Here's the bottom line for me:

- I judge Seal of Corruption, use the Suneater (a dps weapon not a spell damage weapon), use Divine Plea when it's up, and use consecration, holy shield, judgement of wisdom, HotR, and exorcism (when applicable) whenever they're up.

- My threat is LOW. I have a mage friend who does great DPS and is ALWAYS in danger of pulling off of me. I have some ZA gear while he has Kara gear. He should not be getting so close every pull.

- My mana is LOW on any fight with less than 4 mobs. I can't judge wisdom because I'd have DPS pulling off me constantly, instead of about once every pull. Boss fights are a CHORE because of this. I have to use a mana potion every time.

- During AOE pulls (actual AOE pulls not normal pulls that you AOE through) things do not stick to me like they did during 3.0.2 and before.

- I find myself drinking after almost every pull, slowing the run down and making people wonder, "You know, druids and warriors don't have to do this..."

- I feel as though my threat output is 2.4 quality while everyone else is doing 3.0 damage.

- When I get ShotR at 75 it may help my single target threat, but it's just another mana sucking move that I can't really afford.

So bottom line, my threat is low and my mana intake is terrible. I am most assuredly NOT happy about this, and GC's post that basically stated "We don't think you guys have an issue," has really infuriated me. I went from a guy who assured my druid friend when he was doubting the developers that they absolutely knew what they were doing, to now feeling so down about my paladin that it's depressing to play.

Also as a side note, I don't believe DPS should ever have to worry about threat, unless the tank is servery under geared and/or has no idea what they're doing. I also have an affliction lock (that's a blast to play) and I can tell you that standing around waiting for my threat to drop isn't fun in the least.

Situational awareness and leadership qualities should be what defines good tanks from bad, not threat output.

I hope the developers are truly reading these posts and considering changes in the very near future.

Edit: I want to add that this isn't past experiences, this is what I'm dealing with in the new instances that I've tanked (Utgarde Keep, The Nexus, Azjol, and the Old Kingdom so far).

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Q u o t e:


There were a bunch of us at release. Then Blizzard put out the infamous 1.9 patch and screwed over paladin tanking. After that there was a huge in-rush of new paladins intended to be holy only, and a huge outrush of paladins quitting or rerolling because they couldn't play their tank the way they intended. (I quit from 1.9 to 2.0.)

Paladins were certainly playable as tanks after 2.0, but really didn't shine until 2.3. By then almost no one leveled a paladin as a tank from level one, because there was no one to group with and ret was more efficient.

-- Digren

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Level 10 -71 Protection.
At no point in time have I bothered leveling a anything else.
I made a tankadin. Not a paladin. A TANKADIN.

Why should I be forced to have a warrior when I want a tankadin and i want to simply have parity.
I don't want to be the better overall tank.
I don't want to be the better AE tank.
I don't want to be the better boss tank.

I just want to be able to do as well using a paladin or warrior with equal gear. I want the classes to be close enough that my skill determines whether or not I do well. I don't want to sit out a fight because a silence kicked me in the face and I couldn't use shield wall during it, or I take more damage, or I can't taunt the boss when needed because of a stupid mechanic failing me. (had it happen plenty when bosses switch to do some attack on a random DPS member)

I'm not asking to be better. I am asking to have the tools that allow me to be as good.

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Q u o t e:


Couldn't have said it better myself.

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That was rather elegant.

Still, despite what GC says, it might still be prudent to get over the "I only want this one character!" and just level up that warrior.

I know I am. And I even have faith that I can tank just fine on this toon, but there are a few things that always bug me.

The fact that warriors have way more health than me.
The fact that they have better threat on bosses.
The fact that T7 is much better for warriors than paladins, and I imagine T8 will be the same way.
The fact that pary, block value, expertise, hit, and haste are all better for warriors than paladins.

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Q u o t e:
Still, despite what GC says, it might still be prudent to get over the "I only want this one character!" and just level up that warrior.
I know I am. And I even have faith that I can tank just fine on this toon, but there are a few things that always bug me.

