divine-sacrifice
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The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in 4.0.1
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to gregg@wow.com. A couple weeks back, I covered the changes to protection for the 4.0.1 pre-Cataclysm patch that usually goes out a month(ish) or so before release. The point of those patches is so that everyone can play with the new class features and get everything figured out before the chaos that is the actual expansion release. Now it's time to do the same sort of coverage for ret pallies. If you haven't been following the changes thus far, it's going to look odd. There are new class concepts and skill/buff consolidations. First off, picking your spec now has a lot more meaning from the get-go. You receive most of the passive buffs that you'd have to spend 40 talent points getting in the past for free at level 10 that are responsible for making your chosen spec usable. As an example, you get Sheath of Light, Two-Handed Weapon Specialization and Judgements of the Bold. That provides your attack power-to-spellpower conversion, your weapon damage bonus and your mana regeneration. All of this just for picking the spec. In addition, you get a new attack called Templar's Verdict that we'll get into later. First off, let's talk about the biggest change to our class in the expansion: holy power.
The Light and How to Swing It: Protection in patch 4.0.1
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to gregg@wow.com. My fellow tankadins, I know we haven't talked in a while. I've been talking to the ret pallies lately, but I haven't forgotten about you. The main reason is that I kind of swapped over to retribution during that time period where the devs were mucking with Holy Shield so much, and it was a little more consistent to swap over to something else during that time period. I even had my newish tanking gear back on while playing on the beta lately. However, a lot has changed since we last spoke, and it would behoove us all to get down to business. Tanking as you know it, with our fairly static rotation of 96969, is gone. Divine Plea's refreshing with melee hits is also gone. Also, we now have another resource bar to watch, in addition to mana. Be not afraid. There are answers beyond.
The Light and How to Swing It: Where did they go?
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Before we get on to business, I need another batch of screenshots for headers if anyone feels like tossing a couple my way. A lot of abilities have been either renamed, revamped or removed in the Cataclysm beta. This is part of a consolidation process to remove a lot of buttons off of our bars. Other abilities were changed to remove durability and healing from retribution. However, in the interest of explaining where things went, I decided it might be best to make a list of our lost and renamed abilities, for those of you who haven't been able to keep up with all of the changes.
The Light and How to Swing It: Prot talents in Cataclysm
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to gregg@wow.com. If you saw my column last week, you'll notice that I've been less than thrilled with the way the protection tree had been progressing in the beta. Sure, things have been getting better, but it has felt as if the whole tree is fairly unsettled. With the latest build, we're finally starting to see things get a little smoother and the mechanics to make a little bit more sense. Keeping Holy Shield up is easier than in previous builds, and a lot of depth to the types of strategies we can have while tanking has greatly improved. Also, our mastery bonus has been official revealed. I'm going to use the same type of disclaimer that I did on the ret talents article. These may not be the talents we'll end up seeing when the expansion hits, but they're getting there. Some talents will look pretty close to how they exist currently, while others have absolutely nothing to do with their current versions. Let's go take a look.
The Light and How to Swing It: Overgeared tanking
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. With the ease of gearing up an 80 tanking paladin, you go from being poorly geared with wonderful healers keeping you alive while you take advantage of all of the various tricks of the trade to practically soloing some of the lower-end heroics. That ability to survive anything also starts to cause your mana to run out. Pulling things at the speed you used to doesn't do enough damage for Spiritual Attunement to do any good, things are dying too fast for Blessing of Sanctuary to be of any help, and every time you hit Consecration, you can physically feel your mana pool get smaller. While you can pray that you get a druid in your party to hit you with the occasional Innervate, you want to be more self-sufficient, which can cause you to have to change around your tanking style to keep your mana pool filled so that you can actually use your abilities. We'll also take a look at some of the bad ideas on how to handle this.
