Anyone have any suggestions on building a Ret/Prot spec for solo questing and dungeon runs?
Get consecration so you can aoe grind and tank dungeons
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If you’re intent on going Ret/Prot, split your initial points between Redoubt and Benediction. Since Paladins do not have a taunt in this edition, you’ll need the mana and the responses to critical attacks. By this point, you should be up to working on Verigan’s Fist (starts at 20th in the Cathedral, DO THIS).
If you’re going to go deeper into dungeons, go with Toughness, and either Deflection (extra mitigation) or the combo of Improved Seal of the Crusader / Judgement ( if you need more ‘taunt’ through Judgement).
From there, if you’re good for solo questing, so build more into Protection (Improved Righteous Aura is a must). Honestly, at this point, I’d start building into Holy, it will help your tanking and damage. I prefer the ten points into Divine Strength and Intellect, your stats matter here, and Intellect goes really far for all Paladin types. Then a point in Consecration, but less for AoE grinding (it’s a bad habit), but more for maintaining those groups in dungeons. then invest the rest into Protection, if you want to tank seriously.
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Thanks!
My thinking was that if I went in to Prot up to Rightous Fury then hit Ret after that it would help with grinding down mobs faster
Bad idea. You want conc asap to tank. Rethink your strategy. Early prot talents is not efficient for anything
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Have a higher level friend with fiery weapon enchant enchant your weapon so you can breeze through the first 20-30 levels or so.
get consecration at level 20, put the rest of the points wherever. Respec deep prot for holy shield at level 40.
Prot/Ret isn’t a build until cap, and even then, it’s only a PvP build, it’s really bad for dungeons.
If you play Prot, your main sidespec will be holy. There aren’t really any good low hanging fruit in ret. Getting parry is redundant because you want to sit proc redoubt with holy shield. Adding parry has the side effect of pushing block down the attack table, lowering your damage. Benediction and iBoM are useless. Judgement CD is useless because prot doesnt use it on CD. Imp Crusader is worthless because you dont judge it. Command is useless because you use a 1h weapon, and they cap out their speed in the range where SoR>SoC.
Nothing in ret is useful for a prot paladin.
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How is he supposed to get aggro if he doesn’t have conse at 20?
Benediction is pretty bad, Prot uses judgement as a pseudo taunt and keeps Seal of Righteousness up 100% of the time. Benediction is for more judgement spammy specs. I judge reseal maybe once every 20 seconds if things go well. The cost reduction is worthless. You might get 1 more seal out of it, but Prot needs to drink between pulls, so I really don’t see the point.
Wasting your pseudo taunt on a holy power buff is really a poor idea. Putting any points into isotc is a MASSIVE waste. You want to have judgment for when you need on demand threat.
Deflection pushes Block down the table, which is bad.
Prot needs a holy offspec to generate aggro. Not even 31 points ret would make up for the lack of conse.
Nothing matters but TPS, and pushing off Conse until level 60 is such poor advice I dont even know how to process it.
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You don’t get taunt in classic. Be a healer.
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Its almost like there’s 400 hours of gameplay before the meta solidifies at 60, where you can do LITERALLY whatever you want and it doesn’t matter.
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I assume you want primary ret with secondary prot, and you don’t want to tank, because ret/prot for tanking is not real workable. Everyone here is talking about tanking, but you don’t mention it in your post, so I’m not gonna talk about tanking and assume you want some kind of ret build that focuses on 2H/DPS/soloing.
Your base talents in either tree are pretty trash. Imp Dev Aura is kinda bad, but if you’re not using a shield then Redoubt doesn’t help you at all. Pick your poison. Precision is almost a must-pick for just about any paladin build, with your strong reliance on autos the +hit, especially early on when there’s no +hit gear to speak of, is really good. Guardian’s Favor is a critical talent for PVP. Blessing of Kings is nice, but early game it doesn’t do a whole lot since people don’t really have much in the way of stats to start with.
Imp Blessing of Might is underwhelming. Even at level 60 with Rank 7 BoM from the AQ book, you’re talking about spending 5 points to gain the equivalent of 18.5 strength. At lower levels it’s much worse. You’re spending 5 talent points for the equivalent of 5.5 strength (rank 2 BoM). Benediction provides a similarly small benefit, but for your mana. It’s another case of just, pick your poison. They each provide a marginal benefit. Personally I would go for Benediction just cause you’re probably going to be collecting str/stam gear and only the occasional gorilla/eagle piece, so stretching your mana pool a little further is slightly more helpful than a few extra melee ATP. This is even more relevant in parties, when your more helpful blessings are things like Salv (to just let DPS go ham, since a lot of the time you have to hold back anyway not to pull threat), Wis, and later Kings. Imp SotC is never really worth it. Damage/mana spent-wise, and like time per kill, it’s not super worth it to be judging SotC at the start of fights. You’re much better off judging righteousness/soc for the straight up extra damage. On a boss fight where you’ll have more time to get benefit out of SotC, it makes more sense to judge it at the start, but it’s not worth investing talent points into. Deflection will help you with a little damage mitigation while leveling and PVPing. Imp Judgement can give you a little bit more DPS, but if you use it regularly you’re gonna OOM all the time and slow yourself down. I would probably go 2 in Imp Judgement and 3 in deflection here.
Seal of Command is a must. Pursuit of Justice will provide some marginal help with questing and PVP. Conviction is 5/5. Spend points however you want to get to 20, then get 2H weapon spec and sanctity aura. Then spend points however to get to 25 and get 5/5 Vengeance. Go back to prot and look for Imp Hammer of Justice and Imp Conc Aura.
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ret/prot is great for solo leveling, but not good for dungeons as you won’t have enough points for holy shield and consecrate. Going down the ret tree is kind of pointless without picking up vengeance.
It’s more of a beeline down the ret tree until 5/5 vengeance, then down prot for hit and defensive/improved armor on the way towards improved HoJ. This way you’re a bit tougher and can handle things that would kill full-on DPS build, which helps with going back to solo elite quests when you outlevel them a little(which is the solo strategy.)
Personally, I just went deep ret followed by going down holy for consecration as I also do dungeon, and consecration is fantastic for large dungeon pulls when used on a vengeance proc.
If you want to play a full tank and enjoy the prot AoE farming memes, I suggest doing so around 51 where you can get consecration, blessing of sanctuary, and holy shield. All this combined with ret aura adds up to huge amounts of damage going out based on the number of mobs hitting you.
Many pallies, especially rets, will run sanc aura as benefits their own personal DPS, but ret aura actually does a whole lot more damage. The thing is, the damage is attributed to the person getting hit, so it doesn’t look good on meters: this is just one of the many examples as to why don’t even come close to telling the full tale.
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Best tip I can give you on leveling a Paladin is… don’t. 
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Ok
What does everyone think about leveling and tanking dungeons Prot till Improved Righteousness Fury and then go Everything after that into Holy as I level
when youre tanking 5mans make sure to give everyone blessing of sanctuary, it will make it a lot easier to hold aggro…
Salvation?
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Get consecration first then go down the prot tree. Without consecration pallys have no easy way of holding aggro on multiple mobs.
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sorry, thats what i meant… Blessing of salvation…
What is up with all of these paladins wanting to be a worse version of a warrior. Paladins are good at healing warriors can tank and do DPS, and if you just want good DPS be a rouge.
Maybe it’s not always about being the best of the best.
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