Contents

This guide is simply intended to provide a general overview of Paladin leveling. For a more in-depth and highly detailed resource on everything Paladin related, from leveling to PvP to Raiding to earning gold, check out the Killer Guides' Paladin guide.

Introduction

This page has been updated for Cataclysm

Once upon a time Paladin’s were Allliance only and were among the slowest levelers in the game, bringing up the rear in comparison to even other healing classes such as druids, priests, shamans, etc.  However, with the change to experience gain combined with the increase questing experience and a few buffs since the 3.0 (Wrath of the Lich King) expansion, Paladin leveling is not nearly so painful and PvP is downright... juicy. Since then Paladins have been the weapon of choice for many roles, giving the class great flexibility.

With the 4.0 series of patches the Paladin's mechanics have changed somewhat and the spells and talents have been streamlined, like all of the other classes. They're still very flexible, being able to heal, smash, tank, etc. and are a blast to play.

As a leveling Paladin you’ll excel as a healer, tank, and even deal out solid straight up damage. You have to use your combination of abilities to fulfill a number of conditions: paladins are capable of soloing quest bosses that other classes find impossible and our healing improves our survivability immensely.

Paladins are even capable of area effect grinding. With some decent gear, and some attention paid to heals and bubbles, Pallies can round up several mobs and kill them reliably. Equip a shield at lower levels and Retribution Paladins make excellent dungeon tanks. At 30 buy the "dual spec" ability from your trainer and make one of those builds Protection. Keep the other as Holy or Retribution, depending on your preferences.

If you love to tank? With wait times for random dungeons being close to zero, for tanks, you can easily level all the way to 85 without ever leaving the dungeon system.

All in all Paladins are in fine shape.

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Quick Paladin Leveling Guide

Race: Race doesn't matter much, so pick what you like. Humans might be the best alliance choice, if you have to be efficient. Tauren might be the best Horde choice, for stomp and the extra Stam.

Professions: To expensive to bother with when leveling. If you must then Blacksmithing and/or Inscription might be good choices. Our recommendation is to pick two of the gathering professions while leveling: Herbalism, skinning, mining.

Build and Glyphs:

• Retribution is our recommended leveling spec.
• Protection is a great tanking spec., and can work outside of the dungeons.
• Holy only if you're healing teams all the way.
• Click here to level even faster

Stats and Gear:

• Strength
• Two handed weapons - with the highest DPS numbers you can find.
• Stam
• Resilience if your PvP
• Relics, if you can find them, with Str and Stam.

Gems and Enchants:

• Skip it unless you have the gold and the interest.
• Gem for Str.
• Enchants can be found for cheap, at times. Str and Stam.

Consumables:

• Potions of mana and/or healing
• Potions and/or scrolls of Str.
• Buffing foods

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Races and TradeSkills

As a Paladin your choice of race is restricted to Human, Dwarf, Draenei, Blood Elf, and Tauren. If you intend to raid after leveling then the Draenei are your best choice. For PvP Humans are #1. If you want to look good then your only choice is a Dwarf. Blood elves are left out in the cold here. ;)

That said, I'm quite happy with my Belf Pallies, and the Tauren's War Stomp and extra Stam is nice.

As far as leveling goes, none of the racials are any great use, although the Draenei add to your hit chance means a few less miss signs and is a nice thing to bring to raids, where hit rating is very important.

Draenei: You're a squid. Deal with it.

• Their best racial adds a 1% chance to hit, self only with 4.0 , which has some utility. In the end-game this saves three or more "+ to hit" gems (or enchants) which you will now be able to put elsewhere.
• Their heal is nice, except that you have an assortment of your own.

Dwarves: Short, blocky, make excellent door stops.

• Other than their good looks Dwarves have Stoneform, which removes bleeds and such. With the 4.06 patch is also reduces damage, by 10%, for the duration of the effect.
• Their weapon expertise has some use in end-game raiding, if a mace if the best weapon available.

Humans: The only proper Pally race.

• Increased rep gain is nice when looking to gain faction with any of the dozens of factions available.
• Escape is a very useful PvP ability and will sometimes find use while leveling. This allows the use of two DPS trinkets in PvP.
• Expertise with swords and maces has some end-game use, in that it saves a few points that can be put elsewhere.
• Paladins have no use for Spirit unless they're healers.

