Welcome to Skill Capped’s Guide on the Best PvP Talents & Hero Talents for Holy Paladins in The War Within 11.0

All sections for Holy Paladin PvP have been divided into corresponding sections for the most optimal hero talents, class talents, spec talents, race, stats, gear, enchants, gems, and macros. This will help you have a good understanding of Holy Paladins in PvP for The War Within, the strengths and weaknesses associated with this specialization, and help you conquer the arena. This section will guide you on the best Holy Paladin PvP Talents in The War Within.

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Hero Talents: Lightsmith
Hero Talents: Herald of the Sun
Class Talents
Spec Talents
PvP Talents

The War Within expands our arsenal of talent options, which include our new talent hero talent trees, Herald of the Sun and Lightsmith. Lightsmith as risen in popularity entering the new patch, and is actually the more preferred hero build in its current state. Now, let’s further explain how to best allocate your hero talents.

Hero Talents: Lightsmith

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First off we have Lightsmith, which is our preferred loadout and has experienced a lot more representation in the current meta. This hero build revolves around Holy Armaments, to which you can alternate between Holy Bulwark and Sacred Weapon on yourself or allies. You can also apply a Sacred Weapon on an ally every time you use Avenging Wrath thanks to Blessing of the Forge, making it more reasonable to play Avenging Crusader, 1 minute wings instead of 2, for more Sacred Weapon uptime.

Another reason we advise Avenging Crusader is because you are dealing more damage from our Holy Armaments. Now, let’s explore the talents that require a bit more understanding to make use of them in arena.

Solidarity makes it more likely to apply our Holy Armament on our ally, granting us the same effects. If you proc a Holy Armament from Divine Inspiration on yourself however, this will affect a nearby ally as well.
Tempered in Battle is your strongest talent located in this Hero tree, specifically for the health transfer once you or an ally falls below 40% HP. This only applies to targets affected by Sacred Weapon, meaning you want to place this on the opponent’s primary kill target. You can also distribute some over-healing as long as the person you’re over-healing is affected by Holy Bulwark, but isn’t as potent as the Spirit Link effect.

Hero Talents: Herald of the Sun

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Starting off with our Herald of the Sun hero talents, let’s look at the core talents chosen that make up this build.

Dawnlight is applied after using Barrier of Faith or Holy Prism, granting a stackable periodic damage or healing effect directly on targets, and radiates 8% of its direct damage and healing to nearby enemies or allies, respectively.
Blessing of An’she has a chance to proc a massive healing buff on our next Holy Shock from periodic healing effects, mainly with Eternal Flame and Dawnlight.
Sun’s Avatar enhances the effectiveness of Dawnlight by applying it to multiple targets after using Avenging Wrath. Additionally, you become linked to any active Dawnlights, dealing extra damage to enemies and healing to allies passing through them.

Alternatively, you can select Gleaming Rays instead of Morning Star if you want more direct healing out of your spenders if Dawnlight is active. This can provide a slight upper hand against setup based comps that deal a lot of burst damage, helping you recover easier once out of Crowd Control and during their burst sequence.

Paladin Class Talents

In the Paladin Class talent tree, most of your talent choices will be mandatory when advancing onto each tier. Some of most noteworthy mandatory talents are:

Fist of Justice as a hefty cooldown reduction on our Hammer of Justice.
Sacrifice of the Just, which is now a 60 second cooldown reduction on our Blessing of Sacrifice instead of 15 seconds.
Divine Toll and Quickened Invocation, synergizing extremely well with our Rising Sunlight talent for more healing coming from our Holy Shock, while also having more ways to proc Blessing of An’she due to Sun Sear.

First is the selection between Repentance and Blinding Light.

Repentance is most typically used, as this allows for you to land follow up control off of a Hammer of Justice, Fear, or even a Cyclone if properly timed, and is a longer duration than Blinding Light. We highly recommend pairing this ability with Light’s Countenance to turn this into a spammable Crowd Control spell.
Blinding Light is available to have an instant cast AoE Crowd control, but most compositions for Holy Paladin have specializations that use the Fear Diminishing Returns. This requires Holy Paladins to have more coordination to gain value out of this spell.

