Holy Paladin Best Covenants, Soulbinds, and Conduits — Dragonflight 10.2.5

Please be aware that as of the Dragonflight Pre-Patch and Dragonflight expansion, all Covenant abilities, Soulbinds, and Conduits will only function while within the Shadowlands. This page will temporarily remain as a reference.

This page assumes that you are already familiar with Covenants, Soulbinds, and Conduits. If that is not the case, we have a number of pages that can help you get up to speed:

• Covenants Guide, which explains what Covenants are, what perks they bring, and how you can join one;
• Paladin Covenant Abilities, which lists all the abilities that Paladins gain by joining each Covenant;
• How To Change Covenant?, which tells you how you can switch Covenant (rejoining a former Covenant will require you to perform a number of tasks to regain their trusts);
• General Soulbind Guide, which explains what Soulbinds are and how you can pledge yourself to them to open up their Soulbind tree;
• Paladin Conduits, which lists all of the Conduits available to Paladins.

Focus	Covenant	Soulbind	Advised Tree
Raiding	Venthyr	Theotar the Mad Duke	Best Venthyr Raiding Covenant and Soulbind at Max Renown
Raiding	Necrolord	Bonesmith Heirmir	Best Necrolord Raiding Covenant and Soulbind at Max Renown
Mythic+	Venthyr	Theotar the Mad Duke	Best Venthyr Mythic+ Covenant and Soulbind at Max Renown

Necrolord and Venthyr are extremely competitive Covenant choices and there are pros and cons of both Covenants. At the end of the day, you can clear every form of content with either Covenant choice but after nerfs to Ashen Hallow and access to double Legendaries, Necrolord will pull ahead in Raiding with Venthyr still remaining superior for Mythic+. However, until you are able to access the Holy Paladin 4-Piece bonus and double Legendaries, Venthyr and Necrolord are extremely close in Raiding and the best choice will depend on the fight and what your healer comp needs.

If you are interested in more detailed Covenant discussion where we continue to break down the debate between Necrolord and Venthyr, you can read our Covenants and Soulbinds analysis section at the bottom of this page. We would highly recommend reading this if you are still unsure about what Covenant to pick. This will hopefully help you pick the Covenant choice that is best for your playstyle.

Below we will list the best Conduits available to Holy Paladin. If you are interested in more detailed descriptions of them, continue reading to the next section of the guide.

It is important to note that we are able to swap conduits freely thanks to the removal of conduit energy. In most cases this will not impact Holy Paladin, but you may want to swap conduits depending on the legendary you are using.

• Best Potency Conduits: Focused Light, Ringing Clarity (if Kyrian), Hallowed Discernment (if Venthyr), Righteous Might (if Necrolord), Enkindled Spirit, and Untempered Dedication.
• Best Finesse Conduits: Light's Barding and Echoing Blessings.
• Best Endurance Conduits: Shielding Words, Golden Path, and Condensed Anima Sphere.

When filling out your Soulbind tree, you will want to prioritize Potency Conduits as they are the only Conduit type to directly increase your damage or healing. This means that you will want to choose two of them when making your way down the Soulbind tree.

1. Untempered Dedication is the very best Conduit when playing the Maraad's Dying Breath Legendary and it is not even close. If you are not using this Legendary, you should avoid using this Conduit as you do not cast Light of the Martyr enough to justify using it.
2. Focused Light is our most flexible Conduit. The increase to Critical Strike chance on Holy Shock can be useful in every form of content. You will want to use this conduit anytime you are not using Maraad's Dying Breath.
3. Our Covenant Conduits: Hallowed Discernment, The Long Summer and Ringing Clarity are fairly strong Conduits for Raiding, Mythic+, and solo content. If you are Kyrian, Venthyr or Night Fae, you will want to use your respective conduit as your second potency conduit.
4. Enkindled Spirit is a competitive Conduit in terms of HPS value to Focused Light but it will generally fall behind unless it is a higher rank than Focused Light. This will be one of your stronger options for your third conduit choice.
5. Adaptive Armor Fragment is technically a conduit for tanks, but it works for Holy Paladins and provides a nice boost to intellect. It is a strong contender for your third potency slot and you will often find yourself deciding between this conduit and Enkindled Spirit for your third slot.
6. Resplendent Light is a tricky Conduit to rank as it is easily our best Conduit if we were to be using Holy Light frequently. However, because this ability is not very common in our rotation, the Conduit will not get nearly enough value. In most cases, you will want to stay away unless you plan on using high amounts of Holy Light.
7. The Conduit tied to Necrolord is fairly weak and is not worth considering.