The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 2
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week he's trying to help those of you crazy enough to tank Gnomergon when it's still a level appropriate instance. We're doing a much longer than expected series of articles on the low level dungeon runners now that the new cross-realm Dungeon Finder is up and running. This is part two of our series on the low level tank. Last week we talked about the basics of threat, avoidance, mitigation, and what stats to be on the lookout for when choosing gear. We did promise to get into talents and skills this week, but that would have ended up being three pages long. So we're going to leave skills until next week and just concentrate on talents this time around. If you're extremely new, take a look at this nice article explaining talents for new players. If you've got that down, let's start move on to more paladin specific info.
The Light and How to Swing It: Divine Sacrifice
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week we're going to talk about trying to not take one for the team. While some of you might be looking at the skill in the title and not know what I'm talking about, we paladins have a nice little talented ability known as Divine Sacrifice. A lot of holy and protection paladins should already know about this cursed little gem. Depending on your spec setup, you might even be aware of it as a retribution paladin. If you're not familiar with the skill, it's sitting on the left in the third tier of the protection tree. Go look, I'll wait. For those of you that didn't go over to look, it is essentially a raid-wide version of Hand of Sacrifice and often nicknamed the "raid-wall" for its shield-wall-esque capabilities. It allows the casting paladin to take 30% of the damage from every person in the party or the raid for 10 seconds. Luckily, it can be used in combination with Divine Shield so you don't instantly die from all of that incoming damage. Currently, it's a fairly dangerous little skill. With it you can either be savior or martyr of your raid group depending on how you use it.
Paladin changes in Patch 3.1 PTR build 9722
A new Patch 3.1 PTR build went up earlier and while there aren't any official patch notes, our data-mining friends over at MMO-Champion have dug up some goodies as usual. There aren't too many changes for Paladins in this build, but there are interesting stuff in there, not least of which was the unintended revelation of the internal testing on Crusader Strike. The more down-to-earth changes are as follows:HolyDivine Plea - now only reduces the amount healed by your Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Holy Shock spells.This properly reflects Blizzard's intention of nerfing Divine Plea for Holy Paladins. The change allows healing from Seal of Light and Judgement of Light to go unimpaired, the latter particularly useful to Protection Paladins and Retribution Paladins. Considering that Protection is now designed to have maintain a 100% uptime on Divine Plea, this is an important distinction.Aura Mastery - tooltip has been modified to properly reflect its 10 seconds duration. The excellent new ability confused a lot of players who thought it was a permanent, passive ability. Don't freak out, people! It's an activated ability that lasts for 10 seconds and has a two minute cooldown. The tooltip should help dispel the cloud of confusion.The rest of the changes after the jump...
[UPDATED] Patch 3.1 PTR build 9658 Paladin changes
So the new PTR build dropped, and it doesn't look very pretty for Holy Paladins. Before we get into the grim side of things, it looks like Aura Mastery has been made baseline. Does this mean a new talent will be popping up in the Holy tree? That seems likely, but don't bet on it yet. Now on to the bad stuff...HolySacred Shield - Cannot be on more than one target at any one time.Ouch. So much for raid damage mitigation. Back to single target healing, the lot of you!Infusion of Light - No longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead. Moved to Tier 10.Double ouch. This seems to be a PvP nerf to me, and others are crying out the same on the forums. Without addressing it directly, Ghostcrawler states that "several of those changes were made for PvE reasons". He was, of course, referring to Sacred Shield, considering that one of Blizzard's concerns was the increasing number of mitigation abilities going into Ulduar. Losing half-a-second Holy Lights will be severely palpable to Holy Paladins in Arenas. [UPDATE: With Aura Mastery's old effect made baseline, the new activated ability talent is all kinds of awesome - Now makes anyone affected by Concentration Aura to be immune to Interrupt and Silence mechanics and increases the effectiveness of all other auras by 100%. Lasts 10 sec. 2 min cooldown. This is a fantastic ability that compensates a little for the other nerfs. Because it is a party or raid-wide buff, this is extremely powerful -- imagine the improved versions of Retribution Aura and Devotion Aura working at 200%. This makes Paladin synergy simply too good. The 2 minute cooldown is about right for PvP, although a 12 second duration might have been more appropriate. It's an excellent talent on paper, I can't wait to see in practice.
