This extensive guide covers areas such like aggro generation, mana management and the hows of tanking. I have only included topics such as aggro generation, spells and tanking method. To view the comprehensive guide written in full by Gestalt of Ysera, click here.

The Paladin has several key features that operate very differently than the other two tanks.

The Paladin uses mana where the other tanks use rage. While this originally prevented them from being viable tanks for long fights, mana regen from healing recieved (via Spiritual Attunement) makes this no longer an issue. Tanking Paladins affectionately refer to their “Blue Rage bar”, as SA replenishes their mana supply constantly. The remaining functional differences are twofold: first, a paladin has a much larger (and scalable) functional resource pool (i.e. 100 rage is worth X seconds of ability use, 4000 mana will be more time of ability use than X), offset by a greater need for efficient spending. Second, they start a fight at full resource, making heavy frontloading possible.

The Paladin generates threat through Holy spell damage (with threat multipliers). Their overall threat model is more like a Druid than a warrior: high damage with bonus threat for damage dealt. They differ from Druids in that their damage source is unaffected by any mitigation mode in the game. Holy Damage has no resistance value: the spell damage can “miss”, resulting in a full resist, but partial resist or school-specific resists don’t apply. Since the damage is magical, rather than physical, the armor of the mob has no impact on the threat generated by the paladin. While some of the threat is generated from holy damage procs on successful weapon swings, a lot of Paladin threat is coming from reactive procs (i.e. damage when hit) and AoE DoT, so even outright mob avoidance has only a moderate effect on threat generation. This spell-based threat mechanic does make the paladin less effective on mobs that silence (see below) and are magic immune (though resistances aren’t a factor).

The Paladin generates threat through multiple sources that are active simultaneously, most of which are fire-and-forget. At any point in a fight a Paladin will probably be building threat from: seals on weapon swings, hits taken, hits blocked (at all times), bonus damage on hits blocked (when Holy Shield is active). These multiple damage sources all scale with gear and add up FAST. In any multi-mob encounter the Paladins screen will be covered with a constant stream of numbers.

Since much of the damage and threat of the Paladin is passive or nontargetted, there is no real limit to the number of mobs a Paladin can hold. The threat built on non-targetted mobs is substantial: instance nonelites will usually kill themselves from reactive damage long before DPS gets to them on the target list, and elites will still be substantially weakened when DPS gets to them. Paladins rarely require crowd control: the only limit to the number of mobs they can tank is the amount of damage the healers can stay on top of.

Paladins can frontload a LOT of threat. At level 70 (in decent pre-raid gear) Avenger’s Shield (the primary pulling ability) will generate 2-5k threat on the three targets it hits, followed by 1-2k threat from Judgement of Righteousness. While applying 3,000 to 7,000 threat on the first DPS target before it gets into melee range is remarkable, consider the real trump card on Paladin threat generation: Avenging Wrath ups all damage dealt (and thus all threat) by 30% for 20 seconds, once every 3 minutes.

Paladins are somewhat limited in their “Oh No!” buttons. While Righteous Defense *does* function through a Divine Shield (i.e. the paladin can bubble, then taunt, and the mob will come back and smack at them to no effect), the timing on this is very tricky and only works on mobs that can be taunted. Ardent Defender (always active) cuts all damage recieved in half if the Paladin is below 20% health, but it is sometimes “leapfrogged” by big, slow attacks: an attack that takes them below 20% may be followed up an attack that flat out kills them, even with the damage reduction.

A Tankadin who is not tanking is more or less dead in the water. Paladin tanks have very small mana pools: 5-6k at 70 pre-raid, at best. They rely on mana regained from Spiritual Attunement so that they can focus their gear on mitigation, and as such don’t have much staying power when they aren’t a primary healing target. They miss most of the mana efficiency options from the Holy tree, so their healing is limited. Their best DPS options require taking hits to function, so their damage is laughable (substantially less than a Protection warrior) when they’re not tanking. With a gear swap they can be a support healer (as well as handle buffing and decursing), but they are limited when it comes to changing roles mid-combat.

The single greatest challenge a Paladin will face is their own versatility. A Paladin has more manual control over their pacing during a fight than other tanks, making efficiency very important. They have more things to keep track of, so a lot of multitasking is required (even on single-mob fights). They have a wide range of options that may be required at various stages in the fight, and it’s up to the Paladin to determine when to emphasize threat, mitigation, or efficiency.

