A Look Back at Protection Paladin in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial

wowhead.com:

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Protection Paladin Writer, Lincoln, offers a retrospective highlighting Protection's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists

Protection Paladin Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

With War Within alpha on the horizon, I thought it would be a good idea to take another look at how Protection Paladin in Dragonflight played out and ask key questions about Blizzard's stated design goals.

I personally think Protection Paladin has gone in the wrong direction for the last two expansions. I have been extremely critical both publicly and privately of the reintroduction of Holy Power and other changes that I feel have done more harm than good. Thinking back to the last three versions of Prot. Paladin, I think that Dragonflight Prot. Paladin is a worse design than Shadowlands Prot. Paladin and Shadowlands Prot. Paladin was a worse design than BFA.

The design has gotten progressively worse with each expansion. In fact, I would go as far to say that Blizzard used tuning as an attempt to recover from design choices that did not work out as intended. The current meta strength of Prot. Paladin overshadows how poor the underlying gameplay is.

But Blizzard tried to improve the design going into Dragonflight but for whatever reason, it just didn't work out. The first question I want to examine is: What did Blizzard try to do in Dragonflight?

What Blizzard Tried in Dragonflight

Blizzard tried to reduce Shield of the Righteous uptime and the primary way was through resource starvation and removing the Holy