Paladin The health pool

The health pool

The health pool represents your life. When your health pool is zero you're dead. These are obvious concepts. But how to keep your health pool up? There are essentially 2 ways: increase it and prevent it from be wiped.

You can also replenish your health pool with healing spells and regeneration (see Mana pool & healing and Regeneration in combat sections). Remember for now that regeneration from spirit stat don't work in combat.

Increase your health pool
Your health pool is based on the hitpoints gained on your grinding to level 60. A human paladin health pool at level 60 without any item bonus is 2201 hitpoints. You can increase this amount with:

Items with stamina bonus (+10 hitpoints every point of stamina)
Potions like Flask of the Titans (temporary)
Priest buff Power word: fortitude (+54 stamina at max rank)
Druid buff Mark of the Wild
BoK. Note that this bless will raise all your attributes by 10% including bonuses you get from items and buffs.

Preventing damage
You can try either to avoid completely incoming damage and also try to mitigate it. Paladins thanks to their high survivablity have a lot of tools helping them in this duty.

Avoiding damage

dodge skill. 1% every 20 points of agility and 1% every 25 points of defense over 300 at lvl 60 (see defense stat for details). You can dodge either physical or magical attacks avoiding them totally.
divine shield will grant you invulnerability to everything for 12 seconds every 5 minutes
blessing of protection will grant invulnerability to physical damage (melee or ranged) for 10 seconds every 5 minutes (3 with talent guardian favor in protection tree)
parry skill. Can avoid damage from melee hits. 1% every 25 points of defense over 300 at lvl 60 (see defense stat for details).

Another underevaluated option to avoid damage is to go out of range from your enemy. Stating this I don't mean fleeing from your enemy. Here you have some examples:
Magic spells often have strict requirements as target in line of sight or in front of caster in order to work, so going on your enemy back while he's spellcasting can be a good tactic. You can also continue to bash it with your weapon too.
Hunter also have a so called "dead zone", they can use ranged weapon only if enemy isn't within 8 yds and can use melee weapons like all classes only if enemy is in a 5 yds range. So from 5 to 8 yards they can't hit you while you can use some abilities on them: HoJ, all judgements, holy shock, consecration, HoW.

Mitigating damage

Armour. Works only for physical melee and ranged damage (see armour stat for details)
Magic resistances. If they're high enough can also avoid damage. See proper section for details.
Block skill (shield required). With a shield equipped you can also block partially damage from physical attacks. See defense stat for block chances formula. If you block a hit successfully the amount of damage mitigated is :
[(Shield block value) + (Strenght / 22)]