AOE Paladin Leveling Guide for Hardcore Classic WoW - Talents, Gear, Professions, and Gameplay

[@octyandosa]

📝 Some notes post-upload 📝 Audio mixing is off - sorry for low volume - will fix moving forward Will make a short on value of mana vs. hp (i.e. Seal of Light/health pot vs. Seal of Wisdom/Mana pot) Forgot a few strong items to specifically target for AOE Paladin (PRE-RAID): Mark of the Chosen (quest) Naglering (BRD) Force of Will (BRD) Useful consumes I've started using at 60: Oil of Immolation (alch) Crystal Spire (Un'goro crystals) Might make a future video on max threat, pre-raid gearing, and raid drops to target

[@bpro2010]

Subbed, im currently rolling a Prot Pally and this is a good video to refer to.

[@leonholz5901]

Very nice guy to play dungeons with and ask for pala advice. Thanks for the awesome guide! :) ~ Lanira

[@alistairdodd4161]

This tank is LEGIT! Smoothest runs I've ever had.

[@gochujangman]

Great guide, thanks! Did you favour Holy Shield or Consecration more during your leveling? I really like the vibe of Shield, but I guess it isnt really better than Consecration…

[@octyandosa]

Luckily, you don't really have to decide. Just go consecration first and then beeline to holy shield

[@manoqueenz]

Not sure if you’re a new prot pala, but from classic 2019 you may want to look into pickrobber’s KZbin channel. He basically invented the ret prot build (for single target tanking) in classic, and tanked all raid bosses in the game. With dual spec, prot pala should really shine since you can carry both SP and agi/str sets and change to the relevant needs (SP set + cons spec for AoE, agi/str set + SoC spec for single target threat). The ret prot build really begins to shine with BWL gear, although you can tank everything with just blessings spam up till then (and still need blessings spam after BWL gear ofc). Good luck on the pala journey, OP!

[@octyandosa]

@manoqueenz Thanks for the tip, and hope the video was helpful to you in some way! I'm new enough to not know about this! I'm currently wrestling with whether to start pre-bis farm/raiding at all - the likelihood of anyone bringing a prot pala in HC seems super low. Which leaves me with some options (farm gold to fund other characters, transfer to PVE, etc) If I end up transferring to PVE, I'll definitely look into this!

[@theophrastus_bartholomaus]

Thank you for the great guide! What do you think about stamina/willpower gear instead of stamina/intellect? I think it is better for smaller pulls during aoe farming?

[@octyandosa]

@theophrastus_bartholomaus Stam Spirit is viable if you want to play the safest (but slowest) possible stat distribution, while rolling pull to pull doing 1-4 mob pulls. Good with Holy Shield. Spend lots of mana at the start of the pull, finish it while afk meleeing to regen. The issue with Spirit is that consecration/holy shield has an 8 and 10-sec cd respectively, which interrupts mana regen very regularly, so you only really get full value from the spirit when you are literally afk meleeing (not holy shielding, not consecrating, not judging/refreshing seal) - and doing that can slow down your kill time It's basically unkillable with low mob count, but then again, so is stam/int! Stam/int also let's you have the option of killing faster, pulling bigger, and gives you more emergency mana as a buffer. Int just means you'll be drinking after every pull

[@Jack.Mc3]

Thoughts on weapon enchants? I see so many things regarding going either life steal, +30 spell power, fiery weapon, or fiery blaze for proc hits? Wondering if u can shed some light on this!

[@octyandosa]

@JackMc-c9r I'm not super knowledgeable on enchant value so take this with a grain of salt: While leveling I think it's safe to say Fiery --> Fiery Blaze around the 40s is probably correct. Fiery is just huge value up to 30-35, and Fiery Blaze takes off as you start doing larger and larger pulls with your kit mostly online For AOE farming in the late game (huge pulls post-Skullflame/DFB) 30sp should* win out pretty easily. It's not exactly significant for our consec damage (only contributes ~1.25 damage per tick) but both Skullflame and DFB scale more significantly with sp (100% for Skullflame's lifesteal proc, 10% per tick on DFB's lifesteal proc). More healing, more damage, less need to swap auras to holy light. Sp also scales with dragonbreath chili (100% on proc) by the way! Same for threat in dungeons/raid: 30sp should be better than any other option due to scaling on SoR and other spells There's probably some deep theory stuff on lifestealing that I'm not aware of. Hope this helps!

[@daretoinspire1982]

What do you think about Spirit? I am lvl 20 right now and followed another aoe guide that tells me to invest in 50% int/stam and 50% spirit/stam so that we have much better regen. Generally, i am regenerating mana at twice the normal rate. In combat, it starts regenerating about 5 seconds of not using spells and every second so it goes quickly. I wonder if this stat would be as important or more important than intel to avoid OOM.

[@octyandosa]

@daretoinspire1982 Hope the video was helpful! TL;DR = spirit good for small pull counts, more flexibility when picking a spot to grind, or highly competitive layers. Int = pseudo mandatory for bigger pulls Below a super long answer with my full thoughts: I think your approach of balancing Int and Spirit is perfectly viable (if not even better than pure int), especially at lower levels and with smaller pulls. If you like doing 3-6 mob pulls and lower downtime between pulls, i encourage you to try a spirit + holy shield build! Spend a ton of mana early and then lean on the spirit to regen as the pull ends However, if you start pulling more mobs at a time (maybe around level 41 + full plate, Skullflame, or other gear powerspikes) you'll start to really feel the pressure of needing to kill the mobs before you oom. At larger pull counts, consecration has to get dropped on CD, holy light has to get casted relatively often, etc, which means youre only benefitting from 1 or 2 Spirit ticks at a time as your spells interrupt your 5-second rule consistently. That being said, having TOO much Int is (theoretically) strictly bad. If you end every pull with 50% mana, the excess int is technically a wasted stat and it means you COULD have equipped more Spirit, Strength, or whatever else to reduce your downtime etc etc etc. But: we arent robots playing a simulation, so i view that excess mana as an insurance policy in case a pull goes bad. We also drink after every pull to start the next pull at 100% mana - does some extra spirit meaningfully reduce my downtime if I'm going to drink to full anyway? Experiment with both!!

[@octyandosa]

@daretoinspire1982 forgot a few thoughts: Whale gear is WAY cheaper than Eagle gear, but Spirit might also lose some value as you get a higher mana pool and higher mana costs (it can't really keep up with the amount of mana consecration costs)

[@Dragonskin1001]

INSANE TANK PLAYER