I'm saying it doesn't matter unless it lets us tank progression raid bosses. If it does, then the spec is fine. If not, then you are giving up way too much as a prot spec to make it reasonable. If you are geared for protection, you're going to have, what, at most 50% of the +healing as someone with healing gear? Why would you sacrifice all that just to be an off-tank or trash mob tank?

Absolutely. And 20% was just a number, it wasn't based on anything. The main theorycraft issues for a tank are threat and mitigation. Mitigation, properly specced, you were looking at what, 5% difference? Not so bad, though keep in mind with stat budgets, etc paladins will have naturally less Stamina and Defense in order to make room for Int and +Spell Power, making the gap wider.

Well, you need a bar to measure things by. Paladins can tank all current 5 man content just fine; I've tanked UBRS before. The issue with the class was that the moment you stepped foot into a raid, your tanking abilities were useless because someone else could do it way better, and you were best off healing/cleansing. Using 5 mans as a baseline for anything is not a good measure, and PvP is not a good bar for the tanking mechanic either, obviously, so what you are left with is raids.

Improved Holy Shield would be an awesome talent, especially if you could get a perfect shield block and mitigate crushing blows. And yes, AD would be much more tolerable as a 3 point talent. Having oh shit abilities is very nice, but probably not worth 5 talent points.

One "annoying" thing with paladin tanks in raid content is, you'll need to have a warrior sundering the mob anyway, which is quite a lot of rage wasted on a dps warrior(especially if he forgets to reapply it often enough and the stack drops a few times). You could instead use a prot war and have a perma sunder stack the whole fight, and keep your dps warriors at their max dps value, and switch the paladin to another role, say dps too(not sure how viable dps paladins are in raids atm). Which is why imo, you won't see paladins main tanking too often unless: a) there's no warrior in your guild who wants to be a prot tank anymore after BC b) you're an officer/GM and a paladin and as such you will force warriors to step out of the main tanking position c) all your warriors have rerolled other classes because of the rage normalisation ^^

I agree specing prot without main tanking feels like a waste, however I'm curious at how viable a partial prot spec is in group pvp as a support dps(prot/ret or something, haven't checked the templates) which means you could have more than one thing to do with the spec.

d) Your rogues purchase the "Expose Armor" skill at the trainer.

Expose armor is only stronger than sunder if talented, only few raiding rogues have it anyway since it's use is C'thun phase 1 and that is about it. Not to mention that keeping expose up is much more damaging to a Rogue's DPS than keeping is sunder for a Warrior's.

As for Paladins MTing, i don't think that is about to happen soon, they are however much better at keeping aggro from many multiple mobs, like on Gluth zombies, at a lesser risk than any other class capable of tanking, and expansion will just streghten that role. Now it is only to Blizzard to implement situations like those on raids.

My personal opinion is this.
If content requires a paladin tank, it cannot require a Prot paladin tank. It would be like having a boss for which you MUST have a survival hunter, content hasnt to this point been made that way, nor should it.

If content doesnt require a prot-Paladin, then why spec prot ?
The opportunity cost for speccing prot is far higher than the other two trees, especially if you essentially never use your specialization outside of the odd job a Ret/Holy paladin can do.

The worst thing that could happen for paladin tanks is for the trees to remain as they are, and for Blizzard to throw in 1 Gimmick fight that requires holy damage to tank. I dont think I could face 12 months of "Paladin tanking is fine look at XYZ", where XYZ is said, singular, gimmick fight. It would be the equivalent of claiming Warlocks are a tanking class because of the Twins encounter.

Prot paladins need to be made a viable tank in their own right (the same as Bear-Tanks) or it will continue to be a waste of a talent tree past Kings.

Yeah, they probably can't make encounters where you need prot paladins particularly (although they clearly DO make encounters where you need prot warriors, or at the very least which cannot be done without prot warriors unless you are both a) alliance for salv and kings and b) overgeared).

I think the idea is that they will make boss encounters where multiple tanks are necessary, and it's the choice of the raid group as to whether the spare tanks in the raid are joe random fury/prot warrior who will DPS in his spare time or joe random prot/holy paladin who will buff all the time and heal in his spare time. Joe random prot/holy paladin should also be a better choice of extra tank and then joe random arms/fury warrior who doesn't spec prot at all.

