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Paladin Tankadin Guide

The Burning Crusade changed all that. Shadowpriests are more than welcome in raids. Druids can spec full balance and do amazing DPS, or go feral and bear-tank their way through any raid instance they have the gear for. And even valordins get their time in the sun, with the Protection spec rebuilt into a valid tanking tree.

This guide explores what the new breed of valordin, the tankadin, is capable of. Forsaking healing power for the ability to stand tall, taking what the mobs dish out and refusing to buckle, a well-played tankadin can do things that warriors and bears would weep to see.

It is not an easy path, but it can be walked. This guide will help you understand it.

Please note that this guide is meant for the level 70 paladin -- while Protection is a viable leveling tree, such is not the focus of this guide.

Part 1: Basics
Part 2: Strengths and Weaknesses
Part 3: Avoidance
Part 4: Recommended Gear
Part 5: Talent Builds

Basics
Those of you who've played the tank classes in other MMOs, or even a warrior or feral druid in WoW, may think that the tankadin plays much the same as those you are familiar with. While it's not "spam Sunder Armor and Thunderclap repeatedly" or "keep hammering the high-damage attacks", there are many similarities from the player's perspective. The underlying mechanics, though, are quite different.

One of the keys to a tankadin is an early talent in the Protection tree, Improved Righteous Fury. While the damage reduction alone would make it a useful talent, the increase to threat caused by Holy damage makes it one of the lynchpins of a tankadin's talents. Holy damage, after all, is how a paladin holds aggro -- not the white numbers that show up in your combat log, but the yellow.

This does not mean that a tankadin should forsake stamina and defense for spell damage plate. A single spell damage weapon such as the Continuum Blade or Crystalforged Sword, enchanted to add an extra 40 spell damage, is often more than sufficent when combined with a couple pieces of tier armor to hold aggro up until your allies are facing Lady Vashj and Kael'thas on a regular basis. While such a weapon typically provides little in the way of basic melee damage, again, the white numbers are not how a tankadin generates threat.

Playing as a tankadin is simple enough. One basic strategy is to judge Wisdom right away on the main target, and keep Seal of Righteousness up and judging at all times. Combine this with the Holy Shield talent (as critical a tankadin talent as Improved Righteous Fury, if not moreso) to build threat every time you block -- and a good tankadin will be blocking a lot -- and once the mob starts beating on you, your group will be hard pressed to get it to stop.

Which is just what a good tank wants.

Strengths and Weaknesses
The Good:
AoE Tanking: That idiot hunter just aggroed another pack of naga in heroic Slave Pens? Start spamming Consecrate and tell the priest to keep you healed, because this is where the tankadin shines. No class can hold aggro on multiple mobs at once like a tankadin can. A warrior can Thunderclap, and a druid can spam Demoralizing Roar, but compare that to constant Consecrations and it's no contest. Of course, having enough stamina and avoidance to SURVIVE that many mobs beating on you certainly doesn't hurt.

The Bad:
Silences: If there's one thing that can ruin a tankadin's day, it's getting silenced. Since all our abilities count as spells, getting silenced means we can't judge Righteousness or (worse) keep Holy Shield up. This is less of a problem when the silences are frequent but short (such as Karazhan's Maiden of Virtue), but dangerous against long silences such as Gruul's.

No Fear Breaking: While certainly much less of a problem with the changes to creature AI in patch 2.3, one problem tankadins share with bear tanks is the lack of an inherent ability to break fear. While Fear Wards and Tremor Totems can mitigate this problem to some degree (not to mention the PvP trinkets), it's still annoying against bosses that fear a lot. Mind control's even worse, since mob AI doesn't play well with tankadins; but unless you're fighting Blackheart the Inciter every ten minutes, you won't encounter the latter very often while tanking.

Easy Ganks: Remember how I mentioned PvP trinkets? Yeah, good luck getting one as a tankadin. We don't PvP well. While this isn't a problem on most servers (even on the PvP ones, world PvP is more often dead than not), it still limits our ability to get the arena gear if we aren't willing to spec Holy every week or so.

Too Much of a Good Thing: Funny thing about tankadins. We get too much avoidance, we don't take as much damage. We don't take as much damage, we don't get as many heals. We don't get as many heals, we don't get as much mana. And when we don't get as much mana, our already-small pools become that much more of a liability. Running an instance as a tankadin will make you either worship the ground your group's mage walks on, or curse the names of every mage that didn't want to group. Long story short, tankadins run out of mana fast when we're not taking much damage. While this is rarely a problem against hard-hitting mobs such as those you encounter in raids, five-man instances will leave you well acquainted with the Conjured Glacier Water icon.

Avoidance
102.4% is the magic number all tankadins must strive for. That number represents the total avoidance (miss + dodge + parry + block chances) needed to prevent raid bosses from landing crushing blows on you. This isn't as easy to reach as it is for warriors (who can just hit Shield Block every five seconds), but it can be done without so much as glancing in the direction of Karazhan.

The chance of a same-level mob missing its attack on you is, by default, 5%. The skill you have in Defense can make it higher, and also reduce the chance of you receiving a critical hit -- 490 is the standard number to shoot for, since reaching that level will make it impossible for a melee critical hit to be landed on you regardless of how much resilience you have.

Running the numbers in your head, or even with a calculator, can be tricky, let alone determining whether or not this or that item will make you uncrushable. However, various online tools (and even some addons) will automate the task for you.

Recommended Gear
The following items are of particular use to tankadins in the quest to get to uncrushable before raid-tanking.

Timewarden's Leggings
57 stamina, 11 dodge rating, and three sockets? Yes, please. Not a single stat is wasted on something of little or no use to the tankadin. Ignore the socket bonus and jam three blue +stamina gems in there -- Solid Stars of Elune plus a Clefthide Armor Kit give these legs a whopping 123 stamina BEFORE talents!

Jade-Skull Breastplate
Any plate-wearing tank will want this chest, to be honest. 50 stamina, 25 defense, and 23 shield block rating? Very handy for reaching uncrushable, and surviving the blows that'll get dished out once you need to worry about being uncrushable.

Devilshark Cape
Until you're hitting Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep on a regular basis, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better tanking cape than this bad boy.

Flesh Beast's Metal Greaves
They may be from a Mana Tombs quest hardly anyone bothers with, but if you can get a group to do it, these boots beat anything you'll find until Karazhan for avoidance.

Ring of the Silver Hand
Not quite perfectly itemized for the tankadin, but still quite nice to have. Stamina, Intellect, and defense, all in one package. Plus, it's non-unique, so go ahead and kill Warlord Kalithresh enough for two of them. Not like anyone else is going to roll.

Noticing a trend here? Almost without exception, these are all items suitable for a warrior tank. There's a reason for this -- a tankadin will, in order to have enough health to act as a tank, typically have a very small mana pool compared to a Holy specced paladin. While, as mentioned previously, this is annoying in five-man instances, when fighting bosses or raid mobs you'll be getting enough heals that you'll need to drink a lot less often.

Talent Builds
There's really only one main talent build for the tankadin. There may be a few changes here and there -- dropping Precision for Improved Seal of the Crusader or Pursuit of Justice, maybe -- but for the most part, this is what you'll see in 2.3. (The cookie-cutter tankadin build may change in future patches, of course.)

For more information about the tankadin, there's an entire message board dedicated to this oft-misunderstood spec over at http://www.failsafedesign.com/maintankadin/. Of course, you can always stop by our own message boards, and someone should be able to offer some advice.

Good luck!