word-of-glory
Latest
The return of the Shockadin!
I think the leveling is too easy now, so I end up leveling my characters in otherwise suboptimal ways. I quested as arcane rather than as frost. I'd not learn flying until I absolutely had to. I'd do only orange quests. I also leveled my paladin as a shockadin all the way to 85. Mists of Pandaria comes along, and I figured, why let the 5 levels to 90 stop me? Guilded paladins had told me I should go retribution, that the pre-MoP shockadin excitement wasn't going to pan out. But then I happened upon the "Not Mad, Just Disappointed" shockadin spec by Catulla of Flavor Text Lore. I've styled my paladin in this flavor of shockadin, and I've been having a blast. I don't have the holydin expertise to comment on whether shockadin really could be viable for Challenge Modes or PvP. However, I highly suggest trying this out if all you want is a little healer-spec mob-killing action. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
The Light and How to Swing It: Remembering our first year of holy power
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 questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. As I looked forward to this year last December, I wasn't sure holy paladins were going to survive 2011 in one piece. We were just learning to adapt to the three-heal model and figuring out how to manage our holy power properly, and I had serious doubts about our AoE healing and mastery bonus. Luckily, I was wrong, and we have thrived in Cataclysm. We started by focusing on our specialty, powerful tank healing, and then expanded to take over the raid healing role as the year progressed. While holy power and the new healing model were the big topics of early 2011, AoE healing has clearly been the topic that defined this era in holy paladin history. Holy Radiance's first beta version, Healing Hands, was loudly trumpeted when the Cataclysm NDA was lifted. Light of Dawn's struggle to find a place in our arsenal has caused more lines of paladin patch notes than any other ability. Learning to AoE heal has been our biggest challenge this year but also our greatest success.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladins and holy power
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 questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. When discussing the major changes that paladins saw in Cataclysm, holy power is always at the top of the list. While hunters received their pseudo-energy resource called focus and death knights had their rune system revamped, holy power was easily the most interesting mechanic that was introduced. There's no way to play a holy paladin efficiently without completely adopting holy power. The two holy power releases are both free and flexible. They only cost holy power to use, and they give us a strong instant heal and the only instant AoE heal in our toolbox. We receive a relatively fixed amount of holy power every minute, with the biggest contributor being Holy Shock. We can only use Holy Shock about 10 times a minute, although a few of our talents help augment that number. The key concept is that holy power is a fixed resource, which means that deciding between Light of Dawn and Word of Glory becomes an important choice.
The Light and How to Swing It: Best practices for holy paladins
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 questions you want answered, like what to look for in your World of Logs parses. Holy paladins are doing all right. While patch 4.1's notes may have retribution and protection up in arms about the new cooldown on Word of Glory, holy paladins are exempt via Walk in the Light. We're actually not seeing any changes in the upcoming patch -- at least, none that have been announced yet. The lack of updates shouldn't come as a surprise to a healing class that's been performing relatively well. Minor balances to our mana and effectiveness have been used to keep us in line with the other healers, but we're otherwise stable. Patch 4.1 will buff our recently discussed set bonus, but that doesn't help improve the gear today. Just because Blizzard doesn't have any buffs planned doesn't mean that we can't work on improving our performance naturally. There is truly no WoW player who can perform perfectly at every moment, but the closer we get to that ideal, the stronger healers we become. As healers, we should constantly be developing our skills and refining our gameplay. There's nothing worse than feeling like the weak link on the chain, and so keeping ourselves at top healing efficiency is crucial to being successful in whatever environment you're healing in.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution of patch 4.1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Justicar Alex Ziebart tackles patch 4.1's impact on retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Before we get started here, I'd like to include a disclaimer: Yes, we're about to talk about patch 4.1. However, it is still extremely early in the patch's life cycle, so anything and everything could change before the patch hits live realms. We are going to talk about the patch because I feel the few changes to retribution currently on the PTR are significant, and talking about them is a good way to gain an understanding of them. If you like (or dislike) a change but don't understand the how and the why, what good is it? With that out of the way, it's time to render judgement upon the patch 4.1 patch notes.
