Paladin Team
From Sedes Draconis
Contents |
Introduction
My historical fondness for monocultures
I have an odd fondness for monocultures in World of Warcraft. I was introduced to the game by a friend who played in a hardcore roleplay guild of all orcs (Shadowclan). That sounded interesting, but I loved trolls too much, from the earlier games. So I joined, helped develop, and eventually took over and equivalent troll guild (Tooska Tribe). Single race roleplay guilds give you the chance to explore and focus on the unique attributes of the race.
I also have a fondness for gnomes, and together with some other people decided an all gnome team/guild would be hilarious fun. All gnomes does not work as well as all trolls, or even all orcs, most importantly because gnomes have no healers.
In putting together the first team for the all gnome guild, I thought, "hey, if we don't have any healers, why not go all out and not have any tanks either? All casters, all the time!". Thus was born the shadowy ruling council (codename: Little Brother) of W.I.D.G.E.T. (World Institute of Daring Gnomish Exploration and Tinkering), containing three mages and two warlocks. All warrior and all rogue teams followed, but never really got off the ground.
The problem with these single (or almost single) class parties was that gnomes have no hybrid classes, and thus any single class party is desperately lacking in one or more type of ability. An all druid team was succesfully put together by some of the people associated with WIDGET, and I believe it did quite well, but I was not in direct contact with that group.
My interest in paladins
I've been mainly a Horde player ever since I started, and didn't have any real contact with paladins for a long time. I mainly played gnomes on Alliance side, and still had no contact with paladins. One day, at the used bookstore, I was looking at C.J. Cherryh's novel titled Paladin, with cover art of a close up of a women's face with black eyeliner and lipstick. "Goth paladin!" I decided to make a goth paladin. Her name is Stana, and she's a half-Dark Iron, misanthropic dwarf retribution paladin, who wears primarily dark blues and purples and blacks. She's also my highest level alliance character, one of my favorite characters to solo with, and probably the best developed unique personality of any of my Warcraft characters.
I put this new interest in paladins together with the idea of 5 man teams of a single class, preferably a hybrid class, and said, "hey, how about 5 paladins". As I learned more about paladins, I was struck by just how well the idea should work.
Following is my write up of the benefits of a five paladin team, and some strategies for maximizing those benefits. However, I still have relatively little experience with playing paladins in groups, I have only started to experiment with multiple paladins, and I have effectively no experience with paladins in endgame (either as my own characters or party members). So this advice may miss important pieces in the translation from theory to practice. I hope to improve it as I experiment.
Client Version
This essay was originally written in September 2007, for World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, version 2.1.3. It was last updated in July 2008, for BC 2.4.2.
The Benefits of Multiple Paladins
Roles
Paladins can serve a number of roles. A Protection Paladin is a formidable tank that just won't die. Many consider them to be the single best class at holding agro against many targets at once. A Holy Paladin has been called "a priest in plate" and is an excellent healer, as well as having an arsenal of burst spell damage. And finally Retribution Paladins specialize in melee dps. A team of 5 paladins contains all three of the basic roles. In addition, paladins have abilities to both raise and lower the threat caused by individuals in the party, so the tank can be generating extra threat, and the healer can be generating reduced threat.
Gaps in Roles
DPS
Paladins are not usually among the first classes mentioned when it comes to DPS. In many cases, paladins outlast their opponents by being unkillable rather than taking them down fast. In some cases, especially some instance fights, this is not a viable strategy, as the fight will get harder the longer it goes on.
However, I believe that a team of paladins in which a significant number of them are focused on damage has a good chance of doing as much as they need to, especially given the ways in which they are able to improve each others' damage. But this remains to be tested.
Pulling/Ranged Damage
Paladins are distinctly lacking in ranged attacks. They cannot train in any kind of ranged weapons, and have very few ranged spells. Every one of their ranged spells has a cooldown plus some other limitation, it can only be used on some targets, or only late in a fight, or only by some talent trees. This is problematic in situations which require delicate pulls to separate mobs from each other.
