Matt Walsh

Gaming By Matt Walsh

Next steps after boosting a paladin tank to 90

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. With the introduction of level 90 boosts on the horizon, many players are going to be trying new characters, classes, and specs they may have never tried before. I expect this means that many folks are going to give protection paladins a go for the first time, which is a very exciting prospect, because the spec makes for a very fun tank playstyle. In order to help those new folks hit the ground running, I'm kicking off a two-part "quick start guide" that'll break down the spec in the 101-iest way possible, to give those new tankadins a barebones foundation that they can use to jump right into getting their faces pounded in. For today's post I'm going to talk about why one should choose to spend $60 or their free Warlords-given boost on a protection-specced paladin, and what they need to know to safely jump into that first dungeon.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: The ups and downs of protection's funky aggro

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Granted, as far as class design goes, protection paladins are sitting fairly pretty (and not just the blood elves). Our rotation is great, our stat priorities produce a fun playstyle, our talents do what they need to. We don't have any serious holes in our stable of cooldowns, and on the whole staying alive isn't really an issue for us as long as there's a healer nearby. If you had to ask me what the biggest source of frustration with my paladin is, I would quickly reply with the inconsistencies of how aggro plays out. That's not to say that single-target, Patchwerk-like aggro is an issue. Vengeance as-is means that tanks really aren't going to lose threat if they have a lead and they're being punched in the face. Rather, where the look and feel of the system breaks down is on the periphery, and in particular when new adds appear as the clock ticks on those crucial few seconds between spawning and gnawing of the closest healer.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking tactics for bringing down the Warchief

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Finally we've reached the end of the road and, in some respects, so too has Garrosh. He started out as the most emo orc this side of Oshu'gun and after a series of misconceived alley-oops rose to become the leader of one of the two superpowers on Azeroth. Of course we've all finally gotten sick of his nonsense, and it's time he was shown the door. Garrosh presents, as most end-of-raid bosses do, a terrific challenge. This fight is not a walk in the park. Its increasingly harried phases will try the durability of any tank's nerves, without a doubt. To topple this Warchief you'll need to bring your absolute A-game, and hopefully today I'll be able to help you do that.

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking tactics for the penultimate five bosses of Siege of Orgrimmar

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. A little more than a month ago I wrote the second part in this series of tips and tricks for the boss fights of the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, and now (nearly three months after the raid was released) I think I've taken my sweet time enough in closing this enterprise out. Unfortunately the excitement of BlizzCon and the holiday prevented me from coming to a timelier conclusion here, but hopefully your guild was like mine and was stuck on Thok for a couple of weeks -- wait, that's awful -- and so perhaps this may still be somewhat relevant to you. Anyway, there are six bosses to go in this pretty well populated raid, and while most are pushovers, some can present a significant challenge for most groups. Garrosh follows the fine tradition of end-of-raid bosses being multi-phase monstrosities and as a result he's going to get a post all his own -- there's a lot going on there. For the remaining five, because I'm pressed for space and I have to cover so much ground, I'm going to present my tips in more of a lightning round-type of format. Okay, let's do this!

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: BlizzCon recap for tankadins

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. BlizzCon this year was a magical time to be a tank, learning what we did about all the changes coming down the pike in Warlords of Draenor. It seems that Christmas is coming early this year, with Blue Claus having decided that (for once) we're getting just about everything on our lists. Whereas Mists was in many ways an experiment in how tanking could work going forward -- with DPS stats galore -- Warlords is going to officially set those changes in stone and even expand on them! I can't remember the last time I was as stoked as I was then, sitting in those seats and reading the word "GONE" next to dodge/parry. It was like something out of a dream. You always dreamed it would happen and then finally it does... There's just no way to prepare yourself for that kind of elation. And, believe me, the other changes they announced are just as good.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Tips and tricks for tanking the Gates of Retribution

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. The other week we explored the first four bosses of the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, though funny enough it's the branch of the instance that doesn't actually take place anywhere near the orc capital. Regardless, now that that section is cleared, we move on to the sunny shores of Durotar for slightly more serious encounters. Time for some of the messiest tanking you've experienced all of Mists!

