Seeing how no one has written yet a paladin tanking guide on the EU forums since all the stickies were unstickied, I decided to write one myself.
This guide (as the name of the thread implies), is meant to help those paladins who want to specialize in their tanking role, but they don't have too much experience on it.

SUMMARY
Part 1 - General Toughts about tanking
Part 2 - Paladin Tanking Skills, Tricks and Talent Builds
Part 3 - The Tanking Situations and Limits
Part 4 - Frequently Asked Questions


PART 1 - General Toughts about tanking
As probably everyone out there knows, being a tank (and this essentialy involves PvE play, there are ways to "tank" in PvP as well, however, those are not guaranteed to work all the time, because other players are not always "forced" to react to you, and might ignore you anyway), essentially implies for you to be the one who receives all the direct hits from the monsters, (except the Area attacks, random attacks, ecc but those will be explained later), in order to protect your party member, with your healers healing you and your dpsers getting down the monsters...
This breaks down in essentially 3 things:

1 - Threat generation:
You could even be immortal, but if the mobs were hitting your party members instead of you, you would be a useless tank anyway. Threat (also called Aggro commonly), is a value that basically indicates how much the monsters you are fighting "hate" you. This value is not listed anywhere on the WoW UI during game, but it is definitely there. The monsters attack whoever has the highest threat value AT FIRST. once the first target is estabilished, for another player to take aggro of you it will take an mount of threat superior to yours, this depends if the other player is within 20 yards of melee range. (This is the reason why the tanks always get angry if anyone else pulls!)

If the player is within melee range then it takes him 110% of your threat for the monster to stop attacking you and moving to the other player.
If the player is farther than of melee range then it takes him 130% of your threat for the monster to stop attacking you and moving to the other player.

Every action performed generates threat, unless it's modified by particular modifiers coming from itemization or talent abilities. Excluding those, the general base values are:
The "Body pull" (the act of running near to a monster and doing nothing else) generates an infinitesimal (0,0000..1) amount of threat. Every action performed by someone else after the body pull will take aggro.
1 point of healing done generates 0,5 points of threat. Overhealing does NOT generate threat.
1 point of damage done generates 1 point of threat. Resisted or 100% mitigated damage does NOT generate threat.

Keep this in mind, this usually indicates that the dpsers are those who will take the aggro more often than not, except in peculiar fights where DPS is restrained a lot, but the healing cant be as restrained. (The Onyxia fight is the most famous example, where Healing aggro is more of a problem than dps for threat issues).

Another important thing is that threat does not have diminishing returns and does not decay over time by itself, in case you were wondering.

The last and perhaps most important thing, is that this holds true for all those cases in which the enemies are not using peculiar abilities with which they reduce your threat (This will be covered in Part 3) or remove em from their target list permanently or temporarly. (For example, the mobs artificial intelligence can see if a player is shielded and results immune to their attacks, in this case, you will be removed temporarly from their attacks, but this will be covered later in the Part 2).

2 - Damage Mitigation:
Of course, you could also be the best threat machine of the world, but if you had such a poor damage mitigation that monsters could devour you in matter of seconds then the healing wouldnt manage to keep you alive and the mosnters would kill your comrades anyway.
Damage mitigation consists in aiming at maximizing the reduction of all incoming damage. This mostly comes from your Talent Build, your Gear and on how good you react to the monster's moves.
An important aspect on damage mitigation is how to balance the pure mitigation with Avoidance.
The pure mitigation is generally what prevents you from dying, while the avoidance is what saves you in some extreme cases (you are low on health, not getting healed and you get a lucky string of dodges and parries) and it also makes the healers save mana.
Pure Mitigation consists in Armor, Stamina and Block Value directly, and Defense rating +Block rating indirectly (because Defense reduces the chance to be crit, and shield block rating is the stat the costs the least that can put the crushing blows off the hit table, some argue that since TBC this is no longer the case, however, Im still pretty sure that to push crushing blows off you need a sum of total avoidance to be over 100%, and shield block rating is the stat the costs the less of all the avoidance ones, in a way, you could consider dodge and parry too here, but they cost more for the purpose of pushing crushing blows off). Avoidance consists in Defense, Dodge, Parry and Shield Block rating. Keep in mind that usually the pure mitigation is better than avoidance, because it makes you more reliable, and stacking ONLY avoidance, makes you more a slot-machine than a tank. This is not to say that avoidance is bad, avoidance is GREAT, but only when complemented with a solid and estabilished pure mitigation.

For reference on how the hitting table of mobs affect you, please refer to:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Attack_table
For every information concerning the attack table of mobs, and how your damage mitigation affects em.

