How to Tank as a Paladin

NOTE: This guide has been completely revamped to reflect the drastic changes that were
implemented with patch 4.0.1 and the release of Cataclysm.

 Tanking Basics

 Talents

 Glyphs

 Holy Power

 Stats and Gear

 Unhittable

 Reforging

 Gems and Enchants

 Threat Rotation

 Multi-target Threat

 Seals

 Consumables

 Macros

 Things to Remember

 Return to Main Page

Paladin Tanking Basics

So you want to take a beating, do you?  Well, you’ve come to the right place.  This guide
will walk you through the basics of playing a protection based Paladin, or Tankadin as they
are commonly called. 

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 how to tank.  To
tank you need to know what to do and when to do it, that’s the biggest difficulty in actually
learning how to tank and doing it well. That's where this guide attempts to help.
So why play a Paladin tank, and what makes a Paladin tank different from the
other forms of tanks?

Paladin tanks have solid damage mitigation especially when taking many hits.  This is
because any hit we block has its damage reduced by 40%, and we block a lot of hits.

While we do not have a rage bar like a Warrior tank, we have a mana bar that gets used in
much the same way, and gets replenished every time we get healed. We also have both a
single target and multi target ranged taunt that can be used as a backup taunt in the form
of Blessing of Protection.  We have several ranged pull backs in the form of the Avengers
Shield and Exorcism. We also have a stun on a cool down timer and an AoE stun against
undead targets. We also have an AoE heal, single target instant heal from Holy Power, and
a group or raid damage reduction.

Because all of the Paladin abilities are on timers or act for very short time frames, tanking
as a Paladin involves very close management of spell casting if you want to get the most
threat and damage mitigation possible. You constantly have to manage all of your abilities
and cooldowns, all while watching what is going on around you. It can take some serious
getting used to.

Threat
 Paladin Tank
Paladins work best when
you can group creatures up
and tank many at
once.
Starting at the beginning, your job as a tank is to hold threat, sometimes called aggro, on
you and off of your DPS and healers.  This is a measure of how mad the enemy is at you
and how likely they are to attack you.  As a tank this is your primary concern, keeping the
enemy attacking you. 

How you keep threat starts with the most basic tanking ability you have, Righteous Fury. 
This is a buff that you cast on yourself that increases all threat that you cause by 200%. 
This means any damage you do to an enemy counts as 3x the actual damage you did for
threat generation purposes.

While the base UI has a simple threat meter system built into it, I would strongly
recommend getting a mod such as Omen to track your threat. This will help you figure out if
you are generating enough for your DPS and let you know how far ahead you are from
them.  If you consistently have a huge lead in threat it allows you to do other things without
worrying about losing threat.

Talents, Glyphs, and Holy Power

As a Tankadin, realize that you will need to place almost all of your points in the Protection
tree. You need to do this to grab all of the major tanking abilities, many of which are found
very deep in the tree. You will spend at least 31 points in the protection tree and likely a bit
more before venturing over to the Retribution or Holy trees to spend your remaining talent
points.

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: Divinity
which grants 6% bonus healing, Toughness for 10% extra armour, Sanctuary to prevent
critical hits against you, and to suffer 10% less damage, and Holy Shield which blocks an
additional 10% of damage.  There are many more useful talents in a good build, but rather
than go through all of them, take a look at a standard raid build.

Shown below is a typical Tankadin build that many players are currently using for raid
tanking at level 85:
 Typical Tanking Build

You can find a typical build in a Talent Calculator here.

Glyphs

While there are a number of decent Glyphs for a Protection based Paladin there’s not a full
set of prime, major, and minor that you need to take.  Instead, there are primes that you
must have and a few major glyphs.  So the ones you really should take are as follows:

Prime Glyphs:

 Seal of Truth for the 10 Expertise Rating which is a huge buff, and frees up
itemization points on your gear to be used on other stats.

 Shield of the Righteous for an extra 10% damage with your shield.

 Crusader Strike for 5% extra crit chance with it, or Judgement for 10% extra
damage.  Both are much weaker choices than the first two though.
 Major Glyphs:

 Holy Wrath so that it also stuns Elementals and Dragonkin.  This helps reduce
incoming damage for a short period of time.

 Focused Shield is an option for raid main tanking as it ups the damage and threat
on a single target, but gets rid of the bounce and therefore the threat on secondary
targets. Situational

 Whatever you want for your third.

