Pelinal
Best Holy Paladin Double Legendaries for Sepulcher of the First Ones
This legendary/covenant combination will feel a familiar combination. It's ultimately what Paladin used in a lot of progression raiding for Sanctum of Domination. With Paladin's being nerfed, and nearly universally other healer's being buffed, Paladin needs to find it's niche. This combination is what allows you to do it. The damage from
Ashen Hallow (albeit nerfed), power of it as a raid cooldown and exceptional tank healing due to
Maraad's Dying Breath allow you to contribute meaningfully in any raid. Given the substantial nerf's to Paladin, the likelihood of running two is less probable, which is where this setup ultimately shines. You have flexibility with powerful raid cooldowns, damage and powerful tank healing.
This legendary is potentially powerful. Due primarily to the Paladin set bonus
Dawn Will Come. This combination will allow you to have near, or even 100%
Avenging Wrath uptime. In fight's with consistent damage, this setup may outpace the aforementioned setup for HPS. But the reality is, paladin's aren't brought for HPS. Mistweavers, and Resto druid's fill that niche. So ultimately by playing this setup you are sacrificing damage, and utility for throughput. That may not always be the case.
Shock Barrier and
Shadowbreaker, Dawn of the Sun are fairly interchangeable here. The key thing is both are throughput based legendaries.
Best Holy Paladin Double Legendaries for Mythic+
The Mythic+ possibilities are a bit more diverse. As it depends greatly on what level of keys you are doing, and Kyrian, Venthyr and Necrolord all have some success in Mythic+. But this combination is sure to be a staple. It allows you to continue to contribute damage, even while nerfed. As well has great synergy due to the higher uptime on
Ashen Hallow.
Lincoln
Best Protection Paladin Double Legendaries for Sepulcher of the First Ones
This is a very straightforward combination. You'll just take two net positive legendary items and combine for more damage. Protection Paladins outputs a lot of damage and supplementing that with longer
Ashen Hallow casts will add more damage. It won't necessarily change the playstyle outside of some strategic cancels of
Ashen Hallow to better line it up with
Avenging Wrath for burn phases.
The question with this combination is -- what is the final tuning of the raid. Will we have the Holy Power to dedicate to
or we will need
Divine Purpose for more self-healing? Or will we need to resort to
The Magistrate's Judgment for any reason? Based on testing, the damage pattern is such that you can push more damage without getting punished. One key thing is that sims for 9.2 are still in development so
Vanguard's Momentum could surpass
The Mad Paragon if the conditions are right. And we haven't seen the last 3 bosses on any difficulty so that could also impact what legendary combinations are utilized.
This is a potential dark horse combination. Night Fae gains a lot from double legendary when they can combine their personal damage output legendary with the potential to buff another player. There are some variables at play that we just don't know about right now. It will depend on:
- Movement on the last 3 bosses
- Viability of specs like Fire Mage
So far in testing, the movement on the first eight bosses is limited enough that
Ashen Hallow should outperform Night Fae. However, if the last three bosses have any movement where you don't have optimal
Ashen Hallow casts then Night Fae could be better. You also get the added bonus of
Soulshape, which will offset a major Paladin weakness depending on the scenario. The downside of this combination is that it requires a DPS spec with a strong offensive burst cooldown because that's the best way to use
Blessing of Summer. It's never self-casted and if there isn't a DPS spec that has a strong offensive burst cooldown in the raid, Night Fae won't be something you opt into.
Best Protection Paladin Double Legendaries for Mythic+
In 9.1.5, you can only choose one of these two legendaries and they each offer distinct advantages.
Divine Resonance offers defensive steadiness while
Bulwark of Righteous Fury offers just more raw damage. In 9.2, we'll just wear them both! Both legendary items synergize really well very naturally as they provide a positive feedback loop on your rotation. In order to min/max your damage, you'll want to pool Holy Power and play around the buff stacks from the free
Avenger's Shield casts. This adds a new gameplay wrinkle where you want to plan out your resource economy a bit more.
One thing that remains to be seen is if we can actually flex into the extra damage or will we need more tankyness from another legendary to push higher keys. The real wildcard is the tier bonus and how that's tuned. If it's tuned high enough, then
The Magistrate's Judgment could be a contender for the second legendary since it will be hard to beat extra Holy Power value. And if we need just more tankyness, that could mean using
The Ardent Protector's Sanctum or
Of Dusk and Dawn as more defensive options.
Bolas
Double Legendary Synergies
There's a couple of interactions I think are worth talking about generally before getting into specific combinations. Firstly, the new tier set - neither of the bonuses have much of a special interaction with any of our Legendaries, so it doesn't end up having any impact on the best combination to use.
Secondly, the interaction between
Divine Resonance and
The Magistrate's Judgment. A lot of people seem to expect
The Magistrate's Judgment to be especially good in combination with
Divine Resonance, since logically more
Judgment casts would make
The Magistrate's Judgment better. However, this expectation misses the point of why
The Magistrate's Judgment was useful to begin with.