Blood Elves: Too busy looking in the mirror and playing with their hair to be good Paladins.

• Best Horde race for Pallies. Well, Ok, the only Horde race (pre-Cataclysm.)
• Any Silence effect is nice in PvP, and sometimes elsewhere, and the Blood Elves have a nice Area Effect silence with their Arcane Torrent (which also recovers a small amount of mana.)

Tauren: Big, Fuzzy, Huggable... perfect for Holy Pallies.

• Tauren - (The best Horde Pally) Paladins say, "Moo?" Ok, it's weird, but in Cataclysm the Tauren can become Paladins.
• War Stomp is a nice area effect Stun, which is useful in leveling and PvP.
• They also have extra health, which is useful in any situation for anyone. Mooo. Extra health and an area effect stun? Sign me up. Actually, the health doesn't scale well and isn't worth much at high level.

Tradeskills for leveling

For leveling, skip the tradeskills for the simple reason that they're very expensive to level. If you have the cash then Blacksmithing (for your weapons and plate adorned body) is nice, as is Mining to supply your Blacksmithing skill. If you have a ton of gold then Alchemy has lots of useful potions and Engineering has lots of useful gadgets.

• Mining, Herbalism, and Skinning are your cash grinding skills. Pick any two. Gather full stacks of gatherables and sell them on the Auction House. Recommended:
  • Mining provides a stamina buff
  • Skinning provides a small Critical Strike boost.
  • You probably won't need Herbalism's LifeBloom heal, but the added Haste is nice.
• Cooking has some foods with nice buffs.
• First Aid is occasionally useful, for those times when you just don't want to spend the mana on a heal, but it's far from essential, especially in Cataclysm. It does give you something to do with all that cloth, though, and you can troll your buddies by bandaging them instead of healing them.
• The other tradeskills have some nice self only buffs or items, but little utility otherwise and a lot of expense. On the other hand, for end-game raiding, the "self-only" features have definite value. See the Paladin guide for more on those skills.
• Inscription might be a decent money maker on your server, but it takes a bit of work.
• Enchanting is another very expensive skill to level, but you can disenchant items for your own use or to sell the parts. If you have enough cash this is a good way to make sure all your gear is "properly enchanted" as you level, you twink, you. ;)
• Ditto Jewelcrafting. Unike Enchanting, though, you won't see much gear with gem slots on it while you level. Combinied with Mining you can prospect for gems and might be able to find and cut enough to make it worth your while.

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Leveling Talents for Cataclysm

Skip to the leveling build

It used to be that Retribution was the only way to go for leveling. Dungeons were hard to get to and PvP didn't give experience. Then came the changes. Now we have the random dungeon finder tool and the battlegrounds (BGs) give awesome XP (if you win.) See our dungeon leveling guide for dungeon tips.

Leveling as Holy

You can certainly do this, but it will be painfully slow if you're questing. Joining a dungeon team will result in fast XP and is a good way to go. The same is true with PvP, if your teams are winning. Find yourself pocket Rogue or Warrior and stick with him. Here's our Holy Paladin page for builds.

Leveling as Protection

When questing you're halfway between Holy and Retribution. You'll be best off when you can be attacking several mobs at once.

As a tank you'll level very quickly in the dungeons, since queue times for tanks are very short. PvP can work even though your one on one damage isn't so hot. You're fairly hard to kill so you can make a good defender until the damage shows up. See our Protection Paladin page for builds.

Retribution Paladins are the Rightous Crusaders who crush opponents with weapons and holy magic. This is the damage and light tanking build and the best for solo and small group leveling. You can quest with the best of them, do some light tanking, bring some nice damage (DPS) to your group, and can even toss out the occasional heal. You might not be able to handle groups as well as Protection, but you do a lot more damage and can kill fast enough to make up for it.

Not to mention what you can do to people in PvP.

Retribution is the spec we'll use for this guide, but if you want to level as Holy or Prot then just jump to those pages and grab the appropriate build.

Mechanics

Paladin mechanics have changed, with 4.0, into a Holy Power system. It's very similar to the Combo Points sytem that Rogues use, except that the Holy Power stays with the Pally, not on the opponent.

From the Devs: This (Holy Power) is a new resource which works similarly to (a Rogue or Druid's) combo points. Paladins will generally want to build up Holy Power until it shines through with a bright yellow glowing effect (3 "points" worth.) Once Holy Power has been built up, it can be consumed to augment existing abilities. For example, Word of Glory can be used to cast an instant-cast free heal. This gives paladins several options for how to spend their Holy Power, depending on the scenario.