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Tips for tanking the first four bosses of Siege of Orgrimmar

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Siege of Orgrimmar has been open for a month now (how time flies!) and with what I've seen over the last month I'm still not sure how I feel about the raid as a whole. The first four bosses are utterly uninspiring to tank and it seems like the raid tries to make up for it with some crazy-hectic fights in the next quad. Dark Shaman alone gave me more grey hairs than I care to admit. I get ahead of myself, though. As they say, there's no better place to start than at the beginning, so in this post I've written up basic quick 'n dirty strats for each of the first four bosses along with glyphing and talenting recommendations to hopefully give you a far easier time toppling the Sha-corrupted forces that stand between you and the actual conflict going on across the sea in Durotar.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Proving yourself at the gold-level tank Proving Grounds

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. As soon as 5.4 launched, one of my biggest goals (aside from the obvious one of getting the legendary cloak) was to go out and grab gold in the tank Proving Grounds before my co-tank could. I'm sure all of you can appreciate the impulse. While I wouldn't say gold is hugely difficult (especially now that I've taken some furtive steps into Endless, it feels like a walk in the park in contrast), it's become obvious in hindsight that I made some errors in my first few gold attempts and made finally overcoming that particular challenge more difficult than it needed to be. Thankfully I think I've learned from my mistakes here, and now, like an Afterschool Special, I can impart some useful knowledge on how best to approach Proving Grounds and go for the gold.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Everything tankadins need to know for 5.4

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. With Blizzard's not-confirmed, delayed, and then for-reals confirmed release date for the Siege of Orgrimmar patch now finally looming in the very near future, this seems as good a time as any to actually sit down and compile and digest the trickle of changes that have steadily been dripping out of the PTR. In previous posts I've talked about the biggest changes as they were first revealed, and since then there have been some even bigger changes, thanks to the numbers pass and its requisite tweaks. All in all, despite a few nerfs, protection paladins are still sitting pretty. We've got some of the best tanking mechanics in the game, we still have haste as a (powerful and viable) option for gearing, and we still have a wide and varied toolbox at our disposal. This expansion has been very good to us, and this patch does little to change that! That said, let's dive in and take a look at the details.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: A look at the tanking gear of patch 5.4

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Is there anything more enjoyable as a patch approaches than ogling all the new gear set to drop in the next raid tier? When the most addicting psychological hook in this game is the steady increase of character power, nothing can be more intoxicating than the promise of new heights and plateaus of character strength and durability. Breathe deeply my friends -- that is the smell of loot, ripe for the picking. Come patch 5.4, a whole new array of armor, trinkets, weapons, and shields will be preparing to find their way into your bags and the very first time you set foot within the new raid you'll want to be prepared with an idea of where the best loot will be dropping for you. Whether it's from that gaping hole in the Vale, behind the walls of Orgrimmar, or from the smoking corpse of Ordos, there's plenty of excellent new gear to choose from. In this post I'm going to first talk briefly about what gearing priorities will look in patch 5.4 and how you will need to cope with inevitably reaching the 50% haste breakpoint, then I'll break down all the new tanking gear in 5.4 by slot. And, thanks to our love of various DPS stats, that definition of what can be tanking gear (for good or ill) casts a very wide net.

