gearing-holy-paladins
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The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing a new holy paladin at 80, part 2
Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we discuss the most efficient way to use your emblems of triumph to pick up great holy gear. Do any of you remember raiding Naxxramas, back at the start of Wrath? What now seems so trivial today was actually pretty easy back then too, considering that guilds in level 70 gear cleared it on their first night in. Even considering how simple raiding was at that point, loot drama could still occur. A guild on my server, one of the larger and more successful guilds too, disbanded over a loot dispute. It wasn't about whether or not hunters should be allowed to roll on one-handed items (they shouldn't), but rather about whether an item with spellpower, mana per 5, and haste should be given to a healer. The item in question is the Torch of Holy Fire, which today, we would clearly state is a healer weapon: MP5 means that a healer should be using it. However, one of the guild's elemental shamans contested that it was also best-in-slot for him, and that DPS classes deserved gear before healers did. His argument was that letting the DPS gear up was more important than giving items to healers, because more DPS meant quicker boss fights. Once an encounter was beaten, additional healing did nothing to push progression. While the idea of a guild focusing on gearing their tanks first and everyone else second is not that uncommon, the idea of DPS superiority over healing was divisive enough to rip this group apart. Healers were arguing for their fellow brethren, while DPS derided them for being selfish. Paladins were particularly focused on, since critical strike rating was far more desirable back then and we were rolling on sp/haste/crit gear along with every other caster DPS class. Luckily for us, things have changed a lot since those early Wrath months.