Back in Castle Nathria in 9.0, it was a lot more difficult to get 3
Templar's Verdict casts inside the
Final Reckoning or
Execution Sentence window for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there was no
Divine Resonance as an alternative option to guarantee an extra free Holy Power partway through your cooldown window, and secondly the maximum rank of
Ringing Clarity was a lot lower. Instead of an expected 3.4
Judgments per
Divine Toll, you'd get an average of 2.92 at maximum conduit rank. You were also a lot more likely to get 0
Ringing Clarity procs than now, about 5% of the time instead of less than 1% currently. As a result, the extra Holy Power that
The Magistrate's Judgment effectively provided helped make that third
Templar's Verdict cast happen more consistently, and before the
Final Reckoning debuff ran out more consistently too.
With current gear and systems though, that extra Holy Power doesn't actually provide much benefit. It's uncertain whether
Execution Sentence will even be used due to
Zeal's synergy with Ret's tier set bonuses. But even if
Execution Sentence is used,
Divine Resonance and extra
Ringing Clarity ranks make the third
Templar's Verdict cast trivial to fit inside the window, and it's very unlikely for
The Magistrate's Judgment to let you fit a 4th cast just due to the number of maximum GCDs you can reasonably get inside
Execution Sentence. Even when it does, the additional cast won't be buffed by
Judgment or by
Final Reckoning due to being fit into the last GCD of
Execution Sentence, and
Final Verdict would have provided close to the same overall damage benefit by simply applying an extra 15% to three
Judgment-and-
Final Reckoning-buffed
Templar's Verdicts at 100% consistency.
Outside of applications for the
Execution Sentence window,
The Magistrate's Judgment just doesn't provide a huge benefit either. Extra
Templar's Verdict casts are just less valuable than making
Templar's Verdict (or
Divine Storm) do more damage due to the GCD cost of needing to actually press the button more. While it is definitely possible that
The Magistrate's Judgment ends up actually being better than anticipated, the recommendations I'm making here are based on the expectation that it won't be significantly better than it used to be.
Best Retribution Paladin Double Legendaries for Sepulcher of the First Ones
Kyrian does very well in two situations - pure single target damage where it synergizes well with one minute cooldowns like
Execution Sentence and
Final Reckoning, and 4+ target AoE where
Divine Toll itself just does a lot more AoE damage than other covenant options.
Single target damage tends to be the most important thing in most raids, and
Final Verdict provides the largest single target increase for a non-covenant Legendary. It also comes with a nice benefit of letting you cast
Templar's Verdict from a further distance, which is a nice quality of life boost for a spec that can sometimes struggle with mobility. With the
Templar's Vindication and
Virtuous Command conduits scaling further,
Templar's Verdict will probably be damage neutral to use on two targets again, so it'll also be less of a downside to run
Final Verdict on fights that are mostly single target but have an occasional extra add like
Dausegne.
For a fight that is a mixture of single target and AoE,
Vanguard's Momentum will probably be a good choice. It's especially good if enemies are dying at different times throughout the fight since you can snipe
Hammer of Wrath on low health enemies.
The Magistrate's Judgment is another reasonable Legendary that fills a similar niche; it's decent enough at any target count while not being particularly strong at any specific number. A boss like
Artificer Xy'mox is where a combination like this will probably be good, where there are periods where you're just fighting the boss and periods where there are waves of add spawns.
Tempest of the Lightbringer is best when you're casting
Divine Storm pretty much the entire fight. An encounter like Prototype Pantheon where there are usually at least two targets to hit is the kind of situation where this Legendary will be useful, but it's definitely a more niche option for Raid than the other ones above. The fact that it doesn't provide any single target increase is a huge drawback in an environment where single target damage is usually very important.
Necrolord's niche is two target cleave. It's the sweet spot for the free
Divine Storm and the
Templar's Verdict that procs it to both be strong enough to be worth the covenant choice. It does almost as good single target damage as Kyrian, but does substantially less on 3+ targets.
The choice for second legendary follows pretty much the same thought process as Kyrian, with the assumption that the fight will mostly be single target or two targets.
Final Verdict will be better if the fight is mostly one target with an occasional second target, and
Tempest of the Lightbringer will be better if the fight is almost exclusively two targets.
Night Fae provides a fairly strong external damage buff. Although it hasn't been utilized much up to this point - probably because the damage is attributed to the Paladin on logs rather than the target - the buff itself can be powerful, providing a ~48% damage increase for 10s with an extra ~12% buff the 10s before and after. Unfortunately the best spec to buff with it, Venthyr Boomkin, also received a nerf this patch, so it's a bit less likely to be worthwhile using. However, if a strong enough burst spec does pop up again, this could be a covenant worth considering.
Your choice for second Legendary here also follows the same logic as Kyrian .
Final Verdict for single target,
Vanguard's Momentum for variable target counts, and
Tempest of the Lightbringer for AoE.
Best Retribution Paladin Double Legendaries for Mythic+
Kyrian is by far the best covenant for Mythic+. Its strengths of doing both good single target and the best AoE suit dungeons the best of any covenant.
Tempest of the Lightbringer will usually be the best other Legendary to use, since the increase it provides on AoE is substantial. It does still have the drawback of not providing any single target damage increase, so it could be reasonable to use a more well-rounded Legendary like
Vanguard's Momentum or
The Magistrate's Judgment on Tyrannical weeks instead.