The Light and How to Swing It: Straight talk about holy paladin healing
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 questions you want answered, like how come I had to use Lay on Hands to save that tank. You've heard me talk about Cataclysm's revolutionary triage paradigm of healing, and you've read all about the new Three Heal style for heal design. Every healing class starts with three nearly-identical healing spells as a baseline. The devs then sprinkle in a few extra heals to make each class somewhat unique. Add in a variety of AoE and specialty heals, and you've got a recipe for any one of the healing classes in Cataclysm. We were subject to a lot of retooling to get our holy tree to fit into this model, but it was definitely a success. While it's fun to discuss the paradigm from a bird's-eye view, it's also not representative of actually healing encounters. WoW isn't played with a pen and paper, but with a keyboard and mouse. Every boss encounter requires different techniques, and their varying mechanics are key in determining the best course of action. How can we take what we know about the new healing paradigm and actually apply it to real encounters? What heals are holy paladins really using today?
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: How to heal before Cataclysm
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 questions you want answered. Blizzard's development team really has its hands full. They're working on implementing some of the largest class changes ever introduced, while also trying to maintain some semblance of balance at both level 80 and 85. While a few things have fallen through the cracks (like the DPS of every plate class after the patch initially launched), most players are able to adapt to the changing environment. We've all been busy regemming our gear, reforging to the stats that are the best for us, and ensuring that we've gotten rid of all of the mail healing gear we stole from shaman before patch 4.0.1. I've covered several of the upcoming holy paladin changes in detail and also talked quite a bit about some of the future healing strategies that we'll be implementing. Unfortunately for us, holy paladins are stuck between a rock and a hard place right now. We're without Holy Light's old potency to carry us, and with Holy Radiance eluding us until level 83, we're in a pretty weak place. We used to have Judgement of Light and a full 100 percent Beacon of Light to carry us on the healing meters. Now, we've got resto druids dropping Efflorescence patches all over the raid while we're praying to hit even a handful of targets with Light of Dawn. What can we do in the meantime to keep us effective while waiting for Cataclysm?
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 rotation and cooldowns 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. A couple of weeks back, I covered the basics of things that changed for retribution paladins. At the time, I was putting off any information about rotations, because our class has drastically changed and I wasn't sure if there were any more changes coming down along the lines. Now, 4.0.1 is here and locked in. I'll be honest. Some of you might not like the direction the class has taken. I do ask you all to at least give it a try for a week before getting upset. A lot of classes have been revamped and I expect a lot of class-swapping before the expansion. However, those of you who are looking at these changes and drooling should find much more depth to the class.
The Light and How to Swing It: Hot talents and glyphs for holy paladins
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 questions you want answered. The holy paladin talent tree has historically had issues with its filler talents. While many of the talents and abilities were spec-defining, there were other talents that literally had no purpose and were never taken. I'm talking about Sacred Cleansing, which actually didn't work at all throughout most of Wrath. How could we forget Purifying Power, whose usefulness was completely negated by the Glyph of Holy Wrath, which itself was only used to exploit a difficult encounter? Even with all of these junk talents in the tree, we also had a distinct lack of DPS talents, leaving holy paladins nearly helpless when left to fend for themselves. Cataclysm's new truncated talent trees resolve many of the issues our previous talent tree had, as well as providing several DPS talents to give us some flexibility when we need to up our damage output. Exorcism has finally become the spammable attack we can use from range to nuke our targets, and Crusader Strike gives us some DPS presence while we're in melee range as well. The core focus of the holy paladin will always be healing, but it's nice to see that Blizzard created talents and glyphs to support both the healing paladin and the pseudo-shockadin that's emerging in Cataclysm.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in 4.0.1
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 gregg@wow.com. A couple weeks back, I covered the changes to protection for the 4.0.1 pre-Cataclysm patch that usually goes out a month(ish) or so before release. The point of those patches is so that everyone can play with the new class features and get everything figured out before the chaos that is the actual expansion release. Now it's time to do the same sort of coverage for ret pallies. If you haven't been following the changes thus far, it's going to look odd. There are new class concepts and skill/buff consolidations. First off, picking your spec now has a lot more meaning from the get-go. You receive most of the passive buffs that you'd have to spend 40 talent points getting in the past for free at level 10 that are responsible for making your chosen spec usable. As an example, you get Sheath of Light, Two-Handed Weapon Specialization and Judgements of the Bold. That provides your attack power-to-spellpower conversion, your weapon damage bonus and your mana regeneration. All of this just for picking the spec. In addition, you get a new attack called Templar's Verdict that we'll get into later. First off, let's talk about the biggest change to our class in the expansion: holy power.
