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Paladin Guide: Basics - Playing a Paladin - Equipment - Quests - Trainers Spells and Talents - Paladin Forums & Community Sub-Spec Guides: Tankadin, Healadin (Pre 3.0.2), Retadin (Pre 3.0.2)

Paladin spells come in several types: Auras, Blessings, Hands, Seals and Regular cast spells and attacks. Auras are long term effects that the paladin puts into play that stay in effect until cancelled. A paladin may only have one active Aura at a time. Blessings are short term buffs (benefits) for the paladin or other characters. A paladin can only have one blessing on each character at a time. He can cast blessings on as many different characters as he has mana. Seals are short term buffs for the paladin only. Seals normally have two abilities, one while active and one when released with judgment against a target. The rest of the paladins spells are normal spells just like any other character.

Spells are also sorted by the school of magic that the spell belongs too. Paladin spells are broken down to three schools: holy, protection and retribution. I use the word school so that we do not confuse it with the type as above. Holy spells provide healing ability, Protection spells generally provide damage and threat, while Retribution spells are all about damage.

You can find a complete list of spells here: Paladin Spell List.

Talents for any class are important but for a Paladin as a Hybrid class they are even more critical. As a Hybrid class how you place your talent points determines what you can do, unlike a single purpose class like a rogue who no mater how they place their talent points they still are just there for damage. That just is not the case for a Paladin. If you put most of you points into the Protection tree then you are going to be a Tank, into the Holy tree and you will be a healer, and lastly if you put you points into the Retribution tree then you will be a damage dealer.

A very important thing to note about talents is that you can unlearn them if you need to. This allows you to build your character one way for early levels and then change mid-way or even late game to a different style. This is a general tip and works for all classes not just paladins.

To unlearn all your talents, the first time only costs 1 gold, the second time only costs five gold, and it increments from there. This is a very nice bonus, it means you do not have to play your end-build from level 1 (well.. 10). Not many argue that a retribution specialist paladin is the best until the 30+ level range. So go with retribution until the 30s, then switch.

Once you get there, many people say that soloing and playing in general becomes a lot easier if you have a shield and are specialized a little more defensively. Well, spend a gold and do that! Then finally, once you hit 60, you can re-specialize your character to be the best you can for PvP or whatever you plan on doing.

Plan on using the re-specs, the first few don't cost that much. Do not use them as an excuse to just throw points anywhere, as that would waste your re-specializations and make you spend much more money, but rather take advantage of your ability to switch between proven existing builds at certain levels.

It may seem obvious to some, but we see people running around in the 20s doing things that are not really optimized, and they know it, but they always do it because they think it will be 'better in the end'. Well, in this game, you can wait until 'the end' to do that if you wanted.

A complete talent calculator can be found on the official World of Warcraft site here. It is a great place to start exploring the Paladin class as once you understand the talents that you can gain you are a lot closer to understanding the class itself.

You can also find a complete guide to all Paladin Talents here.

The following are various tried, true, and tested builds that are very good at doing what they are designed to do. As a notice, though, you should ALWAYS try to make your own build and play how you want to play. That's just way more fun! If you need a good push in the right direction, then check out these following top builds!

A note on the builds, they are all built for a level 80 Paladin and show an end state talent tree. It is important to remember that when placing you talent points when levelling, where they go is not critical. It is important however to keep moving your way down the talent tree as quickly as possible to gain new abilities. This means that initially you can skip many of the talents on your way down the tree until you have either reached the bottom or have to place more at a higher level to keep moving down.

Protection Builds

Tanking Build - This build gets all of the normal Tanking talents which includes Holy Shield, Toughness, Redoubt, Hammer of the Righteous and many more. The core Protection talents chosen in this build should be in every tanking build and it would be easy to pick up even more talents in the tree, however we are saving points to go into the other two trees.

In addition to all the Protection tree talents the build moves into the Holy tree to get the improved threat from Seals of the Pure and reduced fear from Unyielding Faith. In addition it moves into the Retribution Tree to grab the 5% parry from Deflection and to cut down your judgement cooldown by a second with Improved Judgements. This build can be found here: Tankadin Guide.

So you want to take a beating, do you? Well, we’ve got the right place for you. Our Protection guide will walk you through the basics of playing a protection based Paladin, or Tankadin as they are commonly called. You can find it here: How to Play a Tankadin.

Retribution Builds

PvE Build - This build is for those players looking for the best possible DPS, giving up healing and defense for the ability to lay the holy smack down on the enemy!

This build gives you the highest amount of possible damage. There are few compromises for anything else in the build. While using this build and properly geared you will be able to do huge damage, while providing group buffs, some group healing through your Divine Wrath ability, and mana return from your Judgements of the Wise.

The build to use to do all of these this is found here: Paladin DPS Build.

PvP build - This build is for players who are looking to get that extra little bit of survivability and burst damage in PvP. Key abilities in this build include the standard damage boosting abilities but also Eye for an Eye so that you reflect some damage back at the attacker, Pursuit of Justice so that you can chase players down, while skipping the normal improved Blessing of Might since you will be having Kings up for survivability. Which brings us to the fact that in this build you also put extra points into the Protection tree to get Blessing of Kings for survivability and Stoicism for the reduced stun time. You can find the build here: Retribution PvP Build

Holy Builds

Healing Build - This is a pretty standard healing build with some points put into Protection to add some survivability. In the Holy tree you work your way all the way to the end of the talent tree to get Beacon of Light which adds a great AoE type heal, allowing you to heal other targets in a group while still healing the Tank. It also grabs all the bonus healing, bonus critical, and reduced time abilities. All of these form a great core of healing ability.

The build then moves over to the Protection Tree to grab Blessing of Kings and then move down to Improved Devotion Aura to provide extra healing and armour on all targets. You can find the build here: Holy Healing Build.

Judgement of the Wise Build - This is an interesting build that goes deep into Retribution to gain the Judgement of the Wise ability. This ability grants 15% of your mana back plus mana regen to party or raid members when you judge your seals. This means that if you move in close to the fight and judge seals as well as heal you can have huge mana regeneration. While you will not have as big of heals as a normal holy build, some players looking for something different are having good results with it. You can find the build here: Healing / Retribution Build.

Have comments or suggestions? Thought of something that has been missed? Found an error? I would love to hear from you! Please post in our Paladin Class guide forum, or email me at messiah@tentonhammer.com