Protection Paladin Tank Stat Priority — The War Within (11.1.5)

Defensively, the stat priority for Protection Paladins is as follows:

1. Haste;
2. Mastery;
3. Versatility / Critical Strike

This priority is not impacted by your choice of Hero Talent.

It is important to take into account that Haste, Mastery, and Versatility are all extremely close in terms of value, and item level is by far the most important aspect of gear upgrades. In most cases, this stat priority is only really useful comparing when you have two items of the same item level.

Once you start to approach 30% Mastery, you will want to consider balancing this stat budget out with more Versatility where possible to avoid Diminishing Returns.

Haste reduces your global cooldown and the cooldowns of most of the abilities that are part of your rotation. Haste's main task is to increase Shield of the Righteous uptime, to generally smooth damage intake and make you more predictable to heal. At ～20% Haste, you will have more than enough rotational Holy Power to achieve very high uptimes on Shield of the Righteous. At ～25-30% Haste, you will be able to cast Word of Glory without fear of dropping Shield of the Righteous uptime. Once you are at this level of Haste, you will want to start looking to maximise the benefits of other stats over Haste.

Mastery, thanks to Mastery: Divine Bulwark, increases your chance to block attacks and your attack power, as well as increasing the damage reduction you get from standing in your Consecration. Mastery also allows you to block periodic spell damage at a rate equal to your block. Finally, Mastery increases your attack power which will improve the damage of your abilities but not damage that comes from external sources such as trinkets or enchants.

Versatility increases all damage and healing done as well as reducing damage taken. Versatility gives you slightly more damage reduction per point than Mastery, and it will also be active outside of Consecration. However, it is not as strong as Mastery due to missing out on block chance as well.

Critical Strike increases your damage and healing output and also gives you Parry, as you get 1 Parry from for every 1 point of Critical Strike. Critical Strike does very little for you defensively outside of the parry increasing, which can increase the frequency at which Grand Crusader can trigger. It is worth noting that in scenarios where Physical attack from multiple sources is happening (Mythic+), parry becomes a very valuable defensive stat.

Strength increases the Armor gained from Shield of the Righteous, your attack power, and your parry chance (by a small amount).

Against most encounters, you need to have a decent amount of health in order to give yourself the chance to be healed before a subsequent attack kills you. In addition to this minimum amount of Stamina, we feel that Stamina remains quite valuable for Protection Paladins. However, most of your Stamina is innately found on your gear, but it is always a good option to have additional Stamina available, should it temporarily be necessary through trinkets, enchants, and gemming (in that order). As you become more comfortable determining the amount of survivability needed for each encounter, you can shift some of that Stamina into other stats.