Mists of Pandaria Classic Protection Paladin Talent Builds

Protection Paladin has considerably less talents than past expansions though the simplification of the talent tree still leaves us with several choices to make. As a Protection Paladin your goal is to maximize your personal survivability while dealing as much damage as possible to generate as much threat as possible and vanquish your foes as quickly as possible.

Below is a rough breakdown of each choice available for each tier of Talents. In Mists of Pandaria you will unlock a new row of talent selections every 15 levels, starting at level 15.

This tier of talents is dedicated exclusively to mobility and increasing your characters movement speed.

• Speed of Light is our default choice as Protection. A 70% movement speed increase will allow us to quickly reach mobs that are out of range or allow us to reposition the mobs we are currently tanking. It is also a relatively short cooldown that will likely be up any major movement needs to occur.
• Long Arm of the Law will increase your movement speed each time your cast Judgment. As a Protection Paladin we will be casting Judgement on cooldown so this is an option to consider if you need to constantly be repositioning.
• Pursuit of Justice provides movement speed based on your current Holy Power but as a Protection Paladin your goal is to cast as many Shield of the Righteous as possible while maintaining Eternal Flame so we will ideally never have more than a few Holy Power.

This tier of talents focuses on our crowd controlling abilities. The choices in this tier can be dependent on exactly what content you are doing so you may find yourself swapping between these depending on the encounter.

• Fist of Justice is our default choice as it replaces your Hammer of Justice ability with a shorter cooldown version of itself and with 10 additional yards of range. Stunning the target can often be the best way to reduce incoming damage and as a Tank our goal is to minimize incoming damage as much as possible.
• Repentance incapacitates your target for 1 minute. As a tank you will rarely if ever get the opportunity to cast this as any time spent casting removes your ability to avoid incoming attacks but in situations where this is cast pre-pull it can be situationally useful.
• Evil is a Point of View now allows us to cast Turn Evil on Humanoids and Beasts. This can be useful especially in a situation where another incapacitating effect is already present and you need a reactionary crowd controlling effect but it is incredibly rare that either Fist of Justice or Repentance will not accomplish the same thing but better.

This tier of talents focuses on self sustain and mitigating incoming damage.

• Eternal Flame consumes 3 Holy Power and applies a heal-over-time effect to your target. This is our default choice as a Protection Paladin due to the nature of its scaling with both Bastion of Glory and Vengeance. This is an incredibly powerful heal that when cast on yourself also increases the duration by 50% making it incredibly efficient as well.
• Sacred Shield is another strong option but unfortunately just does not compete with Eternal Flame due to its scaling with both Vengeance and Bastion of Glory.
• Selfless Healer causes each of your Judgment casts to grant you a buff reducing the Mana cost and cast time of your next Flash of Light, while also increasing its effectiveness. This is an interesting choice, but our primary focus needs to be on self-sustaining and Eternal Flame does that much better.

This tier of talents is centered around our utility and defensive cooldowns, either bolstering our current abilities or allowing us access to additional powerful defensive in the form of Hand of Purity.

• Unbreakable Spirit reduces the cooldown of your Divine Shield, Divine Protection and Lay on Hands abilities by 50%. This is the ideal choice as a Protection Paladin as you should be using your Divine Protection early and often to reduce incoming damage and Divine Shield can often be used to entirely remove mechanics from boss encounters.
• Clemency grants a second charge to your all of your Hand of Sacrifice, Hand of Freedom, Hand of Protection, and Hand of Salvation abilities before incurring their cooldowns. While this is an interesting option the increased availability of our primary defensive cooldowns found with Unbreakable Spirit is just too strong to pass up.
• Hand of Purity reduces the targets damage taken by 10% and and periodic damage taken by 80% for 6 seconds. This is an incredibly niche pick but can almost completely remove specific abilities from certain encounters so consider choosing this if an encounter has a considerable amount of periodic damage.

This tier of talents will focus on bolstering our ability to do damage by increasing the potency of our cooldowns or allowing us more access to Holy Power spending and generating abilities.

