paladin
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Neverwinter: Elemental Evil bringing the Paladin, higher level cap
Elements are the "in" thing for 2015, especially in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. First we found out that DDO will be implementing the Temple of Elemental Evil this year, and now we've gotten word that Neverwinter's newest module will be called Elemental Evil (it's no coincidence; both titles have a relationship with Wizards of the Coast, who likes to do these tie-ins). This module will be a significant one when it comes early this year. Elemental Evil will add a new class to the game, the Paladin, and increase the level cap from 60 to 70. The increased level cap means more skills and quests for all eight classes. Cryptic also announced that future updates in 2015 for Neverwinter will include the player guild housing Strongholds system, the Xbox One launch, and the arrival of popular D&D characters. [Source: Cryptic press release]
WoW Archivist: Class protests and the Million Gnome March
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Betas make players nervous about their class. It happens every time. Blizzard makes changes, often drastically, and for better or worse some people hate the changes. I've been keeping my eye on the beta class forums since the Warlords beta began, and I've seen a lot of unhappiness this time around. The ability pruning that was one of Blizzard's major design goals for classes this year has removed depth from rotations, taken away both utility and cosmetic options, and in some cases radically altered or deleted abilities that players enjoyed. Beta testers have voiced strong opposition to many of the changes. In ten years, I haven't seen players this up in arms about class issues since classic WoW -- an era when many specs and mechanics were simply broken in PvE, PvP, or both. This past Friday, something happened that I believed would never again happen in WoW: an in-game class protest. With much more open lines of communication from developers to players in recent years, I thought the game had matured beyond the point where such things would ever be necessary. But here we are, almost ten years after the most famous class protest in WoW's history, and players once again felt the need to gather in Azeroth to voice their complaints.
Skyforge trumpets Paladin class
The mix of sci-fi and fantasy themes in Skyforge marches on, as the upcoming MMO announced its latest class: the Paladin. Heavy armor? Big sword? Giant shield? Divine backing? Yes on all counts. According to the reveal, Paladins "are the spiritual heirs of Aeli and a true weapon of good." As would be expected from this type of class, Paladins are tank characters with high health, fast regeneration, the ability to shield allies, and plenty of defensive skills. The Paladin builds up righteous anger to unleash in the form of special abilities and must pretty much always fight in melee range. We've got the Paladin trailer after the break, so give it a look-see and let us know what you think!
Five must craft neutral Hearthstone cards
There are a lot of cards in Hearthstone. It can be difficult to know which ones to craft with your hard earned dust, especially in the beginning. Do you save up for a legendary or try and craft more accessible cards in order to build up decent library? I mentioned it before, but I think the best option is grabbing up the basics, specifically cards that hold value across multiple decks. There's no ranking behind these cards, so grab them up in whatever order you see fit. All of them have strengths and weaknesses, which we'll discuss below.
Know Your Lore: The paladin's charger
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. The steed of a paladin isn't your typical mount. Unlike the early mounts of vanilla, it never existed as a physical object -- it was a spell cast by the paladin that summoned the steed from nowhere. In later years, it has since joined the rest of Warcraft's steeds on the mount tab, but for the longest time, the charger could only be found in the paladin's spellbook. This was no ordinary mount -- and its origins were also far from ordinary. While blood elves, draenei, and tauren were later introduced and given unique mounts of their own, in the original game the paladin class and its unique steed were only available to humans and dwarves. Unfortunately, the days of tracking down and compiling the elusive materials needed to harness a charger have disappeared since the release of Cataclysm, which saw both the quest chain for the Alliance, as well as the chain introduced for the Horde, removed in patch 4.0.1. But although the paladin's charger can now simply be learned at the appropriate level, there was a time where obtaining that steed was a much more difficult task, one with a unique and interesting tale behind it. As is only appropriate for a paladin, it's a tale of Light lost, a tale of redemption and hope.
Breakfast Topic: Is your Hearthstone main your WoW main?
While the gameplay in Hearthstone doesn't match WoW's exactly, it does a pretty good job of giving you the feel of the class you're playing. Of course, with such a different kind of game, having a similar feel doesn't mean that class you play the most in WoW will also be the class you play most in Hearthstone. For my part, I play a monk in WoW -- not an option in Hearthstone -- and typically play a paladin -- which used to be my WoW main -- in Hearthstone. So today we're asking you, readers: which class are you playing most in Hearthstone? Does it match your favored WoW class or not?
What's going wrong with tanking in five player content?
