In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Protection Paladin (WoW MoP 5.3). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Protection Paladin guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Theck (@TheckPhD), the main author of Sacred Duty (a well respected, and arguably the most valuable Protection Paladin theorycrafting resource).

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents offer you a choice between 3 means of improving your movement speed.

• Speed of Light is an active ability, with a 45-second cooldown, which increases your movement speed by 70% for 8 seconds.
• Long Arm of the Law causes your successful Judgments to increase your movement speed by 45% for 3 seconds.
• Pursuit of Justice passively grants you 15% increased movement speed, and an additional 5% increased movement speed for each charge of Holy Power that you have, up to a maximum of 3 (so, up to a grand total of 30% increased movement speed).

Your choice here will depend entirely on your playstyle and the requirements of the encounter.

Speed of Light is excellent because it offers you a reliable movement speed burst.

Pursuit of Justice offers you a constant, passive movement speed boost, which is excellent for moving out of harmful effects.

Long Arm of the Law offers more frequent but shorter bursts of speed than Speed of Light, and in case this is beneficial for a particular encounter or playstyle, the talent can be appealing.

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents offer you a choice between 3 means of crowd-control.

• Fist of Justice is an improved version of Hammer of Justice, which it replaces. Fist of Justice stuns the target for 6 seconds, with a 30-second cooldown, from a 20-yard range.
• Repentance puts the (Demon, Dragonkin, Giant, Humanoid, or Undead) target to sleep for 1 minute. Damage done to the target will break the effect, and only one target can be under this effect at one time (from the same Paladin).
• Burden of Guilt causes your Judgment hits to reduce the target's movement speed by 50% for 12 seconds.

The talent choice here is largely irrelevant, and it will not affect your performance in any way. You should choose based on your own preference, or on the requirements of the encounter, in terms of add crowd-control.

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents offer you a choice between 3 healing abilities.

• Selfless Healer causes your Judgments to reduce the cast time and mana cost of your next Flash of Light by 35% per stack. Additionally, if used on players other than yourself it also increase its healing by 20% per stack. The effect can stack up to 3 times.
• Eternal Flame replaces Word of Glory. It costs Holy Power (up to 3), heals the target for an amount roughly equal to Word of Glory's healing, and places a HoT on the target, lasting 30 seconds. The power of the HoT is dependant on the amount of Holy Power with which the spell is used. When Eternal Flame is used on yourself, the HoT's power is increased by 100%.
• Sacred Shield places a 30-second buff on the target, which then goes on to create a damage absorption shield every 6 seconds. The individual shields being broken by damage or expiring has no effect on the main buff. Sacred Shield has a 6-second cooldown.

The choice in this tier comes down to either Sacred Shield or Eternal Flame, but we feel that Sacred Shield is best.

While Sacred Shield provides about as much absorption as Eternal Flame provides healing, it adapts to your damage intake pattern to provide a natural smoothing effect. It also cannot be overheal, and does not cost Holy Power (which could be spent on more Shield of the Righteous casts).

Eternal Flame is a distant second choice, and there really is never a situation where you should choose it over Sacred Shield.

Selfless Healer is useful for healing other raid members, but since this should never really be your task as a tank, we believe that this talent will be the least desirable choice.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 talents offer you a choice between 3 ways of situationally improving your utility.

• Hand of Purity places a 6-second buff on a target, reducing the damage they take from harmful periodic effects by 70%, and reducing all damage taken by 10%.
• Unbreakable Spirit passively reduces the remaining cooldown of Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Lay on Hands by 1% each time you use a charge of Holy Power. The total reduction is capped at 50% of the original cooldown.
• Clemency gives each of your Hand spells 2 charges. This means that you can use them twice before triggering the cooldown (but the cooldown will begin ticking as soon as it is used for the first time).

Unbreakable Spirit gives you more frequent access to several potent personal cooldowns, and this should be your default choice for encounters where Clemency and Hand of Purity do not provide a larger benefit. Note also that thanks to the Tier 15 Set 2-piece Bonus, Unbreakable Spirit becomes even more powerful.

Clemency is great for times where being able to use your hand spells (most notable Hand of Protection) twice as much is beneficial. This is usually the case when your hand spells can be used to negate certain encounter mechanics.

Hand of Purity is only worth taking when you can reduce the damage of a very powerful DoT.

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents offer you a choice between 3 powerful performance-enchancing talents.

• Holy Avenger is a 2-minute cooldown that, for 18 seconds, causes your abilities that generate Holy Power to deal 30% additional damage and healing, and to generate 3 charges of Holy Power, instead of 1.
• Sanctified Wrath passively increases the duration of Avenging Wrath by 50%. Additionally, while Avenging Wrath is active, all healing received by you is increased by 20%, and the cooldown of Judgment is reduced by 50%.
• Divine Purpose gives your abilities that cost Holy Power a 25% chance to cause your next Holy Power-costing ability cost no Holy Power and be cast as if you had 3 charges of Holy Power.

All 3 talents are pretty solid here, but we advise you to take Holy Avenger in most situations, because it gives you more control over when you can benefit from it than the other two talents. Holy Avenger can also be coupled with Avenging Wrath, which, in case you are interested in boosting your DPS, will greatly increase its value.