Avenger's Shield and Holy Shock are both reasonable candidates for some pulls, and a 5 paladin team will have both of these available. Avenger's shield has uncontrolled bounces, and can be used to pull a group from range, but not to seperate a pull from other mobs. Holy shock is an instant cast ranged damage spell, and so highly suitable for delicate pulls (instant cast can be more important for pull mobs that walk in an out of social range), but Holy Shock is deep in the Holy tree, so anyone who can cast it shouldn't have aggro. It can be used in situations in which the tank can easily beat the initial threat to all mobs of the pull. A third alternative is for one of the paladins (probably the tank) to take Engineering as a profession, which provides a number of trinkets with ranged casts.
Crowd Control
Paladins have almost no crowd control. They have Turn Evil, which is a long duration fear usable only against undead and demons (before level 52, it is Turn Undead, only usable against undead). And they have a variety of very short term stuns. But In most fights, a 5 paladin team will have almost no ability to keep some mobs out of the fight while dealing with others.
While this requires a change of tactic from teams with significant crowd control, I do not think it is necessarily a big problem, for two reasons which have already been mentioned: a) paladins have a number of aggro control abilities, and b) Protection Paladins are extremely good at holding threat from multiple mobs. I have been told that the presence of just a well-geared Protection Paladin will often change the strategy away from crowd control, the tank can simply hold aggro from nearly everything, and survive.
Dispels
It took me a while to realize this gap in team roles for a paladin team. There are more or less five kinds of player dispels: Poisons, Diseases, Magic, and Curses on friendly players, and Magic on hostile creatures.
Paladins have no ability to dispel magic buffs on enemies, making them one of only two classes with absolutely no way to do this (neither can druids; warriors can, but only protection warriors). This is mostly a PvP utility, but occasionally useful in PvE.
More important for PvE is the ability to remove debuffs from friends. Paladins have a very versatile dispel ability which removes a poison, a disease, and a magic all at once at low mana cost, Cleanse. But there are two weaknesses: first, it cannot remove curses. This can become a problem in some dungeon encounters. Paladins do have one option for removing curses, which is to bubble. Other than that, they will just have to endure curses, luckily paladins are good at enduring.
The second weakness with Cleanse is its versatility. It is very rare in PvE encounters for mobs to be applying poisons, diseases, and magic, which means that in the average cast of Cleanse, one-third to two-thirds of the utilities is going to waste. In addition, many PvE encounters will be re-applying, or stacking multiple applications of a single type of debuff. This is why many dispel abilities remove multiple applications at once (Dispel Magic, Poison Cleansing Totem, etc.). A paladin will have to cast Cleanse once for each application.
Paladin Choices
One thing that stands out about paladins is the number of choices they have. Not only can they choose to specialize in a number of roles; they also have a number of short term, but exclusive choices.
They have four types abilities in which they must make an exclusive choice between several possibilities: Auras, Blessings, Seals, and Judgement debuffs. In each of these four cases, three facts hold true: a) a single paladin cannot use more than one of these at once, b) multiple paladins cannot use the same choice to create a stacked effect (on the same target, where applicable), and c) multiple paladins can use different choices (on the same target) and gain the benefit of all of them.
Thus, the more paladins you have around, the more of these choices you can be benefitting from at the same time. However, to obtain the full benefit, players must decide between them which choice each paladin will be making, in each of these areas.
Auras
Auras are powerful support buffs that a Paladin can cast for free and leave up indefinitely. Every character in the paladin's party who is within 30 yards (40, with talents) gains the benefit of the Aura. Paladins have Auras that create a variety of benefits that can mitigate damage, ease spell casting, and increase damage in their party, but, of course, each paladin can only use one at a time. Also, though switching Auras costs no mana, it does cost both attention and time (switching triggers the global cooldown).