3 - Control and Knowledge
Haha, you are immortal and you hold aggro like a magnet, but Venoxis just smashed your whole raid with a Holy Wrath, ooops! ^^
This is probably the most important requirement for tanking. Every time you tank, you should preferably know ahead every single move of the mob you are fighting. Of course this is not always possible, so it's very important to be a good observer as well, and notice how certain moves/beahviors from the opponents you fight are triggered. Not only for yourself, but also to put the opponents you fight in a position to hit or not hit your fellow comrades.

Now you might wonder... How should I achieve balance between Threat Generation and Damage Mitigation?
This is a good question, and it really doesn't have a 100% correct answer. However, basing myself on my tanking experience (and its basically over a year that I tank with the paladin), I can say that there are 2 "types" of tanking...

a) The Fast Paced Tanking
b) The Steady Long Term Tanking

The Fast Paced tanking, as the name implies, is basically the act of performing tanking in a very fast way, this is usually the type of tanking you do while facing trash mobs in 5man instances and also some of the 5man bosses too. In this environment, you won't take much of damage anyway, so you should prefer Threat generation to Damage Mitigation here.
The Steady Long Term tanking, is usually the tanking of the raid instances bosses (and some trash too), in this case you will be receiving a lot of damage, and controlling the threat generally is not an issue, because everyone is more disciplined and aware of what an aggro loss from the tank means and what the consequences of it on the raid are, so you should prefer Damage Mitigation here. Even if the bosses has an aggro drop and a taunt immunity then it only means that it's not meant to be tanked by one tank alone, but the task should be performed by multiple tank and this not a concern of yours, personally. (but a concern of the raid leader).
This distimption will be very important for the selection of you gear, for the fast paced tanking, having good amounts of intellect, mana every 5 seconds and spell damage becomes very important, while for the steady long term tanking, it's a lot better to stack mitigation stats like Stamina, Defense, Block rating, Block Value, Dodge, Parry ecc...

PART 2 - Paladin Tanking Skills, Tricks and Talent Builds
Paladins have a wide range of skills, both baseline and talented, to perform a tanking role, do not be fooled by anyone who states otherwise.

--- Righteous Fury ---
Tanking starts from this. Righteous Fury increases your threat generated by your Holy Spells by 60% (90% if improved with talents, and also reduces all incoming damage by 6% with talents). Meaning that for example, you do a Judgement of Righteousness on a mob that hits for 200, you would do 320 threat non talented, 380 talented.
With the tooltip change some argue that now this affects also your healing, but to be honest I never tested this and I'm not sure.
Needless to say, to tank a paladin needs this ability up all the time. Make sure you have it always when you tank!

--- Righteous Defense ---
This is an invaluable tool for tanking that the 2.01 patch brought us. Righteous Defense works EXACTLY like the warrior taunt, except that it affects up to 3 targets and on how you target the ability, instead of targetting the mob, you have to target whoever is being attacked by it. However, with a macro, it's also possible to basically overcome this "targetting obstacle" and make it almost identhical to the warrior's taunt. The macro is: "/cast [help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget] Righteous Defense"

Righteous Defense, will do the following (if it hits)
1 - Put you on top of threat list (including the 10% or 30% gap depending where your ally was).
2 - Recalculate the threat list value of everyone (this is for moves like the Mind Control of priests which generate an infinite amount of threat and only a taunt can take the mobs off em if they use it)
3 - Force the mobs to attack you anyway for the duration of the debuff. (about 2-3 seconds).

Of course, this does not mean that once you cast this, you will have aggro for certain once it runs out, because the effect 1 (putting you on top on the threat list), happens when you cast the move, not when the debuff runs out. So, there might be cases, in which you taunt, the mob attacks you for the duration of the debuff, and then it goes back to the other player.

This happens because the other player probably did a high source of threat right after you taunted, which basically caused him to re-surpass you again on the threat list again.
This is why, whenever you use Righteous Defense, you should ALWAYS add a form of Burst threat right immediately after it!!! This is extremely important to remember while using this ability.

Remember Righteous Defense is like TAUNT, ---NOT--- Challenging Shout or Mocking Blow!!!, those 2 manouvers only cause the mobs to attack whoever does that for an amount of time, but they have no influence on the threat values (Mocking Blow does generate a little bit of threat, but it doesnt put you on top of list authomatically).

Please also, remember that some mobs (mostly raid bosses), are flagged to be IMMUNE to taunts, so for those fights you will have to rely on your own threat generation only, So please, by all means, do not think even for once that this spell is the 90% of paladin tanking, because it's not. Its a great tool, a must have in certain situations for tanking, but it must be used at the right time! And of course, remember that it can be resisted by the mobs, and when it happens, its going to be 15 seconds of imbarass ^^

On a side note, Righteous Defense DOES penetrate spell shields (Shields that make certain mobs immune to magics).
Righteous Defense cannot be used while you are silenced, just like the warrior's taunt.

