World of Warcraft: The Protection Warrior, Tanking and Raiding

The protection warrior has been the most viable and sought after tank for raiding since the dawn of vanilla World of Warcraft and still remains the top-tank with the newest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. The protection warrior has had many rivals, all vying for the spot of main tank in the raiding aspect of the game. Both feral druids and protection paladins offer a wonderful and unique utility to raiding however neither surpasses the protection warrior in its ability to tank a boss one on one. The death knight is the newest addition to the protection warriors' competition; but even this new hero class is unable to fulfill the precision role of main tanking in a raid over a protection warrior.

The protection warrior is simply better suited for this duty of raiding, despite all the rival controversy created by these off tank classes. The protection warriors' abilities, balanced damage mitigation, and threat generation make it best suited for tanking a boss in a raid. This simple fact has been proven time and time again over the years by thousands of different raiding guilds testing these other classes out in comparison to a protection warrior. Obviously there have been exceptional players of druids, paladins, and death knights that can hold their own against a boss...but replace them with a similarly geared protection warrior of equal skill and the protection warrior will always come out on top in regards to making the tedious task of healing the tank easier, as well as the fight in general.

There are countless spreadsheets filled with intensive mathematical equations proving this fact, that protection warriors are superior in the role of main tank within a raid over other classes. There are so many proofs of this fact that they would simply be too extensive to list on this one article. A bit of research will lead any disbelievers to agree with this fact, and if the years of research don't change your mind, simply try it out for yourself.

I have been playing World of Warcraft since it came out almost four years ago in November of 2004. Since then I have played almost every class in the game, including two different protection warriors, a protection paladin, and a feral druid. The simple fact is that protection warriors are the best route to choose if your goal is to be a main tank during your raiding. Warriors were created (and this is even stated by Blizzard) to fulfill the role of tanking. Druids, paladins, and death knights are hybrid classes, and their tanking talent trees were only improved because of the lack of protection warriors across all servers in general (you can't run groups or raid without a tank). Hybrid classes don't excel at one single role, instead they are well rounded and play all three major raiding roles decently (DPS, healing, tanking).

Protection warriors will always remain the be-all-end-all of raiding and main tanking.