I’ve been seeing a lot of searches recently looking for Paladin AoE grinding guides, and I took that as a cue to start working on one. First, it’s worth noting that true AoE grinding doesn’t really begin for Paladins until level 30 or so, but once you really get a feel for it and start getting talents and abilities that will help facilitate larger pulls and better survivability, the levels will start flying by. Before you dive into AoE grinding, there are a few things you need to know: places to grind, talents best suited to this type of grinding, and rotations and buffs that will help you plow through mobs more quickly. This guide will attempt to cover each of these.

Starter Talents

The key to effective AoE grinding is survivability. You need to be able to survive attacks from multiple mobs simultaneously and the more mobs you can handle at once, the better. This being the case, the Protection tree will actually provide the most efficient leveling spec for you. Yes, this will cut down on your damage output significantly compared to if you chose to use primarily Retribution talents, however, the key to AoE grinding isn’t being able to deal more damage but to be able to take more damage. Your damage output won’t be too severely gimped, but if you’re transitioning from a Ret build, you will notice a difference. Let’s take a look at some talents from the Protection tree that will help facilitate more efficient AoE grinding:

Divine Strength: 5/5 – Increases your total Strength by 15%.

There are a couple reasons why Divine Strength will come in handy. First, it will increase your Attack Power with melee weapons. For Paladins, Strength provides an additional 2 Melee Attack Power for every single point of Strength. Second, Strength increases your Block Value. For every single point of Strength, you get 0.5 points Block Value.

Anticipation: 5/5 – Increases your chance to dodge by 5%.

Dodge, or Avoidance (dodging, parrying and blocking) as a whole, increases your survivability. The premise behind the concept of avoidance is that the higher your chance to dodge, block or parry incoming damage, the less overall damage you’ll take, which in turn increases your overall survivability. There is, of course, some serious debate over which is more valuable, avoidance or effective health, for survivability. The crux of the issue with avoidance is that sooner or later you will be hit, and without a good balance between avoidance and effective health, when you are hit, you won’t be able to survive it. This is especially pertinent when dealing with hard-hitting mobs or bosses; however, for the purposes of simple grinding, the debate is largely irrelevant and avoidance will help you a great deal.

Toughness: 5/5 – Increases your armor value from items by 10% and reduces the duration of all movement slowing effects by 30%.

There are a couple reasons why this talent is especially helpful for grinding. First, by increasing your armor, you’re increasing the amount of damage you can take which in turn increases the number of mobs you can deal with simultaneously. Another reason why this talent is helpful is that you’ll find as you grind that you may need to do a bit of running around to gather a sufficient collection of mobs before you settle in to burn them all down. As such, reducing the duration of slowing effects (such as stuns resulting from turning your back to mobs as you run around gathering them up) will help make mob collection more efficient.

Improved Righteous Fury: 3/3 – While Righteous Fury is active, all damage taken is reduced by 6%.

While Righteous Fury is typically used specifically for tanking in instances to help generate threat, this talent makes it a valuable tool for damage mitigation as well. As such, keeping Righteous Fury active while grinding will give you another tool to increase your survivability, which translates into more mobs per pull and more efficient grinding.

The fourth tier of the Protection tree offers you a couple options, neither of which are necessarily “key” to AoE grinding. You can go with Improved Devotion Aura or Improved Hammer of Justice. Improved Devotion Aura will be largely useless to you for AoE grinding because the majority of your time will be spent utilizing Retribution Aura, so unless you plan to also spend some time tanking instances as you level, you can skip that talent. Improved Hammer of Justice will have the most practical impact on grinding of the two, allowing you to use your Hammer of Justice ability more frequently.

Blessing of Sanctuary: Places a Blessing on the friendly target, reducing damage taken from all sources by 3% for 10 minutes. In addition, when the target blocks, parries, or dodges a melee attack the target will gain 2% of maximum displayed mana. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.

This Blessing is great for AoE grinding. First, it reduces incoming damage and thus increases your survivability (more mobs per pull, more efficient grinding). Second, it also helps regenerate mana which will reduce your down time between pulls, making grinding even more efficient. Remember, you’ve already increased your chances to block and dodge with previous talents (Divine Strength and Anticipation), so this talent works great with the talents you’ve already picked up.

So, let’s take a look at our starter build:

From here, you’ll want to focus on working your way down to Holy Shield, which will further increase your survivability and will become a staple in your rotation.

Preparing for the Pull

Once you’ve got the right talents to facilitate smooth multi-mob grinding, you’ll want to make sure you’re buffing yourself appropriately to survive a lot of incoming damage from all those mobs you’ll be collecting.

