5 Prot Paladins?

[OzPhoenix]

Has anyone ever tried this? I mean, my Prot Paladin can take a tonne of damage, has some (admittedly limited) healing, and can even do about 3k dps. So, strictly for 5-man stuff only has anyone ever tried a 5 x Prot Paladin team??

[Khatovar]

What exactly would you gain out of 5 prot that outshines ret? Prot mana pool is absurdly small, healing wouldn't outlast a pissed off squirrel in most cases. You get nothing for heal cast time reduction and nothing to boost healing. Almost all prot talents are totally wasted if you're not getting hit, which at any given time, 4 of your team will not be.

[OzPhoenix]

So, alternately going 5xRet but stacking equipment as if I were prot? Part of the problem I guess is that after a long break from boxing, I've returned and would be keen to start off with a 5 x (insert class&spec here) team to save on all the multiple spells etc. You're right of course about the Prot spec when not getting hit and the healing I admit would be tiny (my current team is lead by a Prot Pally which is what I playing when back to single-boxing), but then 5 x Lay on Hands would get useful to.

[Khatovar]

No, you can do 1 prot and the rest ret, or 1 prot, 1 holy, 1 ret. Ret will provide you with mana replenishment, passive healing on divine storm, 3-4x instant FoL on the tank as needed. Bonus damage, bonus crit, multiple long-term CC, haste, boost to healing and HoTs on heal crit.

There is really no reason to want to stick with 5xsame class AND same spec, you lose so much by not altering spec to allow you to pick up other things. For example, Heart of the Crusader does not stack. Why have 4 toons waste 3 talent points on something that does 0 good? Vindication doesn't stack, no need for more than one toon to get it.

It's not hard to macro multiple specs. The time spent is a minor tradeoff for the huge amounts of utility/dps/survivability that you can gain.

[OzPhoenix]

Khatovar,

Yeah, been reading that 20+ page thread on 5xPaladin (1 prot, 4 ret) so I can see where my innate-laziness is leading me to try and make this a little TOO easy.

At the moment I'm running 1 Prot Pally, 4 Ele Shaman (and needing to convert 1 shammy to resto I think), so I'll also consider raising up 4 ret pallies and see how that goes.

[ghonosyph]

I'm levelin 5 pallys ATM and I can tell you that 1 prot 4 ret is the only way to go, the healing is really very simple and even with crappy gear you still pretty much face roll everything lol

[OzPhoenix]

I am even actually considering not using my current pally, just starting all fresh (except for the bags of gold I'd bring) with 5 x Belfs. 1 Prot, 4 Ret.

I'm one of those freaks that actually doesn't mind levelling and the lowbie dungeons would give me experience in boxing the Prot/Ret combo.

[kate]

1 prot and 4 ret is ridiculously survivable. The prot paladin generates boatloads of threat so usually it is the only one being damaged usually so there's 1 focus for healing. Divine storm's healing is enough passive healing to deal with splash damage from bosses on all the slaves and all healing needed for dealing with trash. Judgments of the Wise and glyphed Seal of Command provides enough mana regen for the ret paladins to just spam things without any regard for mana. You also can get all the aura improvements and blessing of might improvement from ret.

5 Prot would be *less* survivable - no passive healing from divine storm, no mana recovery until much, much later in the tree, too much switching of threat from one character to another so figuring out who needs to be healed is an issue. You'd run out of mana FAST so your DPS would be throttled back on boss fights or anything that takes any real time.

The only change I might make to the team would be swapping out one of the ret pallies for a shaman, but it isn't that big a deal. My team is steamrolling through everything in TBC so far - I think the only boss that gave me any trouble was the dragon in Ramparts, but now I have a strategy that works and it's been smooth sailing.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

If your pallies are geared enough to do 3.5k DPS in prot spec, then yeah, you're easily capable of most 5-man stuff. I was clearing heroics with a team that was all under 3000 gearscore rating and the DPS were only pulling about 1800ish on a good day. If I can do it with that crappy group, you should be able to faceroll it if your prot is doing twice the DPS of my DPS spec.

[Maxion]

Yeah, 1prot&4ret is the way to go for instances, but for pvp and especially arena 5x protret spec with ret gear (with dps 1h + shield) has a lot of potential, there just hasn't been much footage of anyone boxing it yet.