--- Spiritual Attunement ---
Another wonderful ability (a passive one, so you really have to do nothing for this ;D) brought by the 2.01 patch that allows paladin tanking to be sustained over a long period of time. Every heal you receive will cause you to gain an amount of mana equal to 8% (at rank 1) or 10% (at rank 2) of the healing received. At the moment overhealing DOES cause you to gain mana from it. The only case in which this ability does not work is when you are drinking/eating or just sitting down. This is most likely a bug and might eventually get fixed.

--- Consecration ---
This is an AoE Damage abililty, which is awesome for Threat generation against groups of mobs. You could say that this ability is what gives paladin tanks some sort of edge over warrior tanking when it comes to tanking group of mobs. However, this ability also costs a lot of mana, so you have to be careful on how you use it.
Against groups of 3-4 mobs or more, you should keep on spamming this. Against single target, don't do it. Just use it once at the beginning of the fight. After that, use it only once every 1 minute or so... or you can keep on spamming it whenever you are above 60% of mana. But, remember that for single target tanking, if you are having issues on mana, there are better abilities than this which have a much better mana/threat ratio.

--- Hammer of Justice ---
Our Stun skill. This can help tanking in various situation, if a very hard mob is hitting you and you are on low health and he is stunnable, you can save yourself, or you can use it to interrupt spell casting from caster mobs. Anyway, remember to save this spell for when its necesarry to stop a mob, and dont do it just for the sake of doing it, remember that using HoJ lowers our reactionary threat (Holy Shield, Bosanct, Ret Aura ecc...)

--- Divine Shield ---
This spell, probably our most known "trademark", when used, temporarly removes you from the attack list of the mobs, however, once it runs out AND you perform one action, IF you are still on top of the threat list, then it will go back to you, so remember that this spell DOES NOT wipe your aggro!
In addition, another nice trick of this spell is that you can use it along with Righteous Defense, you can Divine Shield yourself, "taunt" the mob back to you for 2-3 seconds. Keep in mind that you will have to manually remove the shield before the debuff effect runs out, or the mob will go back to hitting other party members.
A very well timed way to use this trick is the following:
When you are very low on health, and about to die, you use Divine Shield, you cast Righteous Defense, then you cast a Holy light on yourself, and you remove the shield 0,5-1 second before you finished of casting the Holy Light spell.
In this way, you manage to do some 100% mitigated tanking for 3-4 seconds and heal yourself for a good amount, all while keeping the aggro. This works especially well if you are the only meleer in the group.

--- Avenging Wrath ---
Heh, this one is pretty straight foward, +30% on all damage basically means also more treath. The best way to use this would be at the pull to estabilish initial treath. Alternatively, this can be good in fights where your aggro is dropped by an aggro drop maneuver and the enemy is immune to taunt.

--- Holy Shock (Talented - Holy) ---
This is actually a very good tanking talent, in fact it gives you, both a great tool for aggro generation and also for instantly healing yourself once you have estabilished aggro. The great downside of this talent is that, to get it, you must skip the best talented tanking spell of the paladin tanknig arsenal, which is Holy Shield, so, anyway Holy Shock does not end up being a must-have for tanking.

--- Holy Shield (Talented - Protection) ---
If you plan to do some "serious" tanking in raid environment, this is spell is a must. Against single target, this talent actually means a flat +30% block that you can keep up all the time, because it's extremely mana efficient. It's also the best mana/threat ratio spell in the whole paladin arsenal. Blocking is -EXTREMELY- important in raid tanking to put Crushing Blows off the table, and reducing considerably the amount of damage you take.
Whenever you tank, if you have this spell, keep it up all the time you are being attacked. In the Holy Shield, you can actually see an harmonic skill that balances both threat generation and damage mitigation perfectly.
The only downside of this spell is that it's completely reactive, and it does nothing to help you gain threat, but there are other plenty skills for that. ;)

--- Avenger's Shield (Talented - Protection) ---
This is, overall a decent spell, but not exactly a must have, actually, you could live without this, however, it's still a great tool for pulling and a initial burst of threat, which is a problem generally for paladins. This spell uses melee crit % and has a 9% spell damage coefficient.

--- Crusader Strike (Talented - Retribution) ---
A skill that gives you some threat burst, the threat caused by it is inferior to Holy Shock tho, and it cant be used as a heal, overall its worse than Holy Shock in every way for tanking, even because it costs 41 talent points to reach, but it has one interesting advantage which could be handy in some annoying situations. In fact, it can be used while you are silenced or counterspelled as well.

--- Auras ---
You can only have one aura up if you are the only paladin, remember.
The Auras you should pick are:
1 - Devotion Aura for hard hitting melee bosses in general. In raids this should end up being your first choice of aura, unless you have another paladin with it. In which case you should go retribution.
2 - Retribution Aura for fighing trash mobs and AoE groups in general. (and no, it does NOT proc, if you block/miss/dodge or parry, it only block if you get hit/crit/crusheing blowed by melee or ranged attacks, not spells.). In raids, this is the second choice, go for it only if you have Devotion Already.
3 - Resistances aura for the fights which involve resistances. These aura are alternative to Devotion Aura, so usually there is no need to have both, and you can have these on the same priority of Devotion Auras. In some encounters you might even do the switching yourself during fight if you have a good timing.

