At level 40 you'll be able to grab the talent for Holy Shield. This is another one of those 'up at all times' type buff and it's well designed for it. The skill cooldown is 8 seconds, but the spell lasts up to 10 seconds. This gives you a little bit of leeway when it comes to mashing your hotkey. The skill boosts your block percentage by thirty and any attack you block does damage back to the monster that dealt it. It's a charged buff, so that means it will only be available for 8 blocked attacks or that 10 second duration. Whichever ends first.

Consecration is a skill you nab at level 20. This is where you bless the ground with holy power and cause damage to everything killable in that area. It does have its good and bad points though. It's a great skill for maintaining threat and damage on multiple targets at once and one you'll turn to a lot as you get higher level. The issue is that it's an extremely expensive spell. It uses up about 20% of your mana (or 22% base mana for those of you that know what I'm talking about) with each cast and only lasts 8 seconds. There's a lot you can do with that amount of mana. That's like four judgements and change worth of mana. So, unless you're either all set on mana or just have a whole bunch of big bads after you, this skill could probably be avoided. After all, a paladin tank without mana isn't all that useful.

Hammer of Justice is a good thing to keep around. You can use Hammer of Justice to interrupt spells your opponents are casting or just prevent them from hitting you for a couple seconds with the stun. A lot of monsters in dungeons are immune to stun, so don't expect it to always help you out.

Purify/Cleanse is something to have available for quick access to on your button bars, but not really a priority spell. Depending on the type of healer you have in your group, it can help remove debuffs that they might not be able to touch. For example, if you've got a priest in your party, they won't be able to remove poisons from you. If you're running with a druid, they won't be able to remove whatever magical effects the bosses toss on you. It's not usually something you have to worry about, but can be a life saver those times where it does matter.

As you get higher level, you can grab the Avenger's Shield talent. This puppy is a multi-pulling wonder skill. You literally lob your shield across the room Captain America style to your target and it bounces to his two closest buddies. If you've nabbed the talent Shield of the Templar, it will even attempt to silence your targets for a couple seconds. On top of all of that, it's a great threat tool for the start of a fight or to grab adds in the middle of a fight.

At the bottom (or top depending on your viewpoint) of the protection tree is the talent Hammer of the Righteous which is first available at level 60 (depending on how you've spent your talent points). This is a good damage skill that chains to multiple targets much like Avenger's Shield. The nice thing about this is that it will spread whatever seal you happen to be using around to every target you hit. If you're using Seal of Vengeance or Seal of Corruption, it will spread that damage over time debuff to each and every one of them.

In your 70s, you'll grab a couple new skills: Divine Plea, Shield of Righteousness, and Sacred Shield.

Divine Plea returns 25% of your mana over 15 seconds... unless you're a protection paladin. If you've got Guarded by the Light at two of two points then you'll refresh Divine Plea every time you land a melee attack on something. This means if you keep pulling with very little downtime, you'll be able to keep Divine Plea up non-stop in an instance. This is extra cool, because there is a glyph that allows Divine Plea to reduce 3% of all incoming damage.

Shield of Righteousness is another damage skill and it packs quite a punch. It scales with your block value, so the more block you have, the more damage it does. With this in tow, you'll also be able to do what the level 80 tankadins call the 969 rotation. Essentially it means that if you've got a point in the talent Improved Judgements you can do a simple rotation where you hit a skill with an eight or nine second cooldown (Holy Shield), followed by a six second cooldown (Shield of Righteousness), followed by another nine (Judgement), then another six (Hammer of the Righteous), and then another eight or nine second (Consecrate) and then back to your first six second skill again (Shield of Righteousness). You can swap certain skills in if they're needed like Sacred Shield which I'll talk about next.

Sacred Shield isn't a total damage stopping bubble like Hand of Protection or Divine Shield nor does it reduce all damage like Divine Protection. Instead, it's a buff that will occasionally flip on to reduce incoming damage by 500 and a bit extra depending on your spellpower for thirty seconds. Being as any incoming damage you can avoid is good incoming damage to avoid, this is one of those skills you'll want to keep up on yourself at all times while fighting. Also, with the talent Divine Guardian, you can increase the duration to one minute.

Next week, we're going to take a small break from the low level tanking guide and take a look at how paladins fared overall in 2009. Our ups, our downs, and the changes that caused them. After that, we'll finish up the guide with a look at macros, consumables, and addons for tanks before moving onto healers.

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The Light and How to Swing It tries to help Paladins cope with the dark times coming in Cataclysm. See the upcoming Paladin changes the expansion will bring. Wrath is coming to a close and the final showdown with the Lich King is here. Are you ready for the assault on Icecrown Citadel?

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