Minor Glyphs:

 Nothing provides any huge bonus specific to tanking, so you can choose whichever
ones you want.

Holy Power

In Cataclysm we now have what amounts to Rogue like combo points called Holy Power. We
earn Holy power by hitting opponents with CS of HotR.  The points stack up to 3 and can be
used at any time to trigger abilities such as Word of Glory (a self heal), Inquisition (bonus
Holy damage), or Shield of the Righteous (a huge damaging hit).

Generally we should use our Holy Power only when it gets all the way to 3 stacks.  However
as soon as it does we should use it right away.  How we use it is as follows:

 Shield of the Righteous if we are tanking a single target and need threat.  This is
always the first priority.

 Inquisition if we are tanking a group of enemies and have Consecrate and Holy
Wrath off cooldown and available to use right after.

 Word of Glory if we are low on health but have lots of threat.  Anytime we are way
ahead on threat in a long fight this is a good option as it saves the healers mana and still
generates some threat as healing creates 50% threat.

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 you want to stack avoidance to the point where you
can not suffer a normal hit, have enough stamina to survive any hit, and enough threat
causing ability to hold the boss on you instead of on your DPS.  Actually, that doesn’t look
so simple does it?

Because of the complexities of managing gear, many tanks suffer from something I call
Stamina Stacking. Many tanks simply do not understand the importance of all the stats and
therefore focus strictly on their health pool by stacking stamina. Worse yet, many DPS and
Healers that don’t understand mitigation just look at a tank’s health pool to determine if
they are geared enough for an instance or raid.

Effective Health

Obviously the more health you can have as a tank the better, and this is what too many
players focus on.  What a smart tank or player will focus on is your effective health. Your
effective health is how much damage you can take over time which is far more important
that looking at simply how big of a simple hit you can take, well it's more important once
you can take the biggest hit you need to be able to take.

Let's look at two simplified examples, the first a tank with 300,000 health but no avoidance
and a second tank with 150,000 health and 20% dodge and parry and 30% block. We will
then have them fight a boss that hits for 50,000 damage every 3 seconds after armour
reduction, or 20 times in a minute.

The first tank will take 1,000,000 damage over that 1 minute fight because he will get hit by
every attack. The second tank will parry 4 and dodge 4, taking 400,000 less damage, and
then block 6 more attacks stopping 40% of the damage from  each, or another 120,000
damage. This means that the second tank only needs to be healed for 480,000 health over
the minute fight, instead of 1,000,000.  Ask a healer which tank they would rather heal and
I think you can guess the answer.

While in real life the stat difference may not be as drastic, healers can very easily tell even a
5% difference between characters and will start questioning why a stamina tank is so hard
to heal compared to an avoidance tank.
So instead of just focusing on your total health let's look at all the stats that matter to
Paladin tanks.

Stamina – Stamina grants 10 health for every point of stamina.  In addition, because of
Vengeance, we gain up to 10% of our health as Attack Power which helps us generate
threat.

Dodge and Parry – Dodge and Parry on gear provide boosts to the percentage chance to
either dodge or parry an incoming attack.  At level 85 you need 177 points in either to earn
1%.  Both are subject to Diminishing returns once you are above a certain point, which is
just below 10% at level 85.

Mastery – Mastery provides 2.25% chance to block per point.  This is not subject to
diminishing returns and therefore offers the most bang for you points until you are Block
Capped, which will be described later.

Hit – Hit rating is required so that you do not miss with your attacks.  To hit a raid boss you
require 8% hit at 129 points per percent which works out to 1032 hit at level 85.

Expertise – Expertise helps minimize or eliminate an enemies chance to dodge or parry

your attacks.  Once you get to 26 Expertise a boss can no longer dodge, and at 55 Expertise
they can not parry.  Your goal is to get to at least 26 Expertise which is referred to as the
soft cap.  We do, however, gain 10 expertise rating points from our glyphs so that means
we only really need 16 rating, each of which requires 31 points of expertise on your gear. 
Meaning you need a total of 481.
 Paladin Weapon Threat
Paladins get threat from the damage they cause with thier weapon and abilities.

