TBC Classic Holy Paladin Spec, Builds, and Talents

Holy Paladin talents focus on survivability, throughput, gaining powerful cooldowns, such as Divine Illumination, and maximizing the strength of your blessings.

If you were looking for a leveling-oriented build, please refer to our Paladin leveling guide.

There is only one main Holy Paladin talent build, as the vast majority of talents in the tree are required and not taking them would drastically reduce your healing throughput or weaken the buffs you would be providing to your party. There are three points that I would consider to be optional and I choose to place them in Purifying Power and Blessed Life. These three points can be allocated in a number of talents, but popular alternatives, depending on your personal preference, would be Unyielding Faith for additional chance to resist fears/disorients, Pure of Heart for additional chance to resist curses/diseases, or even Improved Seal of the Crusader, if you know that you will not be playing with another Paladin who has it and want to increase your group's damage output even more.

The Holy tree of Paladin talents focuses almost exclusively on healing-oriented improvements to your character but has some strong tools to increase your survivability as well.

Improved Lay on Hands does a massive heal, but more importantly, also grants them 30% bonus armor from items and buffs for 2 minutes. This buff helps mitigate a ton of damage against any physical damage heavy encounter.

Healing Light increases the amount of healing done by your Holy Light and Flash of light by 4% per rank, which is the single largest healing increase you can get per talent point spent.

Illumination refunds 60% of the Mana cost of your Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Holy Shock if you crit. This vastly increases the amount of incoming Mana you will receive in a fight and there are many talents that synergize extremely well with this.

Divine Favor is a 2-minute cooldown that guarantees your next heal will crit. Not only is this a massive burst of throughput, but it also guarantees you will receive the benefit of Illumination.

Light's Grace reduces the cast speed of your Holy Light by 0.5 seconds when the buff is active. This bonus cast speed can help greatly in a situation where you are required to be doing the maximum healing you can output.

Holy Shock is an instant cast heal or damaging spell that is extremely potent. Holy Shock is not a spell you use on cooldown because of how much Mana it costs, but it is a great tool for an emergency where you do not have time to cast or are moving and cannot stop to cast.

Holy Guidance grants 35% of your total Intellect as spell damage and healing. This drastically increases the value of Intellect for Holy Paladins, as it now directly increases the amount healed by each spell, in addition to already increasing the Mana pool and spell crit chance.

The Protection tree offers an excellent buff in Blessing of Kings and some other strong utility on the way to get it.

Guardian's Favor reduces the cooldown of your Blessing of Protection and Blessing of Freedom spells.

Blessing of Kings is a powerful buff that benefits some classes and specs more than any other blessing Paladins are able to offer.

The Retribution tree allows some very powerful bonuses to our Blessing of Might, as well as some other more optional bonuses later in the tree.

Improved Blessing of Might increases the benefit of Blessing of Might by 20%.

Improved Seal of the Crusader is not something that I had recommended in the guide because of the popularity of Retribution Paladins, especially in 25 man groups, but if you are not worried about the healing done by Judgement of Light or running out of Mana without Judgement of Wisdom, this talent offers an excellent crit buff to benefit your party.