Mana ??

So 70 tanking everything up to Arc so far, and looking to get ready for Kara. I have the defense and the avoidance, but my mana seems to be lacking. About how much should i have? right now i have about 4k unbuffed.

that's not bad. 4-6k unbuffed is the typical range of a pali tank.
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Official tankadin of The Core <Tichondrius>

kinda sucks cause after you cast, AS, Holy shield, 1-2 judgements, then concencrate your at half mana

meh.. never really have mana problems. keep a BoW on yourself, and the moment you start getting heals your mana comes back pretty quick.

If you need to you can always tank with wisdom. That's what I end up doing on heroics
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Official tankadin of The Core <Tichondrius>

take off some gear when doing 5mans, no need to be uncrushable or even uncrittable... nothing will crush you and crits are not nearly as bad as boss crits.
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Dwarf Pali on Ner'Zhul
"Mostly Harmless"

I use BoW in everything below Karazhan level. Also, the 2pc bonus from the Righteous set works wonders with your Consecration mana. If you go that route, I'd suggest Shoulders and Chest. If you're not worried about Uncrushability, the Righteous Chest if properly socketed will supply more health than the Jade-Skull and you get the sweet 2pc bonus.

Party makeup can also help. Having a Spriest or a mana spring dropping Shaman can really make a difference, especially after 2.3.

My mana is generally about 5.7k in my boss tanking set, maybe a touch higher if I'm in trash tanking gear.
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I think my cat is a communist. He's always talking to me about Mao.

Before i stepped foot into kara and i was just doing 5mans so gear wasn't that grate just our DS 3.5 i put 5 points in holy for more int and didn't have the more parry from the ret tree, i felt this helped me alot untill i got to a more usefull 5.5k+ mana unbuffed. Maybe go down the route i used to untill you get gear with more int on it
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http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bloodfeather&n=Erlata

I have around 4K mana (cant remember off the top of my head and cant get onto armory from work) and dont have any problems.

In raid's I'm getting healed enough to give me my mana back, in 5mans I work on after a pull if the healer had more mana than me I swap out some of my defense gear for spell dmg untill it evens out
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.::. Karak 70 Restoration Shaman .::.
.::. Sajuuk 70 Affliction Warlock .::.
.::. Taris 50 Feral Druid .::.

My regular tanking set gives me 6k mana unbuffed, but i have the 10% talent from Holy, so it's something like 5400. More than enough usually. After the frontload threat, DPS usually have time to unleash a lot of DPS before you go oom. Usually 1 or 2 mobs are dead in the time you lose all that mana.

I however have a "threat set" in which i have 8k mana and very low avoidance, that i use for istances that i really outgear.
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Adding 5% int in general will give you about 200 mana total. It is quite possibly the worst way to spend 5 talent points I can think of as a prot paladin, especially in 2.3. If you're really doing bad for mana in heroics/5mans, become more damage-prone.