Protection Paladins — heading towards the right way



Ghost­crawler (Bliz­zard Poster) made a very inter­est­ing post yes­ter­day on the WotLK Beta forums:

Pro­tec­tion — We want more tanks in the game. Main tanks. We think it’s fun to have a diver­sity of play­ers and see how dif­fer­ent spells, abil­i­ties and class mechan­ics get used to solve prob­lems. A Pro­tadin with the right skill and gear should be able to tank any fight in the game. Pre­vi­ously, we tried to push Prot into the off­tank and AE tank roles. While your abil­i­ties are still really well suited for AE in par­tic­u­lar, over­all our phi­los­o­phy has changed and we want you to be able to do any­thing the other tanks do. Note that this means other tanks will get bet­ter at AE tank­ing though. Prot rep­re­sents a spe­cial chal­lenge when not tank­ing because you can both heal and do dps and some play­ers want to do either. Or both. One final com­ment, that you have already seen, is we want you to gear like a war­rior: col­lect Strength and Stam and use tank­ing weapons instead of caster weapons.

And he saw that it was good!

I think the mes­sage is very clear now: we must sep­a­rate from the old think­ing of stack­ing Spell Dam­age (or Power as it’s called now) and go towards the new and improved stats. This will raise numer­ous prob­lems as not many will actu­ally doc­u­ment them­selvs about these changes, but it’s up to us, those who know, to educate.

A very inter­est­ing debate is going on over that the Main­tankadin forums and focuses on the weapon of choice in WotLK: should we stick to caster weapons or switch to true tank­ing weapons? The Spread­sheet says that caster weapons are still bet­ter. How­ever, one needs to remem­ber that we’re still in Beta and many changes will take place until the live ver­sion so who knows what will happen.

Per­son­ally, my plan as of now is to gear for Strength and Sta­mina but to stick to a caster weapon until waters are a bit more clear.

Only one thing is cer­tain: there will be fun times ahead for Pro­tec­tion Pal­adins.

See More Pop­u­lar Posts:

• A Guide to Pro­tec­tion Pal­adin Glyphs
• Patch 3.1 Pro­tec­tion Pal­adin Specs and Glyphs
• Best WotLK Weapon Enchant for Pro­tec­tion Paladins
• Pro­tec­tion Pal­adin build for Wrath of the Lich King
• A ques­tion for all tanks

Sim­i­lar Posts of Interest:

• Pro­tec­tion Pal­adin build for Wrath of the Lich King
• Read­ers ask, itankstuff.com answears (I)
• Best WotLK Weapon Enchant for Pro­tec­tion Paladins
• Pro­tec­tion Pal­adin guide to Karazhan: a few words of introduction
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5 Responses to “Protection Paladins — heading towards the right way”

1. Adrenis says:

   20/09/2008 at 16:51

   Hmm, that is very inter­est­ing. I’m plan­ning on re-rolling a Pal­adin for WotLK and I’m think­ing I’ll go either Prot or Ret. It’s good to know that Bliz­zard wants Pal­lies to be com­pletely viable as tanks. If I can go Ret and still have enough points in Prot to off-tank, that will be very cool.

   Reply
2. Nozeen says:

   25/09/2008 at 19:41

   I think it’s too bad that they’re push­ing War­riors, Pal­adins and Deathknights towards all using the same gear and stats. It seems to me like they’re homog­e­niz­ing the game and tak­ing away some of the unique­ness and fla­vor to each class. I liked Pal­adins as the plate-spelldamage mostly-passive want-to-be-hit tnks, who worked and geared very dif­fer­ently from warriors.

   Reply
3. Knarfis says:

   07/10/2008 at 18:40

   I agree with Nozeen about the homog­e­niz­ing of the class to the other tank­ing classes. Which brings up the other point of gear dis­tri­b­u­tion. Now we pallys need to fight with the war­rrior of all tal­lent tree spec, the ret pally, and the deathknights as well. I use to play Everquest at a pally and it really didnt mat­ter between a war­rior, pally, shad­owknight. If you had plate on u can tank any­thing. Which always kicked other tanks out of the group or raid because one could do it all. Play­ing WOW at this time showed me that the pallys has a much dif­fer­ent roll then the war­riors and where needed for a spe­cific roll dur­ing a raid or group fight. Vice versa for the war­riors. This way of think­ing cre­ated diver­sity and above all NEED. NEED for specifics. So from what im read­ing so far which hasnt been much i admit, those specifics are going away and we, pallys are just becom­ing a plate class that can tank some­thing, any­thing. Like in Everquest, a game that has long been dead because of the over­think­ing of there devel­op­ers and crys of there play­ers who dont know what they where talk­ing about at the time. THe biggest ques­tion that I have from all of this to bliz­zard is WHY?? WHY these huge changes??? What was wrong with the way it was before Lich King?? I always under­stood that one would fix or change some­thing when that some­thing was either bro­ken or didnt work in the first place. Last time i checked, which was last night, my Prot pally worked just fine tank­ing and was in no way bro­ken or didnt work at all. So again WHY??

   Knarfis
   Blade­fist
   Fires Within

   Reply
4. Ziggymarley - Gnomeregan says:

   18/11/2008 at 16:52

   Tech­ni­cally they haven’t changed pal­adins core stats, they just changed spec’s up a bit.. We recieve spell dam­age from sta­mina and our num­ber one (of many) threat build­ing spell relys on weapon DPS which is con­verted to holy dam­age there­fore affected by right­eous fury. So when you become geared with End game stuff, you dont need spell dam­age on your gear, but inver­sly if you are under­geared you may need to buff your spellpower to over­come your gear gap with the dps to hold aggro. any­ways, Wotlk is here, and i can’t wait to see how our roll as viable main tankadin pans out (We couldn’t main tank ill­i­dan as well as a skill­ful war­rior, so I am hop­ing the fight mechan­ics were changed so that pal­adins can suc­ces­fully main tank any­thing a war­rior could, with more grace as per usual

   Reply
5. How to Get Six Pack Fast says:

   15/04/2009 at 17:01

   If you ever want to see a reader’s feed­back , I rate this post for four from five. Decent info, but I have to go to that damn google to find the missed parts. Thank you, anyway!

   Reply