crusade
Latest
The Light and How to Swing It: Deciphering holy paladin talents
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any comments or awesome holy paladin screenshots you have. I was planning to talk about how Conviction was broken and only affected self-healing, but Blizzard's crew has hotfixed that bug already. Conviction now grants the proper healing bonus when we heal anyone. The end result is that our healing done is going to go up significantly. I'm actually wondering whether or not we're going to see a nerf because of it. A 9% boost to healing done is certainly enough to throw off whatever balance we had achieved with the other healing classes' performance. Between the first time I heard of the Conviction issue and the recent hotfix, I have respecced about a dozen times. There are so many viable talent options available for our final flex points that I simply can't decide what I want to pick up. I couldn't even make up my mind when I had three free talent points after dropping Conviction from my build. I love the flexibility that we have when speccing our holy paladins.
The Light and How to Swing It: Protection and retribution builds in 4.0.1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Hi. I've got a quick thing to report on before we get to the meat of the article. If you were tanking those first couple days of patch 4.0.1 and you seemed to be taking extra damage, almost as if you weren't crit-immune, there is a reason for that. There was a bug that made us vulnerable to crits in 4.0.1. It should be fixed now, but I received a couple emails about it from people who were extremely concerned about their survivability. Try things again and see if you're still having issues. We really need to talk about talent builds. I know we're a week after the patch at this point, but due to how much we've changed throughout the course of the beta, I've developed an innate fear of committing to talent builds. Part of this comes from having had talents moved between trees each build. Other parts of this come from seeing talents keep the same name yet be completely changed as far as what they do. I really wanted the patch to drop before doing this, because I didn't trust Blizzard to keep things the same from the PTR/beta build to the live build. However, that is in the past. Let's look toward the future.
The Light and How to Swing It: Ret 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 my email at gregg@wow.com. Yes, yes. I know the last time I wrote about retribution talents that Blizzard came out the next day saying that it was scrapping essentially everything in those versions of the trees. Since then, all three trees have undergone massive (and I'm not exaggerating here) overhauls. However, things have started to stabilize and while these talents may not be final, the tree is a lot closer than any of the previous revisions to what we'll see when the expansion hits.
The Daily Grind: Mob Grudge Match
Ahh, little mobs, you pieces of innocuous computer code you. Standing still or roaming in a set pattern, you live to serve us -- walking bags of experience and loot just waiting to be cracked open. Sure, maybe sometimes you run away when you're hurt (which only ticks us off more) or call out to your buddies when you want them to die as well, but truly, you live a life free of sophistication. You live, you die, you make us better, and then you live once more. Except that's not always the case, is it? Sometimes there's a particular mob that seems to declare a grudge match against you. It's the mob that kills you more often than not, the mob that has a really nasty trick or two up its sleeve, the mob that's stalking you with diligence that's not usually seen outside of a restraining order. What one mob has you seeing red every time it appears? What mob do you attack with a vengeance no matter what, even if you out-level it by the score? What mobs have grated so much that you've declared a crusade against their kind? Grudge match: GO!
[UPDATED] Paladin changes in patch 3.0.3
Yeah, yeah, I know. You're sick of reading about Paladins. Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just here bearing some news and a couple of opinions. You can always skip down to the the next post, anyway. For those Paladin lovers (and even loathers), Patch 3.0.3 brings about some pretty interesting changes to the class. We got a lot more changes than other classes, but then again we've been getting a lot of attention lately, haven't we?First, the bad news. We knew most of the nerfs since they showed up in the Beta a while back. Well, most of those nerfs made it live to Patch 3.0.3, so let's get this over with quickly so we can move on to the good news. Yes, there's actually good news for Paladins this patch. Seals all get nerfed to varying degrees, the general idea being that they no longer deal as much damage either as a Seal or as a Judgement. Don't ask me for the math, you can check out Boubouille's detailed notes on MMO Champion for the details. All Seals have been nerfed, period. Ouch.[UPDATE: Thanks to Turkeyspit who reminded me about the change to Judgement of Light, which now awesomely affects spells and not just melee attacks. I told you this was a good Patch for us.]
Patch 3.0.2 primer for Retribution Paladins
Let's face it. Retribution blows.Blows things up, that is. Out of all the trees -- and I mean all including the other classes -- no tree got more love than Retribution in the Echoes of Doom patch. For many of us, it's been a long time coming. No other class spec has been the butt of more jokes and the target of such derision as Retribution. Not anymore. Not in Patch 3.0.2 and the days leading up to Wrath of the Lich King. Retribution deals so much pain that we've sent the rest of player base running to Ghostcrawler crying for a nerf. And we're getting nerfed. To the ground.Don't panic. The changes are really, mostly aimed at PvP Paladins -- okay, that's me -- but will largely leave Paladin PvE damage output the same. That's excellent news. Because I've grown accustomed to the idea that quite a lot of you guys prefer PvE to PvP, we'll take a look at a PvE Retribution build that will make you the darling of your Heroic runs and more than welcome in raids. Let's bring on the pain after the jump.
