Protection tanking tips

[Roiids]

I am new to tanking raids, I was curious how many of you run seraphim? Do you always keep a charge of shield available if you are going to get hit with something?

What do you guys use to be able to see your co tanks stacks of something on fights you need to swap?

Do you research boss fights to know what to do? Or do you sort of just wing it?

[cuafpr]

1) i dont use Seraphim as it more dps based imo, and tanks shouldn't have DPS based telents (Again just my opinion)

2) depends on the fight and how comfortable i am with it. During progression i tend to sit on a charge in case i need it.. as i learn the flow of the fight i just go through the normal usage, and watching timers to know when to line it up with a big hit.

3) i just put the co-tank as my focus target.

4) I wing it, but the HC guild i run with is ok with this, winging vs researching is very group dependent. Some groups are more hard core and expect everyone to research a fight and know it, others don't.

[iootnega]

I am new to tanking raids, I was curious how many of you run seraphim? Do you always keep a charge of shield available if you are going to get hit with something?

I dont use seraphim.

What do you guys use to be able to see your co tanks stacks of something on fights you need to swap?

target tank and type /focus

Do you research boss fights to know what to do?

yes

[SnowFs]

I am new to tanking raids, I was curious how many of you run seraphim? Do you always keep a charge of shield available if you are going to get hit with something?

I'm always running Seraphim, in raids or dungeons, except the first trys on progression where I'm not familiar with the damage income of a fight. The usage really depends on you and the situation.

If you trust your healers, and theres no incoming damage that demands mitigation, you can feel free to use SotR charges with Seraphim as soon as they're up. Sometimes you might have to hold the SotR charges for N reasons, the raid have taken a good amount of damage and healers are topping everyone's life so you might as well use the SotR charges defensively so the healers won't worry with the raid and you at the same time. You might as well use Seraphim defensively if needed, if you have 2 charges of SotR, you might use 1 to mitigate the incoming damage and use Serpahim with the last charge, it will boost your mastery to 30~40% making the SotR reduce about 80% of the incoming damage and you can recover faster from the blow without having to wait for the healers since you will have a strong heal since Seraphim boost your Versatility too. The more you play, the more you're familiar with the situations and what you can or can't do.

What do you guys use to be able to see your co tanks stacks of something on fights you need to swap?

I use ElvUi that shows the debuffs on raid frames and usually the tanks are placed in group1 of the raid frame, and if you forget to pay attettion to that, DBM has alerts for everything.

Do you research boss fights to know what to do? Or do you sort of just wing it?

Unless you play in a guild that couldn't care less about progression or wiping 10 times on heroic/normal because the tank is missing a simple mechanic, you HAVE to research, because even for PUGs you will be kicked after missing the mechanics twice or even once, since tanks missing mechanics means the raid will wipe, have a huge loss in dps or require a large amount of extra heals.

[Roiids]

Hi team,

Your local friendly tutor here.

First of all, ignore cuafpr and iootnega they are giving you subjective information on their own mis playing. So brings me to a key piece of advise for you.

Don't listen to terrible players.

Onto your questions:

I am new to tanking raids, I was curious how many of you run seraphim? Do you always keep a charge of shield available if you are going to get hit with something?

Here's the FAQ from the prot discord, will answer most of your questions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...hJzy8WutU/edit

Give it a read, read again.

If you've got any specific questions after that feel free to PM or hop on over to the prot discord (You can google it, wont be hard to find).

What do you guys use to be able to see your co tanks stacks of something on fights you need to swap?

Use weak auras for this. www.wago.io find a bunch on there.
I'd recommend this one for Nighthold: https://wago.io/4kZvLGdLM

Do you research boss fights to know what to do? Or do you sort of just wing it?

Use the dungeon journal as your first port of call, has pretty legit summaries of the fights, combine this with boss mods. You're good to go for LFR/Normal/Heroic/Most of Mythic.

After that watch some kill videos, combine it with the above, you're good.

Awesome! I was literally about to ask for a link to some WA's to help out. I use a ton of my main, but totally new to using them as a tank and etc. Thanks for the help!!

Tanked my very first M+ last night.... prot pally is fun AF.

Do you just search that site for WA? or are they pinned in a prot pally disco?

[Holovik]

Awesome! I was literally about to ask for a link to some WA's to help out. I use a ton of my main, but totally new to using them as a tank and etc. Thanks for the help!!

Tanked my very first M+ last night.... prot pally is fun AF.

Do you just search that site for WA? or are they pinned in a prot pally disco?

You can search Wago.io for 'Protection Paladin' and then sort by 'stars' or 'views' and it will put them in order of popularity. You should be able to find something that suits your needs in the top 10. I generally find one that's like 90% of what I want and make any necessary changes.

