Caster-breaker or pack-gatherer? Players argue over who Paladin tanks are, and what a spell block costs

Anilahation's r/wowforever post of 31 October answers a description they had seen a couple of weeks earlier: the Paladin fantasy as being "AoE gods". That was never the fantasy for them, they wrote, "at least not for the majority of classic/tbc/wotlk". The Paladin tank they remember was an anti-spellcaster, and the memory behind it is specific. The tank pulls, two or three casters start casting, the Paladin interrupts them with Avenger's Shield, and the casters run into melee. Anilahation welcomes what they understand to be a new Paladin spell block as a way to "double down" on that identity, and assumes Blizzard doesn't want to bring back Avenger's Shield itself.

Four minutes later OliveSoda disagreed from the opposite memory: they played Horde and became a Paladin tank "in order to AOE tank as a god". About two hours after that, Anilahation replied that they had never seen gathering enemies as a Paladin niche, because grouping enemies up is what every tank does. Handing that job to one class, they argued, would be "like giving a healer the niche of no one can die". Neither memory is checked here against the older games.

Does a spell block help or hurt?

The same morning, the spell block got a harder look on the US forums. Holdmee's thread Why spell block on pallys? calls it "a net negative on raid boss fights". Their worry is about order: a damage-over-time spell hits the tank, the block spends a Holy Shield charge, and a crushing melee blow lands before Holy Shield is back.

Erase welcomed the same change as "a literal niche for paladin tanks". In their view it makes Paladins the raid's spell-damage tank, leaves Druids the hard-mitigation tank and Warriors in the middle, and they aren't convinced tanks will need to be fully crush-capped anyway. "You have an awesome niche. Take the win."

Ronßurgundy came at it differently. As they describe it, the spell block is activated through Holy Strike, so the tank chooses when it is live. If a blockable boss cast could eat a charge and let a crush through, they would hold Holy Strike until that cast had gone out.

None of them describes a logged fight, and the block itself is taken as they each read it. All three are predicting how it will play once raids begin. The older argument and the newer one meet at the same question for Forever's tanks: should a class be defined by the enemies it handles best, or by a job all tanks share?