eternal-glory
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: Paladin Protection glyphs
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. We've recently looked at builds for protection and retribution, so let's continue that trend and take a look at glyphs. I'm going to review all of them, as we're getting pretty close to Cataclysm, and I'm going to also review them in a more global context instead of talking about what is going to help you on hard-mode Lich King. The way I've set it up is that everything that you're likely going to want without question has an asterisk next to it; those are pretty much things you'll want to take. If you look through the major and minor glyphs, you'll notice that there aren't very many marked as such. There's a reason for that. We just don't have that many spectacular glyphs that are useful in all situations for those types. That's not to say the other glyphs are bad (well, some are, but we'll get to that), but they're more situational and require some choice on your part.
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.
Cataclysm beta: Paladins in build 12984
In the middle of the night, a new build for the PTR and beta got pushed to the patch servers, but it hasn't been marked as ready for download at the time of this writing (it might be at the time of this reading, though). Several classes have received major changes (including six new talents scattered across druid specs), while others simply got a collection of damage tweaks. Paladins appear to be somewhere in between those. Most of our changes are small tweaks and talent reorganizations, but a few are obvious balancing passes. While there is a new talent for holy, it's just another of the spirit-to-hit conversion talents that other classes have seen. This could, however, mean a possible comeback of the shockadin -- but I'll leave that for Chase to speculate on tomorrow when he covers the holy changes in more depth. Some quick excerpts from the patch notes, with everything after the break: The holy tree gets a spirit-to-hit conversion talent. Holy Light's healing has decreased by 25% and mana cost has increased to 9%. Divine Purpose proc rate has lowered to 20%.