There will then be a few points which can be moved around depending on the composition that you are facing.

For your flexible class talents, in the first and second tiers you can remove either A Just Reward or Improved Blessing of Protection, depending on your Hero tree, for any of our optional talents. This may vary in case you want more throughput or utility.

Turn Evil if Unholy Death Knight‘s Summon Gargoyle or Demo Locks’ Demonic Tyrant ever become their primary source of damage.
Afterimage to make our AoE throughput a bit higher.
Righteous Protection is super valuable against Unholy Death Knights, Assassination Rogues, and Shadow Priests, as it prevents the opposing team from applying poisons and diseases on your ally affected by Blessing of Sacrifice.
Light’s Countenance can be quite promising if Repentance is selected, as you can spam cast this ability off Crowd Control chains to potentially secure a win.

Holy Spec Talents

Most of the talents in the Holy tree are mandatory for optimal performance. Here are the core talents you’ll want to know about before directly heading into the arena.

Rising Sunlight reacting identical from Dragonflight, although this now delivers additional Holy Shocks after using both Avenging Wrath and Divine Toll instead of using Daybreak. This makes Divine Toll way stronger of a defensive healing cooldown, granting you more flexibility on how you respond to massive damage.
Barrier of Faith becomes our main source of spreading out our new Dawnlight ability, and allows us to activate Divine Favor for more efficient Holy Light casts.
Light of the Martyr has completely changed from its original counterpart, as it is now a passive that gives us a 20% healing increase to our Holy Shock while above 80% health. Unfortunately, the downside of this is you receive a stacking healing absorb, similar to a Death Knight’s Necrotic Strike, while also losing the healing effect of Beacon of Light on yourself.
Blessing of Summer has experienced a massive change to how this spell works. If you want to deal more damage, you’ll want to always apply this on yourself, as a percentage of your healing is converted into damage while this spell is active, affecting nearby enemies. You can also use this to dish out more overall healing, as you’ll want to throw this on your teammate that deals the most damage. This is because a percentage of damage dealt will be converted as a heal onto nearby allies.

As for our flexible talents, we can select either Hand of Divinity or Divine Favor in its choice node.

Hand of Divinity provides us with more burst healing as opposed to Divine Favor, but requires us to cast it in order to reap its benefits and is a longer cooldown. With Holy Light receiving solid buffs to its healing and an increase to its mana cost, we become way more mana conservative.
Divine Favor is our consistent pick here, as we can make use of it after activating Barrier of Faith for stronger Holy Light or Flash of Light casts.

As for our Lightsmith build, we recommend exchanging Avenging Wrath for Avenging Crusader. This reacts similar to a fist-weaving playstyle, as you will be attacking with your Judgment and Crusader Strike more frequently to heal your allies.

Additionally, we suggest removing Tyr’s Deliverance and Boundless Salvation for Truth Prevails and Crusader’s Might. These talents will make your healing feel more fluid coming out of Avenging Crusader.

Holy Paladin PvP Talents

For Holy Paladin PvP Talents, listed below will typically be your default loadout in a majority of games, and will later describe any flexible talents based on your composition or bracket played.

Searing Glare, as this will make any incoming spells immune from enemy targets. Using this spell on players with offensive cooldowns can help reduce current pressure on your team, or against control initiator classes to delay any incoming control. This can give you enough time to top your teammate or apply a preemptive cooldown.
Blessed Hands doubles all of your Blessing spells with the exception of Blessing of Sacrifice. This can be great for multiple Blessing of Freedoms to help keep your team offensively or multiple Blessing of Protections against physical damage teams.
Divine Vision, which excels at times where having more Aura Mastery uptime is potent. This mainly concerns matchups where having more silence and interrupt immunities on casted spells can completely change the direction of a matchup into your favor.

For your last PvP talent slot, this slot will be swapped from/to Divine Vision depending on your matchup and current composition played.

Wrench Evil, converting Turn Evil into an instant cast spell, and is best suited into Demonology Warlocks to peel their pets, especially Demonic Tyrant.
Denounce adds quite a bit of damage over the duration of the game. Additionally, it can be used defensively as it prevents the target from landing crits from their abilities for 8 seconds.