As it happens, there are 4 paladin Auras which are useful most or all of the time (Devotion, Retribution, Concentration, and Sanctity), plus 4 more that are situationally useful (usually only one of the second group is useful at a time). In other words, about 5 Auras are useful at any given time. An all paladin team is in a position to have every useful Aura up in nearly any situation, and without a significant cost to time or attention, since 4 of those can be left on all the time.
In addition, all 4 of those Auras can be improved with talent points (and one is only available through talent points). Therefore, a well designed paladin team could have 4 improved Auras up all the time, with each of four paladins specializing in one of the four Auras that are always useful.
Sanctity Aura
I said four Auras were useful all the time. That includes Sanctity Aura, an Aura not normally considered widely useful. Sanctity Aura requires talent points in the Retribution tree, and by default increases holy damage by 10%. However, there are only two classes which do any holy damage to speak of: priests and paladins; and priests don't really do very much. In short, Sanctity Aura is useful almost exclusively to paladins. Paladins, on the other hand, make great use of holy damage. In a party of 5 paladins, unlike almost any other party, Sanctity Aura is indeed extremely useful.
Total Aura Effect
Improved Devotion Aura: a significant increase to everyone's armor, 40% more than the unimproved Aura. At level 70, this is a bonus of about 1200 armor.
Improved Retribution Aura: damage reflection every time anyone is hit in melee, 50% more damage than the unimproved Aura. This damage is holy damage so a) there is no resistance, b) the tank will be using righteous fury and generating extra threat from all holy damage, and c) it should benefit from the 10% increase to holy damage from Sanctity Aura. This is will a powerful ability for the tank to maintain aggro.
Improved Concentration Aura: 50% of all damaging attacks will be ignored for the purposes of spell interruption (+15% over the unimproved), and all Silence and Interrupt effects are reduced in duration by 30%. A very important Aura for paladins for two reasons a) paladins are melee casters, and so prone to taking damage while casting, and b) single school casters, so most interrupt effects will be effectively silence effects. If you can assume that this Aura will be always up, than just 9 points in holy will give any paladin the ability to heal while being hit with no interruptions, since having 4/5 points in spiritual focus will give the paladin an additional 56% ignore chance (for a total of 106% ignore chance).
Improved Sanctity Aura: 10% bonus to all holy damage, as well as 2% bonus to all damage. An all paladin team with use a lot of holy damage in both dps and threat generation, and will benefit greatly from this Aura. This well help mitigate any problems in maintaining sufficient dps.
Plus one of the following: Shadow Resistance, Fire Resistance, Frost Resistance, or a 20% mount speed increase, as the situation warrants.
That's an impressive chunk of buffs there!
Blessings
Blessings are a second category of paladin buffs. Each Blessing is cast on a specific friendly target (or the paladin themself). Each friendly target can only have one Blessing per paladin, and can have the effect of a specific Blessing from only one paladin at a time. Therefore, with one paladin in the party, each character can have one Blessing; with two paladins in the party, each character can have two Blessings, and so on. There are 6 standard Blessings (as opposed to the three situational Blessings, each with very short durations), so a 5 paladin party has not yet reached the limit of usefulness, when it comes to stacking Blessings.
Furthermore, two of those Blessings can only be obtained through talent points, and two others can be improved through talent points. Therefore, like Auras, a well designed paladin team can have four characters each specializing in one Blessing, with one character left over to apply adaptive and situational Blessings.
Blessings are comparatively short term buffs, and a Paladin should keep constant awareness of the remaining duration of their Blessings on all party members. Any buff nearing expiration should be re-cast before starting a new fight whenever possible, to prevent Blessings from expiring during combat.
Greater Blessings
Somewhere after level 50, each of the classes that have important, long term buffs for party members receive improved versions of those buff spells which can buff multiple targets at once and last twice as long (in the case of paladins, now three times as long, though still half the duration of other classes' equivalents), but require a reagent which is consumed every time the buff is cast. This is designed to reduce the amount of time a player has to spend buffing parties, and especially whole raid groups. The three classes other than paladins (priests, mage, and druids) have only one choice of buff which is of benefit to many or all classes. Their multi-target buffs buff an entire party at a time, requiring one cast for a 5 man, or 2-8 casts for a raid group.