Exactly, and that's why at the moment it is a pointless tree outside of a few survivalist pvp-oriented builds.

So why wouldn't we be viable as main tanks in our own right?

Our mitigation is on par with Warriors. Itemization shouldn't be an issue, because we can use the same type of items as they do. Our threat generation is competitive at base and scales better. What exactly stops us from tanking then?

With smaller raid sizes, hybrid classes become a lot more important. Let's list out the general order of tanking prowess people are spouting nowadays.

Prot Warrior
Feral Druid/Prot Pally(depending on encounter)
Warrior
Paladin
Druid

Let's say you have an encounter that requires a prot tank, immediately followed by an encounter that needs 3 things to be tanked. Your raid is perfectly balanced and has 3 paladins, warriors, and druids of each spec. On the first encounter, everyone but the prot warrior dps/heals. On the second encounter, the prot warrior, feral druid and the prot paladin tank. Tigole once said encounters are designed to be possible to be beaten with odd group compositions. But even if that is thrown out the window, let's say when designing this particular encounter, they draw the "tanking spec required" line here:

Prot Warrior
Feral Druid/Prot Pally
----Anything below this line will die----
Warrior
Paladin
Druid

Further don't forget encounters can now be designed with paladin tanks in mind, since both sides have them. Yeah, yeah, I know, "gimmick fight"; but the biggest thing separating gimmick fights from regular "tank n' spank" is just how much it deviates from expected mechanics.

Are well geared non prot. warriors really worse tanks than prot. paladins?

Our mitigation is weaker, we lack shield block and "oh shit" abilities like last stand and shield wall.
Our itemization will always be inferior because it has to be split over more stats, and we lack an AoE taunt, or any form of second taunt if the first is resisted.

A fully speced out paladin is still behind the game relative to a fury/arms warrior tanking-wise, though they are close enough to be considered even bar any encounter with an enrage type mechanic requiring shieldwall, or which pushes the very limit of damage absorbtion (Patchwerk, Twins). The difference is the opportunity cost the two classess pay to reach that level of tanking viability.

If Prot paladins are not SIGNIFICANTLY better than non-prot warriors and non-prot paladins there will be no reason to use a prot paladin rather than making a dps warrior throw on his tank gear.

You don't really "lack shield block." Holy Shield + Redoubt gives you 9 blocks every 10 seconds versus 2 blocks every 5 seconds with Shield Block. Holy Shield also generates threat.

Somewhat different in that Redoubt is a proc, but 10% should be reliable enough to keep it going, and it doesn't require a button push to activate, which can be valuable. In any case you can't just go "Shield Block? Warriors, check. Paladins, no."

Itemization is not necessarily always weaker. While split over more stats, you can't necessarily predict the allocation of stats. If I recall correctly, the current stats on "tier 4" actually has better mitigation and avoidance for Paladins than Warriors.

As for super-massive damage output requiring Shield Wall/Last Stand, there's always Lay On Hands - not as good, true, but it's something.

Well, Redoubt and Holy Shield are only 30%, as opposed to 75% for shield block. That being said, with rapidly attacking mobs or more than one mob, it doesn't take long for redoubt to start doing more for blocking than warriors are capable of. The real issue is that warriors recieve less crushings because they get to remove the chance for it to occur twice every 5 seconds, while paladins would have to get an extra 15% avoidance to do the same.

The only reason our class tanking abilities doesn't seem better is because many of them are not exclusive. Devo Aura, BoSanct, BoKings, LoH, BoP. Divine Shield does add a nice unique niche though. (The ability to strip off debuffs at will is pretty powerful, assuming they don't keep adding debuffs that persist through DS. -_-; ) It'd be rather difficult to make them exclusive without impacting the paladin's strong group utility, something I see as a defining class strength.

A multi-target taunt (Righteous Defense) should also count as an AoE taunt, methinks. And it's available 12 times as much as the warrior equivalent while affecting less targets. Also, hasn't it been shown that taunt relies on +spell hit? A paladin is much more likely to fit that stat on his armor than a warrior, so it means paladin taunts are potentially more reliable.



