Protection Paladin



Protection Paladins are a core tank specialization in the game. They utilize exceptional self heals, numerous damage reduction buffs, evasion in the form of parrying, and perform solid DPS while holding threat on multiple targets. These tanks function like the other paladin specs; build up Holy Power (functionally the same as rogue combo points) and use it effectively. Luckily for you most of your core abilities generate holy power and your best damage reducer scales off the amount of holy power you dump into it.

These paladins wield a 1h weapon and shield as their main weapon and utilize plate armor. As a tank they benefit from the stat "Bonus Armor" in a powerful way. Bonus Armor does what it sounds like but with the perk of adding to your attack power directly. You add an item for +100 armor and it will directly add 100 to your attack power. Very powerful. Keep in mind that Bonus Armor's defensive capabilities cap at 50%, but the attack power bonus continues indefinitely.

The tank plays similarly to a retribution paladin or enhancement shaman. Fast moving, constantly clicking, always something to do, many abilities to press, active motion at all times. Paladin tanks are very engaging and require a fast mind to steer effectively.

Talents
There are many ways to build a paladin tank, the path I describe here is the one I found works best for me but is by no means the only path to follow. Experiment and find what fits your playstyle best. This build is designed for group success, survival, and to be versatile in multiple scenarios.

 Speed Perks (lvl15)  - My pick is Pursuit of Justice

Speed of Light: a movement speed cooldown that gives you a 75% speed buff for 8s on a 45s CD.

Long Arm of the Law: a passive that increases your speed for 3s each time you activate the move "Judgement" (one of your core abilities).

Pursuit of Justice: a passive that increases your movement speed by 15% at all times and scales with your pooled holy power.

 Stuns (lvl30)  - My pick is Fist of Justice

Fist of Justice: Stuns a target from 20yds away on a 30s CD. A massive improvement on your stun capabilities.

Repentance: Paladin's crowd control, very strong. 30yrd range, 15s cooldown. Works on most creatures and NPCs.

Blinding Light: AoE disorientation to all within 10yrds on a 2m CD. It doesn't seem to work very well...

 Healing Perks (lvl45)  - My pick is Sacred Shield

Selfless Healer: Judgements lower the cast time and mana cost of your secondary heal spell.

Eternal Flame: Uses up to three holy power to heal a target (or yourself) for a large amount and then as a HoT. Increases the total heals when used on yourself. Costs one holy power. A good choice.

Sacred Shield: Gives a target an absorb shield that refreshes itself every few seconds. By the numbers this is the best choice and should be used on CD during encounters. Absorb shields are heals you don't need to take!

 Healing Synergies (lvl60)  - My pick is Hand of Purity

Hand of Purity: 30s CD damage reduction spell. Cuts inbound damage by 15% and reduces the damage of DoTs by 80%. Counts as a "hand" from a paladin meaning you can only have one "hand" on you at a time. I choose this because the 30s CD means I frequently have a damage reduction spell available to save my butt.

Unbreakable Spirit: Reduces the CD of Divine Shield (an OP damage reduction) and Lay on Hands (an OP heal move) by 50%. It's possible this is a great talent, but I always feel like I have enough damage reducers and ability to self heal. I'd pick Hand of Purity or Clemency over this.

Clemency: Gives all your "hand" abilities two charges. If you're often using your hand abilities this could be exceptional. Maybe I'm not pro enough, but I have found this to be trivial compared to another damage prevention ability.

 Tanking Synergies(lvl75)  - My pick is Divine Purpose

Holy Avenger: 2m CD that turns you into a whirlwind of death and power. For 18s you cannot run out of holy power and you deal absurd amounts of damage the whole time. Haste is your friend with this choice.

Sanctified Wrath: One of your aoe abilities now generates holy power and deals double damage. It is easy to use, passive, powerful. A completely acceptable and good choice. Smooths out holy power production. You can only use this ability every 12s though so...

Divine Purpose: Your main damage reduction ability and main self heal spell have a 25% chance to give you a free cast of either. This means while you're tanking normally sometimes you'll get a yellow halo over your head, while active you can use "Shield of the Righteous" or "Word of Glory" for free --> instantly --> high powered. It procs quite often if you're the main tank and playing properly, so it just means you're more flexible. I believe this to be the survivalist's choice.

 Kaboom(lvl90)  - My pick is Holy Prism

Holy Prism: An ability with two modes. If aimed at yourself it heals you a large amount and AoEs five enemies around you (wonderful for grabbing threat). If aimed at the enemy it damages them for a large amount and heals five of your comrades. This ability has a 20s cooldown which means it's an active part of your rotation. It's wonderful for grabbing threat, and healing multiple people simultaneously.

