I'm posting here on behalf of our own prot paladin...

I'm usually OTing along him during raids, but I recently healed 2 different ZA runs in a quick succession (Thursday and Friday). I noticed how much damage he was tanking on the bear boss versus how much damage the other 3 tanks I healed over those runs... Most of them have about the same general gear level, so that's not the problem.. He said he had a lot of problems with "hard-hitting" (or semi-hard, this is still the bear boss) mobs in general, and that he was always tanking a lot of damage.. He's not sure what he's doing wrong, or if he is doing anything wrong and we just have to get used to it and heal through it...

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The WWS is from Karathress, and we're killing the hunter + pet first (he tanks both)... over the course of the fight, I took as much damage as I did on the shaman, who died second... He knows I'm an avid reader of these boards and asked me to look for help...

Keep in mind his AoE tanking is fine (or I'd think so, we haven't had any problems with it yet) and his threat output seems quite nice when I happen to be in cat, I'm looking at the problem from a pure mitigation perspective...

Many thanks

Basically pally tanks will always take a lot more damage unless you take a lot of small hits and block a large portion of them, which is the strength of the paladin. Improved righteous fury and 16k armor just doesn't beat a bear's armor cap or a warrior with defensive stance (+improved def stance vs spell warding when spell dmg is involved).

He's using a lot of spell damage over tanking stats (in both gems and actual items), and has no expertese. While fixing that won't make him take a lot less damage to the point where you'll feel he doesn't take much, having expertese neck and bracers to reduce parries and increase HP will help as well as possibly socketing more stam/hp. Also make sure he has enough avoidance to be uncrushable (102.4% chance to be missed+dodge+parry+block against a lvl70 with holy shield active) for bosses. Rings and cloaks with armor (kara/badge/mag) are also very nice for staying alive.

Note that on FLK both the hunter and his pet hit kinda hard, so I'm not surprised whoever is tanking BOTH them would take a considerable amount of damage. If your healers aren't having a hard time to heal him with the damage he takes and his HP then it's alright, but if you're having difficulties it helps to bring an extra tank - no deaths is more important than having that 1 extra dpser as the fight is very easy to beat enrage-wise if nobody dies.

A couple of notes:

1. On bosses that don't crush (kalatheras adds, bear boss, lynx boss, etc), you will take less damage than him in a lot of cases since his advantage in removing crushing blows is lost.

2. He doesn't have much of any avoidance, which would probably account for why yall took the same amount of overall damage.

In general, he took smaller hits than you did on average, but he took more of them, so it evened out in the overall damage department. You have a lot more avoidance than he does. It would be a guess, but I would be willing to be that would explain your bear boss as well. He probably has less avoidance than the other tanks (But that is merely a guess). Also, since the bear boss doesn't crush, he would probably be taking more damage than a bear tank (generalized statement which can be affected by gear levels obviously).

The short answer is if you are happy with his threat and can live with his damage intake for now, leave him be, but talk to him about building a tanking set with some more dodge/parry/miss in it for when he might need it.

Oh, his threat is fine... He's the one, after I made that remark last night that asked me to post here to see if he was missing something or it was just the class/spec difference...

It's largely a class difference. A paladin will (generally) take more damage than other tanks when tanking by him or herself. That's due to a simple combination of factors:

- Gearing is largely equal to what a Warrior can use. So lower armor than a feral druid.
- Paladins don't have an equivalent to Demoralizing Shout/Roar, also making it so you take a bit more damage. Though typically this will be kept up by a dps warrior or something along those lines in a main tanking situation, if you're tanking a mob away from everyone else by yourself that's not the case.
- Also despite having the same type of gear/avoidance that a warrior has, we don't have Thunder Clap. Which is also something that causes you to take more damage compared to a warrior (An exception would be a paladin with Thunderfury, but those are few and far between, and Thunderfury is a fairly significant threat downgrade).

So typically when you compare each tank a paladin will take more damage over time than a warrior or druid. There's a few exceptions, e.g. on a fast attacking mob that does low damage per hit our higher blocking reliability can possibly mean we take less damage. Also obviously if we're talking about tanking a mob that's being debuffed with Thunder Clap and Demoralizing Shout by a warrior than damage taken will be comparable to that of a warrior.

The debuffs are really the big reason, I'm personally a fan of giving Prot Paladins an attack speed debuff like Warriors, but make it weaker than Thunder Clap (15% as opposed to 20% or similar). But that's beside the point. That'd also mean that there's at least one other source than warriors for attack speed debuffs in raids (There's three separate sources for AP debuffs, but only Warriors for attack speed).

