Protection Paladin Tank Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

As a Protection Paladin, you can expect to perform the role of a solid and reliable tank. In general, your damage intake will be relatively smooth, with many attacks being blocked by your shield or softened by your strong active mitigation. No other tank class has quite the array of tricks up their sleeve that a Paladin does.

Note that this guide focuses on aspects that are specific to Protection Paladins and general tanking strategies are beyond its scope. If you wish to know more about the tanking role and what you can do to improve, we recommend that you read our tanking guide.

Strengths

• Strong active mitigation and cooldown kit against predictable incoming damage.
• Unique group utility and damage reductions with Blessings and Auras.
• Good burst capabilities with cooldowns for damage and threat generation.
• Great emergency cooldowns like Lay on Hands and Divine Shield when things look dire.
• Good self and group healing with Word of Glory and Lay on Hands.
• Can remove poisons and diseases with Cleanse Toxins.

Weaknesses

• It takes a few GCDs to get Shield of the Righteous started meaning the start of combat can be dangerous. This can be offset by using a cooldown such as Ardent Defender / Guardian of Ancient Kings.
• Moving out of Consecration means losing out on damage reduction.
• Limited mobility outside of Divine Steed.
• Mistakes in your rotation can be very punishing.

Protection Paladins have seen a wide range of changes in this patch to both talent trees and abilities. Many new talents have been added to the core Paladin tree.

The key highlights of these changes are:

• Avenging Wrath has been moved to the spec tree and has the effects of Avenging Wrath: Might baked in.
• Divine Toll has taken the place of Avenging Wrath and is much more accessible.
• Empyreal Ward is a new talent which gives the target of Lay on Hands armor for 30 seconds and ignores healing reductions for the heal.
• Lightbearer is a new talent which makes a portion of healing recieved from other players also heal 4 nearby players.
• Lead the Charge is a new talent which reduces the cooldown of movement abilities for 4 nearby players. A mini Time Spiral.
• Lightforged Blessing now heals 3% (was 1%).
• Blessing of Dawn from Of Dusk and Dawn has been increased by 10%.

The key highlights of these changes are:

• Damage increased by 6%.
• Base Armor and armor from Shield of the Righteous has been increased by 10%.
• Shield of the Righteous damage and Word of Glory healing has been increased by 20%.
• Blessed Hammer, Hammer of the Righteous, and Judgment cooldown has been reduced by 10%.
• Some talents have moved locations.
• Gift of the Golden Val'kyr and Uther's Counsel now only cost 1 point.
• A new talent has been added Refining Fire. This adds a DoT to targets hit by Avenger's Shield.

Lightsmith had two talents removed which were not very useful and have had new talents created in their place:

• Fear No Evil and Excoriation have been removed.
• Authoritative Rebuke and Tempered in Battle have been added.
• Tempered in Battle will be the go to in more single target oriented scenarios, and Tempered in Battle will pull ahead in Mythic+ when combined with Punishment.

For a full breakdown of all Class Changes in The War Within, check out our dedicated page below.

If you do not have a Paladin at max level, you can follow the link below to help you in your quest to reach max level. Keep in mind that leveling as a tank, while not always the fastest, means you are great at being able to pull large groups of enemies and AoE them down.

Should you be leveling as a tank, it is recommended to learn the ropes throughout the leveling process as well, as generally, it is not tuned to be very hard. Addons are rather important to be able to tank well, such as threatplates, but also tracking buffs and debuffs. Playing dungeons while leveling will give you a sense of those addons before getting thrown into max-level content.

Tanking, in general, means a lot of pressure to not only do damage and thus threat to make sure things are attacking you but also about surviving those attacks. As a Protection Paladin, this generally means generating as much Holy Power as possible, so you can spend it on Shield of the Righteous to reduce damage intake. There can be moments where damage taken is higher and you will want to supplement this with another cooldown should, these would be scenarios such as pulling a large amount of enemies or bosses. If you are fairly new to the class and spec and need to jump into it right away, we recommend the Easy Mode page linked below.

If you have got the basics down and want to improve your class knowledge, go to the Talent and Rotation pages for more in-depth information.

Tanks are generally quite uncommon, so finding a group as a tank is not too difficult, and gearing up might happen rather fast. At the start, all you really want is a higher item level, as you value all the stats you can get. Once you have options of similar item levels, you can follow these pages to read more on how the different stats influence your character, as well as what gems, enchants, and consumables you should be using. You can also find a page dedicated to more end-game gearing information on the BiS and Gear page.

End-game content comes in many forms that can vary quite a lot in both gearing and playstyle, depending on what you focus most of your efforts on. While tanking in raids or in Mythic+ on the surface seems similar, there are many ways they differ, and you can focus on them separately in the pages linked below. PvP is typically not played with tank-specced players, so we recommend you play one of the other Paladin specializations (Holy / Retribution) should you wish to learn more of that.

Tanking can sometimes be rather unforgiving, especially if you are not quite sure what is actually going wrong; below, we have linked a few resources aimed at helping you improve playing your character.