Putting it together: A typical pull
1. Prep Seal of Righteousness
2. Avenger’s Shield, break line of sight/ have other players counter if the pull involves casters.
2a. If CC is necessary (and it usually won’t be), apply it after the AS pull.
3. Judgement of Righteousness on the first kill target.
4. Consecrate, Holy Shield, up a Seal, in this order (to insure timers are appropriately staggered).
4a. If more threat is needed, Seal of Righteousness
4b. For more threat on a longer fight, Seal of the Crusader (Judged immediately, then up another seal).
4c. If more mitigation is needed, Seal of Light (Judged immediately, then up another seal).
4d. If the mobs are runners, Seal of Justice (judged, up another).
4e. If it’s going to be a long fight, Seal of Wisdom (Judged, up another).
5. Keep Consecrate and Holy Shield up, rotating seals and Judgements as necessary. Try to maintain active judgements on as many targets as possible, rotating weapon swings between judged targets to maintain them.
6. Throughout the fight try to move your targets a little bit as they die. It can be difficult to loot 12 corpses stacked directly on top of each other.

General systems
The rule of the Paladin is 1-per: 1 seal at a time, 1 judgement per target (per paladin), 1 blessing per target (per paladin).

Paladin holy damage generates 1.6 threat per point, 1.9 post talents.

Judgement operates independantly of the Global Cooldown.

Global Cooldown
With the exception of Judgement, all Paladin spells and skills use the Global Cooldown. Given that most of the spells used for tanking are instants, the Paladin has no method of “soaking” the downtime between GCD’s: this built in pause is a true pause. The Paladin offsets this with the duration of all their GCD-consuming effects: most Paladin tank spells are fire-and-forget, something you can activate then simply allow it to work for a few seconds. The moderate cooldowns on most of these spells means the Paladin will rarely have to choose between more than 2 or 3 abilities on any given Global Cooldown. A Paladin will have to choose carefully to optimize their efficiency, unless…

Unless they don’t have to choose at all. The Cooldowns for the primary tanking spells can be staggered in such a way that they will rarely, if ever, overlap. Your initial series of casts throughout a fight will determine how frequently this overlap will occur: if you start out with a string that brings an early overlap, you will have to deal with those overlaps frequently. If you start out with effective staggering, you will only have to maintain it. The one curveball you will have to deal with is long cooldown skills, like HoJ, or long fights where reapplying BoSa is necessary. There are a few tricks that help in this process:

Use Consecrate before Holy Shield any time you’ll be using both. The 2 second gap between their CD’s means that if you reverse this, they’ll overlap on the next CD.

The time when both HS and Consecrate are on Cooldown is when you Judge. While Judgement itself does not invoke Gobal Cooldown, the seal you’ll be refreshing will.

Special or situational abilities like HoJ, AS, or refreshing BoSa should also be fit into this window, but be aware of how this may effect the timing of other skills.

Keep an eye on your cooldowns. If you aren’t using a mod that displays the cooldowns on the buttons themselves, get one.

Keep an eye on your spell durations. Turning on “Aura Fade” for scrolling combat text will give you a visual cue when seals and blessings fade, but you need to be thinking ahead so you can fit refreshed buffing into your skill rotation.

General Spells and Abilities
The magic word for a Paladin tank is OPTIONS. You have a lot of them from base class abilities and talent-granted spells. We’ll get to Seals, Blessings, Auras, and abilities from talents shortly, but first lets take a look at some more general abilities.

Spiritual Attunement
This is part 1 of “Why Paladins can tank now”.
You don’t have a mana bar. You have a blue rage bar (that starts full instead of empty), and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Spiritual attunement will provide you with plenty of staying power as a tank: until you hit 70, 8% of all healing you recieve will apply to your mana as well, and at 70 it moves to 10%. This may not sound like a lot, but in most tanking scenarios where staying power is very important (i.e. boss fights), you will be recieving a LOT of healing (think 6-7 digits). That’s a lot of mana, and should be more than enough to keep you cranking out threat.

Righteous Defense
This is part 2.
You have a taunt. At first glance it may seem a bit odd: it’s player targetted, effects multiple mobs, and operates from range. The first thing to do when you get this ability is to macro it (macro below). It will now function more or less like a default taunt, with a few noteworthy exceptions. First, if that player pulls aggro on multiple targets (up to 3), they’ll all come to you. Second, it operates from range. I can’t stress how awesome that is. A Paladin does not, and should not, move to pickup a target: they can taunt from range, and have some handy abilities to build threat while the target is walking back to them.

