Warrior or Paladin preference help for a returning boxer

Greetings everyone,

Im pondering coming out of WoW retirement to get back into cataclysm, i hear generally good things about it, i ran around it with my druid for a few the other day and it seemed interesting enough to go for it again.

But i have a dilemma now. I have pretty much each class at level 80, minus a DK, and i have multiple shamans at 80. Most are ICC geared, but the issue i am facing right now is what to use as my tank.

I have a Warrior and a Paladin, both of which i have no issues with, and do not prefer one over the other. Im curious to know from the current teams running Paladins or Warriors, what the feel is would be fit for say the following team combination.

My original team was a Paladin, 3 Shaman (2 Ele/1 Resto), and 1 Boomkin, which i enjoyed.

My secondary team was a Warrior, Priest, Warlock, Mage, Hunter.

I was pondering going Warrior/Paladin, Ele Shaman, Boomkin, Priest, Mage. I am still having a hard time determining what tank to use or if i should stick to my ele shamans boomkin setup for ease. Would there be an particular reason to choose a paladin over a warrior or vis verse (in your opinions), as i do not know ins and outs of all the class changes, and i falling 10 months behind in the Theorycrafting to determine a preference just yet.

Despite the changes with 4.0x, Paladin is still considered the easiest tank to multibox with, at least for now. The Cata Normal Instances appear to be aoe'able (more from what I've read, I've only done BRC and there is no difference with this one vs all the other Normal Pre-Cata Instances for pulling/tanking).

For simplicity I'd go Paladin first still.

I actually do not have a preference. I love them both as tanks, and they both have strengths and weaknesses.

The warrior tank will do a ton of DPS while tanking, even though they only have 1 AOE worth a crap (thunder clap), and the other AOE is just meh (cleave). Most of the Paladin's DPS comes from it's plethora of aoe skillz.

I love that the warrior has awesome single target threat and crits like no other. I like that he sunders armor, reduces AP, and slows attacks. I don't like his relatively weak AOE, but at least it's cooldown isn't that long. I like his health buff and charging, and he can stun up the ass.

I like the paladins amazing aoe tanking ability - you have consecrate, the hammer thingy (which has an awesome radius actually), the wrath thingy (awesome), and consecrate. Consecrate was nerfed pretty ghey, but it's still not bad. The shield thingy is awesome for pulling, an AOE pull! They still do good dps while tanking though, single target isn't too bad if you know what you're doing. You also have an instant "clutch" heal (word of glory) which is nice.

I'd say toss a coin, they're both great tanks.

Paladin selfhealing with Word of Glory is insane.

Pally > warrior any day for me. Allthough i really lack warrior knowledge :P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Littleburst

Paladin selfhealing with Word of Glory is insane.

Pally > warrior any day for me. Allthough i really lack warrior knowledge :P

---

This plus pally aoe skills are great. Aoe might not be as important in Cata instances with the CC pulls. Even when you can aoe something down, it is usually faster and safer to cc a caster or elemental.

I've boxed both and both are doable, but the pally seems to have more useful tricks and simpler macros.

I have not had to cast an active combat heal on my pally tank in any heroic boss fight since 4.0 went live. The only exceptions were when I pulled more than one pack of mobs in a heroic. And I'm talking about with a 5x prot group that isn't using Divine Storm for heals. It's crazy. I'm sure it won't scale in the Cataclysm heroics but thus far, Word of Glory is just nuts.

Most serious raid guilds currently consider the DK as the premier tank going into Cata from my understanding. If you're not opposed to the idea, blood DK's are pretty silly when it comes to tanking.

With my new PvE group, I'm really liking my DK again. I have used my son's raid-geared pally to run leveling groups and yes, they are pretty insane with the self-healing, but I wanted to be different and used a DK tank and holy pally for this group.