Once you have enough health for the content that you are tanking (the amount of health
you should have is subjective, however a good starting point is 100k for level 85 instances,
125k for heroics, and 150k for raids) you should instead focus on becoming "Unhittable" or
"Block Capped". While this is a bit of a misnomer since you can still be hit, what you are
looking to do is raise your avoidance stats to a point that you are not able to be hit with a
normal hit, instead the worst you will suffer is a hit that you block with your shield. What
this means is that the worst an enemy can do to you is their normal hit damage minus your
block value. We will look at this more in the Unhittable section below.
 While +hit and +expertise will increase your threat output due to you hitting the enemy
more, threat is generally not an issue. +Hit is helpful though so that you can always hit with
your taunts and special abilities. If you can, reaching the melee hit cap of 8% is useful but
not nearly as necessary as with other tanks. The same applies to expertise since it adds
additional threat but is not a necessity like it is for Warriors and Death Knights.

The Hit Table and Reaching Unhittable or Block-capped

As explained above this does not mean you can not be hit, but that you can not suffer a
normal full damage hit. Prior to the WotLK expansion this was called uncrushable, but
WotLK essentially took crushing blows out of the game. The same math as before applies to
figuring out if you are unhittable.

You must understand how the hit table works before we start though. A raid boss has a
102.4% chance to hit you since you are 3 levels lower than he is. This means that you need
102.4% of total avoidance to not suffer that hit. How is it made up?

Your avoidance stats are Miss, Dodge, Parry, and Block. Miss is normally a base 5% chance,
however since a raid boss is 3 levels higher this goes down to 4.4%. At level 85 once
specced as a tank and with some decent level 85 gear you will have numbers such as the
ones below:

 4.4% - Miss

 12.5% - Dodge

 12.5% - Parry

 30% - Block

This means that you will be hit normally by the boss roughly 40.6% of the time.  Those
stats are relatively easy to reach and provide a great starting point for Heroic Content, but
you will want to ramp up those numbers before raiding.
Once you start raiding your goal is a set of numbers something like this:

 4.4% - Miss

 20% - Dodge
 20% - Parry

 52.5% - Block

By maximizing block first since it is the easiest to get you remove all normal hits from the
hit table and lower overall damage significantly.  Once it has been maxed and your total
avoidance is 102.4% then you can start to shift some back into dodge and parry.

Reforging

Reforging is a great way to adjust your stats to those that better suit your exact needs.  For
a complete guide on how to reforge check out our guide here: Reforge This - A Guide to
Reforging in World of Warcraft. As for paladin tanks you should adjust your stats so that you
maximize mastery.

As you will only be equipping tanking gear, you don’t have that many options on reforging
as you will not have stats that you can easily sacrifice such as haste, crit, spirit, or others. 
Instead all your gear will have only Stamina, Strength, Expertise, Hit, Dodge, Parry, or
mastery.  So, which to switch around first?

Your first priority is to reforge any expertise and hit into mastery on your gear to up your
block percentage. This is counter to previous expansions where hit and expertise mattered,
and don’t get me wrong, they still do.  However, while in theory focusing on hit and
expertise should take priority, threat is currently not an issue on raid bosses due to the
tank’s vengeance ability.  Our threat is so solid that we can afford a few misses or parries
past the first few seconds of the fight, and those points are better spent on maximizing your
mitigation.

After moving any expertise or hit into mastery, if you have pieces that only have dodge or
parry they are next on the list.  On these pieces reforge your highest avoidance stat (dodge
or parry) and move it into mastery to provide block until you are at the block cap.  This is
because mastery is not affected by diminishing returns and will do more for you by lowering
incoming damage faster than the other stats once they are over 10%.
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 Stamina
gems in your blue slots, parry in red slots, and dodge or mastery in yellow.  Given how
important maximizing mastery is you may want to consider every slot to be filled with a
hybrid stamina/mastery (blue or yellow sockets) or parry/mastery (red sockets) gem to get
the highest avoidance.

As for your helm’s Meta Gem socket you should grab a Austere Shadowspirit Diamond ,
which grants 81 stamina and +2% armour value.  Better yet it only requires you to have 2
yellow gems which will easily be satisfied by any mastery gems you have.

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.

Gear Enchants

Notes / Source (if not from an

Slot Bonus
enchanter)

Head +90 Stamina and +35 Dodge Earthern Ring - Revered

Shoulders +45 Stamina and +20 Dodge Do Therazane - Honored

Chest +20 Stats May sub with +15 to all stats

Back +250 armor  

Wrists +50 Dodge May sub with +50 hit

Hands +65 Mastery May sub with the cheaper +50 Mastery
 Legs +145 Stamina and +55 Agility May sub with the cheaper Twilight Leg

(Charscale Leg Armor) Armor

Feet +50 Mastery  

Shield +40 Block Rating May sub with a +160 armor

Weapon +40 hit May use Mending or Windwalker

instead, but both are very expensive

Single Target Threat Rotation - 93939

Ok, you now understand the basics about gear, stats and talents but how do you actually
tank something? Knowing that most of your threat generation comes from holy damage how
do you cause as much as possible as quickly as possible? What is the best rotation to
generate as much threat as possible on your target so that they stay attacking you?