Light's Hammer: 1m CD that allows you to throw a lightning hammer to a selected area. While in that area the hammer will damage enemies in the zone and heal comrades. If the boss is stationary you can throw it and end up healing everyone and damaging anything within it passively. It has a 1m cooldown though, so you don't have access to it all that frequently.

Execution Sentence: 1m CD with two modes. Aim it at yourself and it'll massively heal you over time. Aim it at an enemy and it'll massively damage them over time. It is powerful in PVE and PVP. 40yrd range too, this ability is potent. I personally just want to have more buttons more often, but this is a great talent and choice.

 Differentiators(lvl100)  - My (boring) pick is Holy Shield

Empowered Seals: Gives you buffs when you change stances. Unfortunately Firestorm's WoD is missing one of the core seals for this leaving you only with two to stance dance between. It would heal you for 2% of your health every 3s and increase your haste by 20% for 20s. When used optimally this can be extremely powerful giving you both buffs constantly. I personally would rather focus on the fight rather than stance dancing for a buff. It's strong, I just find it distracting from what the goal of a tank is... to keep everyone alive.

Seraphim: 30s CD that costs five holy power and has 50% uptime when played optimally. This is the biggest buff in the entire game as far as I know. Seraphim gives you a 750 stat boost to Haste, Crit, Mastery, Multistrike, Versatility, and Bonus Armor for 15s. That is FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED in stats given to your character on demand. Ludicrously, staggeringly powerful. It completely changes how you should play Paladin Tank, you are no longer a tank - you are a user of Seraphim. If you pick this talent choose "Holy Avenger" from the lvl75 talents, they are synergistic. I believe all supremely pro paladin tanks should choose Seraphim due to how incredibly powerful it is. But remember your job is to tank and meat shield, to keep the whole party alive and never die yourself. Seraphim can be distracting.

Holy Shield: A passive that increases your block chance by 15% and gives you the added ability to block spells. When you block an attack or ability you will damage the attacker for ~5000 dps. This isn't an exciting talent but it does its job without demanding you change focus. It isn't sexy. It isn't fancy. It just does its job and is happy to be employed. I pick this talent because it is steady, functional, and permits me to focus on my task as tank. There are actually two hidden benefits to this option that most new protection paladins don’t initially realize. One is that it can block individual ticks from magical dots, allowing you to drastically mitigate the dots on Thogar and Flamebender, and the second is that it also blocks AoE damage from magical sources, not just single target spells.

Glyphs
There are some paladin glyphs that are simply must haves. I have trouble breaking my current setup because it's so versatile and functional. I occasionally see other paladin tanking glyph builds, but I often question their reasoning. Here is my setup.

Major Glyphs
Glyph of Divine Protection: It converts a pure magic damage reducer to both a magic and damage reduction ability. On a 1m CD you have a 20% reduction in physical and a 20% reduction in magic damage. This I believe is a must-have essential paladin tanking glyph. Start with this as your foundation.

Glyph of the Consecrator: Your AOE "Consecration" moves with you. Consecration is a cool little ability where you blast fire out your feet in a radius around you dealing AOE damage to anyone in the radius. Normally you set the consecration and that's where it stays. But with this glyph you can play normally and it'll be with you the whole time. Tanking involves a significant amount of movement, so I can't imagine living without this quality of life perk.

Glyph of Word of Glory: Your core self heal now gives you a damage buff, 3% buff for each holy power spent healing. As paladin tank you are healing yourself constantly so this is effectively a permanent damage buff. Keep in mind if you take the lvl75 talent "Divine Purpose" then your free procs of "Word of Glory" will also give you a damage buff. In general it'll be a 9% buff to your damage.

There are many other tanking glyphs but everytime I try to change this setup I'm disappointed to learn this is simply the best way to build the paladin tank... Maybe if I had it built for Seraphim + Holy Avenger I'd have a different opinion? But for my mind the other major glyphs aren't worth mentioning.

Minor Glyphs
Glyph of Righteous Retreat: This is your old bubble hearth tactic. You become immune to damage and hearthstone out of danger before your immunity expires.

Glyph of the Mounted King: Automatically casts your 5% stats buff when you mount. A quality of life glyph to ensure you're always buffed. Keep in mind this can cause combat bug in some circumstances...

