retribution-paladin
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Blizzard's new level 90 crash-course videos
Blizzard has released 11 instructional videos designed to give a new level 90 a quick and dirty introduction to their class. The title is perhaps a bit misleading, because these are not complete class overviews. Instead, each video focuses on a particular specialization of that class--and specifically, a DPS specialization. The specs featured are: Frost death night, Balance druid, Survival hunter, Arcane mage, Windwalker monk, Retribution paladin, Shadow priest, Combat rogue, Elemental shaman, Destruction warlock, and Arms warrior. If you've got a brand-new 90 that you're still figuring out, or if you're looking to busy yourself learning a new aspect of your class before Warlords of Draenor, these might be of interest to you. It is nice to see a Blizzard-sponsored guide for specs such as the Balance druid, which I personally find annoyingly complicated to play, but I'm a bit puzzled by the extremely specific nature of the videos. Are there going to be further guides for tanking and healing specs? Or for the DPS specs not covered here, such as Affliction warlocks, Fury warriors, Feral druids, Subtlety rogues, and more? I think videos like this that come straight from the horse's mouth of Blizzard are a great idea, but it's strange to see a set of them that feels so incomplete. Still, if you're toying with the idea of learning one of the specs covered, the videos are a good place to start.
Weapons and stats for ret paladins in Siege of Orgrimmar
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Weapons have always been my favorite piece of gear. They're iconic and powerful; they define our spec more clearly than any spell or ability. So when I stepped into Throne of Thunder and finally saw Zerat, Malakk's Soulburning Greatsword drop, I took one look at my aging Shin'ka, Execution of Dominion, a pale copy of its normal and heroic variants, and quickly tossed the axe aside. And then did the same thing to Zerat when we saw Uroe, Harbinger of Terror drop from Lei Shen. And again when a heroic Greatsword of Frozen Hells gracefully tumbled from the heavens and landed on the corpse of Horridon, nestled in whatever pockets or pouches or sacs a massive direhorn may have. As patch 5.4 and the Siege of Orgrimmar loom on the horizon, some exciting and deadly instruments wait to be plundered. Since this will (okay, might) be the final raid of the expansion, now is a good time to reexamine our stat weights before we make any judgment calls on the bludgeons that those savages have to offer.
How to key-bind your retribution paladin
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! There are few things more frustrating while playing video games than being unable to control your character properly. In select cases this can be due to some fault in the game itself, but more often than not it tends to be a hardware malfunction. I had an increasingly difficult time playing Halo 3 when I would whip my controller at the wall in a blind rage every time someone would counter-snipe me just when I found a particularly good perch. Recently though, my troubles have been with my mouse. My Logitech G500 has served me well for a few years but countless hours of furious clicking in games like Diablo III and Torchlight II have taken their toll. After some careful deliberation I decided to get the G500's older brother, the Logitech G600. I felt, playing as much WoW as I do these days, investing in a self-proclaimed "MMO mouse" would be sensible. When I got the mouse and unboxed it, however, I was not prepared for just how many buttons this thing has. I sat with my spellbook open trying to find the most reasonable arrangement of keybinds for longer than I care to admit. Eventually I settled on a group of binds that I'm slowly but surely getting accustomed to, though not before I "misclick" and toss a Hand of Protection on a hunter. This week I'd like to go over keybinds, discussing some general tips and going over two different schemes that I've used that hopefully some of you will find useful (unless you're left-handed, in which case I apologize that these tips may not be all that helpful for your sinister situation). If you have another setup you'd like to share, please do!
