As a pally tank, you can typically forget quite a few of the Seals or Judgements, especially if you have a healer backing you. You can forget all about Seal of Wisdom/Light, so long as you’re specced for Spiritual Attunement (gain mana = 5/10% of the healing done on you by other targets), leaving you open to run Seal of Righteousness/Vengeance/Corruption (level & faction-based, Righteous prior to 64 as alliance or 66 as horde, then switching to Vengeance or Corruption, as they share the same ability). I have yet to find a use for Seal of Justice. When I’m party- or raid-tanking, I skip Judgment of Wisdom, as your mana is being regained as you’re being healed. Justice doesn’t seem to be very needed in a party or raid situation, as not many dungeon targets flee at higher levels. Judgement of Light helps to keep the rest of your melee dps/offtank healed, so that’s my choice there.

So honestly, Pally tanking isn’t as complicated as you make it out to be, but it definitely more involved than druid tanking. Hell, I hadn’t even thought of tossing FFF in my bear rotation; I was to used to being a cat, and just tossing it on a target when I got a sec, or pulling with it.

Jim

look me up on shattered halls

Warriors… the only reason your forgotten is your mechanics are a lot less flashy and hidden in the internals(mitigations and things other people can’t see) of the game, and pallys of course are the flashiest of tanks(though dks give them a close run) but I can tell you now that my icc raids never go without a warrior tank. They just seem to stand up a little better and as long as we feed them things to faceroll they are amazing. NOW THE THING TO REMEMBER IS THAT while they may be less adaptive as the pally they are also the best counterpart for a pally! Often times it is necessary to use the warriors single target threat gen to tank a boss or perhaps an odd mob, while the pally handles the aoe gathering. Decent guilds realize the benefit of warrior tanks and are hard pressed to not have one in a raid. And more importantly to call them “common” ground is incorrect. if anyone Dks are the common ground as they can emulate all three types of pre wrath tanks. prioritize the tanks based on the fight and you will notice that the top end guilds that have the ability to do so end up swapping out warriors for pallys or druids or dks a lot.

Also someone up there i believe said that druids are hard to get rage on. if you cant get rage on a druid your doing something wrong. a swipe or 2 mangles should give you enough rage to carry you on to the next gcd, the next thing is once you have your dodge high enough and start dodging things or you take a good hit you gain rage. the only time you might not gain significant rage is when the mobs are basically dying before you gain enough back. But if you read the post you’d notice pallys run into the same problem, and i know warriors do. Dks rarely run out thanks to talents, but then again they are a “hero” class lmao.

Also the whole stamp collector vs surfer thing. I think maybe you should have gone with free-spirited vs technical but props for the diversionary tactic lmao. Give them a spot of attack and take away from flaming you over the rest of the post haha, not that anyone would but ya.

then someone said dont consecrate right of the bat…. um. why not? Are you aware that if you dont drop it off first your simply delaying it based on the 969696 rule? considering consecrate is simply a placed dot i don’t understand why you wouldnt drop it first, bring all the mobs to you and run through the rest of the 969696. I understand your theory but the simple fact of the matter is that with the threat generated with consecration and perhaps a holy wrath you should have enough aggro to take care of it. (Now this is assuming your talking about regular trash which if one or two pull off you shouldnt care i mean if the dps is strong enough to aoe it off of you then taunt it back, unless your just considerably less geared than the dps you shouldnt lose more than one or 2, if more then that more than likely its one person pulling off cause they are so l33t in which case the blizzard gods bestowed the pally with the ability to, In Holy Fervor, Righteous defense up to 3 of them off that bombtastic dps whippersnapper. That being said if its in a raid yell at your dps on vent and tell them they need to learn how to raid and continue to bash them until they get the picture or better yet just boot them from the raid if they are pug)
SIMPLY PUT IF THE DPS IS PULLING AGGRO BY STARTING TOO EARLY ITS NOT BECAUSE YOUR DOING THE WRONG THING ITS BECAUSE THE DPS IS NOT DOING THE RIGHT THING.

finally one more dispute, You failed to mention the difference in gearing. not that anybody with 1 finger cant pull up a google of what to gear but since bears and pallys gear significantly different might be worth mentioning should you ever turn another thread about this. (I always find that druid gearing is much easier in terms of it being easier to determine what is an upgrade, but a lot harder to get since you often have to compete with dps[mainly rogues or a kitty and often times in pugs hunters or shammys])

for those that i talked about this is not meant as a flame but as a criticism to open up the door to self reflection and studying. If something doesnt seem to be working change it. Remember this game is ultimately a personaly choice matter. in the end its your choice. If you strive to be better pay attention to criticism and see if maybe it makes sense to littlest degree before you get mad about it. ;p

Ales

Reading your in-depth explanation of what goes on in a Paladin tank’s head for a single pull was hilarious; I never stopped to think about it until now, but you are quite right; a lot more goes on in my head when tanking on the Paladin as opposed to the Death Knight because the Paladin has that many more options available to him.

I will argue about your analysis on mobile threat generation; although Consecrate is stationary and Hammer of the Righteous requires melee range, the cooldown on Righteous Defense is so ridiculously short that as a Paladin tank, you should never lose threat long enough to be unable to regain it before a DPS dies. Using the 969 rotation, Consecrate is always down so if a mob jumps to a DPS, you just Righteous Defense it back to you. Now it’s running through the consecrate to you building minor threat. Now it’s in melee range of you ready to be Hammer of the Righteous’d. Now it has 1 stack of Vengeance or Corruption.
Funny you mentioned the Pit of Saron, if I’m in there and I notice the healer is doing a stand up job, I will pull the whole tunnel at once, non-stop. I’m overgeared for it now, but the day of the release I didn’t know there was a stop point, and I went all the way freaking out my healer due to the damage I was taking. That particular example may not be the best since Paladins also have Holy Wrath which you mentioned, but although our main abilities are stationary or require melee range, that won’t stop us from bouncing through an instance like you ;)

So what am I? A stamp collecting surfer?

Well two points though, Hammer of the Righteous hits 3 targets, 4 with glyph (not 3 or 4 additional, so there is nothing that can hit 5 targets).
And Divine Plea doesn’t give you mana on hits, it is a mana tick. It just replenishes itself on hits.

Pit of Saron cave run, you don’t actually have to build threat on the way, I’m sure it is very useful to actually do it but since you are running first and no one is hitting or doing anything you will have the aggro until the end, and there you will put down your consecrate and your holy wrath. Only one time did I have issues there and it was when a healers started healing people along the way, a druid healer actually, and he died rather quickly, that would have been prevented had I been a bear instead.