Righteous Defense

From WoWWiki

Righteous Defense
Righteous Defense Instant cast 40 yards range Come to the defense of a friendly target, commanding up to 3 enemies attacking the target to attack the Paladin instead.
Usable by
Class	Paladin
Properties
Type	Utility
School	Holy
Cooldown	10 sec
Other information
Ranks	1
Related debuff
Righteous Defense Taunted. Duration: 3 seconds.

"Only a paladin would be foolish enough to run into combat blindly. Then again, only a paladin would be that brave." - Deacon Markus Hallow^{TCGFoO 52}

Introduced in 2.0 (The Burning Crusade), Righteous Defense is a method for Paladin's to temporarily taunt NPCs.

As of 2.4, Righteous Defense can also be cast on an enemy mob, much like the Warrior's Taunt ability. Its behavior when used in this way seems to be much like its behavior if cast on a party member. If the enemy that is taunted is attacking another player, 2 more enemies that may be attacking that player will also be taunted.

Rank table

Rank	Level	Mana Cost	Duration	Cost
1	14	4% of Base	3 sec.	40

Patch changes

In Patch 3.0.2, the global cooldown was removed and the mana cost was removed while the cooldown was reduced to 10 seconds.

Tips and tricks

Given the majority of a paladin's abilities are short ranged, the possible tactics is fairly limited as the tanking paladin would have difficult time retaining the aggro until he is once again in melee range with the mobs.

Macros for this ability

This macro causes Righteous Defense to act similarly to a warrior's Taunt ability. (Not necessary since patch 2.4 as Righteous Defense now works on enemy mobs as well.)

/cast [target=targettarget,help] Righteous Defense

This lets you cast the spell without changing targets. Another thing you can do is add "combat" to the conditionals, and add another spell at the end to cast if you're not in combat (You'd likely never cast Righteous Defense out of combat).

#showtooltip
/cast [help,target=mouseover] [help,target=mouseovertarget] Righteous Defense