Tanks in general – and Paladins specifically – are in a weird spot. They need to take damage in order to remain useful. With too much tanking gear and avoidance, you stop taking damage – and you stop regenerating mana or generating rage.

Without mana (for Paladins) or rage (for Bears and Warriors), you’re a pretty useless tank.

So how much damage does a Paladin need to take, on average, to keep his mana bar stable?

How Much Mana Does a Paladin Use

First, let’s take a look at a regular Paladin tanking rotation. Except in special circumstances that would include the following spells: Seal of Righteousness, Holy Shield, Consecration, Judgement.

Seal of Righteousness costs 260 mana. You’ll cast it approximately every 10 seconds, making you expend 26 mana per second.

Holy Shield costs 280 mana. You’ll cast it approximately every 10 seconds, making you expend 28 mana per second.

Judgement of Righteousness costs about 180 mana. You’ll cast it approximately every 10 seconds, making you expend 18 mana per second.

Consecration costs 660 mana. You’ll cast it ever 8 seconds, making you expend 82.5 mana per second.

Note: Even with Improved Judgement, you may be unable to use Judgement every 8 seconds. Doing so would probably interfere with Holy Shield due to global cooldown, and it would usually be better to keep Holy Shield up than try to eke out a bit more DPS from your judgements.

Taken together, a full tanking rotation would eat up approximately 155 mana per second, or 775 mana per 5 seconds. Yikes, that’s a lot of mana.

How Much Mana Do We Regenerate?

Chances are that you have little or no mp5 on year gear. That’s fine. You would need a ton of mp5 to balance out your mana consumption (~200), and it’s not worth sacrificing that much avoidance/threat generation.

Your main source of regeneration, then, is Spiritual Attunement. For every 10 points of health gained through heals from other players, you regain 1 mana. You don’t regain mana for over-heals, nor do you get anything from damage absorbed by a shield (i.e. PW: Shield).

With that in mind, it’s pretty easy to determine how much damage you need to take to balance out your mana consumption. If you take 7750 damage per 5 seconds, you’ll regenerate 775 mp5 – enough to stabilize your mana pool.

This could be re-written as 1550 damage per second.

Is That Likely?

Well, it is certainly possible to take 1550 damage per second and live. With a decent amount of healers on you, that shouldn’t be a problem.

But how many raid bosses are going to deal that much damage to you over the course of a fight?

In SSC, Hydross only deals 750-1000 dps to a well geared resistance tank. Fathom Lord Karathress is similar – 750-1000 dps. Morogrim is the heavy hitter out of the group – dealing anywhere from 1200-1500 dps.

What it seems is that most of these bosses don’t hit hard enough (based on my math and the WWS reports I’ve seen) to constantly re-fill your mana bar.

If We Aren’t Taking Damage… What Do We Do?

There are a few alternatives to help you through this mess.

The simplest is to pot. Early and often. If you’re not taking enough damage to refill your mana bar, you aren’t taking enough damage to die. You should never have to use a health pot, but you should scream at your healers if you ever drop below 20%.

I do this on a lot of long fights, such as Gruul. Towards the end, he deals more than enough damage, but until grow 6-7 he doesn’t. Likewise, I pot all the time on Void Reaver. He does a decent amount of damage, but once you’re second on the aggro list you’ll be sucking wind for mana.

Downrank Consecration. You may have noticed that Consecration accounts for more than half of your mana consumption. You could drop it altogether, or downrank to rank 1. This would be a savings of 70-80 mps, and help your mana bar equal out when you’re only taking 7-800 dps.

The only problem is that this severely cuts your threat generation. With some decent spell damage, Rank 6 Consecration accounts for nearly 300 tps. That’s roughly 30% of your threat – not something you want to give away lightly. Unless of course your DPS sucks.

Judge Wisdom. In long fights, it is best for threat generation to judge Crusader on a boss. The extra spell damage adds somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 tps. Nice little bonus. However, if you’ve got a comfortable lead in threat, you should consider judging Wisdom. I do this a lot, unless I know it’s going to be a quick and aggro-sensitive fight.

I don’t have any hard numbers on how much mana you regenerate from Wisdom, but it is certainly helpful. This also makes downranking Consecration more useful – because Rank 1 won’t do a lot of threat, but it will still proc Judgement of Wisdom and regain some mana for you.

In most situations, you’ll have to use one of these solutions. It’s a rare fight when you constantly take enough damage to completely stabilize your mana pool. However, it’s also some good incentive to alter your tanking itemization slightly and get some threat generation (Spell Damage, Expertise, Hit Rating) over raw avoidance.