Protection Paladin Playstyle and Rotation Guide

Protection Paladin has a very fast paced play style. Below are some tips and tricks to help you improve.

1. Use Shield of the Righteous off GCD, usually with a holy power builder, or Avenger’s Shield. This will let you keep building holy power constantly without having downtime. It will also let you keep Shield of the Righteous up a lot more.
2. Consecration is your friend. If you have to take a large tank hit make sure you have Consecration down, even if you are super far away from anything you are attacking. The flat damage reduction Consecration provides is huge, use it to your advantage.
3. Make sure you have 3 holy power for Word of Glory or Shining Light ready to use after a large tank hit so you can heal back up as quickly as possible.
4. The silence from Avenger’s Shield is an incredibly potent tool. Using it correctly can reduce the amount of damage you and your group takes significantly, and it often allows you to complete solo a mob’s interrupts in a key. Divine Resonance is another huge enabler of this. Tracking the free Shields it sends out and using them to interrupt mobs takes a bit of skill, but is very good to do.
5. Use Divine Shield + Hand of Reckoning to completely immune certain boss mechanics, just make sure you cancel your Divine Shield BEFORE the forced attack debuff from Hand of Reckoning falls off.

Make sure you have Consecration available when you move, and try to move. Ideally you want to move slowly to where you need to be so you can drop Consecration along the way. But if you are forced to move far, be sure you have a Divine Steed charge and Consecration ready for when you stop. Keep in mind that you keep the benefits of Consecration for 4 seconds after leaving it, use that time to make the move.

General Rotation

This is your general rotation outside of cooldowns. For cooldowns, it’s best to send them on cooldown in order to get the most use out of them.

Lightsmith Single Target

1. Consecration, if you aren’t standing in it, or with 5 stacks of Divine Guidance
2. Shield of the Righteous to prevent overcapping holy power
3. Sacred Weapon if Avenging Wrath is not coming up in the next 30 seconds and Sacred Weapon is not already active or remaining duration of the active Sacred Weapon is <= 5 seconds
4. Judgment at 2 charges, or if 2nd change is coming in less than 1 GCD
5. Hammer of Wrath
6. Holy Bulwark at 2 stacks of Holy Armaments
7. Divine Toll
8. Avenger’s Shield
9. Judgment
10. Eye of Tyr if talented with Inmost Light and not needed as a defensive
11. Holy Bulwark if not needed as a defensive/external
12. Word of Glory at 2 stacks of Shining Light
13. Blessed Hammer
14. Consecration

Lightsmith Multi Target

1. Consecration, if you aren’t standing in it, or with 5 stacks of Divine Guidance
2. Shield of the Righteous to prevent overcapping holy power
3. Sacred Weapon if Avenging Wrath is not coming up in the next 30 seconds and Sacred Weapon is not already active or remaining duration of the active Sacred Weapon is <= 5 seconds and
4. Divine Toll
5. Eye of Tyr if talented and not needed as a defensive
6. Judgment at 2 charges, or if 2nd change is coming in less than 1 GCD
7. Avenger’s Shield
8. Holy Bulwark at 2 stacks of Holy Armaments
9. Hammer of Wrath
10. Judgment
11. Holy Bulwark if not needed as a defensive/external
12. Word of Glory at 2 stacks of Shining Light
13. Blessed Hammer
14. Consecration

Templar Single Target

1. Consecration, if you aren’t standing in it
2. Hammer of Light
3. Eye of Tyr if Shake the Heavens is not active or it’s duration is <= 2 seconds
4. Shield of the Righteous to prevent overcapping holy power
5. Hammer of Wrath
6. Judgment at 2 charges, or if 2nd change is coming in less than 1 GCD
7. Divine Toll
8. Avenger’s Shield if Shake the Heavens is not active
9. Judgment
10. Avenger’s Shield to refresh Barricade of Faith. This is technically a damage loss, but is usually needed for survivability when actively tanking.
11. Blessed Hammer
12. Word of Glory at 2 stacks of Shining Light
13. Consecration