4 - Concentration aura if you are doing the "self-heal offtank", if you are holy specced, you have Spiritual Focus, and you are offtanking an add whch has a moderate to low amount of dps and which is not being dpsed by your comrades, with this aura on you can tank and heal yourself at the same time. But PLEASE, do not think that this way of tanking is feasable against hard hittnig mobs that are also being dpsed by your comrades, because it's simply not. Casting implies you are not blocking/parrying anything, which makes you vulnerable to crushing blows.
5 - Sanctity Aura (Talented - Retribution, and also improved). If you have this, then you should have this up all the time... in Raids this should be your best aura choice if you can get it from another paladin. (usually the best raid tanking specs dont go so deep on Retribution...)
Overall, the choice of aura, depends more on what your spec is, even because in raids you can always get other paladins with different specs to give you another aura to compliment yours.

--- Blessings ---
You can only have one blessing up if you are the only paladin, remember...
Blessings you should pick are:
1 - Blessing of Wisdom generally if you are doing fast paced trash tanking. This ends up being the fourth choice blessing you'll need for tanking in raid.
2 - Blessing of Kings (talented - Protection) against hard hitting bosses in general. In raid environment, this also ends up being the best tanking blessing because it boosts your stamina value by A LOT.
3 - Blessing of Sanctuary (talented - Protection), against bosses who have high dps and high attack speed, but low burst damage. Blessing of Sanctuary is also the second choice you should get for tanking in raids, in case there is another paladin with BoK with you.
4 - Blessing of Light only if there are other paladins with you... IN raids this should end up as the third choice on you.
5 - Blessing of Might is next to useless for tanking as a paladin, and in any case, should end up as the last choice, only if you have everything else covered...
6 - Blessin of Protection. This blessing can be used as a last-resort taunt, in some situations, if you want to remove temporarly one of your fellow raid/party members from the attack list of some mobs, this can help a lot, and it might get the mob back to hitting you, if you are the second on this threat list.
7 - Blessing of Freedom. This is useful in some cases. Most of all on those root+silence effects like the web of the spider boss in Zul Gurrub, it can be used to remove it and resume tanking.
In raids, like for the auras, the choice most of all depends on your spec, like for auras, because you can always get other paladins with different specs to give you another blessing to compliment yours.

--- Seals and Judgements ---
These are the CORE of the active part of paladin tanking. While tanking, you will be mostly pressing a Seal and a Judgement every time the Judgement cooldown is up. Seals and Judgements also are also the greatest source of your threat generation.
The best way to use Judgements is to use a damage judgement at first to confirm your initial threat, then put a "debuff" judgement on the second one, and after that you can resume with the damaging judgements.
1 - Seal of Righteousness. This is the standard tanking seal. It gives steady aggro, the judgement also gives a nice little threat burst. This is usually the seal that ends up being used the most.
2 - Seal of the Crusader. Don't bother with the seal, but the judgement is great, in fact with the last patch and the new spell coefficients, Judgement of the Crusader is great for boosting the threat of other seals. In raids, this should be the second choice judgement.
3 - Seal of Command (Talented - Retribution). This Seal is not really reliable for tanking, hower, if you are protection specced and have a slow one hander it might be good to use, also combining Hammer of Justice + Judgement of Command can give you a nice threat burst, which is actually higher than the one of Judgement of Righteousness. Remember, however, that the spell damage coefficients of Seal of Command are lower than those of Seal of Righteousness.
4 - Seal of Light. This is the best off-tanking seal. Yes, you heard it right. When you offtank a single target that is not being touched by anyone, this is the seal to use. Just use an initial JoR burst for threat, and then keep SoL+JoL all the time, this allows the maximum damage mitigation, making the healer's job easier, and Consecration+Holy Shield should be enough to hold aggro on a target that is not being dpsed anyway. One fight where this comes extremely handy is the Bloodlord fight in ZG if you offtank the Raptor and kill the Bloodlord first. This should be the third choice of judgement in raids.
5 - Seal of Wisdom. Another great seal for tanking. Overall, the judgement is probably the best of all debuff judgements for tanking, as it keeps your tanking sustained over time along with Spiritual Attunement. The seal is not as useful, however, it's still great in the emergency cases in which you are very low on mana, and you are quite sure that you have estabilished a good amount of threat already, so you can use SoW+JoW to replenish your mana even faster. In raids, this should end up being the first choice of judgement, because it benefits the whole raid a lot.
6 - Seal of Vengeance (Alliance only). This is the seal for long term tanking, best suited for bosses, because it generates a great amount of threat over time, and the good the thing about this spell is that is way less way less reliant on the spell damage stat compare to Seal of Righteousness, which is a good thing if you wanna stack damage mitigation stats, which is what you should aim for long term tanking.
7 - Seal of Blood (Horde only). This Seal has some advantages and disadvantages when it comes to tanking, in terms of threat generated its pretty good because it increases also quite well with the usuall offset pieces of tanking gear that have a good amount of strength on it. The Downside is that every time you hit and judge on a target you lose health, which is a bit against the whole purpose of tanking, however, someone suggests that with Blessing of Sanctuary it could be possible to basically reduce to nothing (1) the damage taken with the Seal hits, which could be true, and in which case Seal of Blood would be a really good tanking seal, I have yet to confirm this tho.

