Playing a Tankadin can be a lot of fun but can be quite challenging, so you should only enter into tanking if you are prepared to be responsible for groups and learn a lot. Tanks are the lynch pin in every group and as such are expected to know and understand all of the fights in an instance or raid. That is an easy task compared to actually knowing ugg boots how to tank and when to do what though as the biggest difficulty now is actually learning how to tank and doing it well. That’s where this guide attempts to help.
Paladins differ a little in tanking from Warriors, Druids, and Death Knights who generate all of their threat (aggro) from the damage they directly cause. As a Paladin, a significant portion of your threat still comes from the damage you cause with your weapon,wow gold, but a large portion also comes from your other abilities. These include the damage you cause to everything near you with Consecration, and the damage you cause to everything that hits you with Holy Shield and Aura of Retribution.
There are several great Protection abilities, but the ones that really stand out to me are your Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield and the Hammer of the Righteous. All three of these offer great methods of producing additional threat. Your Holy shield offers increased block as well as holy damage caused back to the attacker. It is on an 8 second cooldown but lasts 10 seconds. This allows you to overlap it so that the increased block chance is always active. Avenger’s Shield provides a great method to pull enemies from range and establish a good head start on threat. Lastly your Hammer of the Righteous provides a great way to supplement the AOE threat that Consecrate provides, since it affects multiple targets.
There are many critical abilities in the protection talent tree though. In fact there are more good talents than most players can reasonably take. Just a few of the key ones are: Anticipation for a 5% boost to dodge, Toughness for 10% extra armour, Sacred Duty and Combat Expertise for 8% and 6% additional stamina from each respectively, One-handed weapon specialization for a 10% boost to all damage while holding a one-handed weapon, and many more.
This is the Tankadin Build many players are currently using for raid tanking - Tankadin Build. While it focuses heavily on Protection it also goes into Retribution to get increased damage, speed, parry,buy wow gold, and a debuff to the opponent’s attack power. It is a fairly standard raid build used by many Tankadins.
While there are a number of decent Glyphs for a Protection based Paladin the ones I suggest are based on tanking usefulness. Therefore the greater glyphs I believe you should use are:
Glyph of Divine Plea - This glyph reduces the damage you take while you are using your Divine Plea. Since Divine Plea can effectively be active 100% of the time due to the talent Protected by the Light, this is a 3% constant damage reduction.
Glyph of Seal of Vengeance - This glyph increases your Expertise by 10 while Seal of Vengeance is active. Since you will be dodged and parried less this increases the damage and therefore the threat that you cause.
Glyph of Hammer of Righteousness - This glyph allows your Hammer to hit one additional target. This is great for AOE situations and really helps you AOE even better than you normally can.
Stats and Gear
Gear for a Tanking Paladin is pretty easy in theory, but turns into a constant juggling act of micro-management in reality. In theory it is easy as you need to get to 540 defense to avoid getting critically hit by raid bosses and then wow gold stack Stamina and avoidance abilities (Dodge, Parry, Block). There are some other useful abilities such as Strength (for threat generation and block value), Hit, and Expertise. However this is where the balancing act comes in.
Your primary goal will always be to remain at 540 Defense or just slightly over. Once this is complete then you need to focus on health through Stamina so that you can take big enough hits to live until a heal hits you. Stat wise it is easy to see why Stamina is important - every point provides you with 10 extra base health which turns into more after your talents and Kings. When you factor in the boost through talents and Blessing of Kings, a simple investment of 10 stamina that would grant 100 health becomes significantly more. Obviously the more health you can have as a tank the better,buy wow gold, however a balancing act comes into play as you need to ensure defensive abilities as well or you will be too hard to heal no matter the amount of health you have.
Gems and Enchants
Gems and enchants will play an important part in getting you to the numbers you need to be able to tank heroics and raids.
First we’ll start with the easier topic of gems. In general you should be putting +Defense gems in every socket you can when you first gear up so that you can reach the defense cap. Once your gear allows you to do that then blue +Stamina gems should go in every socket possible blue or otherwise. When the socket bonus is worth following you can fill the other colored sockets as follows. Yellow slots should be filled with the green +Defense / + Stamina gems. Red slots should be filled with the purple +Strength / +Stamina gems.
As for Meta Gems there are two options. If you are still reaching 540 defense to get to defense cap then get the Eternal Earthsiege Diamond that grants +21 Defense and +5% Shield Block Value. If you have reached defense cap then get the Austere Earthsiege Diamond and the +32 Stamina and and 2% increased armour value that it provides.
Now onto the more difficult topic of enchants on your gear. Proper enchants can add a ton of stats to your already good gear. The most critical ones depend on the stats that you are lacking at the time and will fluctuate as you gear up.
Tanking Seals
The two main seals that you can use to generate threat while tanking are Seal of Righteousness (SoR) and Seal of Vengeance (SoV). Both cause holy damage, but cause it in a different way. Which one should you use though? The answer is pretty simple, in almost all cases you use Seal of Vengeance since it will generate more threat.
Seal of Righteousness generates holy damage every time you hit with it. It causes damage based on its starting damage plus a percentage of your attack power and spell power. Seal of Vengeance works slightly differently as it places a DOT on the enemy that stacks up to 5 times in addition to the initial holy damage it causes. This DOT causes damage and therefore threat over time. While the damage it causes on the initial hit is slightly lower than SoR the DOT makes up for it. This means that at the start of a fight it generates very little threat, but ramps up over the first 5-10 seconds of the fight until it is generating full threat. Seal of vengeance gains a percentage of your attack power and spell power to cause holy damage.
The delay in initial full threat does mean that in extremely short fight situations you may want to use Seal of Righteousness so that you are building full threat right from the start. It could be used for trash mobs in normal instances, some heroic instances and even some of the easy to kill raid trash. However, for anything that is buy wow gold going to stand up to your group for more than 10-20 seconds you want to switch to Seal of Vengeance as it will generate more threat over time.
There is another seal that can be used at times as well, which is Seal of Blood / Seal of the Martyr. This Seal causes slightly more damage at the cost of inflicting damage to yourself. This is generally used if you over gear the content you are tanking and you are not taking enough damage to require enough healing to generate your mana back.
