If you want to balance healing and soloing potential, you need to actually balance it. Right now, you're skewing too far over into total clearic/support type. Which is fine, if you wanna be the best support in a group, but not needed.

I'd suggest 40 points in holy, going down far enough to get 5 points in holy guidance. Holy tree would look like this:

5/5 Divine Intellect
5/5 Spirtual Focus
3/3 Healing Light
2/2 Improved Lay on Hands
5/5 Illumination
2/2 Improved Blessing of Wisdom
1/1 Divine Favor
3/3 Sanctified Light
5/5 Holy Power
1/1 Holy Shock
3/3 Light's Grace
5/5 Holy Guidance

Now you want some power and efficiency from Ret:

5/5 Benediction
2/2 Improved Judgement
3/3 Improved Seal of the Crusader
5/5 Conviction
2/2 Improved Retribution Aura (mainly people underestimate this talent)
3/3 Crusade
1/1 Sanctity Aura

You can drag 2 points from Holy Guidance to put in Improved Sanctity aura, but that's up to you. It would help you heal your group better. You don't need Kings or improved Devo aura. In a raid, a prot pally will cover kings, and it's not needed in 5 mans. You'll lack Divine Illumination, but honestly, it's not needed. Paladins are already crazy mana efficient. Someone did the math behind Divine Illumination awhile ago, and it's overall effect is about the same as taking a mana pot.

This will max your holy potential. If that is your goal, then tanking has to be a distant objective.

I think a paladin gets 1% spell crit per 50 int. Could be wrong, though. For healing, copious amounts of +heal first. Mana/5 and spell crit next for healing longevity. Int is a 4th concern. If you want to calculate your spell crit, check your character sheet under the spell section and it will tell you.

Figured I'd give this thread a little kick-start in the form of a topic to discuss, so here we go~


Rolling a BE Paladin has been - and I kid you not - a refreshing experience after playing an Alliance Paladin for so long. This is mainly due to the fact that a vast majority of Horde know very little about Paladins and I had a chance to explore avenues I had not really considered before due to the fact with their tenure as an Alliance-only class, Paladins had well-established roles and were expected to stick with them. While leveling up I've encountered near total ignorance when it comes to Paladins, ranging from amusing to irksome. Now I know that horde players can just as easily play alliance, but that fact has not really made itself apparent from my experience thus far. Paladins by and large are met with skepticism as to their talent builds outside of Retribution, perhaps because the majority of us are Retribution and there are not many examples to draw off of of other specs.

After toying around with the different specs seeing how Paladins could fit best in the grand scheme of things Horde-side (at least on my server) I've landed once again in This Build.

Gearwise, my default set is that of a Shockadin, focusing on spellcrit/spellpower/int/stam, and I'm finding it is working very well. It carries over fine for main healing and with all the choice shockadin gear available, crit rates soar providing a great deal of mana efficiency for Holy Light. It has gotten to the point where I hold off on casting to make room for crit heals and they land often enough that I can rely on that. This creates exceptional healing power/efficiency since as a Paladin, every percent spell crit is an exponential improvement over the one previous. Obviously I'm not gonna get the monster heals that come off Paladins with +1500 healing, but I'm satisfied sitting at +700 heal/+400 spell damage pre-raid.

As for stacking healing/mp5 gear, it seems rather redundant. Even without that gear you spend most of your time as the only healer sitting fat and happy at near full mana even with average joe tank; most bosses don't even go through half of your mana pool. I haven't had the opportunity to find a place in heroic groups due to the fact that Paladins are treated as an unknown here and people tend to go with what is familiar and comfortable. Even in regular instances, I had a hard time starting out due to lack of awareness. If they were looking for a tank, I'd ask to join and get the "we need a warrior or druid", and I was generally treated as a backup healer and groups wouldn't move until they found a second healer...usually a Holy build priest of assorted variants.

On the subject of tanking, it's a subject I've been mulling over recently. Specifically the difference between a full blown prot tank and the build I am using right now. The differences, while significant enough, seem to balance out with one another in terms of utility and the difference scenarios faced by tanking Paladins.