--- Anti Undead/Demon Arsenal ---
Paladins have a great advantage when it comes to fight Undead and Demon mobs, thanks to Exorcism and Holy Wrath spells. Not only because those 2 spells help you generate more aggro, but also because they can permit you to re-caliber your Seal-judgement choice to be either more mana conservative or to focus more on damage mitigation (with Seal of Light).

Concerning the Talent Builds, I do not want to impose anything, the only things I can do is:
1) Suggest you the talents that I have and I will go for in TBC:
At level 60 http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/paladin/talents.html?000000000000000000000530513350002142015010500500000000000000000
At level 70 http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/paladin/talents.html?000000000000000000000530513352002152515010520500000000000000000
2) Tell you which are the must-have talents for -base-level tanking. (to tank at least as decently as any non-prot specced warrriors)
1 - Redoubt
2 - Improved Righteous Fury
3 - Holy Shield
4 - Improved Holy Shield

3) Tell you which talents are very good for tanking, but not exactly must haves (this also depends on the type of content you wanna tank, you might need to take em if you want to rival protection specced warriors)...
1 - Benediction
2 - Deflection
3 - Precision
4 - Toughness
5 - Anticipation
6 - Shield Specialization
7 - Spell Warding
8 - Ardent Defender
9 - Stoicism
10 - Sacred Duty
11 - Improved Judgement
12 - Reckoning
13 - Weapon Expertise (this will be explained on the post below)

2) Redirect you to the Paladin talent guide that we have stickied on the EU forums here if you wanna experiment some kind of non conventional tanking build:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=95769948&sid=1

