Paladin Class Guide

Holy Paladin continues to be the single-target healing specialist while now also having tools to deal with AoE damage through Light's Vigil, the new capstone talent. That being said, you will need to be careful about spamming this new ability as it has an extremely high mana cost and needs to be used cautiously. For players who have missed living the Shockadin lifestyle, many talents have been added and adjusted placing more power in damage builds.

In addition to the above changes, these following changes should play a key role for players wanting to increase their healing or damage outputs:

• Infusion of Light — Holy Shock and Flash of Light critical strikes reduce cast time of your next Holy Light, which will help to give you the ability to quickly drop large heals while in significant danger.
• Voice of Truth — Grants you immunity so Silence and Interrupt effects for 6 seconds. This functions similarly to Concentration Aura and Aura Mastery from other versions of the game, allowing you to cast without worrying about being interrupted.
• Reverence — Allows a percent of your mana regen to continue while casting, helping to improve mana stability over the course of a fight.
• Consecrated Ground, Divine Precision, Holy Power, Improved Holy Strike — all increase your damage output, allowing you to live your Shockadin dreams.

Holy Paladins have a lot of reasons to be hopeful heading into Forever, but overall viability will largely be tied to if it can manage the heavy mana costs associated with Light's Vigil. If it cannot, then you may struggle to compete with other healers during difficult AoE moments. That doesn't mean Holy Paladin will not be desired, the single-target healing is very valuable and each raid needs at least 3 Paladins for buff purposes. How well it will do numerically is still to be evaluated though.

Leveling Information

Holy Paladin Guides

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In Forever, Protection Paladin gets access to its most desired feature: a taunt. Seal of Fury causes Judgement to taunt an enemy for 4 seconds. Due to Seals no longer being consumed by Judgement, you will not need to play a seal twisting mini game and can instead focus on having the best seal active at any given moment. Additionally, mana talents have been changed/added to help manage the mana costs that come with playing Protection Paladin. Below we will break down some of these new changes:

• Improved Seal of Fury — When the absorb shield provided by Seal of Fury is gone, you will gain back mana.
• Shield Specialization — Blocks have a 100% chance to restore a percent of your mana. While this effect can only proc every 3 seconds, it should play a massive role in allowing you to sustain your mana during combat.
• Swift Judgement — This ability will finish the remaining cooldown of Judgement while also making the next Judgement cast free. With this, you can quickly get a taunt off while not missing out on any damage that comes from holding Judgement to taunt.
• Templar's Bulwark — When activated, you will gain a massive absorb shield. This effect does apply Forbearance and cannot be cast while you have Forbearance. This is a massive defensive cooldown that you can use in moments of extreme danger.
• Iron Creed — Holy Strike now generates additional threat and will reduce damage taken. You will want to keep constant use of this ability in order to benefit from its effects.

While these are fantastic changes overall, there are concerns about how Protection Paladin is reliant on blocking enemy attacks in order to manage mana costs. When you are not actively tanking, you are not regening mana and that can become a problem. Additionally, having your taunt attached to Judgement means that you either need to be rotating through seals or hold off on pressing Judgement for periods of time.

Leveling Information

Protection Paladin Guides

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Retribution has received several changes to their talents focused on increasing their rotational complexity slightly by iterating on the new Holy Strike ability, as well as many new talents with effects on your gameplay. The talent trees also opens up for two different popular Retribution archetypes. The new talent Twist of Light leans into the Seal-twisting archetype, where you weave Seals between auto-attacks to deal more damage. Another alternative build can drop Twist of Light and invest 21 points into Holy for Holy Shock leaning into the Shockadin archetype. Consecration is now available to all Paladin specializations, giving Retribution access to an AoE damage spell without needing to invest talent points for it.

Regardless of which archetype you prefer to play there are several strong new or reworked Retribution talents that empower the hybrid nature of Paladin, with talents both improving Holy spell damage and melee damage. Below is a list of all Retribution talents that have been changed, talents that remain unchanged and have only been moved slightly might not be mentioned:

• Benediction — Now reduces the mana cost of all instant spells and abilities by 2% per talent point, up to 5 points.
• Holy Conduit — Reduces the mana cost of Consecration, Holy Wrath, Exorcism, and Hammer of Wrath by 20% per talent point, up to 2 points.
• Vindication — Your attacks may now reduces enemy Attack power instead of Strength and Agility, also gives the player Attack power for 30 seconds, both effects increasing per talent point, up to 3 points.
• Sanctified Judgement — Gives an increasing chance for Judgement to refund a portion of the mana cost of your active Seal when used. 33% proc chance and 20% mana refunded per talent point, up to 3 points.
• Pursuit of Justice — Now gives 8/15% increased speed while mounted.
• Eye for an Eye — Now activates on all Critical Strikes against you, but the damage it reflects is lowered to 5% per talent point, up to 2 points.
• Sacred Arbiter — Increases Holy Strike damage by 10% and causes it to refresh all Judgement effects, including those from other Paladins.
• Crusade — Increases all damage dealt by 1% per talent point, and an additional 1% against Demons and Undead targets, up to 2 points.
• Two-Handed Weapon Specialization — Now increases damage dealt with two-handed melee weapons by 3% per talent point, up to 3 points.
• Vengeance — Now causes your Critical Strikes to give a stacking Physical and Holy damage up to 5 stacks. Each stack grants 1% increased damage per talent point, up to 3 points.
• Champion of the Light — Increase your Spell damage and healing by 33% of your Intellect per talent point, up to 3 points.
• Instrument of Law — Reduces the cast time of Hammer of Wrath by 0.5 seconds per talent point, and reduces all threat you generate by 10% per talent point when Righteous Fury is not active, up to 2 points.
• Twist of Light — When you replace either Seal of Command, Seal of Righteousness, Seal of Fury, or Seal of Justice with another Seal you gain a buff causing your next auto-attack to activate your old Seal once.

Leveling Information

Retribution Paladin Guides

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