holy-light
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The Light and How to Swing It: We wait with bated breath
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 our upcoming pre-Cataclysm class preview. Today's date is Dec. 24, the night before Christmas. The children have been put to bed, with stories of fantastic Smoke Bombs and amazing Flame Orbs dancing in their heads. We're sitting quietly by the unlit fireplace, waiting for our friend St. Ghostcrawler to arrive during the night. His yacht is led by flying ponies, and he arrives each year to bring us presents. These gifts are morsels of information, crafted by the elven developers in their Irvine workshop. Blizzard has a tendency of saving the best for last. My friends, I am here to tell you, paladins are clearly the best class in World of Warcraft. I am eager to see what the developers have planned for us, but I am also worried about the level of change that we are going to see. Several of the other classes saw significant redesign, like warlocks, and if we're a week behind everyone else, I get the feeling the changes are going to go quite deep. I'm not saying that this type of invasive surgery isn't necessary, I just hope that I like what I see when I wake up on the other side of the knife.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing Valithria Dreamwalker
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 examine how to tackle the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter in Icecrown Citadel. If you've been raiding much in WotLK, you've seen quite the spectrum of 'new' mechanics. While Naxxramas was just a refresh of the old level 60 dungeon, the other raid instances have provided some truly unique fights. The vehicle fight, which started with Malygos and was followed up by Flame Leviathan, gave us the opportunity to step outside our abilities for a few moments, and work with an entirely new (or even nonexistent) healing toolbox. We've also seen fights where healing was the wrong thing to do, with the case-in-point being Anub'arak (specifically on heroic). Healing the wrong target on that fight was literally anti-DPS, as it healed the boss. Icecrown Citadel brings with it several new mechanics, with one specifically that I am sure will be remembered for many expansions to come. That encounter, as you may have guessed, is the escape of Valithria Dreamwalker. Blizzard decided to try some role reversal on this fight, and put healers in charge of 'taking care' of the boss. Instead of killing the boss, however, we must heal her to full, allowing her to escape the dark, cold halls of Icecrown. The DPS are relegated to handling adds, which is their least favorite job, while we get to focus our efforts on a single, stable target, to whom we can do no overhealing. How can it get any better than that?
The Light and How to Swing It: Your group is on fire
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 examine how to handle situations where your entire party is taking serious damage and there's nothing you can do about it (or is there?). I don't know about you, but I've woken up in the middle of the night, on more than one occasion, from a terrible nightmare. I'm not talking about the Emerald Nightmare, you'll have to read Stormrage or talk to some tree-hugging druid if you want to hear about that. I'm referring to something similar to Argent Confessor Paletress' Confess attack; nightmares with a far more sinister source: memories of failed encounters from the past. My guild's first attempt on the Twin Val'kyr has caused me more sleepless nights than any other so far. It was early in the week of their release, and so nobody in the raid had ever seen the Twins before. With no prior knowledge, we pulled the bosses blindly. My co-healer, a resto shaman, disconnected immediately due to an unknown problem. Suddenly I was faced with 10 targets all taking damage from a passive AoE aura, two tanks that were being hit pretty decently themselves, and random DPS in the group losing large chunks of their life at what seemed to be random times as balls of energy bounced around the room. This is my nightmare: the entire raid is on fire at once, and I'm all alone.
The Light and How to Swing It: Keeping the tank alive
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 examine how to handle situations where the tank is getting destroyed, and we're tasked with keeping them alive. Tank death. It's one of the worst ways for a raid encounter to end: abrupt and usually absolute. In a dungeon, you've typically only got one guy who can take a few blows, and so the enemy will start cleaving your soft DPS. Blizzard balances each raid encounter around the idea of having two tanks, so the other tank is often busy with their own duties, and can't survive the double duty. With this era of multiple enrage timers and tight DPS requirements, there's really no room for bringing a spare tank for the 'just in case' situation. Holy paladins are uniquely designed to be the masters of tank healing. We've got multiple cooldowns we can use to reduce their incoming damage, and the most potent HPS toolkit available. A tank has to actually try to die when we've got the Holy Light firehose aimed at them. However, even with all these abilities at our disposal, a tank can still eat dirt halfway through an encounter if we're not playing our best. Read on for a discussion on how to keep your tank up during high damage situations.