PART 3 - The Tanking Situations and Limits
A tip I can give for tanking here is to go to the Interface Advanced options, and set the Target's target window on ALWAYS. This will help you a LOT while tanking, for understanding when you have lost aggro, or when a mob is performing a heal or a Random Attack (this will be covered soon).
While tanking, you must realize, that it cant only be threat and mitigation, well, yes there are fights like those, but they are either dead-easy or just a plain gear-chec, you must also realize that in some cases there are limits to our tanking, for example, when it comes to damage caused by a mana burn, paladin tanking becomes hardly bearable. But of course, this is all depending on the type of fight you are going to fight.
Anyway, the attacks you need to watch out for are:
1 - The infamous RSTS (Random Secondary Target System) attacks! Those attacks will hit the tank ONLY if there is no one else within the range, this means that in most cases those attack will NEVER hit the Main Tank, but they will hit someone else instead. MC is full of those, for example the shadowbolt of Gehennas is a RSTS, the charge of the Lava Surgers is a RSTS, the Burning Soul of the Firelords is a RSTS and so on...
In some cases, when you are outnumbered, its very important, that you try to keep your party members WITHIN the range of the spell, so that you do not get hit by those abilities. One example of this is the Polymoprh of the Zulian Witch Doctors in Zul Gurrub. If you tank those, tank em within 5-10 yards of someone else, so he'll get polymorphed, not you, and you wont be scolded for losing aggro.
2 - The Area attacks! You need to be careful! At the beginning of the guide I showed the example of the Venoxis' Holy Wrath which will destroy your raid group if you tank him too near your party members. Same goes for other type of AoEs, for example in ZG, the axe throwers (usually they get zerged in 20, but if you try to do ZG in 5 or 10, this issue will come out), have a spinning axe throw attack that hits everyone within 30 yards of em, if you are the only one in 30 yards, you will take all the axes. And if you are decently geared you can survive yes, the healers can stay at 35 yards and heal you from there, same for ranged dps. A similar thing is done with the Zulian Blooddrinkers because of their AoE health drain.
3 - Wing Buffets, Knockbacks and Threat reducers. This is where tanking becomes interesting, those abilities (like the wing buffet of Onyxia, the knockback of the Ravenian, or the knockback Zulian Troll Berserker), will reduce all the threat you generated up to now, by either a percentage or a set number, that depends on the mob's ability. To counter those, the correct usage of Righteous Defense is essential, however, you can also counter this by "overkilling" threat. This means, going all out and staying above the second one in the threat list by a great amount. Of course, to achieve the good balance within this threat generation and the needed damage mitigation is very hard.
Now, however, remember that NOT all knockbacks (some of those look like knockbacks but they are just uppercuts), do not reduce you threat by a significant amount, example of this are the Quiraji Gladiators and Kirtonos the Herald.
4 - Threat Wipes. Like the threat reducers, but the difference is that those ones completely WIPE your threat. An example of this is the Back Hand of Doctor Theolen Krastinov in Scholomance or Ramstein's Backhand in Stratholme. The only way to countre those is Righteous Defense, in fact its very unlikely, to regain the full threat if the battle has gone on for quite some time without a taunt-like ability.
5 - Threat holders. Unlike the reducers or wipers, those ability do NOT affect your threat value, they just remove you from the mob's attack list for the duration of the effect. Those effects include, usually Gouges and Fears, and all effects that could break on damage received. When these effects run out, producing 1 threat will be enough to regain the mobs to attack you (if you are still first on the threat list). Against fear effects you can use the Divine Shield+RD trick to counter, remember the 5 minutes CD tho... If you are an alliance paladin then you can always get a Dwarf of Draenei priest with you to Fear Ward you to reduce the risk of this threat holder.
6 - Silences, dispells and mana burns. Those the "palatank killers", to some extent. In fact it mostly depends on their nature, entity and frequency to determine if they would totally nullify paladin tanking or not.
Garr (most known case of PvE dispeller), is not an issue, he can be overcome easily, most of all because he is not being directly dpsed by anyone else. (they focus on the adds first). Dispells are not a great issue overall, and the talent Stoicism helps you against this. But even without it, you can just recast after the Dispell, unless you are being mana drained, mana is not an issue.
Jek Lik, has a melee AoE silence, but this can also be overcome quite easily, if you have a dedicated dispeller on you to remove your Silence. As long as its a poison/magic/disease or a movement Impairing effect (which can be removed with Blessing of Freedom by yourself), silence is not an issue, because someone else can remove it. If silence is a not removable debuff and it's done very frequently, then the paladin tanking is slayed for that fight. Something that keeps you silenced for more than 50% of the time without any possibility to counter it is not really tankable by a paladin in an efficient way.
Mana burn damage or mana drains are a great problem as well. In this case, it mostly depends on their cooldown and the entity of mana/damage drain done. A move that instantly burns several thousands of mana and converts it into direct damage slays paladin tanking as well, making it very inefficient. A way to help overcome this, is stack resistance gear, but its not a really reliable method.

PART 4 - Frequently Asked Question
Q - Can paladins tank?
A - Yes.

Q - Paladin tanking was buffed in 2.01? And in 2.03?
A - Yes, a lot. Even more ^^

Q - Does Divine Shield wipe aggro?
A - No, it only "drops" it momentarly, like a threat holder. Same for Blessing of Protection.

Q - Does Righteous Defense work while Im under the effect of Divine Shield?
A - Yes, but only for the duration of the debuff. It doesnt give you 12 seconds of immortal tanking.

Q - What spec is better for tanking?
A - Overall, I'd say Protection...

Q - What is better a slow or fast weapon for tanking?
A - Generally a fast weapon, because it's more reliable, having a miss/dodge/parry from a fast weapon has less of an impact than getting it from a fast weapon. Also, having a fast weapon makes sure you make use of all the Reckoning charges.

Q - Should I stack a lot of intellect and spell damage for tanking?
A - Depends on the entity of that "a lot", intellect and spell damage are important stats for fast paced tanking yes, but you still require good amounts of stamina and defense to do tanking in a decent manner. If you are in doubt, consider this answer a "no".

Q - Why are our tier 4/5 sets so filled with it?
A - This is a good question. My interpretation is that, first of all, its only 5 pieces, but the set bonus being 4 indicates that for maximizing tanking potential we should only use 4 of those, and using the other pieces with damage mitigation stats.
Also, please consider that its a very "hybridized" set, it's not only for tanking, that sets also gives "some", healing capacity, perhaps to reinforce the vision of the "Holy tank that heals".

Q - What stats should I have at least for tanking at level 60? (unbuffed)
A - I can only give you some marginal values, and they are based on my experience with a full protection build, with different specs, there might be a need of higher spell damage stats...
For tanking 5man instances, I recommend at least 4k hp and 3,8k mana, with 50 spell damage and 325 defense.
For tanking raids at least 4,8k hp unbuffed and 440 defense. (to start with ZG/MC)
Of course those are meant to be starting values and they are meant to be improved.

Q - And for level 70s? (unbuffed)
A - For normal 5man instances, 10000 armor, 8500 hp, 420 defense and 100 spell damage.
For 5man Heroics and raid instances, 12000 armor, 10500 hp, 490 defense, and at least over 15% in dodge/parry/block chances (unbuffed).
Same considerations made for level 60 stats, should be applied here as well.