Retribution Aura

While you might think Devotion Aura would be a good choice for AoE grinding because of the increase to your armor value (and thus, your damage mitigation), Retribution Aura will actually provide the most efficient buff. Part of this is because, as you run around collecting mobs, you want to make sure you’re continually dealing damage so that the mobs don’t reset. Another reason Retribution Aura is helpful is because it provides constant damage to every mob attacking you, making the process of burning through large packs of mobs much quicker.

At low levels, mana efficiency can be an issue (particularly as you maintain a constant stream of Consecrates and occasionally heal yourself), and you want to make sure you’re keeping a constant stream of damage going at those mobs so that they don’t simply outlast you. You want to make sure you have enough mana to both deal damage and heal yourself as necessary, and Retribution Aura will help with this. With Retribution Aura up, you’ll often find that the aura (along with Consecration) will kill off mobs you haven’t even focused on yet before you get the chance to turn your attention to them. This is desirable.

Blessing of Sanctuary

There’s a reason we wanted that 21-point talent! While you’re out grinding, you’ll want to make sure you keep Blessing of Sanctuary up constantly. While it’s true that Blessing of Might or Blessing of Kings might also be helpful, Blessing of Sanctuary will actually provide you the most overall benefit. Kings will increase your survivability and damage output slightly by increasing your stats, and Might will increase your damage output by a fair amount; however, Sanctuary will give you exactly what you need for efficient grinding: damage mitigation and mana regen.

Recall what we talked about when we decided to take this talent in the first place. Sanctuary works beautifully with the other talents you’ve got to help increase your survivability through reduced incoming damage and your increased avoidance from other talents in tandem with this Blessing will make sure you’ve got a constant stream of mana regen cooking, reducing your down time between pulls for a more efficient grinding experience.

Seal of Light or Seal of Wisdom

Now, which of these two seals you decide to use will depend on a couple of factors. First, if you aren’t Level 38 yet, that makes the decision pretty simple (you won’t have Wisdom yet). But, if you’ve got both seals available to you, you’ve got a decision to make that will depend largely on your experiences and a bit of experimentation.

Seal of Light should be used if you find you’re taking a bit too much damage for you to deal with efficiently (you find you have to heal yourself frequently as you go). Seal of Wisdom should be used if you find your mana regen leaves something to be desired and you frequently need to stop to drink between pulls.

Now remember, you can seal one way and judge another to balance things out, or you can judge and seal the same way to get even greater returns. The method you choose will depend largely on your own experiences and what your individual needs are. Try a combination of each and see which configuration works best for you. Your options are:

• Seal and Judge Light (greatest health return)
• Seal and Judge Wisdom (greatest mana return)
• Seal Light and Judge Wisdom (moderate health and lower mana return)
• Seal Wisdom and Judge Light (moderate mana and lower health return)

Righteous Fury

Now, remember that we took Improved Righteous Fury in our talent build to help reduce incoming damage. As such, you’ll want to remember to keep this spell up at all times for the greatest amount of damage mitigation and survivability.

Buff Checklist:

1. Retribution Aura
2. Blessing of Sanctuary
3. Seal of Light or Seal of Wisdom
4. Righteous Fury

The add-on PallyPower can help you keep track of these buffs so that you don’t forget to refresh any as you go along. PallyPower is a recommended add-on for all Paladins to have, especially if you intend to spend time in groups as you level or plan to raid in the end-game. It makes keeping track of and assigning Paladin Blessings so much easier, so if you haven’t gotten it yet, you really should do so as soon as possible.

Before every pull, you should make sure you have each of these buffs active. I found that I was frequently forgetting to refresh Blessing of Sanctuary as I leveled, and even missing that one buff made a huge difference in my survivability and efficiency. It’s especially easy to forget to refresh Sanctuary when all of your other buffs are 30 minutes, so be sure to keep an eye on it. If you’ve got PallyPower running, you’ll notice the blessing bar turn red when the buff fades, so it serves as a nice reminder.

Coming Up Next

In part two of this guide, I’ll be talking about specific places that are ideal for AoE grinding in different level ranges and what types of mobs provide the best grinding experience. Part two will take into account types of mobs (beast, humanoid, elemental, etc as well as melee vs casters), mob loot and mob density so you’ll get the greatest return (experience as well as income and materials) for your time spent grinding. I’ll also be talking about the best attack rotations to use depending on the types of mobs you’re dealing with.

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