The Light and How to Swing It: It's all intellect's fault
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 examine the difference between throughput and longevity, and how intellect skews the scale. Paladins have an incredible amount of what I call 'support' spells: things that aren't part of your rotation but provide us with quite a bit of flexibility. All of our 'Hand of X' spells would fall into this category, along with several other unique abilities that set us apart from other healers. Our healing toolbox has also expanded significantly, with Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light completely redefining how a holy paladin heals in WotLK. My actions bars are filled with macros and various support spells that I may need on a moment's notice. Even with the sheer number of abilities that paladins have to deal with different situations, we are left with only two true healing spells to rely on. Holy Light and Flash of Light are our workhorses, with nearly all of our actual healing coming from one or the other. Holy Light provides us with an essentially infinite source of throughput (see the above graph from Valithria Dreamwalker), while Flash of Light's efficiency gives us a longevity that has other healers green with envy. Trying to reconcile the difference between these two paradigms, massive throughput vs persistent longevity, is one of the most intensely discussed topics in the holy paladin community. Read on for my thoughts on the topic.
The Light and How to Swing It: A little less hybrid
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 helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. Ghostcrawler has been doing a lot of talking pertaining to paladins and Blizzard's vision of them for the future. A lot of this has been spawned by some of the changes the developers have been toying around with on the public test realms. In the current build of the PTR, Lay on Hands causes Forbearance on its target which has prompted quite an uproar from the playerbase. This cuts a leg out from our two major defensive cooldowns making us choose either health or invulnerability during a fight. Holy paladins are getting some text tacked onto Sanctified Light which will allow them to reduce the chance it will cause Forbearance on others by 33/66/100% to allow it to still be useful when healing in groups. As this is the PTR, we don't really know how much of this will end up on the live realms. The developers have been toying around with several different ideas and at the moment we're not sure which one or ones they'll end up going with.
Patch 3.1 PTR build 9658 Priest changes
As I'm sure many of you have heard already, another build has hit the PTR this afternoon. Information on what's contained within is still slowly filtering in, but many of the class changes are already known thanks to Boubouille. Most of the Priest changes are just number tweaks, but there's some good stuff in there for potential Holy Priest PvP viability. Yes, Holy PvP! Let's dig into what we've got.Shadow Shadowform now gives the the periodic damage from your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells the ability to critically hit for 100% increased damage.
Glyph of Holy Light nerfed
Yesterday, the healing forums were flooded with complaints largely by Priests alleging that the new 3.0.8 version of the Paladin Glyph of Holy Light was completely overpowered and made Paladins into group healers, shoe-horning them into a niche recently left half-vacant by our Circle of Healing nerf. Such complainants will presumably be happy to hear that the glyph is being hotfixed, reducing the range from 20 yards to 8. Ghostcrawler calls the glyph "vastly overpowered," and goes on in a later post to give a bit more information. Like most changes, this was not done in response to QQ; as it turns out, the glyph was just overpowered. He also states that [major] glyphs are meant to be "about on par with passive talents" in terms of their power, which is in line with what I've been observing (maybe a few percent increase in damage/healing/mitigation per glyph, for the good ones). At any rate, sorry to my Holy Paladin friends; I guess this one was just too good to last. I'm still jealous of your everlasting mana.
