Spiritual-Attunement
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The Light and How to Swing It: Overgeared tanking
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. With the ease of gearing up an 80 tanking paladin, you go from being poorly geared with wonderful healers keeping you alive while you take advantage of all of the various tricks of the trade to practically soloing some of the lower-end heroics. That ability to survive anything also starts to cause your mana to run out. Pulling things at the speed you used to doesn't do enough damage for Spiritual Attunement to do any good, things are dying too fast for Blessing of Sanctuary to be of any help, and every time you hit Consecration, you can physically feel your mana pool get smaller. While you can pray that you get a druid in your party to hit you with the occasional Innervate, you want to be more self-sufficient, which can cause you to have to change around your tanking style to keep your mana pool filled so that you can actually use your abilities. We'll also take a look at some of the bad ideas on how to handle this.
The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysm class preview wishlist
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. Well, here's the problem. I was going to do this whole long article on my predictions and wish-list for the paladin Cataclysm class previews that were coming out Friday. The problem is that they've moved them up to Wednesday which is the same day this column normally goes live. So, I can either write a nice long column with predictions that will end up going live after the real information comes out or we can do a short and sweet prediction article a day early with more time spent on analysis for tomorrow. I'm going with short and sweet version.
The Queue: An unrelated Q
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I'm in charge of the Queue train today, which means for the first time this week, this is a Star Trek free zone. Admittedly, I can't shake the obsession with the letter Q, so we're just taking things a different route today. Behold: Q. Darasen asked... "Perhaps this is better answered by the Priest community but thought I''d ask here. I have been leveling a healing priest through the dungeon finder and was curious about the proper use of "Power Word Shield". I use the spell constantly as it is very mana efficient. I have had some players tell me I should not use it though. A warrior told me he thought the shield kept him from gaining rage (he was unsure) and a Paladin told me that he couldn't get mana back when shielded. So should it be used regularly or not?"
The Queue: Better than Bejeweled
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Good afternoon, ladies and gents! Let's waste no time and jump right in today, shall we?Horris asked..."I have a question. What's with the sudden change from red to yellow sockets between T7 and T8 for warrior tanks?"Sockets have always been notorious for not being the optimal color for certain specs and classes. T7 seemed like the odd duck to me in that case, where the sockets were generally pretty good for most classes. Now they're back to being sort of weird like has almost always been the case.
The Daily Quest: Of Ruby Voids, Hunter podcasts and life without Spiritual Attunement
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. The Sacred Duty Paladin blog looks at skipping Spiritual Attunement with the change to Divine Plea in Patch 3.1. The Hunter's Rhok blog details the strategy used to successfully complete the Ruby Void achievement. And they perfected it in a PuG! Tanking Tips has a Strafing 101 guide up for tanks that also includes Strafing 102. Some interesting tips in the comments section as well. All Things Azeroth has podcast #105 ready for your listening pleasure. They cover many topics this time including the Glider ruling, Ulduar achievements and the difficulty of becoming Immortal. Big Red Kitty has also posted his latest podcast. Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.
Ghostcrawler talks some more on Retribution DPS
I'll be honest with you. Retribution DPS has made me a rather sad panda lately. It wasn't my DPS exactly, but I sat down to watch my brother-in-law farm Valkyrs in Valkyrion with his three-week old Level 80 Death Knight. He pulled about five mobs and proceeded to demolish them. With Cinderglacier and Killing Machine proccing, he hit all mobs with a Howling Blast for about 6-7k each, and topped things off with a 7k Frost Strike. It made my jaw drop. Mind you, my brother-in-law is an excellent player, so this probably isn't your average Death Knight. But then, he was only equipped in heroic gear, with his best loot being a Wraith Spear. He hadn't even hit his peak.I know anectdotal stories like these are plenty and tangential to the issue, but if you've raided as a Retribution Paladin with equally geared and skilled players, you'll know exactly what I'm trying to say. So it was a major surprise in Patch 3.1 that the slimming down of the Retribution tree hit our DPS hard with a nerf to Fanaticism (reduced to three ranks for an 18% crit, down from 25%) and Righteous Vengeance (reduced to three ranks for 30% damage, down from 40%). Was it to balance out the fact that Exorcism could be used on any target? Certainly not. At any rate, Blizzard was aware that Retribution DPS on the PTRs wasn't where they want it to be.
Ghostcrawler talks about Spiritual Attunement
If you've been keeping tabs on the Paladin changes lately, you might've noticed one thing that jumps out -- Spiritual Attunement will no longer be a skill but a talent deep in the Protection tree. Essentially a mechanic designed to help Paladin tanks keep their mana up, it was also key to Retribution Paladins' mana regeneration as it works synergistically with Seal of Blood / of the Martyr, the primary Retribution Seal.Of course, if Spiritual Attunement being removed from trainers, the self-damage of Seal of Blood becomes little more than a gimmick and an inconvenience. It also tended to invalidate one glyph, which was the Glyph of Seal of Blood. If Spiritual Attunement is deep in the Protection tree, then the glyph becomes aimed at tanks... who don't use the seal. When players pointed this out on the forums, Dresorull replied to test it out in a future build (I still had Spiritual Attunement as a skill on the PTR) and locked the thread.In a related post, Ghostcrawler lays out Blizzard's intentions for Paladin mana regeneration, saying that Spiritual Attunement is critical to Protection, but they "don't actually like Holy and Ret having (it)". He explains that such a mechanic depends too much on the encounter and gave Patchwerk as one example where SA won't return mana to anyone but a tank. He notes that Blizzard would still like to tune Paladin mana regeneration -- Holy through Illumination and Retribution through Judgements of the Wise.
[EDITED] Paladin changes in Beta build 8962
Unlike last build, where Paladins got so many important changes it took me two posts to cover them all, we get just a little love this Beta build. So little, in fact, that I didn't bother writing it up until now. For those curious Paladins, however, here are the goodies (and baddies) that popped up in Beta build 8962.ProtectionHammer of the Righteous was changed from a triple-target Crusader Strike -- which was kind of silly, really -- into a weapon strike that works off DPS as base damage. The spell now reads: "Hammer the current target and up to 2 additional nearby targets, causing 3 times your main hand damage per second as Holy damage." Which means that even fast one-handed weapons work well with the spell because it calculates from DPS. It makes perfect sense and is a definitive step away spell damage weapons, which traditionally have low DPS. Meanwhile, Improved Devotion Aura's healing effect was also buffed to a maximum of 6%, up from 3%, and Toughness was nerfed to a 30% duration reduction for all movement impairing effects.