Paladin Blessings are different, since they have more varied choices. In most parties, the paladin would never choose to give everyone the same Blessing. Some classes benefit from Blessing of Wisdom most, other from Blessing of Might, the tank could use Light or Sanctuary, and so on. Therefore the paladin version of these improved buffs buff everyone of the same class in the entire raid, per use of a reagent. In a normal party, paladins must liberally squander their reagents to get the extended duration of these greater Blessings, since each reagent use will only affect one class, which would often require 4 or 5 reagents per party. However, in an all paladin party, greater Blessings can be used to bless everyone at once, and so the extended duration can be obtained in party as well as raid situations.
Blessing of Light
Blessing of Light is a buff which increases the effect of healing on a target. This can be a powerful buff on the main tank, who needs almost constant healing in many situations. However, there is a catch: Blessing of Light only increases the effect of two healing spells, Holy Light and Flash of Light. These are the two primary paladin healing spells, but they cannot, of course, be used by any other class. Therefore in a normal party situation, this Blessing will only increase the healing done by one person. In a party of five paladins, this will increase the effect of almost every healing spell cast on the target.
Total Blessing Effect
Improved Blessing of Might: A significant bonus to attack power (20% higher bonus than unimproved). At level 70, this is a bonus of 264 attack power. This bonus will be a significant fraction of the total attack power of even a well geared Retribution Paladin (on the order of, say, a 10-20% increase).
Improved Blessing of Wisdom: A large amount of mana regeneration that continues during casting (20% more than unimproved). This noticeably reduces downtime, and increases a paladins ability to keep casting through and extended fight. At level 70, this will be slightly over 48 mana every 5 seconds. Every paladin will benefit from this, being able to cast more tanking, healing, or dps spells.
Blessing of Kings: a 10% increase to all stats (requires at least 11 points in Protection). This is a useful Blessing for anyone, since it will significantly increase whatever stat they are already focused on. It will be perhaps most useful to hybrid classes which benefit from all stats. Such as paladins. This will increase the damage, health, and mana of all five paladins.
Plus two of the following on each paladin (when no situational Blessings are in play):
Blessing of Salvation: Reduces threat generation by 30%. This is a powerful way to control aggro, especially in combination with Righteous Fury. Anyone who is not supposed to have aggro will benefit from this, especially the main healer.
Blessing of Light: Increases the amount of healing the target receives from Holy Light and Flash of Light. Using maximum rank Blessing and heals, this is about a 20% increase to Holy Light and a 50% increase to Flash of Light. This will apply to the healing cast by anyone, in a five paladin team (with the exception of Holy Shock heals, if any). This will massively increase the ability of the healer(s) to keep people alive. Anyone taking sustained damage will benefit greatly from this, such as the main tank.
Blessing of Sanctuary: Reduces damage taken from all sources, and reflects holy damage every time a an attack is blocked with a shield. At maximum rank, this reduces damage by up to 80 from every attack, and reflects 46 holy damage per block (plus bonuses from Sanctity Aura). This is extremely useful to a tank, since it provides both damage mitigation and aggro maintenance. It is especially useful for paladin tanks since they use shields (unlike druid tanks) and generate extra threat from holy damage (unlike any other tank).
Seals
Paladins have two more choices in the form of Seals. Paladins can have the effect of two Seals in play at once: one in the form of a buff on themselves, and one in the form of a debuff on their target by using Judgement to apply the Seal to the target. Theoretically, actually, a paladin can have Judgement debuffs on multiple targets, but this are very short term debuffs (20 seconds) that are refreshed by melee strikes, so in most situations, a paladin will have only one judgement debuff in play.