Macro:
/cast [help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget,help] Righteous Defense

Consecration
Consecration is a terrific threat source when dealing with multiple targets: toss it down and let the holy damage tick away at your enemies. It’s effective for adding another source of threat on a single target as well, but be aware that it’s a mana hog. The relatively high mana cost is offset by its fantastic scalability: consecrate recieves a full 96% of your +dam/heal, though divided evenly between the ticks.

Avenging Wrath
Obtained at 70, AW is a powerful threat tool. It increases all damage dealt (from all sources, including reactive damage procs) by 30% for 20 seconds. With a 3 minute cooldown it’s usable once per trash pull and a few times per boss fight.

Seals and Judgements
Seals provide the tanking paladin with a wide range of tactical options, allowing for “on the fly” adjustments to your performance during an encounter. While it is possible, and even sometimes desirable, for a Paladin tank to focus purely on threat generation and do just fine, the class really shines when used to its fullest capacity, and doing that means knowing when to use what seal and judgement combination.

Seal of Righteousness (SoR)
Bread and butter: Holy Damage per swing. This is your primary source of direct-to-target threat as a tank. The holy damage dealt per swing scales very well with +damage gear (with reasonable amounts of +damage it outperforms SoC because of how well it scales). You’re using this any time that you don’t have a compelling reason to have another Seal active.
As a Judgement(JoR): JoR is a nice little swat of holy damage. Like other Judgements that don’t apply a debuff, this won’t replace an existing judgement, so fire away. When you’re trying to build a threat lead, judge this every time the cooldown is available. When you need to be a bit more mana efficient, Judge right before the Seal runs out.

Seal of the Crusader (SotC)
SotC gives you a nice boost to overall physical damage dealt over time. Since physical damage doesn’t benefit from the beefy threat multipliers of Righteous Fury, this is almost perfectly worthless as a tank.
As a Judgement(JotC): Ah, here we have a very different story. JotC boost Holy damage dealt to the target (varying by the coefficient of the spell that deals the damage). For all intents and purposes, JotC raises your +dam/heal against the target by the indicated amount. Judge this early on fights where you have some lead time: the extra efficiency over time is worth the Judgement cooldown. On short fights, or fights where you need threat FAST, don’t bother. Also: do not Judge this when you have a Retribution Paladin available to do it for you. Their talents make their JotC much more powerful than yours.

Seal of Justice (SoJ)
SoJ adds a chance to stun the target to your weapon swings. This sounds interesting, and could be useful in paladin-heavy groups (i.e. 4 paladins with SoJ up), but in most situations it’s just not worth the hassle. First, the stun percentage is relatively small. Second, most of the things you really wish you could stun you can’t.
As a Judgement(JoJ): This judgement completely cancels the run behavior of the mob in question. If maintained on the target they will not run, ever. Handy for dealing with humanoids or other runners in position-sensitive areas. If you are in an instance where runners are an issue, judge this on every target. There are lots of options for dealing with runners, but none of them are this simple or effective.

Seal of Light (SoL)
SoL is a perfect example of the flexibility and utility of Paladins in a tanking role. If you have enough of a threat lead to maintain it with other Holy damage sources you can throw on SoL and heal yourself with your weapon swings. This effective reduction in your overall damage goes a LONG way: a Paladin using SoL on a target with JoL on it has the best overall damage reduction in the game (at the cost of a temporary reduction in threat generation). Note that the amount healed scales with +dam/heal. When you’re comfortable with your threat lead and notice the healers are having trouble, SoL can help (especially paired with JoL).
As a Judgement(JoL): This debuff has a chance to heal when striking the target. The amount healed is less than the Seal, but applies to everyone striking the target (including ranged weapons and wands). This is your Judgement of choice on short to medium duration fights (especially trash mobs). The overall reduction in the healing the raid needs is substantial, saves healer mana, and makes it possible to move to the next pull faster. Note that the chance to proc is a fixed percentage per swing, so people attacking move often will recieve healing more often (rogues, enh shaman, and fury warriors love this).

Seal of Wisdom (SoW)
Another option for extending your efficiency in a fight: Seal of Wisdom has a chance to restore mana per swing, thus giving you more mana to spend on your other abilities. In most tanking situations you’ll be getting enough mana from Spiritual Attunement to use all your abilities as soon as they’re available, but you will need a boost from time to time. If you have enough of a threat lead you can use this to give your mana pool a bit of oomph, but most of the time you’re better off using this as a Judgement.
As a Judgement(JoW): This judgement functions similiarly to JoL, restoring mana instead of health. This is the judgement of choice for long fights, both for yourself and for the other casters in the group. With JoW on the raid target, healers and casters can replenish their mana by wanding (which stacks with normal regeneration). JoW will also let you more or less throw mana efficiency out the window: you’ll be able to set ridiculous threat levels, spam your abilities, and not worry too much about running out.