Q - What's the matter with Weapon Expertise? Doesn't it look like a useless talent? Why hasn't it been removed/improved/replaced yet?
I don't know the answer to such question, however, I can try to give an explanation to this talent with some of recent "debates" concerning Weapon Skill.
According to former CM Crezax, each point of weapon skill reduced the chance of a mob 3 levels higher than you to be missed by 0,2% to dodge by 0,1% and to parry by 0,6% and increased your chance to crit him by 0,2%.
You can find the post here: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=166546791&pageNo=1&sid=1#2

If this was the case, and this was a fix applied to 2.1 patch, then this talent would end up being very useful to increase your survivability while tanking bosses. Because whenever a creature parries one of your attacks, his next swing timer will be reduced by a certain percentage (I have read somewhere around 40%), this is also the case in which you die because it looked like the boss gave you 2 shots at once (and you blame lag for it ;D). In addition, from personal experience, bosses tend to have different "defensive" tables from normal mobs, in fact in a recent fight with Curator I experienced a 17% parry chance from him (With the Weapon Expertise talent), however, this was pre 2.1 patch. Next time I will have the chance to face him I will record the combat log again and I'll post the difference results to see if something was really changed/fixed in 2.1 patch to help this talent become better.

And that's about it. If you have any questions to ask, suggestions to make, anything else, I'd gladly consider em and edit the guide in consequence.

Update 1 (01/03/2007) - Added Hammer of Justice and Avenging Wrath in the skill list. Changed some descriptions and corrected some typos, also added reccomended tanking stats for level 70.
Update 2 (30/05/2007) - 2.1 patch changes. Added Improved Holy Shield on the recommended talents list and Weapon Expertise on the suggested talent list. Also added an explanation to the idea behind Weapon Skill as a tanking stat on the FAQ section.

Thank you very much for this guide.

I've been a protection Paladin for a very long time, and I've tanked instances long before we recieved our special tanking buffs. I must say it's become much easier now that we have a taunt and better mitigation options.

Hopefully this guide of yours will encourage more Paladins to try out the tanking role. I've always considered it a very interesting style of play.

I've found if very difficult to find gear for tanking, but combined with talents and enchants I've managed to come up with a decent setting for my Paladin. My stats are currently (without buffs):

4600 HP
5000 MP
340 Defense
140 Spelldamage
8800 armor (60% physical damage reduction)

With this setup I can main-tank any 5-man instance, but I'm yet to try any raid settings outside UBRS. I have two pieces of Lawbringer and two pieces of Judgement that make up for the bulk of my gear, combined with two pieces of the Lieutenant Commander PvP-set.

My neck-piece, cloak, trinkets and rings are the base of my +defense stats so that I can switch my main gear around to adjust spell-damage and intellect. It's all pre-MC gear, including the Redoubt Cloak from Dire Maul.

The shield I use is the Grand Marshal shield (+7 stamina enchant) that I recently aquired, along with my Aurastone Hammer sporting a +22 intellect enchant. Having a large mana pool actually helps my tanking in that I can generate more threat without running out of mana (spiritual attunement doesn't help all that much when I'm not taking a lot of damage), but it is a very fine balance and I had to cut my defense down from 410 to 340 in order to make this possible.

Alternatively, I can gain up to 4800 Hp and 5400 mana unbuffed, but then my defense will be down to 320. This makes Blessing of Kings very valuable to me as it allows me to reach approximately 5000 HP and 5800 mana.

It's tricky, to have so many stats to consider - but the problem will be easier to solve with the promised itemization that comes with the arrival of the Burning Crusade.

But tanking as a Paladin is quite possible, and has been for a very long time.

I think people will realize that sooner or later, even those who claim we can do nothing but heal.




Peace out,

- Galiant, 60 Dwarf Paladin of Ahn'Qiraj

Helpful guide. I'm rolling a Blood Knight Tank and it's soon becoming apparent that i'll have all the responsibility of tanking quite soon! This taught me some new things and refreshed my memory on everything else

Thanks

Reserved and sticky please :)

This needs to be a sticky :) Thanks!

Many good points, though there's a few of them I have to disagree with:
- Blocks no longer push Crushing Blows off the table, in Burning Crusade. Instead, stacking Defense skill/rating does, but counts only half against mobs above your own level. So maximizing block rate is no longer the way to go to survive crushing blows.

- In almost all cases, Blessing of Sanctuary should be the primary blessing of choice (but in a raid situation, it's very unlikely that you don't have both Blessing of Kings and Blessing of Protection) because it helps on the aggro generation, while reducing every incoming attack by 80 (at highest rank). Those 80 will be useful in almost all situations, with the exception of extremely slow, hard-hitting bosses.

