Mists of Pandaria Classic Protection Paladin Stat Priority

The stat priority for Protection Paladin is as follows:

1. Hit Rating to cap (7.5%)
2. Expertise Rating to hard cap(15%)
3. Haste
4. Mastery
5. Dodge and Parry
6. Critical Strike

Hit and Expertise are both incredibly valuable as a Protection Paladin as they ensure your Holy Power generating abilities to hit allowing you to cast your active mitigation Shield of the Righteous and maintain your Eternal Flame buff to greatly increase your sustain. Surviving as a Tank in Mists of Pandaria revolves heavily around maximizing your Shield of the Righteous up time and ensuring you are always generating Holy Power is the best way to do this. Your Hit cap is 7.5%, or 2550 Hit Rating at level 90. Your Expertise cap is 15%, or 5100 Experitse, but keep in mind if you are a Dwarf or a Human using the weapon type that corresponds with your racial bonus it may reduce the amount of Expertise needed to reach Expertise cap.

Thanks to the addition of Sanctity of Battle your Haste rating reduces the cooldown of your Crusader Strike/ Hammer of the Righteous and Judgment abilities which act as your primary forms of Holy Power generation. Generating as much Holy Power as possible is the key to maximizing not only your survival but damage and threat output in Mists of Pandaria as you will want to cast Shield of the Righteous as often as possible while still maintaining your Eternal Flame on yourself and with an excess of Holy Power could even consider helping heal the raid with Eternal Flame.

Mastery is still an incredibly powerful stat for Protection Paladin as it increases the amount mitigated by our Shield of the Righteous, increases the effectiveness of our Bastion of Glory buff and increases our chance to block.

Dodge and Parry are both great choices, but are considered to be slightly less valuable than Haste or Mastery due to the ability to control damage intake compared to having to leave things up to chance with Dodge and Parry. You will likely find yourself with more Parry than Dodge rating, as Strength (which will almost always be present on gear) increases your chance to Parry. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between Dodge or Parry, it is often better to choose Dodge as they both have separate diminishing returns.

Critical Strike unfortunately does not do much for a Protection Paladin outside of increasing your damage dealt and a chance at increasing the potency of your initial cast of Eternal Flame, so it is ranked quite low on our priority for Protection Paladin.

Unlike previous expansions, you will rarely if ever have to choose Stamina in place of other stats as Stamina will be present on almost every piece of gear allowing us to focus more on maximizing secondary stats like Haste. The only situation where you will likely need to consider choosing stamina over a secondary stat is when gemming your gear and the added health from gemming Stamina over haste is rarely worth the increase in Holy Power generation so we often opt to gem for Haste instead of Stamina as the more damage we can mitigate the less health you will need to survive.

Armor is a flat physical damage reduction that can be found in most gear slots. We will not have to do anything to optimize the amount of Armor on our gear as it is not able to be reforged to and it will already be present on most items.