Are Prot Pally's Viable?

[Caelia]

Well, our main tank switched from prot pally to blood dk and this is speaking from a 10 man casual guild pov. Suddenly the healers felt way better with healing a dk than a pally.

Maybe he just wasn't that good at playing pally?
Generally speaking a prot pala will take less and more steady damage than a DK, a blood DK however will have more self heals.

[Deleted]

My druid went bear for a few weeks and from experience can tell you bear was definatly better at taking less damage and has passive magical damage decreases.

That said, my favourite character is still my paladin, once they take away the cool down on word of glory in 5.0, we'll be back to been the best tanking class.

As a bear I just don't have that sense of utility. On my paladin i can throw a wog here and there, got divine guardian which imo is far superior to the frenzied regeneration on bears and I have better cool downs on my paladin.

[Lyaral]

Paladins have been indirectly nerfed this tier by several factors.

-High amounts of regular magic damage or unblockable physical damage quickly removes the effective health advantage paladins have had all of this expansion due to block cap.

- Paladins only have 10% passive magic reduction. I think dk’s have ~15% and druids are at ~25%. Due to the potency and regularity of magic damage on certain encounters, having the strongest magic reduction cd sadly doesn’t cut it. Smaller but more regular cd's combined with a higher passive reduction make dk's the strongest in this area.

-Dual tank fights which have a very minor role for the offtank always have favoured a druid’s who can do significantly more dps than any of the other tank specs, especially when wearing dps gear is viable.

-Raid damage is ridiculously high in dragon soul on heroic mode, so much so a raid cd having a 6 seconds longer duration for all tanks apart from paladins is a reasonable nerf, especially when tanks ‘major’ cd is hardly needed. Not to mention that we’re unaffected by our own cd.

-Our mastery is capped very easily which forces us to convert what we can into stamina to gain effective health. This was fine in firelands but due to the amount of mastery available in dragon soul we're forced heavily into dodge + parry which DR horribly at this gear level or into threat stats which are close to all but useless.

(Sorry for bad spelling/grammar I'm a little drunk and awful at it anyway. Merry Christmas!)

Oh and despite all of the above we're perfectly capable of tanking every encounter in the game we're just not the first pick when any of the other three tanks are an option.

[Astray]

A friend told me pretty much every other tank is chosen over a prot paladin, is this correct?

If you ask all 4 tank classes "do you think your class X is weaker than the other classes?" and most of them answer "yes, i think others are a bit stronger" it means they are pretty equal.
If Class X answers, "Class A and B are better than me but C is worse" it means that class X is fine and class C really sucks.
If the average player thinks his class is fine, it has be nerfed big time ;-)

And tell your friend to check his gear, gems and enchantments ;-)

[Ferocity]

Mangle should hit higher than CS, it has double the cooldown. My ShoR regularly crits above 60k. My AS hits very hard too. My Judgement does 25k non-crit. My CS crits well over 30k. Last ultraxion kill I was over 21k dps without trying particularly hard.

With Ataraxis my DK now crits for 100k occasionally. In solo-tank fights with not best gear seen 24k dps. Mangle procs from Lacerate very-very often, and if ok with rage - Maul/Thrash make up for Mangle cd, and Berserk puts ot cd to 0 and makes it cleave (and says hi to Avenging Wrath). Judgement 25k non crit - ret gear? Still ain't looking good in comparison to "bad" 70k DSs.

This affects DKs and Warriors too.

Yeah but DK keep scaling with mastery, Warrior have hard reachable cap as well (though warriors imho ain't much better than paladins currently as well).

We get 8% spell hit so that when we have melee cap, we also have spell cap so that our spells also always land. The splash damage from HotR always hits if the HotR hits. HotR has the same miss chance as every other melee move in the game.
Judgement cannot be dodged or parried.

Swipe/ Bloodbloil/Heart Strike/insert any other AoE, miss on per target basis, name me any other AoE which misses altogether on everything on triple check (miss, dodge, parry). Also our spells which based on spell hit table are - Consecration, Holy Wrath and Exosrcism, these spells in Cata could as well not exist for Prot. And while Judgement cannot be dodged or parried, it uses melee hit table.

HoP, HoF, HoSac, HoSalv, DG, 3 target taunt on 8 sec CD with an unlimited range so long as the player target is within 40 yd range (I have taunted mobs that are 200m away with RD), Vindication is 360° AE, bubble is still useful for certain mechanics.

Can agree only on RD here. And nah, DG was nerfed to uselessness without 4pt13. Also Vindication =/= Thunderclap/Icy Touch in Pestilence. Bubble stopped removing almost all significant debuffs in newer content whatsoever (some were even back-fixed). Salv ain't really used, HoP ain't really used in raids, HoF & HoSac - mostly PvP.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

the 25k non-crit judgements are standard tank gear ~394 equipped with stacked-up vengeance.

[Deleted]

Top tanks list is:
- DK
- Druid
- Pally
- Warrior

Healing depends, if you're talking about the madness encounter its pretty much this:
- Druid
- Shaman/Pally
- Priest

For the other bosses its:
- Druid
- Pally
- Priest/Shaman

For bosses like ultraxion its:
- Pally
- Druid
- Priest/Shaman

But all these healing priorities are only noticable in very high end levels.
Mostly you cant tell the difference.

[Senka]

A big part of Druids getting "better" at tanking was because of the +10% buff to the AP raid buff. A Druid's survivability scales directly with AP with Savage Defense because the shield is 25% of their AP. That's one reason even Druid tanks gem for Agility.

So although the buff was meant to help meleers compensate for, well, being melee there was no way around it helping Druid tanks too.

[Phishy714]

I love it when people throw the word "viable" around like they know what they are talking about. Lols

[Braegan]

I think Splosion hit on it. You do expect "some" dps contribution from the tank...and right now...Prot Pallies are awful low compared to the others.

I dunno. I'm loving the 60k+ crit SoTR brainsmashers when I've chock full of vengeance. And I'm only 376.

[Nelrock]

I dunno. I'm loving the 60k+ crit SoTR brainsmashers when I've chock full of vengeance. And I'm only 376.

So do I. Even still, I run with a druid tank, and he's a solid 3K higher than me on Ultrax. I'm throwing everying...including the sink...at him. Not to mention, our self heal is tied to those same 3 HPs.
I'm not saying prots aren't viable. Our run does just fine and I take all of the single tank stuff. There is still a noticeable difference though.

[Floross]

Madness: This is where a Blood DK shines, they can literally take zero damage from impales with a nice blood shield, their rune regen is faster, they can AMS stacks at the end when tanking the tetanus adds and have the stacks fall off.

I wanted to touch on this. Tetanus is entirely physical , you can bop+cancel or bubble+cancel the stacks , I doubt you can AMS them.