- Seal of Blood combined with Blessing of Sanctuary should work for tanking, as Blessing of Sanctuary also removes damage taken from Seal of Blood. As long as you do less than 592 white dam each melee attack (lvl 70) Blessing of Sanctuary will "absorb" all of it (592x1.35=800, 10% of that taken as damage is 80). Getting above 592 dam each attack (non-crit) on a pretty fast weapon should be hard, if not impossible, if you're wearing tanking gear.

With that said, AP/Crit gear is not otherwise very useful for tanking, so you're probably much better of with Seal of righteousness (since you don't have Seal of Vengenace), but it is technically possible...


Otherwise very good post, reported for sticky-request.

Sticky sticky!

Nice guide, one small thing though. On your threat numbers, healing 1 point causes 1 threat for every healer, except paladins where it is 0.50 threat.

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Q u o t e:
Many good points, though there's a few of them I have to disagree with:
- Blocks no longer push Crushing Blows off the table, in Burning Crusade. Instead, stacking Defense skill/rating does, but counts only half against mobs above your own level. So maximizing block rate is no longer the way to go to survive crushing blows.

- In almost all cases, Blessing of Sanctuary should be the primary blessing of choice (but in a raid situation, it's very unlikely that you don't have both Blessing of Kings and Blessing of Protection) because it helps on the aggro generation, while reducing every incoming attack by 80 (at highest rank). Those 80 will be useful in almost all situations, with the exception of extremely slow, hard-hitting bosses.

- Seal of Blood combined with Blessing of Sanctuary should work for tanking, as Blessing of Sanctuary also removes damage taken from Seal of Blood. As long as you do less than 592 white dam each melee attack (lvl 70) Blessing of Sanctuary will "absorb" all of it (592x1.35=800, 10% of that taken as damage is 80). Getting above 592 dam each attack (non-crit) on a pretty fast weapon should be hard, if not impossible, if you're wearing tanking gear.

With that said, AP/Crit gear is not otherwise very useful for tanking, so you're probably much better of with Seal of righteousness (since you don't have Seal of Vengenace), but it is technically possible...


Otherwise very good post, reported for sticky-request.

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I didn't know about the changes to crushing blows. Is there any source to confirm that change? Anything, even from WoWwiki or World of Raids would do, a post from a blue would be even better ;D

The order of preference of blessings that I listed is that in raids in the case you only have one paladin, you should use BoK on yourself, instead of Bosanctuary, because:
BoK is a scalable buff, this means it improves with other buffs, also considering the high stamina jump in TBC, BoK will be able to give around 100 stamina alone in raid content.
Also, consider that this staccks with 2 talents, which are Sacred Duty (+6% on stamina) and of course Ardent Defender, increasing your maximum health also increases the threshold at which this ability starts to kick in. If you have 10k health, AD kicks in at 2k, if you have 12k health, AD kicks it at 2,4k and so on... If you have this talent, you could say that having more stamina does increase your damage mitiagation.

Concerning the Seal of Blood + Blessing of Sanctuary. Theoretically, it would be a great way to use the seal that I didn't think of. However, it is yet to be seen is if it's intedended for Blessing of Sanctuary to completely remove the damage caused by it by so much, I would expect a change/nerf over this, for PvP issues.

Anyway, thanks for your input on the guide, I will change that thing about crushing blows if you provide me with a link or a screenshot that prove what you say ^^

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Q u o t e:
Nice guide, one small thing though. On your threat numbers, healing 1 point causes 1 threat for every healer, except paladins where it is 0.50 threat.

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I don't know about paladin healing threat, which used to be lower than the others some patches ago, but some claim that now back to the values of other healing spells. Some claimed it was somewhere around 0,10 at first, then it was upped to 0,20 at least, but I have no real solid info about this.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the healing of other classes generates 50% of the threat of dps. So, every point of healing = 0,5 threat.
Unless you mean that Damage causes 2 points of threat, but in that case it would change nothing, since it would be all multiplicative.

Very nice guide, thanks for taking the time to write :)

Originally when i specced to 10/41/0 i was really missing SoC as ive been a retri paladin for so long, but now im getting used to SoR. Defence is the big thing that is proving a little difficult to get, but im gaining more and more each week. Have not really tried tanking higher end instances yet, only trash in AQ40 and the adds that spawn at the edges in the Fankriss fight. Was really enjoyable experience and im hoping to take it further.

HP - 5011
MP - 5057
Armor - 11010
Defence - 363

What i have so far after 4 weeks collecting stuff. Hopefully will get some rings/trinks and a necky sooner rather than later :P Diffucult to find any that isnt Warrior prio tho

Miko ~ Turalyon

Errr... bump :P

Stickeh

Excellent guide. I'm going to go protection spec on my paladin once he hits 60, and this guide will be very useful to me. :)