All the prot paladin WAs: https://wago.io/search?q=protection%...din&sort=views
I personally like this one: https://wago.io/ProtPaladin

[cuafpr]

Hi team,

Your local friendly tutor here.

First of all, ignore cuafpr and iootnega they are giving you subjective information on their own mis playing. So brings me to a key piece of advise for you.

Don't listen to terrible players.

Onto your questions:

I am new to tanking raids, I was curious how many of you run seraphim? Do you always keep a charge of shield available if you are going to get hit with something?

Here's the FAQ from the prot discord, will answer most of your questions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...hJzy8WutU/edit

Give it a read, read again.

If you've got any specific questions after that feel free to PM or hop on over to the prot discord (You can google it, wont be hard to find).

What do you guys use to be able to see your co tanks stacks of something on fights you need to swap?

Use weak auras for this. www.wago.io find a bunch on there.
I'd recommend this one for Nighthold: https://wago.io/4kZvLGdLM

Do you research boss fights to know what to do? Or do you sort of just wing it?

Use the dungeon journal as your first port of call, has pretty legit summaries of the fights, combine this with boss mods. You're good to go for LFR/Normal/Heroic/Most of Mythic.

After that watch some kill videos, combine it with the above, you're good.

Nice advice but if you trying to say me and the other guy are terrible players then wtf? My advice is for my play style which is enough to clear HC with ease and progress into mythic, sure i'm not playing a style that pushes world/realm first which is why my last part was about it all being group dependent. I used to spend hours min/maxing theory crafting / reading theory over mantankadin .... then i realized its more fun to just play the game how you want and figure out bosses on the fly. this is obviously myself and my current raid group, likely the vast minority of people feel this way.

I will say that is over kill for the OT for NH, there is nothing in there that a simple /focus on the OT can't display just as easy without addon help.

[Marrilaife]

Seraphim has uses in 3 situations:
1. You're doing farm content, healers are bored, everyone wants the boss dead as fast as possible and content isn't challenging / threatening.
2. You're doing cutting edge content like world top progression raiding / very high m+ and you need to meet specific hard dps check and you can afford the survivability loss, your whole group is good at avoiding extra damage and your healers are good at decision making who needs their heals the most at which moment. Does not apply to 99% of the population.
3. You are a parse lord and don't give a fuck if your healer gets a heart attack, but at least you outdps some baddie dps and get these sweet warcraftlogs ranks.

Ofc if you're overgearing the content or running farm content it lands in #1 stuff that isn't threatening enough so you can as well go for dps. Dps checks are also non-existant or non-crucial so you can as well play without. If you run content like heroic raiding then the only thing that is wiping people is not doing the tactics, choice of talent A vs talent B will not wipe you even if there are better choices and worse choices.

Vast majority of paladins play with seraphim because "muh dps", some of them are really good at their class, but many many are rubbish and get paladins the opinion "it's that tank class that does a lot of dps but feels like made of paper". If you know how to compromise and play with seraphim without getting randomly gibbed, then it's a sizable dps gain, if you don't... well first job of a tank is not to die rest comes after.

You should also save a shield charge for special boss abilities, many dungeon bosses require you to use "active mitigation" to block specific abilities (skovald in hov, illyssanna in brh, 1st boss in vault whatever his name), several raid bosses have also high damaging abilities on a specific timer, things like spellblade's annihilation for example. That ofc requires you to know what to expect from the boss and when you should conserve your shield charges.


"What do you guys use to be able to see your co tanks stacks of something on fights you need to swap?"
Default raid frames just sort by role so I'm sure the other tank is from the top and click show all debuffs not only dispellable so all the tank debuffs are shown.

Some people raid without raid frames up on non-healers but I can't imagine doing that, if you need to use hand of the protector, bop, spellwarding, lay on hands, freedom, sacrifice etc. multitude of utilities we have, it's better to see the whole raid not just select target / focus.

This can ofc be substituted by any addon that modifies raid frames to someone's liking and aesthetics.


"Do you research boss fights to know what to do?"
That would be preferred, we're 5 months into nighthold and still at least 50% of the tanks I had the pleasure to pug normal NH with for my legendary BLP had no frigging clue what the bosses are about. Don't be like them. People who taunt the add on augur to the boss when I put it away, people who never taunt swap on krosus or botanist, people who glue to the other tank on gul'dan making him get 10 stacks of attack speed etc.

Reading dungeon journal will get you most of the basics, half the fights on normal / heroic all you need to know is swap at x stacks of y debuff and move to / away from specific things. It's not really requiring hours of deep research.

