Protection Paladin Tank Guide — Dragonflight 10.1

As a Protection Paladin, you can expect to perform the role of a solid and reliable tank. In general, your damage intake will be relatively smooth, with many attacks being blocked by your shield or softened by your strong active mitigation. No other tank class has quite the array of tricks up their sleeve that a Paladin does.

Note that this guide focuses on aspects that are specific to Protection Paladins and general tanking strategies are beyond its scope. If you wish to know more about the tanking role and what you can do to improve, we recommend that you read our tanking guide.

Strengths

• Strong active mitigation and cooldown kit against predictable incoming damage.
• Unique group utility and damage reductions with Blessings and Auras.
• Good burst capabilities with coolodwns for damage and threat generation.
• Great emergency cooldowns like Lay on Hands and Divine Shield when things look dire.
• Good self and group healing with Word of Glory and Lay on Hands.

Weaknesses

• Downtime on Shield of the Righteous leaves you very exposed against constantly high damage.
• Moving out of Consecration means losing out on damage reduction.
• Limited mobility outside of Divine Steed.

1. Seal of the Crusader now deals 10% additional damage (up from 5%)
2. Rebuke interrupt duration has been reduced to 3 seconds.
3. Hand of the Protector healing bonus is now capped to provide up to 100% additional healing based on the targets missing health.
4. The tooltip for Punishment has been clarified to include interrupts from Avenger's Shield.
5. Word of Glory and Light of the Titans have been buffed by 25% to balance the spells with the 25% Health increase to players this patch.
6. The absorb from Bulwark of Order has been increased to 30/60% (up from 25/50%).
7. The absorb from Moment of Glory has been increased to 25% (up from 20%).

For a full breakdown of all Class Changes in Patch 10.1, check out our dedicated page below.

If you do not have a Paladin at max level you can follow the link below to help you in your quest to reach max level. Keep in mind that leveling as a tank, while not always the fastest, means you are great at being able to pull large groups of enemies and AoE them down.

Should you be leveling as a tank, it is recommended to learn the ropes throughout the leveling process as well, as generally it is not tuned to be very hard. Addons are rather important to be able to tank well, such as threatplates, but also tracking buffs and debuffs. Playing dungeons while leveling will give you a sense of those addons before getting thrown into max level content.

Tanking in general means a lot of pressure to not only do damage and thus threat to make sure things are attacking you, but also about surviving those attacks. As a Protection Paladin, this generally means generating as much Holy Power as possible, so you can spend it on Shield of the Righteous to reduce damage intake. With our active mitigation not being up constantly, it is important to make sure you can cover those times when Shield of the Righteous is down with another cooldowns should damage intake still be high. If you are fairly new to the class and spec and need to jump into it right away, we recommend the Easy Mode page linked below.

If you have got the basics down and want to improve your class knowledge, go to the Talent and Rotation pages for more in-depth information.

Tanks are generally quite uncommon, so finding a group as a tank is not too difficult and gearing up might happen rather fast. At the start, all you really want is higher item level, as you value all the stats you can get. Once you have options of similar item levels you can follow these pages to read more on how the different stats influence your character, as well as what gems, enchants, and consumables you should be using. You can also find a page dedicated for more end-game gearing information in the BiS and Gear page.

End-game content comes in many forms that can vary quite a lot in both gearing and playstyle depending on what you focus most of your efforts into. While tanking in raids or in Mythic+ on the surface seems similar, there are many ways they differ, and you can focus on them separately in the pages linked below. PvP is typically not played with tank-specced players, so we recommend you play one of the other Paladin specializations (Holy / Retribution) should you wish to learn more of that.

Tanking can sometimes be rather unforgiving, especially if you are not quite sure what is actually going wrong; below we have linked a few resources aimed at helping you improve playing your character.