WotLK My preference

[xTheLichKingx]

Really don't know about y'all but I prefer stacking armor to the moon on prot paladin.

All of my healers love me and want no other tank but me in the raids. The raids are always smooth as hell and I take no damage.

I stack armor up to 49.9k and just keep going if I don't reach the lvl 83 armor cap. Organ/PTS/Eof belt/cape, 10 man saurfang bracers, 4pt10, pillars of might, rs25 boots, rotface neck, onyxia ring + devium, etc.

[Raenel]

I covered a BiS list for Prot pala many years ago; It's hidden in the depth of a long post but it's essentially here; I went over some preamble thoughts on the whole armor vs stam setup on it, could be worth a read. https://forum.warmane.com/showthread...59#post2610259
I may update it slightly (warmane fixed libram swap shenanigans long ago for example). But imho going armor or stam tank in all scenarios is the "riskiest" form of being a "BiS" tank that exists; You're great on some fights and as close to suboptimal as possible on others (whilst still wearing high ilvl gear). Again, covered in the post in detail.

To parrot back common knowledge and basically every single forum veteran / wow veteran / tanking guide written since the dawn of time; Obviously there's so much thing as a single BiS list for tanks; If you want to be "truly Best in Slot" you change equips on a fight by fight basis.

But honestly if you're a "BiS tank" (emphasis on quotation marks), you're massively overgeared for any encounter in the game; There's not a single fight on warmane, even on Lordaeron, which requires a tank to be at those gear levels and thus no matter if you go armor or stamina, you're probably going to be "fine". But there's a big distinction from playing "decently" to playing "at the best level theoretically possible", which is again, the very definition of "BEST-in-slot". If you're not using the BEST setup for a fight, you're technically not "B"iS

Instead, I'd like to take the opportunity to refer to OP's post as an example of someone with a thought process which is "too rigid" and I would warn against that in terms of self growth;
As a washed up veteran with slow reaction times watching younger players excel on retail classic, my only advice is more introspection can go a long way;

Notably, new players become experience players by forming biasses and opinions as they play. Eventually, you run out of things to form opinions and biasses on, and thus the only way for self growth is to start reevaluating old biasses. If your evaluation was a simple "X is good, Y is bad" you very quickly run into a skill cap extremely quickly. Instead it's not so much "X is good and Y is bad" it'll transform more into "X is good 90% of the time but useless for this niche scenario, Y is bad 90% of the time but the best way to solo-tank that last scenario"

And then tying it back to OP's post; Armor tanks have the great advantage of skewing the EHP formula towards damage reduction; Intuitively if you take 10% less damage, your incoming healing is also 10% more "Effective" since healing comes before the damage reduction. However, with the abundance of Holy Paladins and how Beacon of Light works, in most scenarios there will be an abundance of overhealing and thus this perk of damage reduction is "less useful" especially in 25 man raids as the healer count and damage intake gets higher.

However, armor has the fatal flaw of not working on magic damage; And the biggest risk to tanks dying in endgame raiding is generally magic damage; Remember your job as a tank is to prevent raid wipes; You know, keeping aggro, all that stuff, but a big part is reducing the likelihood of deaths; Being an armor tank leaves you the most vulnerable to dying to magic damage, and in terms of risk assessment, you have the highest possible risk of death to magic damage out of any tank setup in the game using item level 264+ items in all slots.

Remember you're not meant to think about this in terms of "Oh but i tanked 20 times just fine" It's more about "instead of having a 5% chance of wiping on any given pull, I'll change my setup and reduce that to 2%"

[Whiteman]

So i am interesting in to, with only 69 (2.1%) hit rating who will u save with your Miss taunts all the time
2.1% + 3% from sp + 8% from glyph if you are even using it
another thing, how did u manage to get 49.9k armor, without armor pots (and u cant have 100% up time of them). (with all armor parts and armor pot u will have ~46.6k).
Better post your own armory and show people you char then just writing this and begging for attentions

[Persivaln]

Better post your own armory and show people you char then just writing this and begging for attentions

That's kinda his only goal here - attention. Despite being proven wrong in each thread where he states his "hidden gem, slept over" builds and tactics.

[OhieMitzen]

another thing, how did u manage to get 49.9k armor, without armor pots (and u cant have 100% up time of them). (with all armor parts and armor pot u will have ~46.6k).

I think he meant he gets whatever armor he can to get to as close as possible to 49.905.

[xTheLichKingx]

So i am interesting in to, with only 69 (2.1%) hit rating who will u save with your Miss taunts all the time
2.1% + 3% from sp + 8% from glyph if you are even using it
another thing, how did u manage to get 49.9k armor, without armor pots (and u cant have 100% up time of them). (with all armor parts and armor pot u will have ~46.6k).
Better post your own armory and show people you char then just writing this and begging for attentions

Did I beg for attention? I posted this to state my opinion on tanking and see other kind and polite people to discuss their opinions. But I can see you're just meat riding.

That's kinda his only goal here - attention. Despite being proven wrong in each thread where he states his "hidden gem, slept over" builds and tactics.

Yes you are correct. I am dumb, you are king, all hail persivaln.

I think he meant he gets whatever armor he can to get to as close as possible to 49.905.

That's what I meant. Stacking armor is my preference. No clue why these haters whining about me stating my preference and opinion lmao.
Anyways, most good tanks prioritize Armor > Stamina > Avoidance, with avoidance being the absolute worse stat to go for.

My opinion is most of these tanks trying to do heroic content with 28-32k armor buffed up are just making content unnecessarily hard on their healers.

[Obnoxious]

No clue why these haters whining about me stating my preference and opinion lmao.

Perhaps because this is a discussion forum, not your personal blog.

[Blkunxpd]

. .