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%.
The Light and How to Swing It: Protection in patch 4.0.1
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 gregg@wow.com. My fellow tankadins, I know we haven't talked in a while. I've been talking to the ret pallies lately, but I haven't forgotten about you. The main reason is that I kind of swapped over to retribution during that time period where the devs were mucking with Holy Shield so much, and it was a little more consistent to swap over to something else during that time period. I even had my newish tanking gear back on while playing on the beta lately. However, a lot has changed since we last spoke, and it would behoove us all to get down to business. Tanking as you know it, with our fairly static rotation of 96969, is gone. Divine Plea's refreshing with melee hits is also gone. Also, we now have another resource bar to watch, in addition to mana. Be not afraid. There are answers beyond.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Power hands-on
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 how holy power works and what we'll be using it for. If we look at the resource systems of WoW over its lifetime, it's clear that Blizzard has been trying to diversify the mechanics. We've seen warriors' rage system constantly tweaked, rogue energy regeneration altered in every expansion, and hunters returning to their old focus resource from back in the original beta. The inception of death knights also introduced not one, but two resource systems to the game. Warlocks are even getting a new soul shard system in Cataclysm that will give them a brand new resource bar. Paladins of all specs have been having problems with their ability usage. Retribution paladins could use a castrandom macro and do nearly full DPS, protection paladins have an incredibly static "969" rotation, and holy paladins have been stuck using nothing but Holy Light since Naxxramas. We needed something to help us break the cycle of repetitive ability usage. The dev team looked at ways to give our class a little more flavor, and came up with the concept of holy power.
Cataclysm Beta: Holy power questions
Holy power is the big conversation topic for paladins right now (well, that and mobility in PvP -- but that's always a topic of conversation for paladins). For those of you who have been out of the loop, Blizzard announced during its last developer chat that for the betterment of the class, paladins would be receiving a new resource called holy power. This would be used in conjunction with mana for a variety of new and existing abilities. So after having played with holy power on the beta realms, we decided to ask our Twitter followers if they had any questions or concerns about this new system for us to look into. Soranomaru asks: "How fast does it accrue? How do you spend it effectively? Is it a mechanic to empower spellcasts or another ressource like mana?" Short answers: Currently, every 3 seconds for ret, 4 seconds for prot, and 6 seconds for holy due to the abilities and talents they'd be using to earn it. Usually, three points is the most efficient. It's a secondary resource, like runic power is to runes on a death knight, and there are certain abilities that use it and other abilities that have nothing to do with it. Long answers: Holy power is a secondary resource that you'll have along with your current mana bar. As retribution and protection, you'll be using Crusader Strike to build up your holy power points (HPP). If you're holy, you'll still have access to Crusader Strike, but you will also be using Holy Shock to build up that HPP. The most HPP you can build up at a time is three, so you'll be earning and spending fairly quickly. Some abilities give a flat rate based on how much holy power you put into it (Word of Glory), while others get much more efficient with the more points used (Templar's Verdict).
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Powah!
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 gregg@wow.com. Well, Chase decided against using "Holy Powah!" as the title for his paladin article on the subject for healadins, so I am selfishly going to grab it. For those of you who haven't been keeping up with paladins since the Twitter developer chat on Friday, we're getting overhauled yet again and more deeply than ever before. Not only are things being simplified and condensed again like we saw at the beginning of Wrath, but we're getting an additional resource system on top of mana. That's right, additional and on top of mana, which means we're going to be the second (or third?) mana-based class with an extra resource bar to watch. This new system is called holy power, and no, it isn't referring to a talent in the holy tree that adds crit. It is a mixture of combo points and runic power. This whole conversation is going to take a while (and a couple of blue quotes), so let's continue after the break.