Hm, usually I'm giving advice and not asking for one, but I'm a bit confused.
Since the last patch I've noticed a massive loss of threat (~20%) and I can't really see why. I didn't change my specc and only switched a few items. At the moment the armory shows my avoidance gear (370ish spelldmg), my more paladin-ish gear set has something around 480 spelldmg, but it doesn't close that 20%-gap.

I didn't change my rotation or anything so I feel really lost. The only really logical explanations that come to my mind would be
a) Omen/Threat-1.0 shows wrong stuff (we had some problems with Omen in the last weeks) and I'm just too paranoid.
b) Our warlocks and hunters just can't play, my threat is fine and I should let them die instead of feeling guilty.
c) I'm way too stupid to press my 4 buttons.
d) I'm bugged...

Dunno whats happening here, but wandering from 1000 single target tps to 700-800 feeds me some very solid amount of confusion. Any ideas?

PS: Just to say it again, I changed almost nothing - Battlemaster enchant on my mace has been there for a long time and I found it really worth it, especially due to the global threat in Hyjal and yet the missing of +40 spelldmg hasn't been an issue. Btw, as far as I can see from WWS, the Battlemaster proc seems to scale with spelldmg.

Paladins take more damage than warriors or druids under most circumstances. This isn't the end of the world; they make up for this by being much harder to crush than warriors and taking less damage as their health drops further into the AD zone. And usually, they take less spiky damage than druids (no crushes) or warriors (less parry gibs/random crushes) so it ends up not being as much a problem.

But it's a weakness of a paladin, and if you believe that damage intake is the be-all, end all of tanking they're the worst tanking class. Keep in mind that the difference is not a huge one regardless.

The ZA gear in particular is very good for this purpose, as long as you can get the necessary defense elsewhere. I was able to tank FLK hunter + pet + priestess at the same time, by having the ZA shoulders/boots/helm/shield -- I had somewhere around 550 block value with a lot of stam. I certainly didn't have much spell damage but since the shaman was being killed first, it was unnecessary as I had plenty of time to build up threat.

With 3 ZA items, I'm at about 580 blocking in my mob AOE tanking gear. There was an analysis a few pages back on the relative importance of various tanking aspects; the comment was something to the effect that at high levels of blocking value it gets powerful. I can vouch for this - the healers are commenting that I don't seem to take much damage, especially in AOE tanking situations and with rapid-hitting bosses (e.g Prince in Kara, Bear boss in ZA).

The downsides to the ZA gear is a real struggle to stay at or above 490 defense (i've been re-gemming to [Enduring Talasite] over [Solid Star of Elune] - which negatively affects hit points), and a lower damage and healing level - I'm finding the odd thing is being pulled off me in AOE tanking situations, where before I'd have and keep them all. The loss of threat is something I'm concerned about, but so far it has seemed manageable, especially considering how much the block value seems to have improved my survivability.

I think... the ZA gear and block value gear in general... will have a permanent place in my various wardrobes. I'd highly recommend investing a month or two and getting it all from ZA - with a 3 day reset window, it's only about 30/60 days (with leather/plate 2nd tank) to have more or less got everything, assuming you can find a similarly committed group of 9 other players. My group's ZA runs are getting shorter as we get more experience/gear - I think they'll hit one and a half hours complete clear before we're done with the place, right now running about 2.5 hours.

Just throwing myself out there for scrutiny. Be gentle :P

For Akhtal. Tell you friend to come check out this thread. I learned a lot here. (thanks guys/gals) He just needs to gear like a warrior when it comes to tanking hard hitting mobs/bosses. There is a point when he gear is further improved, that things will swing for the better. My pally used to be the same way. Hit really freaking hard and seemed pointless to have me tank things. Few more upgrades here and there, I now have more mitigation and avoidance that the guild warriors. This will change of course, at least I hope it does. But. He's on the right track and will get there soon enough. I threw up my Armory if he'd like to check it out by all means. Here is also a paladin I compare myself with time to time to see what gear I will be rolling on.