When it comes to choosing which Conduit to use, when using the Maraad's Dying Breath Legendary, Untempered Dedication should be used 100% of the time. If you are not using this legendary you will want to use Focused Light for your first conduit slot. Your second conduit choice will generally be your Covenant-specific conduit unless you are Necrolord. For your final slot, both Adaptive Armor Fragment and Enkindled Spirit are competitive choices and you will want to pick whatever conduit you have higher.

1. Divine Call provides a nice reduction to the cooldown of Divine Shield at higher ranks, but is fairly weak until you are able to get a higher item level version of the Conduit.
2. Golden Path provides decent self-healing when you are making use of Consecration.
3. Shielding Words will give you a minor shield when using Word of Glory. In situations where you are using Word of Glory frequently, it will have decent value. In raids, it is not exceptionally strong.
4. Condensed Anima Sphere is very comparable to Golden Path except it requires no effort to play around and get full value. While the value may seem low, it adds up significantly over the course of an encounter.

Your best Endurance Conduit will change depending on what type of content you are doing. You can choose whichever you prefer and will not be at a disadvantage for doing so.

1. Echoing Blessings provides a decent boost to your blessing abilities.
2. Light's Barding is a valuable increase to your mobility.li>
3. Pure Concentration is extremely weak outside of niche PvP situations. You will want to avoid this Finesse Conduit outside of PvP.
4. Wrench Evil is another Conduit that requires very rare situations to be useful. Can be useful in PvP and rare Mythic+ situations. But has no use for Raiding.

Your best Finesse Conduit will come down to Echoing Blessings and Light's Barding. With Paladin having very weak mobility compared to other classes, the extra duration on Divine Steed can be extremely valuable and will likely be slightly better.

Both Necrolord and Venthyr are acceptable Covenant choices. Even Kyrian remains acceptable even if it is a bit behind the other two. In Patch 9.2, we gain access to the ability to use double Legendaries as well as our new tier set bonus. Unfortunately for Venthyr, even after receiving significant nerfs, it also does not benefit nearly as much from double Legendaries or from the tier set. Necrolord already uses its covenant-specific Legendary so it gets to equip another Legendary entirely of your choosing. Venthyr is locked into having to equip Radiant Embers as its second Legendary which is extremely situational. Given that Necrolord also spends a significantly higher amount of Holy Power every minute, it is able to proc the tier set bonus at a higher rate than Venthyr.

Due to reasons mentioned above, Necrolord is the recommended Covenant once you gain access to double Legendaries and your tier set. Until then, the best Covenant largely comes down to fight design and whether or not Ashen Hallow will have good uses. In situations where your raid is spread or there are not enough opportunities to use Ashen Hallow, then other covenants such as Necrolord will pull ahead.

It is also worth noting that Venthyr is more difficult to use as it requires coordination and preplanning unlike that of Necrolord. However, it provides an extremely strong healing cooldown while also doing incredibly high damage. In some cases, Venthyr will provide less overall healing but significantly more damage and it provides your raid team with a very strong healing cooldown. Venthyr is harder to play with as it requires precise positioning and if the raid or mythic+ party moves out of it, you will lose significant value. With all of the risks that Venthyr has, it still has quite a high potential ceiling since with very little overhealing, not many other abilities will be able to compete. Even at lower levels of play, just adding another raid strong raid CD during Mythic progression can make a huge difference, not to mention the damage it provides being super valuable during progression.

That being said, it was nerfed quite significantly as previously mentioned and the real power it has is significantly lower than previous patches. While its strengths and weaknesses have not really changed, its overall power has lessened making Necrolord (especially with 4pc/double legendary) notably stronger.

• Kyrian has Divine Toll, which provides you with a strong burst cooldown you can use for damage or healing. It has a short cooldown of only a minute so it you will be able to make constant use of it. It also has amazing synergy with some of our talents like Glimmer of Light.
• Venthyr gives us Ashen Hallow, which is a 4-minute cooldown with a 30-second duration. Unfortunately long cooldowns are not super desirable in Raiding or Mythic+. When you also factor in that it is stationary it loses even more value in Mythic+. That being said, it does provide considerable healing and damage which can make it a strong choice if you are okay with the long cooldown and lack of flexibility that comes with selecting it.
• Night Fae is quite possibly the most interesting of our Covenants, as it provides us with 4 more unique blessings that you can rotate through. Night Fae was exceptional when Beta first rolled around, but it has since undergone significant nerfs that have decreased the uptimes on each blessing to very low amounts. You do not get the strong blessings often enough to make the ability competitive. It is currently our worst Covenant.
• Necrolord causes our next Word of Glory to trigger Light of Dawn for free and also generates 1 Holy Power. This provides us with extremely strong Light of Dawn casts as well as extra Holy Power, giving it extremely strong synergy with the talents Awakening and Divine Purpose.

