In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Holy Paladin (WoW MoP 5.3). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Holy Paladin guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

For 10-man raiding, this guide has been reviewed and approved by Smirk, a Holy Paladin who raids in Paragon.

For 25-man raiding, this guide has been reviewed and approved by Atismund, a Holy Paladin who raids in Envy.

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents offer you a choice between 3 means of improving your movement speed.

• Speed of Light is an active ability, with a 45-second cooldown, which increases your movement speed by 70% for 8 seconds.
• Long Arm of the Law causes your successful Judgments to increase your movement speed by 45% for 3 seconds.
• Pursuit of Justice passively grants you 15% increased movement speed, and an additional 5% increased movement speed for each charge of Holy Power that you have, up to a maximum of 3 (so, up to a grand total of 30% increased movement speed).

Speed of Light is excellent because it offers you a reliable movement speed burst. Given the drawbacks of the other two talents, Speed of Light should be your default choice.

Pursuit of Justice offers you a constant, passive movement speed boost, which is excellent for moving out of harmful effects. That said, it does not stack with the movement-speed-increasing feet enchant, and you will seldom have 3 Holy Power charges when you are on the move.

Long Arm of the Law offers more frequent but shorter bursts of speed than Speed of Light. It requires you to judge in order to get the speed boost, however, and overall we do not recommend it.

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents offer you a choice between 3 means of crowd-control.

• Fist of Justice is an improved version of Hammer of Justice, which it replaces. Fist of Justice stuns the target for 6 seconds, with a 30-second cooldown, from a 20-yard range.
• Repentance puts the (Demon, Dragonkin, Giant, Humanoid, or Undead) target to sleep for 1 minute. Damage done to the target will break the effect, and only one target can be under this effect at one time (from the same Paladin).
• Burden of Guilt causes your Judgment hits to reduce the target's movement speed by 50% for 12 seconds.

The talent choice here is largely irrelevant, and it will not affect your performance in any way. You should choose based on your own preference, or on the requirements of the encounter, in terms of add crowd-control.

That said, you will probably find Fist of Justice to be the most useful option in the vast majority of encounters. The stun provided by it is one of the longest single target stuns in the game, and it has no significant resource cost attached to casting it.

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents offer you a choice between 3 healing abilities.

• Selfless Healer causes your Judgments to reduce the cast time and mana cost of your next Flash of Light by 35% per stack. Additionally, if used on players other than yourself it also increase its healing by 20% per stack. The effect can stack up to 3 times.
• Eternal Flame replaces Word of Glory. It costs Holy Power (up to 3), heals the target for an amount roughly equal to Word of Glory's healing, and places a HoT on the target, lasting 30 seconds. The power of the HoT is dependant on the amount of Holy Power with which the spell is used. When Eternal Flame is used on yourself, the HoT's power is increased by 100%.
• Sacred Shield places a 30-second buff on the target, which then goes on to create a damage absorption shield every 6 seconds. The individual shields being broken by damage or expiring has no effect on the main buff. Sacred Shield has a 6-second cooldown.

The best choice is Eternal Flame. As an added bonus, the healing done by Eternal Flame transfers through your Beacon of Light, meaning that if you blanket the raid with Eternal Flame HoTs, then the Beacon target will also receive a steady stream of healing.

Sacred Shield is is also a viable option if you are tank healing, although we still feel that Eternal Flame is better.

Selfless Healer is decent, but since it requires you to weave in Judgments to benefit from it, you will not find much use for it.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 talents offer you a choice between 3 ways of situationally improving your utility.

• Hand of Purity places a 6-second buff on a target, reducing the damage they take from harmful periodic effects by 70%, and reducing all damage taken by 10%.
• Unbreakable Spirit passively reduces the remaining cooldown of Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Lay on Hands by 1% each time you use a charge of Holy Power. The total reduction is capped at 50% of the original cooldown.
• Clemency gives each of your Hand spells 2 charges. This means that you can use them twice before triggering the cooldown (but the cooldown will begin ticking as soon as it is used for the first time).

We believe Unbreakable Spirit should be the default choice in most encounters. It greatly improves survivability (by allowing more frequent use of Divine Protection) and utility (allowing you to bypass mechanics or reset debuffs more often with Divine Shield). The talent gets better with better gear, since more Haste increases your Holy Power generation rate, which results in the cooldowns of abilities being reduced more.

Clemency will literally double your already powerful utility. In case your Hand spells turn out to be useful in an encounter, this talent will undoubtedly be a strong choice.

Hand of Purity's usefulness depends greatly on the number of effects that are affected by it. If it works against relevant boss mechanics, it can be an excellent cooldown to use on the tank. As a rule, debuffs that cannot be removed through immunities (such as Divine Shield) are not affected by Hand of Purity either.

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents offer you a choice between 3 powerful performance-enchancing talents.

• Holy Avenger is a 2-minute cooldown that, for 18 seconds, causes your abilities that generate Holy Power to deal 30% additional damage and healing, and to generate 3 charges of Holy Power, instead of 1.
• Sanctified Wrath passively increases the duration of Avenging Wrath by 50%. Additionally, while Avenging Wrath is active, it reduces the cooldown of your Holy Shock by 50%.
• Divine Purpose gives your abilities that cost Holy Power a 25% chance to cause your next Holy Power-costing ability cost no Holy Power and be cast as if you had 3 charges of Holy Power.