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: How will protection glyph come 5.4?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. One of the most monumental changes that protection paladins will be facing in the upcoming patch will be a simple nerf to one of our favorite glyphs. Since just about the beginning of Mists, protection paladins have uniformly equipped the Glyph of the Battle Healer to great effect and, alas, the devs have finally decided to step in and put a stop to our shenanigans. You can't really blame them, Battle Healer was brokenly good -- free heals that were augmented by Vengeance, and while they weren't a gamechanger by any means (thanks to overheals), it was still an advantage that paladins had over any other tanking class. It was a needed change. Regardless, the change to Battle Healer has a ripple effect for protection paladins as it makes Battle Healer a purely situational glyph for fights where the raid needs your Seal of Insight procs more than you need them for yourself. Which means, for probably the first time in many, many months, we will have an open glyph slot. Let's take a look at what could possibly fill that empty space, both in our hearts and our glyphs tab.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

Will Proving Grounds be the new litmus test for players?

A few days ago there was a thread on the official forums where a player expressed concerns that the new Proving Grounds feature would be used by PUG leaders to filter invites for groups, raids, or any other group content. Because Proving Grounds essentially grades any participants, the fear is that trade chat will be flooded by folks looking only to invite players with, for example, a gold medal/completion. Bronze and silver need not apply. It's a pattern that has repeated itself many times whenever a new way of evaluating players was added to the game. In the past we've seen PUG leaders demand armory links, gearscore/average iLevels, and even achievements proving completion of the raids that they were organizing for (which often created Catch-22 situations for many players).

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News

News By Matt Walsh

Something needs to be done about avoidance

I've had a bit of a chip on my shoulder lately about avoidance stats in WoW. For the duration of the expansion plate tanks of all stripes have been spurning pieces with dodge or parry -- or heavens forbid, both -- in favor of more interesting stats like hit, expertise, haste, and mastery, which all provide some sort of hook to the new active mitigation paradigm. It's weird, but in this case, Blizzard is a victim of their own success. They've designed a fantastic new way for tanks to perform their job, which has had the unfortunate side effect of neutering two of the oldest tanking stats in the game. Yet, Blizzard seems convinced that this is a situation that needs fixing, rather than a blessing in disguise, and across the various patches of Mists they have been making tweaks here and there to make avoidance stats more attractive for each plate tank. I believe that this is an incorrect approach; they should instead embrace this happy accident. Much as how leather tanks get to enjoy DPS stats like haste and crit as their bread and butter, so too should plate tanks be freed from the oppressive yoke of bygone, obsolete stats like dodge and parry. The game has finally left those broken stats behind and this is the opportunity to usher in a new, more-perfect system of tank gearing.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Danger looms on the PTR for prot

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Well, this is it. Pack it in, we had a good run. We once were lions amongst melee, kings amongst tanks -- but no more! Thanks to the latest PTR build and the villainous Ghostcrawler, we couldn't even tank an adorable, spiked battle Corgi, let alone Garrosh! How was that -- dramatic enough? I'm trying to capture the special spirit of despair that the official forums usually excels at. (Ok, yeah, room for improvement.) Anyway, truthfully, these aren't particularly devastating nerfs, and on the whole won't do much to tamper our survivability. If anything it hurts our utility a bit, though there are worse spheres to be nerfed in. So, let's dig in and talk about what each change means and how it will reverberate.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: A look at what's in store for prot in 5.4

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. The first big 5.4 patch last week didn't have much of anything for prot, and despondently many of us found ourselves looking over what were primary pvp-oriented or retribution-focused changes. However, finally, our time has come! Wednesday night a whole slate of changes hit the PTR, with all sorts of eyebrow-raising additions for the tankadins out there. Let's dig in and talk about what's on our plates for the next patch as of the latest build.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: How many abilities is too many?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Remember Divine Intervention? I was talking about bygone abilities with some guildmates the other day (we need a ret/holy hybrid, by the way!) and it evolved into an interesting conversation about ability bloat in WoW. Some of them thought that they had way too many abilities on their bars with far too many keybinds to manage, and were dreading finding room for anything new that could be added in the next expansion. Personally, I don't feel like I'm in the saturation point just yet (maybe because I'm not a prolific macro-er) but I can definitely sympathize with the sentiment. Ever since TBC, Blizzard has been heaping more and more abilities into our toolbox, and if we're not yet at a saturation point, we will soon be at one in the future. Regardless, it's interesting to look not only at what our toolbox is like now, but also what it used to be like, and then if something had to be cut down the line, where the knife may well be pointed.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: The problem with tanks