The new best single target (boss) tanking rotation is called by the name 939 or 93939, this
is derived from the old 969 rotation. These two simple number based names come about
due to the cooldowns from your basic tanking abilities, and involve weaving the two
cooldown lengths together to cause as much threat as possible.

The 3 refers to the abilitiy that you will use every second global cooldown, which is every 3
seconds.  This is your Crusader’s Strike.  You will use this ability every other global
cooldown.

The 9 refers to your abilities that are on a longer cooldown and will only end up being used
once every 9 seconds. These are your Judgement, Avenger’s Shield, Holy Wrath, and 3 Holy
Power Shield of the Righteous.  You will notice that there are four abilities listed there,
however you actually time them is based on a set of three.

A standard single target threat rotation will look like this:

GCD - Ability
1 - Judgement
2 - Crusader Strike
3 - Avengers Shield / Holy Wrath (if AS is on cooldown)
4 - Crusader Strike
5 - Shield of the Righteous (whenever you have 3 holy power)

 To make this easier many players will arrange their abilities in a manner that they can
easily remember what to do next. A fairly standard setup is: Crusader Strike, Judgement,
Avenger’s Shield, Holy Wrath, and Shield of the Righteous, as shown below.

By using this setup on your toolbar your rotation becomes as follows: 2-1-3-1-5-1-2-1-4-1-
5-1 and then repeated. You can also find a fairly standard macro later in this guide that
allows you to combine the Avenger’s Shield and Holy Wrath buttons so you only need to use
4 buttons instead of 5, simplifying the rotation. While useful and making your bar cleaner I
would suggest at least keeping the full list on one of your toolbars for fights where you may
need to break rotation or prioritize different abilities.

Multi Target Threat Rotation - 93939 

The new multi-target (trash) tanking rotation not significantly different than the single
target rotation in that it is still basically a 939 rotation.  However, instead of using Crusader
Strike every other cooldown you use your Hammer of the Righteous ability.  Also, instead of
prioritizing your Avenger’s Shield you prioritize Holy Wrath.  Finally you use holy wrath any
time it is available instead of Avenger's Shield.

Therefore a multi-target threat rotation will look something like this:

GCD - Ability
1 - Judgement
2 - Hammer of the Righteous
3 - Holy Wrath/ Avengers Shield (if HW is on cooldown)
 4 - Hammer of the Righteous
5 - Consecrate (if available)

Tanking Seals and Blessings

It is not like the old days of BC or WotLK, we really only have two seals to choose from
now.  Our tanking seal is the Seal of Truth which causes damage when judged and also
places a DoT on each target that it hits.  The DoT stacks up to five times and deals holy
damage over time.  While in theory you could use the Seal of Insight for some healing
return while tanking, it is a threat loss and does not return much health.

The same goes for Blessings in Cataclysm.  Gone are the days of multiple Blessings to chose
from and we really only have two now.  Blessing of Might for damage and mana regen and
Blessing of Kings for stat boosts.

Which Blessing you should use really depends on two things.  First, if there is a druid in the
group, you bless might since Mark of the Wild is essentially the same as Kings now. 
Second, if there is no druid it is up to the healer.  If they have enough mana regen, then
Kings is better because everyone gets a stat boost, if not, then bless might so that the
healer has more mana regen and can heal longer.

Consumables

While items and gear are required for any raid, obviously, you also really should bring along
all the consumables that will help you maximize your tanking ability. The ones that every
Tankadin should bring to a group or raid are:

 Flask of Steelskin - Increases your Stamina by 300.

 Elixir of The Master – Increases your Mastery by 225.

 Elixir of Deep Earth – Increases your armor by 900.

 Lavascale Ministrone - Grants 90 Mastery and 90 Stamina for 1 hour. This food
grants the most mitigation as it is mastery based.
 Blackbelly Sushi - Grants 90 Parry and 90 Stamina for 1 hour. This food grants
tons of avoidance.

