My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
While I draw breath, they shall not perish.
So long as they live, our enemies will fall.
I am defender, protector, guardian.
I am a Paladin.

Yes there are some caveats, soloing is one of them. My lousy dps and extended downtime make solo grinding unbearable. Unless of course I’m doing this:

A few days ago I switched my Paladin from Ret to Prot, as 66 seemed to be the level of choice to do so. Now I’m happily tanking. I’ve noticed that sometimes I have to drop defense gear so that I take enough damage, and in one fight I considered getting my 2h sword out again, just so that the hits would hurt more.

These were 60-62 instances – so is that pretty normal if you’re doing a lower instance. eg. At 70 will I be doing the same in the 68-69 Instances?

As I was writing my response in the comments I figured I’d go ahead and make it a full-fledged post.

Paladins are a unique breed in that our rage bar just happens to be blue. We use our mana to generate threat and provide other utility like our taunt and the occasional hammer-stun. When we tank, we rely on our healers to provide a healthy stream of mana by way of our passive Spiritual Attunement.

For every heal that we successfully receive, SA rewards us with 10% (at level 66) of the healed amount in mana with one very important caveat: if we’re at full health, we get no mana. This can be extremely problematic as in Nathan’s situation where one isn’t actually losing enough health to keep their mana levels up.

I often joke about taking my gear off as we run through 5-man trash as I burn through mana at an extremely fast pace but stay relatively topped off in the health department due to my superior defense. What you will find as you progress through content as a tanking pally is that you will need to acquire (and keep with you at all times) at least 2 (if not more) sets of gear.

The first set is probably closest to what you’ve acquired thus far if you’re new to the prot scene and that is high spell dmg, high int, mp5 gear. These pieces will come in handy when burning through instance trash, and even on some boss battles that favor staying power over damage reduction. If you’re still not taking enough damage, feel free to slip into some caster cloth or pull out the ole’ zweihander.

The second set is what you will be working on for raid content with a focus on tanking stats. Get yourself to 490 defense to become virtually uncrittable and work on 102.4% for uncrushability. With these goals in mind, you will still probably want to hang on to most any tanking piece you come across as different stats will be better suited for different scenarios. Some gear will have have a focus on mitigation (reducing the damage taken) while other items will provide more stamina (allowing you to take more damage) or avoidance (not taking any damage at all). Which stat to build over the other is still a topic of huge debate among players. My preferred solution is to have them all and switch them out as needed.

So to answer your question Andrew, yes, it is entirely normal and you will still be tweaking your equipment on the fly throughout runs at 70 in not only the dungeons but I can only assume well into the raid progression as well. With so many different encounter types, increasing the ability to excel at your role by adjusting your stats through gear is crucial to the success of any player, especially the tank.

I’ve only ran a couple of instances as the frontman.. err frontlady. Mana tombs at level 70 was relatively easy, but Shattered Halls in Hellfire Citadel gave us a decent challenge. We made the huge mistake of attempting the heroic version of SH prior to our regular run… we couldn’t make it past the first pull. A definite reality(gear)-check. We made it through the normal Shattered Halls without too much trouble. Learned a few valuable lessons, laughed, cried, killed and plundered.

The actual tanking play-style requires a high degree of micromanagement. I rarely find myself spamming a single spell over and over *cough*healading*cough* but rather I’m constantly trying to manage my timing, cooldowns, and buff/debuff durations to maximize both my threat and my survivability. The key is being able to not just have a tried and true cycle of skills but being able to adjust them based on the circumstances. In one scenario, i might not be taking enough damage to require consistent healspamming, which ultimately affects my mana pool as I won’t be getting much of a bonus from spiritual attunement, so i’ll bust out my seal/judgement of wisdom. On the other hand, a hardhitting boss or an unfortunately large trash pull will result in seal of light to help ease the job of the healer. There’s also times where i’ll need to throw on my wings or pop a spell-damage trinket to keep up with the threat from a hard-dotting lock or a crithappy boomkin.

So with my newfound role comes a desire to master it. I’ve found the Maintankadin Forum to be an invaluable resource for a newb prot pally such as myself. The other part of the equation of course is gear. Much like a warrior, paladins have to maximize mitigation and staying power through typical stats like defense, dodge, parry and block but there’s also a need to maintain a certain level of spelldamage as that’s where the majority of our threat comes from. This stat juggling turns gearing up a paladin into a fine science.

This science is made infinitely more convenient with addons like Rating Buster and TankPoints as well as awesome theorycrafting tools like warcrafter.net. Warcrafter allows you to import your character from the Armory (or start from scratch with a blank template), and switch out any piece of gear imaginable to see its effect on your overall stats. It also includes the ability to add various enchants and gems and calculates for further fine-tuning. I highly recommend checking it out. I’ve saved my current gear wish-list at http://www.warcrafter.net/sandbox/16972. It’s probably not the most efficient or definitely not the best gear arrangement possible, but it does offer a good mix of what I would consider obtainable items over the next month or so and gets me over 490 defense (uncrittable by bosses) and close to 102.4% total avoidance (uncrushable) with holy shield up.

Time to go tank another instance. =)

I knew instantly what spec he was rollin w/ his Capt. America shield toss and his extra reckoning swinging. I figured wth, time for a respec (my second since I rolled this char way back at the beginning of Dark Iron). It was time to graduate from retnoob to tankadin.

With Shelbi respecing her lock to affliction, and us both just reaching level 64, it worked out well. I’m still getting the hang of the new skills but I’m definitely liking it. I’ve found that I’m much more effective at taking out multiple mobs and actually prefer to go up against groups at a time. I’m eager to head back to Azeroth to do some AOE-grinding in Stratholme.