My idol


Overall, my thought is gear like a warrior slap on a spell damage weapon and holy shield/consecrate to death add a seal here and there = Win\



I heard and seen this a lot. Agility in the long run, imo, seems like wasted materials. None, not a single piece of gear paladin do pick up has even one point of agility. No tier piece has it. No random trash loot from any 25 man raid has it. Agility is just not a stat Paladins have the luxury of stacking. 15 agi to gloves compared to 2% threat or 10 stam leather working kit. Just doesn't compare. This is also why a Warrior, who gets plenty of agi, would put agi on cloak. Where paladin should just go for the dodge it'll do more for your avoidance overall. Until they decide to add more stats to Pally tier gear that is. I wish they would change it. Until then, go with Stam or threat on them gloves don't waste mats. OR This is something I tend to do. Get multiple sets of gear, if able of course, Gem/chant them up in different fashions see what works best for you. It is possible to stack agi i suppose proper use of gem slots and all that. Heck as stated way in the beginning of this post. Having gear for +spell damage and mobs tanking and gear for bosses isn't a bad idea, For mobs you do not need 490 defense so you get a little slack in the gear chioces.


Overall Hardening up that shell, stack stamina, gem stamina. Find the right gear and you just get the avoidance you need. Nothing better than having a prot warrior jealous at you for having more hp. Which is quite a feat I have to add. enjoy

You don't need to stack agility for it to be useful. 15 agility is effectively 0.66% dodge, 33 armor, and a tiny amount of melee crit for a paladin after BoK. Compare that to 126 hp gained from 10 stamina, and agility is going to come out ahead the vast majority of the time. If they ever add a +dodge enchant for gloves I'll agree with you, but for now agility is king for glove enchants when it comes to survivability.

Well yes, you pointed it out, and I disagreed, and the entire discussion is right there in your link. I'm not sure how referring me back to that is supposed to convince me of anything.

Where on earth did I say this applied to all fights? Where did I say that you needed your mana to last longer than the fight? For that matter, where did I suggest that gearing up mp5 was even remotely a good idea? You're engaging in a staggering degree of strawman-arguing and over-generalization.

I'm talking about specific situations, such as: 1) Voidreaver, where you need to be able to put out threat for up to 2-3 minutes while OTing in between getting full mana refills from SA, and 2) Tanking Al'ar adds, where you need to be able to put out significant threat so that dps can open up quickly., despite the fact that you're not taking a lot of damage.

In both of these cases, having a bit of intellect on your gear makes a non-trivial difference in the amount of time you can spend generating threat, and in fact buys you far more utility than you'd get from stacking exclusively spelldamage and relying only on your base ~3.5k mana pool.

Of course it depends on more than just time-to-OOM. But no, you can't ignore the effect of the size of your mana pool, any more than you can ignore any other factor. To pretend otherwise is silly.

I would agree with +dodge to gloves, Let's hope we see that in the future. .66% to dodge is nothing compared to what actual dodge rating from gear would get you. If you need the dodge that much find an item with dodge rating on it. Horde paladins are short on HP, proven fact. Use your gear to get our survivability where you need it, Use the gems and chants to A: ensure being uncrushable B: stack hps. In all honesty if you need .66% to dodge in order to help you survive what is your gear looking like?

33 armor? really 33 armor I don't even wanna think about calculating what 33 armor gives you. 33 armor isn't gonna push you over to a new % of damage reduction, well I take that back it could, but really 33 armor.

And for melee crit. yup melee crit. If i had to rely on my weapon swings critting in order to help threat the raid would never dps.

Don't get me wrong. I understand what you are saying. It could indeed be very helpful if you happen to have heroic gear that has agi, str, and stam on them, hell throw that enchant on there. Paladin Tier gear though......nothing. It focuses on what is most important.

This of course is my opinion. In the long run it all comes down to what you need most. Being a Paladin you have the so many options available to you. Sometimes you just have to think about getting two different set to accomplish one goal. Raid boss you want avoidance throw that agi up there if it'll help ya out. Aoe tanking spell damage or stam is the way to go. or hell 2% base threat added to everything, I can't complain.

0.66% dodge might sound insignificant, but if there were magically a 15 dodge rating enchant we could use instead, that would only add 0.79% dodge. Toss in the 33 armor and the two would be very comparable.

Also, I'm not talking about gear. I'm talking about enchants. Just because agility isn't an overly desirable stat to look for on gear doesn't mean we should rule it out when looking at enchants.

@Snowy: Thanks for pointing out the armor option, I'd completely forgotten about it.

What am I missing here that makes us different from alliance paladins (in terms of stats)?

I find that block value is very useful for a protadin, and probably our best source of mitigation against multiple mobs.

For tanking trash in MH (which we have just started to do a week or so ago) I have about 580 block value. Mobs hit for around 1k, so I am reducing the damage I take on a hit by a bit more than half and the damage is coming in quite steadily without bursts. In tier 5 and 6 instances it wouldn't be all that hard to raise this block value to the 700 area or beyond.