Choosing the best Covenant will come down to how much you value minmaxing your character versus aesthethic appeal. Above we broke down the Covenant abilities and how they compared to each other. Below we will cover extra information on the abilities like how to use them and what we would recommend for Soulbind pathing.

Divine Toll is an extremely strong burst cooldown that will fire up to 5 Holy Shock on allies or enemies (depending who you use it on). Each Holy Shock will generate 1 Holy Power. Generally you will want to use this ability as often as possible during an encounter. Given its relatively short cooldown of only a minute, you will be able to get a lot of use out of it. As mentioned previously, it has very strong synergy with some of our talents such as Glimmer of Light. Each Holy Shock cast by Divine Toll will trigger your glimmers.

For us, Kleia and Forgelite Prime Mikanikos are the two best Soulbinds for Kyrian paladins. Kleia will likely be the better Soulbind in raid as you cannot make use of the Mikanikos traits in raid as well as you can in Mythic+. That being said, there are situations where Mikanikos can outperform Kleia regardless of content. Whenever you constantly need healing, Mikanikos will be better.

We suggest following this path + Conduit pick choice and timing:

Below is our chosen path and Conduits for this Soulbind:

Ashen Hallow gives Holy Paladin a strong throughput cooldown but on a very large cooldown. The healing/damage done by the ability is not terrible, but the 4-minute cooldown is what hurts it the most. It also does not allows room for much flexibility as it is a stationary ability that you place on the ground and forget about. If you move away from it, you will lose all of its benefits. Since it has a long duration of 30 seconds, it is not uncommon that you would move away from it in Mythic+. Even with it being not very flexible and very unfriendly for movement. It still provides incredible healing and damage, making it an extremely competitive choice to Kyrian.

All three Venthyr Soulbinds are fairly competitive and you can make a case to use any of them. That being said, Theotar the Mad Duke will be the best option if your goal is to increase your overall healing. That does not mean General Draven or Nadjia the Mistblade are bad. Nadjia is very strong in Mythic+ content and Draven still has very powerful traits such as Hold Your Ground. Unfortunately, their traits are not consistently good enough to justify taking either of those Soulbinds over Theotar for raiding.

Theotar the Mad Duke will be the best Soulbind for Venthyr. It provides you the option early to choose between a movement speed increase or shield. Followed by the ability to pick up two Potency Conduit slots while still giving you access to whichever final ability you would like to choose.

Below is our chosen path and Conduits for this Soulbind:

Vanquisher's Hammer is a strong Covenant ability that empowers your next Word of Glory to trigger Light of Dawn. While it is not as good as Divine Toll, you can make a solid case it is our second best Covenant ability as it is free to use and you interact with it frequently. It does not have the drawbacks that Ashen Hallow does because it is something you can make constant use of in both Mythic+ and Raiding.

The Necrolord Soulbinds are not nearly as impressive as some of the other Covenant Soulbinds. Nearly all Soulbinds here are viable choices and do relatively the same thing. The main differences come in the utility provided by each tree. We recommend using Bonesmith Heirmir as it provides the highest HPS increase of the Soulbinds.

Below is our chosen path and Conduits for this Soulbind:

Blessing of Summer is quite possibly the most interesting Covenant ability at our disposal, but it is also unfortunately our weakest. It does provide some strong buffs you can use on yourself or your allies in the form of Blessing of Summer, Blessing of Autumn, and Blessing of Spring. That being said, you are not able to make use of these abilities as often as you would like for the Covenant to be viable. You rotate through the blessings in a specific order and each lasts 30 seconds with a 45-second cooldown until you can swap to the next blessing. Without higher uptimes, Night Fae is not nearly good enough to warrant taking over the other Covenants.

Dreamweaver is easily the best Soulbind available from a healing perspective. Right away you gain access to a cheat death ability that can be incredibly valuable when doing progression content. It also has Social Butterfly and Empowered Chrysalis which are interesting abilities in their own right. However, if you were to choose one of those you would lose access to having two Potency slots.

Niya is not very strong from a healing perspective, but it does offer the best damage out of any of the Night Fae Soulbinds, making it worth considering if you are focusing purely on Mythic+ or PvP and would like access to the damage output it offers.

We suggest following this path + Conduit pick choice and timing:

The best choice for the Dreamweaver tree results in only having one Potency slot available. You can opt into going the Soothing Voice route but given the strength of Empowered Chrysalis, you will be slightly weaker.

Below is our chosen path and Conduits for this Soulbind: