World of Warcraft Paladin Guide

Introduction

I’ve loved this class since the moment I created my paladin. When I turned lvl 60 and had a little experience there, I wrote a guide to share my thoughts with others. Since then I have had more time to experience the end-game content and progress through the raids. I’ve seen many different encounters, had opportunity to collect a wide range of gear and seen new roles that paladins need to fill. As such, I feel it necessary to write a new guide to take into account the things I’ve seen since before. While many of my views remain the same, others now differ slightly and along with amending some things I was previously unsure of I now have fresh content to add. Also, while my last writeup was just about what I did with my spec, this one will attempt to cover all specs/approaches as an overall guide.

In short, I’m revising and expanding my previous guide in this new one. As before, this is all based on my opinions, my experiences and my theories. Some may disagree with the things I say but everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and these are mine. My aim again is threefold; To help new paladins get an idea of what the class can do, and needs to do. To give existing paladins some possible new ideas and perhaps answer any questions they may have been asking themselves. To give other classes an insight into what a paladin can do. People will read this for different reasons and if at the end I’ve given just one person something to go and think about, I’ll be happy. So, on to the guide, which has the following sections…

Part 1: What is a Paladin?
Part 2: Attributes & Stats
Part 3: Auras, Blessings and Seals
Part 4: Talents
Part 5: Combat Mechanics
Part 6: Gear different roles
Part 7: Gameplay Techniques
Part 8: Enchants
Part 9: Class Armour Sets
Part 10: Summary

Part 1: What is a Paladin?

Simple question that one – what is a Paladin? The answer is not so simple, and will vary depending on who you ask. Some see the paladin as a holy warrior, skilled in combat with the ability to protect themself and others with healing when necessary. Others will be focused on that healing part and see the class as a protector whose prime role is to keep others alive. This question causes a lot of unrest amongst the paladin community, with many claiming blizzard made a broken class who are nothing like paladins in other games and need fixing. Now you may ask what my view is, and the answer is simple: we are whatever we want to be. I’m not interested in what a ‘paladin’ in some game 10 years ago could do. I look at paladins as they have been made in World of Warcraft, and that is as a hybrid class. We can be that warrior with heals. We can be the healer, the protector. In fact, I would say paladin is the most complete class in the game.

To be more specific, there are three commonly accepted roles within the game. Those three roles are DPS, Tanking and Healing. As a hybrid class, a paladin is capable of performing each role. Now obviously being able to perform each role gets us labelled with the old saying “Jack of all trades, master of none” and to some extent this is true. A rogue, mage or warlock for example would be considered better for DPS than a paladin. A warrior is the recognised tanking class in the game. For healing, priests and even druids are seen as better. So why would anyone want to be a paladin, if we’re always inferior to other classes in whatever role we play? My answer to that is again simple: we are versatile. Most other classes have a very fixed role, and rely on others in different roles to create a balance. A paladin can step into any role that is required, and thus maintain equalibrium within a group. In essence, I see our role as adapting to any situation we are thrown into and using our versatility to adapt and ensure everything goes as smoothly as possible. Now please note that I am not stating we are purely a support class – on the contrary, I view paladins as being excellent on our own too. I’m simply saying that while other classes can be very fixed in what they do, we can do many things and that is what I love about the class.

If you ask most people what a paladin does in groups they’ll say “cleanse, buff and heal”. Mention damage and they’ll laugh. Here’s a brief overview of what I view a paladin as doing in different environments.

5-man Raids

This is one place a paladin excels with our versatility. Your typical 5-man group has a Tank, Healer, Crowd Control, DPS and Random. Our best role in that mix is the Random slot, as then we can react to anything that comes up and add dps when things are secure, off-tank if a big pull needs that or if there’s a 2 “boss” fight (eg. BRD emperor/princess and DM Tribute king/observer) and support the healer with our own healing if required. Although that’s our best role, and my personal favourite, we are also easily capable of performing as the main tank for a group or as the healer. There is no 5-man instance in the game that a paladin cannot tank, and the same for healing. People prefer having a warrior as tank or a priest to heal and sure, if they’re available it’s perfectly reasonable for them to do that and we slot into the random/versatile role. Our best role is in that non-specific slot that allows us to keep an eye on the group and do whatever is needed at any given time but we can also perform the main tank or main healer roles, and that makes us a great addition to any group. In fact, if there’s a dps specced warrior in the group I’ll often do the tanking so they can dps, and the same if there’s a shadow priest. The problem of course is that most people insist a paladin can’t main tank or be the group healer, if you try to join pugs (pickup groups) for one of those roles. If you’re with people who know you, however, they’ll know you can do it and let you.

20-40 Man Raids

The end-game raids from ZG onwards, here’s where paladins get labelled as buffbots, cleansebots and healbots. We go from being told we’re not healers in places like strat/scholo to now told that healing is all we’re can do. If you mention the word damage, you get laughed at. Well, while I agree that healing and cleansing is an important role for us I am very open to paladins in damage mode. Let’s look at what a raid consists of: first you have the main tank and a few off-tanks, then there’s the dps and finally the healers. For a raid to succeed, the tanks (and dps) need to stay alive so sufficient healing is required. While priests and druids will be the primary healers, paladins will usually find they need to heal too to cover the whole raid. Let’s say there’s a MC raid with 4 priests, 2 healing druids and 6 paladins. If just the priests and druids healed, that wouldn’t be enough so at least some of the paladins would need to be in full healing mode. Taking MC as an example again, heavy cleansing is required for Sulfuron. With the priests/druids dedicated to keeping tanks alive, paladins need to keep the nasty things off the raid through cleansing, and provide backup healing. It’s a simple fact that sufficient healing is required for a raid to succeeed and as one of three healing classes we must be prepared to fill that role when necessary, which unless the raid is heavy with other healers will be often. When it comes to end-game raids, a paladin is primarily a healer and a cleanser out of necessity.

Now you may be thinking that I’ve just confirmed what people say, that all we can do is heal & cleanse. Not at all. I agree that healing and cleansing are two important roles we will usually have to perform, but in no way do I accept that they’re all we can do. Damage paladins are laughed at, but sometimes in a raid that’s the best option. While a raid needs enough healing to work, there is such a thing as too much healing. If a raid is heavy with other healers with more than is really necessary, it can be better for a couple of paladins to whip out their big weapons and go in damage mode – better to add damage than to stand at the back doing nothing most of the time. The argument people make here is that instead of letting paladins go in damage mode it would be better to take extra rogues or mages instead. As far as I’m concerned, when given the chance to prove it a paladin can definitely hold their own when it comes to dps. Sure, we’re not likely to be topping meters but we can certainly mix in there with most of them, often out-damaging some and certainly not lagging far behind. With the right gear, and a spec to help with it, a paladin in pure damage mode can put out more than enough damage to warrant them being in the raid instead of yet another rogue. What often happens to pull a paladin down on the meter is that in cleanse-heavy fights they’ll help cleanse, and in bad pulls when a rogue will just keep adding dps the dps paladin might step back and help with a few heals. A rogue will do damage 100% of the time they’re in active play. A paladin probably won’t, even in full dps mode. While that will give a rogue an advantage with damage meters, it does not mean the paladin sucks at dps… simply that there are times when we’ll support heal/cleanse for a bit instead of standing there swinging away. A paladin might also do damage in most fights, but do pure healing in those that need extra healing – that doesn’t mean they can’t do high damage when they are trying to. That omnipresent versatility is why, if healing is secure without them, I am perfectly happy to see extra paladins in a damage role as they can a) dish out plenty of damage to keep in touch with other DPS’ers – won’t top the meters (a good mage/rogue etc. will be higher), but won’t necessarily be at the bottom of them either – and b) if the sh*t hits the fan, step back a bit and support heal/cleanse. The other thing with raids is even rarer than dps, and that’s tanking. While a place like Scholo or Dire Maul we can tank without problems, for a paladin to main tank in an end-game raid is very difficult indeed. For one thing, we lack the extra threat abilities that a good warrior (or druid) tank has and will use. Second, we have no means of snap-aggro (ie. taunt) to regain control if aggro is lost, and finally even if we can hold aggro, none of our higher tier sets have tanking stats on them other than stamina – we have no Defence on them, and set bonuses are for damage/healing rather than tanking like a warrior’s set gives. Ultimately we were never meant to be more than secondary backup tanks. We have the ability to tank as well as a warrior in smaller 5-man instances, but in end game the warrior is clearly set out as “the” tank and has both the talents/abilities and the gear to support that. A paladin has limited threat generation abilities, and as we move up through the higher raids we can only collect tanking items close to what a warrior has access to by picking up a few random non-set pieces if the opportunity presents itself. While there are cases of paladins tanking Onyxia or MC that’s when guilds have them on farm status, want to have a bit of fun and experiment a bit – often when they’re taking alts through to be geared up. It’s certainly far from optimal – if a raid MT is needed, it will be a warrior or even a druid and not a paladin. What we can do is off-tank if necessary. If you look at the Garr fight with 8 adds, if the raid is short of warriors/warlocks a paladin can easily tank an add. The same with adds at Sulfuron/Domo. We can collect gear ready to off-tank when needed, but don’t create a paladin thinking you’ll be able to MT end-game as that simply won’t happen.

So that’s end-game for us. Mostly healing and cleansing, the ability to perform a damage role if we’re not needed for healing and we can off-tank adds if necessary. To fit that, a paladin looking to raid should focus on building healing gear first, damage gear second and tanking gear third. It should also be a consideration when assigning talent points.

Group PvP

Whether in a BG like Arathi Basin or world PvP with a group, a paladin has a very important role to play when PvPing with others. Some paladins will play like warriors and only heal themselves, refusing to heal others, because they feel they’re entitled to play for themselves as much as any other class. To me that’s a load of rubbish. What’s the point of hacking away with your sword and keeping full mana if the mage next to you is stunned and about to be killed by a couple of rogues? They’d just turn on you next. A true paladin should always be watching out for others. That’s not just with healing, but also tools like Blessing of Protection – you can BoP that mage and the rogues can’t do anything to hurt him, while you then quickly heal him back up. We can save our stun for classes like a shaman who’s just about to heal, put buffs on others. We melee when we can, and be ready to heal when we need to. Group PvP is all about teamwork, and a paladin should always know what’s going on around you to be ready to react in whichever way is needed. It’s much the same as that flexible/versatile role in instances and raids… we don’t just do one thing, we change our actions depending on what each fight needs.

One major strength we have in PvP is our survivability – in AB we make excellent flag defenders, able to survive under attack longer than any other class to protect the flag until help arrives. If we’re performing a healing role, we have the armour and shield to hold off melee that turn on us while we continue to heal, and the bubble.

Part 2: Attributes & Stats

This section will go through the various attributes and stats we use, and explain what they do. Attributes have different effects on different classes, and these are the numbers for a paladin at lvl 60. If you’ve ever wondered just how much of a bonus your strength gives you, this will provide the answer.

Agility:
+2 Armour per point
+1% Melee critical hit chance per 20 points
+1% Dodge chance per 20 points

Intellect:
+15 Mana per point
+1% Spell critical hit chance per ~30 points
Faster weapon skill increase (I don’t know how much faster)

There is dispute here, as some claim it is 59.5 intellect for +1% spell crit, but tests have shown that this value changes between classes and 30 is now generally recognised as the value for a Paladin. From personal experience I support this value being 30.

Spirit:
Health regenerates out of combat only at the rate of: Spirit * 0.25 per 2 seconds
Mana regenerates both in and out of combat at the rate of: (Spirit / 4) + 8 per 2 seconds

For mana, this means every 4 extra Spirit will give +1 mana regen per 2 seconds. Note that this regeneration won’t happen for the first 5 seconds after casting a spell, so you can’t use your magic if you want mana back from spirit. The difference between mana and health regen is that mana will regen while you’re in combat as long as you haven’t cast anything for 5 seconds, while health will only start to regen when you’re no longer flagged as being in combat.

Stamina:
+10 Health per point

Strength:
+2 Attack Power per point (see Attack Power below for how this adds damage)
Increases the amount of damage you can block with your shield. The formula is: Shield Block Value + (Strength / 22) for the max you can block when you block, so 22 strength gives an extra -1 damage received when you block with a shield.

Attack Power:
+1 DPS (damage per second) per 14 Attack Points, with melee weapons.
This means that at 2 Attack Power per Strength, +7 Strength will add 1 DPS.

Defence:
Defence will increase naturally as you level, to 300 base at lvl 60, but can also be increased by items/talents etc. It has the following effects:
+1% Parry per 25 points
+1% Dodge per 25 points
+1% Block per 25 points (shield needed)
+1% chance to be Missed per 25 points
-1% chance of receiving a Critical Hit per 25 points

Armour:
Our total armour rating is calculated as follows:
((Agility * 2) + Equipped Item Armour + Devotion Aura + External Buffs) * Modifiers

With “Modifiers”, I mean for example the +30% armour for 2 minutes gained by casting Improved Lay of Hands on yourself. If you had 1000 armour, you’d get 1000 * 1.3 = 1300 total armour, for the duration of the LoH. External Buffs would be things like the +240 Armour from a Protection Scroll.

You may be wondering which attributes we need, and that I will address later on. Needless to say, different roles require different attributes and as a multi-role class that means a lot of different gear for a paladin to perform effectively :)

Part 3: Auras, Blessing and Seals

Now on to the core Paladin abilities, starting with our auras. These provide bonuses to us and anyone in our group (that’s a max of 5 in our own group, not a whole raid group) who is within 30 yards of us. Auras require no mana to put up, so can and should be switched between or even during fights depending on what is needed. Only one aura of each type can be in effect for each group… that is you can have Devotion and Retribution running together from two paladins, but two Devotion auras will only work as one (the strongest one of the two) so if there’s more than one paladin in the group make sure your auras are different!

The auras are as follows:

Devotion Aura:

The most common aura, this simply adds an armour bonus to help reduce physical damage taken. This will have more effect on a cloth wearer than on a fully tanked up warrior with a shield, but useful for all. Also more useful if you use a 2h weapon, as it helps cover the armour lost by not having a shield. The max at lvl 60 is +735 armour, or +882 if you have 5 points invested in the improved aura. In a raid, this will most often be given to the tank.

Retribution Aura:

After Devotion, this one is seen a lot. It simply adds holy damage to anyone who physically attacks someone covered by this aura. At lvl 60, it will do 20 damage for each hit or 30 if you have the full 5 talent points to improve it. I find this aura perfect to use against rogues or dual-wielding fury warriors, as with two (usually fast) weapons the damage soon adds up! Also useful when you’re grinding mobs and pulling several at once.

Concentration Aura:

This one is rarely used by most paladins, but is bloody important. What it does is add a 35% chance to not set back your casting meter if you are hit while casting a spell. Mages and priests will love having this on, and for the paladin this means if you use spiritual focus (max 70% chance to heal uninterrupted), combined with concentration aura you will get 100% uninterrupted healing. Yes, it does stack this way – you can be hit by 20 mobs at once and still not get your healing time set back. When other casters don’t need this constantly, ie. when I’m solo, I will use Dev or Ret aura for combat and quickly switch Concentration on immediately before any heal to ensure I don’t lose time on casting, then switch back after. It’s also the aura I usually have up in PvP, as when I need to heal there I really, really don’t want to be interrupted.