All the World's a Stage: So you still want to be a Shaman
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-first in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. There's something about shamans that gets us thinking and talking. Whether it's something as simple as the proper pronunciation of "shamanism," or something as profound as a shaman's humility in relation to the source of his or her power, the lore and ideology of the shaman class often resonates with players more than many others in the World of Warcraft.One reason for this is that shamans have been such a pivotal force in the lore, possibly more than any other class in the game (depending on your point of view). Other classes, such as warriors, or paladins, come as a sort of pre-defined archetype in fantasy games that don't seem all that different from their original forms in other fantasy settings. The actual beliefs of a priest, for instance, don't seem to matter so much to many players, so long as the class can heal like we expect them to. Even the druids, with their central place in night elf society, sometimes seem more like nature-based magic users rather than true philosophers in their own right.Shamans, however, have a major burden to bear in one of the central plot shifts of the Warcraft storyline -- namely that the orcs, who entered the Warcraft stage in the Warcraft 1: Orcs and Humans computer game as rampaging demonic evildoers bent on destruction, and actually turned out to be a peaceful race that just got tricked into being evil. Shamanism had to be much much more than just an archetype with some special powers -- it had to be a way of thinking, a system of belief that could be taken over by demonic corruption and yet at the same time act as a beacon of truth and goodness once that the demonic taint had been defeated. Shamanism has got to be complex and profound, or else the story wouldn't make sense.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Paladin
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the fourteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. You might say that paladins are the guardians at the gates of hell -- they fight evil wherever it penetrates into their world and they take the fight to the evil's source in the hope of quenching it forever. Although they focus on guarding their people from undead and demonic forces on the rise, paladins actually stand against evil everywhere, including the evil in their own hearts.Being a paladin means that you have a relationship of some sort with the Holy Light, that mysterious force of goodness and faith that flows to some degree within all living beings with positive intentions. Most paladins (and many priests) believe that when you do something that you believe to be good, the power of the Light increases in you and your connection to the rest of creation is strengthened, whereas doing something evil (such as acts of greed, despair, or vengeance) will darken the universe and weaken your connection to it. Whether this belief system is a religion or a philosophy is open to interpretation, and seems to depend in some part upon which race you are.There are three sorts of paladins in World of Warcraft, aligned with the humans, the draenei, and the blood elves. All of these share certain similarities, but each has its own differences as well.
[UPDATED] Paladin changes in patch 3.0.3
Yeah, yeah, I know. You're sick of reading about Paladins. Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just here bearing some news and a couple of opinions. You can always skip down to the the next post, anyway. For those Paladin lovers (and even loathers), Patch 3.0.3 brings about some pretty interesting changes to the class. We got a lot more changes than other classes, but then again we've been getting a lot of attention lately, haven't we?First, the bad news. We knew most of the nerfs since they showed up in the Beta a while back. Well, most of those nerfs made it live to Patch 3.0.3, so let's get this over with quickly so we can move on to the good news. Yes, there's actually good news for Paladins this patch. Seals all get nerfed to varying degrees, the general idea being that they no longer deal as much damage either as a Seal or as a Judgement. Don't ask me for the math, you can check out Boubouille's detailed notes on MMO Champion for the details. All Seals have been nerfed, period. Ouch.[UPDATE: Thanks to Turkeyspit who reminded me about the change to Judgement of Light, which now awesomely affects spells and not just melee attacks. I told you this was a good Patch for us.]
Behind the Curtain: Religion as a game mechanic
Should we have more religion in MMOs?I'm not talking about the Priests and Paladins we see in World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 and probably lots of other games I haven't played. Religion for character classes like these is more often than not a game mechanic, something which is used to explain the source of their powers. Divine Magic is a term which is frequently used to explain a player or character's ability to cast spells. It's a catch-all term, attributing magical and mystical abilities to ill-defined deities and otherwordly beings watching over the game-world. Usually benevolent, these beings empower their followers, enabling them to carry out miraculous feats. Probably deliberately, religion has remained generally fuzzy and ill-defined in MMOs. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Religious debate in the real world is a sure-fire way to incite some flames, and it's no wonder that games developers have been keen to shy away from it thus far.
