How To Improve As Protection Paladin - The War Within Pre-Patch (2024)

Last updated on Jul 23, 2024 at 00:30by Panthea55 comments

With any combat resource system you want to avoid waste. With Holy Power wehave abilities that build Holy Power ( Judgment, Crusader Strike/ Hammer of the Righteous/ Blessed Hammer,and Hammer of Wrath) and abilities that spend Holy Power( Shield of the Righteous, and Word of Glory). Your aim here is toensure that you use your Holy Power spenders before reaching 5 Holy Power. Learnhow to plan your ability rotations so that this scenario does not occur.

As an additional tip: You should try to ensure that your Shield of the Righteous casts that are empowered by Judgment. Casting Judgment increases the damagethe target takes from Shield of the Righteous by 25%, and you want to makesure that unless absolutely necessary, it is empowered by it. This can betricky or in some cases impossible to pull off if you need prolonged uptimeon Shield of the Righteous and are unlucky with Grand Crusaderprocs.

Consecration has a very short cooldown, but along duration (duration lowered by your Haste as it ticks faster), it isgenerally very easy to have 100% uptime on Consecration. However, since youcan only have one Consecration active, and casting it again overwrites the oldone, it is a rather big loss to your rotation to constantly be recastingConsecration when you do not have to. This means it is important to know howmuch duration your current Consecration has to know when to prioritize it inyour rotation again.

Word of Glory is a self-heal with that increases effectiveness thelower health you have. Due to its Holy Power cost outside of 5 stacks of Shining Light you need to restrain from using it until you are ratherlow in health. A common mistake is to spend Holy Power on it when you are onlymissing a very small amount of of health, thus reducing potential Shield of the Righteous uptime, or wasting a Shining Light buffthat makes it free to cast. It is a fine line as you obviously need to makesure to not use it too late and you end up dying. This requires a lot ofknowledge of how high and immediate the incoming damage is. You also need toknow what cooldowns or active mitigation you have up or available, to make sureyou can survive going as low as you can without a risk of dying. Planning thistakes a bit of practice since it is on the global cooldown.

You should always have an Aura active. Which aura depends on the situationyou and your group is in.

• If you are the only Paladin in your group/raid, you should use Devotion Aura.
• If there is a Holy Paladin in your group/raid, they should be using Devotion Aura, and you should use another aura.
• If there are multiple Paladins in your group/raid, discuss who should usewhich aura.
• If you are mounted, use Crusader Aura.

Paladins are one of the tanks with the most group utility out there, and itis important to make use of these as it can turn the tide in many situations.Your blessings are some of the strongest spells for your group there is, and acommon mistake from Paladins is that they only focus on their own play ratherthan helping the group when possible. This is especially true for Blessing of Sacrifice, which can be used often whenever you know a teammember will be taking damage; this is even more important for your co-tank inraids. Blessing of Protection or Blessing of Spellwarding arealso tools you should try to find situations for to help your group out. While Blessing of Freedom has more limited uses most of the time, there arestill moments where it shines and it is a mistake not to use.

If you have chosen the Hand of the Protector talent, you got anamazing tool for getting allies out of being at dangerously low health with thepress of a button. Be careful when helping others with this though, as it doesso at the cost of Shield of the Righteous casts or potential self-healsyou may need, but hopefully it means the healer can focus more on you instead ofpanic healing the both of you. It also upsets your rotation since it takes up aglobal cooldown from your normal rotation.

Lay on Hands is an instant full heal on you or another player that isoff the global cooldown. This is incredibly strong to get you out of a lowhealth situation should your Word of Glory not be free right now, or younot having the Holy Power available, or in real emergencies, if you can notwait for the global cooldown of Word of Glory, Lay on Hands might need to beused.

If a raid or boss ability will require you to use specific cooldowns,personals, or externals to survive, you want to build up a plan for when touse these strong cooldowns against what abilities. Make sure you are usingsome form of add-on to track other team members strong cooldowns to be ableto call for them.

With Protection Paladins not being able to keep 100% uptime on their Shield of the Righteous, in many situations we are required to fillin the gaps of Shield of the Righteous uptime with cooldowns to smooth damageintake. Try either using short cooldown external, or Ardent Defender to buy you a few more seconds of safety while youlet Shield of the Righteous recharge.

While it is always cool to dish out a lot of damage, even as a tank, goingoverboard with offensive tools often times will blow up in your face. If youare unprepared for the situation you are in, being in a high offensivegear-set or mentality can easily get you killed. While all the damage you cando is nice, it is no good to anyone if you end up dying. The rightamount of offensiveness is completely player dependent, meaning certainplayers feel comfortable and safe at a lower defensive level than others

On the flip side, there are many players out there who just goes all outin survivability. This means survivability talents, gearing, trinkets, andconsumables. While a tank's first and foremost job is to not die, there comesa point where a lot of that survivability becomes redundant. Highsurvivability at the cost of damage output usually leads to threat issues,making you have to work a lot more to keep threat off of damage dealers orco-tanks. It is a fine line to balance between survivability and damageoutput but a general rule of thumb is to start with going overly defensive,then systematically you go for more and more damage output, while stillstaying at a level you consider yourself to be safe at.