Resistance Auras:

The remaining “trainer bought” auras add resistance to Shadow, Frost or Fire damage. These do stack with any resistances from items, and add +60 to each at the highest level. The paladin’s ability to add +60 fire resistance for example is rather useful for a group going to take on Onyxia or MC. Simply use these when the damage you take is one of these types, and don’t forget it works in PvP too – fire res against a fire mage, frost res against a frost mage, shadow res against a shadow priest or warlock. If you know what type of damage is coming your way, switch the appropriate aura on.

Sanctity Aura:

This one can only be obtained by paladins who have enough points invested in the Retribution talent tree to get it. It will add 10% to any holy damage dealt by a group member under the influence. This is useful if you go for a high Retribution build as it will increase all your holy damage from SoC, JoC etc. and can help a paladin who intends to tank by causing more damage for generating aggro. Holy paladins will love being grouped with a Ret paladin who has this aura up.

Blessings:

The core of a Paladin support role comes from our blessings. Up to lvl 60, these will last a max of 5 minutes per cast and provide bonuses to the recipient. At lvl 60 you can then get Greater Blessings, which last 15 minutes but cost more mana per cast and require the reagent Symbol of Kings each time. These reagents can be bought in stacks of 20 for 30s, or 24s if you have enough reputation to reduce the price. Also note that a Greater blessing will be cast on anyone of the same class as the actual target, if they’re within range – so if 3 rogues are close and you cast Might on one, they will all get it. The blessings available are as follows:

Blessing of Might:

A blessing to help those doing melee damage, this blessing adds attack power when cast. The highest is +155 at lvl 60, though you can use talent points to make this stronger and there is also a higher level of the blessing available as a drop from AQ20 that will give +185. The max from BoM is +22 with 5 points improving it and the extra rank from AQ. This is usually the primary blessing to give to Warriors, feral Druids, Rogues and Paladins who do damage.

Blessing of Wisdom:

This one is for casters, regenerating mana every 5 seconds. The highest at lvl 60 is +30 mana every 5 seconds, though again there is one available as a drop that will do +33. If you have it improved through talents that adds another 20%. Generally anyone who uses mana will want this, though with most cloth-wearers I’d give them Salvation first, and then Wisdom if there’s a second Paladin around.

Blessing of Salvation:

This one simply reduces threat generation, up to -30% at the highest level. A great blessing for cloth wearers, as keeping them safe is rather vital when in a group. Also should be given to any other non-tanks if there are multiple paladins around, but if you’re the only one this is generally just for clothies and classes with more armour will prefer other blessings first in a small instance. An extremely valuable blessing for large raids, probably the most important for a dps class when you need the tank to keep aggro at all times.

Blessing of Sacrifice:

Not often used, this one takes damage away from the target and deals it to the paladin who cast the blessing instead. At the highest level this transfers 55 damage per hit. Note that this blessing only has a length of 30 seconds, meaning frequent spamming of it if you intend to keep it on someone. Useful perhaps in some situations, like if you’re supporting a warrior who’s being hit by a rogue with two fast daggers. It also means you can’t be sheeped with this on someone, as you’ll keep receiving damage from them to break it.

Blessing of Light:

Casting this will make your Holy Light and Flash of Light healing spells more effective on the target. At the highest level this adds up to +400 for Holy Light and +115 to Flash of Light. This is great in groups for anyone you’ll be focusing your healing on, ie. a tank. In large raids, if you have enough paladins, putting this on everyone is very nice.

Blessing of Protection:

A little different, this one puts the recipient in a shield that blocks any physical damage for up to 10 seconds at the highest level, but also means they can’t do physical damage while the shield is up. This doesn’t affect magic, so spell damage can still be dealt out and received. I like to put this on a priest or mage who’s aggroed melee damage mobs, giving me time to heal them before they die. No use on anyone being hit by magic damage of course, and never put it on a tank as they will lose aggro instantly! This is also amusing when used in battlegrounds, as warriors and rogues will still try to hit through the shield which can buy your team valuable seconds. Anyone you use this blessing on can’t be given another magic shield for 1 minute after, so use wisely. 5 minute cooldown on this, or 3 if you have it improved through talents.

Blessing of Freedom:

This lovely little blessing will remove any existing movement impairing effects, and give the target immunity to them for 10 seconds. As this has a 20 second cooldown you can have it running 50% of the time if wanted. Perfect if you’ve just been put in a frost trap, or a spider’s web. Usually sees more use in PvP, and is invaluable there, but also shouldn’t be forgotten for group instances… especially if it’s the tank who’s been trapped!

Blessing of Kings:

Available only to those with sufficient points in the Protection talent tree, Kings will increase all attributes by 10%. Generally the strongest all-round blessing but not many paladins have it, as the Protection tree isn’t used much. Damn nice though, especially when there are multiple paladins… as one can give this to everyone and others add different blessings depending on what’s required.

Blessing of Sanctuary:

A lot of people probably don’t even know this blessing exists, as it requires 20 points in the protection tree. What it does is reduce incoming damage on the target from all sources by 24. In addition, if a player with this blessing blocks a melee attack they’ll deal 35 holy damage back to the attacker. Nice to have on tanks – and anyone else in the raid – if enough paladins are available and someone has this. Seals, and Judging them:
Some people seem to get confused with the different seals, and how they work. It’s actually rather simple…. You cast a seal on yourself, which lasts up to 30 seconds giving various bonuses on melee hits. Some add damage to each hit, others can regenerate health or mana. You will always want a seal running through combat, refreshing when it expires. On top of that you gain the ability to “Judge” these seals. What this means is that you will activate the secondary ability on the seal – again each having a different effect. After judging, the seal expires and you need to cast a new one. I’ll outline each of the seals and their respective judgement effect:

Seal of Righteousness:

Adds holy damage to every melee attack. No chance on hit, it always occurs. It has a damage range, which adds more to a slow weapon’s hit than it does to a fast. This is to stop it being overpowered on a fast weapon… it all evens out to the same average. The extra damage isn’t huge, but guaranteed damage every hit is nice if you want constant damage and not have to rely on luck as with some other seals. Generally most useful on a fast 1h weapon. This also benefits greatly from having Seal of the Crusader “judged” first. Most paladins use this in one-hand PvP and when tanking with a weapon faster than 2.2 speed as they feel SoC procs too infrequently at that speed and the consistant damage of righteousness is more useful. That’s a valid point, and I can’t argue with the reasoning there. In PvP though I will use SoC on any weapon 2.0 or slower as the damage potential on SoC is greater, with it being able to crit, so I keep my fingers crossed for good SoC procs. Anything below 2.0, SoR is what I use.

Judgement effect casts instant holy damage on the target. Like the seal itself, this damage isn’t huge but everything counts. Can crit as a melee hit for 200% damage.

Seal of the Crusader:

Adds attack power and reduces attack time by 40%, but also makes your hits do less damage. You’ll attack faster, but do less damage per hit than without the seal. Overall DPS (damage per second) is increased. Not used too often, generally in the early levels before you get SoC. The main use of SotC is when you judge it.

Judgement effect increases holy damage taken by the target for the next 10 seconds. This judgement is nice to cast at the start of a fight, as it is refreshed with every melee attack on the affected target and will then keep adding extra damage to your holy attacks. At the top end this will give up to +140 holy damage, which depends on the actual ability used as will be explained a little later.

Seal of Command:

Generally seen as the strongest combat seal a Paladin has, SoC requires sufficient points in the Retribution talent tree to obtain. Yes, unlike other seals it’s a talent and not a generic skill. SoC has a chance of adding holy damage equal to 70% of the damage from your melee hit (before armour reduction is factored in), and this holy damage is able to crit. SoC is calculated as a melee attack, so uses melee crit chance and does 200% damage on a crit rather than the 150% a spell would do. Also, as the damage is calculated from what your melee strike did before armour reduction was applied, it will often look like 100% or more instead of just 70%. This seal can give a huge damage increase, but does depend on luck – it can occur often, or seemingly not at all. Personally I find it great, and wouldn’t want to PvP without it… also damn nice for PvE damage.

The proc rate on SoC is 7 ppm (procs per minute), equating to once every 8.57 seconds on average. This average is then applied to your weapon speed to give the percentage chance on hit, for example a 2.2 speed 1h sword would have an average SoC proc rate of 26%. Judgement effect is similar to that of Seal of Righteousness, as it adds instant holy damage to the target. The difference is that if your target is stunned, the damage will be doubled. This judgement uses melee crit for 200% damage.

Seal of Light:

Using this seal will give each of your melee hits a chance to give you health back. This health is just generated, not stolen from the target. I’m currently unsure of the proc rate on this, and haven’t really tested it. The thing about this seal is that when you use it it means you lack the extra damage from SoC/SoR, but can be useful to regenerate health while grinding with a fastw eapon.

Judgement effect is similar to that of the seal, in that it gives a chance per hit to return health. The difference is that it works for anyone who uses a melee attack on the judged target. This judgement period is refreshed with each attack, and will disappear if the target goes unhit for 10 seconds (or 40 with improvement through talents). While the seal itself is not something I use, the judgement is excellent and should be maintained on any boss fight. Not worth putting on normal mobs, but in AQ/MC etc. the mobs there have enough health and last long enough for it to be worth keeping on them, and not only the bosses in those places.

Seal of Wisdom:

This acts the same as Seal of Light, but this time restoring mana instead of health. Again I’m unsure of the proc rate. If you’re tanking and mana is almost out, you can activate this seal to gete mana back up if you can miss the extra damage/aggro from SoR or SoC a while.

Judgement effect is also the same as judging Seal of Light, but with mana instead of health. The difference is that casters (mages etc.) can use their wands to hit the affected target to get the chance of mana returned. This is another one that should be kept on bosses if possible, and mobs in MC/AQ etc. I also judge this instead of light if I’m tanking in a smaller instance, as it lets me keep getting mana back while using SoC or SoR for extra aggro.

Seal of Justice:

Chance on hit to stun the target for 2 seconds. Not one you can use on bosses, it will work on mobs and other players. To be honest I don’t see much use for this seal… you can’t predict when it will stun and it lacks the extra damage SoC or SoR give. Too inconsistant for my liking. The judgement however is more useful.

When you judge Justice, your target is unable to flee for 10 seconds (timer refreshed every time you hit them). This doesn’t work on bosses or players but on mobs it prevents runners. This judgement is rarely used, but is actually an excellent method of preventing a mob running and pulling extra groups which could cause a wipe – just judge this once, then put your combat seal on and the mod will be unable to run. Ratehr useful in a place like scholo where large groups of mobs are very close together.

Part 4: Talents

Talents are at the core of any character. Depending on what you want to focus on you’ll take different talents to suit that goal. The thing with paladin talents is that there are many misconceptions as to what each path lets you do. The typical view people take is that Holy is for paladins who try to heal, Protection for those who try to tank and Retribution for those who try to do DPS. Yes, people generally are that negative about our talent trees… taking the view that whichever we focus on forces into one role only, and doesn’t let us do well in that role anyway. That’s complete rubbish :) First off, Holy is not just for healing – yes, it has the healing talents in there which are great but as a paladin is a melee/caster hybrid, holy is also an option for damage. Seen all that high-end plate gear with +damage/healing on? Likewise, Protection is not just for “trying to tank”. It has a couple of very nice tanking skills but the protection tree also has talents for protecting/buffing others and extra PvP damage with a 1h weapon. The Retribution tree is the one that is focused purely on damage, with that damage seeing most benefit from a big, slow 2h weapon.

The question you have to ask yourself when doing talents is what you want your paladin to excel at – not what you want to do. The reason I mention that is because our talents simply help us in certain aspects, rather than dictate what we have to do. Our gear is probably the most defining aspect in that, as a paladin with 0 holy talents can still heal ok with the right gear while a holy paladin without any healing gear won’t heal too well at all. The same with tanking, you can do it without any protection talents at all if you have the gear for it.

So when deciding on talents we don’t tell ourselves “Ok, I want to be able to do this so these are the talents I need” but rather “I’d like to strengthen my focus in this, and these are the talents that can give me an edge there”. A subtle difference :) Right then, I’ll get onto the talents themselves with my views on how useful they are.

Holy Talents:

Tier 1: Divine Strength

Rank 5/5: +10% Strength
A simple talent, each point gives you +2% strength up to a maximum +10% with 5 points. This tends to be the most common starting talent for paladins, and is quite good. This talent is most useful for paladins who intend to melee a lot: particularly those who invest mainly in the Retribution tree. If your gear gives you 250 strength, this talent will give 25 extra which is almost +4 dps. While great for a melee-oriented paladin, the difficulty comes for one who wants to spec for focus on healing. In that case, you have to decide if you use your remaining points on this or in another tree.

Tier 1: Divine Intellect

Rank 5/5: +10% Intellect
As with Divine Strength, this adds +2% intellect for every point up to a max of 10% at rank 5/5. This is the tier 1 talent of choice for any paladin who wants to focus in the holy tree, especially those wanting a boost to healing ability. Personally if I had to choose between this or divine strength I’d take this as it adds a bit more flexibility – gear with 250 intellect would add 25 more, which is almost 1% spell crit and 375 mana.

Tier 2: Spiritual Focus (requires 5 points in Holy tree)

Rank 5/5: 70% chance not to lose casting time when damaged
Spiritual Focus is a situation talent. In raids, you’ll probably never need this as you’ll not take damage that can delay heals apart from the occasional aoe hit. Outside raids, however, it’s quite essential for me. When grinding it lets you keep going and going, healing mid-fight easy enough. In small instances it lets you keep healing through bad pulls that get you attacked by mobs. A big bonus to this talent is that it stacks with concentration aura for 100% undelayed casting when damaged. In PvP, this means you can count on getting your heal in when you need it without being delayed 2-3 seconds by that rogue who keeps hitting you (aside from being kicked/silenced etc.). For me, this is a very important talent in the holy tree and the best choice from tier 2 to get to tier 3, though some will take both divine strength & intellect to bypass this one.

Tier 2: Improved Seal of Righteousness (requires 5 points in Holy tree)

Rank 5/5: +15% damage to Seal of Righteousness
SoR is the seal that people often use with fast 1h weapons, using SoC at other times – or for those without SoC, they’ll use SoR all the time. Personally I never use SoR. I have SoC and even when tanking with my Quel (which is relatively fast at 2.0 speed) I’ll use that as I find it generates more holy damage than SoR does, even if I had this talent. I see this one only being worthwhile in a Holy/Prot build – in that case you won’t have SoC from the Ret tree and thus will be using SoR a lot. You’d probably then have the points free to put here. That’s the only time I’d consider it. Note that this talent doesn’t increase your damage when judging SoR, just the seal itself.

Tier 3: Healing Light (requires 10 points in Holy tree)

Rank 3/3: +12% to healing spells
Another simple one, this adds +4% to healing for each point up to a max of +12%. I see this talent as essential for any paladin who’s going full holy with a focus on healing – with my current healing gear, this is giving me around +70 healing which is quite a lot for just 3 talent points. Also rememebr healing isn’t just for raids, it keeps you alive longer in PvP and every little extra can mean your opponent needing another hit to kill you which can mean the difference between winning or losing. Paladins specced high in Ret or Prot can still get this, though it does then mean choosing what to leave out for it. I love this talent… great for any raiding paladin, and a nice bonus in PvP too.

Tier 3: Consecration (requires 10 points in Holy tree)

Rank 1/1: AoE doing 384 damage over 8 sec to any enemy walking onto it
Consecration is an aoe spell, covering an area of ground around you which will deal 384 damage over 8 seconds to any enemy who walks onto it, at lvl 60 with the highest level of the spell. First off, this has a very high mana cost for the damage it does on a single target making it a waste of mana in single target situations. Even on 2 targets it’s borderline. Against 3+ targets you’re then looking at good damage return for mana cost, and the more you hit with it the better it becomes. The undead groups of mobs at the beginning of strat scarlet area perfect example of where consecration shines. It also provides an excellent tool for a tanking paladin to keep groups of mobs aggroed and not running off to hit casters, and remember you can keep spamming a lower level consecration for less mana to maintain that aggro. Another very useful thing with consecration is in PvP, if you think a stealthed opponent is nearby you can spam lvl 1 consecration for hardly any mana cost which won’t do much damage but will desteath the enemy if they get too close and give you a couple of vital seconds to get the first hit in before you’re ambushed. Worth taking for any paladin investing in the holy tree, particularly those looking to tank from time to time. For the tanking, Prot-specced paladins should be looking to get this too.

Tier 3: Improved Lay on Hands (requires 10 points in Holy tree)

Rank 2/2: +30% to LoH target for 2 minutes, -20 minutes cooldown
Lay on Hands is an instant heal on a 60 minute cooldown that heals the target for the paladin’s total health, and also gives the target 550 mana if they’re a mana user. With the improved talent, the first point gives +15% armour to the target for 2 minutes and reduces the cooldown to 50 minutes. With both points improving it, +30% armour and cooldown reduced to 40 minutes. This for me is one of the best talents in the holy tree. For raiding, if several paladins have this each can use it on almost every boss and that huge health boost and 30% extra armour then become very useful for tanks at critical moments. Not just a raiding talent, the reduced cooldown lets you use it more often in PvP and small instances which is always fun. If you’re going Holy, try to get this.

Tier 3: Unyielding Faith (requires 10 points in Holy tree)

Rank 2/2: 10% chance to resist Fear and Disorient effects
5% chance for the first point, 10% with two. Higher chance of resisting fear sounds nice on paper but having used this for a long time it rarely worked. In my opinion, not often enough to be worth 2 talent points anyway. It’s a talent that sounds great for PvP (we all know how annoying fear si there) and PvE encounters like Onyxia and Magmadar with fear, but honestly I’d only take it if you have spare points you can’t think of anything better to spend them on. I’d rather have more reliable talents.

Tier 4: Illumination (requires 15 points in Holy tree)

Rank 5/5: 100% chance for critical heals to return the mana cost of the spell
This talent is primarily why the Holy tree is often seen as required for a paladin to heal. That’s not quite true, but Illumination is indeed a brilliant tallent. With the full 5 points invested in it, every time flash of light or holy light crits you get the mana back that you used to cast the spell. In raids, and as your gear gets better with higher intellect and spell crit, this will occur more frequently. The mana return of illumination is why holy paladins can have the best mana efficiency of any healer in the game, and when combined with divine favor further in the tree you can get huge crit heals when you need them with mana back – perfect! If you go Holy, you need this. Excellent talent. Ret paladins can also get it in a 20/0/31 setup. Also a prerequisite for both divine favor and holy shock, you need this to get them.

Tier 4: Improved Blessing of Wisdom (requires 15 points in Holy tree)

Rank 2/2: 20% increase to BoW effects
BoW is, at standard level, 30 mana/5 seconds at lvl 60. With 2 points invested here that adds 20% to it to become 36, great to give casters on raids. The extra rank of BoW that drops in AQ20 can then take it up to a maximum 39 mp5. If you’re going full Holy, this is worth taking for buffing both yourself and others. Ultimately whether or not you take this depends on how many other paladins on raids have it, unless you want it for solo use too. It certainly is useful, and a good use of 2 points.

Tier 5: Divine Favor (requires 20 points in Holy tree and 5 Illumination)

Rank 1/1: Next flash of light, holy light or holy shock is a guaranteed critical hit
Divine Favor does exactly what it says on the tin. After you cast this it grants a crit on your next flash of light, holy light or offensive holy shock – holy shock used as a heal doesn’t work with divine favor for a certain crit at the time of writing this. As you need 5 points in illumination to get this, you’re then guaranteed the mana cost back from it if used with one of the two healing spells (holy shock doesn’t currently return mana). If you’re going Holy, you’ll be getting this and it sure is nice. The cooldown is 2 minutes. Along with the obvious raiding benefit of a huge, free crit heal every 2 minutes it’s also great for that same reason in PvP. You can either use it offensively to get a crit on holy shock if you have that spell, or as I prefer, get that free huge heal every 2 minutes.

Tier 5: Lasting Judgement (requires 20 points in Holy tree)

Rank 3/3: Duration of Judgements of Light and Wisdom extended by 30 seconds
This may not sound great, but after you’ve used the two judgements this works with (Light and Wisdom) you’ll realise just how useful this talent is. The judgements have a standard duration of 10 seconds. Every time you hit the target, that duration is refreshed but as a paladin if you take time away from hitting to heal or by getting knocked back it’s very easy for your judgement to disappear and you have to put it up again which costs mana. With this talent, every point adds 10 more seconds to the duration. With the full 3 points that means 40 seconds total – you can judge at the start, heal for 30-35 seconds and then quickly run to hit the target to refresh it again for another 40. This talent lets a paladin keep JoL or JoW up even while pure healing, which is impossible otherwise. You could say melee paladins can just keep those up, but if healing palas can do thse it lets anyone doing melee keep Judgement of Crusader up for extra holy damage – and it’s easier for us to keep it up, lets a paladin without this talent step back to heal a bit without worrying about losing their judgement for the raid. I like this talent, though it can be a choice between this and Imp. BoW if you’re only putting 31 points into holy.

Tier 6: Holy Power (requires 25 points in Holy tree)

Rank 5/5: +5% critical chance with spells
Pretty simple again here… 1% spell crit for each point invested. A very nice talent combined with Illumination, the more you crit with heals the more often you get mana back and the longer you can keep healing. Also nice when used offensively with holy shock, which does very nice damage on a crit. If you’re going Holy for either the healing, offensive spellpower or both, get this – you won’t regret it. Every time you crit with a spell you’ll be glad you have this talent.

Tier 7: Holy Shock (requires 30 points in Holy tree and 1 Divine Favor)

Rank 1/1: Instant spell that hits an enemy or heals a friend for 365-395 damage/healing.
This is it, the 31 point talent at the end of the Holy tree. 365-395 damage with 20 yard range on a 30 sec cooldown. Is it worth it? Many say no, but then they’re usually those who are specced for Retribution and don’t see the versatility of this spell. First off, it may not look like huge damage (I know I was initially disappointed when I was levelling and saw it didn’t do 1000 as I was hoping) but remember every bit of +damage gear you have will add to the damage this spell does. With high +damage/healing gear, holy shock can actually hit for quite a lot, especially when it crits. Having judgement of crusader on the target adds even more. Mine currently crits for around 800-850, which is certainly not low. You can use it for steady damage in a damage role, extra aggro and pulling when tanking and in PvP it both adds damage and let’s you finish off low-health runners. Again in PvP you can save this to hit anyone who tries to bandage while you’re healing in your bubble. On the healing side, it’s come in handy more than once when a tank has suddenly taken a huge damage spike, is on low red health and you can instantly give them a few hundred more health as a buffer instead of waiting and hoping your heal on a timer lands before they take another big hit. It really is a very flexible talent, becomes quite strong as you improve spell damage gear and I’d feel lost without it!

Protection Talents:

Tier 1: Improved Devotion Aura

Rank 5/5: +25% armor granted to Devotion Aura
This doesn’t add 25% to your total armor, just to devotion aura. As the aura gives 735 armour, the full bonus here would increase that to 919. Is 184 armour for 5 talent points worth it? Absolutely not. Even if you want to give a little extra armour to a raid tank, there are many better uses for 5 talent points. I see this is a complete waste of points.

Tier 1: Redoubt

Rank 5/5: +30% chance to block with shield after taking a crit
Redoubt has 2 great uses – tanking and PvP against melee opponents. With the full 5 poitns, after you receive a critical hit (either melee or spell) you get +30% chance to block with your shield for the next 10 seconds or 6 hits, whichever occurs first. Obviously you need a shield equipped for it to work and it’ll only have any effect against melee, but damn it’s useful. When tanking, if you take a big crit that’s exactly when yuo need extra protection so your healer can get your health abck up and this provides just that. In PvP it’s perfect against rogues – they typically hit fast and often and crit a lot, so you can have this almost constantly up when fighting rogues. This means a lot of blocks and seriously improved damage mitigation as a result. Rogues hate fighting paladins with 1h/shield and redoubt, especially if you have a thorium spike added to the shield! Redoubt is a brilliant talent, and can fit in both Protection builds and all-round builds. I currently have 4 points in protection, and those are in 4 redoubt.

Tier 2: Precision (requires 5 points in Protection tree)

Rank 3/3: +3% chance to hit with melee
1% chance to hit for every point up to a max of 3. This is an interesting talent. As I’ll show later, +Hit is very similar to +Crit but the placement in tier 2 of the protection tree makes it a bit awkward to take for a dps role without losing out on things you want from holy/ret. For anyone speccing 11 in protection for BoK this talent is a great one to have if you’re also going to do plenty of melee. If your focus is going to be on healing/support, you might want to look at other things from tier 2 to progress through the tree. For a full prot tanking build, this is nice as less misses means more aggro.

Tier 2: Guardian’s favor (requires 5 points in Protection tree)

Rank 2/2: Blessing of Protection cooldown reduced by 120 sec and Blessing of Freedom duration extended by 6 sec
This talent is a perfect fit for the tree it’s in: protection. With BoP the 2 points reduce the cooldown on that from 5 minutes to 3, which is very nice as BoP is a great tool for paladins that is very underused. This has uses in both PvE and PvP – in raids/instances you can shield a clothie who nukes a bit too much and gets aggro, while in PvP for example you can put it on the priest who has 3 rogues attacking him/her and laugh as their efforts are wasted while the priest keeps healing. A reduced cooldown lets you use it more often. The extended BoF, well that is a PvP thing again that is good for both yourself and others. It protects you longer from slowing effects and is perfect for protecting WSG flag carries. This talant is great for 2 points, well worth getting if you’re putting points into protection. Good for PvE and brilliant in PvP protection.

Tier 2: Toughness (requires 5 points in Protection tree)

Rank 5/5: +10% armor from items
Another simple one, each point gives +10% armour from your items up to a max 10%. From items means armour, shield, trinkets/rings with armor rating on them etc. This one is nice to have if you’re planning on tanking things, as it can give around 750 extra armour with blue tanking gear. Also nice for a bit extra cover against melee in PvP if you’re speccing in this tree.

Tier 3: Blessing of Kings (requires 10 points in Protection tree)

Rank 1/1: Buff giving +10% to all stats
There’s no questioning it, this is the strongest blessing a paladin can have and the most wanted. That’s why it needs talent points to obtain, and a slightly annoying 11 protection points required to get to it which limits what you can get in other trees. The fact that both BoK and SoC from the Retribution tree are 11 point talents means if you go Holy for holy shock you can’t get both this and SoC, you have to choose. If you take this and SoC, you can’t have holy shock. That said, it is a very good buff and every guild should have several paladins with this so you’re not always reliant on the same paladin being at each raid to give it. If you’re going Protection specced, get this. If you’re thinking of going 11 Prot to get this, it’s definitely worth it if you’re willing to lose either holy shock or SoC.

Tier 3: Improved Righteous Fury (requires 10 points in Protection tree)

Rank 3/3: Threat generated by Righteous Fury increased by 50%
Righteous Fury increases thread generated from holy damage by 60%. With +50% from 3 points in this talent, that adds 30% more for a total +90% increased threat from holy damage. This has two uses. First and most obvious is when you’re tanking and you need every bit of threat you can get. Second is when you’re not the tank but in a group and protecting the casters in case anything goes for them, with this on it’d be a bit easier to pull mobs away from them. The primary use is in tanking though, and this talent is pretty much necessary for any paladin speccing in Prot specifically for tanking.

Tier 3: Shield Specialization (requires 10 points in Protection tree and 10 points in Redoubt)

Rank 3/3: Increase damage absorbed with a shield by 30%
For this talent I first have to remind you how blocking works. When you block, you don’t cancel out all the damage from the hit. Instead you block a certain amount of it, depending on your blocking value. For example, a shield with 40 blocking would cancel out 40 damage from a blocked hit, with any damage after that still being dealt. This talent with 30% extra absorbed would turn 40 blocking into 52, thus becomes more useful the higher your block value is (from shield and any item with +block value. It’s a nice thing to have if you’ll be tanking and speccing with plenty of prot anyway. If you’re only in Prot tree for BoK, this can be missed.

Tier 3: Anticipation (requires 10 points in Protection tree)

Rank 5/5: +10 Defence
Very simple, each point gives you 2 defence up to a maximum of 10. This gives +0.4% chance to each for parry, block and dodge. Also 0.4% more chance for your enemy to miss you and 0.4% less chance of receiving a critical hit. Is that worth 5 points? It depends what you’re intending to do. As with shield spec, if you’re going full prot for tanking this will be a nice talent if you can spare the points. If you’re just putting in 11 points for BoK or 25 for Reckoning, it could be skipped.

Tier 4: Improved Hammer of Justice (requires 15 points in Protection tree)

Rank 3/3: -15 seconds to Hammer of Justice cooldown
Hammer of Justice has a base cooldown of 60 seconds. The stun itself lasts 6 seconds. With this talent the cooldown becomes 45 seconds. This won’t be much use on bosses as they’re usually immune to stun but it lets you stun mobs more frequently and perhaps more importantly, if you’re using your Prot spec in PvP you’ll find this talent particularly useful there. Worth taking if you’re going this far down the tree, for enhanced mob control and annoying the horde with frequent stuns in PvP – very nice combined with judging SoC.

Tier 4: Improved Concentration Aura (requires 15 points in Protection tree)

Rank 3/3: +15% to Concentration Aura effect and 15% chance to resist Silence and Interrupt effects.
Concentration Aura adds 35% chance to not lose casting time when damaged. With it improved that becomes 50%, with 15% chance to resist Silence and Interrupt effects on top. This boost to the aura is nice, though the 50% is no different from 35% if you already have Spiritual Focus from healing. This improvement has most use if you’re not investing in the Holy tree, and still want a decent chance of healing undelayed in PvP or when grinding – without this improved or spiritual focus you’d be in trouble if you’re grinding mobs and need to heal fast. So I’d say if you’re speccing Prot and not taking the holy talent, take this. If you have spiritual focus, this isn’t necessary unless you want the resist chance against mages in PvP.

Tier 5: Blessing of Sanctuary (requires 20 points in Protection tree)

Rank 1/1: Damage reduced by 24 and 35 damage dealt to the attacker when a melee attack is blocked
This may not sound a lot, but is actually rather good. As it only costs 1 point, a paladin going heavily into the prot tree should take this as extra damage mitigation for tanks (and anyone else in the raid) never hurts. 24 less damage from all sources adds up to quite a lot when someone is taking steady damage, and the damage return on a block is a nice bonus for tanks.

