WotLK Classic Retribution Paladin Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

Retribution Paladin talents focus on maximizing damage and sustaining the Mana you need to be able to use your abilities throughout an entire boss fight no matter the duration.

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

There are two builds for Retribution Paladin in a raiding environment. The first mentioned above spends the extra points you have outside of the Retribution tree in Holy to maximize your personal DPS with Seals of the Pure while still obtaining the powerful raid cooldown Aura Mastery.

The second puts the points you had allocated into the Holy tree into Protection where we will be able to get the extremely powerful raid cooldown Divine Sacrifice. While this spec is a somewhat of a considerable loss in DPS, the raid cooldown can sometimes be the difference in killing a boss or not.

The Retribution section of the Paladin talent tree focuses on increasing your damage and sustaining Mana to be able to continuously use your spells and abilities.

Benediction reduces the cost of your Seals and Judgement ability. These are two of the spells you will cast the most, so the Mana cost reduction is very noticeable.

Heart of the Crusader turns an already powerful personal debuff on the mob into something that benefits the entire party by making critical strikes more likely against mobs effected by this debuff.

Seal of Command will be your go-to seal in an AoE or multi-target situation.

Pursuit of Justice gives a small chance you will completely avoid some spells as well as increasing your movement speed. One of Paladin's largest weaknesses is their lack of mobility so any added movement speed is huge.

Crusade is a flat damage increase against Humanoids, Demons, Undead, and Elementals which covers almost every mob you will encounter in Northrend.

Sanctified Retribution increases the damage of everyone effected by your auras by 3%

Vengeance increases your Physical damage and Holy damage stacking up to 3 times all the way to 15% every time you crit. This synergizes extremely well with other talents we have taken that increase the crit chance of our abilities.

Repentance incapacitates your target for 6 seconds. This is a powerful crowd control effect but can only be used against Humanoids and breaks on damage.

Fanaticism increases the crit chance of judgements by 18% and reduces all threat generated by 30%.

Crusader Strike deals 75% of your weapon damage on a short cooldown and is a key part of your damage rotation.

Divine Storm deals 110% of your weapon damage to 3 enemies and will be a primary part of not only your AoE DPS rotation but single-target as well!

Divine Sacrifice redirects 30% of incoming damage from party members to the Paladin.

Glyph of Reckoning allows you to use your Hand of Reckoning ability to deal damage without taunting the boss, leading to a considerable damage increase thanks to the damage the ability causes when the mob is not actively targeting you. This helps fill gaps in your rotation and will considerably increase your DPS.

Glyph of Judgement increases the damage dealt by Judgement by 10%, though it also greatly increases your threat.

Glyph of Seal of Vengeance grants 10 Expertise while Seal of Vengeance is active, allowing you a lot more freedom itemization wise.

Glyph of Lay on Hands reduces the cooldown of one of your strongest cooldowns.

Glyph of Blessing of Kings reduces the cost of both regular and greater Blessing of Kings by half making rebuffing in combat less costly.

Glyph of Sense Undead provides a free 1% bonus damage against Undead while Sense Undead is active.