Paladin Leveling Guide
February 28, 2010 by admin
Leveling your Paladin is much the same as leveling other characters, but there are a few specific guidelines one should adhere to. In this WoW Paladin Guide you will learn a lot of simple things that you can do to get the most out of your character and thereby level up in the most effective way.
Paladin Summary
Paladins are one of the four hybrid classes in the game. They can do a little bit of everything and when it comes to leveling, they do it all very well. Killing a Paladin in PvE content is downright a pain – it takes a LOT of time to wear one down, with the healing, armor, and big heavy swings they can throw out there. Paladins have a ton of self-administered buffs, spells, and bubbles that you need to master if you even remotely plan on reaching the top tier of this class. Another big problem that sends so many people for a Paladin leveling guide is the mana issue. These guys are not casters by nature, but they use a lot of mana. So, as you can guess, they have woefully little in the way of Mana. If you don’t manage it well, it’s OOM for you.
Paladin Race
Alliance: Alliance gets the choice between three classes for that big bad mace wielder – Humans, Dwarfs, or Draenei. The Humans and Dwarfs are the old school Paladins from the beginnings of the game – so they’re set up with the basic stats you may want for this class.
That said, the Human race doesn’t offer much that’s very useful. It’s a bit boring too – though the starting area for humans is a cakewalk and travel is minimal to get to the next area (Westfall is right there). Dwarfs have Stoneform, which is unspeakably cool for any class, but their racial boosts are for ranged stuff. Not exactly a Paladin’s strongsuit. That leaves the Draenei who are great for any class – as is the case with most expansion add-on classes. If you’re aiming for a good Draenei Paladin, you could do much worse. Having the Gift of the Naruu is going to be HUGE early on when your own healing efforts are so limited.
Horde: Only one choice here, so that’s that. If you’re a Horde player and want a Paladin – it’s the Blood Elf or nothing (at least until Cataclysm hits). What does that mean? Not a whole lot really, though your ability to load up on the mana centered talents of a Blood Elf is nice for the mana hogs that are Paladins. A good class for this all the way around.
Paladin Leveling Talent Builds
Retribution Paladin Leveling Guide
As a Retribution Paladin your primary job is to hit things and to hit things hard. Just make sure to stay alive while doing it. Ret Paladins are all about swinging a big slow two handed weapon while being able to heal through any damage that may be taken. At lower levels Retribution leveling can seem somewhat boring and uneventful. You will spend most of your time killing 1-2 mobs at a time and doing it fairly quickly, but just not as quickly as most of us Ret buffs would like. Once you get Divine Storm you will find yourself making the most of your time by AOE leveling on 3-4 mobs at once. Because Divine Storm hits up to 4 targets and heals you as well it makes a good skill to AOE grind with. Here is my Paladin Retribution Spec from level 10 to 80.
Leveling a Protection Paladin
Well the obvious advantage is a holy Paladin is amazing at healing. This is why many people always try to get a Paladin in their Guild or party. Another great advantage of the holy paladin is they are very mana efficient, this comes in handy very often.
Some disadvantages is the Paladin Leveling is difficult because questing can sometimes be a challenge. Also grinding can be a challenge many times. So leveling a Paladin of this sort can be stressful, but in the end its a very rewarding experience.
Leveling a Protection Paladin
Trying to level as a Protection Paladin? I’d like to give you some tips on the best way to approach this task and tell you some of the advantages of leveling as a Protection Paladin in World of Warcraft. Paladin leveling of this type is fairly simple. Some advantages that a Protection Paladin has is this type of build has great buffs and is a great type of Paladin build if you’re using Grinding to level up.
The Protection Paladin has many different protection buffs that come right off of the protection talent tree. Using the different buffs that this build offers can help you in creating a very successful Paladin character. Leveling a Paladin of this build will be very easy because of these buffs, and Grinding will be very easy because I’ve had times where I could kill mobs of more than 15 monsters.
Leveling with a Protection Paladin also has the advantage of the different types of items you can use. My favorite item to use with this kind of Paladin is the augmenting holy shield. Also if you playing as this type of Paladin it would be in your best interest to work on your Reckoning, and Blessing of Sanctuary talents. The Protection Paladin is a great type of build you can use, and it’s my favorite build.
Profession Choices
With the introduction of the benefits of trade skills and the increase in how fast toons level now, I feel it has no down side to having a gathering profession while leveling. Just don’t spend all your time crafting things as well if you want to level as fast as possible. Here are some of the options you have to choose from.
Mining – Gather ore from nodes, in turn allowing you to either smelt the ore into bars, or sell/keep the ore. (Mining now also gives a stamina bonus based on what level the gather skill is) 450 skill now grants you +60 to your base stamina.
Herbalism – Gather plants from all around the land, either sell these on the auction house or pick up alchemy as well to create potions. You could also choose to do inscription and create glyphs as well as rare cards later on. (A good way to make some extra cash early on is using herbalism and selling the herbs. Herbalism now also gives you a heal over time type of spell, this is helpful for certain classes but as a Paladin you can already heal yourself fairly easily.)
Skinning – Skin all of the beast mobs you kill collecting furs and skins. (The bonus with skinning at max level is increasing your critical strike rating by 40 points.)
The three professions above are normally the better ones to choose while leveling as they will help you to collect and make some extra gold while leveling. I normally choose 2 gathering professions then when I hit 80 I drop them for two professions I can really benefit from, such as blacksmithing and jewel crafting.
Gear and Weapons
Gear for a good Retribution Paladin can be a pain in the backside. There are a lot of different things you’ll need as you level to keep those stats nice and even. You could be working on getting some more mana to maintain your seals and judgments or you could be focused on increasing your strength enough so that you can land some bigger hits with that hefty sword of yours.
At first, you’ll work with some basic mail armor – the key stats to aim for when you get started is Strength, then Intellect, then Stamina for some much needed health, Agility to too boost your critical attack rate, and Crit rating. That should set you up pretty well as you level up – well enough to keep the mana pool flowing and your damage blowing over anyone in sight.
When you reach Level 40, make sure to have a nice stock of Plate armor on hand. It’s going to cost a LOT to do this with gold, so save your quest rewards from level 33 on so that you can just swap over your stats when needed. If that fails, make sure to keep the right stats on equally leveled mail armor. Sometimes, those nifty healing boosts are only available when you load up on mail gear.
For your weapon, you want to find a big, heavy 2 handed sword to knock some teeth out and show who’s boss. Get the slowest weapon with the biggest damage range. Trust me, this will be the way to go with almost any melee class.
For more fast leveling info for all classes, including your Paladin, you will want to take a look at the Zygor leveling guides. With guides for both Horde and Alliance, these are by far the most useful leveling guides available and have a great map mod as well that makes life much easier in-game.
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