Like Auras and Blessings, the number of Judgement debuffs is equal to the number of paladins who can apply them, since each paladin can only have one active, and multiple paladins cannot stack the same debuff on a single target (with the exception of Seal of Vengeance, which works on a different kind of mechanic from other Seal-generated debuffs, see below). There are four of these Judgement debuffs, 3 of which are useful in nearly any circumstance. In this case, five paladins are superfluous, since no more than 4 of them will be able to usefully apply Judgement debuffs. On the other hand, this allows one paladin to not worry about applying and maintaining a Judgement, such as the main healer, who may find it too difficult to maintain while in full heal mode.
Total Judgement Effect
Judgement of the Crusader: Increases holy damage taken by the the target. Again of limited use to other classes, but the heavy reliance of paladins on holy damage means the target will take a significantly increased amount of damage. In addition, this Judgement can be improved with a talent from the Retribution tree, allowing one paladin to specialize in it (this paladin would presumably be the main assist in a party of five paladins). With improvement from talents, this talent increases the critical strike rate of all attacks. All dps paladins make heavy use of crits, melee crits from Retribution Paladins, and spell crits from Holy Shock specialists (I believe Improved Seal of the Crusader effects spell crit as well as melee crit, but I am not currently sure.) In addition, there are several items which improve the effect of this Judgement, so the paladin has the possibility of specializing their gear as well as their talents to deliver a powerful Judgement of the Crusader.
Judgement of Light: Any melee attack made against the target has a chance to heal the attacker. A useful extra bit of continuous healing. This debuff has a fairly high proc rate, and at level 70, each proc will heal for 95 damage.
Judgement of Wisdom: Any melee attack made against the target has a chance to restore mana to the attacker. Another source of mana regeneration, which is important for paladins. This also has a high proc rate. At level 70, each proc will restore 74 mana.
Judgement of Justice: This will prevent the target from fleeing. Very useful when it applies, since paladins are short on crowd control, slows, and ranged damage to stop runners (on the other hand, the massed effect of three or four hammers of wrath will stop many runners quite handily). If this Judgement is used well, the party should have almost no runners. After level 48, this judgement has the additional effect of capping moving speed at normal run rate, so no ability will allow the target to increase their speed above that, which adds pvp functionality.
Crusader Strike
Crusader Strike is a powerful instant attack available from the end of the Retribution tree. I think it is a safe assumption that at least one paladin in a five paladin team will have access to it. Crusader Strike it is notable at this point because it refreshes "all Judgements on the target", even those cast by other paladins. This would allow a single paladin to refresh all four Judgements on a target. This special ability of the Crusader Strike is, obviously, more valuable the more paladins are in the group, up to a maximum usefulness with four paladins.
With two deep Retribution Paladins, all four Judgements could be applied to two targets, and theoretically maintained indefinitely, without any paladin having to switch between the two targets to refresh their Judgements. The cooldown for Crusader Strike used to be half the duration of a refreshed seal, which meant a single failure to land a Crusader Strike will lose any Judgements it was maintaining. The cooldown was reduced to 6 seconds, which means a Retribution paladin will 2 or 3 chances to refresh a seal before it expires, which should be plenty.
Seal of Vengeance
Seal of Vengeance is an Alliance-only spell trainable at level 64. When the Seal is active on a paladin each melee hit has a chance to apply a damage over time debuff to the target. This debuff stacks up to 5 times (doing 5 times the damage per tick) and the full stack is refreshed with every proc. Judgement of Vengeance does instant holy damage that increases with each application of the debuff on the target (but does not use up those applications). Two or more paladins with this seal up will add to a single stack, and quickly bring the debuff to full effect, and easily maintaining it, even while taking turns Judging for full effect.
The Horde equivalent spell is Seal of Blood. It provides no extra benefit when used in a group with multiple paladins.
Miscellaneous Benefits
Spiritual Attunement
Starting a level 18, Paladins gain a passive ability called "Spiritual Attunement" which restores mana to the paladin whenever they are healed by someone other than themself. This works for any kind of heal, instant or heal over time, as long as it originates from a player other than the paladin being healed. Even bandaging works, as long as it is another character doing the bandaging. Healing from potions and Seal of Light always affect the character originating the action, and therefore never trigger a mana gain from Spiritual Attunement.
