Classic Protection Paladin Tank Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

As a Protection Paladin, your rotation is entirely dependent on your Mana and the consumables that you have available. You will not have intellect on your gear since you will be going for more defensive stats like Defense and Stamina, meaning your Mana pool will be low. Your main sources of threat generation are going to be keeping up Seal of Righteousness and Holy Shield to passively generate threat from auto attacks and holy damage procs. Mana permitting, you can also use Judgement for a burst of single-target threat, along with Consecration for strong AoE threat.

• Keep Seal of Righteousness up;
• Keep Holy Shield up;
• Use Judgement on pull for a burst of threat;
• Use a rank of Consecration, Mana permitting, for AoE threat;

You should have every rank of Consecration bound and ready to use depending on how much threat you need to do and how much Mana you have. Part of mastering Prot Paladin is planning your spells out so that you can use your Mana when you really need it by not wasting Mana early unnecessarily. Using consumables, especially Mana regenerating ones such as Major Mana Potion and Demonic Rune are important to letting you use more spells, thus generating more threat during a fight. You will not have a large Mana pool, so using Mana consumables is almost required to function normally as a Protection Paladin.

Another useful trick for threat generation is to weapon swap right before you use Consecration. Consecration is a incredibly powerful AoE threat generation tool that scales off of Spell Power. If you equip a weapon with Spell Power before your use Consecration, it will do more damage for the full duration, and you can switch back to your normal weapon immediately after.

Against undead targets, Exorcism and Holy Wrath are also excellent damage sources, but sadly you will not get to use them often in raids until Naxxramas.

Cleanse is also an extremely powerful spell that should not be overlooked. It is the best dispel ability in the game, able to clear most types of debuffs.

• Keep Seal of Wisdom up;
• Keep Holy Shield up;
• Use Judgement on the target you are hitting;
• Spam Greater Blessing of Kings on a Warrior.

Greater Blessing of Kings generates threat based on the number of targets buffed. It turns out that in 40-man raid groups where you generally have lots of certain classes, such as Warriors, casts of GBoK will generate a decent amount of threat. You can actually just spam GBoK while regenerating mana from Seal of Wisdom and Judgement to keep threat in raids with minimal effort. This is only useful with a large number of buff targets however, so do not try this outside of raids, or if you care about your damage dealt.

One of the main drawbacks of Protection Paladins is the lack of a taunt, which is required on multiple raid encounters throughout WoW Classic. Normally, this would make Paladins almost non-viable in certain encounters; however, there is a way around this, but it requires a bit more effort than a normal taunt. If you are going to need to take threat from another tank, you must get to just below them on the threat meters. Once you are in a clear second place for threat, you can use Blessing of Protection on them, which wipes out all of their threat. This will cause the target to switch to attack the next highest threat player, which should be you. You can then hold the boss, and the original tank just needs to taunt back if they need to.

It is important to note that this will require a Blessing of Protection every time you need to taunt swap, which means you will either need to use this sparingly or have multiple Paladins available to help you. Your co-tank should also be a Warrior or Druid, so they have a taunt of their own. Most importantly, though, this does require careful threat management to pull off, so make sure you are watching the meter and tell other inactive tanks to stop hitting the boss, if you need to catch up.

Protection Paladins use one seal mainly, Seal of Righteousness. This seal causes you to deal a flat amount of holy damage with each attack, meaning it is important to use a fast weapon for more holy damage procs. If you are off-tanking in a raid and not actively taking damage or generating threat, you can also choose to use Seal of Wisdom to use Judgement for the Judgement of Wisdom debuff on the boss, which will cause anyone attacking it to generate Mana. This can be a very useful utility to have, but any Paladin can do it, not just Protection.

Your Blessings are incredibly powerful buffs that should be kept up at all times. You will want to coordinate with the other Paladins in your raid to see who should be buffing what on each class, since you can only use one on any given person at a time. With the Greater Blessings they will last 15 minutes, so you generally will not need to worry about refreshing them in the middle of a fight, but you will want to check between pulls to make sure none are in danger of falling off.

While you will spend most of your time doing damage to generate threat, do not forget that as a Paladin, one of your core strengths is your ability to support your raid with your powerful utility, specifically your cooldowns. Lay on Hands can be a great panic button if someone is about to die and even a lower cooldown like Cleanse can be extremely useful on some fights. You will want to pair Lay on Hands with a Mana potion however since it will drain all of your Mana when you use it. Blessing of Freedom and Blessing of Protection can be extremely powerful utility cooldowns as well. Part of mastering Paladin is getting comfortable with using the correct cooldown for the correct situation, both to play defensively and to help others.