Tanking is not always easy, mind you. But tanking can be an incredible amount of fun, and I hope that it'll make a real comeback in terms of popularity when Warlords of Draenor goes live. Right now, I feel like a few problems really keep tanking from being as universally popular as it could be. Difficult to get starting gear - For most people, it's hard to get started as a tank. Gearing is an issue, because some tanks (DKs, warriors and paladins) need specific tanking gear, while even the leather tanks still generally use different stats to some degree, different enchants, different weapons for tanking than DPS or (especially) healing. This is a problem the gearing changes in Warlords should really help with. Where can you learn it? - Tanking requires a different skill set from DPS or healing. While proving grounds exist, they don't really teach the most important part of being a tank - reacting to other players. It can be hard as a new tank to walk into a dungeon having never done it before. That leads into the third difficulty of picking up tanking. Dungeons don't provide any sort of experience right now - With the wildly disparate gear levels on people running random dungeons, you can have a tank in 450 gear trying to hold aggro off of players in 580 gear. While it can be nice to be the tank in 580 gear, even you might have trouble when groups don't cooperate, run ahead of you, pull mobs half way across the zone, and generally simply refuse to act like any kind of groups at all. This is something I'm hoping the gear squish and ten levels will do away with - we'll all basically be on the same page when Warlords dungeons are being run. While there are still a lot of places where tanking is both fun and rewarding - raiding (especially in a guild group, be it heroic, normal or flex), challenge modes, even in LFD or LFR if you get lucky - I do think it can be a lot to ask a new tank (whether or not she or he is a new player or just new to the role) to grow a thick skin fast enough to deal with the toxicity possible in the current random queue environment. Which is a real shame, because tanking is fun - it can be stressful, and oftentimes groups have an expectation of a tank doing the work of knowing how every fight works for them, but that's not always a negative.
Warlords of Draenor: Tanking and the future
One of the things I'm thinking about lately is how tanking is changing in Warlords of Draenor. In at least one major way, it's not changing - Active Mitigation established itself in Mists, based in part on DK tanking in Cataclysm, and it's going to be front and center in Warlords of Draenor. But right now, AM tanking heavily relies on four stats (depending on the tank class) and all four of those stats will be gone come Warlords, meaning that we're looking at a pretty significant change depending on the class. The remaining stat, mastery, is probably going up in value, and in addition, we'll have crit, haste, readiness and multistrike to consider. But stats aren't the whole of the game, and they're not the whole of the changes, either. In addition to new stats, there are the abilities each tank will see affected by readiness to consider. There are also Draenor Perks for each tank spec, granted randomly as we level from 90 to 100. There are changes in what abilities exist, in what specs get them. Vengeance is gone, replaced with Resolve, buffing our self heals and absorbs. In short, while the basic idea remains the same - generate resources via attacks to spend on damage reduction in one fashion or another - how we go about it, how it interacts with us has so many changes that it's worth discussing in length. There's so much change coming in that I don't pretend I'll catch all of it, which is why we have comments, after all. So what do I expect to see out of tanking coming 6.0? It should be noted, this discussion is based on the Warlords alpha patch notes and such datamining as I've looked over, and I freely admit I only tank on one class, so while these are general observations I may be missing key class specific factors.
Skyforge shows off the Paladin class
After revealing the Cryomancer a few days ago, the Skyforge team is showing off the second class that was spotlighted during its GDC demo: the Paladin. In addition to the usual fighter abilities you'd find with a Paladin, Skyforge's holy warrior wields a powerful artifact that is used to both inspire allies and threaten enemies. "The Paladin is capable of performing devastating attacks and engage in prolonged battles with abilities such as the Righteous Blow, Seal of Light, Punishing Bolt and Celestial Shield," the forum announcement states. "The Paladin is one who not only inflicts damage on his enemies, but also protects his friends, making him an excellent brother in arms!" [Thanks to Dengar for the tip!]
Next steps after boosting a paladin tank to 90, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. It's always weird coming to the end of an expansion and seeing the road before you suddenly much shorter than you remember it was the last time you gave it a serious look. Very soon things will radically change -- the gear that made us gods will be obsolete, health pools will be laid low, and the stats that we had come to loathe will be no more. As they say, all good things must come to an end. Pandaria is no different. This is a path we've walked before, in the twilight of every expansion. As the content winds down in its own interminable fashion, and we run that end raid for the umpteenth time, we find solace in trying new experiences through the prism of alts. As I discussed in last week's post, with the advent of the boosting feature, many folks will be trying out paladin tanks for the first time -- especially since they now have the advantage of skipping the (painful) journey of leveling a tank entirely. This guide is for them.