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I don't like falling back on the "but I'm on an RP server" argument, but I'm on an RP server, and I play a paladin to be a knight in armor, standing face to face with monsters, drawing their wrath, and keeping them occupied while the rest of my team of adventurers prop me up and kill the things.

It's all I've ever played, and all I'm interested in. If Blizzard doesn't want it to be viable, I'll quit, just as I did from 1.9 to 2.0. Fortunately, Blizzard wants it to be viable at this time; it's the implementation that just needs working out. And it seems to me that they're working on it.

I'm tanking level 70 dungeons as Ret. Why?

1) Better threat. More DPS moves, more attack power scaling, better BoM.
2) Equal survival. I can heal myself instantly usually (and I don't really care about the swing timer reset as ret). This makes up for losing holy shield.
3) Better mana. Judging gives me mana back compared to having to wait for mobs to hit me as prot (no way to get mana back from casters as prot).
4) Suffer less from silence or mana drain, which are both quite prevalent in lower level dungeons (nexus in particular). Judging gives me lots of mana back due to JotW. Crusader strike and Divine Storm are both able to be used when silenced and I do more white damage.
5) CC. I can pick a target to CC and start off the pull with that and get threat from the CC. I also know that the CC is always gonna go up.

Maybe I'll go back when I get SotR (Shield of Righteousness) since maybe that'll make my threat go back up to decent levels as prot. I'll have to test and see. Until then it's not useful to level as prot because I can tank anything I want to as ret and I have more threat as ret and do more damage, plus it's easier to solo quest as ret. Seems pretty sad to me though that there's really no benefit to being tank spec'd when tanking low to mid 70s dungeons.

edit: The only thing I miss from Prot is Avenger's Shield because Ret doesn't have a ranged pull. Makes doing some quests more annoying, but it hasn't been more than an annoyance so far.

edit2: I leveled this char as prot from level 10 all the way up. I too quit from 1.9 to 2.0 and played my priest instead (my raid needed healers). I keep having doubts about whether or not I should play my paladin as a tank in WotLK. If my experiences so far keep continuing I probably won't. I'll probably end up as ret instead and let the warrior tank.

edit3: GC, we may have "scaled" better than warriors, but if we didn't get any gear to support that scaling, then we really "scaled" worse than warriors. The point is, no matter what you say about our scaling, warriors had better threat/mitigation in BT/Sunwell than paladins at the same gear level. When we talk about scaling, we're talking about how we had worse threat and worse mitigation given the range of possibilities in the game at the time, not about the fact that our %s were technically higher.

Another way to put it is, the reality of tankadin threat was much lower and scaled less in BT/Sunwell than the reality of warrior threat. Saying anything different is offensive - "Oh your talents would have scaled better if we had put the gear in to support them. Oops. Tee Hee." is the impression that sort of statement gives.

I was thinking this weekend about mana regeneration, since I got Divine Plea. It seems to me that my ability to generate threat is a large house of cards built on more cards.

1) I receive mana when I block, parry, or dodge an incoming melee hit, provided I run Sanctuary instead of the Kings that I give everyone else. This makes it trivial to maintain mana when being hit by many, many things, but harder when I'm being hit by fewer things. It seems counter-intuitive to try to keep the adds alive (or pull more in) when tanking a single boss (like the four doom bosses during the invasion event), but it is a viable, and indeed reliable, option. If I lose aggro, this mana income stops, and the house of cards tumbles down.

2) I receive mana when I'm healed. This percentage has never really been high enough to trivialize mana income except on progression-content bosses. Indeed, it's usually lacking in other cases. This one suffers most from a "collapse" of the house of cards; if I lose or don't have aggro, I can get little to nothing from this. "Stand in the cave-in" should never have been a viable strategy to off-tank Gruul, but it was.

3) I receive mana from Divine Plea. I dropped this in an open spot at shift-4 on my hotkeys, but I may need to improve it to "2" just after autoattack. It looks to be a reasonable patch, but for some reason I don't see it as any more than a patch to prop up an untenable system. This does not generate enough mana to regain aggro on a mob, unless I can taunt first. Taunt is a separate discussion.

So things are working for the most part, yeah. I have trouble duoing with my wife (warlock), because I have to generate the same amount of threat to hold aggro off her as a do in an instance or raid, but I take less damage and dodge/parry/block less. The fact that she kills the thing before I can regain the mana I spent pulling it just exacerbates the situation, as does the fact that she cap tap her imp for mana and keep going. I can only heal between fights as a bubble would kill her (or reveal that she can tank as well as I can). I know the game isn't balanced around particular groups, but this has always been frustrating. She excels at being solo; I'm crippled. Honestly we get faster XP if I just auto-follow her and let her solo.

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Q u o t e:
So things are working for the most part, yeah. I have trouble duoing with my wife (warlock), because I have to generate the same amount of threat to hold aggro off her as a do in an instance or raid, but I take less damage and dodge/parry/block less. The fact that she kills the thing before I can regain the mana I spent pulling it just exacerbates the situation, as does the fact that she cap tap her imp for mana and keep going. ... She excels at being solo; I'm crippled. Honestly we get faster XP if I just auto-follow her and let her solo.

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Copying a comment I made in a different thread regarding this issue, as this thread is far more relevant.

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Q u o t e:
A better way to regen mana than "Take more damage", needs to be found.
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Q u o t e:
DK's start with runes open to be used for their magical attacks = Paladin Mana
DK's start with 0 Runic power, but it builds up as they fight for the physical type attacks = Druid/Warrior Rage

Give Paladins a rage or runic bar and have our melee abilities use this. It SHOULD also make them not affected by silence. The down side, we are like Warriors/DKs/Druids in slowing down our front loaded threat a bit.
The mana return would be fine for our magical abilities. The rage type abilities covering our Shield, Hammer, and Melee specials would just modify our threat rotation slightly.
Only Exception I would say should be AS, have it on a 30s - 1 Min cooldown with no mana or rage requirments. It is our Gun after all.

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And in reference to TPS/DPS concerns, I would love to have RF ratio lowered and DPS increased to compensate, but the PVP issue usually kills us on this. Unless it goes to 1 hand specialization modifiers. IE: +15% all damage but -5% all threat.

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Q u o t e:


DK's start with runes open to be used for their magical attacks = Paladin Mana
DK's start with 0 Runic power, but it builds up as they fight for the physical type attacks = Druid/Warrior Rage

Give Paladins a rage or runic bar and have our melee abilities use this. It SHOULD also make them not affected by silence. The down side, we are like Warriors/DKs/Druids in slowing down our front loaded threat a bit.
The mana return would be fine for our magical abilities. The rage type abilities covering our Shield, Hammer, and Melee specials would just modify our threat rotation slightly.
Only Exception I would say should be AS, have it on a 30s - 1 Min cooldown with no mana or rage requirments. It is our Gun after all.

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Any chance of a change this huge was gone as soon as beta went live. I don't think we'll ever see a change of this magnitude implemented in a patch. Seems like a one-per-xpac kind of thing. Like the seal/judge system.

Though in a perfect world...it would be a Fury bar. We leave rage for the warriors.

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Q u o t e:


Any chance of a change this huge was gone as soon as beta went live. I don't think we'll ever see a change of this magnitude implemented in a patch. Seems like a one-per-xpac kind of thing. Like the seal/judge system.

Though in a perfect world...it would be a Fury bar. We leave rage for the warriors.

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NEED MO' FURY would sound so much cooler when I'm spamming Concies. Honestly, I don't see it as being too hard to change the Paladin system into a rage like system, or something similar. We need to compensate slightly for always starting out with full, perhaps with a buff system like Vengeance where the longer we're in melee the more effective we are, but it would otherwise remain pretty simple.

After all, the Protection Paladin has very limited ways to scale his mana pool, especially if he's gearing properly. So, without intellect on the gear every spell which scales based on % of base mana is actually ALSO using % of maximum mana. So, we simply tweak a few talents deep in the tree to create a semi refillable "rage" bar, much like the Retribution Paladin. You tweak the abilities so that a normal single target rotation will be kept almost indefinitely, but using AoE abilities for extra TPS on single targets would start to deplete that mana pool. Adding a 'mana dump' tool, perhaps off the GCD (like an "on next strike" attack) would add some skill based gameplay in regards to resource management.

I believe that abilities like Consecration and Hammer of the Righteous need to be used in AoE situations and not part of a single target rotation. Just as Circle of Healing and Wild Growth should be tools used for AoE encounters, so too should Consecration and HotR be designed with this philosophy in mind. Though that is only my opinion, it seems to me that it would aid by keeping everything consistent. The more tools you have the more clarity new players may need to understand what situation to use them in. With so few tools, we can use them all in every situation without repercussions. Now we feel like we MUST use these AoE abilities to remain competitive, even on single target fights.

The problem stems from the fact that we do not have enough abilities to fill a single target rotation or have talents that allow us to switch it up on the fly for maximized TPS/DPS. In response, we've compensated by using Consecration and Hammer of the Righteous, both to fill gaps in a rotation AND to fulfill this perceived loss of threat so we remain competitive.

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Q u o t e:


I am hardly a beacon of positivity (as Gildas will attest to---), but pre-patch, I tanked Maiden. I tanked the pre-curator mana-blobs. I tanked Nightbane. I tanked Gruul. I tanked Magtheridon. I am not the best or most skilled tank out there, either. I'm not even in a raid guild: I'm the GL of an RP guild. Any paladin who couldn't MT every boss in Kara was, as Flexie would put it, a "baddie".

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Oh there were a ton of us who rolled with the punches and continued doing the content. However, it just goes to show what it is we're trying to focus on here. You may have been able to do it, but there is no shadow of a doubt that a Warrior or a Druid would have been capable of doing it better.

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Q u o t e:
My annoying stridency and harpy-ish negativity here annoys even me, but it is to a purpose. Although annoying and obnoxious, I believe every negative observation is accurate. The most annoying, sheep-bleating qq in history got results in 24 hours from GC; months of responsive, informed, rational, data-backed feedback from beta and ptr was chucked in the roundfile to appease qq from non-paladin PvP wussies.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

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I spent my time in the trenches writing out page after page of thoughtful reasoning and example filled bilge with the hopes that the right people might read it and say something like "Houston, we have a problem." The simple fact of the matter is this...it didn't work. Walls of text tend to be skipped and forgotten, but nobody can resist a good list. Whether its a shopping list, or the movie listings, you always tend to scroll through it until something catches your eye, and I believe thats what happened here ;)

PS: 4 minutes left in queue *cheers*

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Q u o t e:

We think this is one of the strongest reasons to go with a new ability – paladins don’t have a ton of snap aggro abilities at the moment. We're working on something now but it's too early to announce it yet.

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Whisper it into my ear, I promise I won't tell anybody! Scout's honour!

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Q u o t e:


1) I usually let my warrior OT buddy tank Maiden, but on weeks where he wasn't able to make it, I did it. It was tougher for me than for him, but if a pally is careful, determined, and reasonably competent, Maiden was do-able. The others? NEver had a problem at all. In fact, against Nightbane when I was running my warlock, our warrior tank (not my buddy, the current OT) was never able to lead us to a Nightbane kill. Nightbane wasn't the problem; the skellies during air-phasees was the problem. We lost one healer per air phase minimum. I switched Fean over from ret to prot at about 67 or so because of this (Consecrate + skelly flypaper), and because the guy who pally-tanked (briefly) in SLabs with Terrock's Quill (a polearm) made me realize how tank-starved my server is.

