Click here for the Paladin Class Guide, also check our build specific guides: Holy, Retribution, and Protection.

• 1.0 - Introduction
• 1.5 - Races and Skills
• 2.0 - Talents
• 3.0 - Gear & Progression
• 4.0 - 1-80 Paladin Leveling Guide

Introduction

Paladin’s were amongst the slowest levelers in the game not that long ago, 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.

As a leveling paladin you’ll excel in certain areas, plus you will deal out solid straight up damage, even though that’s not really our intended forte.  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, healing improves our survivability immensely, invulnerability shield, etc.

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.

All in all I’d say that paladin’s were actually one of my more fun leveling experiences, read on.

This guide is simply intended to provide a general overview of leveling a Paladin. For a more in-depth and highly detailed resource on this class, including gear, gold, builds, PvP, rading, and more, check out this Killer Guide's Pally Guide, here.

1.5 Races and Skills

As a pally your choice of race is restricted to Human, Dwarf, Draenei, and Blood Elf. 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 the your only choice is a Dwarf. Blood elves are left out in the cold here.

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.

Draenei:

• Their best racial adds a 1% chance to hit to the entire group. This is a nice bonus to the raid and saves three "+ to hit" gems or enchants to put in other areas.

Dwarves:

• Other than their good looks Dwarves have Stoneform, which removes bleeds and such.

Humans:

• Stealth Detection is very nice in PvP against Rogues and feral Druids. 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.

Blood Elves:

• Any Silence effect is nice in PvP, and sometimes elsewhere, and the Blood Elves have a nice Area Effect silence with their Arcane Torrent. It also adds a small amount of mana.

Tradeskills

For leveling, skip the tradeskills for the simple reason that they're very expesnive to level. If you have the cash then Blacksmithing (for your weapons and plate adorned body) is nice, as is Mining to supply your BSing skill. If you have a ton of cash 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.
• 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 its hardly essential.
• The other tradeskills have some nice self only buffs or items, but little utility otherwise.

2.0 – Talents

We have two leveling builds here, depending on what you want to do.

Holy is great for healing, but lousy for solo leveling, so we have no build here. If you spend all your time grouping then go for it, you'll level fast. Otherwise wait till 80. Same for Protection, though we do have a build. You'll be a solid tank, well nigh unkillable, but you will take hours killing mobs that Retribution Pallies will insta-gib. However, you'll be able to take groups that Ret Pallies can't, and that's fun.

1. 0/20/51 Retribution build. You're a killing machine with heals. Ret pallies are laying waste in the battlegrounds and people constantly QQ about how overpowered they are these days. This is great is you're playing one, not so great if youi're trying to kill one. This build is a standard leveling build and can be used for basic PvP or dungeon DPS. Hardcore PvP/DPS will require tweaking.
2. 7/51/13 Protection build. (the build link is below.) This one trades off straight up killing power for a lot more of the Hard to Kill aspect. This is a good build for rounding up piles of mobs and grinding them down to mush. Laugh as they make their futile attacks against your invincible self. You can take this build into various instances and be the group tank. For raiding, you'll want to change a few things.

The Talents:

The first talent simply makes us more efficient, so it helps. Improved judgement means that you’ll also be expending even more mana if you really want to kill faster.

Seal of Command is an obvious choice, it serves as our defacto damage seal all the way to 80, unless you happen to be a blood elf, whereupon seal of blood would likely replace it at 64, and that’s a ways away. 

Conviction is another great talent, bringing up our generally pathetic critical rate another few notches.  A lot of what makes a paladin deadly is varying burst damage, seal of command procs are quite random at times, and criticals simply factor in to this quite naturally.

Sanctified Retribution improves our damage while in retribution aura, which is more often than not the aura of choice for leveling. More damage from the aura plus this 2% increase make it worthwhile.

Two-handed weapon specialization and Vengeance: these two increase our general damage output significantly.  With a reasonable critical rating you can keep a 3-proc vengeance running for hours at a time when questing and grinding, that’s a big increase of overall DPS.

Sanctified Wrath and Judgements of the wise are both potent increases to both party viability and solo capabilities, extremely useful and welcome to a retribution tree that was once rather pathetic to look at.

Fanaticism, apply everything I said above, just more-so.  Dramatically increases our judgement critical rating, bringing it up to an extremely high chance of proccing vengeance when used as an opening strike, nothing much else to say.

Finally, Crusader Strike, the bread & butter of the retribution tree and a hefty DPS increase when factored into a standard damage rotation.  This reduces dependency on random-chance/luck factors such as seal of command procs and so on.

Rightous Vengence adds an 8 second DoT to your, hopefully frequent, Judgement, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm abilities. So in addition to pounding their heads in you can watch them bleed. Good stuff.

Divine Storm is a nice point blank A of E attack.