Next steps after boosting a paladin tank to 90
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. With the introduction of level 90 boosts on the horizon, many players are going to be trying new characters, classes, and specs they may have never tried before. I expect this means that many folks are going to give protection paladins a go for the first time, which is a very exciting prospect, because the spec makes for a very fun tank playstyle. In order to help those new folks hit the ground running, I'm kicking off a two-part "quick start guide" that'll break down the spec in the 101-iest way possible, to give those new tankadins a barebones foundation that they can use to jump right into getting their faces pounded in. For today's post I'm going to talk about why one should choose to spend $60 or their free Warlords-given boost on a protection-specced paladin, and what they need to know to safely jump into that first dungeon.
Hearthstone: The Rock, a paladin deck
The meta has changed! Among the classes, the gap between best and worst has narrowed significantly. Today we'll examine a couple of emerging paladin decks. Their hero power is called Reinforce which generates a 1/1 Silver Hand Recruit. The one we're looking at today is aptly titled The Rock. You'll find out why in a few moments. Read on for the full deck list!
Pantheon's Crusader brings two shields to the fight
Pantheon's latest announced class, the Crusader, might have the trappings of a traditional armored tank, but he's got a few surprises up his sleeves -- such as the ability to dual-wield shields. Crusaders are front-line fighters that use heavy armor, one- and two-handed weapons, and tall shields as well as a dollop of divine power to smite foes and bless allies. Players who go down this virtuous path can specialize either as a melee-focused Cavalier or a magic-using Paladin. It sounds as though Crusaders will be very beneficial to parties with group-wide buffs and the ability to tank effectively. They'll also get a squire to help out, undead-banishing abilities, and the option to pick up two shields for both protection and offense.
Pantheon reveals the Cleric
Pantheon is still in the early stages of its Kickstarter campaign rollercoaster and has revealed its first (non-stretch goal) class: the Cleric. According to the announcement post, the Cleric is a battle priest who's big on doing nice things for good folks while smashing bad folks with blunt instruments. The Cleric uses divine spells to heal friends and harm foes backed up with his or her trusty warhammer or flail and a lot of heavy armor. It looks as though players will have an option to eschew this mode and spec as a lightly armored spellcaster or an astral Paladin. One of the most interesting aspect of the Cleric is his or her choice in deity. That choice won't be merely for roleplaying purposes but will influence which spells and abilities will be granted to the Cleric.
Patch 5.4 PTR: Vengeance changes
If you're a tank in World of Warcraft you know what Vengeance is. Originally intended to allow tanks to keep up with increased DPS from improved gear with DPS stats on it while accumulating tanking gear that generally lacked those stats, it's turned into a means for tanking players to do chart topping DPS on some pulls (especially AoE ones with multiple tanked mobs). There's been a lot of discussion about what might happen with Vengeance in patch 5.4, and now we have our first look at what Blizzard is contemplating for the tanking specialization. Rygarius - 5.4 PTR Patch Notes - August 2 Vengeance has received several changes. Vengeance now grants Attack Power equal to 1.5% of the damage taken, down from 1.8% (The tooltip said 2% but it was actually 1.8%). Tanks no longer receive Vengeance from many persistent area damage effects (standing in the fire) or from missed attacks (dodging and parrying an attack will continue to work as it has before). There are now diminishing returns on Vengeance gains while tanking multiple targets. Each additional target grants progressively less Vengeance. source These changes are almost certainly aimed at reducing the very high DPS that we can see on trash pulls and boss fights with a great many streaming adds (such as Tortos' bats or the packs before Iron Qon) especially as we head into the final tier of gear for Mists of Pandaria, which would inflate these numbers even more. Raids that use tanks with the highest DPS tanks will probably feel these changes the most. As always, this is the PTR, so if you have an opinion on these changes getting on the test servers and testing them out is useful so you can give proper feedback.