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Last Thursday, Ghostcrawler tweeted something which caused a bit of a stir within the tanking community. In it he revealed that the devs were looking at some strict caps for Vengeance levels (30% of health for 10s, 50% for 25s) that would prevent tanks from using Vengeance to pursue unintended things like solo tanking a two-tank raid boss or standing in fire to stack really obscene amounts of attack power. Now, this isn't another column about the virtues or not of Vengeance. That's a pretty mutilated horse at this point, and from the looks of it, the mechanic is not going anywhere any time soon. However, the brief rekindling of the Vengeance debate did once again shine some light on what is a continuing problem in WoW: what should tanks be allowed to do (in terms of damage output) and what can be done to keep players from parlaying excessive survivability into unintended advantages? What do you do when one third (arguably two-thirds, a lot of this can apply to healers as well) of your players' roles revolves around the mitigation and prevention of damage, and the primary means you have of creating barriers or challenges for players is the threat of character death?

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

Throne of Thunder With Protection Paladins: Being awesome

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. It's not a new phenomenon for protection paladins to be able to use their extensive utility toolbox to mitigate or outright circumvent fight mechanics; it's something that we've been doing since Uther first picked up a blunt object. Throne of Thunder continues that lofty tradition with all sorts of mechanics that can be ducked or dodged by crafty paladins with an excellent sense of timing and the proper addons or macros. We'll also touch on whether it's a good thing that one corner of WoW's tanks can break aspects of an encounter, and the ramifications of such possibilities.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: In defense of stamina

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. If you have spent much time on the official forums at any point since the beginning of -- oh, say, Cataclysm -- you'd notice that there is a particularly prevalent slur that is oft flung around in tanking discussions. This slur cuts to the very core of what it means to be a tank, it is an accusation of seeking vainglory over properly gearing ourselves for survivability. Worse, it is an accusation of being behind the times on tank theorycrafting due to either apathy or incompetence. It is the Scarlet S. Stam stacker.

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Mastering the Troves of the Thunder King as a paladin

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Fortune and glory, kid. Nothing animates like the prospect of a massive pile of treasure, especially when you're racing against the clock and greedily snatching up as much as you can. The trick, in the end, is to be prepared for any obstacles thrown at you -- that is what separates the Indiana Joneses of this world from the Satipos. And if you prefer to be the former and exit the scenario with more gold than you can carry, you'll need to do your homework before you plunge into this exciting new feature from patch 5.2. Thankfully, paladins tend to have a lot of tricks up their sleeves and with the new talent system that is doubly true. With the right preparation, we can make the most of our toolset and claw our way to the end of the loot run with a minimum of muss or fuss.

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PC Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking the first three bosses of Throne of Thunder

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Like jumping into a cold pool after spending too much time in the hot tub, tanking Throne of Thunder after weeks of tier 14 may be a bit of a shocking experience. (Sorry, had to.) This place is no joke -- the health and damage requirements are ratcheted up severely from the previous tier of raiding. The bosses will hit harder and the mechanics will be tighter, but on the other hand, the loot will be even shinier. Honor and glory awaits in the halls of the Thunder King. The first quarter of the dungeon is designated as the Last Stand of the Zandalari, and you'll be seeing some old, tusked faces. Let's talk about what you'll need to do to withstand everything that the finest warriors of that dying land can throw at you.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: A look at 5.2 tanking loot

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Another patch, another tumbling pile of loot that we will spend the next half year greedily chasing like a kid in a candy store. Y'know, if the kid was only allowed to visit the candy store once a week, and the store owner handed him a random piece every time he visited. Still, it's pretty exciting, the possibilities of a new patch. Aside from all the interesting new stuff to do, a new patch always presents the opportunity to grow your character in power and effectiveness through ever-increasing item levels. 5.2 is unique in that, for the first time, most raid drops will have five different versions of item level value. With the introduction of Thunderforged items, we now can collect Raid Finder, Normal, Normal Thunderforged, Heroic, and Heroic Thunderforged flavors of each and every raid drop. Despite this cacophony of loot, for the purposes of my sanity and yours, I'll only be listing the normal-mode version of each item in the list ahead.