As with all the other classes when you hit level 10 you will be given a choice of which talent specialization you will take. For Paladins your choices are: Holy, Protection, or Retribution. Once you pick one or the other you will be locked into that tree until you have spent 31 talent points (eaarned at level 69.) While this will get you to the top talent you can buy whichever talents in the tree that you want, skipping the top if you prefer. After that you can buy talents from either of the other trees.

Certain abilities are automatically picked up when you pick your specialization.

For Retribution Paladins the abilites that you will gain are:

• Templar's Verdict: A strike that consumes 1 to 3 points of Holy Power. Damage increases greatly as the points used increase. Unlike a Rogue's Combo Points the Holy Power stays with you, not on your opponent, allowing you to gain HP from opponent #1 and use it on #2.
• Shealth of light: Increases your spell power by a % of your attack power and increases your chance to hit with spells by 8% .
• Two Handed Weapon Specialzation: Increases the damge done with your 2-hander by 25%
• Judgements of the Bold: Your judgement restores 25% of base mana over 10 seconds.
• Mastery: Hand of Light (trainable at level 80:) Your Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, and Crusader's Strike abilities deal additional damage as Holy Damage. Increasing Mastery rating increases the amount of bonus damage.

Cataclysm Retribution Paladin Leveling Spec:

For leveling talents we're looking for things that improve damage, reduce downtimes, and and that are generally useful (such as speed boosts.) Talents that are purely PvP oriented or group airneted are skipped, though if you group a lot (eg: you're the tank) you might want to grab those. See the notes at the end of this section.

Note that we're not taking all the points in the chosen talents as we want to get int Zeolotry asap. With some of the talents we'll take a point now and come back later for more.

6/4/31 click to view the entire build

Go here to get to Level 85 Fast!

Other talents:

• Eye for an Eye - Returns some of the damage taken by spells to the attack. More for PvP.
• Guardian's Fervor - More for groups, not so much for soloing.
• Sacred Shield - 3 sec cast time makes it less useful when the damage is crashing in. Still, there are times where it might be useful, especially in dungeons.
• Selfless Healer - If you're part of the heals for your group then this is a good talent. If you never heal others then it has little use.

Now drop down to Gear or check out our recommended leveling guide.

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Gear & Notes

The Stats

Gearing a retribution paladin used to be tough at times, at any given time you’d have numerous priorities to consider, such as whether increasing your mana pool for more seals/judgements is a better idea than just boosting strength, etc. Or should you get the gear with high Strength or high Stamina? What about Spirit?

With Cataclysm the equation is easier.

Strength, pretty much all the way. At lower levels you will run out of mana occasionally. Buddy up with an Alchemist, or buy the mana potions, and you'll be fine. At higher levels, esp. with Blessing of Might the mane issues go away unless you're casting a lot of spells.

Short stats: Strength and Stam, then more Str. Any Hit or Crit you find will be enough.

Long stats:

1. Strength is all powers for breaking heads and is your #1 stat, by far.
2. Hit rating is more for PvP and even more for Raiding, not so important for leveling. 5% is quite adequate for most needs and 8% is good for all your melee attacks against anything. Your Sheath of Light give you 8% spell hit anyway, so your spells are covered.
3. Expertise keeps the other guy from avoiding your strikes.
4. Crit rating is very important, but still not close to Str.
5. Spell Power only appears on some trinkets and enchants and, other than Exorcism and your heals, your not casting much in the way of spells.
6. Intellect expands your mana pool and improves spell damage and spell crits, but since you won't be casting much in the way of spells Int is way below Str in value.
7. Stamina is important if you're getting killed, otherwise you don't need much. If you're on a PvP server you might want more.
8. Agility is useless to you.
9. Spirit is useless to you unless you're a healer.
10. Mastery is a big snooze for Ret.
11. Resilience - only appears on PvP gear and then only at mid to high levels. Very important if you PvP, useless if you don't.

Plate is your armor (from 40+.) Know it and love it. Stick with plate. Previously that piece of mail armor might have better stats at any given level, and plate might be unavailable, so you might be tempted use it if it's an upgrade. Sometimes the Mail armor has better stats for healing, as well.