WoW Archivist: When Blizzard "hated" the Horde
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Which faction does Blizzard love more? For several years it's been all the rage to claim that Blizzard loves the Horde and hates the Alliance. Players trot out the "green Jesus" theory. They show how the past two expansions have focused far more on Horde characters and storylines than on Alliance intrigues. It's true that Blizzard placed Thrall and now Garrosh and Vol'jin in the spotlight over the past few years. Players also look at the shiny new Orgrimmar that the Horde got when the old one burned down, and how Stormwind also took a beating and still hasn't recovered. You can make the case that Blizzard has somewhat favored the Horde in WoW's recent history. But this is so very, very strange to vanilla players like me. Back then, players were convinced of the exact opposite. Players were so convinced, in fact, that some actually wanted a CM to die. In vanilla, Blizzard "loved" the Alliance and "hated" the Horde. Don't believe me? This quote is from a 2005 editorial called "Why the Horde is worse, and how Blizzard could fix it": In the end, I am just a jealous Horde player... It is up to Blizzard to fix this game; I have done all that I can. Either World of Warcraft can be remembered as a great MMORPG, or it can go down as a horribly imbalanced one, like many before it. That's for Blizzard to decide. Let's take a trip back to 2005. On a bus, perhaps. A bus made out of elemental electrical energy.
Know Your Lore: The color of magic
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. .@yuvalaziza Both priests and paladins can wield the Holy Light. However, not all wield it through the same means (e.g., Elune, An'she). :) - Sean Copeland (@Loreology) July 22, 2013 Earlier this week, Blizzard Historian Sean Copeland was answering questions on Twitter when the above answer came up. People were upset about it because the answer, while seemingly pretty simplistic, seemed to devalue the importance of Elune and the unique nature of night elf philosophy and religion. Magic, in all its forms and function in Warcraft, is one of those tricky subjects to understand -- almost as tricky as trying to wrap one's brain around the cosmos of the Warcraft universe. These types of questions get asked a lot, however. And while not everything regarding magic in Warcraft has been fully defined, we can definitely take a look at these different schools of magic and how they relate to one another on Azeroth.
Tier 16 Armor Set videos: Paladin, Druid, Rogue, Death Knight [Updated]
Adriacraft are back with more tier set videos. This time we've got the tier 16 armor sets for Paladins and Druids, with Rogues to follow later. What do you think of the sets? Here at WoW Insider we're unsure, both these tiers look rather similar, and there seems to be a recurring theme of basic-colored armor with some unusual, even bizarre, frill detail. As previously, the tiers' different colors will come from different difficulties. You can also remind yourself of the previous datamined tier sets for the Warrior, Priest and Hunter. Hit the break for the other two sets! And do check out Adriacraft on YouTube for all the latest patch videos!
Should you play a paladin in WoW?
If you're just getting started with World of Warcraft, the range of class options available to you can be a bit daunting. Which class is the best? Which class is the most fun? Which class will you enjoy? There's no answer that's right for everyone -- and you may wind up trying a few classes before you find the perfect fit. But where to begin? Today's class run-down will cover paladins, WoW's holy warriors. As Blizzard puts it, paladins are called "to protect the weak, to bring justice to the unjust, and to vanquish evil from the darkest corners of the world." But your paladin may have its own motivations -- indeed, within the game you're certain to meet paladins with motives less pure. In fact, one of the interesting things about the paladin class is how different various paladins are: while alliance paladins very much fall along Blizzard's class description, the blood elf paladins, who style themselves Blood Knights, haven't always been particularly good guys. But enough of that: what you want to know is how paladins play, so read on for more.
Fearsome paladin collective crusades for the Light
Knights in shining armor or divisive zealots? The roleplay opportunities for a group of paladins in Azeroth are fierce, either way you look at it. The catch is how they are perceived and manage to interact with their fellow players. Are they protectors of the faith and guardians of fellow citizens, or a fearsome hammer of intolerance to be brought down upon anything that deviates? Amelas Langston of Caelestis Templares, a guild of paladins on Silver Hand (US-RP), walks that line regularly with a guild of roleplayers who've become known for their devotion to eradicating any opposition to the Light. Has its hardline approach made pariahs of its players? Or has its stalwart stand against the forces of evil made heroes and saviors of its characters? WoW Insider: Most readers will probably assume that a guild of paladins is portraying a knightly, noble mission, but in fact, your roleplay focus is quite different. A recent recruiting post on the realm forums noted that many of your members roleplay "gruff, jackass characters," and the words "zealotry" and "intolerance" have been used to described the group's approach to its roleplay. Does your mission cast guild members in danger of becoming pariahs among the Silver Hand RP community? Amelas: It's a fair thing to assume. I've found that the majority of people that role play as paladins have that sort of a character. The Caelestis Templares, however, are dedicated to a goal, that goal being the eradication of all that stands in opposition to the Light. Intolerance and zeal are actually key virtues of our guild, so to describe us as zealots would be pretty accurate. If our characters encounter something that the Order dictates is heretical, then they are obligated to take action against it. It becomes a bit of a drag when the actions of our characters make people think that the player behind them are as hard and unfriendly as they are.