The only way for that to happen is for a Prot warrior to be a much better tank than a non-Prot warrior, so that there's room for a Prot paladin tank that is a significantly better tank than the non-Prot warrior while not necessarily a superior tank than a Prot warrior. That is currently not the case, since Blizzard seems to want to avoid "pigeonholing" (If you want to raid, all warriors go Prot; Priests Holy; Mages Fire; Druids Resto; etc etc.).


We're also assuming that the relative utility of paladin healing remains the same. HoT stacking and larger HP pools should make channeling paladin heals of less value. It also frees up extra healing for paladin tanks with lesser mitigation. Something I haven't seen you analyze is the nature of paladin threat generation and tanking. It's not the same as warriors (rage vs. mana/available skills), so it has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Is the warrior the golden standard of tanking? Is a warrior, with his combination of threat generation and mitigation, the best possible tank for all situations now? Most of them? Some of them? What about in BC?

Our mitigation is weaker HOW?

Warriors with 0 into Protection: 10% damage reduction on all
Paladins with 27 into Protection: ~10% damage reduction on all, +20 defense, +6% stamina
Warriors with 40 into Protection: ~16% damage reduction on all, +20 defense, +5% stamina

Unless you think Blizzard will require Prot Warriors on all raid content, I don't see how you can use mitigation as an argument against Paladin tanking. As for our "oh shit" abilities, we have DS+RD, LoH, and Ardent Defender.

We are somewhat limited on how Blizzard chooses to itemize our set tanking gear, but no one's making you take those anyway. You can just pick up non-set Plate tanking gear. We even have a slight advantage in the fact that we don't need to get melee hit, because we have a talent for it.

AoE taunt? Paladins are less likely to lose the mobs in the first place. Not to mention the fact that our taunt affects 3 targets to begin with. As for resists, Warriors don't have a second taunt either. MB forces the mob to attack the Warrior for few seconds but has no effect on the aggro list, AFAIK.

Define significant then. Prot Paladins get +20 defense and +6% stamina over non-Prot Warriors. That seems good enough to me.

Given equal-level gear, I would say yes (speaking as someone who has a level 70 Paladin in Beta and has tanked 20-mans and MC on my alt Warrior in Live). Could the Protection tree be a bit better? Sure. But I think that has more to do with the fact that Weapon Expertise in T8 is an utterly useless talent for us more than anything else.

Did they change the Paladin taunt? Last I read about it, it was said that it was a special taunt that could not be resisted (granted, that is maybe pretty outdated info).

I have to fully agree here. If a Warrior not specced for tanking is better than the other 2 hybrids specced solely for that job, then something is horribly wrong.

Talents were updated some time ago, but not on the official website or the PTR. Imp. RF now gives +6% damage reduction. Imp. Resist Auras is gone and replaced with spell warding, 4% damage reduction from spells, and Imp. Divine Shield has the same effects as before, but is now called sacred duty and also ups stamina by 6%.

so it's 10% damage reduction total, but only to spells. To physical we get 6%.

Ok well Given I dont have a Beta key, Ill plead ignorance.
Obviously all those changes make a big difference to the viability of Prot.

Warriors yes are 16% on spells, 10% on melee.

Yes defence matters for itemization and won't scale, but it is still important.

As for the 6% stamina, 6th tier talent called Sacred Duty. 2 points for 6% stamina.

There's no practical way right now to gear and buff a paladin to survive through a hateful strike. Maybe with 2 pt imp LoH. I've played around with ctprofiles (here if you're instrested) and picked up all the best offset tank pieces in the game leaving out a couple of overly difficult pieces to obtain (mostly Redemption pants for 30 stam, used bloodsoaked instead, later naxx shield), I only came up to just shy of 6k hp unbuffed. That's about where the rank 14 warriors are in their DPS gear and a sword/board. And keep in mind I need to have 10% more than them because, you know, defensive stance.

You can most likely do twins, but hateful strikes is definately not happening.

Well, since we're talking about the next patch, you only need 4% more than them. The profile you linked has 467 stamina, so with sacred duty, you would have 495 stamina, with kings, etc, flasks, maybe a world buff if necessary, you could probably pull it off. Anyway, hateful strike offtanking is a specific situation that plays strongly in a druids favor (since next patch bear form is health + 40%).

Closer to 10% actually. Don't forget about +10% to armor from Toughness. I know the Warriors can get it too, but we were comparing Prot Paladins to non-Prot Warriors, so...