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Reviews

Reviews By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: A review of tier 14 from a tanking perspective

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. With the Throne of Thunder echoing in the distance, it will not be much longer before tier 14 is a fading and pleasant memory for many raiders. I think it's a fair assessment to say that this tier has been one of the most successful in WoW's history, at least from an encounter design perspective. An unexpected follow-up from the doldrums of Dragon Soul, the raids of Mogu'shan Vaults, Heart of Fear, and Terrace of Endless Spring have been interesting and (most importantly!) engaging -- especially for tanks. Remember that in the closing days of Dragon Soul and Cataclysm, there was a general feeling of ennui in the raid tanking community. Between the nullification of threat, the introduction of Vengeance, and the seeming dumbing-down of raid mechanics throughout Cataclysm, the sentiment was that Blizzard had given up on making tanking interesting at anything but the heroic raid level. And even then, by "interesting" it meant you would have to cope with much, much more damage. Obviously, it's human nature to assume that past is prologue and as such many tanks assumed the worst was yet to come. So imagine the surprise when the mists dispersed and the land of Pandaria revealed an unexpected renaissance for raid tanks.

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News

News By Matt Walsh

The Light and How to Swing It: A not-so-hasty retreat

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Ghostcrawler created panicked ripples in the tankadin community when he unexpectedly declared on the forums that he had "plans to try and lower the value of haste relative to dodge and parry." I'm sure you, as I, have read over these quotes multiple times, so I won't repeat them all in full for the sake of not wasting the humble electrons shooting through your computer. Nonetheless, the key takeaway is that he feels the main problem is paladin tanks are prioritizing haste, which wasn't supposed to be a major tanking stat, over dodge and parry. (More on that in a bit.) He foresees that a fix might have to involve a nerf to Shield of the Righteous, the primary beneficiary of our haste; though this would be accompanied by some kind of buff to keep our survivability level. Likewise, GC is concerned with protection paladins taking haste plate out of the mouths of those specs it was designed for -- DPS death knights and paladins among them -- and thus causing unnecessary friction in a group. And, of course, he's worried that protection paladins might turn their nose at good tanking gear with dodge and parry stats, considering them garbage. (Again, we'll revisit this.) Thankfully, the crab recognizes that above all, having haste as a tank is fun, and he claims he wants to preserve that. Which is great. So, let's look at this whole crazy mess, and figure out where we are and where this might leave us.

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Gaming By Matt Walsh

5.2 round-up for protection paladins

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. I must admit, while following all the changes of path 5.2 as they trickled out, the one change that got me really, really pumped was the further loosening of transmog rules. In 5.2, a one-handed sword (as just about all our epic weapons are this expansion) can be transmogrified to an axe or a mace. In addition, many weapons from earlier expansions that were designated as mainhand weapons, have been changed one-hand weapons. Combined, this means that in 5.2, no matter what actual weapon I have, it can look like the Gavel of Unearthed Secrets -- an iconic paladin weapon if I ever saw one. Sure, swords are great (the Crusader's Glory is particularly nice), but when I think of paladins smiting the undead and enforcing the will of the Light, I see them holding a massive hammer in their hands. So I'm excited to return to that motif. But obviously there's a lot more going on in patch 5.2 than transmogrifying! There is a new tier set with new set bonuses worth digging into, as well as a slew of class changes that are coming down the pike.

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