Paladin Abilities Guide
Paladin abilities are quite varied in their usage, being separated into numerous categories such as seals, auras, blessings, judgements, heals, etc. All in all we have more than a few methods of buffing ourselves, injuring opposition, and aiding our teammates as well.
It’s by proper combination of these spells that we truly unveil the power of the paladin as opposed to flinging off whatever judgement we feel like or utilizing some random seal for a given fight. Through calculation and observation it’s not that hard to determine what seal works best when and where for your paladin specifically, as this will vary by gear and level differences.
For the most part prior to around 10-20 you’ll never even need to use judgement, it’s after this point that the spell becomes wildly better and starts becoming a part of your standard ability rotation all the way to 70 and beyond.
Auras will fluctuate between mediocre and downright useless, especially at 70, but it’s never a bad idea to have one going anyway, generally better than nothing. Blessings prove useful at all times, just getting a bit annoying to refresh every 5 minutes but this will end when you pick up the greater blessings for longer durations.
Seals
Seals play a large part in turning paladin DPS from pathetic into somewhat reasonable, and for higher level retribution players, quite nice actually. Whether you be a tank, healer, or DPS paladin, seals play a large part in maintain mana, health, and consistent damage for some.
However many seals also play a greater role simply for being used as judgements as opposed to actually being active during the fight, many of those would be seal of light/wisdom and sometimes crusader, this can greatly improve a raids health or mana recovery.
Damage wise seal of command, an 11 point talent in retribution, or seal of blood, the horde specific seal, become the primary contenders. As far as I know command Vs seal of blood has SoB edging out command over time in raid DPS, however command is used by both sides until horde (blood elf) paladins receive SoB at 64.
All in all, seal usage is but one crucial part of a paladins arsenal, without proper judgements, blessings, and sometime aura selection, it won’t make a paladin magically great.
Auras
Aura’s are much less difficult to select amongst when leveling, indeed you’ll likely be switching between either Retribution or Devotion, whichever you fancy more, for the majority of your levels. Retribution is particularly useful for protection leveling.
Sanctity aura is also picked up later on in the retribution tree, proving a viable DPS aura but I generally didn’t get much out of any specific aura until the high 50’s, prior to that it’s mostly semantics as to your selection.
Upside is that some specific auras can become very useful raid-wise, determining the course of a fight even where resistances are crucial to a raids survival.
Blessings
Blessings are another aspect of the paladin class, allowing you to give teammates and fellow raid members a large overtime increase to damage, mana regeneration, or with BoK (Blessing of Kings) an overall increase to all statistics.
Proper selection of what blessing to use when will greatly improve your chances of prevailing in certain boss fights and dungeons in general, PvP wise blessing of freedom comes quite in handy, specifically for flag carriers in warsong gulch.
As far as what to use on yourself, leveling will see you switching back and forth between might or wisdom depending on how mana efficient you are, with occasional usage of the others for unique situations.
Judgements
Judgements are another key to effectively fighting, leveling, defeating bosses, boosting raid DPS and health, and finally renewing your own mana pool to maintain unstoppable killing. Almost every judgement has some use at some point, more than you can say about our auras.
Primary usefulness is judgement of either wisdom or light, either one can renew enough life or mana that within any given fight you exit at nigh 100% HP & MP. I personally side with wisdom on the manta that mana = life given paladins amazingly efficient flash heals.
Other judgements include crusader for increased holy damage, useful if you have multiple paladins in a party, and righteousness/blood for instantaneous damage. Personally I find the judgement of blood a bit too much HP costly but righteousness is more like a pin-prick, pick your poison.