 Mushroom Sauce Mudfish - Grants 90 Dodge and 90 Stamina for 1 hour. This food
grants tons of avoidance.

 Mythical Health potions - Bring a stack just to be safe, however they don’t really
heal a lot, at probably less than 10% of your health.

Macros

There are several very common macros that every Tankadin should use (assuming they
haven't started already) to simplify their life. Many more can be found in the official forums.
The most common that I use though are as follows.

Simplified Rotation Macro

When using a standard 939 rotation, you want to use Avenger’s Shield (AS) any time it is
not on cooldown and only use Holy Wrath when AS is not available.  This is not always
predictable though due to Grand Crusader procs. Many players do not like to tie up 2 slots
on their action bar for both abilities though, and will sometimes miss using AS when GC
procs.

What you do then is create a macro that will cast AS by default, or Holy Wrath if AS is not
available.  Then simply replace your AS and HW buttons on your toolbar with this one,
freeing up a button space.

#showtooltip

/cast Avenger’s Shield

/cast Holy Wrath

Taunt

This macro can be used to turn your Righteous Defense taunt into a more Warrior like taunt.
Simply click on the mob you wish to taunt and the macro will target their target for you and
cast Righteous Defense. If, however, you already have a friendly target set as your target it
still works as it normally would.
 #showtooltip Taunt
/cast [target=target,help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget,help]
Righteous Defense

Emergency Taunt

While not really a taunt, many Tankadins use Hand of Protection (HoP) as a backup taunt.
Since it protects the affected player from physical damage if the attacker is only doing
physical damage they will leave them to attack the new person on top of their aggro table,
which is hopefully you.

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is possible to hit yourself with HoP with this macro if the attacker
switched targets while you are targeting them, If you do, the macro will cancel the bubble if
you simply use it again, however you have now wasted your HoP.

#showtooltip Backup Taunt

/cast [target=target,help] Hand of Protection; [target=targettarget,help]

Hand of Protection

/cancelaura Hand of Protection

All in One Taunt / Backup Taunt

For those minimalist players that want as few commands on their toolbars as possible, you
can combine the above two macros into one. When combined it will first try to use
Righteous Defense on the target or targets target and if that has already been used it will
cast Hand of Protection on that target.

#showtooltip All In One Taunt

/castsequence [target=target,help] Reset=8 Righteous Defense, Hand of
Protection; [target=targettarget,help] Reset=8 Righteous Defense, Hand of
Protection

Bubble to Break Fear, Poison, Debuffs

Sometimes you get feared, poisoned or something else and need to get out of it fast. This
can happen in fights with mass fear effects when you do not have enough priests for a full
fear ward rotation or don't have Shamans for tremor totems. Using this macro once casts
your Divine Shield, using it a second time cancels it so that you can grab threat back from
the target fully cleared of debuffs.
 You will notice that technically it cancels the aura first. That is so that when you use the
macro the second time it does not error out with "Spell not ready". If you do not have
Divine Shield active already the cancel aura command does nothing.

#showtooltip Divine Shield

/cancelaura Divine Shield

/cast Divine Shield

Tips

Things to do

 Learn to use the 939 rotation and staggering your Holy Shield with other abilities to
make sure it is active at all times.

 You should always run a threat meter of some sort (the one I prefer is Omen). It will
allow you to judge how far ahead you are of your DPS'ers.

 Remember that your Avenger’s Shield no longer breaks most CC, so feel free to use
lots of CC, you will need it in heroics. 

 Remember everything in this guide! You're not a Warrior tank - you have different
concerns and requirements. While they are different they are not necessarily better or
worse, just different.

 Tanking is not something you can pick up in a day. It is a long hard road that
requires lots of practice and gear. Make sure it's for you before you even start.

Things to avoid

 Since you really need to use different abilities to hold aggro on multiple enemies
compared to single, make sure you don’t forget. 

 Also, since some of your multiple target agro abilities break CC, such as Hammer of
the Righteous and Consecration, make sure you pull enemies away from CC targets.

 Do no use your taunt right way, instead of trying to pull the enemies back in some
other method, unless there is more than one creature on that group member.  Then
taunting should be your first option to grab them back.  Try to save it for when your healer
has pulled aggro or when a DPS'er has several enemies on them at once.
 Avoid looking at stats other than your core stats. Due to mana return from healing
and blessings you no longer need to worry about Intelligence as a Paladin tank (at least on
gear).