I like your ideas, and agree with you they need to give prot some healing utility. I had a rough idea I posted awhile back, of a deep prot talent that reduced the cast time of a paladin's healing spells by .5 seconds for 10 seconds when a paladin took damage, stacking up to 5 times. When tanking, it could be used for some self heals. But if the paladin is not tanking, he could utilize it by keeping blessing of sacrifice on the tank to trigger the ability, keep judgement of light up to heal that damage.

But yeah, Paladins need to be near equal to warriors on the base stuff; 10% damage reduction, 16% magic reduction, health. What should differentiate them, then, is the extras they bring beyond that. Warriors have shield wall, last stand. Paladins can AoE tank and have their 8 charge holy shield for better crush protection.

Prot outdamaging fury isnt that bad, on a second thought. Any serious dps warrior would be fury specced anyway. Prot dps is threat capped very, very hard. We would be leveling, tanking, and farming in prot spec, yeh; but would it be really overpowered? There's more than one class who levels, farms, and raids with the same tree.

Perhaps a bit of a derail incoming, but I felt it was relevant to this topic and since being dropped into a very unique position tonight due to yet another of our MTs quitting the raid scene, I'm looking for a bit of advice. With the launch of TBC, I was adamant I wanted to tank with my paladin; I specced for it, geared, excessively enchanted and socketed but was eventually 'forced' to respec Holy as we had a shortage of healers, and as I raidleader I felt it necessary to lead by example. This is the tank set I've built up anyhow:

http://armory.wow-europe.com/#charac...erhood&n=Daine

Needs a couple more Solid Stars, but it's generally a pretty solid set for where we are at. Seeing the previous droprates of Wrynn Dynasty and T4 gloves, it's more than likely I could pick both of those up very soon. However, tankadins still have a stigma attatched to them, and despite being the (now) best geared regular tank, I do wonder whether my time would be better spent gearing/repping my warrior:

http://armory.wow-europe.com/#charac...hood&n=Alariel

She's pretty fresh to 70, took her to a few Kara's and generally enjoy the feel of warrior tanking and what it brings to the table over a paladin. However, it's gonna take a while to get this warrior where I need her to be, despite the obvious headstart she has in the hitpoints department, but she lacks avoidance and armour. To my knowledge, no paladin has ever successfully tanked Magtheridon, and this is what worries me - even with the best gear available to Daine which I'm not far off attaining, am I still going to be destroyed post-Gruul, and can I even handle Gruul whom we haven't killed yet? Some advice would be much appreciated.

That's a very good tanking set! I'd recommend getting a Vengeance card (Furies deck), obviously Wyrnn Dynasty Greaves, Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable, and T4 gloves. I'd also keep using Bracers of the Green Fortress over Bracers of Dignity. Oh, you should also probably pick up the Heroic Badges ring - your avoidance should be sufficient to handle it over Elementium Band of the Sentry and it's a great boost to HP/armour.

As far as your Warrior goes, yeah, reasonable gear for starting Kara - you'd obviously have to gear it up in there, which would be quite the pita.

Actually, a Paladin has tanked Magtheridon - I distinctly remember the topic on the WoW (American) Paladin forums about it. He also stated that it was his guild's first kill (and it was pre-nerf), if my memory serves. I may be mistaken.

You should be able to handle Gruul, but it's going to have close, close margins for error. Whether or not you can take it probably depends more on your healers than on anyone else at this point. (Particularly if you change a few slots to aim for higher armour/stamina so you can soak big hits.)

It will almost unquestionably be easier if you switch to your Warrior, but it will take longer - if you're planning to recruit another Warrior, I'd recommend sticking with the Paladin for now. If you're planning to simply take over the MT role yourself, it's probably worth the investment to gear your Warrior and switch mains.

Magtheridon would be no harder than Gruul to tank, which I do every week. The only reason I don't currently tank Magtheridon is that about 1 in 4-5 of his attacks is a giant Cleave that can't be a crushing blow, making him a premier Feral target.

It was said before, making the tanking tree higher dps than the dps trees... makes the dps trees obsolete. Fury is already pretty limited in raids due to ferals being way superior OTs, and only bringing imp TC as raid buff. Next to that the decently geared fury warriors start getting threat capped already. Arms brings a bit more, if specced for Blood Frenzy and Mortal Strike (yet to see a fight in 25mans where healing can't be interrupted tough).


As was mentioned before, the whole tanking disussion seems to depend on alot of class features or flaws:
- Prot Paladins and Prot warriors are useless when not tanking that's just how it is.
- A warrior who tanks an add that dies early is pretty much useless after that.
- Prot warriors are superior Maintanks for end game raiding when compared with prot pallies.
- Druids are a shapeshifter, not a hybrid and have their dps + tank tree in one, hence they can switch to cat and dps somewhat okish in their bear tank gear, toss innervates, cres, or do some heals (weak ones)

I think a more interesting part of the discussion is, why does none of the tanking classes properly scale with gear? If you outgear an encounter as tank it gets more and more difficult to actually hold aggro, shouldn't that get easier?

Actually for Druid if you outgear the encounter it gets exponentially easier from my experience. Sure, in theory you get less rage from being hit (against raid-level mobs this is irrelevant) but Druid gear tends to come with upgrades to agi, str as well as armour/sta/def. More damage and crit = more rage for Bear tanks. I'd assume the key for Warrior/Paladins is not to purposely outgear the fight.

Looking at the extremes, on one end you have a next-to-impossible to kill tank with no threat, on the other you have a paper tank with massive threat. Part of being a tank is (as far as possible) to pick your spot in between those two to suit the encounter.

I think this is a good point. The "15-20 points in Prot" offtank is really almost obsolete in the 25-man raiding game at this point; either you don't need any offtanks at all for the encounter (in which case those 20 points in Prot are wasted), or you can field enough offtanks through druids (or paladins, on specialty AOE encounters).

I mean, I guess it's good that it exists as an option. If your guild had no/few feral druids then one of these would be a decent (if less flexible in terms of switching roles mid-fight) substitute. But you're replacing a class who could tank better and then DPS better with a class who'll be a slightly worse tank, and probably significantly worse DPS (without the opportunity to swap gear).

Maybe it's offset by the superior (?) dps a 0/4x/15-20 warrior could put out on fights where no offtank was required.