Tier 5: Reckoning (requires 20 points in Protection tree)

Rank 5/5: 100% chance to gain an extra attack after being victim of a crit, stacking up to 4 times
Reckoning is why a lot of Protection paladins invest in this tree. Reckoning may seem a little complicated but really is quite simple. Any time you’re crit, whether by melee or magic, you gain an extra attack. If you’re continually attacking yourself you’ll just see 1 extra instant attack after being crit. What makes this talent powerful is what’s called a reckoning bomb. As the extra attacks can stack up to 4 times, you can sit back and not use your melee attack on the target until you’ve been crit 4 times and have the full stack. Then you let loose and hit them with 5 simultaneous attacks – adding more through seal of righteousness or seal of command if you have one of those activated. A good reckoning bomb can do a lot of damage at once, but does require patience to use. This technique is very PvP focused – it’s certainly not something you can use unless you’re being attacked yourself, as it requires you to be critted to work. For tanking, reckoning does help with extra threat. If you’re trying to do damage to a boss when you’re not tank, reckoning won’t be used as you won;t be hit to activate it. Take it if you’re going this far down the tree, but only go this far in prot specifically for reckoning if you understand the situations where it works and really want it for that.

Tier 6: One Handed Weapon Specialization (requires 25 points in Protection tree)

Rank 5/5: +10% damage with one handed weapons
Whether or not you take this depends on how much you plan on using 1h weapons. Being heavy prot, that is likely to be most of the time unless you’re putting extra points into Retribution for SoC and the crit chance there. Even with those Ret talents, you may want to 1h/shield constantly, and if you have holy shield you’re even more likely to do so. +10% damage is nice, but 5 points invested here do limit what you have spare for other trees. If you have the points to spare, go for it – extra damage can’t hurt. Make sure you’re not missing out on better talents from other trees by doing so though.

Tier 7: Holy Shield (requires 30 points in Protection tree and 1 point in Blessing of Sanctuary)

Rank 1/1: Increases chance to block by 30% for 10 seconds or 4 blocks. Also deals 130 damage to the attacker on a block.
This is the talent many paladins think is vital to be able to tank. Yes, it is good – the extra blocking will reduce the damage you take, especially when combined with Redoubt being activated as the two together then give +60% block chance. 130 damage on each block then is great for extra threat when tanking or hurting a melee opponent in PvP. It’s not necessary to be able to tank though, so don’t think you have to get this talent before you can tank. It simply makes you more durable as a tank as you not only have this talent but also the other tanking talents you pick up along the path to getting this. If you really want to focus on tanking and/or plan on doing a lot of PvP against melee oponnents, this is fine to invest in. If you only plan on the occasional bit of tanking and want PvP strength in a more generic way against casters rather than just rogues, this may not be the best option.

Retribution Talents:

Tier 1: Improved Blessing of Might

Rank 5/5: +20% attack power granted by Blessing of Might
Basic BoM gives +155 attack power. With the 5 points improving it that becomes +186, so 31 extra AP or 15.5 strength. If you compare this to Divine Strength Strength from the Holy tree, that talent would give you 15.5 exta strength if you had 155 str from gear. s you can easily get 250 strength from decent blues, divine strength would then give +25 which surpasses the +15.5 here. That’s only looking at yourself though, and Imp. BoM is more for buffing your group/raid as a whole. Rogues and warriors will love the extra attack power, not just yourself. Also if you look at it from a solo point of view you can have both this and divine strength from the holy tree. Most Ret paladins will take this talent and it is useful, you just might want to skip it and save points if many other paladins in raids already have it improved and you wouldn’t be needed to put BoM on anyway.

Tier 1: Benediction

Rank 5/5: -15% mana cost of Seals and Judgements
-15% mana on seals and judgements may not sound huge but you will use these a lot. Some paladins simple judge every 29 seconds before seals expire, others judge whenever the cooldown on judging is up and do so every 10 seconds, or 8 with the talents to reduce that. For that second method in particular, Benediction will save quite a lot of mana over the course of a fight. Generally whether or not you take this depends on if you prefer it over Imp. BoM, and that for me comes down to how many paladins already have it improved when you raid as I mentioned above. If so, and you’re looking at doing a lot of judging and recasting seals, benediction is the stronger option. You can take both though, and that’s fine if you have the points to spare.

Tier 2: Improved Judgement

Rank 2/2: Reduces the cooldown of Judgement by 2 seconds
Judgement is normally on a 10 second cooldown. With this talent you can drop it to 8 seconds. You should only do this if you intend to continually judge whenever the cooldown is up (for example judging Command as fast as possible for extra damage) and really needs to be combined with benediction. If you’re not going to do that high-paced judging, save the points for other talents. Personally I’d skip this and save the points.

Tier 2: Improved Seal of the Crusader (requires 5 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 3/3: Increased Attack Power bonus of SotC and Holy damage bonus of JotC by 15%
3 points here gives +15% attack power to seal of the crusader and 15% extra holy damage on judgement of the crusader. The seal boost isn’t too useful, as Ret paladins will want to use Seal of Command instead for high bonus holy damage on hits. The judgement boost is where this talent is used. When you judge crusader on a target it increases all holy damage done to it by up to 130. With this talent, that becomes +150. 20 extra damage isn’t huge, but the longer the fight is and the more holy damage you inflict through SoC or any other means the more it adds up. Particularly useful on boss fights if you’re in a damage role. The downside is that you have to hit the target every 10 seconds to keep it refreshed. Not an overpowered talent, but worth taking if you’re going heavy Ret for a focus on damage. You’ll want to squeeze out every bit you can.

Tier 2: Deflection (requires 5 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 5/5: +5% chance to Parry
Parry works against melee attacks. 5% extra chance to parry reduces the damage you take when receiving melee attacks, as a parried attack does 0 damage. That makes this talent great for PvP against melee classes, tanking and generally any time you’re grinding/in an instance with mobs hitting you. From a raiding point of view you wouldn’t notice not having this as you’re not going to have Golemagg hitting you for it to be used, so if your interest is purely raiding you can skip this and take the faster judgements and improved seal of crusader instead. For solo/small group work, I like Deflection. Every parry keeps you alive longer.

Tier 3: Vindication (requires 10 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 3/3: Chance on melee hit to reduce the target’s agility and strength by 15% for 10 sec
Let’s say you’re in PvP against a warrior who has 300 strength and 150 agility. If Vindication procs they then have 45 less strength and 22 less agility for 10 seconds. 45 strength is roughly 6.4 dps, so with a 3.8 speed weapon that warrior will hit you for around 24 less damage per hit for the next 10 seconds with 1% less crit chance. For PvP this is only any use against warriors, rogues and meleeing shaman. In PvE, it’ll work on mobs and smaller bosses but most main bosses are immune to the effects. As such, take it if you’re going to do a lot of PvP and have the points to spare but for raiding I’d consider saving the points for other things. This is an extra “oh well, I have points to use” talent rather than a core necessity.

Tier 3: Conviction (requires 10 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 5/5: +5% crit chance on melee hits
Ok, now this one you simply cannot pass if you’re a Ret paladin. +5% melee crit not only works on weapon hits, but also crits for Seal of Command, Judgement of Command and Hammer of Wrath – yep, they all use melee crit rate and not spell crit. As melee crit works with so much of your damage output you really, really need this talent. xcellent for any melee paladin, but heavy Ret paladins in particular. You can live without it if you’re a Holy paladin focused on spellpower but if your Ret you want this. Also a prerequisite for Vengeance further down the tree.

Tier 3: Seal of Command (requires 10 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 1/1: Chance on hit to add holy damage equal to 70% of the damage of the attack
This is the strongest melee seal a paladin has and the reason why even most Holy paladins spec at least 11 points in the Retribution tree for the times they’re not healing. It works like this: SoC has a proc rate of 7ppm. That means an average proc rate of 7 procs per minute. 60/7 = 8.57. That is then factored into the speed of your weapon, so a 3.8 speed weapon will have 44% chance to proc SoC per hit (3.8/8.57 = 0.44). This means the slower your weapon is, the greater chance of proccing SoC on a hit. When SoC procs it adds additional damage equal to 70% of the hit it procced off. If your hit is for 500, you can get a SoC for 350 and this can then crit for 700. What makes SoC even better is that there’s almost no holy resistance in the game and magic damage is not mitigated by armour, so SoC is excellent against plate wearers. The other part of SoC is the judgement. Judging command will deal an average of 180 damage to your target. If the target is stunned that damage is doubled to 360 average. If that then crits, 720 and so on. Additional spellpower (and judgement of crusader on the target) will further increase the damage done by both SoC and JoC, making them even stronger. Simply put, SoC has the greatest damage output of any seal we can get so must be a serious consideration for any paladin looking for high melee damage and can’t be skipped if you’re going full Ret.

Tier 3: Pursuit of Justice (requires 10 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 2/2: +8% movement speed
Another situational talent. If you’re a flag carrier in WSG, racing around on an epic mount or chasing someone who’s a couple of yards in front of you, you might find this talent great. In raids and instances it has no use whatsoever. That makes this a PvP talent in my eyes. That, combined with the fact that it won’t stack with speed enchants on boots etc. makes it a bit pointless for me and despite having some fun with it for a while I’d recommend saving the points for something else unless you really do loads of PvP and can’t live without the speed boost. As this adds the same speed bonus as the speed enchant on boots that makes this talent worth 7 stamina for 2 points – as they don’t stack, you can get this talent and 7 stam on your PvP boots or the boot speed enchant and not use this talent. If the talent was +7 stamina for 2 points, would you take it? As that’s essentially what it does.

Tier 4: Eye for an Eye (requires 15 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 2/2: Spell crits received deal 30% of the damage taken to the attacker
You’re in AB, a mage crits you for 2000. If you have Eye for an Eye, the mage then takes 600 damage themselves. It’s a great talent for any paladin who’s going to PvP a lot against casting classes, as if you receive a big crit they’ll take a hefty bit of damage too so even if you die shortly after the rest of your group can kill them easier. PvP is the primary use for this, so if you’re focused on raids you might want to save the points and not get this. Depends on your goal… this is a fun talent to have in battlegrounds, and ofc if you meet a caster 1v1 out in the world somewhere. One thing to note is that the damage dealt from this talent can never exceed 50% of your total health (so if you have 4k health, the max you can hit them back for is 2k which realistically is not going to happen all too often!)

Tier 4: Improved Retribution Aura (requires 15 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 2/2: Increases damage from Retribution Aura by 50%
Alrighty, this is simple. Ret aura normally does 20 holy damage to anything or anyone who hits you in melee. With this talent, that becomes 30 damage. After 10 hits that’s 300 damage instead of 200 if you have this aura up the whole time. Again, this is situational. Against rogues or fury warriors that could soon add up if they have two fast weapons. When grinding with this on, you could pull multiple mobs and do a little extra damage. When tanking it’d generate a tiny bit of extra threat. Ultimately it’s not too strong but nice enough to have if you have the points to spare – another one I wouldn’t say is a core talent at all, just a possible nice bonus talent. One other reason this isn’t such a great choice is that in the next tier Sanctity Aura becomes available.

Tier 5: Two Handed Weapon Specialization (requires 20 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 3/3: Increases damage with 2h weapons by 6%
This does exactly what it says, and that is to add 6% damage to melee attacks. If you’d hit for 300 normally, with this you’d hit for 18 more making it 318. A SoC prov would then get 13 extra damage as a result. Not huge for 3 talent points but the additional damage gets larger the better your gear is and if you’re specced heavy Ret for maximum melee damage output you’ll want to take this. A solid talent choice for a Ret paladin.

Tier 5: Sanctity Aura (requires 20 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 1/1: 10% extra holy damage dealt by all party members within 30 yards
This aura is a great one for squeezing out more damage as a Ret paladin. 10% extra holy damage means your SoC, JoC, HoW etc. will all be stronger and that adds up in a fight. Not only does it add to your damage but also to that of any other paladins or holy priests in your group, and they’ll love you for it. A ret paladin and holy paladin combo with sanctity aura up make a very nice team. I’ll keep this one short: If you’re going this high up the Retribution tree, get this aura.

Tier 6: Vengeance (requires 25 points in Retribution tree and 5 points in Conviction)

Rank 5/5: Increases physical and holy damage by 15% for 8 sec after dealing a critical hit
Vengeance is a brilliant talent for significantly increasing the damage output of a Retribution paladin, and the main reason for investing this far down the tree. Every time you land a crit, physical and holy damage is increased by 15% for the next 8 seconds. This is triggered by a crit with your weapon, a SoC proc, JoC, hammer of wrath etc. Critting with any of those will activate Vengeance. If you have a crit rate of around 25% you should be able to keep this active more or less perpetually. 15% extra damage is quite a lot indeed, and combined with sanctity aura you’re looking at a large bonus. If you’re focused on melee combat, get this.

Tier 7: Repentance (requires 30 points in Retribution tree)

Rank 1/1: Puts the target in a state of meditation for 6 seconds
Repentance is a PvP talent, and even then more for 1v1 combat than group work like in the middle of BG’s. The reason for this is that any unlike a stun, any damage done to the target with repentance up will cancel it and wake the target up. That makes this primarily a tool for either stopping someonw from running so you can catch them, or to keep them unable to do anything while you heal yourself. If you’ve gone heavy Ret and intend to do PvP, take this and use it. f you’re focused on raiding, you could skip it if you really wanted to as it won’t work on mobs or bosses in places like MC. It will work im smaller instances as a form of emergency short lasting crowd control, or when grinding, but PvP is the main aspect of Repentance.

Ok then, I’ve given my view of all the talents. As for what I recommend, that’s for each individual to decide. Each tree has different things to help you in different situations. What you need to decide is what your focus is going to be in the game, and then look at the available talents to choose a path that will help you with that. The most versatile for me is a 31 Holy build, with the rest in retribution at least up to SoC as that gives both good healing bonuses and damage output from the two trees – melee boosts from ret and some extra holy damage from the holy tree. It’s a build that works well for both raids and PvP. Of course a couple of paladins in a guild do need BoK, and a spec to include that requires 11 protection. To take that route you could go 31 holy, 11 prot if you want to focus on the healing (and holy damage) side of things, or heavy retribution instead of holy if you want to maintain the melee bonuses. The one thing I’d advise against unless you’re doing it for specific reasons is the 31 protection build… I’m not saying it’s bad, as on the contrary it is very useful, but it is more restricted in where you get the best from it than holy and retribution are.

So there are many options, which should you choose? Well, to start with let’s assume you want to spec to give a boost to your healing. To do that, the following Holy talents will help:

-Divine Int for +10% intellect gives you a higher mana pool
-Spiritual Focus works with Conc. aura to let you heal while taking damage
-Healing Light gives up to +12% to healing spells
-Illumination returns mana when your heals crit
-Divine Favor guarantees your next heal will crit
-Holy Power increases spell crit to work with Illumination
-Holy Shock provides an instant heal, though it is mana inefficient

If you’re ready to spend a significant amount of your time as a healer in raids, speccing 31 Holy is the best option for you. You get access to all those talents listed and not only do you get the full healing potential but you also can use the extra holy damage from consecration and holy shock. The healing boosts aren’t just for raids either – they’ll help you while solo and in PvP. To me, a 31 Holy build offers the most versatility. You don’t need to go for the full 31 though – you can take 21 to get up to divine favor, 20 for illumination or even just 13 to get up to healing light. How many points you invest will depend on what else you want to do with your paladin.