With 4.0 though, you get Plate Specialization (at 50) which gives you a 5% bonus to your primary stat (Str for Retribution) if you have Plate in all armor slots. This will make plate superior to any other choices.

Gear? Strength and maybe Stam. Crit rating is good if it comes along with Strength. You're not terribly gear dependent, but we all love the good gear. Get it from instances or the Auction House. Upgrade your weapon every few levels and the rest of your gear whenever.

• Level 70: Do some PvP and buy your epic arena gear from the Arena Legacy Vendors. This will keep you well geared until...
• Level 77: Put away all heirlooms and start buying and using Cataclysm gear. The stats on that stuff are WAY better than almost anything else at this level. Send all yoiur regular (level 80 capped) heirlooms to your alts.
• Level 81: Put youir level 85 heirlooms back on.

Cataclysm gear - at level 77 dump all of your leveling gear and buy Cataclysm greens from the Auction House. They are way better than even level 80 pre-cataclysm blues and are comparable to the better epics. They're not better than the best epics, so if you have a level 80 raid or arena geared pally you want to take from 80 to 85 then keep your gear.

Two handed weapons are what you want for leveling. Save the Weapon and Shield for tanking. You want the 2-hander with the highest DPS possible, which usually means the slowest weapon you can find. You special attacks are all based off the weapon's average damage. 2-handers with Strength and Hit/Crit rating are awesome.

Note that your Two Handed Weapon Specialization gives you 20% more damage with 2-handers. None of your talents give you anything with one-handers.

Mastery Rating - You will start seeing this on Cataclysm gear and you will be able to train to use it at 80. Mastery is a weak stat for you, so don't bother trying to stack it.

Gems and Enchants - Enchants can be very expensive, so skip them until you have the gold. You'll level fast enough that you will outgrow your gear quickly and the enchants probably won't be cost effective. Gems are a nice little boost for when you find that piece of socketed gear. You won't see many gem slots before 60, though.

If you are going to use gems and or enchants then pick the ones that give you the stats you need, whether it's strength, stam, or whatever.

• Gems: Gems for strength
• Enchants: Str and Stam are often cheap.

Sometimes you can find either for very little gold, so it's worth looking occasionally.

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Leveling Your Paladin

Unless you're tanking, and you won't be before level 15, use a two-handed weapon. You'll use Crusader Strike to build up your Holy Power (which will appear on a "meter" right under your mana bar.)

With one to three points of Holy Power you can fire off Templar's Verdict or World of Glory or other abilities. Three points gives a much better result than one or two.

Have a Seal and Blessing of Kings or Might up at all times.

As you level you will be better able to control grouips of mobs.

Keep in mind that Protection Pallies are much better at the tanking game.

• Don't gimp yourself, equip a two-handed weapon. If you're grouping and you are not the tank then turn off Retribution Aura and Rightous Fury in favor of other things that generate less threat.
• If you're tanking instances at lower level (and you can) then equip a shield and one handed weapon. Keep Rightous Fury and Retribution Aura up to greatly improve your threat.
  
  
• Always get the biggest bags you can afford. More space means fewer tips to the vendor to dump stuff.
• Carry a couple of potions of water breathing for those times when you'll really want one.
• Potions of healing are nice for those time when Word of Glory and the mana just aren't there
• Ditto for mana potions
  
  
• Consumables, such as buffing foods and potions of strength, are very nice to have and will both speed up your leveling and reduce your downtime.

• Make an alt (alternate character) just to sell stuff on the Auction house. Gather stuff while questing, mail the white and better stuff to the alt, then get back to work. Log into the alt when you're done and sell the stuff.
• Questing with a compatible partner reduces the XP per kill, but increases the kill rate more then enough to compensate, so dual up when you can. There's also less downtime, so that speeds things up, too. Priests and Druids go very well with Paladins.
• Daily quests (from 70+) are a nice way to get XP, gold, rep, and some items.
• PvP, endless shopping, and other time wasting activities can be great fun, but will slow your leveling.
  
  
• PvP in the Battlegrounds, on the other hand, gave give up some nice XPand gives you honor points which you can use to buy some nice gear at mid levels. If your team is winning then you can level very quickly in the battlegrounds.
  
  
• Always log out in an Inn, for the Rested XP Bonus.
• If you really want to get to 85 fast then you should invest in a leveling guide.