Protadin?

[Eabah]

Allern, help me! I've got Z almost to 80 (like, she's literally 4k away with three quests to turn in and I just waited to ding to have some people around.)

What rep would you recommend grinding first? Is the Titansteel Guardian or Bonecrusher better, or should I go straight for a tanking weapon if I can find one? How do you hold threat? Any particular addons (besides pallypower, got that, I promise!) I can't live without?

[LineNoise]

You want a physical weapon for threat, not a spellweapon. Weaponspeed is almost entirely irrelevant, with the exception of Reckoning, which a fair number of high-end protadins don't even *take*. (IIRC, weaponspeeds approximating 2.0 are best for Reckoning. You want exactly 4 swings during the Reckoning buff. Exceedingly minor concern, though, since the vast majority of your threat is CD-limited, not based on white swings or seals.)

There's some sexy starter-tank weapons from the Ragemane quest in Zul'drak. If you can def-cap without those, however, the Titansteel will be *vastly* superior for threat.

You threat rotation is something called the 696 rotation. You have a bunch of 6 second cooldowns and a bunch of 9 second cooldowns. Interleave them. Hammer and Shield of the Righteous are your sixes, HS, Cons, Judgement are your nines, IIRC. So HS, HotR, Judge, ShoR, Cons, HotR, HS.... It looks complicated, but if you visually separate your sixes and your nines on your action bar, then just think about alternating groups, it flows pretty easy.

Essential tanking addons, for me, are some replacement for Blizzard unitframes first off. Target of target, Focus, focustarget. Enemy castbar. Debuff filtering/tracking. I don't know that there's any specific palatank mods that are that important, though.

All plate tanks should wear the Wyrmrest tabard first, until you hit revered with them. Cape, Chest, Boots, all of them pretty close to BiS blues. After that, it's Argent to Revered for your head enchant.

[Eabah]

I'm getting epic cape and boots crafted, though, so chest'd be the only thing, but chest is An Important Part Of This Complete Tank Set.

Which reminds me I want to hit you up for the JC neck and ring epics later after I get a chance to hit the AH for mats.

[kageneko]

I use a variation of the 696 to take advantage of the Libram of Obstruction. I make sure I Judge and then Shield of Righteousness (which are 9-6). That's insane huge bonus threat. The addons I care about:

* PallyPower
* Some Raid Frame + Clique/SmartDebuff/Decursive for auto-cleansing
* Some kind of raid frames that highlights people who have aggro so I can Righteous Defense + target
* Omen mostly to make sure I don't exceed Nat on Patchwerk (although IceHUD takes care of that)

Lots of other stuff is personal flavor.
* IceHUD cause I love it
* Satina Buff Frames
* SCT/SCTD
* Dominos
* ItemRack

[LineNoise]

Note that the Cape is Dodge, not Defense, and you're often struggling to stay north of 540 early in your career. The Titansteel boots are honestly not *that* much better than the Wyrmrest boots. Definately get the Titansteel helm and shield, though. You're never really going to want to take a helm that doesn't have a meta, as a tank. Either Austere (Stam/%AC) or Eternal (Def/%BV). Daunting gloves and legs from BS are also phenomenal (enormous +def for getting 540 in a hurry). Tempered Saronite is decent enough, but you want to replace it all as quickly as possible.

[Eabah]

The gearing guides I'm looking at from maintankadin show the nerubhide cape as being the best 'guaranteed' (as opposed to drops) for a starting protadin. It's also pretty cheap, as these things go, not more 250 for mats, so. We'll see how my defense looks when I stack it up. I'm currently only a few defense away, but I sitll have one more iteration of rating rot, and, well, it's a /rating/.

I'm already wearing the Daunting stuff.

(And likewise, I have something ike 45 titansteel and a mess of orbs already, so the boots are damn cheap for me.)

[kageneko]

If you use Rawr (I don't know how good it is with 3.1), then make sure you tell it to have Defense >= 540. The default optimizations won't give you that Rawr for tanking is more like a framework than a real guide to follow. It'll give you suggestions and there's a lot of room to play around.

[mihrimah]

BTW, if you tanktypes (or anyone, really!) wants the LW leg enchants with the frozen orbs and furs, let me know. Bodil still needs some skillpoints!

Ed: Your orb, maybe furs. I have lots of chitins and scales.

-m

[kageneko]

I'm going to experiment with Tankadin2 (And Tankadin2 Aura) again. It displays all of your important numbers pretty much in your face and I think it even does stuff like announce when your taunts miss. The Aura addon is pretty simple. It lets you know if you have no aura or Crusader aura on in an instance.

[LineNoise]

Tankadin2 will also count the number of times that Ardent Defender saves your ass from dying. Which is where I got the numbers I was telling you about earlier.

Someone did a Sarth25+3 run early in the expansion when they were really kinda undergeared for it. No less than five times in a single attempt, AD prevented MT death and the subsequent wipe. They killed him on that pull, too.