The other minor glyphs are cosmetic or are nonfunctional.

Stat Priority
Strength > Bonus Armor > Mastery = Haste > Crit = Multistrike > Versatility

All classes should go deep into their main stats (strength + stamina) is the best course of action. It you get a piece of gear going from 670ilvl --> 685ilvl but the secondary stats aren't optimal, you would still pick the 685ilvl item because of the importance of strength and stamina. However, when going from something like 685ilvl --> 691ilvl (warforged) you could consider the secondary stats and weigh them heavily.

Like all non-healer classes the stats Speed + Leech are the most desirable stats. When in doubt, change your gear to accommodate these stats. Leech is ludicrously powerful and speed enables you to be in the right position at the right time or avoid damage. Both will save your life and are massive quality of life buffs.

I believe that paladin tanks are one of those classes where "every stat is good". So aim for bonus armor + mastery + haste and let the rest be what it is. You will feel powerful. 'Enchant your weapon with either mastery or haste, not bonus armor. 'Fun fact, enchanting haste means you'll have 3000 haste on each proc that slowly scales itself down to zero.

Bonus Armor reduces your inbound damage by upwards of 50% and should be your main stat. Once you have it maxed out (~700 bonus armor), you can continue to stack it since it's a direct increase to your attack power. I'm of the mind it's better to spread out your stats among the others, but a tank in the raiding community went insanely deep on Bonus Armor (+1400 bonus armor) and is consistently a top3 dps as a tank. You choose whether to stack it hard or not, both paths are successful, but the power of pure bonus armor is undeniable.

Mastery increases your main damage reduction ability's buff and increases your block chance, additionally it increases your attack power. If you have 20% mastery it will buff your: "Shield of Righteousness" by 10%, attack power by 20%, and block chance by 20%. Paladins have many passive perks which function off of blocking or avoiding attacks. By increasing your block chance you directly increase your cast rate of numerous abilities, your self heals, your holy power generation, basically everything that makes you a good tank is improved by avoiding more hits. This makes mastery a central stat to stack on yourself.

Haste increases your attack speed, spell casting speed, DoT tick rate, and how quickly your abilities come off of cooldown. Paladin tanks are an active class, you want to be hitting a lot of buttons quickly. This makes haste an essential and fun stat to stack up. At some point ~22% you no longer need to stack haste and can focus on other stats.

Critical Strike increases the potency of your damage and healing abilities. On paladin tank crit has the added bonus of increasing your parry chance! Remember that many of paladin passive perks involve bonuses when you avoid damage. So parrying more attacks means you get more bonuses which means more everything. Crit appears on so many items that I don't find the need to go after it specifically. I haven't found the crit weapon enchantment (Mark of the Thunderlord) to be useful enough either.

Multistrike gives all your abilities a chance to trigger again at 30% of their initial potency. You can think of multistrike like another form of crit. But paladins have a perk involving multistrike called "Shining Protector"! It states that all heals you receive (including multistrikes) have two chances equal to your multistrike to heal you an additional 30%. Since you're healing often as paladin on so many levels (your seal, leech, numerous abilities, etc) you can get free additional heals by having more multistrike. And remember that the best way to get crafted items stacked with Bonus Armor (your favorite stat) is to reroll the stats until it's multistrike/armor. So you'll end up with a decent amount anyway.

Versatility is a great little stat, nothing wrong with it but also nothing great about it. It's a "worse bonus armor" since it functions largely the same way. Each percentage of versatility will increase your damage by that amount and reduce your damage taken by half that amount. If you had 10% versatility (a high number) you'd deal 10% increased damage and receive 5% less damage. While it's weaker than bonus armor, it ends up being additional armor once you've hit the 50% reduction cap on bonus armor. Unless you want a janky build you don't need to go out of your way to stack versatility, but don't be sad if you have a good item with versatility on it.

Weapon and Armor Guide
Your tank should wield a 1h weapon and a crafted shield. Almost all of your crafted items should be set as multistrike / bonus armor since armor enables you to be so incredibly powerful. In general the best crafted slots are: weapon, ring, shield, trinket, boot, belt, bracers. For tanks specifically I recommend they abandon the Kazzak bracers in lieu of multi/armor crafted. The Kazz bracers have decent stats for tanks, but they're spread too thin to be BiS.

As a tank  your main role isn't to deal massive damage, it's to survive  the longest possible. For this reason having a crafted sword isn't always a good idea. It's certainly not a bad idea, but you get higher stats using a crafted item for one of the main slots like helm/chest/legs/boots/etc.