• Holy Avenger increases the damage of your Holy Power generating abilities by 30% and causes them to generate 3 Holy Power. This talent is our default choice especially at lower gear levels as the added burst of Holy Power generation can help build a buffer of Shield of the Righteous up time and get early Bastion of Glory stacks to apply our Eternal Flame.
• Sanctified Wrath extends the duration of our Avenging Wrath by 50% (10 seconds, totaling in 30 seconds of up time.) and reduces the cooldown of Judgment by 50% and causes it to generate an additional Holy Power while Avenging Wrath is active. This often results in being the highest damage output of the talent options in this tier and can greatly increase your survivability due to the increased healing received.
• Divine Purpose gives you Holy Power spending abilities a 25% chance to make your next Holy Power spending ability to be free and behave as if it was cast with 3 Holy Power. This talent is a great choice but can be a bit difficult to plan around due to its random nature. As we gain more Haste rating with better gear through the expansion this talent becomes more and more competitive with the other two options.

The final tier of talents offers new abilities added in Mists of Pandaria that will allow you to both deal damage and and heal yourself and members of your party.

• Execution Sentence applies a damage-over-time effect on enemy targets and a heal-over-time effect on friendly targets that increases throughout the duration of the effect. This will be our default choice in any purely single target encounter where your group does not need the healing effects of Light's Hammer.
• Light's Hammer summons a hammer to a targeted location dealing damage to any enemies within a 10 yard radius and healing any allies within the radius. This will often be the best option for an encounter even when fighting just a single enemy as the healing provided to your group acts as a powerful raid cooldown when high levels of Vengeance are active.
• Holy Prism is an incredibly niche option that we will not often be taking. Holy Prism if cast on an enemy deals damage to the target and heals 5 nearby allies of the target, if cast on a friendly target it heals the target and deals damage to 5 nearby enemies. With high amounts of Vengeance this can be a great way to heal your group through otherwise deadly damage but more often than not Light's Hammer will result in a greater benefit for your group.

Glyphs in Mists of Pandaria have had their power scaled down considerably, Prime Glyphs have been removed and we will now only have to focus on Major and Minor Glyphs. Major Glyphs will have considerable impact on your Damage and ability to survive an encounter while Minor Glyphs will mostly be for cosmetic and quality of life purposes.

As a Protection Paladin there are a number of powerful Glyphs to chose from that will not only bolster your damage done but also increase you and your groups survivability. The only glyph that will be running at all times is Glyph of the Alabaster Shield the other two slots are open to personal preference and what best suits the encounter you are currently facing.

• Glyph of the Alabaster Shield causes your successful blocks to increase the damage of your next Shield of the Righteous by 10% stacking up to three times. This is a massive damage increase to an ability we will already be using as often as possible.
• Glyph of Hand of Sacrifice causes your Hand of Sacrifice to no longer redirect the damage to the Paladin. This is an incredible way to mitigate damage on a member of your group without having to worry about the possibility of you dying as a result of reducing their incoming damage. As a Tank reducing any source of incoming damage is always a great choice and this allows you to mitigate a considerable amount of damage from an ally.
• Glyph of Final Wrath causes your Holy Wrath ability to deal an additional 50% damage to targets with less than 20% health. This causes Holy Wrath to act as a mini execute and is especially powerful when fighting multiple enemies.
• Glyph of Focused Shield causes your Avenger's Shield to hit a single target but deals 30% more damage. This is a great way to increase your damage in a situation where there is only a single target or a high priority target.
• Glyph of Double Jeopardy causes your Judgment ability to deal 20% more damage if cast on a different target than your previous Judgement. This will be a default choice in any encounter that involves more than one target, especially when you will be spending most of the encounter fighting multiple enemies.
• Glyph of Divine Protection reduces Physical and Magic damage by 20%. This changes your Divine Protection ability from a purely Magic damage defensive ability to now split the damage reduction half Physical and half Magic. While most encounters will be a mix of both Magic and Physical damage if you ever find yourself in a situation where you are taking purely Physical damage this is a great choice as Divine Protection will otherwise be rendered useless.
• Glyph of Consecration allows you to place Consecration at a targeted location. This makes it much easier to place your Consecration allowing for you to generate threat on multiple targets.

Minor Glyphs as mentioned above will only offer you quality of life or cosmetic benefits in Mists of Pandaria so listed below are the only two options that may actually impact your game play.

• Glyph of Righteous Retreat causes your Hearthstone to be 50% faster while Divine Shield is active.
• Glyph of the Falling Avenger adds a slow fall effect to your Avenging Wrath