The next big thing after healing is damage, and that can come in several forms. Let’s say you want to retain the image of a plate wearer wielding a big 2h sword, swinging that around when solo, in PvP and/or going for dps in raids. For 2h weapon dps you really will need at least some Retribution, and here are the key tslents from that tree that will help there::

-Seal of Command is the big one, the seal that gives most damage when used with a 2h in a dps role. Without this, doing good dps is rather difficult (and I mean dps, not burst damage)
-Conviction for higher crit rate
-Vengeance for a good extra damage boost
-2h weapon specialisation which isn’t huge, but still adds to damage
-Sanctity Aura to increase all holy damage

As I said in the list, SoC is the big talent. If you don’t have it you rely on SoR for extra damage output, and that simply offers considerably less dps than SoC when combined with a big, slow weapon. So if you want to retain your high damage output through melee, you’re going to want at least 11 Ret points for SoC access. Along with that, the 5 in Conviction are very good for increasing damage via crits – particularly if you go further down the tree for vengeance. Going for vengeance is the big decision with Retribution, as if you take that you cannot get 31 points in any other tree. For this you have to ask yourself that question; what do you see your paladin focused on most. If you want the maximum melee damage potential you can specc up for this, though that limits the available Holy to around 20/21. If you don’t want to take it you can explore the holy spell damage option of a holy shock build instead.

Finally we come to the Protection tree, the most unique of the three. There are a few reasons why you might be thinking of putting points in Prot:

a) Just going for 11 to get BoK access, staying focused in Holy or Ret.
b) Looking to build a strong Tankadin, which is still limited even if you’re 31 prot and restricts other options.
c) Going for Reckoning to build a reck-bomb PvP paladin.
d) Not interested in damage, and just want a strong Holy/Prot build for maximum raid support.

It all comes down to what you want to do. If you want to be able to dps, you’ll want 16-31 Ret. If you want efficient healing you’ll be looking for 13-31 Holy. As healing and damage are the two most common interests for paladins, that means most will use either a 31/0/20 Holy/Ret or a 20/0/31 build. Both work well for those two things – healing and damage, just slightly different approaches. 31/20 has a slight advantage with the healing, 20/0/31 or 21/0/30 has the melee dps advantage. 31/0/20 can give higher dps, but you become a bit more dependant on spell damage on your gear. Going into the Prot tree, 31/20/0 and 20/31/0 are both strong options for raid support and more defensive PvP. The one thing those prot builds lack is the ability to provide 2h SoC dps in a raid, but not all paladins want to do that anyway.

For most people I would suggest Holy/Ret or Ret/Holy – two very good all-round builds that let you do anything you want, as long as you have the gear. If you want to spec Prot for whiever reason, that’s great! Just be aware that you’re a bit more restricted in what you can do well, but as long as you understand that and are happy with why you spec that way then Prot can be very rewarding and certainly the least common approach.

Part 5: Combat Mechanics

No, this isn’t a section about how we can go around repairing machines in combat. It’s to explain how some functions of combat work, such as how hits and misses are calculated, what blocking does, how extra spell damage applies to each spell.

What determines a Hit, Miss etc?

To start with, when you make a hit there are 3 possible outcomes that can be “rolled”. These are a Hit, Crit or Miss. Each is mutually exclusive, so only one can occur. Let’s say you have 5% chance to miss and 20% crit chance. That means your chance of a normal hit is 75%. If you’re unlucky and roll a miss, that’s all that happens, you miss. If you roll a hit or a crit, that then receives an additional check to see if the target blocks, parries or dodges. If they dodge or parry, you do no damage. If they block, the mechanics for blocking come into effect which I’ll go through soon. There are also glancing blows which I’ll also explain. Note that attacks from behind cannot be parried or blocked.

What’s your chance of missing then? Well, the default for lvl 60 vs lvl 60 with your weapon skill equal to the target’s defence (300 for a lvl 60 mob) is 5% chance to miss. Each additional level your target is adds 5 to their defence and thus 0.2% to your chance to miss, so on lvl 63 mobs you’re looking at 5.6% base chance to miss. There are two ways to reduce that miss chance – items with +Hit on them, and increased weapon skill beyond 300. Every 1% extra Hit chance you get subtracts 1% from your chance to miss and adds it to your chance to hit. That means that against lvl 60 targets, +5% chance to hit would mean you won’t miss. For lvl 63 targets, +6% hit required for that. Using the previous example of 5% miss, 20% crit and 75% hit chances, if you then added +5% hit gear to that you’d end up simply with 20% crit, 80% hit, with each outcome then being a possible parry/dodge/block when the target’s defensive chances are applied. Note that if you gain +1% crit, that 1% is taken from your hit chance and added to crit instead with your chance to miss remaining the same.

What does + Weapon Skill do?

This is something not many people seem to understand. Quite simply, there a couple of things it does. First, every point of weapon skill you have higher than your target’s defence adds 0.04% to each of your chances to hit and crit and also lower’s your target’s chance to dodge, parry and block by 0.04% each. The default max for a lvl 60 character is 300 weapon skill and lvl 60 mobs have default 300 defence, with each extra lvl adding 5 to that. That means +5 weapon skill (from human sword/mace racial for example) would give you 305, which against a lvl 60 mob gives the following:

+0.2% chance to hit
+0.2% chance to crit
-0.2% chance for target to dodge a successful hit/crit
-0.2% chance for target to parry a successful hit/crit
-0.2% chance for target to block a successful hit/crit

Adding that up, you initially get 0.2% greater chance to hit (from the miss/hit/crit roll) and then if that hit lands, 0.4% less chance of it being fully negated with an extra small chance of avoiding a block from targets with a shield equipped.

The big thing with +weapon skill comes in PvE raids like Molten Core and beyond where you find mobs at lvl 62 and 63. Aside from the above stats, when fighting a mob 2 or more levels higher than you an extra possibility for a hit is introduced: glancing blow. After the initial miss/hit/crit roll, a successful hit or crit then has a chance to become a glancing blow instead. Research indicates a 40% chance of a glancing blow on a lvl 63 mob, and when a glance occurs you’d receive -30% damage on the hit with 300 weapon skill. Each point of weapon skill above 300 reduces the damage lost on a glancing blow by 3%, so taking the example of Human +5 with swords that would give a 15% reduction, making the 30% damage loss become only 15%. With +10 weapon skill you’d then get the full 30% damage loss removed and you hit as normal.

For an example with glancing blows, let’s say you’d normally hit a lvl 63 molten giant for 500. At 300 weapon skill you’d suffer a 30% drop for a glancing blow and only do 350 damage. At +5 (305) weapon skill you only lose 15% and hit for 425, with the full 500 damage if you happen to have +10 (310) weapon skill. As you can see, through a long fight increased weapon skill becomes very, very good on targets of lvl 63+.

So which is better, +1% Hit or +1% Crit?

From a PvE aspect, the two are actually pretty much the same in terms of end damage output, and here’s why. Let’s say your normal hit does 100 damage. If you crit, you do double that for 200. If you miss, you do 0. In both cases the difference is 100 damage. A more in-depth example can be given to further prove that, as I’ll show now. I’ll take the 100 average damage for a normal hit and assume the base values of 5% chance to miss, 15% crit and thus 80% hit. Over 1000 attacks, that would average out at the following:

[(1000*0.05*0)+(1000*0.15*200)+(1000*0.8*100)] = 0 + 30000 +80000 = 110,000

If +5% Hit from items is put in that becomes 0% Miss, 15% Crit, 85% Hit which gives…

[(1000*0.00*0)+(1000*0.15*200)+(1000*0.85*100)] = 0 + 30000 +85000 = 115,000

If that +5% Hit is exchanged for +5% Crit, Hit drops to 75% and Crit goes up to 25% for…

[(1000*0.05*0)+(1000*0.20*200)+(1000*0.75*100)] = 0 + 40000 +75000 = 115,000

So statistically there is no different until you reach the 0% Miss point, where from then on any more +Hit has no effect at all. Note that my examples don’t include parry/dodge/block as although that would reduce the actual damage dealt, they’d be the same probabilities for each of the three setups and not have any relative difference in effect.

The one thing to watch though with Hit vs Crit as a paladin is if you have the talent Vengeance from the Retribution tree. As Vengeance procs off crits and increases your damage by 15% for the next 8 seconds, +Crit becomes much more useful then.

What does Blocking do?

It’s very easy to be confused about blocking, and assume it works the same as dodge/parry in that if you block a hit, you take no damage. In some cases that is true, and you see “xx attacks. You block” in your combat log. At other times it’ll be something like “xx attacks for 256 (57 blocked)”. What’s the difference? Well, I’ll explain how blocking works. To begin with, let’s go back to the attack rolling. If something hits you, that hit then takes a roll against your defensive stats to see if it is dodged, parried or blocked. If a dodge or parry, you simply take no damage. Blocking is different though. For starters you need a shield equipped to be able to block in the first place. Then instead of nullifying the attack, if you block you block up to a certain amount of damage (your block value). If your block value is equal to or greater than the damage you took – which happens often against normal mobs – you’ll get the simple message that you blocked with no damage received. If for example your block value is 50, if the hit would be for 45 you block it all. If the hit would be for 55, you block 50 and still take 5. So a successful block prevents a certain amount of damage, after which point you still take anything above that value. Here’s the formula for block value…

Total Block Value = Shield Block Value + Extra Block Value + (Strength / 22)

Let’s say you have The Immovable Object, the shield from AV exalted. That has 44 Block, and an extra on-equip bonus of +27 to blocking. If along with that you have 220 strength you’d then have 44 + 27 + (220/22) = 81 total block value. That means any hit you successfully block will be completely blocked up to a max of 81 damage. If the hit is over 81, you block the first 81 but anything over that still hits you, so a hit for 100 being blocked would result in 19 damage received and 81 blocked.

So it is possible to block quite a bit. There’s then possibly a huge hidden bonus to blocking, which doesn’t seem to be widely known, and that’s with regard to critical hits. Many sources say that if a hit is blocked it cannot be a crtical hit. That means that if you’re tanking a boss that can potentially crit for 2000, if you block not only do you take 81 off that (given the value from the previous example) but you also reduce the extra damage from a 2000 crit to a 1000 hit. I need to look into that more as I’ve not tested it myself but from the various places I’ve seen it reported I beileve it’s true. Now obviously we’re not going to be MT in ZG/MC etc. where hits that large occur, but the principal of blocking preventing crits is still useful to us.

For tanking in 5-mans for example, extra damage mitigation and crit prevention from blocking is a very nice thing to have and helps keep us up. In PvP it’s extremely useful against rogues as you can block a lot of the damage they do. Having the Redoubt talent makes 1h & shield my setup of choice when facing rogues, as their crit rate pretty much keeps Redoubt active most of the time and the high block rate with that reduces a lot of damage taken. If you’re full protection spec, each block with holy shield active would then also deal a lot of damage back to your target. They’re really the only two situations where blocking is relevant for us though, tanking and PvP against melee. For healing it’s not going to be used and if you’re in dps mode you also won;t be using it. For the situations where blocking does come in to play though it is very, very good for us.

How do +Damage/Healing and +Healing affect me?

To start this one I’ll first clarify one thing. Some items say a simple “+x Healing” while others say “increases healing by up to x”. There is no difference between those at all, and though you might think they work differently they are exactly the same… just a bit of a daft way for blizzard to write two different tooltips for

How do +Damage/Healing and +Healing affect me?

To start this one I’ll first clarify one thing. Some items say a simple “+x Healing” while others say “increases healing by up to x”. There is no difference between those at all, and though you might think they work differently they are exactly the same… just a bit of a daft way for blizzard to write two different tooltips for them, as it does mislead people. So anything that increases healing works the same no matter how it’s written. The second thing is that some items are just +Healing and others +Damage/Healing, with yet more that are +Damage/Spellpower. For healing spells, both +Healing and +Damage/Healing work exactly the same… the only difference being that items with +Healing alone tend to have higher values of that than those with +Damage/Healing. Anything that is a simple +Damage or +Spellpower will affect our damage spells, but not healing. To increase healing it must mention that it increases healing, and not just damage.

The next related question then… do all spells get the same boost from these values? The simple answer is no. Each spell we have receives different bonuses from +Healing or +Damage/Healing, and that is based on the coefficient. Each spell receives a fixed percentage value which determines how much of a bonus they get. Those coefficients are as follows (obtained from US forums):

10% Seal of Righteousness
19% Holy Wrath
29% Seal of Command
33% Consecration
43% Judgement of Command
43% Holy Shock
43% Hammer of Wrath
43% Exorcism
50% Judgement of Righteousness

43% Flash of Light
71% Holy Light

100% effect is only granted to spells that have a casting time of 3.5 seconds or more. Anything below that receives a reduced coefficient. Take Holy Light for example, it has a 2.5 second casting time so 2.5 / 3.5 = 0.714. Thus it receives a 71.4% coefficient. Flash of Light is a 1.5 second cast, which gives 1.5 / 3.5 = 0.428 for a 42.8% coefficient. Instant-cast spells like Holy Shock, Judgement of Command, Exorcism etc. all receive the same 43% coefficient as a 1.5 sec cast spell. The things we have lower than 43% are for special abilities like seals that work differently, and would be overpowered if they received 43% so they have their own lower fixed values. For a simple example of how this works, look at healing… if you have a total of +400 healing from items each Holy Light would get +284 from that while Flash of Light gets +172.

Both +Healing and +Damage&Healing are very useful for paladins. +Healing is what you want for a raid healing set, while the +Damage will boost your holy damage in combat. That’s not just for holy paladins, though it does make holy shock so much better when you have good spell damage on your gear. Even retribution paladins benefit from it with SoC, JoC, HoW etc.

Melee & Spell Crits

Your melee attacks and spells will achieve critical hits at different rates, and have different damage modifiers. For instance melee attacks get the crit rate increased by agility (+1% chance for every 20 agil), items with +melee crit chance and the retribution talent Conviction which will give up to +5% with the full 5 points invested. A melee crit receives 200% damage – in other words it does double what the hit would normally do. A hit with your mace that would otherwise do 250 damage will crit for 500.

Spells on the other hand have a lower critical damage bonus of 150%, so in simple terms you add half the damage onto what you’d normally do. A spell that would otherwise do 250 damage will crit for 375. The critical hit rate for spells can be increased by intellect (+1% for every 30 or so int), items with +spell crit chance and the holy talent Holy Power which can add up to +5% crit chance on your holy spells with the full 5 points invested.

Something to note here is that some “magic” abilities actually use melee critical hits, rather than spell. These are:

Seal of Command
Judgement of Command
Hammer of Wrath

Even though you cast those things, they’re considered melee abilities as part of the retribution side of things and therefore crit at melee rates for melee crit damage bonus.