There are three good bonus armor trinkets (and a crafted one that is so-so). "Tablet of Turnbuckle Teamwork" gives 500 mastery and has a use ability for 1800 armor. "Evergaze Arcane Eidolon" gives mastery and procs for 2000 armor for 10s. "Blast Furnace Door" gives 400 armor and procs for 2300 mastery for 10s. Any combination of these is powerful since you want mastery + armor in large amount.

I personally use the Kazzak trinkets instead of dedicated tanking trinkets. We have plenty of damage mitigation and I prefer having the stat-stick giving me 205 to every secondary stat, and the speed/leech trinket giving me 20% speed + 20% damage reduction + 8% leech. I simply weigh leech too heavily and find it to be too useful to not use the Kazzak trinkets.

Macros and Utility
Paladin tanks benefit from having certain macros on their bars since they are strong quality of life improvements and will increase survival rate. Some of our abilities can target others and yet as tank you wouldn't do that and thus it's better to just have those abilities forcibly target yourself.

Macros are marked with bold+italic, generally beginning with #showtooltip.

#showtooltip Judgment

/startattack

/use Judgment

#showtooltip Crusader Strike

/startattack

/use Crusader Strike

#showtooltip Hammer of the Righteous

/startattack

/use Hammer of the Righteous

#showtooltip Sacred Shield

/tar player

/cast Sacred Shield

/targetlasttarget

#showtooltip Blessing of Kings

/tar player

/use Blessing of Kings

/targetlasttarget

#showtooltip Blessing of Might

/tar player

/use Blessing of Might

/targetlasttarget

The first three ensure that you begin attacking when using the abilities. Many times in WoW you'll use an ability but won't actually start the attack. These sorts of macros remove that issue by telling the game to begin combat. The "Sacred Shield" and buff macros are simple. Shield should always be on you, I have never once thought "Oh gee that guy needs a shield" -  I need the shield  - so this macro saves you hassle and has it always target you. The buffs in raid always spread to the group, so it's just easier having the spell target yourself. The buff macros aren't necessary, they just save you a headache once in awhile.

Core Abilities and Function
Paladin tanks are an active class with both passive and active mitigation. Tanking is a bit of an art form and choosing which cooldowns to use at the right moments determines your survival, and your team's success. The following are the core paladin abilities.

Defensives
In addition to these abilities, you should have also chosen the absorb shielding talent "Sacred Shield". The reasoning and description for this is found in the talent section of this guide.

Shield of the Righteous: requires 3 holy power, 1.5s cooldown (CD). You slam your shield into your target causing moderate holy damage. For 3s you take 25% less physical damage and the cast gives you the "Bastion of Glory" buff.

Hand of Purity: 30s CD. Places a hand on the target (you) reducing damage taken by 15% and DoTs by 80% for 6s. Remember you can only have one hand on your at a time.

Divine Protection (Glyphed): 1m CD. Reduces magical damage by 20% and physical damage by 20% for 8s.

Ardent Defender: 3m CD. Reduces damage taken by 20% for 10s. While this is active if you would be killed by an attack instead you are healed for 12% of your maximum health. I constantly wish the CD for this were shorter.

Guardian of Ancient Kings: 3m CD. Reduces damage taken by 50% for 8s. Cool looking ability that summons an angel king to guard and fight with you.

Divine Shield: 5m CD. Reduces all damage taken by 50% for 8s and removes all debuffs on cast. Causes "Forbearance" for 30s which prevents some other abilities from being used. Be careful using this, it removes all your threat as well. I save this for emergencies only, or when the other tank is right there to grab all the threat you just abandoned. It's useful on Kromog, Flamebender, Train Boss, and Furnace when you are dying from debuffs and are among the last alive.

Hand of Protection: 5m CD. Prevents all physical damage for 10s and prevents you from dealing physical damage. Causes "Forbearance" for 30s. I don't use this often at all, but it would certainly be useful in key moments.

Offensives
In addition to these abilities, you will have an offense talent (lvl90) in the form of "Holy Prism", "Light's Hammer", or "Execution Sentence". These are described in the talent section of this guide, all are viable - I pick "Holy Prism".

Judgment: 5s CD and 30yrd range. Deals moderate holy damage to a single target and generates 1 holy power.

Crusader Strike: 4s CD and melee range. Deals moderate physical damage to a single target and generates 1 holy power. Has a 30% chance to reset the CD of your Avenger's Shield.