Seal of Blood (SoB)
This is the seal of choice when you have a fantastic threat lead and both you and the healers are incredibly bored. The issue with this seal in its current form is that it scales incredibly poorly with +dam/heal. At 64 you only need about 75+dam/heal for SoR to be doing more damage than SoB. Even more fun is that this seal damages you with every swing. Again, only break this out when the healers start complaining about being bored (and if JoL is on the target, they probably won’t even notice).
As a Judgement (JoB): Inferior to JoR in every way, for the reasons noted above. Cross your fingers and hope that we see a tweak to the spell damage coefficient to make this useful.

Seal of Vengeance( SoV)
The Alliance-only seal is much more interesting than the aptly named SoB: each swing has a chance to apply a stackable holy damage DoT, and the Judgement deals direct holy damage based on the size of the dot stack (which caps at 5). In theory, SoV and JoV could provide better threat generation than SoR/JoR, but for one problem: keeping the dot stack maxxed is by no means certain. Alliance tankadins give SoV very mixed reviews because of this: some love it, and say that it’s great, when it works. Others point out that “when it works” isn’t often enough to really rely on it as a primary threat tool. Try it, experiment, and if you master this ability and find it’s irreplacable, let us know.

Blessings
There are a few blessings that are of particular interest to the Paladin tank. While you should be familiar with the general function of your buffs for 5-mans, you won’t be doing too much buffing in a raid environment (and as a Protection Paladin, it won’t be complicated either: Kings for everyone). That being said, there are a number of Blessings that perform an important utility role for a tank.

Blessing of Protection (BoP)
Makes the target completely immune to physical damage for a short time, and also prevents them taking any action but spellcasting. BoP is handy for saving an overzealous caster, but the most important function it performs is an aggro redirect. Any mob that has a single physical attack on its attack table (i.e. virtually everything) will stop attacking the target and move to the next target on their hate list. In virtually all situations this should be you, bringing the mob directly back to you. What’s interesting about this “taunt” is that it technically isn’t a taunt: since the effect is applied to a player, immunities on the mob are irrelevent. You can, effectively, taunt a mob that is taunt-immune. Note that this will cancel any blessings you’ve placed on the target. Conversely, you can prematurely remove the BoP by applying another blessing. Macro BoP thus so you don’t have to switch targets to use it as a taunt, but be careful you don’t wind up putting it on yourself:

/cast [help] Blessing of Protection; [target=targettarget,help] Blessing of Protection

Blessing of Salvation (BoS)
This lowers the threat generated by the target player by 30%. Note that this does not work retroactively: they keep the threat they’ve already generated, but BoSa will reduce all threat generated after it is applied. This is a great followup to BoP: If you had to BoP someone, you probably need to BoSa them as well. Do NOT use the macro above (or a sequence macro) for BoSa: it is entirely too easy to accidentally apply it to yourself, as the “help” syntax does not prevent self-application. Also note that there is often a bit of lag in the “target of target” window, so you can’t rely on it when using BoSa. Instead, bind this to a button configured for mouseover, or macro it with [target=mouseover]. When you BoP someone, remember who it was, mouseover their name on your raid list, and hit BoSa. Chances are good you won’t have to taunt for them again.

Auras
Changing your aura costs no mana, but does invoke the global cooldown. While you need to be careful about your GCD use, there are some situations where swapping auras mid-combat will be necessary.

Retribution Aura
The Aura of choice whenever you have more than one target hitting you (unless you have a Ret paladin available to provide the Improved version). The threat generated by Ret aura is free (i.e. costs you nothing), constant, and non-negligable.

Devotion Aura
The Aura of choice when you need a little boost to your mitigation. While the armor provided does not scale, it’s still a bit less damage taken, and in many situations a little is all it takes to make the difference between a screenshot in front of a corpse and a up-close inspection of the quality tilework on the floor.

Resistance Auras: Shadow, Fire, Frost
These are very, VERY handy for fights that are heavy on the associated damage type. On element-heavy fights witching to these on the appropriate fights can provide a MASSIVE damage reduction for both you and your party. Be aware of what the other classes in your group are capable of buffing: Priests can help with Shadow, Shaman can help with Fire and Frost. There may be situations where you’ll want to fill in the gaps, especially in 5-mans.