[UPDATED] Paladin changes in Beta build 8926 part I
This is one of the biggest patches to hit Paladins in a while, and it's a mixed bag. Let's get the bad news out of the way first -- all of Seals have been nerfed. All of them. Seal of the Martyr / Blood, Corruption / Vengeance, Wisdom, Light, Justice, Righteousness and even Command have all had their damage reduced. The formulas are tweaks of the values of attack power, spell power, and weapon speed -- a bit complicated to explain in detail -- that result in an overall damage reduction. Now, before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, let me say one thing: don't panic.We can probably consider this patch the nerf patch, which is an essential part of the tuning process. The developers traditionally start from a high power scale and fine tune it downwards -- I mean, look at the poor Death Knight. This is still the Wrath Beta, and while there is a chance these numbers might stick through to live, testing these lowered numbers are vital to getting everything right for release. If you're in Beta, log in, play with it for a while, and give feedback. If you're not in Beta, hold back a bit from making a ruckus and exercise a little patience until the testing is done. Let's take a deep breath. Now where'd I put my inhaler...
Darkmoon Faire Decks: An overview
As I've mentioned before, The Darkmoon Faire is currently in Terrokar Forest, just outside Shattrath City, so if you have decks to turn in or need to refill your private stock of Darkmoon Special Reserve, now's the time to get on it. But if you're still a little bit taken aback by the prospect of gathering all those cards, or wondering if the trinket at the end will really be worth it, we'd like to help you out. In this post, we'll be looking at both the old and new decks and listing some pros and cons of each deck so you can figure out if you want to spend the next month tracking down cards before the Faire shows up in Elwynn Forest in March, or even if you just want to blow your epic flying mount fund on getting a deck before it leaves for the month. We'll start in on everything after the jump.
New Darkmoon cards stats revealed
I was never able to collect any of the Darkmoon cards (although I'm pretty sure I have six or seven of the Warlords cards sitting in my Warrior's bank), but I always thought they were a great idea. Since the expansion, however, the old cards haven't been quite up to par for level 70s. Enter the new Darkmoon decks-- Blue announced a little while ago that there would be new cards to collect, and now Tiare has compiled what the new Darkmoon trinkets will do for you when completed.[Darkmoon Card: Vengeance] (Ace - Eight of Storms)You have a 10% chance when hit by an attack or harmful spell to deal 95 to 115 holy damage to your attacker.[Darkmoon Card: Wrath] (Ace - Eight of Furies)Each time one of your direct damage attacks does not critically strike, you gain 17 critical strike rating and 17 spell critical strike rating for the next 10 sec. This effect is consumed when you deal a critical strike. (Stacks up to 20 times)[Darkmoon Card: Crusade] (Ace - Eight of Blessings)Each time you deal melee damage to an opponent, you gain 6 attack power for the next 10 sec., stacking up to 20 times. Each time you land a harmful spell on an opponent, you gain 8 spell damage for the next 10 sec., stacking up to 10 times.[Darkmoon Card: Madness] (Ace - Eight of Lunacy)Each time you land a killing blow on an enemy, you gain the Power of Madness.Unfortunately, we're not quite sure what "Power of Madness" means-- it could be anything from a simple beserk buff (+Damage and Spell Damage, -Healing recieved), to a shapechange to a Worgen, or even "Opens a portal into the Twisting Nether that periodically summons demonic minions to aid the caster in battle for 14 sec." (at least that's what the rumors say).But sweet cards nevertheless. The Wrath and Crusade cards look especially cool, but I'm confused about the 10 second limit-- someone with Wrath can supposedly build up to a whopping +340 crit rating, but does that mean they somehow have to hit 20 times (without critting) within 10 seconds? Is that even possible? I don't see it procing more than two or three times before the ten seconds are up or a crit appears.[ via MMO-Champion ]
New Burning Crusade Screenshots
The official site has posted five (gee, a whole five!) new screenshots from the upcoming WoW expansion The Burning Crusade. From what I can tell from the pics, we get a nice new desert landscape that looks sort of like a Yes album cover, and some new Blood Elf character shots, which look pretty cool, I guess.Still no screenshots of Murlocs running around in Ironforge wearing leather armor, though...and nary a wisp in sight.