While mana regeneration is an accute problem, we feel that Divine Purpose is the best choice, since it will often result in mana-free spells.

Once mana regeneration levels stabilise, we believe that Holy Avenger will be the strongest choice, because it offers you its benefit on-demand, essentially granting you another healing cooldown.

Divine Purpose's randomness will make the talent less desirable to you as a healer later on, since you may get its benefit when you do not need it, and you may need it when it does not proc.

Sanctified Wrath should mostly be considered for the 50% duration increase to Avenging Wrath. While we believe that this element is quite strong, we still prefer Holy Avenger or Divine Purpose to it.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents offer you a choice between 3 abilities that are centered around damaging multiple enemies and healing multiple allies.

• Holy Prism can be cast on an ally or enemy target. If cast on an enemy, Holy Prism deals damage to them and heals 5 nearby allies. If cast on an ally, it heals that ally and damages 5 nearby enemies.
• Light's Hammer places a hammer at a target location on the ground for 16 seconds. During this time, the hammer will heal all nearby allies and damage all nearby enemies. Enemies' movement speed is also reduced by 50% for 2 seconds each time they take damage.
• Execution Sentence can be used on enemies or on allies. If used on an enemy, they take a certain amount of damage over 10 seconds (the damage they take is low at first, and it increases gradually). If used on an ally, they will be healed for a certain amount over 10 seconds (the effect is also gradually increasing).

Execution Sentence is very good for single target healing, but its ramp-up time and high cooldown make it more difficult to use.

Therefore, we believe your best option, currently, is Holy Prism. You should use this by casting it on the boss or add that is positioned next to your raid members.

Light's Hammer is the best choice if your raid is stacked up.

8. Major Glyphs↑top

There are several Major Glyphs that are of interest to you, although none offer clear performance improvements.

• Glyph of Divine Plea changes your Divine Plea spell. With the glyph, the spell has a 5-second cast time, but 12% of your maximum mana is restored instantly at the end of your cast. Moreover, the healing penalty normally associated with Divine Plea is gone. This glyph should be taken in most situations.
• Glyph of Divinity increases the cooldown of Lay on Hands by 2 minutes, but causes it to also restore 10% of your maximum mana when used. If you know that you will use Lay on Hands at very specific moments of the fight, and this glyph does not interfere with that, or if you are only going to get a single use out of Lay on Hands anyway, then this glyph is quite good. Overall, you should almost always be using it.
• Glyph of Protector of the Innocent heals you for 20% of the amount that Word of Glory (or Eternal Flame, in case you have taken that talent) heals its target. It only works if you cast these spells on someone other than yourself. It is a nice way to gain some free self-healing, and it is preferred when there is magic damage in the encounter.
• Glyph of Divine Protection adds 20% Physical damage reduction to your Divine Protection cooldown, at the expense of 20% magic damage reduction. This can be useful in certain situations, particularly in cases of physical raid damage (in which case it should replace Glyph of Protector of the Innocent).
• Glyph of Beacon of Light removes the global cooldown of Beacon of Light, making it much easier to change your Beacon target.
• Glyph of Flash of Light places a 7-second buff on the targets of your Flash of Light, which increases your next heal on them by 10%.
• Glyph of Illumination causes your Holy Shock critical heals to grant you 1% of your maximum mana, but at the same time reduces the mana return you gain from your Holy Insight passive ability by 10%.
• Glyph of Light of Dawn causes Light of Dawn to affect 2 fewer targets, but to heal each target for 25% more. This glyph is excellent if you are in a 10-man raid, or if you generally want to use Light of Dawn in situations where it will not heal more than a few players.

9. Minor Glyphs↑top

Minor Glyphs are purely cosmetic, and have no effect on your gameplay.

One glyph is worth mentioning, though. Glyph of the Righteous Retreat increases the cast speed of your Hearthstone by 50% while Divine Shield is active, allowing you to successfully bubblehearth once again.

10. Changelog↑top

• 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 update: nothing to change.
• 04 May 2013: Slightly adjusted the discussion of Tier 3 talents to express that Eternal Flame is better even if you are tank healing.
• 30 Apr. 2013: Made several updates.
  • Changed the classification of Hand of Purity and Clemency as utility, and of Unbreakable Spirit as survival.
  • Mentioned that Speed of Light is the preferred Tier 1 talent choice.
  • Mentioned that Fist of Justice is the preferred Tier 2 talent choice in most cases.
  • Made it clearer that Eternal Flame is the preferred Tier 3 talent choice for raid healing, while Sacred Shield is best for tank healing.
  • Vastly improved the Tier 4 talent discussion.
  • Added mention that Light's Hammer is best when the raid is stacked.
  • Added Glyph of Divine Protection, and mentioned that Glyph of Divine Plea and Glyph of Divinity are more or less the default choices.
• 05 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Added mention of the movement speed reduction applied by Light's Hammer.
  • Added mention of the damage reduction provided by Hand of Purity.
  • Added mention of the new values of the Flash of Light boost provided by Selfless Healer (20%/40%/60% per stack, down from 33%/66%/100%).
  • Added mention of the increased healing done by Eternal Flame when cast on self.