Given equivalent gear for their respective strengths as tanks, these are the only differences I can discern:

Prot Heavy:

Avenger's Shield - Good initial multi mob agro, but you lose the ability to use it after the initial pull.
Holy Shield - Good single mob mitigation. It gets eaten within two seconds on multi-mob pulls and you lose the increase in block value. You also cannot really control where the charges land in order to stave off potential loose mobs (as if they would fall off anyways).
Ardent Defender - A++ AE grinding talent, turns you into a monster when soloing or doing normal instances/weak trash mobs in heroic/raid scenarios. Utility falls off when mobs hit so hard they can leapfrog the ability and kill you outright.
Reckoning - Very nice DPS/Threat boost on whatever you happen to be attacking, especially with SoR up. Procs often tanking 4+ mobs, and seemingly not enough when only dealing with 3 or fewer...obviously mob attack speed needs to be taken into account, but this is what I have found in instances on average.
Sacred Duty - 6% more stam from items.
BoK - Nice for raiding, at least one paladin will have it...unless you only have one paladin on your raids.
Spell Warding - Some take it, some don't. Arguable utility.

Holy Heavy:

Holy Shock - This is a lot of agro. Instantly. At range. Compared to Avenger's Shield, it is arguably better as it doesn't have a deadzone. I've had times when someone would attack before mobs would enter my consecration area. Holy Shock would nab them immediately...Avenger's shield would keep getting interrupted even with the 0.5 second cast time. It works as an instant self to buy time in hard situations as well.
Holy Guidance - More threat, roughly ~100 spell power over what Prot can achieve if both subjects are wearing equivalent tanking gear appropriate to their specs.
Unyielding Faith - Sort of like spell warding in terms of how useful it actually is.
Combined Healing Talents - Helpful in a pinch, even if it does screw around with mitigation.

On a related note there is a principle difference on how each spec deals with easier content. A Holy Paladin will switch in more spell damage gear to increase threat/damage generated so the group can pull off higher dps and make for a faster run. A Protection Paladin will can run into multiple groups of mobs like a madman and as long as healers are paying attention you end up with a psychopath tanking 10-20 mobs and generating some rather absurd dps through porcupine gear/talents, reckoning, seal of wisdom and consecrate. Both work very well, Protection has more fun and is certainly more mana efficient due to having double attacks for SoW and high block values on equivalent gear.

Summary? Well I guess as someone who has played all specs in their current incarnation, the upper tier Prot talents, while nice, do not merit the sacrifice in versatility/utility in the Holy tree (unless I feel like running around like a maniac in some normal instance). There is not enough gain in net mitigation and a loss in threat generation for the tanking role that Paladins are supposed to (by most accounts) excel at, which is AE tanking, to justify the expenditure in points from my point of view. Of course you can't AE tank in most Heroics, but Holy offers unrivaled threat generation, allowing your group to really open up on stuff. Does this increase in kill speed make up for the reduction in mitigation in terms of healer resources? I'm sure someone will find out sooner or later.



Obviously all of the above posting is my own view on things, your mileage may vary.

I have mixed feelings about Divine Illumination. I suppose it depends on how often you find yourself needing to spam heal. I find it only really comes into play in PvP and Heroics...everywhere else it just sits there on my action bar taunting me. It's certainly one of those talents that shine when you need it, but on the other hand it's a panic button that's 41 points into a tree - and panic buttons, at least for me, tend to get saved up to the point I never used them for an entire instance. Silly thing to do for something on a three minute cooldown >_<

I was initially unimpressed by Divine Illumination, but I love it now. I tend to use it one of two ways...either spam Holy Light for massive throughput, or use it like a mana pot, I pop DI and start Flashing - my mana will go up while I continue to heal. I save it for specific things in Kara, but in 5 mans or heroics, I basically just pop it every cooldown. While not tremendously sexy as a 41 point, its really a nice addition to the holy tree.