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When I was progressing through Kara mere weeks after the release of BC, we rolled with two tanks. Our strategy for Nightbane was to have the Warrior tank Nightbane due to stance dance, his better gear, and better mitigation and health. I'd jump in for the skellies, thinking that this was what I could do best until my gear and skills grew. Little did I know that this idea of a Paladin off tank (along with encounters designed for it) would spread itself all the way to Sunwell.

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Q u o t e:
2) I am going with the tactic that worked. Only result so far was a 3-day suspension. I need more pallys to join me, but sadly most seem unwilling to stoop to the depths I have to get the devs to fix what they broke.

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Even though we may say otherwise, we truly appreciate it mostly because we don't have the stones ;) Also, its against my well bred Canadian nature.

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Q u o t e:
3) Congrats, and have fun. But what queue are you talking about? A bg? or do you actually have to wait to get onto your server? Please explain the wait, and what it is for.

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My server has a stupid long queue every night =/ We've been offered a transfer, but there's so much history here. Its totally my fault for staying, so I won't really complain. Doesn't stop me from celebrating when I get in though! =D

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Q u o t e:

We think this is one of the strongest reasons to go with a new ability – paladins don’t have a ton of snap aggro abilities at the moment. We're working on something now but it's too early to announce it yet.

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Aaaa thank you, thank you, thank you. The message got through to Blizzard. I wasn't sure ever how to word it but that is it, right there.

If we had more ways to snap aggro, we could keep up with other tanks. What we have now barely keeps us on par with other tanks, and if one gets a bit ahead of us, we'll never catch up.

Also I'm glad you noted that our damage is lower than other tanks, even though the way I read into your response, it didn't mention any hope about that being an issue. It really is though, we could use some help soloing. We're almost there, but not quite, still floating between 'fine' and 'sub-par'.

Now... I wait.

(p.s. if you really loved us you'd give SotR a sound effect, wink wink nudge nudge say no more)

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Q u o t e:


Aaaa thank you, thank you, thank you. The message got through to Blizzard. I wasn't sure ever how to word it but that is it, right there.

If we had more ways to snap aggro, we could keep up with other tanks. What we have now barely keeps us on par with other tanks, and if one gets a bit ahead of us, we'll never catch up.

Also I'm glad you noted that our damage is lower than other tanks, even though the way I read into your response, it didn't mention any hope about that being an issue. It really is though, we could use some help soloing. We're almost there, but not quite, still floating between 'fine' and 'sub-par'.

Now... I wait.

(p.s. if you really loved us you'd give SotR a sound effect, wink wink nudge nudge say no more)

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The wording of that makes me raise my eyebrow a little bit, as a "taunt" isn't necessarily analogous to "snap aggro ability". I'm just hoping that we don't get served with another irritating gimmick instead of a solidly functioning ability.

About DPS though, I have a feeling there are two possible reasons why we're not getting as much of a response on that:

1. They're waiting to collect more data based on Paladins who have ShoR in the belief that this is where the 'DPS gap' comes from. While this undeniably sucks for us poor scrubs who are still leveling (most people at this point) if it turns out balanced at 80, it can be argued as a justified design decision.

2. Ghostcrawler has already mentioned elsewhere that ways to improve Prot/Holy DPS are being considered if needed, and they're looking at possible solutions. However GC isn't going to say that, as he is understandably keeping that information close because he's been jumped on in the past for mentioning fixes or abilities that never materialized. Now that I think about it, though, one possible solution could be to just improve the damage proc given by SoV when a 5-stack exists on the target. Make SoV require 1h weapons if needed to prevent Ret abuse.

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Q u o t e:


Couldn't have said it better myself.

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To that effect, might I put forth the following for consideration? Specifically about Holy Shield.

Could it be possible to take Holy Shield off the GCD? I, for the life of me, can see no reason why our blocking ability is tied to the GCD.

Could it be possible to make Holy Shield unaffected by Silence? It can be very painful for a boss, or even trash mobs, to cast a silence on me when I'm tanking and making my primary blocking talent completely useless for the duration.