Tankadin vs. WarriorFollow

Each tank has their strength and weakness.

Prot warrior is the most solid all round. Druid has a smack tonne of dodge which makes the very useful on some fights, prot pallies can hold down packs of mobs and laugh.

Same time Prot warriors can't handle more than a couple mobs, feral druids can't reach uncrushable, and Prot pallies lack the single target threat generation of either feral or prot warrior thus making them last choice on a lot of 1 on 1 boss encounters.

In early end-game (read: Heroics and 10 mans) Warriors will have certain advantages over Paladins. Namely, they get a higher base health (Especially you filthy Taurens!), higher mitigation, and more "Oh sh*t!" buttons.

Warriors have multiple spell casting interrupts, all on relatively short cooldowns. Warriors can hold tremendous threat in an one-on-one encounter. If things go to hell, they can increase their lifepool and become nigh invincible. (Last Stand/Shield Wall). They can also stance-dance out of fears.

Their shield block gives them an immense amount of shield block %, allowing them to become uncrushable with the barest amounts of gear. Because of rage mechanics, as long as they have health, they can keep on fighting. (Assuming the mobs hit them hard enough) Warrior's threat scales with shield block, effectively allowing them to hold more threat as their mitigation improves.

Paladins have much different strengths/weaknesses. They are inherently squishy, their lifepool not comparing to that of a warrior's. (At first) Their shield block is only a 30% increase (Math not so EZ), which means much more gear is required to become uncrushable. However, their shield block lasts for many more charges than a Warrior's. Once a certain threshold is reached, a Pally tank will *never* be crushed. (Barring stuns and the like) Their threat scales with spell damage, arguably faster than a Warrior's.

Mana allows the Pally to front-load threat on a mob, and their "blue rage bar" mechanics allows them to keep on going assuming they get heals, but if they go OOM, agro generation pretty much stops until they get enough mana back from heals.

Their one-on-one threat generation is decent, but because of the class mechanics, Pallies can hold an infinite amount of mobs, heals permitting. As for "Oh sh*t!" buttons, Pallies only have 2. One will heal them to full, possibly avoiding a wipe, at the cost of lowering their agro generation for a while. (IE: They OOM when using it) The other is terribad for tanking, BUT has some uses (Namely if everyone else is dead, it buys 12 seconds of lawlprot DPS).

As for spell interrupts, Pallies fail horribly. Alliance Pallies have 1 interrupt, one which has a 1 minute cooldown. Horde Pallies have 2, on a 2 minute and 1 minute cooldown.

The Paladin pulling method is also, sometimes, superior to the Warrior's. With their shield, the Pally can instantly put a large amount of threat on up to 3 targets. Since post 2.4, the shield does not break CC, allowing the pally to throw the shield with impunity.

Tanking wise, Warriors need to press more buttons than Pallies. I press 3 buttons to tank. (4 if it's a Demon/Undead) My friend needs to keep up a certain rotation in order to tank on a Warrior.

tl;dr: Warriors are easier to gear up than Pallies and are overall easier and more forgiving of errors. Properly geared, skilled Pallies are monsters.

Irregardless, both are situational, and there are times when a Pally tank will shine, and vica versa.

Edit: Zomg, wall of text!

Edited, Apr 25th 2008 11:23am by Zeromatter

Edited, Apr 25th 2008 11:57am by Zeromatter

I'll second that. I have a friend who was levelling a prot pally through the mid/high 60s maybe 2 months ago. My Warrior (at heroics/early raid level gear) and the rest of our static ran normal Durn with him at the time and he (prob 67-68) made me look like a punk on trash pulls. After getting to and burning the 2nd barracks I just put on questing gear and pretended to know what I was doing DPSing the rest of the way. Only time I put my board back on was to OT the 2nd boss.

Where you can kindof see the difference in strengths right there in your face well before you get to the point where youre dealing with heroic or raid content... BM. Our healer and I (tanking) can bust that place up almost regardless of who we bring for DPS/CC. He (the Pally) struggles tanking it somewhat and HATES the place with an almost psychotic verve. When we were trying to get him KoT revered for his pants, we just let him slapfight the adds while I dealt with the single primary target. Went very well. When we've run it with him as MT and me off-spec DPSing, its been really messy.

Wha? i tanked that place like a mad man, no goalie needed i tanked all the adds all DPS on the "boss", after boss died i ran off to next portal with adds in tow and the DPS just kinda picked em apart. BM is an incredible place for pally tanks! :P they make it ezmode.

Behold, the power of words! Probably the finest piece of writing on this subject I an aware of.
The Maintankadin discussion on tanking gestalt.

I tanked BM on my prot pally last night at level 69 with barely 10k HP and not 1 single person died the entire run.

How in god's name is BM "hard" for a pally tank?

There are some nice things about warrior dont get me wrong. i like the shield block being separate from GCD. like that a lot. I like the lower taunt CD, also like the different threat generating methods and the Debuffs you throw up on the target. sunders, demo, TC, good stuff. Ive been doing mostly 5 mans lately and its funny, i have to ask the group wtf can be CCd, and what the hell mobs i should mark CC. since on my pally all that mattered was where the DPS went, i was spoiled. mark first DPS target, mark second DPS target, run in and consecrate tanking everything, once first target dies mark the 3rd dps target, then 4th, then 5th... etc.

This is pretty much what it comes back to in the end though.


Raids have 2-4 tanks depending on the fight, but when it comes right down to it a raid will always take a Prot Warrior to do the boss before they take a Pally. For simple mechanics in terms of skills available and threat generation.