Retribution Paladin Frequently Asked Questions — The War Within (11.0.5)

Although the Crusading Strikes Auto-Attack build is the much more popular of the two, the difference between them is very small, only a few percent at most. If you enjoy one playstyle considerably more than the other, then you will not be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage by choosing to play with it. Keep in mind that in order to optimally play with Crusading Strikes, you will want to track your auto-attacks in order to be able to predict your Holy Power generation.

Although there are very minor Haste percentages at which you can theoretically gain an extra GCD inside one of your cooldown windows, none of them are worth aiming for specifically. Rush of Light's inconsistent uptime means that you could gain that GCD frequently without that Haste, which means that any breakpoint that could exist instead becomes a much wider range. The best method for determining which gear to use will always be using simulations since they are able to do the work for you over thousands of iterations in order to determine the best average outcome. If you are unfamiliar with simulating your character, you can refer to our Raidbots guide below:

The difference between races is very small, and you should generally feel free to play whatever race you enjoy the most. That said, if you are purely only interested in throughput increases, currently, Tauren is the best race for Horde, and Human is the best race for Alliance, with Dwarf close behind.