Having just hit 90 on my Prot Paladin I figured I’d take a few moments to talk about the state of our tanking rotation. (With apologies to Maintankadin and Theck for perhaps over simplifying things)

Anyone familiar with the Cata rotation would have become accustomed with the prot pally “heartbeat” rotation. With a 1.5 second GCD and Crusader Strike/Hammer of the Righteous on a 3 second cooldown, fully half of our GCDs were occupied and it became only a matter of prioritizing the fillers. As an example:

CS-AS-CS-J-CS-SotR

MoP brought about a few changes to filler priority as well as an extension of Crusader Strike’s cooldown to 4.5 seconds leading to something more like:

CS-X-X-CS-X-X-CS-X-X

Where X (obviously?) represents our fillers. Another change is that our Judgement now generates Holy Power and is on a 6 second cooldown. Holy Power is what contributes to our Active Mitigation (via Shield of the Righteous) and therefore is our highest priority filler. Leaving us with:

CS-J-X-CS-X-J-CS-X-X

The way we fill the rest of the spots on the rotation just relies on prioritizing the remaining spells and should look something like:

Avenger’s Shield Consecration (I know, I’m surprised too but with the cooldown lowered and the damage coefficient raised this ability is actually worth leaving on your bars, unlike Cata) Sacred Shield ( With less than 6 seconds on the buff (Ninja Edit here) Refresh Sacred Shield if you have less than six seconds remaining on your thirty second buff and assuming you’ve talented into it, which you should have because it feels like the only mandatory talent for Tankadins) Lvl 90 Talent (I love Light’s Hammer here but your mileage may vary) Holy Wrath

Now we’re all armed with the correct buttons to push and the correct order in which to push them. I’ll drop a link at the bottom for the spec/glyphs I intend to use as I begin heroics but keep in mind these will change on a fight by fight basis and have much less impact on overall performance than they would have in previous expansions.

As a final note I just want to point out that Shield of the Righteous and Word of Glory have been taken off the GCD, allowing us to mash them whenever we like without disrupting our rotation. I will personally be evaluating my tanking by first measuring SotR uptime, as this seems to be the single greatest way to smooth incoming damage and take some of the load off of my healers.

Paladin Sample Spec Build