If you're in a guild, you can always ask an officer, raid leader or the other tank. In pugs, well you never know how people will react but me personally I'd rather have a guy ask me what he should do than stand there like a dummy. Still, it happened to me more often in lfr than in normal pugs, that a tank would ask "first time here what do I do?"

It's easier to "wing it" and follow the crowd if you play a healer or a dps, you can always try to do that in case of a new instance, queue as healer / dps and then check what's happening to the tanks.

[kiklion]

At the very least, you should learn to play seraphim. And if you know seraphim, you should learn to play RP. If you aren't comfortable as either spec then you are seriously handicapping your team. If you refuse to play either spec then you are letting your team down.

Seraphim massively increases your dps. Are you wiping to spellblade because arcane adds are blowing up? Well seraphim can help push your guild past that phase.

My guild isn't close to pushing progression content. We are working on mythic guldan. There is a DPS check p1 to push before the second add. People who have cleared Mythic NH weeks ago would say something like 'With the new traits, it's easy to push that DPS check!' but my guild only got here because of the new traits. We are doing with the new traits what people were doing before without them. If I don't go seraphim, we don't make the push.


I watch raid frames to track the other tank. Most/every fight in NH has taunt off's on debuff dropping. Not when tank hit's x stacks. We also communicate over discord when to taunt.


I watch a fatboss guide if I can. Review dungeon journal. Check out other teams kills on warcraft logs and check for timings.

[Kethmil]

1. I play seraphin on every fight, since I heavily overgear content now. Doesnt matter how much people repeat the opposite, tanks are supposed to do dps. Same as healers and same as dps. Of course, you can get away with two tanks that do subpar dps on a 20 person group, same as you can with 2 subpar dps characters. But at the end of the day bosses die when they reach 0 hp, no matter who did the damage.

Do whatever you can to increase your dps without dieing. Most of the times when you're going more sturdy when you dont really need it you mainly are making healers to overheal more.

Also, if you have legendary helmet and 4 pieces of tier you an go on tank/healer configuration and drop a healer. You'll be doing less dps, but the extra dps will make up for it.

2. I use a combination of weakauras and standart interface for that.

3. Always check on advance, watch videos, go on pugs on my off-raid time to learn how other groups do mechanics... When i progressed on a more hardcore way we were always ahead of pugs so mainly checked dungeon journal and checked world first vids if they were more available.

[Marrilaife]

Do whatever you can to increase your dps without dieing.

The second part is kinda relevant though, there are so many paladins that just spam seraphim on cd disregarding any mitigation, I did hc NH on my resto druid alt and had one of these, a guy who pulls all the scorpions on skorpyron, dies in sub 2 secs, same on botanist he has high stacks of debuff, gets 2-shot then whines "wtf healers", you can play seraphim where it doesn't endanger you, but you should be careful with it. If you go into content you don't know well, with healers you don't know well and they don't know you, it's completely different story than playing in a set group where everyone knows what to expect from each other, healers know what kind of damage intake to expect from the tank, you know mechanics by heart so you barely need to remind yourself of them, etc.

What pisses me off is druids, warriors and monks can focus on their dps (as a tank) without big tradeoffs to survivability, so in general they can have best of both worlds, while paladins cannot, you need to constantly decide between "can I afford to do less dps" and "can I afford to be more squishy". It depends what content you play and what kind of group of people you play with.

If you raid heroic NH every week since the raid opened you probably have so many titanforges you indeed outgear the content and can easily afford going out full dps, assuming people aren't being stupid. I mean, what's the reason tanks in pugs take 8+ stacks of dot on Krosus and 20+ stacks on botanist? There is no reason except the fact they're either lazy or clueless to taunt from each other. The better you execute tactics and don't take unnecessary damage the less tradeoff exists from going full dps setup in talents, trinkets and gear. So if you do the tactics correctly you might not even feel that you traded anything off.

Now if you head to an unknown instance, especially with a pug, having easier rotation and more abundant defenses can help you learn the encounters easier with less risk of random deaths. But everyone has different learning curve, some people grasp immediately the idea behind the encounter even without much up-front research, some need more time. That's why there's so big disparity between guilds, some clear instance on hc in 2 days and others take months to do so, and I do not know what kind of content OP is aiming at.

The ideal case scenario is you play with seraphim and don't have any issues surviving or taxing your healers. Doesn't always happen though.

[Holovik]

To me it depends on what I'm doing. I run Seraphim full time right now. I outgear most of the content and am very familiar with the fights so I know when, and more importantly, when not to use Seraphim. Going into TOS though I will be dropping Seraphim for Righteous protector since I am unfamiliar with the fights and would prefer the survivability over the DPS increase.