a lot of it in exchange for flexibility - would a 0/30/31 Fury/Protection Warrior have some tanking ability? Yeah, but he'd be lacking a lot compared to a more raid-tanking spec'd Warrior. There's also the simple fact that Flash of Light spam is useful, but insufficient for many fights - particularly the ones where you would want to trade tanks for healers.

Now, that's not to say that Flash of Light spam isn't a good thing to have or that Protection Paladins are so awful that they can't pull it off for more than twenty seconds or anything of the sort. However, the difference between me being Holy spec and me being Protection spec...well, I feel like I could solo heal Nightbane between air phases with a Holy spec and mana potions. I chain-drink mana potions and hope that I don't run out of mana before the fight is over as a Protection spec.

 

Crowl

With the increased use of enrage timers, if you have adds that need tanking, having a class that can switch to doing useful dps after their add is down is a huge bonus for druids over pallys and warriors, not to mention the shadowpriest synergy for holy pallys.


That doesn't seem an unreasonable assumption though.