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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.
The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing a new holy paladin at 80, part 1
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 pick up healing gear as a newly 80 paladin. I feel like raiding in Wrath of the Lich King has started towards a slight lull in the past week or two. Many high-end guilds are stuck at 11/12 heroic kills in ICC, looking across the gaping chasm that is the Lich King fight on heroic, focusing on the few guilds who have managed to topple Arthas for good. I also find that most of the casual guilds have also settled into their niches, killing those Icecrown bosses that they have the time or raw numbers to defeat and being content with that. With only Ruby Sanctum to look forward to in terms of remaining raids and graduation season already started, I can already feel the post-expansion exodus ready to begin. Guilds begin losing members faster than they can be replaced, and recruiting becomes a daily burden instead of a monthly chore. While all of this may sound like bad news, there is some hope in this transition period between the final tier of Wrath and the first tier of Cataclysm. Players will be using the free time to level alts, and I have already seen a deluge of newly minted toons appear in my guild this month. With any luck, there are future holy paladins in this mix, and in a few weeks' time, we'll have new brothers and sisters in arms. However, before they're truly ready to take up the mantle of keeping a tank alive through 3 stacks of Festergut's Inhaled Blight?, they're going to need some sweet gear to give them the throughput and longevity to pull it off.