It is also worth noting that, due to the frequent tank switching mechanics in raids, your uptime on Holy Avenger while actively tanking the boss will be much higher than it would initially appear (you will have it active roughly half the time you are tanking).

Divine Purpose is less appealing because it procs randomly and you do not have any freedom to choose your survivability (or DPS) boost when you need it most.

Sanctified Wrath is problematic because using it properly requires that you alter your rotation (you need to prioritize Judgment ahead of Crusader Strike) if you wish to get the maximum benefit from it.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents offer you a choice between 3 abilities that are centered around damaging multiple enemies and healing multiple allies.

• Holy Prism can be cast on an ally or enemy target. If cast on an enemy, Holy Prism deals damage to them and heals 5 nearby allies. If cast on an ally, it heals that ally and damages 5 nearby enemies.
• Light's Hammer places a hammer at a target location on the ground for 16 seconds. During this time, the hammer will heal all nearby allies and damage all nearby enemies. Enemies' movement speed is also reduced by 50% for 2 seconds each time they take damage.
• Execution Sentence can be used on enemies or on allies. If used on an enemy, they take a certain amount of damage over 10 seconds (the damage they take is low at first, and it increases gradually). If used on an ally, they will be healed for a certain amount over 10 seconds (the effect is also gradually increasing).

The best choice in the vast majority of situations is Light's Hammer. This spell provides you with AoE damage and healing, and can also serve to burn down groups of adds.

Execution Sentence is the best in terms of single-target DPS or healing, but the healing has a ramp-up time that often causes it to be ineffective.

Finally, Holy Prism lags behind the other two choices both in terms of DPS, and in terms of healing. It has a shorter cooldown, being available more often, but this also means that you need to spend more global cooldowns on it. It is most useful as a snap aggro tool, because casting it on yourself or on an ally will usually pick up the nearest 5 enemies in a single global cooldown.

8. Major Glyphs↑top

Glyph of the Battle Healer causes you to passively heal nearby targets for 20% of the damage you do with auto-attacks, Crusader Strike, Shield of the Righteous, and Hammer of the Righteous while Seal of Insight is active. This glyph will provide a rather considerable amount of passive healing to your raid, and is arguably the strongest glyph you can choose.

There are several other interesting Major Glyphs, which can prove to be beneficial (even if only slightly), in some situations.

• Glyph of the Alabaster Shield causes your blocks to increase the damage of your next Shield of the Righteous by 20%, stacking up to 3 times. This is a solid DPS/threat increase.
• Glyph of Focused Shield reduces the number of targets that your Avenger's Shield hits to 1, but increases its damage by 30%. This is excellent if there is no need for multiple-target DPS/threat in the encounter.
• Glyph of Consecration allows you to place Consecration at a targeted location (instead of simply underneath your character). This is a great way to pick up adds that spawn in a location far from you.
• Glyph of Divine Protection turns 20% of the magical damage reduction granted by Divine Protection into physical damage reduction. Choosing this glyph will depend on the type of damage you want to use Divine Protection against in the fight.
• Glyph of Holy Wrath causes Holy Wrath to stun Elementals and Dragonkin, which adds utility to the spell.
• Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous increases the duration of the Weakened Blows debuff applied by Hammer of the Righteous. Unfortunately, this is a very small DPS increase, making this primarily a convenience glyph.
• Glyph of Avenging Wrath will turn out to be a very small self-heal over the course of a fight.
• Glyph of Final Wrath gives your Holy Wrath increased damage against targets below 20% health, which can come in handy in some situations.

9. Minor Glyphs↑top

Glyph of Focused Wrath turns your Holy Wrath into a single-target attack. This is useful when there are crowd-controlled mobs around your primary target, but you still want to get to use Holy Wrath against that primary target.

Other Minor Glyphs are purely cosmetic, and have no effect on your gameplay.

One glyph is worth mentioning, though. Glyph of the Righteous Retreat increases the cast speed of your Hearthstone by 50% while Divine Shield is active, allowing you to successfully bubblehearth once again.

10. Changelog↑top

• 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 update: updated the description of Glyph of the Battle Healer.
• 04 Apr. 2013: Changed Hand of Purity's category to Utility, and Unbreakable Spirit's category to Performance-enhancing.
• 31 Mar. 2013: Made several improvements.
  • Updated the Tier 1 talents section to make Long Arm of the Law appear more appealing than before.
  • Updated the Tier 3 talents section to emphasise that Sacred Shield is the best choice by far.
  • Updated the Tier 4 talents section to reflect that Unbreakable Spirit should be the default choice.
  • Updated the Tier 5 talents section to better reflect the value of Holy Avenger (as the best talent), when compared to the other two choices.
  • Updated the Tier 6 talents section to correct a minor error in the description of Holy Prism, and to offer a better evaluation of the three talents.
  • Updated the description of Glyph of the Battle Healer to better account for its value. Also updated the descriptions of a few other glyphs to be more accurate. Added Glyph of Holy Wrath and Glyph of Focused Wrath.
• 05 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Added mention of the movement speed reduction applied by Light's Hammer.
  • Added mention of the damage reduction provided by Hand of Purity.
  • Added mention of the new values of the Flash of Light boost provided by Selfless Healer (20%/40%/60% per stack, down from 33%/66%/100%).
  • Added mention of the increased healing done by Eternal Flame when cast on self.