There is no particular special benefit from Spiritual Attunement for having multiple paladins, except that everyone will be receiving this benefit, and everyone has the potential to be healed by someone else. In a party of all paladins, a character should never heal themselves (except during a breakdown in organization). If the main healer takes damage, a backup healer should be healing them. This goes for bandaging as well, whenever possible.
Since overhealing does not restore mana through Spiritual Attunement, the main healer may find it useful to take damage in some circumstances in order to be healable, and therefore recharge some mana. The situational Blessing, Blessing of Sacrafice can transfer damage taken from another target to the paladin for 30 seconds at a time. When the main healer is starting to run low on mana, they may in some cases find it useful to cast Blessing of Sacrafice on the tank, reducing the damage the tank takes, and taking that damage themselves, allowing them to be healed (by another character) and restore some mana to continue healing. I am unsure of the ultimate effectiveness of this trick.
Lay on Hands
Lay on Hands is an emergency heal with a very long cooldown: it drains the the paladin of any remaining mana (but can be cast even when the paladin is out of mana) and heals for an amount equal to the paladin's maximum health, plus restoring some mana. Improved Lay on Hands reduces the cooldown, and adds an armor buff to the target of the heal. There are number of interesting aspects to this in an all Paladin team.
All team members have large health and mana pools, so they will always gain nearly the full effect from Lay on Hands (as opposed to a mage, from whom a heal equal to a paladin's maximum health will probably be a significant overheal, or a warrior or rogue, who don't get the benefit of restored mana).
All team members have this emergency heal, greatly increasing the chances of survival. On the other hand, a player receiving two Lay on Hands at once would be a great loss of opportunity, and it may be useful to work out a Lay on Hands rotation to prevent this.
Lay on Hands applied to a paladin with Spiritual Attunement will restore a significantly larger amount of mana than usual, as long as it is cast by a different paladin than the target (this should be figured into the Lay on Hands rotation).
Improved Lay on Hands gives a percent based armor buff, and therefore gives a larger armor buff to heavily armored targets (which the whole team will be) than to anyone else (on the other hand, with dimishing returns on armor rating, this is probably not a larger percent of damage reduction).
A Sketch of a Team
Roles in a Team
A team of all paladins can be extraordinarily powerful, but requires very tight coordination in order to gain the full effect, since the team has a large number of roles to be assigned. Since everyone is the same class, the assignment of roles is less obvious than in a mixed-class party and should be explicitly worked out in any group with two or more paladins.
The normal roles of main tank, main healer, and main assist must be clear; it may also be important to assign a back-up healer and back-up tank. Further, each paladin should know which Aura, which Judgement, and which Blessing(s), are their job. If some Auras or Judgements are considered essential, then the team should know who will take over those tasks if a character dies.
An Example Team
This is a theoretical example team. It has yet to be tested.
The 61 point talent builds are extremely provisional and aimed at pointing out possibilities as much as being solid builds. For example, I have given everyone but the main tank the 4 points in Spiritual Focus needed for uninterruptable heals (assuming Improved Concentration Aura). This is may not be useful, but the possibility is worth pointing out. I have not given any of them Aura Mastery, since in most cases all five will be close together (since paladins have few ranged abilities).
The Judgement debuffs other than Judgement of the Crusader are assigned more or less arbitrarily, since they cannot be improved. The special responsibilities of each team member are bolded.
Paladin A: Protection
Paladin A is the main tank. She has at the very least 37 points in Protection, picking a number of talents to improve survivability and threat generation. She also has full points in Improved Concentration Aura and Blessing of Sanctuary. She starts with a Judgement of Righteousness for initial threat. She may take over the Judgement of Justice if Paladin B's Judgement slips.
The Protection tree also has another Aura to improve (Devotion) and another Blessing (Kings), but each of these are earlier in the tree, and are left for the back up tank.
