WoW Protection Paladin Tank Guide

Table of Contents

Guide by: Mazorrok

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WoW Protection Paladin Introduction

Protection Paladin in 10.0.7 is coming in a super solid position. The talent tree rework adds a lot of strong abilities to choose from while retaining the core aspect of what Protection Paladin can be. Offensive Juggernaut? Check. Off healing? Check. Offering great abilities such as Battle Rez, Blessing of Protection, Spellwarding and Freedom, a poison and disease dispel are things that make Protection Paladin one of the best pug tanks to choose from.

Protection Paladin is a block based tank spec that uses their abilities to generate holy power to then use on Active mitigation, damage and healing. The talent trees offer a lot of abilities to reduce the cooldowns of many core abilities and gain a lot of damage amps making the playstyle variable to your liking, no matter how defensive or aggressive you like to play.

WoW Protection Paladin Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

1. Strong offensive & defensive cooldowns.
2. Lots of interrupts, I mean LOTS
3. Great utility with many available stops and off healing
4. Auras provide a great party buff

Weaknesses

1. The Active mitigation can be a little weak compared to other tanks.
2. Can feel a little squishy outside of defensives
3. AoE snap threat can be tricky without Avenger’s Shield up

WoW Protection Paladin Stats

Strength is your main stat for protection paladin and should be valued before any secondaries. Ilvl is better than secondaries as your gearing.

  • Haste: reduces the cooldowns of our more frequent holy power generators as well as effects our GCD, making the rotation smoother and makes our holy power generation quicker, which in turn means for Shield of the Righteous, bigger damage, easier active mitigation.
  • Mastery: Like other tanks this increases our attack power. What makes Mastery strong for Paladin tanks, the that it increases our block chance while within our Consecration(rule #1, always be in Consecration) while also reducing the damage you take while you stand in it. This is a stat we like a lot, pound for pound, we gain more from mastery than any other stat aside from haste until a certain break point.
  • Critical Strike: Increases critical strike chance and the rating itself is also our parry rating. While we are a block based spec, parry does have some use for us. Grand Crusader relies mostly on parry chance to reset the cooldown of Avenger’s Shield. While a useful stat and definitely not something to dump, it’s neither our most important stat.
  • Versatility: Increases the damage we do, decreases the damage(50% value) we take and increases our healing done. All around good stat to keep up but not necessarily prioritize.

Haste > Mastery > Versatility =/> Critical Strike

WoW Protection Paladin Enchants, Gems & Consumables

Gems:

  • Until you reach a good haste breakpoint(for me it’s around 33%), use Haste based gems
    to gain your increase where its needed to be, after that focus on Mastery.

Weapon:

  • You have enchants for Protection Paladin, Sophic Devotion and Frozen Devotion. Sophic will provide you with a strength proc with good uptime, good both defensively and offensively. Frozen Devotion is purely a damage boost seeing its most value in AoE.
  • For weapon consumables, the Howling Rune provides a sizable haste bonus for 2 hours, to be used in all content.

Phials:

  • Tepid Versatility: This phial is cheap and grats you a chunk of vers, since we prioritize Haste and Mastery over Versatility, this is a great way to shore up a secondary stat you could otherwise be lacking in that will provide benefits in all content
  • Eye of the Storm: For each enemy that hits you(x5) you gain a strength bonus, this of course is better when there’s a minimum of five enemies to be fighting that one. There are ways to gain max benefit of this, pulling trash onto bosses(not recommended for beginner’s) and always making sure you’re chain pulling into more mobs to keep the buff going strong.
  • Glacial Fury: Like Frozen Devotion, this is also a damage proc Phial that only has offensive benefits, but can do a lot of damage if you aren’t worried about yourself defensively.
  • Elemental Chaos: This phial is interesting, will grant you a large secondary stat bump at all times, alternating between your secondaries for 60 seconds each. Paladins like all the stat and will always have a good bonus from this, unfortunately it’s unpredictable and might not be the stat you want at the time.

Enchants:

  • Cloaks: Regenerative Leech is the better all around enchant. Paladin have no means of getting base leech and with our nuke buttons, gain a lot of benefit from the tertiary.
  • Bracers: Leech or Avoidance are solid options here depending on content. Since Paladin have a mandatory talent in Sanctified Plates, reducing AoE attacks by 10%, leech is going to be the better play in most scenarios.
  • Rings: Devotion of Haste then Devotion of Mastery when your at a comfortable level of Haste.
  • Boots: Watch’s Loam, a nice stamina increase
  • Pants: Fierce armor kit, what used to be a consumable is not a permanent enchant gaining our primary stat and stamina.
  • Chest: Waking Stats is a simple primary stat buff.

WoW Protection Paladin Basics

Like most tank specs, Paladin is a builder spender spec, building holy power to then have access to our spenders, damage, healing and active mitigation.

Holy Power Generators

  • Judgment(1hp,x2 in Wings with Sanctified Wrath)
  • Hammer of Wrath(1hp)
  • Blessed Hammer(1hp)

Holy Power Spenders

  • Shield of the Righteous(3hp): This is our big AoE damage outside of Avenger’s Shield and our active mitigation, granting a large chunk of armor stackable up to 12s*.
  • Word of Glory(3hp): Our big instant heal

Off the Global Cooldown

Shield of the Righteous is off the GCD and can be pressed simultaneously with another one of our builders.

Defensives

  • Ardent Defender: 20% baseline damage reduction and cheat death while active
  • Guardian of Ancient Kings: 50% damage reduction, 5m cd baseline with many way to reduce that.
  • Eye of Tyr: 25% damage reduction to you applied to affected mobs, with Inmost Light talented, 45s cd and deals respectable damage.
  • Sentinel: Wings. 20% Damage and healing buff, decaying 30% Max Buff and damage reduction buff as well. See talents below for more info.
  • Divine Shield: Bubble, Full immunity, taunts everything nearby with the talent on what can be a 2m cd with the right talent setups.

WoW Protection Paladin Talents

Protection Paladin is already in a strong position in 10.0.5 and its about to get much stronger, in fact, I honestly believe this version is going to be nerfed pretty quickly into 10.0.7.. but lets get into the changes and how I think the build will play out.

WoW Protection Paladin Talents

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WoW Protection Paladin Class Tree

There’s quite a few changes to the class tree, Divine Toll is being removed from the Spec tree into the class tree, Sanctified Wrath being moved in return to the class tree. We’re also seeing a significant rework to Of Dusk and Dawn and a few new talents being added in.

There’s little changes in the first portion of the tree aside from Retribution Aura.