Protection Paladin Leveling

7/51/13 Protection Leveling Build

Leveling as a protection paladin is my personal favorite.  This build endeavors to find an enjoyable and intriguing method of combining our great AoE tanking capabilities with our stacking damage buffs, designed to slowly whittle down surrounding groups of monsters.

Retribution Aura, Blessing of Sanctuary, Holy Shield, and Consecration, all these buffs, many of them from the protection talent tree, come together to provide us immensely effective AoE capabilities.  By itself none of the above would deal more than possibly 5% our overall damage, however when built up in unison they easily do enough to drop groups of 5, 10, and sometimes even 20+ mobs at once.

Optional additions would be a shield spike for increasing block damage, augmenting holy shield and BoS (Blessing of Sanctuary) somewhat.  Mana efficiency is another key here, you have to be capable of maintaining your mana pool for at least the entire pull, if not a couple more thereafter.

Key talents for this build would be Reckoning, Holy Shield, Blessing of Sanctuary, and almost everything at the bottom of the protection tree boosts survivability and/or damage.

For more about tanking and such see our Protection Paladin page.

3.0 – Gear & Progression

The Stats

Gearing a retribution paladin can be tough at times, at any given time you’ll 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?

As far as overall greatest DPS and efficiency is concerned, I often tried to get a point or two of intelligence for every three or four points of Strength. Stamina took slightly less priority than intellect..

So, in the long run this lead my health pool to being perhaps slightly high if not even with my mana pool, which actually worked quite well in the long run.  As you continue to level, our mana efficient heals make a high mana-pool essentially the equivalent of an increased health level, just make certain you get that heal off in time.

Critical rating and strength are both massively helpful stats to build up, critical directly increases our chances of procing vengeance and in doing so boosts our overall damage output by up to 15%, that’s very big.

Walk the fine line between too much damage and too much mana all the way to 80, it should serve you well.

1. Strength is all powers for breaking heads (melee)
2. Intellect expands your mana pool, which you need.
3. 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.
4. Agility adds to crit rating and a small amount to your defenses, but is definitely 2nd tier to the first three.
5. Spirit... Zzzzz....
6. Crit rating is very important.
7. Hit rating is more for PvP and even more for Raiding, not so important for leveling.
8. Spell Power depends on... you. If you're casting a lot of heals then you want more. If yo're just judging and mashing, then not so much.

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

Gear? Strength and Int and Stam and Crit rating. 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 as it comes.

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

Gems and Enchants - Enchants can be very expensive, so skip them until 80, unless you have lots of cash. You'll level fast enough that you will outgrow your gear soon enough that enchants probably aren't cost effective. Gems are a nice little boost for when you find that piece of socketed gear and gems are cheap enough.

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.

Professions - If you don't have a ton of cash and/or you want to level quickly then skip all of the crafting professions. They are all expensive to level up and time consuming. Take two of the gathering professions instead and sell what you gather. That will keep you in mounts and gear.

• Take skinning (since you will be killing a bazillion skinnable beasts and since it adds to your all important crit rating) and either mining or herbalism. Mining adds stam and you probably won't need the small heal that you will earn from Herbalism.
• Take cooking for the buffing foods. They're not essential for leveling, but are nice.
• First Aid is occasionally useful for when the mana is a bit low.
• Alchemy will make a variety of useful potions, but will cost you to level it up.

Misc tips:

• 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.
• Buy some scrolls of recall off the Auction house. They're like an extra use of your hearth stone. Make sure the scrolls are appropriate for your level.
• 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.
• Daily quests (from 70+) are a nice way to get XP, gold, rep, and some items.
• PvP, Instances (out of your level range,) endless shopping, and other time wasting activities can be great fun, but will slow your leveling.
• Always log out in an Inn, for the Rested XP Bonus.
• If you really want to get to 80 fast then you should invest in a leveling guide.

4.0 – 1-80 Paladin Leveling Guide

As you probably know, there are thousands of quests in the World of Warcraft and a few zillion monsters to slay (not even including other players.) Keeping track of all those quests, looking up the details (perhaps on thottbot.com,) and figuring out where to go and what to do can become a drag, at times.

To keep track of it all, and level quickly and easily, we've been using Zygor's Guide. Zygor's automates the whole leveling process for your Pally, or any class. Not by playing the game for you, but by keeping track of everything, including all the info you need to complete each quest, and by automatically updating as you go.

Pick your starting point and the guide automatically updates and advances as you complete quests, , tracks your objectives, automatically sets a waypoint arrow, and includes the important quest info. You will never again wonder where to go or what to do. You will probably never need to look at your quest log again, much less browse Thottbot.

Hitting level 80 in well under 10 days (in game time) is easy and, if you're fast and efficient you might be able to hit Zygor's advertised time of 7 days. Grab your copy here or read our Zygor's review.