Quick one today, my new pet hate is Pallys who won’t buff, won’t respond to psts, and generally act like they bring nothing to the raid. Even when I play my undergeared pally – I frigg’n buff!
Case in point was the weekly raid this week: Sarth. I know its a cake walk, but not giving a shit about fellow players is just poor form. Thank you to the raiders who understood that not all Paladins who pug runs are selfish mongrels; just most of them.
Grrrr.
Update 2: This post is now out of date due to the changes in Cataclysm, and has nothing specific to level 85 tanks anymore.
I can tell you that builds for Paladins have changed in an incredible range of ways, as to has the rotations and use of resources. The Holy power addition means a Paladin Tank is no longer just a AoE tank – target switching is real for all Tanks now. If you don’t like switching targets and loved being lazy then Paladin is probably the best choice for tanking, but you’ll readlly need to be careful and change your style to be effective.
The EJ Forum is the best place to start, read the first sections, and then jump across to TankSpot for more information.
Update: A new post for Paladin Tanks at Level 80 is here, updated for 3.3.3.
The patch v3.0.2 has me thinking of how to spec, and honnestly I just don’t know. I’ve tried to silently troll the usual forums for builds, but found a storm of activity with no clear winners.
So here goes…Here is a spec that is for a level 70 Prot Paladin, is heavy on Tanking, and has little flex into the other talent trees.
Edit: As 3.1 is fast approaching, consider this spec out of date. I’m sure the basics will be ok, but I’m not claiming this is accurate anymore.
As a follow-up to his post, my response, and now BRK has put together a great explanation of how to combine a Hunter and a Paladin Tank with crowd control. My hats off folks; he used diagrams.
As an aside I went looking for Cockroach images and it seems that there is an Australian cockroach that makes all the others seem a tad piss-weak. The image here is of the Australian Rhinoceros Cockroach, which looks to be one mean son-of-a-bitch. As an Australian Pally Tank I will now adopt this proudly.
Back to BRK’s wisdom:
The bizarre thing is this: Tankadins who prefer to ignore CC and tankadins who don’t understand CC perform pulls in exactly the same manner. Isn’t that freaky?
Go read it. Its darn good.
Pally terms used so far: Cockroach, Tankadummy, Pallywhacker. LOL. Don’t forget Threatmachine (sung to James Brown’s Sex Machine), Rhino, Armadillo; and something I got called on a PuG a few days ago: Threat-Whore (not untrue).
TyphoonAndrew's - Eye of the Storm 