Part 6: Gear for different roles

As I mentioned at the start of this guide, gear is very important for a paladin and probably our most defining aspect. Whatever we do, be it healing, tanking or dps, we need different gear. Items that are great for one aspect will be almost useless for another. Along with those core gear sets we also needs extra things, for example cleansing requires slightly different stats from healing. There are resistance sets we need. All this means two things. First, a lot of hard work obtaining all the different gear… we probably need more than any other class. That hard work extends to both time invested in running instances and money spent on purchases, enchants etc. The other thing is that it takes up a lot of bag space – your bank and character bags should be full of stuff. Here’s my view of what a paladin should have for each situation

Healing Gear:

There are three situations where you can be performing a pure healing role. In small instances if you’re the main healer, in large raids and in group PvP. Some elements remain the same for each situation, other things will be different. To start with, what stats does a paladin need on healing gear? Well, I have a thread detailing that at [url]http://www.tribute2.org/gits/viewtopic.php?t=746[/url] but I will mention it here too. It all comes down to two things primarily: Having enough mana to keep casting, and good healing bonus to make your heals more efficient. For the mana aspect there are a couple of stats to look at. First there’s your intellect, 15 mana per point and your main source for a high mana pool. Second, mana per 5 seconds or Mp5 for short. Mp5 will regenerate mana while you cast, unline spirit which only regen if you haven’t cast for 5 seconds. As a paladin will usually be spamming flash heals, we don’t often get long enough pauses for spirit regen to be too worthwhile, and unlike priests we don’t have talents to make spirit work during casting or add to our healing bonuses, so for our mana we should have plenty of intellect and Mp5. There is one other thing with mana, and that’s for a holy paladin who has illumination. When we crit our heals, we get the mana cost refunded so spell crit is another nice stat to have. For more efficient healing there is one thing that helps there, and that’s +Healing. The higher healing we have, the stronger our heals become and we can even drop ranks of healing spells to still heal well for less mana. Spell crit will also help with efficiency, giving us extra healing on crits. After those primary stats, you shouldn’t neglect stamina completely. As a lot of raid encounters have aoe damage, damaging debuffs etc. it is still important to have good hitpoints so you can survive those things. A dead paladin is a useless paladin :) Take the Onyxia run last night for example – I survived a deep breath with 44 health remaining, so that +7 stam I have on my boots or taking an item with stamina instead of one without kept me alive. Stamina should not be ignored. So the following stats should be looked for in a healing set:

Intellect
+Healing
Mana per 5 seconds
Spell Crit
Stamina

For a pure healing set, they’re the important things. As for which you focus on, different people have different approaches. Some stack as much +healing as possible before anything else. Others will focus on maximising their Mp5 to continue casting forever without going out of mana. Then there are those who try as much spell crit as possible for the illumination talent. My personal approach is to combibe them all, but with +healing as the dominant stat. Here’s how I built my healing set: When I started putting it together, my first priority was to get my mana pool up. My target was 5000 unbuffed mana. After that I started adding as much +Healing as I could while staying above that 500 mana mark. Along with the +Healing, Mp5 got introduced and some spell crit items. I also kept my stamina up where possible At the point of writing this my healing set now has the following stats, unbuffed:

5.2k mana, 4.1k health
+550 healing
50 Mp5
around 12% spell crit (including talent)

This balance works nicely for me, as I never seem to go out of mana and my heals are strong. I should note that at this time my gear consists of mostly ZG items, with only a few from MC/Onyxia. My focus is mostly on the +healing, but my 50 unbuffed Mp5 combines with BoW for almost 90 and I can add mana oil if I think it’s necessary for around 100 mana regen every 5 seconds. This sort of setup I can strongly recommend for any healing gear. As I say, it works very well for me. As we progress through the new raids I’ll keep adding to this and all my stats will continue to increase.

Now there are a couple of things with healing sets. Firstly, armour – is it necessary? The argument of Plate vs Cloth has gone on for a long time, and will go on indefinitely. People will always have their own views on the matter that conflict with others. Here’s my take on the issue: It’s completely situational! Sometimes you will be likely to take a lot of physical damage and armour (and shield) become very useful, a big advantage paladins have over priests. Other times damage you take will be magical, making armour useless, or even no damage at all. Here are some examples:

You’re running through ZG, fights like Panther and Tiger boss have adds that do melee damage. It’s good there to be in plate with a shield so the damage you take is limited, whereas in full cloth you’d be more like a priest in that you’d take damage faster and time to react to that danger is shorter. You’re at Raggy in MC, getting hit by a lot of fire damage. You can be in plate or cloth, that won’t change the damage at all – the only thing that can reduce spell damage you take is the correct resistance, it doesn’t matter what type of armour that’s on.

You’re in Arathi Basin, playing a healing role. While damage from mages and other casters isn’t reduced by having plate, there will be rogues, warriors and shamans coming to hit you with pointy objects. In this situation armour is very useful indeed, giving you much greater survivability in full plate and a shield if melee come for you. Horde melee hate fighting a paladin in plate with a shield, it takes them ages to kill you.

Generally, in raids, being full plate is not important. Your healing set can easily include cloth/leather/mail and as cloth and leather in particular often have better healing stats than our available plate, that can be preferable. Remember that what you use to heal in a raid doesn’t have to be what you use elsewhere – you can have cloth items for figths where damage will only be magical, plate for when you’ll be taking physical hits. It’s all about knowing what’s going to be coming at you and ajusting your gear accordingly. The one limiting factor with cloth/leather is that those items will mostly go to priests and druids. A paladin will usually be mostly plate as a result of that anyway, but there’s nothing at all wrong with picking up healing cloth if you want to when the opportunity presents itself.

The other thing with healing gear is when you think about combat stats. Take Lawbringer for example, most stats are for healing but it has some Strength on it. The reason for this is not because strength is important for healing, but because Lawbringer is not a pure healing set – it’s a hybrid set. While Lawbringer items will likely still be better for healing than most things you have before MC, the only pure healing set for a paladin is Redemtion, the tier 3 set from Naxx. Lawbringer is there as the first epic set a paladin will obtain, intended to strengthen the healing aspect but also has some strength thrown in so you can use it to go poke things with your sword (though Lawbringer is far from ideal as a dps set). One useful thing from this, however, is if instead of a pure healing role you’re playing more balanced – adding a bit of damage when healign is secure, and dropping back to heal when needed. For times like that, Lawbringer and Judgement are nice to be wearing instead of 100% pure healing items as they will add to your damage a bit but still have strong healing stats. Again, equipping more balanced gear vs pure healing items is situational, and you should choose based on what you’ll be doing. For pure healing, strength and other combat stats are not needed at all. If you’ll be doing both damage and healing in the same fight, a set like Lawbringer with stats for both situations will be nice.

Cleansing
There are fights where rather than healing, you’ll spend most of your time spamming cleanse to remove poisons/magic debuffs from the raid. Some do both healing and cleansing in the same set of gear but I like to make a few changes, as when you’re primarily cleansing you don’t use all that +healing – cleansing simply uses mana. To cleanse I bring items in that add more intellect and/or mana regen, so I can cleanse for longer before going out of mana. An example of this is that for healing I use Hide of the Wild as my cloak, but bring one in with 5 Mp5 for cleanse-heavy fights.

Tanking Gear:

Ok, we’re past the argument of whether a paladin can tank or not. Here I’ll address which stats you need to look for to build a tanking set for your paladin. One important think to remember is that we are not warriors. While a warrior tank doesn’t need mana and can focus on the pure tanking stats, we depend on mana to hold aggro so we have to sacrifice some stats to keep mana up. A pala tank set is a tricky thing to balance right, needing more stats than a warrior. So where to start? Well, there are the two core stats – Stamina and Defence. You’ll want both of those quite high. After those which are aimed at taking damage, we have to look at how we can hold aggro. Unlike a warrior we don’t have instant strikes to generate threat, ours all comes from damage. As such, it doesn’t hurt to have good Strength as the more damage you do, the more threat you produce. Most of our threat will come from holy damage though, so any extra spell damage you can add without dropping other important stats to do so is a bonus. Agility may sound like a stat for rogues, but remember it increases dodge so nice to have on tanking gear. Finally, to keep outputting that holy damage you need mana, which means Intellect and Mp5 needed. Here are the stats to look for in a pala tank set then:

Stamina
Defence
Intellect
Mana per 5 seconds
Strength
Agility
Spell Damage

You’ll of course want to use a shield, and be in Plate armour. As for the mana issue, it will depend on what the fight is. If it’s a fairly long boss fight you’ll want a good mana pool to last throughout. If you’re off-tanking an add or something that won’t last too long, you can stack up a bit higher on Defence/Stam and run on lower mana. As with healing, it just means adapting to fit each situation. Along with the core stats, extra things like block/parry/dodge are still nice to have, it just depends what you can fit in with your mixed gear.

DPS Gear:

Right, so you’re in a raid (or even a small group run) and intending to dps – never mind healing, let’s assume your sole purpose at this time is to dps and nothing more. Your goal here, as with any dps class, is to maximise your damage output. With the primary source of our dps being melee, a big two handed weapon using SoC, the core stats are the same as a warrior: Strength and Crit. For a paladin with Vengeance from the Ret tree, a high crit rate is essential to keep that +15% damage buff up. That can be obtained from simple+crit, and from agility which gives 1% crit per 20 points (and then also increased dodge). For raids with lvl 63 mobs, you then also want to try to bring in +Hit to minimise the times your swings miss. With a slow weapon around 3.8 speed, missing is annoying :) So for the core of our dps we’re much the same as a warrior: Strength, Crit, Hit. What makes us different is that whereas warrior abilities come from combat-generated rage, we depend on having mana to keep our stream of damage up – a paladin with no mana can only sit there and auto-attack, which significantly reduces dps. Though we can use JoW and rank 1 SoC to keep up damage when oom, it’s nice to have a healthy pool to play with for our other abilities. Then there’s spelldamage which will increase damage from SoC, JoC, Holy Shock (if you have it) etc. and finally stamina, which is still important for fights with aoe damage where you will be getting hurt. So while a warrior just has a few core stats to obtain for their dps gear, we have many, including:

Strength
+Crit (Agility counts here)
+Hit
+Damage/Healing
Intellect
Stamina
Mana per 5 seconds

For a good DPS set at MC level you should be looking at building at least around 750 unbuffed Attack Power, 20% Crit Rate and as much intellect/stamina as you can then fit in with that, with a couple of +Hit if you can. A Retribution pala with Vengeance would also want to try to aim for 25% crit. Unfortunately spell damage on gear is limited until Judgement unless you use the rank 7-10 PvP set or Soulforge. The perfect paladin dps set for me is Avenger from AQ40 which includes all these important stats. Until then, we just have to pick random things up and mix ‘n match :) Just a quick note on Strength vs Attack power. As 1 strength gives 2 AP there’s no difference between an item with 10 strength and one with 20 AP unless you have the divine strength talent from the holy tree. If you do, your strength increases by up to 10% but not attack power, so if you have that talent you should try to have Strength on your items rather than AP (unless the AP would give more than a item with the strength anyway). Just remember that to do DPS you need to be able to hit hard, so Strength/Crit/Hit/Damage&Healing should be at the top of your list for stats to look for, but don’t neglect the mana/health side too much.

Raid Hybrid Gear:

The idea of a hybrid set is to give you a more flexible set of gear to wear when your role may change mid-fight when you’re unable to change items in combat. You may be starting in a dps role, but aware that before the fight ends you could be needed to step back and provide full healing/cleansing cover. Conversely you may be starting with healing, but free to move in and add damage if healing is secure without you. For either scenario, the dedicated Healing or DPS setups would leave you weak in the alternate role. This is where we mic things a bit. By balancing the stats more you will lose some effectiveness in one area, but be stronger overall – it’s no good being in dps gear if when you’re needed to heal you have no mana and no +healing on your gear. So a hybrid set for me includes a good core of stats needed to deal damage, but also healing potential. Something like this mix:

Strength
Intellect
+Damage/Healing
+Crit
+Hit
Mp5
Stamina

You won’t have quite as much damage output as with a pure DPS set but you become more versatile. PvP Gear:
Many people see PvP as the time when you just whip out that big 2h weapon and go hit things. They’ll use the same gear they use anywhere else, just change weapon. Well.. if that’s how they want to play that’s their choice, but personally I take as much care in choosing my PvP gear as I do with PvE. To begin with, the thought of 1 set of PvP gear is daft to me. If you were raiding you wouldn’t want to DPS in healing gear, or heal in DPS gear, and the same applies to PvP. The thing is you’re likely to be in different situation. You could be out solo in the world, likely to be attacked by horde at any time. You might be going into a BG alone where you want to play offensive, acting as a healer for a group or defending a key location such as a flag in AB. Let’s look at the offensive first:

Offensive PvP:

Ok, so rather than playing a support role you want to get out there and kill things yourself. You want to be in the thick of combat dishing out the damage. To do this there are two approaches. First the traditional melee option… big 2h weapon, SoC and high strength/crit. Pretty much the stats you’d use for DPS in a raid, except it’s not necessarily. You can use the exact same set, or you can play with the survivability of a paladin in mind and stack up on the stamina/intellect for high health and mana. That would mean losing a bit of damage but making it harder for the horde to take you down. Spell damage is very, very good for PvP even if you’re melee based as it gives you more burst damage – think SoC, JoC, Hammer or Wrath and so on. If you’re Holy specced, you then have Holy Shock every 30 seconds you can use which really depends on spelldamage. So for a PvP melee offensive build, with a big 2h weapon, I’d prioritise the stats something like this…

Stamina
Intellect
+Damage/Healing
Strength
Crit & Agility
+Hit

Spec will play a part here – Holy palas may want more spelldamage in a 2h build than, say, a Ret pala who still wants higher crit for vengeance procs.

The other approach is for a Holy paladin, and that’s the “Holy Power” build. With this your focus is not at all on melee, but magic. The aim is to stack as much spelldamage as possible for your Holy Shock, JoC and HoW and melee just becomes something to do while your spells are on cooldown. The important thing here is that it takes a LOT of spelldamage before you’ll notice the big damage coming in… around +400. Until then you might be disappointed with the results. It really takes dedication to put together a successful spell damage build as a paladin. Trinkets like ZHC are damned useful here, for extra burst damage when you need it. So the stats for a Holy Power build would look a bit like this:

+Damage/Healing
Spell Crit
Intellect
Stamina

You really have to focus on those key magical stats. Any melee stats you get on top are just a bonus.

Defensive/Support PvP:

As I’ve said countless times already, Paladins have better survivability than any other class. When in a Battleground, it;s often best for the team effort if you use that survivability and play defensively in a support role – the aim being to keep yourself and others alive as long as possible. Look at two possible scenarios: first, you’re defending a flag in AB. You might be alone, or have company, but either way your prime objective has to be to protect that flag against greater numbers until help arrives. If you’re in offensive gear you might be able to do more damage but you’ll also be easier to kill, and if you’re dead you can’t prevent a flag being taken. For that reason, if I’m in a position where I’m defending a flag I will always equip high survivability gear.

Another example would be if the team is attacking. Sure, it’s great having high damage to kill horde but a dead damage dealer does 0 damage so unless others are already performing healing roles, a paladin can make a huge difference to attacks by dropping back and performing pure healing. If you can keep your teammates alive when otherwise they’d be dead, you’ve added more to the fight than you could if you were attacking instead of healing.

