With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown.

We've been doing a series on playing a low level tank. We started out with talking some theory and stats, worked our way into talents, and this week, we're going to delve into the world of skills. Paladins, as a hybrid class, have a wide variety of skills available to them. Some of these can be useful, some have no part in a tank's skill rotation. We'll take you through your initial buffs and what skills to keep within reach if things get ugly.

Skills:

I'm not really going to tackle the spells in order of level, but more in order they need to be talked about. We'll do a couple what spells to avoid and then we'll work our way through the ones you do want.

When tanking, you're going to want to make a point of using only instant cast spells. If any spells require you to sit there and magically wave your hands for a couple seconds, then you should avoid using it while things are beating on you. This means Holy Light and Flash of Light are out. Exorcism is out except for pulling new mobs. And while we're on the topic of things that are out, Redemption isn't much of an option to any paladin in combat, but that's for a completely different reason.

There are also two other spells that while they can have some great uses while tanking, generally aren't something you want to cast on yourself and leave on. Those are Hand of Protection and Divine Shield. There lesser sibling, Divine Protection that you get at level 6 is perfectly fine though and we'll get to it in a second. The reason you should avoid using HoP and DS is that while they're active, your threat is zero. Anything attacking you will suddenly lose interest and go find another person to play with and your healers really don't like it when that happens. If you cancel either of those, your threat will be back to where it was beforehand. This can be handy if something jumped out of nowhere to attack your healer or one of the dps, you can cast Hand of Protection on them which will drop their aggro to nothing allowing you to pick up the target easier.

[View Remaining 12 Paragraphs]