Behind the Curtain: Religion as a game mechanic pt. 2
If developers chose to extend similar mechanics to affect players, you might find yourself being penalised for being in possession of 'forbidden' materials, whatever they may be. Mechanics might be in place to reflect how devout your character was, meaning you were actively prevented from taking certain actions at a certain time, reflecting any holidays or religious observations your character made. Imagine a Paladin who was actually prevented from ganking lowbies because it was contrary to his faith? Shocker. More blue-sky thinking, I know. Putting aside for now the idea of fake religions, what about allowing real-life religions into games?
Holy and Protection buffs incoming for Paladins
Ghostcrawler just recently posted some good news for both Protection and Holy Paladins. Some of them are simply a matter of convenience, but all of the changes posted were nice little buffs.First, Righteous Defense now has an 8 second cooldown. It's 15 seconds on live realms, and was 10 seconds previously in the beta. I'm very, very glad this change was made, though it's an example of the 'slippery slope' of homogenizing classes/tanks. Paladins were the only class with a ranged taunt, but now all of the tanks have one. Righteous Defense still taunts multiple mobs, but all of the other tanks had/have AOE taunts as well. Righteous Defense mostly lost what made it beautiful compared to the other taunts, so it really needed this buff to not look terrible. I'm glad they did it.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a draenei
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the eighth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.The draenei are one of Warcraft's more unique contributions to the realm of fantasy fiction, the one player race without no real precedent in earlier fantasy worlds. These are not your typical elves, orcs and dwarves borrowed from Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons; the draenei are tall, with hooves, tails, horns and even face-tendrils -- but they are noble and spiritual people, the last remnants of an ancient civilization of magic and beauty.To begin thinking about what it must be like to live as a draenei, imagine how the human race might be many thousands of years into the future, maybe a quarter of a million years from now. Whatever technology those people might have would probably seem like magic to us. Our descendants might unravel the mysteries of biology to such a degree that they can halt the aging process and live as long as they want to. They may be able to tap on sources of power we haven't even imagined, and act with motivations and purposes we could scarcely understand.The draenei as a people were once like this, 25,000 years before the setting of World of Warcraft. Even at that time, they were already ancient in their history and advanced far beyond what you and I might understand. Their world, called Argus, was a prosperous society full of great achievements and magical wonders, quite unlike anything we see today. They had a different name then, however -- they were called, the "eredar" -- a name which now upsets the draenei as a painful reminder of everything they have lost, the corruption, the betrayal and the near extermination of everything they have ever known and loved.
[UPDATED] Paladin changes in Beta build 8926 part I
This is one of the biggest patches to hit Paladins in a while, and it's a mixed bag. Let's get the bad news out of the way first -- all of Seals have been nerfed. All of them. Seal of the Martyr / Blood, Corruption / Vengeance, Wisdom, Light, Justice, Righteousness and even Command have all had their damage reduced. The formulas are tweaks of the values of attack power, spell power, and weapon speed -- a bit complicated to explain in detail -- that result in an overall damage reduction. Now, before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, let me say one thing: don't panic.We can probably consider this patch the nerf patch, which is an essential part of the tuning process. The developers traditionally start from a high power scale and fine tune it downwards -- I mean, look at the poor Death Knight. This is still the Wrath Beta, and while there is a chance these numbers might stick through to live, testing these lowered numbers are vital to getting everything right for release. If you're in Beta, log in, play with it for a while, and give feedback. If you're not in Beta, hold back a bit from making a ruckus and exercise a little patience until the testing is done. Let's take a deep breath. Now where'd I put my inhaler...
