retri tanking heroics+?Follow

Death knights get defensive talents in all their specs. Paladins do not.


So yeah you can tank some easy things just because you have plate and can hold hate through righteous fury/dps, but you're not really going to tank anything that needs serious tanking.

I did tank Black Morass, but I probably could have tanked it on my rogue too.

Blood: Blade Barrier, Spell Deflection, Veteran of the Third War, Vampiric Blood, and Will of the Necropolis can all be considered tanking talents, not to mention all the self healing don't hurt either.

Unholy: Anticipation, Shadow of Death, Magic Suppression, Anti-Magic Zone, and Bone Shield are the ones that stick out to me most as tanking talents.

Of course all the DPS talents to a lesser extent as tanks do put out much more DPS than they used to. And Frost is littered with more tank like talents.

Point here is to show that all 3 builds for DKs are made to be able to tank. Blizz first stated there would be a PvE tree, PvP tree, and tank tree, but they changed their design philosophy to make all 3 trees viable in each aspect of the game. Yes, one tree may be "best" at something, but all 3 will work.

This is not the case for Paladins. Retribution has 1 tanking talent: Deflection. The rest is for boosting DPS or is more suitable to PvP play. I agree that yes you can tank some minor content as Ret, but I would not let a Ret specced Paladin tank a Heroic for me unless "maybe" they had full Naxx25 tanking gear.

As far as the "Ret tanking build": imo, just go Ret or go Prot, don't try to do both. You can do that once dual specs are released.

If you're specced far enough into the protection tree to get Holy Shield, you're not ret anymore...you're protection.

You have no business tanking in heroics without Holy Shield.