#0 - Feb. 15, 2008, 3:16 p.m.
THE IDEA
The idea behind prot leveling is fairly simple. A prot paladin is harder to kill than one your own family members. You (hopefully) have a ridiculous amount of hitpoints, as well as armor and damage mitigating factors working in your favor eg. block rating, dodge, parry, etc. Basically with blessing of sanctuary up, you're not taking that much damage from anything. On top of that, you have heals, shields, lay on hands, seal of light, judgement of light, potions, bandages, and of course the ever present option to bubble hearth. This makes you about as tough as a coffin nail in thrall's cairn. When you work at leveling as prot for a while, you tend to find out the limits to your abilities and can therefore end many fights with over 80% hp and 80% mana if you work out judgement of light, and judgement of wisdom properly =D
YOUR BUFFS
Retribution Aura - The most simple and probably one of the more important parts to this guide. Retribution aura is your friend. Basically it's like a never ending thorns on yourself which is seriously impressive. Always have retribution aura up so that any mob that hits you will be taking damage. You'd be surprised how fast 20 dmg every time you're hit adds up.
Blessing of Sanctuary - At level 60 it reduces damage taken from all sources by up to 24 for 30 minutes. It also does 35 damage to any target the paladin manages to block an attack from. In layman's terms, this ability reduces all the damage you take, EVERY HIT AND SPELL, by 24. When you've got 10 mobs on you each hitting you every 1.5 seconds you're talking about some serious damage mitigation ok? :D As well as that, if you keep up Holy Shield and have some decent block rating, you're going to be doing a great deal of holy dmg to each and every person you block an attack from. Considering your 1h weapon is there purely for you to be hitting a judged target with seal of light, your shield is you main dmg dealer.
Righteous Fury - If you have specced to improve this in the protection talent tree (you should... do it... do it now...) you should be reducing all your damage taken by 6%. Hell to the yes. Along with your sick armor, block rating, blessing of sanctuary and righteous fury you can maximize the reduction in damage taken. That way, with seal of light up your health is going up even faster and you can survive for longer and take on more mobs, god this makes me happy just thinking about it.
THE MOBS
Melee
Ideally what you want to look for is fast hitting, low dps, and most importantly, NON CASTER mobs in an area. Casters do too much damage and aren't going to sit there and hit you with their staff if they have mana. Therefore, it's a hell of a lot easier to kill a mob that's hitting you and killing themselves in your melee range, than taking a frostbolt barrage from across the room. Capiche? A protection paladin counts on his retribution aura, and holy shield, blessing of sanctuary to basically... have the mobs kill themselves.
You may not have notices but mobs get really angry, really fast when you come near them. As well as this, little beestings like your abilities, will not deter them from beating on you mercilessly. Therefore the ideal mobs you want to find to group up and fight are the ones that are actually trying to hit you. Someone who tries to hit you, can be blocked, and will therefore take some serious damage from holy shield and blessing of sanctuary. This is how you kill mobs.
Keep in mind, your 1h does not do a hell of a lot of damage ok? therefore, you have to count on the mobs stupidity, and hope that they're dumb enough to not stand there and let you kill them... but actually dumb enough to hit you and kill themselves. Simple as I can put it =D
What to do - Ideally, you need to find a place where there are tons of fast hitting, low health, high money drop (hehe) mobs in the same area. The routine I use involves mounting up with seal of light on me and running around to tick off about 10 of them my level. Don't run too far or the ones you aggroed at the beginning will lose interest and go back to where they were before, big waste of time all in all. So run around on your mount until you've got about 5 mobs on you, then dismount and judge the last one you ticked off with seal of light. Then put seal of light back on again. This way every time you hit the judged mob, you have a decent chance of restoring something over 100 health which should drastically increase your survivability, yay =D
Make sure to keep them in front of you, there's no point trying to kill someone who takes the majority of their damage from your blocking their attacks if they're beating you in the back of the head. It will take some practice but maneuver yourself so that they're all in front of you and at the worse somewhere in front but to the side. Never behind. Keep up holy shield as often as possible as well as a consecration that's perhaps one rank lower than your max (for mana conservation) That way your block rate is still going up by 30% and their taking max damage from blessing of sanctuary, while YOU keep as much mana as possible by doing the max damage possible.
Great. Now that you've got 5 mobs on you, and if you're comfortable with that (aka your health isn't going below 75%) start walking backwards into other groups of mobs. You'll find that as you move along tagging more mobs, the ones you picked up at the beginning are going to start dying... fast... and very close to each other whereas YOU, you legend you, are going to be staying relatively even at a decent HP count and doing equal dmg to everyone except the mob who's taking your axe in between the eyes.
Once upon a time when you were retribution you would take on 1 mob at a time, maybe two if you felt lucky and beat them down bit by bit simple. Prot is superior in that when you change your focus target to the mob after the judgement of light one goes down, the next mob you target will already be below 50% guaranteed! =D Then you just rinse and repeat the judge, reseal, tips from above and walaa before you know it everyone in a 2 mile radius is dead and you're standing there with a buttload of corpses to loot yippee =D
Casters
Now, there's nothing in the book to say we can't kill casters, I'm simply telling you that it's a helluva lot easier to kill melee mobs than these suckers. And as well as that, you'll find that where you can get about 6-7 melee mobs on you and stay relatively healthy, 6-7 caster mobs are going to hurt you... a lot...
Casters are those painfully annoying mobs who don't actually hit you often, but rather spend 1.5 to 2 seconds casting spells that do far more damage than your average melee attack. Basically, they're not hitting you enough to justify your retribution aura, BoS, doing enough damage to kill them, they do way more damage than melee mobs and are therefore way more of a pain in the patooty.
What to do - Caster mobs are still relatively simple enough to handle. Whereas I recommended using Seal of Light, and judgement of light on the melee mobs to keep your health up, you want to take down caster mobs fast.
Take them 1 at a time just like you used to when you were retribution! Run up to them with Seal of Righteousness and when they start casting smash them in the face with it. Put it back up and beat on them some more. Judge them with it whenever you can and rinse and repeat throwing in heals if necessary (probably not assuming you have a decent amount of health and there's only one) If they're an elite or you think you might have trouble taking them out, throw down some consecrations as well and use hammer of justice wisely (aka at the end of their spell casting so they've wasted their time)
VIDEOS!
This is a pure alliance spot to grind in. Horde can't kill these Orcs, we work for them. I added this video purely to show you the effectiveness of prot pally aoe grinding. The paladin did fairly well all in all, although I prefer to keep my health a little higher than she did. Have a look for yourself, this will give you a basic, decent idea of what you're aiming for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEM0fr7f4v0
Another decent sort of video. This paladin did well although I would have advised him to hit each mob indivually before moving on you can see a few of his mobs running off after he gets to the last group. Consecration does not encourage them to continue fighting you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVE3ShBs4vs&feature=related
This is one of those ridiculously long intro movies, and the paladins health goes further down than I like once again but a decent idea. Probably the best of the three but I'll leave that up to you =P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X709m13kjo&feature=related
