Letting something potentially useful get sharded is never a wise move. I'm Prot myself and I MT a Karazhan each week, but I've picked up 3-4 nice healing upgrades that would have been sharded otherwise, and you can bet I'm damn glad to have them on Aran.

If your loot system encourages the sharding of useful loot, then probably needs to be looked at. (In my view, DKP is entirely unnecessary for Karazhan anyway.)

Meh, took off guild dkp discussion. Not relevant to the discussion.

Lets just say in our current system if I take healing gear I will fall behind for tanking gear, so I'm not going to start until I've first collected the tank gear I want.

You can avoid crusing blows when your total avoidance is greater than 100% (that is, miss + dodge + parry + block). You already have a Libram of Repentance, so you're looking for 65% base avoidance against a level 73 mob.

Which is approximately 67.4% base avoidance on your character sheet.

Putting aside classic ideologies and guild acceptance, the bottom line is pretty simple.

Paladin tanks will only survive as long as the itemization is there to back it up.

It's quite easy to find in the armory paladin tanks with over 10k hp, 18% dodge/parry/block, 15k ac right now (all unbuffed) so I going to have to agree as long as the itemization is there I don't see why not.

The only real issue is with fights where the boss spams fear.

Stamina:

Paladins have less base hp than warriors, on the order of 1000+ IIRC. While (and correct me if I'm wrong) prot paladins can get +6% stamina while prot warriors can only get+5% stamina, that 1% stamina is not going to be 1000HP for any reasonable value of gear. Hell, for 1% stamina to be even 100HP you need 1000 stamina.

Hence, prot warriors (even leaving aside that prot warrior sets will probably have more stamina than prot paladin due to paladins needing more stats) will always have more HP and be superior for fights which depend on surviving "one-shot" type abilities assuming equal armor mitigation (and both can wear plate of the same iLvL, so there should be equal armor mitgation, as they have the same +armor talent).


Equal ability to avoid crits.

Warriors have a more consistent ability to avoid crushings. Paladins with sufficiently high block rating should be able to do the same, provided that Holy Shield is up and Redoubt has procc'd, but warriors don't need to rely on a proc.

Defensive stance grants 10% flat mitigation, vs improved righteous fury 6%. Improved defensive stance grants a further 6% spell damage reduction, spell warding grants a further 4%. Warriors have better passive mitigation.

Equal ability to parry/dodge and to gain further parry dodge, leaving aside again that warrior gear can probably get more due to paladin item budget being spread thinner.

As such, paladins are directly inferior for MITIGATION in every way.

The hope for paladin tanking must lie in the things paladins have that warriors don't:



1) Ardent Defender- honestly seems preferable to rely on superior stamina and mitigation than this, short of a gimmick fight where everyone is constantly semi-Enfeebled or something. Not really a niche.

2) Ranged taunt- this one has definite possibilities- wouldn't it have been amazing to have back in the day on a fight like Sartura (or Noth for that matter)? Bit gimmicky, and not so much an MT thing probably, but such is life.

3) Divine Shield- rarely going to want to do it as the MT, but still an awesome "oh hell" move provided that you have a few seconds before the mob would be able to nuke the raid (especially combined with the ranged taunt on tauntable mobs).

4) Threat output. This is the big one, since it's applicable to most fights whereas the first ones are gimmicks. Can a paladin tank maintain an acceptable level of mitigation but output more threat? For a DPS burn fight, provided it doesn't also stretch the limits of MT survivability, it is very conceivable that the best solution is the tank with the best threat output.

If a paladin cannot out-threat a warrior tank, yeah, no hope for paladins as *MT* on anything non-trivial. If they can, there's potential.

Anyone got data for warrior vs paladin threat output vs the same type of mob? I've had my first run with a paladin tank in SH last night, but he was a) 47/14/0 holy spec and b) woefully undergeared and yet because of that run I have at least some confidence in paladin tanking..

Picture this. "Welcome to level 70, holy paladin. For your first level 70 instance, we will make you tank SH. What o you mean you never tanked before and you've never seen SH before? What do you mean you have only one piece of gear with +defence? Never mind, we'll tell you what to do! Oh, and we had a PuG rogue without improved sap and like level 63 weapons."

Amazingly we one-shotted everything and only one wipe, which doesn't count because it was the rogue screwing up and inadvertently pulling an extra pack of mobs, so it wasn't too bad, and gave me confidence he could at least hold aggro off the healer

I hear "Paladins have better threat" repeated like a mantra but do they really? Sure you've got great threat doing non heroic shattered halls in spell damage gear but once you get to the point where you are min/maxing mitigation you're probably only getting spelldamage off your sword. Some might have a burst trinket or something in the mix but there are alot of good defensive trinkets out there.

Also with holy shield vs shield block a huge point in shield block's favour is that it has a 5sec cooldown but 6sec duration and its not on the global cooldown. A paladin will have holy shield occupying their global cooldown about 25% of the time. Not that we really have much else to do but still.

Really the 1200hp is the biggest thing though. Would you really want what is effectively a warrior with no enchants tanking anything difficult?

Someone's already said this, but it needs to be restated because so many people don't realize this: a properly geared paladin can avoid crushing blows just as well as a warrior in the worst case, and significantly better in the best case. 65% base avoidance can be achieved in pre-raid gear, and with a Libram of Repentance you can push crushing blows off the table with Holy Shield alone. At that point, Holy Shield becomes just as good as Improved Shield Block for that purpose, and extra crush-avoidance from Redoubt is simply a bonus.

And the "need more stats" thing really isn't true either. There's no need for mp5 or intellect if you're tanking anything serious; on Malchezaar for example, the mana gained from Spiritual Attunement is more than enough to let me spam the max rank of everything without worrying about mana at all -- and if I do say so, my gear gives pretty damn good mitigation. Really, you could convert the strength on warrior tanking gear into spelldamage, and you'd be 95% of the way to ideal paladin tanking gear.

The only inherent gearing difficulty for a paladin tank is the lack of stats from the ranged slot -- librams provide flavor bonuses only. There are other difficulties presented by the gear Blizzard has chosen to put in the game, but that's the only gearing problem that's truly native to the class.

im uncrushable unbuffed, i have less health than warriors with equal gear but nearly equal mitigation, as well as the additional benefits and disadvantages of being a paladin tank.

I can tank kara fine although we haven't gotten to nightbane as well as tank every heroic i've attempted.

As far as holy shield goes, on fast hitting mobs, moroes being a great example, holy shield gets eaten up before the cooldown just like shield block. If redoubt procs it will make you uncrushable as well, but often overlaps holy shield for a diminished advantage.

the beauty of a paladin tank on moroes is blessing of sacrifice, which makes the off tank nearly ornamental, a good combat rogue will do in a pinch.

And redoubt suffers from a similar problem that warriors have with rage, as our gear gets better you see it less and less often.

On our kara raid tonight i had a 15 or so second span where moroes didnt lay a hand on me.
I'd be surprised if redoubt proccd the entire battle.


This is basically generation 2 of the paladin tank, with generation one being pathetic.

In the next step blizz really needs to make our skill set mesh.

Revenge is a perfect example, as your gear gets better revenge procs more and more often, its one of the things they really got right on a warrior tank, we need similar attention to detail to overcome the last hurdle, and some method of equalizing health pools.


http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/?#...furion&n=Zenos

On a hard hitting mob where you have basically infinite mana from spiritual attunement yes, paladins can double a warriors threat output per second easily.
Max level consecration spam by itself would equal a warriors entire threat output, and this is with a spell damage weapon and pure tank gear otherwise.