Whether keeping yourself alive or keeping others alive, a PvP support setup needs survivability. It’s not quite the same as a PvE healing set. One thing is you want a shield equipped here, whereas in a raid you might be using an off-hand item without armour (*cough* flowers *cough*). Having a shield makes you much harder to kill if rogues, warriors and even shamans turn on you. Other than that, the core is the same with a high +healing sum to be aimed for but while in a raid healing set I’d look for high mana regen too, to PvP heal I’d look at dropping that a bit if I could bring in alternate items with greater stamina – again to make me harder to kill. One other thing you may want to do for a support set is exchange some +healing for +damage/healing. You might lose a little, but the extra damage would help if you’re wanting to throw spells around on the horde and not purely heal. So for the support build, here are the stats I look for:

Stamina
Armour (ie. plate & shield)
+Damage/Healing
+Healing
Intellect
Spell Crit
Mp5
Strength

This set isn’t just for healing – the survivability on it makes you very strong in endurance fights. For example, if you’re against a warrior you can gradually wear them down while keeping yourself alive with efficient healing. It won’t kill them as fast as if you were whacking them with a big stick but you’re less likely to die from a couple of quick crits with your higher damage mitigation and you can react better to recovering from spike damage. Don’t underestimate the power of a “support” build – it’s good for yourself as well as others.

Resistances:

There comes a point for any raider when you need certain resistances for encounters. The first example of this is in MC, where Fire Resistance (FR) is required to kill the end boss Ragnaros. How much resistance you need depends on which fight it is: less FR is needed for Raggy than for some bosses in BWL where much more is required by the whole raid. Nature resistance is brought into play for AQ, and Naxx throws several into the equation. If you’re going to be in a resistance-based fight it is important to have a good value of it to make sure the raid is strong. The key here is to try and get as much efficiency as possible for your role while wearing high resstance, which isn’t easy. Often adding resistance items means sacrificing many other stats, it can be hard to find items with good resistance and good stats.

One option here is to stack resistance. Get as much as you can on a few items (an example would be a helm with FR on it, with a FR enchant for even more) letting you be more generous with your other gear to keep stats in. Or you can just equip resistance items wherever possible and just do your best to keep stats up elsewhere. One thing is certain though: if resistance is needed, you need to wear it. It just comes down to having to find out where you can obtain good items and then trying to get them. The two key resistances, as stated before, are FR for MC/Ony/BWL and NR for AQ. If you get to Naxx things then get a lot more complicated :)

Part 7: Gameplay Techniques

The previous section addressed the gear you need for different rolesand situations. Here I’ll provide a few brief suggestions on how to perform efficiently with your actions.

Healing Techniques:

How you approach healing will depend on several things: Your assignment, your gear, how the fight is progressing etc. Let’s start with assignment. In a raid you might be assigned to heal a specific tank or raid member, or in a free-healing role on random players. If you’re assigned to someone specifically then chances are they’ll be taking a steady stream of damage. The key for you to keep them alive is to understand the pattern in the damage they receive, anticipate that and react accordingly. A simple example of this is the Bloodlord in ZG. He has no magical spells, just moderate physical damage but one nasty toy in the form of his mortal strike. You can go for a while with the tank just taking easy to heal hits, when suddenly there’s a MS which can crit for damage in the thousands and applies a -50% healing debuff on the tank. This is where a lot of people wipe at Mandokir as if your healers don’t react to that fast the tank can receive another crit shortly after and die. One method to cover this event is that if other healers are keeping the tank up easily, you can keep “priming” big heals… starting casting of your top rank Holy Light and cancelling if the tank is still healthy when the heal is almost done, but if that MS occurs during your casting time you may already have half that time done and can let the heal go to the tank to take him up almost instantly before another boss hit follows. Little tricks like that transfer to other bosses that have steady damage with occasional spikes.

If you need to keep a tank up through normal, steady damage you first need to look at the assignments. Are you healing alone? If others are with you, are they priests, druids or other paladins? Different classes heal in a slightly different way. Let’s say, for example, there’s a priest/druid/pala combo healing a tank. The priest and druid each have HoT’s (healing over time) and strong, big heals. They’re in the best position to cover damage spikes. The paladin on the other hand can spam the fast, mana efficient Flash of Light to keep a constant supply of healing on the tank – lots of lesser heals, with the priest/druiid providing the less frequent, larger heals. If you notice the tank steadily dropping in health despite your spamming FoL you can go for a big HL to fill him/her up and then go back to spamming.

Random healing needs a great deal of anticipation. You have to try to know the encounter, know what sort of damage will be thrown around and spot who’s going to be in danger – you need to get your heals to those who need it most at any given time. Importantly if you see a tank very low on health you should try to get them back up. Even though other healers are assigned to the tank, they may have been stunned/silenced etc.or could be disconnected. The tank could’ve just taken a huge damage spike. Whatever the reason, if the tank suddenly shows at low health random healers should be ready to help out. eeping the tank alive is top priority almost everywhere, so don’t neglect that just because you’re not assigned to them specifically. For healing randoms, a good example is with the wasp mobs in AQ20. You have the white ones that throw poisons out for steady damage and then the stingers that randomly charge people and can crit for high damage, almost one-shotting clothies sometimes. Otherthan cleansing the poisons away, as a random healer you must be aware of who’s in most danger from the charges. Someone with 50% health is more likely to die from a charge than someone at 80%. The stringers often charge the same person twice so even if the first charge doesn’t do huge damage, if you don’t heal them a bit a second charge could crit for the kill. Along with judging who needs the heals most you also have to judge how long you have to get a heal in and how much is needed – no point casting a holy light if the target will be hit and killed in less than 2.5 sec, while it also may not help going for a flash of light if the next hit on them would kill them regardless of that heal.

In general, a paladin does best to spam Flash of Light with Holy Light as a backup if a larger heal is reuirred. Those with 21 points in Holy can also save Divine Favor for those times when a big, crit heal is needed.

One technique becomes available when you have good gear, and that is ranking down. As the bonus received from +healing remains the same at different ranks, you can cast lower rank heals to get smaller end results but for better mana efficiency. This is because you’ll still get the same bonus from your gear, just the initial base healing that drops. This can allow you to spam heal longer, but also help bridge the gap between core heals – the difference between FoL rank 6 at around 800 health and HL rank 9 at 3000 is considerable, but you can use a HL rank 5 or 6 to get a heal between those two values. This is useful if you feel a FoL would not be enough, but your big HL would overheal. For this reason I always have FoL 6, HL 5 and HL 9 on my action bar as my three main heals. One thing to be careful of, particularly with ranking down FoL, is to not go too far and make your heals so tiny they’re insignificant. Sure… it’s nice to save some mana if you’re spamming randomly and just topping everyone up, but if your heals become critical to keeping people alive you have to know when to switch to larger heals.

Other than that, you should just try to watch your mana pool. Know when you can stop healing for 30 seconds or so to let mana regen – it’s not always necessary to spam without breaks. Have mana potions for boss fights where you may need them, particularly at tough new encounters. If you think you need even more mana, collect things like dark runes which give mana back on a different cooldown from potions.

Tanking Techniques:

The main thing to watch out for when tanking as a paladin is that we have no taunt to snap aggro back if it’s lost. We can BoP a mage who’s just critted a bit too much, but that’s on a lengthy cooldown and doesn’t help if more than one person has stolen aggro. To help you get a good threat hold just ask your group to give you a few seconds, the same as they would to a warrior who asks for sunders before dps begins. Unless they’re a bunch of twits, they’ll understand why this is important. After that you have to hold aggro until the fight ends, which isn’t easy.

Threat as a paladin comes from two things: melee damage and spell damage. Each swing with your weapon does threat related to the white damage caused, simple. Most of our threat comes from holy though, particularly with Righteous Fury activated for +60% holy threat. We have the following to use throughout a fight to help generate threat:

Weapon
Seal
Judgement
Consecration (talent)
Holy Shock (talent)

You’ll often hear that fast weapons are best for tanking. That’s from a warrior’s point of view, as faster weapons often generate more rage for them to use on instant strikes.As a paladin we don;t use rage, so that is not a factor for us. In contrast, weapon speed has one major result – which seal we use. If you use the warrior thinking then Seal of Crusader can seem best, as it makes your swings much faster. The problem with this is that it doesn’t add any extra holy damage to benefit from righteous fury. The two you’ll want to look at for generating threat are Righteousness and Command. SoR adds constant damage, every hit based purely on the speed of the weapon – a slower weapon gets more per hit than a faster one but it all averages out at the same added dps. Command on the other hand is proc based, with a chance per hit. While this means many hits will go without any extra damage, when it procs it does more than a SoR bonus and can crit while SoR does not. Which is most efficient comes down to how fast your weapon is. SoC has most damage potential, but if your weapon is fast it might rarely proc and the constant stream of SoR damage would be better. If the weapon you use is slow, SoC will proc more often and likely add more damage than SoR would making it the stronger choice. It’s a matter of preference for each individual but tanking with a Quel’serrar (2.00 speed) I use SoR, while when I used a mace with 2.70 speed I found SoC better. I guess the balancing point for me would be around 2.3-2.4, if it’s above that SoC is probably best and below SoR unless you feel lucky and want to go with SoC anyway. Another consideration with the seal is that on unstunned targets (most bosses immune to stun), JoR actually does more damage than SoC whereas if it’s a stunned mob you’d get more from JoC.

How often you judgerighteousness or command depends on how much mana you have, and how long you expect the fight to last. If it’s a short encounter you’ll likely keep throwing everything you have when cooldowns are up. If a long fight, you’ll try to conserve mana so you don’t run out. The same applies to consecration and holy shock. Consecration is one that is mana efficient on single targets, but against groups of mobs is the best ability a paladin has to aggro them all onto you – and does good damage for the mana cost when there are 3+ targets hit by it. The more mobs you can hit with consecration, the better it is. Holy shock is like a judgement… a burst of holy damage, but on a longer cooldown. The 20 yard range on this makes it a nice pulling tool for a holy paladin. A key tip for tanking is that if you’re on a boss where you need to make your mana last, judging wisdom when you pull will keep a steady supply of mana back to you as you swing. You just judge it once, then switch to SoR or JoC and judge those freely while JoW stays on. This can even keep you full of mana, especially if you’re not using consecration. If the fight has aoe damage and you have melee classes with you, you may want to judge Light instead so all gain a supply of health. If your mana is getting very low and the fight isn;t over, judging wisdom and then using seal of wisdom for a while will fill you up fairly fast. So here’s what I’ll usually do when tanking a boss:

Judge Wisdom
Activate SoR (or SoC)
Holy Shock when I feel it’s needed
JoR (or JoC) when needed

With consecration used to aggro large groups of mobs onto me. When moving through mobs I like to leave holy shock and exorcism (if an undead zone) ready to try to snap aggro back if anyone pulls a mob off me. Apart from that there’s not a lot we can do… just get some aggro time before dps starts on a boss, try to keep your mana up and throw out that holy damage. Mana potions are useful if you get too low, and don;t forget your lay on hands.

DPS Techniques:

Kill things.

PvP Techniques:

I’ve already mentioned the different approaches to PvP… offensive, defensive, full support etc. so there’s not much to say here but I will go over a few things. As I said before, even if you’re playing offensively you should always be prepared to throw a heal on an ally who’s getting hit. Don’t forget you can BoP clothies who are getting hit by melee, that really can save the day at a key moment – and not only clothies, but rogues/warriors can be saved if about to die at the hands of melee, a quick BoP wollowed by a heal and then they can remove the BoP and go back to killing. When healing yourself, bandages can be used in the bubble to save mana if you’re happy to keep supplying yourself with them. Cheap PvP potions can also be bought and used from certain vendors. If you’re engineer, you can make cheap iron bombs which have a stun on them and even better a deathray which is uninterruptable and does 0 damage to yourself when used within your bubble. Here are a few other things to watch for when PvPing:

1. If fighting a class like a shaman, try to damage them down to low health and save your stun for when they start to heal. if they leave healing to late this can let you finish them off before they’ve had chance to heal at all.
2. The reverse of the last point, never leave your healing too late as if you do you could get stunned, silenced etc. and killed when you still have loads of mana which is simply embarassing. If facing a class that can stop your heals, try to bluff them into using those abilities when you want by fake-healing. Doesn’t always work, but worth a try.
3. Concentration aura stacks with spiritual focus for 100% undelayed healing while being hit. That makes it the strongest PvP seal for me, and I usually have it active all the time. You can try switching to it when you want to heal but hordies who know to watch for that will see when you want to heal if you try that.
4. It may be tempting to give yourself BoM all the time, and that can be best if you’re going all-out offensive, but for survivability the best blessing you can give yourself is BoL for stronger heals.
5. Don’t forget to buff others – it may be annoying to you, but quickly buffing those you see can make a difference.
6. Cleansing works in PvP as well as in raids. SW:P on someone close? Cleanse it off. Roots holding a warrior in place? Cleanse them away. The decursive addon makes this very efficient.
7. If you’re defending a flag in AB, try using a fast weapon so you can get more frequent hits on opponents trying to cap it.
8. If supporting a flag carrier in WSG, use your blessing of freedom to prevent movement slowing debuffs (except daze, annoyingly).
9. Rank 1 consecration may not do much damage, but it will destealth any rogues or druids who are creeping up on you.
10. Blessing of Sacrifice cast on someone who’s taking damage will transfer some damage to you each time, breaking sheep, seduction etc. used on you. A useful little trick :)
11. If a shaman is purging you, try using rank 1 seals to get them to waste mana purging those, as they cost hardly anything for you to put up.
12. Blessing of Freedom is not just for WSG flag carriers. If you’re in AB and that warrior with you keeps being slowed, keep BoF on him and he can move freely to kill things.

An extra note for WSG, paladins are exceedingly strong around the flag carrier. If we go in our PvP healing gear we can take a lot of damage, keep ourselves and other runners alive efficiently and with BoF we can negate many movement impairing effects. With healing plate and shield we become a real tank as a flag carrier or flag assist, and can really plow through the horde to get a flag back safely. If the situation is reversed and we need to recapture a flag, we can switch to offensive gear to dish out maximum damage if we find it – I’ve often stumbled across a group of horde defending the flag, killed the carrier fast with some quick burst damage and returned the flag before his friends could save him.

I approach different classes in different ways. For example, if about to face a warrior 1 on 1 I will try to take the “outlasting” approach. PvP healing gear equipped, judging Seal of Light or Wisdom at the start and then gradually wearing them down while keeping my health up to avoid a nasty series of crits killing me if I was at half health. In that situation it’s all about mana efficiency – the warrior can’t kill you until you’re out of mana, while you can keep dropping their health without them able to heal. On the other hand, if fighting a mage their counterspell and potential huge crits tempt me to switch from the outlasting technique to burst damage instead, trying to exploit their low armour by “nuking” them, and hoping to stun and finish them before they can escape.

Which seal to sue on your weapon in PvP is similar to tanking – if you have a slow weapon, and want extra damage, SoC is the way to go. If a fast weapon and wanting a reliable stream of damage but less burst potential, SoR. If keeping your mana up to outlast your opponent is more important to you than extra damage, SoW will do that for you.

PvP as with raids is extremely situational – adapt your gear and your style of play to what is needed at the time.

