Paladin vs Warrior tank decision help.

[dazed1992]

Hey all, currently i started the following team but i'm having some doubts.
Tank: Paladin
Dps: Mage,Mage,Warlock
Heals: Priest
All level 23

I was under the impression that paladin would be the best tank due to aoe threat, however currently i'm struggling and while i know it will get better with Blessing of Salvation it seems warrior may be better?.

Warrior vs Paly dungeon scenarios:
I imagine throughout almost all of dungeons i'll be doing body pulls and laying down consecration but it seems there's really no way to guarantee maintaining threat up until that point.

On the other hand warriors can run around with the team on follow and cast battle/demo shout repeatedly for threat which seems like a much cleaner overall solution and will allow for priest heals/renews.There's also the possibility of stance swapping for Thunderclap/whirlwind and have challenging shout for big fast pulls.

Question:
Am i missing something here / does anyone have some perspective on this?

[Apatheist]

Tank: Warrior
Dps: Mage,Mage,Warlock
Heals: Paladin

Best of both worlds.

A warrior with retribution aura and fiery shield will output significant AE TPS and be much more durable than any paladin tank.

[dazed1992]

I've been floating around that idea but i'm not sure how gold Paladin heal would stand up against priest.Blessing of Salvation and retribution would be huge in terms of threat management but would it be necessary to go that far and gimp healing?

[Apatheist]

gimp healing

Paladins are the strongest single target healer in the game.

Even as a priest 90% of your healing will come from heal, flash heal or greater heal. Using prayer of healing outside of specific circumstances or raids is usually pretty inefficient.

[nodoze]

I don't really like a single Paladin healing a Melee-Cleave team with lots of random incoming damage to multiple targets (I have 2 Paladins with 3 Warriors and really like having both from a melee-cleave healing perspective). A single Paladin should be a fine healer of a ranged spell team (with decent positioning the incoming damage should be more predictable and manageable).

At 23 you can already have Consecration, Retribution Aura, Seal of Righteousness, & standard Righteous Fury and should not really be having serious Threat issues.

At 26 you should get Salvation so probably best to just power through at least to 26 and reevaluate.

[Purpleflavor]

Pally's just have trouble tanking raids. They are on par with warriors for everything else, the difference being salvation allows you to dps harder, and warriors have snap aggro with taunt.

We're in phase 1 right now, but in phase 2 i believe ZG opens and you may want to farm some of that, which means having a warrior would be essential.

I myself like the suggestion of a pally healer, as the only thing they cant do is aoe heal, but FoL and Shock are finished before the GCD so you can heal a lot of people really fast.

[dazed1992]

Yea, the more i think about it the more i like the idea of the paladin healer Warrrior tank. I do have a rational/maybe irrational fear that i may need AOE healing and gate myself, but i don't know how realistic that actually is.

Maybe i'm just trying to min max stuff way to far and paly priest is the safest overall with paly war min maxed for aoe.

[Mmrwowboxer]

I seem to tank as a paladin just fine. The amount of mobs you can gather when you learn to bubble pull is almost in the double digits. Plus having a backup healer on large AoE pulls is priceless.

[Madsage]

A warrior does not hold threat once casters start aoeing. Demo shout is 30ish threat every 1.5 seconds, consecration is 100 threat per seconds.

Paladin tank can hold aggro against a mage spamming arcane explosion with blessing of salvation and arcane sublety talent, which means if they deal 250 damage every 1.5 seconds they will generate 70 threat per second.

A warlock would need a demo spec with imp to reduce his threat, making him deal 210 damage per second and 118 tps with Hellfire.

When pulling multiple packs you can throw down consecration so that casters get aggro on you, melee will get pulled with retribution aura, warriors are far worse for aoe tanking, the only reason why they were so good was because demo shout was bugged and generated more threat the more mobs you hit, but that has been fixed and they are back to being weak without consumables and engineering shield ( but with engineering shield and Limited invul potion you can pull huge packs and keep aggro on them)

[Apatheist]

A warrior does not hold threat once casters start aoeing.

This is just not true. There are already videos on this forum of people having no trouble holding threat on their warrior tanks post-hotfix. This comp is also with a priest healer and without the advantage of salvation and retribution aura. He's also not using any TPS consumables that I can see.

I do have a rational/maybe irrational fear that i may need AOE healing and gate myself

Put it this way. There are no encounters a paladin can't heal but there are many a paladin can't tank. Most of them are in raids but there are quite a few dungeon encounters where having a warrior with taunt and viable defensive cooldowns will make everything so much easier. The interaction between limited invuln potions and AE taunt makes clearing some areas ridiculously simple.

Regarding AE healing - it's not an issue. A paladin can literally spam flash of light non stop in decent gear. With around 500 healing in close to preraid BiS and blessing of light flash of light rank 1 heals for about 700hp+ / 1.5s (without blessing of light) and costs 35 mana. Prayer of healing costs over 1,000 mana and heals for about 1600/3.5s party-wide. You can literally cast 29 flash R1 for the same cost as a single prayer and you'll still be full mana because you will regen faster than you're spending mana.

Actually, the only thing I would miss from a priest is an offensive dispel and fear ward. Paladin healing is far superior IMO. If you really need an offensive dispel you can swap to a felhunter and warriors already have tools to break fear.