Templar Multi Target

1. Consecration, if you aren’t standing in it
2. Hammer of Light
3. Eye of Tyr if Shake the Heavens is not active or it’s duration is <= 2 seconds
4. Shield of the Righteous to prevent overcapping holy power
5. Divine Toll
6. Avenger’s Shield
7. Judgment at 2 charges, or if 2nd change is coming in less than 1 GCD
8. Hammer of Wrath
9. Judgment
10. Blessed Hammer
11. Word of Glory at 2 stacks of Shining Light
12. Consecration

Opener:

Lightsmith Single Target

1. Consecration pre-pull
2. Holy Bulwark
3. Avenging Wrath + Hammer of Wrath
4. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
5. Judgment
6. Avenger’s Shield
7. Moment of Glory
8. Avenger’s Shield
9. Divine Toll + Shield of the Righteous
10. Hammer of Wrath
11. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
12. Consecration

Lightsmith Multi Target

1. Holy Bulwark pre-pull
2. Avenger’s Shield
3. Consecration
4. Avenging Wrath + Moment of Glory + Divine Toll
5. Shield of the Righteous
6. Judgment
7. Eye of Tyr
8. Avenger’s Shield
9. Judgment

Templar Single Target

1. Consecration pre-pull
2. Avenging Wrath + Hammer of Wrath
3. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
4. Judgment
5. Eye of Tyr
6. Hammer of Light
7. Divine Toll
8. Hammer of Wrath
9. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
10. Consecration

Templar Multi Target

1. Avenger’s Shield
2. Consecration
3. Avenging Wrath + Moment of Glory + Divine Toll
4. Shield of the Righteous
5. Avenger’s Shield
6. Eye of Tyr
7. Hammer of Light
8. Judgment
9. Judgment
10. Hammer of Wrath + Shield of the Righteous

Survivability

Surviving as a Protection Paladin comes down to 4 things. Shield of the Righteous uptime, Consecration uptime, correct Word of Glory usage, and using your defensives correctly.

Shield of the Righteous and Consecration uptime is pretty straight forward. Use them often and it’s pretty easy to keep them up always. A trick for having Shield of the Righteous up at the start of a pull in M+ is to use Blessed Hammer between packs so you have 3 holy power on pull and can use Shield of the Righteous on pull. Using Word of Glory correctly really helps with your survivability. You don’t want to use it too often for holy power, because you’ll slowly fall behind on your Shield of the Righteous uptime. Instead you want to use Word of Glory from free procs like Divine Purpose or Shining Light as often as possible. You also don’t want to use Word of Glory at too high of health. Typically you want to use it once you’ve dropped below 50-55% health. You also don’t want to sit at 2 stacks of Shining Light procs for too long as you’ll “waste” the free Word of Glory from them.

In raid it’s pretty simple when to use your cooldowns. Big tank nuke incoming? Use a cooldown. Planning your cooldowns beforehand is an important part of raid tanking. Once you are able to script out your movement and cooldown usage, your job as a tank is pretty much done. You just deal as much damage as you can while surviving and making sure to not deviate from your script as much as possible

Mythic plus is a bit more nuanced. You want to have cooldowns running as often as possible to help lessen the amount of incoming damage in each pull, while still saving cooldowns for big tank hits. The easiest way to do this is to rotate between your cooldowns. Use Sentinel on pull or while gathering to mitigate a lot of the upfront damage. Reaching a low amount of Sentinel stacks use Eye of Tyr, following it up with Ardent Defender, then Guardian of Ancient Kings and Divine Shield with Final Stand talented after that if the pack is still alive.

Sometimes you need to save a cooldown for when a big tank nuke is incoming, or for a dangerous pull that’s coming up. Using your other pseudo-defensives in these situations can really help you survive. These pseudo-defensives are things like Lay on Hands, the free Guardian of Ancient Kings proc from Gift of the Golden Val’kyr, or bubble+taunt or Blessing of Protection+taunt for physical damage spells on single target.