I have an avoidance set as well, which has something like 12% more dodge, parry and miss than my aoe set but only about 340 block value and a lot less spell damage since it's made from "random" tank gear rather than T5. When taking a lot of small hits, even this difference in avoidance is made up for by the block value in terms of overall damage incoming. I'm not sure how it would stack up to compare tier 5 and 6 for aoe tanking, since tier 6 is almost entirely dodge/parry rather than block. Apparently, T6 is for tanking heavy hitters and T5 is for Hyjal.

In any case, my block set gives me a lot more threat than the dodge one would, at least until I get t6, so it makes life easier for the dps. The simple fact that I've blocked an attack means I've hit the mob with a couple of hundred damage - and much more than that in threat.

The decision on whether to wear the block or avoidance set is based on how hard I'm likely to be hit. If a mob is hitting me for more than about 2k at a time then block starts to look less attractive I think. That tends to mean that I wear my block set most of the time, since most of the time I'll be tanking a fast hitter or multiple mobs, and other tanks will have the big stuff.

I do think it makes sense to go for an all or nothing approach to block value. After all, we don't get extra threat from it or anything like that. Its only function for us is mitigation. If you are tanking a mob that hits for 8k then you want to 1% more dodge, not 50 block value (or whatever the relative item cost is), so there is no point wasting a single item point on block value. On the other hand you quite often get mobs that hit for less than your block value, and they take damage when you block, so why would you want to dodge or parry?

I did a search for this on the forums but could not find anything! I just happened to get a good shield for my tanking set a day ago. I am uncritable and uncrushable and hit about 22k hp with buffs. The issue i am having is between getting a 18 stamina enchant or a felsteel shield spike. The stamina would add about 227 hp, and the extra threat from felsteel would be nice but it wouldn't count as double threat with righteous fury. I am split right now but leaning towards the spike, any hardcore theorycrafters have an opinion on this?

You would be far better served switching a glove or bracer enchant to spellpower (or threat in the case of gloves -- technically which is better anyways? 20 spellpower or 2% threat?) than switching a shield enchant to a spike, if you're looking to make up threat.

The big 'gotcha' with +damage as opposed to 2% threat is a fairly significant amount of our threat comes from SA returns, as well as the seal/reseal mechanic, and the calculations I've run myself seem to back them up. 2% threat is a not insignifcant amount while dealing with threat capped DPS (because of the 100/110/130), so I'm pretty happy with my choice.

And now I just remembered my gorefiend gloves are unenchanted. D'oh.

The only thing I can think of that he could possibly mean is that for a Horde Paladin health would be lower compared to what a Tauren Warrior or a Druid would have (Because of the Tauren racial), while for Alliance Paladins there are no serious racial differences in health between any tank race/class combination beyond the base health differences.

I can honestly say in practice that it isn't that big a deal. While 5% health is quite a bit with current health values, having 5% less health doesn't make you all that much weaker, especially considering not all Horde Warriors in the world are Tauren.

More on the subject of enchants, on gloves Threat is basically the best threat enchant you can get. Even if we make a high assumption of the TPS gain from spellpower so it's 15 TPS, you'll be outdoing the threat that gives with a threat enchant as long as you do at least 750 TPS, and I can't remember being at a gear level at which I did less than 800ish TPS on a single target. For AoE tanking the crossover point is when your consecration does ~120 damage per tick. Of course I still have spell power on my gloves, but that's more because I still need to re-enchant them with threat; I originally had them enchanted with spell power as they were my grinding gloves as well.

For survivability, it's basically a case of 11.66 stamina, versus 0.66% dodge and 33 armor, versus 240 armor (Or 264 if it works with Toughness).

I have a little bit of spare time on the commute home every evening, so I'm happy to find something to fill it. What statements about paladin tanking are we lacking quantified and verifiable maths for?

I know of:

SoV yields higher threat than SoR at lower spelldamage (i.e. it would be useful to know the point of inflection)
SoR/JoV/SoV weaving yields higher threat than either SoV/JoV or SoR/JoR *on average*.
Paladins take less parry damage than warriors or druids.

Anything else to add to the list?

While the opportunity cost of using them is much higher than thunder clap, if you must have one, Hurricane, Slow, and top-rank Soothing Kiss are all attack speed debuffs.

Hurricane's limited by it's cooldown, the Slow mages have isn't the spell you linked (It's this one) and only slows casting speed and ranged attack speed. I wasn't aware of Soothing Kiss though.