Sometimes there’s just no love for Protection Pallies.

When the Burning Crusade was a bit younger, the forums were plagued with people complaining that Protection Paladins weren’t viable MTs. They didn’t have the health or the abilities to square off against a giant raid boss, and the job should be left to the more raid-worthy Warriors.

Since then, I’ve seen Pallies tank a number of the lower end raids (Kara, Gruul, Mags) with no trouble, and I know of others that have gone through TK and SSC. They do have some short-comings when it comes to single target tanking – no shield wall, no last stand, no shouts – but they’re still viable tanks in a lot of ways.

I was chatting with a new Prot Pally the other day – he was level 69 and just about to turn 70 – and he asked me about the highest raid I’ve tanked, and if Prot Pallies were viable in Hyjal and BT. I don’t have any experience at the Hyjal or BT level, so I wasn’t really sure how to answer that part of the question. However, I remembered hearing that Prot Pallies were very helpful in dealing with the trash waves in Hyjal, so I decided to read up a bit on the situation.

Bosskillers – Pally Haters!

After skimming through the wowwiki information on Hyjal (which for some reason I’ve never done until now), I thought, “This is perfect for a Prot Pally!” Throw a bunch of undead mobs on the ground and ask someone to AoE tank them so that the DPS can go AoE crazy? Umm… isn’t that what we’re made for?

Next, I went to Bosskillers to read the strats on the trash waves and bosses. Here’s a quote from the Rage Winterchill guide.

Raid Setup
Tanks: 5 (A mix of Prot and Fury Warriors and Feral Druids)
Healers: 8
DPS: 12

Alter this setup depending on the number of people you have attuned, but in general make sure to bring at least 2 feral druids and 3-4 warriors. Some of the “tanks” can be DPS specced and change from tanking gear to DPS gear at the end of the waves.

… Did they really just list the tanks and request Warriors and Druids and no Paladins? Are you nuts?

This is Paladin bashing taken to an extreme. You throw a Prot Paladin in the mix with some good gear, and he’ll be able to tank the crap out of those trash waves. It will be much more effective than having a warrior try to flip around and maintain aggro on 5 different mobs, and you won’t need to have 5 tanks.

Not to mention, if you want to have a Warrior MT, your Paladins can easily swap out to healing gear and off-spec heal a lot better than a Prot Warrior can off-spec DPS.

Stop hating Paladins. We’re more useful than you think.