Hammer of the Righteous: 4s CD and melee range. Deals light physical and holy damage to all targets within 8yrds and generates 1 holy power. Has a 30% chance to reset the CD of your Avenger's Shield.

Avenger's Shield: 12s CD and 30yrd range. Deals moderate holy damage and jumps to four additional nearby enemies (AoE), in addition it interrupts & silences the targets for 3s. An incredibly satisfying ability and kind of overpowered in that it interrupts. I sometimes feel bad for the NPCs, they just want to cast things jeez guys.

Holy Wrath: 12s CD and 10yrd range. Deals moderate holy damage spread evenly among all targets within 10yrds. Can be enhanced by a talent to deal double the damage and generate 1 holy power. Can be glyphed to deal all the damage to a single target.

Consecration: 8s CD and ~5yrd range. Creates an area around you that damages all targets within it for moderate holy damage. Can be glyphed to either aim the damaging zone, or to have the zone follow you when moving.

Hammer of Wrath: 5s CD and 30yrd range. Only usable on enemies under 35% health. Throws a hammer at the enemy dealing holy damage.

Utility
Word of Glory: 40yrd range, costs 1 holy power. Consumes up to 3 holy power to heal a target for moderate damage. Your passive "Resolve" enhances this greatly, as does "Bastion of Glory". This is your main healing spell.

Lay on Hands: 10m CD and 40yrd range. Heals a friendly target (probably you or your tank buddy, or a healer in desperate times) equal to your maximum health. In most cases this is a full heal from 0% --> 100%. Causes Forbearance.

Reckoning: 8s CD and 30yrd range. Taunts the target and increases your threat generation toward that target for 3s. A "taunt" is anything that forces an NPC to attack you and gives you "threat". As a tank your job is to maintain high threat so NPCs don't attack anyone but you.

Righteous Fury: Gives you a passive buff that greatly increases your threat generation. Keep this active at all times.

Rebuke: 15s CD and melee range. Interrupts spells being cast and silences that type of magic for 4s. Not all abilities can be interrupted.

Redemption: 40yrd range. Revives a dead comrade with 35% health and mana. This cannot be used in combat and is not a "battle rez".

Hammer of Justice: 1m CD and 10yrd range. Stuns the target for 6s. Can and should be talented to convert the ability to "Fist of Justice" which lowers the cooldown to 30s and increases the range to 20yrd.

Blessing of Kings: 30yrd range. Provides all players in your group a 5% buff to their strength, agility, and intellect.

Blessing of Might: 30yrd range. Provides all players in your group 550 mastery.

Hand of Freedom: 25s CD and 40yrd range. Places a hand on the target to prevent and remove all movement impairing effects for 6s.

Hand of Sacrifice: 1.5m CD and 40yrd range. Places a hand on the target to transfer 30% of their inbound damage to yourself for 12s or until you've transferred a total of damage equal to your maximum health. Can be glyphed to simply reduce damage by 30% without the damage transfer / redirection. This is a very dangerous ability and one I do not ever / regularly use. Theoretically very powerful.

Passives
Paladin has many passive abilities that enhance the experience, reset cooldowns, and provide other benefits that will add to your power + survivability. Paladins also have passive buffs called "Seals" (only two of which work on tanks right now) that can be switched between instantly. But first a reminder of what some core stats do for paladin tank. You have two seals as Paladin tank. "Seal of Insight" increases healing done by 5% and gives your attacks a chance to heal you lightly (sort of like leech, but triggering from every attack). "Seal of Righteousness" causes melee attacks to deal light aoe damage to all targets within 8 yards. In testing, it feels like both abilities are useful. Righteousness triggers your leech (it deals ~700 damage, so you'd get healed for 70hp per enemy it struck, each time it triggers) and adds extra dps. Insight is a passive increase to your heals gained and is what I tend to maintain due to it being "safer" in theory. More experimentation is required. Remember also there's a talent that buffs your seals and gives you reason to swap seals during battle for buffs - more on this in the talent section.
 * Bonus Armor reduces your inbound damage by upwards of 50% and will add directly to your attack power.
 * Critical Strike increases your parry chance at roughly 1/3 of your crit percentage (12% crit = 4% extra parry)
 * Mastery buffs your "Shield of the Righteous" and "Bastion of Gory". It also increases your attack power and chance to block.  20% mastery = 20% attack power + 20% block + 10% Shield of Righteousness buff
 * Multistrike works directly with your "Shining Protector" passive which I'll detail below.