The Real DPS Techniques:

Did you laugh? Not even once? Maybe silently? Bah, ok then. Last time I try to break the guide up a bit with a little light-hearted humour!

There’s actually not much to say about how to DPS. You have your gear on, you use SoC with your big, slow weapon and hope for many crits and procs. Usually you’ll be activating JoL for all those little rogues to get some healing through the fight, but JoW is also an option to keep your own mana up – and to let casters wand the target for mana. Crusader increases holy damage which is nice, but given the current limited debuff slots it’s not really something that benefits the raid as much in a 40-man as light or wisdom would.

How frequently you judge command will depend on your mana and how long the fight is, the same with holy shock if you’ve got it. An important tip is that if you are low on mana and not going to judge for a bit you can use rank 1 SoC at low mana cost which will still proc at the same rate as the highest rank – all you lose is the higher damage from judging it.

Part 8: Enchants

Enchants are so important to me I had to give them a full section of their own. It makes me sad to see people going around in full tier 1/2 and not even a +7 stamina on their boots! It always amazes me that dome people will spend ages trying to get an item for better, and then don’t bother to get a little enchant thus losing out on even more stats. Getting your gear enchanted may sound unimportant, but when you add all the enchants up they are a considerable boost to your effectiveness. Take the stamina enchants for example… you could get +7 on boots, +9 on bracers and +10 (well, 100 health) on chest which add up to 26 stamina. All fairly cheap and easy to get. Many don’t seem to bother even getting those… but if your chest had 46 stamina instead of 20 wouldn’t you be thinking “omg, that’s imba!”? The same with healing… +24 on bracers, +30 on gloves and +55 on weapon can give you 99 extra healing just ffrom 3 enchants which is extremely good for a healer.

Some enchants are expensive, but in my view they’re worth the cost. You can get so many extra stats out of enchants I will always make sure I get them on any item I use. Here are the enchants I recommend for different items and different roles.

Head
Healing: ZG Enchant (10 stam, 7 def, +24 healing)
Tanking: ZG Enchant (10 stam, 7 def, +24 healing)
DPS: Libram of Voracity (+8 strength)
PvP: ZG Enchant (10 stam, 7 def, +24 healing)
FR: Libram of Resilience (+20 FR)

Shoulders:
Healing: ZG Exalted (+33 healing)
Tanking: ZG Exalted (+30 attack power)
DPS: ZG Exalted (+30 attack power)
PvP: ZG Exalted (+18 damage/healing)
FR: Argent Dawn (+5 FR)

Back:
Healing: +5 all resistances
Tanking: +70 armour
DPS: +3 agility
PvP: +5 all resistances
FR: +7 or +15 FR

Chest:
Healing: +100 health or +100 mana
Tanking: +100 health
DPS: +3 or +4 all stats
PvP: +100 health

Wrist:
Healing: +24 healing or +4 Mp5
Tanking: +9 stamina
DPS: +7 strength
PvP: +9 stamina

Gloves:
Healing: +30 healing
Tanking: +7 agility
DPS: +7 strength or +7 agility (+15 agility if you can afford it)
PvP: will depend on which PvP gear it is

Legs:
Healing: ZG Enchant (10 stam, 7 def, +24 healing)
Tanking: ZG Enchant (10 stam, 7 def, +24 healing)
DPS: Libram of Voracity (+8 strength)
PvP: ZG Enchant (10 stam, 7 def, +24 healing)
FR: Libram of Resilience (+20 FR)

Feet:
Healing: +7 stamina
Tanking: +7 stamina
DPS: +7 agility
PvP: +7 stamina

Weapon:
Healing: +55 healing
Tanking: Crusader or +22 intellect
DPS: +25 agility or Fiery*

Shield:
Healing: +7 stamina
Tanking: +7 stamina or +2% blocking
PvP: +7 stamina

* Fiery Weapon enchant on a dps 2h weapon is an option for keeping Vengeance up. Fiery only does 40 damage per proc, 60 on a crit, but when it crits it procs vengeance. Some find that better than +25 agility to keep vengeance running, though I’ve never tested it.

There are others available, but those are the best for me. Some, like weapon enchants, can be quite expensive but if you make the effort to get them you’ll become more efficient for each extra enchant you get. You strive to uprades your blue items to epics… it’s a waste not to then upgrade your epics to enchanted epics! And if you use blues, enchant those, I don’t mean to say just to enchant epics – it was simply an example :) Now you can say you’ll wait to enchant an item as you’re upgrading it soon and yes, that makes sense if you’re getting a new item soon and don;t want to pay for the same thing twice, particularly if it’s a big expensive enchant. But when it comes to the cheaper things… if you’re using something, get it enchanted. And when you have a great item you’ll use for quite a while, spend that money and get the big enchant done.

The enchants I’ve listed are those I see as best in each role. Depending on your range of gear, you may be using the same item in multiple roles. In those cases you have to decide which enchant is best for the item, if you want to focus on the primary role it’s used in or choose one to be useful all-round.

Part 9: Class Armour Sets

I thought I’d add in a section on the various armour sets available to us at lvl 60, giving my view on what they’re best used for.

Lightforge:

The first set you’ll start collecting in your 50′s and work on when 60, Lightforge is the basic armour set and the first paladin set you’ll obtain. While many paladins are desperate to get this set (I was myself as a new 60), the stats on it really aren’t that great. The tier 1 sets all have no “on equip” bonuses to them, just simple, raw stats. The problem with Lightforge is that it’s an extremely generic set – mixed strength, stamina, intelect and fairly useless spirit. For healing it’s mostly useless.. half the items have no intellect. Only those with some intellect are of any use for healing, and even then there are better random drops available in instances. The main use for lightforge is in combat, as the +40 AP set bonus for 4 parts is nice if you combine that with 4 parts that have high strength. Don’t get too hung up on getting this gear though… it’s easily replaced.

Soulforge:

Added in patch 1.10, Soulforge is an upgrade from Lightforge using various quests, item hand ins and expensive purchases to obtain. While Lightforge for me was a mostly useless set, Soulforge really fixed the stats and made each item more useful – droping a lot of spirit and adding much more intellect for one. As well as fixing the raw stats, we see very useful additions in the form of +damage/healing, +crit and Mp5. I upgraded to full soulforge and loved it, though it does require a lot of money… 350g – 400g depending on the current prices of items needed. Soulforge items are useful for healing before Lawbringer, the 2-set bonus of +8 resistance is nice to include in a FR set and for combat the improved stats, added crit and spell damage make it much stronger than Lightforge was. Whether or not it’s worth the money is a matter of opinion, as the refined PvP set now offers similar stats, but the quests are fun and getting the set is a rewarding experience. For healing though, Lawbringer is better and for combat you can put together a strong set with PvP rewards and non-set drops so it depends what else is available to you.

Rank 7-10 PvP Set:

The rank 7-10 set used to be purely melee… little intellect, it focused on strength/crit instead. Patch 1.11 changed this to be more like Soulforge with stats shifting to more of a balance between strength/stamina/intellect and dropping some of the crit for spelldamage instead. Despite being only 6 items instead of 8, this set offers more spell damage than Soulforge and the 2-set bonus offering +23 means a couple of items from this set are also now very nice for an early healing set. I’d say this is pretty much equal to Soulforge in quality… while SF requires substantial cash investment, this one needs some dedicated honor farming to reach rank 10. You can use some for healing, it’s good all-round for PvP and not bad for damage. A nice set to own, it offers a vast improvement over Lightforge.

ZG: Zandalar & Primalist:

The 3 reputation Zandalar reward items from ZG are great. All of epic quality, they have very good stats. The chest at revered is excellent for both dps and PvP, having good stength and crit combined with nice intellect and high stamina. The belt and wrist have +healing on them are are nice for healing sets, particularly with the 4 Mp5 as a 2-set bonus, but the stats on them also make them nice for dps and PvP. With the exalted neck being PvP based more than anything, this little set is interesting as it’s a bit mixed, but all the items are high quality and useful in different situations: worth getting. Also from ZG are the primalist items. These aren’t a set, they have no set bonuses, but for pure healing they are excellent with stats 100% focused for that. Any paladin putting together a healing set should look at obtaining these.

Lawbringer:

Our first full epic set, the tier 1 Lawbringer from MC is seen as our first healing set. Despite it having some strength I would agree that Lawbringer is primarily for healing, having nice +healing and Mp5, high intellect and good stamina. The strength on it makes it nice for things like PvP where you will be doing a bit of melee to defend yourself and not just healing. Personally I treat lawbringer as a healing set, and give it healing based enchants where possible (healing on gloves, shoulders and wrist, ZG enchant on legs etc.). It’s not a set to use for dps so dps enchants like agility are wasted on it. Use it for healing, both raids and PvP – that’s where this set is best. Focus on making your Lawbringer as good at healing as possible. There is one exception to this, and that’s with the helm. Having 10 FR on it to start with, I strongly advise putting a further +20 FR on it for 30 total to use in your fire resist set. It may be tempting to put the ZG enchant on it for better healing/PvP work but Judgement helm from Onyxia is easy to get and with no base FR on that, that’s what you then put the ZG enchant on. Focus on FR for the Lawbringer helm and you won’t be disappointed. Other items like gloves, belt and chest also come with FR and while you can’t put any extra FR enchants on those they make great additions to your FR set.

Judgement:

Ahh, Judgement… the one most agree looks better than any other paladin set. So, what do we use it for? Well, let’s take healing to start with – Judgement doesn’t offer a lot more than Lawbinger for healing, with similar stamina/intellect and healing/mana regen. In fact, some Judgement items are worse than Lawbringer for pure healing. The major difference is that while Lawbringer just gives +healing, Judgement changes that into +damage/healing which makes Judgement far stronger for PvP, general combat and a more hybrid role where you might be mixing damage and healing in raids. While with lawbringer I’d enchant it 100% for healing, with Judgement I’d make a couple of changes: for example, LB shoulders get +33 healing but Judgement for me would be +18 damage/healing, to be a little more useful offensively. Judgement also offers a bit more strength than Lawbringer and the set bonuses are very powerful offensively, making Judgement an excellent all-round set. Ok for healing (though at that level, various non-set items offer better healing stats) but mostly a PvP set.

Rank 12-12 PvP Set:

This set picks up where the 7-10 set left off, with the same core of strength/stamina/intelect with good spell damage. The difference here, aside from all the sats being of higher value, is that we get more crit added to it to make it a little more melee-based, along with some Mp5. There isn’t really a lot to say about this set… it has excellent stats, great damage potential and with good combat enchants it makes a very strong set for both PvP and DPS. The crit on it and high strength makes it great for melee, spell damage and good intellect keeps it useful for those wanting to use more magical things like holy shock. The downside here is that getting rank 12/13 is very time consuming, and requires serious dedication to honor grinding. While the 7-10 set can be obtained without too much trouble, getting past rank 11 is a LOT harder. You really need the hours to invest for this one, and can’t rest until you have it.

Avenger:

So we’ve had a healing set, a spell damage set and the Retribution paladins are begging for a set with some crit on it. Here it is, in the form of the rather daft looking Avenger set. This one has has a simple use: melee. Introducing agility and much higher strength it’s the dps set we’ve been waiting for. For healing, Judgement and Lawbringer are better. For this little 5-piece set, give it the best dps enchants possible. That’s all there is to say about Avenger… it provides paladins with a dps set we can obtain without rolling on “warrior items”. Just don’t go walk onto the set of Starship Troopers while wearing it, or Dina Meyer may throw a grenade your way.

Redemption:

For pure healing, healadins have long complained that our class sets “waste” points on things like strength when for healing that’s absolutely pointless and could be extra intellect or something instead. Well, with the introduction of Naxx tier 3 sets we finally got our our wish with the tier 3 Redemption. No mixed stats, no useless points, this set is what the raiding healadin has been wanting for ages and has awesome healing power. Loaded fullt with int/stam, healing and mana regen this set gives the core stats we need for healing and nothing more. With the stat points dedicated to this purpose we get more out of it than if like lawbrinnger it tried to be mixed with strength on it. Being in Naxx it is the hardest to obtain, and the vast majority of paladins will never get close to it. For those that do, whoever, their healing dream has come true with the perfect set.

Set Overview:

Here’s an overview of what I see the sets best used for then…

Lightforge: Generic, temporary set to use until you get better.
Soulforge: Nice upgrade, useful for PvP and combat in small groups. Some parts nice for healing/resistance.
7-10 PvP: As a PvP set, that’s where this set is best. Also nice for small group combat and as with SF some parts are nice for healing.
Zandalar Rewards: Useful for PvP, dps and not bad for healing. Multiple uses for these 3 items.
Lawbringer: Not technically a pure healing set, but should be treated as one. Good for healing, nice for PvP. Not to be used for dps.
Judgement: Solid all-round for healing and PvP. For healing not a huge leap over Lawbringer, but for PvP it really excels.
12-13 PvP: A great combat set for either PvP or dps.
Avenger: Perfect for dps, great for PvP too. Not for healing.
Redemption: The pure healing set, dream that one day you’ll own some.

Part 10: Summary

aka. the bit you skipped to if you couldn’t be bothered to read the rest
So are paladins a broken class? I don’t think so. When it comes to end-game raids we are indeed primarily healers – both out of necessity and because we’re very efficient at it – and of course cleansing. Our priority is keeping the raid alive through our various abilities. To fit that primary role, any paladin looking to end-game raid must focus on building up a good set of healing gear. It will be our role most of the time, regardless of spec, so you need to be prepared for it. That doesn’t mean we’re only able to heal and useless at everything else though. While we’re not a DPS class, the claim that a paladin cannot do damage is inaccurate. It’s true that a good mage or rogue will beat us on the damage meter but if opportunity arises for a paladin to raid in damage mode we can do a decent job of it as long we we have the gear, and a talent build to support it. Getting a paladin into shape to be able to output consistantly high raid damage is not easy though, and requires a lot of focus. Most times when people say “omg, paladins suck at dps… they’re lower than tanks” it’ll be because a paladin is trying to dps in Lawbringer which is not at all suited to the role. If you accept that you won’t be topping the meters and instead focus on keeping a respectable level of damage up, and watching out for the rest of the raid in emergencies, for me a paladin is not wasted in a damage role if healing is secure without them. When it comes to tanking, yes – warriors will be MT’s in raids and not us. We can tank in smaller groups easily though, and off-tanking in raids is perfectly fine. Again we just need some gear to support that if we find ourselves performing a tanking role.

When it comes to group PvP, paladins excel. Whether in a pure support role or a mixture of damage and support, we can provide healing/buffing/cleansing/burst damage and generally be a huge annoyance to the horde. A good paladin in group PvP is an extremely powerful weapon for the team. Solo PvP we’re not useless, all classes don’t beat us easily. It all comes down to the player behind the paladin knowing how to react to different situations.

Primarily healers in raids then, but we can perform a damage role if given the opportunity. We can also off-tank if the raid requires it. For PvP and smaller group work our versatility is unbeaten. With whatever we do, gear is vital. If there’s a role you want to perform you need the gear for it. One-gear-fits-all does not apply to a Paladin in any way. Then it’s just a matter of getting experience with the class, learning how to react to things.

In short: I love my class. Thanks for reading! (or at least pretending to read) And now just to follow tradition…

THE END