Protection Paladin Playstyle and Rotation Guide

General Rotation:

This is your general rotation outside of cooldowns. For cooldowns, it’s best to send them on cooldown in order to get the most use out of them.

Single Target

1. Consecration, if you aren’t standing in it.
2. Hammer of Wrath
3. Avenger’s Shield with Moment of Glory up.
4. Judgment
5. Shield of the Righteous at 5 holy power to prevent capping.
6. Avenger’s Shield
7. Shield of the Righteous at 3 or more holy power.
8. Word of Glory to heal yourself when you have Shining Light active and have around 50% health.
9. Blessed Hammer
10. Consecration

Multi Target

1. Consecration, if you aren’t standing in it.
2. Avenger’s Shield
3. Hammer of Wrath
4. Judgment
5. Shield of the Righteous at 5 holy power to prevent capping.
6. Shield of the Righteous at 3+ holy power
7. Word of Glory to heal yourself when you have Shining Light active and have around 50% health.
8. Blessed Hammer
9. Consecration

Opener:

Single Target

1. Consecration pre-pull
2. Avenging Wrath + Hammer of Wrath
3. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
4. Bastion of Light + Moment of Glory
5. Avenger’s Shield
6. Divine Toll
7. Hammer of Wrath
8. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
9. Consecration

Multi Target

1. Avenging Wrath
2. Bastion of Light
3. Moment of Glory
4. Divine Toll
5. Consecration + Shield of the Righteous
6. Avenger’s Shield + Shield of the Righteous
7. Judgment + Shield of the Righteous
8. Hammer of Wrath
9. Blessed Hammer
10. Shield of the Righteous + Blessed Hammer
11. Shield of the Righteous + Judgement

Playstyle

Protection Paladin has a very fast paced play style. Below are some tips and tricks to help you improve.

1. Use Shield of the Righteous off GCD, usually with a holy power builder, or Avenger’s Shield. This will let you keep building holy power constantly without having downtime. It will also let you keep Shield of the Righteous up a lot more. 
2. Consecration is your friend. If you have to take a large tank hit make sure you have Consecration down, even if you are super far away from anything you are attacking. The flat damage reduction Consecration provides is huge, use it to your advantage. 
3. Make sure you have a Word of Glory or Shining Light ready to use after a large tank hit so you can heal back up as quickly as possible.
4. The silence from Avenger’s Shield is an incredibly potent tool. Using it correctly can reduce the amount of damage you and your group takes significantly, and it often allows you to complete solo a mob’s interrupts in a key. Divine Resonance is another huge enabler of this. Tracking the free Shields it sends out and using them to interrupt mobs takes a bit of skill, but is very good to do.
5. Use Divine Shield + Hand of Reckoning to completely immune certain boss mechanics, just make sure you cancel your Divine Shield BEFORE the forced attack debuff from Hand of Reckoning falls off. 
6. Make sure you have Consecration available when you move, and try to move. Ideally you want to move slowly to where you need to be so you can drop Consecration along the way. But if you are forced to move far, be sure you have a Divine Steed charge and Consecration ready for when you stop. 

Survivability

Surviving as a Protection Paladin comes down to 4 things. Shield of the Righteous uptime, Consecration uptime, correct Word of Glory usage, and using your defensive correctly. 

Shield of the Righteous and Consecration uptime is pretty straight forward. Use them often and it’s pretty easy to keep them up always. A trick for having Shield of the Righteous up at the start of a pull in M+ is to use Blessed Hammer between packs so you have 3 holy power on pull and can use Shield of the Righteous on pull. Using Word of Glory correctly really helps with your survivability. You don’t want to use it too often for holy power, because you’ll slowly fall behind on your Shield of the Righteous uptime. Instead you want to use Word of Glory from free procs like Divine Purpose or Shining Light as often as possible. You also don’t want to use Word of Glory at too high of health. Typically you want to use it once you’ve dropped below 50-55% health. You also don’t want to hold Shining Light procs for too long as you’ll “waste” the free Word of Glory from them. 

In raid it’s pretty simple when to use your cooldowns. Big tank nuke incoming? Use a cooldown. Planning your cooldowns beforehand is an important part of raid tanking. Once you are able to script out your movement and cooldown usage, your job as a tank is pretty much done. You just deal as much damage as you can while surviving and making sure to not deviate from your script as much as possible

Mythic plus is a bit more nuanced. You want to have cooldowns running as often as possible to help lessen the amount of incoming damage in each pull, while still saving cooldowns for big tank hits. The easiest way to do this is to rotate between your cooldowns. Use Ardent Defender on pull or while gathering to mitigate a lot of the upfront damage, following it up with Eye of Tyr, then Guardian of Ancient Kings after that if the pack is still alive.

Sometimes you need to save a cooldown for when a big tank nuke is incoming, or for a dangerous pull that’s coming up. Using your other pseudo-defensives in these situations can really help you survive. These pseudo-defensives are things like Lay on Hands, the free Guardian of Ancient Kings proc from Gift of the Golden Val’kyr, or bubble+taunt or Blessing of Protection+taunt for physical damage spells on single target.