- Author: Kurathis
- Date: April 1, 2021
- Expansion: TBC Classic
Above is a standard tanking build that makes transitioning from regular dungeons to heroics and from heroics to raids. If you do find you’re taking too much magical damage, you can take the points from Improved Judgement and place them in Spell Warding.
Judgement, on a 10-second cooldown, allows for six casts per minute (The seventh coming right at 60 seconds), while Judgement, on a 9-second cooldown, allows for seven casts per minute, and on an 8-second cooldown, you’re able to cast Judgement a total of eight times per minute, which can increase both your threat and survivability.
Many people recommend picking up Reckoning because they believe it will increase the amount of threat you generate significantly. While Reckoning has become much easier for Protection Paladins to trigger since in Classic we had to be the victim of a critical strike, which won’t be possible when we’re defence capped, there are a few downsides that should be considered:
- Reckoning relies on you having a weapon of 2.0 speed or faster to fully benefit from it. (4 Weapon Swings in 8 Seconds) So, if you have Gavel of Unearthed Secrets, for example, we’d only benefit from 2 of those weapon swings since it has a 2.7 speed. (8 ÷ 2.7 = 2.9)
- Reckoning also relies on you being melee hit capped since those extra attacks could miss and be useless for you
- Reckoning also increases the likelihood of being parried and thus increasing the damage you take via the boss “parry-hasting” you. (Every time the boss parries an attack, their swing timer is reduced or removed for the next attack – it depends on how close to the attack they are when they parry you)
In terms of Blessing of Kings, what we have to consider is that most Holy and Retribution Paladins carry it so we can place the talent point elsewhere. If you are running a dungeon or heroic, and notice you don’t have another Paladin, what do you do? Well, realistically, to make the run go as smoothly as possible, it’s recommended to use Blessing of Salvation instead of Blessing of Kings, anyway.
Currently on live servers, Pursuit of Justice is granting 15% reduced chance to be hit by spells – this may be fixed eventually as it is normally 3%, but for now, this is a huge talent to make sure you pick up! Currently, Paladins have the opportunity to miss out on 15% + whatever your dodge chance is in magical damage.