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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%.
Patch 3.0.2 primer for Holy Paladins
This was supposed to go up before the servers did, but as you probably already know, Patch 3.0.2 wasn't quite what we all expected. Now that servers are starting to go back up online, I can better write up this handy guide for the brave new world. Let's try to get as much of this right as possible. If you were as excited as I am -- and you should be -- you probably logged on as soon as your Realm went up, picked out all those cool talents you've been drooling over these past months, and went off reveling in your newfound power.Good for you. Even though Patch 3.0.2 had a few hiccups, most of the important class changes made it through. I had to delete a lot of my macros and change a few. For one thing, Judgement and a Seal can no longer be cast within the same macro. This is because Seals aren't consumed by Judgements anymore, so they now share the same GCD. If you have macros for your Blessings of Freedom, Protection, and Sacrifice, you should edit them to cast Hands instead of Blessings. Lots of little things. I'll probably talk about that in The Light and How to Swing It. For now, we'll take a look at the talent trees and how we'll settle into the 3.0.2 world.
The Light and How to Swing It: The shocking truth in Beta
Ok. So Paladins rock in Beta. There are a whole slew of abilities and talents that make life a whole lot easier and a lot more fun. One popular request on the comments has been to test drive the new Wrath Shockadin, with improvements like a 6 second Holy Shock and ranged judgements from Enlightened Judgements, it really does seem like the spec has finally come into its own. Of course, what looks good on paper doesn't necessarily translate into actual gameplay. With the reshuffle of talents and the consolidation of spell and melee crit, what used to be a fringe off-spec with a loyal following might actually turn into the spec of choice... for healing Paladins. Before anything, though, let's make one thing clear -- this is Beta, so everything we'll be taking a look at today might (and is likely to) change by the time Wrath of the Lich King is live.