Example 61 point build for Paladin A. In this example, Paladin A has reduced points in some useful talents in Protection in order to pick up some extra parry chance from the Retribution tree.
In a previous version, I gave the Paladin A some points in Holy in order to get resistance to Fear and Disorient effects, but recent re-working of game mechanics and talents convinced me that more points in Protection would be more useful. A paladin team has no squishies, and can survive the main tank being out of commission briefly to Fear and Disorient better than most groups.
Paladin B: Holy
Paladin B is the main healer. He has all the healing talents in the Holy tree, for at least 42 points in Holy. He also has Improved Blessing of Wisdom. He is the only one in the team with no Aura specialty. He generates Crusader Aura during travel, and an appropriate Resistance Aura, if any, during fights. He applies Judgement of Justice to the dps target when necessary. He takes over the Aura of fallen team mates, except in fights which crucially depend on Shadow, Fire, or Frost Resistance.
In some cases, it may make sense for Paladin B to be casting situation Blessings, such Protection, Freedom, and Sacrifice. In these cases, Paladin D will take over casting Blessing of Wisdom on any targets who need it.
Since he picks up all nearly all the talents of a Holy Shock-specialist in the process, I have decided not to make a second Holy Paladin specializing in dps.
Example 61 point build for Paladin B. In this example, Paladin B has everything he wants from the Holy tree, and has a few points on other trees creating some extra damage mitigation and mana conservation.
Paladin C: Crusader
Paladin C is the main assist. She has at least 41 points in Retribution, picking up Crusader Strike, as well as Improved Seal of the Crusader, in order to increase everyone's damage against her target. She has improved Retribution Aura. She has no improved Blessings and casts Blessings of Light and Salvation, as appropriate. The dps target is whatever target has her Judgement of the Crusader on it.
Improved Sanctity Aura is skipped, and covered by the second Retribution Paladin.
Example 61 point build for Paladin C. This example gives Paladin C uninterruptable heals and an armor buff as part of her emergency Lay on Hands.
Paladin D: Sanctity
Paladin D is dps and a back up healer. His specialty is Sanctity Aura, so he has at least 23 points in Retribution. He has Improved Sanctity Aura, and Improved Blessing of Might. His job includes placing Blessing of Might on at least Paladins C, D, and E and Blessing of Wisdom on Paladins A and B when necessary; healing Paladin A whenever necessary; and providing other support heals when necessary. He applies Judgement of Light to the dps target.
Example 61 point build for Paladin D. In this example, Paladin D invests heavily in the Holy tree in his role as backup to Paladin B. (With this build for Paladin D, Paladin B could even drop his points in Improved Blessing of Wisdom, if desired.)
Paladin E: Kings
Paladin E is dps, and a secondary tank when necessary (which should be rarely). She has the lower investment improvements from the Protection tree in both Aura and Blessing that Paladin A did not pick up: Improved Devotion Aura and Blessing of Kings, for at least 11 points in Protection. Most of her other points are in Retribution. She applies Judgement of Wisdom to the dps target.
Example 61 point build for Paladin E.
PvP and Arena
I need more experience before making any extensive PvP claims. But the idea of a five Paladin arena team is compelling. A critical piece of strategy in arena, in my experience, is rapidly identifying primary dps targets: enemy players with low hit points and/or powerful healing. This will be extremely difficult when set against a team of five paladins.
The example team outlined above could probably play arena effectively without changing out of their PvE builds. Tanks are usually the least effective transfer from PvE to PvP, but Paladin A's Avengers Shield could be quite useful in Arena, as would Greater Blessing of Sanctuary.
Afterword
I hope to improve and update this with more information. Also, as I stated before, I lack practical experience with a number of the things I describe here, so I welcome constructive feedback from players with more experience with paladins. I'll probably completely ignore any comments to the effect that a five paladin team can't work, though :P
Also, thanks to Ben KC for input and feedback.