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a dwarf
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the fourth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.Imagine if you were raised in a culture who took playing in the mud very very seriously. As a young lad or lassie, your parents advised you that it would be wise of you to learn digging as your profession, and they hoped that one day you would marry a forger. Your people loved the earth so much that they built their homes and cities underground, and reached as deep as they could into the ground to see what they could find there.Then... imagine if, just a few years ago, someone discovered evidence that your people had once been made by giant Titans out of the very stone and earth you now craft with such care. Wouldn't you be pretty psyched?There's so much more to dwarves than just a Scottish accent and short stature, you see. Dwarves are the Indiana-Joneses of World of Warcraft. After eons of digging into and sculpting the earth of Azeroth, they suddenly have a clue as to where they came from and how everything came to be the way it is for them. They are now spread across distant places of the world, digging and plumbing ancient ruins in order to unravel the mystery of their existence, and discover the ultimate reason for being.
Report Card: Phase 3 quests
Phase 3 is now in full swing on many servers, including mine, and this time, we're working on taking the Sun's Reach Harbor as well as opening up the long awaited badge loot vendor. How do the quests stack up this time around? Does the near flawless run for great dailies from Quel'danas continue? I've had a few days to try out the runs, and I have to say that there's a few rough spots, but you can continue to grow your list of dailies with confidence as the new phases come on.
The Light and How To Swing It: Build you own TTRadin
Hi folks, it's me again. Somehow, Liz's computer got unplugged from the Light at the last minute and wiped her draft for this week clean. The task has fallen upon me once to swing the Light and wreak havoc upon these pages with blood and fury. Or something like that. In the wake of the admittedly lackluster (what, no giant GMs or gnome-transfigurations or demons run amuck?) second take on the TTR stress test, I've decided to write up the experience about making your own Paladin on the Tournament Test Realm, aka the TTRadin. If you haven't logged on to the TTR, now's a good time to download the PTR client and get yourself started.Paladin without the painIf you've never played a Paladin before, the TTR is an excellent way to experience some Paladin goodness without having to go through the entire leveling experience -- some parts of which even self-confessed altaholic and column co-writer Chris Jahosky admits to having a dislike for. Of course, leveling is part of the education process, so don't expect to know all the abilities and talents a Paladin -- or any class you make, for that matter -- right off the bat if you don't have a max-level character of that class on the live servers. That said, making a character on the TTR is well worth the effort and is definitely something any player can use to explore their options. Getting a taste of a max-level character, in our case a Paladin (this is a Paladin column, after all), is something players can learn from. So where do we start? We have the usual racial choices: Human, Dwarf, or Draenei for the Alliance; and Blood Elf for the Horde. Because it isn't a PvP server by definition, you can make an Alliance and a Horde character. The tournament server also isn't like the live realms in that there are no quests or NPCs aside from the trainers, vendors, and arena representatives. I haven't explored the tournament realm completely, but it's safe to assume that it's a barren world. The NPCs are all Goblins, by the way, which is a bit unsettling and bizarre. There are few things stranger than seeing little green men and women in full Tier 2.
Libram of What Might Be Truth, Maybe
The Libram of Absolute Truth has been on a bit of a roller coaster on the patch 2.4 PTR. Its current form on Live servers is a 27 mana off of Holy Light. The PTR gave it a boost to an 84 mana reduction, but it has recently been gutted back down to 34. While 84 mana off is really, really nice, I can understand the nerf(or fix), even if it makes my paladin buddies sad. Off of the top rank of Holy Light, it was a 10% reduction in mana cost. In general, a bonus that large comes from 5 talent points or a set bonus rather than one piece of gear, and unless it diminishes over time, it would be hard to beat that bonus in a Relic slot for Wrath. Unless they start adding raw stats to Relics, which they've stated they don't want to do, things would start looking pretty crazy to top that. In the 84 mana reduction state, it was possible to cast Holy Light rank 2 for free. While not a big heal considering you acquire it at level 6, it was something to do when you're completely drained of mana. You can still do this with the 'nerfed' version, but with Rank 1 of Holy Light, so I'm not sure if that had any effect on the decision. There's also a strong possibility the devs have crappy handwriting and the people punching in the values read 34 as 84. Who knows?