Bastion of Glory: Increases the potency of your main healing ability "Word of Glory" when used on yourself. It creates stacks upwards of 5 total. For each stack WoG heals you 25% more. Normal WoG heals for ~20k, fully stacked WoG would heal for 45k. It is a good idea to stack up Bastion, but I tend not to "watch it" carefully and simply heal myself when I need healing.

Resolve: Increases your healing and absorption done to yourself based on the damage taken in the last 10s. It always enhances your self-heals by 10% and caps out at 280%, scaling between. It's designed to keep you alive and help you heal after massive damage from raid bosses. Gruul's inferno slice or Kromog's slams will trigger it hard and you'll be able to massively heal afterwards.

Forbearance: A negative debuff you gain when you use certain powerful abilities. It prevents other powerful abilities from working while it's active. Forbearance lasts for 30s and is designed so you're not literally immortal for a lengthy period of time. A "fairness" passive.

Grand Crusader: When you avoid a melee attack (block/dodge/parry/etc) or use Crusader Strike / Hammer of the Righteous, you have a 30% chance to reset the CD of your Avenger's Shield and causing the shield to generate 1 holy power. Basically your two main holy power generators and you doing your tanking job can make your shield even better.

Sacred Duty: Makes Haste your "attuned stat" (all classes have a passive like this) by increasing Haste by 30%.

Shining Protector: All heals you receive, including multistrikes, have two chances equal to your multistrike percentage to heal you for an additional 30% of the initial heal. If a multistrike heavy healer is hitting you with heals, and your multistrike is elevated (remember Multi/Armor is your optimal crafted setup) you will passively gain extra heals. This isn't something to build around, it's just a pleasant perk.

How to Play One
Being a tank is about understanding what your function is in the game. Your job is to survive and help your team survive. Many tanks can deal massive dps, or heal like crazy, or have fancy tricks, but at the end of the day the tank is there to be a meatshield and soak hits from the NPCs. To this end you are empowered with the ability to generate + maintain high threat and generally have many AOE abilities to hit every NPC and keep them focused on you.

With all this inbound damage and focus from the enemies you must survive their onslaught. To this end you have been given numerous defensive abilities to reduce the amount of damage you take. How you use these abilities, at what time, for what inbound damage, is what makes you a bad/good/great tank.

Being a decent tank begins with understanding what you're fighting against. For here on WoD read up on Blackrock Foundry and learn what abilities are especially dangerous to you. Generally tanking is done with two players sharing damage and debuffs, both watching each others' backs. Choosing when to have the boss' attention is key to your team's victory. An arrogant tank is usually a soon-to-be-dead tank, so play carefully and with a sharp mind to ensure your team doesn't wipe.

Functionally you play a Paladin tank by building up holy power and using your "Shield of the Righteous" (SotR) to protect yourself with as much uptime as possible. Holy Power is your core resource as a paladin, much like a rogue's combo points. Your main offensive abilities generate it and your best tanking abilities spend it. The efficient generation and expense of holy power is key to being a successful paladin in any spec. It is a good idea to "pool" (save up) your holy power and use it at four or five stacks for maximum effect.

During every fight you should maintain damage prevention at almost all times. Your SotR protects you from 25% of all inbound damage, and you can have two additional short cooldown you should use freely as they don't consume any holy power (Hand of Purity 30s CD and Divine Protection 1m CD). You must movement-dodge as much damage as you can, avoid fire, position the boss in safe places, and keep up a variety of cooldowns. With the defensive CDs there are two schools of thought. First is to use the right one at the right time, likely this is the smartest path of course - precision is often the best approach. But the argument can be made that you should use your longest CDs first/early during a boss fight, because they'll have a chance to replenish during the battle. An example would be Kromog or Gruul who dispense massive damage at regular intervals. Using your long CDs first (like "Guardian of the Ancient Kings" 3m CD) means you'll have access to it again later, whereas if you saved it you might not get to use it twice during the battle.
 * Build holy power constantly with "Judgment", "Crusader Strike", "Hammer of the Righteous", and "Avenger's Shield"
 * Spend holy power at key moments to heal with "Word of Glory" and prevent damage with "Shield of the Righteous"
 * Constantly maintain uptime of your "Sacred Shield" and "Consecration" (absorb shield and aoe passive)
 * Be prepared to self heal, taunt, or use a defensive CD at a moment's notice

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1804980-Protection-Paladin-Guide-(6-2) ← This is another excellent Protection Paladin guide, going a deeper into the numbers and some details I chose to skim over.