I’m asking about mid-levels (20 to 50), not about 60, endgame or raids.
I’m an altoholic, but as a Paladin I’m level 20 and mostly clueless. The guides say Retro is best for leveling…but they say if I get some INT armor, my retro Paladin can heal dungeon groups while levelling.
What about tanking? Can Retros do that?
Yesterday I did a Gnomeregan run (on my 34 dwarf hunter), and our tank was a 32 Paladin. She held aggro amazingly well on groups. Was she using Protection talents to hold all this aggro?
I’ve seen a recommendation to put 11 points in Holy to get Consecration, an AOE talent. Are there AOE talents in Retro and Prot too?
Any advice and suggestions are helpful.
ret is fine to level but holy/prot is prob better. tank needs gear but holy not so much
aoe threat should be strong, single target it just means he was just bringing the dmg probably relative to others in group.
IDK what level you get righteous fury. Important talent to paladin tanking vastly increases holy dmg threat (consecration). Prob had that as well
Consecration is really the only must have.
If you level as Ret your only problem while questing and grinding is mana.Manage your mana usage and it’s great.Good survivability as long as you have the mana to do do damage and heal if needed.One thing to note is that if you get in an area where you need a lot of mobs and you see a solo Prot Warrior grinding,throw him a buff and a heal,he will likely throw you an invite and be happy to get you along to keep him topped off and buffed.
Poor mana management will make you wish you were specced anything but Ret.
It’s really difficult to tank with people your own level without imp righteous fury and impossible with consecrate. Be sure to take all +spell damage gear you can find along the way. Even if you’re wearing some leather/mail in some slots, at least you’ll be able to hold the threat. Strength/agi won’t help much with threat.
If solo leveling, invest in a second monitor, because it’s just about as boring as leveling a priest.
You will likely never die unless its PVP or a REALLY bad mob pull, but you kill slow.
I recommend travelers on netflix, its a pretty good watch.
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As others mentioned, Consecration is pretty crucial for tanking. Without it, you’ll tend to have trouble holding threat on more than 2 mobs at a time, and are screwed if clothie DPS split between the skull and something else.
Beyond that, you could tank 20-50 as ret. It’s not as easy/smooth as going prot but people have made do with less and with tanks in high demand you’ll undoubtedly find groups that won’t take issue with it.
I like ret. Ret is fine. But ret needs haste. When you think you have enough haste you don’t, go get more. Then when you think you are ready, go and get more haste.
Probably the best spec to level as is Holy. Very friendly soloing, albeit slower, but your resource management is better and you can have a wider pool of survivibility.
I’m currently lv 52 on my Pally.
This probably doesn’t apply to OP - but I ran my pally to 40 in a week with Holy (11 for consecrate), then prot (redoubt w/ thorium spike). Just followed him on my druid (2nd account) with imp thorns + 3 piece Cenarion bonus (39 damage thorns) and put low lvl rejuvs on him to keep him topped.
It. Was. Nuts.
I could pull about 25 murlocs at a time in wetlands and they would just fall over dead as I ran around. Was getting 20 minute levels from 20-30.
At times my sub lvl 30 pally was doing over 400dps from aoe / reflect. Hardest part was finding enough mobs that respawned quickly. Best was:
Murlocs in Wetlands in the EAST (respawn VERY quickly, and lots of them). (20-28)
Raven Hill Cemetery (Ran out of mobs often, do a loop around the crypt, then a loop around the cemetery getting the low lvl skellies, then usually wait 2-3 minutes before crypt respawns). (28-32)
Orc Farm in Arathi (32-38)
Weave in some quest hubs, fun spots you enjoy etc.
Now at 40 im taking it slower - holy dungeon leveling as I enjoy dungeons more than grinding/questing for the most part (done it all 100x before).
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Yea the amount of dots/ticks you can get with ret/thorns/shield spike/consecrate is nuts. I feel like I am missing one more, but pally aoeing is great if you got some good heals.
Just browsing here since i never leveled a Paladin past level 4.
I was under the assumption you just auto attack your way to 60 and then heal everything else.
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Been leveling my pally as ret(24) goin fine. Best tip I found is Blessing of Wisdom > Blessing of Might. You will not really notice the slightly higher dps you will notice the significantly reduced downtime from less drinking.
Boxless: holy, dungeons, focus on int and spell power gear. Make friends fast.
I’ve been leveling Retribution and got my Verigan’s First at level 21. The damage boost is amazing and I flew through the next 10 levels. Mana isn’t a much of a problem because I eat after a fight instead of self heal.
Along the way, I’ve both healed and tanked dungeons with gnomer being the latest. I can hold agro on a single target but have trouble with more than one since I don’t have consecration. But with enough DPS, it hasn’t been a problem.
Healing with flash of light and keeping wisdom buff on me let’s me heal in prolonged fights and not run oom.
I say go Ret because dungeons make up just a fraction of your leveling time. Solo leveling is much more important. Stack strength so your SoC procs and white damage increases.
That was pre 1.9 when you had literally zero damage attack spells.
That is incredibly based.
Biased? Or based on what?
It was true as judgments did zero direct damage before the paladin revamp in 1.9.
Unless fighting undead and then you had exorcism for those fights. Oh, I did forget about consecration.