Why are all tanks Paladins?

[MeowthThatsRight]

I am a healer so when leveling I preferred to just do dungeon after dungeon with a bit of questing thrown in. After a few runs I noticed that most tanks seemed to be Paladins so I started a little tally. Here are the results

Death Knights: 2
Druids: 0
Paladins: 14
Warriors: 3

Is anyone else finding an overwhelming number of pally tanks in the LFG? My guild's 5 big tanks are 3 Pallys a DK and a Druid so this Paladin majority even seems to be within my guild. Looking at every last person in the guild who is identified as a tank I found:
12 Pallys, 4 Warriors, 3 DKs, 2 Druids.

Is it just me or are Paladins the vast majority of the tanking popualtion?

[Xyborg]

I've been encountering a lot more warrior tanks lately. But the reason behind the high paladin tank population was the AoE tanking craptacular that was WotLK. Paladins were just better at AoE tanking so more people rolled them.

[Deleted]

I've no clue as my main (and only 85) is a warrior tank, with an arms PVP offspec, thus I've tanked every single instance run 80+. However, I've seen quite a lot of paladin tanks around Stormwind compared to warriors, death knights and especially druids.

[Nomm]

Makes sense, as a large portion of the player base is paladin anyway.

[MeowthThatsRight]

Makes sense, as a large portion of the player base is paladin anyway.

I have noticed that myself. When I'm on my tank every other healer is a paladin and every other group I am in seems to have a ret pally DPS. Dunno what makes Pallys so popular...

[Zidayn]

I actually have not seen a single DK tank since hitting 85 on day 3. I was very surprised when Blizzard's recent "fix" post indicated a balance in tank numbers and class representation.

[Kittystyle]

My main is a pally tank but I also heal on a shaman and yeah, seen a majority of pally tanks in the dungeon finder.
Not to qq but i think a lot of ret pallys may have gone prot too since its changed a lot and not really in a great place at the moment.

[Torture]

The right royal shafting that Ret seems to have been given (thank god they're looking at Mastery changes) and the fact levelling as prot was apparently far easier, I can imagine we've seen a fair few swaps from Ret - Prot.

Personally I've only ever had a warrior tank......doh, that'll be me then

[Apellosine]

nope. I'm getting about even of each type of tank except for bears which are very underrepresented, apart from that probably DK, pally, warriors in that order but not separated by much.

[Blahu - Twisting Nether]

This makes me a combination of sad, and somewhat happy. I play a bear tank and I always feel there aren't enough of us. In fact in runs on my lowbie bears were talked about as the worst tanks. To which I guffawed of course.

More OT: I do tend to see a lot of pallies tanking. It might be because the paladin class has had the reputation of face roll and people thought it might apply to the prot spec too, that way they can be apart of the tanking community. Though I should hope nobody facerolls tanking.

[Khevis]

Bears get the shaft as the lower level tanks as they don't get any meaningful AE hold until like... 36 ... so yeah I can see why no one bear tanks. After the rightfully horrible early experience of playing "catch the mob" I can see most saying screw it and not tanking ever again. Anyone who played lv 70 TBC bear probably also wasn't thrilled with bear then, and ditched out (hi, that'd be me) and never went back. (Also, I abhor the idea of building yet another gear set.)

as for high majority of paladin tanks, I haven't pugged too much, but I'm not seeing an overwhelming majority around, myself. Low rep of bears and DKs, maybe. I think the whole "dedicated tree" think scared a bunch of DKs out of tanking perhaps because they couldn't have X or Y from other trees (that didn't move over). I had a bear last night I got to heal, wasn't so bad, but I've had horrible experiences in Wrath and BC with bad bear tanks that were either sponges, couldn't hold threat, or otherwise a nightmare to heal/deal with. >.< Bears have a bad rap, I'm sure, and they're getting there really, but meh - I take all tanks with a grain of salt if I'm not it (and I do with myself because I am human and make mistakes...).

I've seen a decent amount of warriors and there's more warrior tanks among my friends then paladin ones. It might also be because for some, that's what they've played.

[underdogba]

If this observation is actually true, it could be some combination of these factors --

- Tauren pallies are the new hotness

- Ret is hard to play

- Healing is harder now

[Deleted]

There seem to be many protection paladins, but not really that overwhelmingly many. On the other hand feral tanks seem to be very rare.

Personally I play protection warrior and the other tank in my guild is a death knight. We also have one offspec DK tank and that's it.

[deneweth]

I was a druid tank and switched to pally tank in BC for hyjal. I dual spec'd to ret to level and wanted to try it out for a bit while waiting for guildies to hit 85. Ret dps is kinda low right now and the 'rotation' isn't very fun for me plus instance ques were longer than I liked so I switched back to prot and it was pretty fun so I stuck with it.

I've heard warriors are hard to play or difficult to master. DKs seem fine, I almost switched my main to the DK alt that I had been tanking pug ICCs with. I don't understand the lack of feral tanks at all because I see plenty of kitties that wait 40 mins to dps. I know their damage is OP right now but at some point you'd think they'd get tired of linking recount and learn to tank. Most of the druids I encounter have been resto though. I can't really say which tanks there are more of since I'm never grouped with other tanks.

[Merrena]

Wrath led a lot of people to roll Paladins

I'm a tank currently because Ret is broken

[PetersenIII]

Why are all tanks Paladins?

Druids are *boring*, Warriors are "too hard", and no one likes DKs.

[Blahu - Twisting Nether]

How are druids boring? We have a decent range of abilities for aggro, a few damage reduction abilities to juggle (including pulverize), and get the fun of when tanking finding the spots where the boss is doing a mechanic so we can innervate the healer of rebirth someone. And if you think that last request is unreasonable..... please tell everyone I group with it is. No one believes me lol.

[Rynor]

If this observation is actually true, it could be some combination of these factors --

- Tauren pallies are the new hotness

- Ret is hard to play

- Healing is harder now

I can't talk about Ret, but healing on a pally is by no means hard. You just have to use what's in your spell book. I can say that reading here has taut me something about healing that I woulld have over looked. Hand of sacrifice is another great ability that should be used every CD to make your life and other healers life easier. And yes I leveled as Prot only due to the fact that I had the gear laying around due to WotlK.

[Deleted]

I am a healer so when leveling I preferred to just do dungeon after dungeon with a bit of questing thrown in. After a few runs I noticed that most tanks seemed to be Paladins so I started a little tally. Here are the results

Death Knights: 2
Druids: 0
Paladins: 14
Warriors: 3

Is anyone else finding an overwhelming number of pally tanks in the LFG? My guild's 5 big tanks are 3 Pallys a DK and a Druid so this Paladin majority even seems to be within my guild. Looking at every last person in the guild who is identified as a tank I found:
12 Pallys, 4 Warriors, 3 DKs, 2 Druids.

Is it just me or are Paladins the vast majority of the tanking popualtion?

Sorry, too little information for me to give a meaningful response.

- what level are you and when you did these tallies?
- what level were the tanks?
- for what level should the poll apply?

Paladin tanks are pretty OP at the lowest levels (sub-58) in both survival and aoe threat, but mainly survival. Other than that, I wouldn't say there's an overabundance of them.

I'd say i saw far more DK's from 60 to 80 than I saw any other tank spec. The lowest represented tank was Bear for me as a healer from 10 to 80 during patch 4.0.

[Bunsie]

<- Warrior :P

I think most death knights stray from tanking because if they are just learning they'll just get thrown into "failknights" when they make a simple mistake. People just don't have the patience anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from doing a bit of scanning druids are a little under-par at the moment compared to other tanks? (No offense intended if this is not the case)