The Light and How to Swing It: Evaluating the success of holy power for retribution
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Before we begin, go take a look at the new beta build 15640 currently being mined. Some of it is a bit wonky and messed up (Blessing of Might now gives 0 mastery, huh?), but some big ret changes can be found. Blizzard seems to be cleaning up some spell mechanics and tooltips by taking a weed whacker to those abilities that have both attack power and spell power dependencies. The new version of Sheath of Light, Sword of Light, boosts our SP by an additional 20% of our AP. I'll wait until the number crunchers at Elitist Jerks have a chance to digest this material before I say whether or not the extra 20% conversion will make up for losing our double-dipping AP bonuses on things like Censure and Word of Glory, but really this move just strikes me as trying to clean up the mechanics so the devs don't get a migraine every time they want to tweak a few numbers. Hopefully, we'll come out of this change with most of our limbs intact, and the blues will successfully save a few brain cells in the long run.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 ways to start retadin combat off with a bang
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! One of the perks of this job, at least in my mind, is receiving reader mail and interacting with the community. I love doing what I can to help people new to the spec; it's really why I started blogging and writing about retribution paladins in the first place! Anyway, last week I received an email posing the following question: I have noticed that some other ret paladins have very high initial DPS. How are they doing this and how can I do the same? The string of abilities and buttons you hit at the beginning of combat, called opening sequences or openers, are a much-discussed topic among theorycrafters and the community at large. Naturally, your first few attacks can set the pace for the rest of the fight. Fortunately, the spec is forgiving enough that even if you flub a button at the beginning of an encounter, your overall DPS won't go straight in the toilet. Even so, I have a few pieces of advice up my sleeve from my own experiences that can help you start the fight off right.
The Light and How to Swing It: In defense of Inquisition
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! When your paladin first hit level 81 and you visited your trainer, I bet you had no idea how much of an impact that little ability called Inquisition would have on your future DPSing career. OK, maybe if you read the tooltip you could have had some idea, but I will fully admit that I completely forgot it was in my spellbook until a short while after I hit 85. And to be fair, at the time it was a really lackluster ability. Sure, Exorcism hit like a truck thanks to the new version of The Art of War, and Hammer of Wrath still hit decently hard, but other than those two abilities, Inquisition didn't really buff a whole lot. One of the main selling points of Inquisition (if not the main selling point) came when Blizzard changed our mastery from 3 free holy power to X% extra holy damage off your most used abilities in patch 4.0.6, allowing Inquisition to boost an even larger percentage of our damage by 30%. So, thanks to our mastery, Inquisition is here to stay. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In case my own opinion wasn't made clear in the title, I have been a long-time supporter of this ability. However, I know that there is a very large group of players with a dissenting opinion, and that's OK. Some preferred the Wrath model of retribution to the current model, and for others, it's just the opposite. In an effort to make my reasoning clear, I'm going to pick a few of the most common complaints I have seen or heard. Hopefully, my responses won't make me seem like I'm a masochistic freak who loves to stare at a countdown and plot in advance exactly when to refresh it. Because I'm totally not -- my therapist assures me that I'm a completely normal person.
Retribution bug hotfixed, Vengeance temporarily returns to PvP
Zarhym has given us an update on the bug with Seal of Truth from yesterday, and it opens a fascinating window into the complexities of the code that ultimately is the World of Warcraft. Zarhym - Update on Retribution Paladin Bug The bug where paladin Seals could sometimes cause excessive damage has been fixed. This bug came as a result of a hotfix we put in to fix an issue where some attacks, such as Scatter Shot, were still causing Vengeance in PvP situations. While these things may seem totally unrelated, it has to do with our proc system, which is an extremely complicated mechanic under the hood. We reverted that hotfix, meaning you may sometimes see Vengeance in PvP. But we don't think that will present a major balance concern at this time. To be clear, we have no current plans to take action against players who experienced this bug last night unless we come across any extreme cases. The error was ours and we haven't seen any evidence -- so far -- of players excessively exploiting the bug. We reserve the right to take action if we do find evidence of players crossing the line to repeatedly exploit this bug for major in-game advantages. source I won't lie, I find this fascinating. The idea that the issue lies in a system that on the surface would seem totally unrelated gives me the shivers just imagining what it must be like to maintain and advance the design for code that's been around for years and years. I have to agree that letting Vengeance sometimes pop up in PvP is probably the better option. It's only going to happen in an extremely limited set of circumstances, anyway. I'm also glad only extreme edge cases will be seeing bans, as I had no idea the bug even existed while leveling my ret paladin last night and only figured it out afterwards. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
The Light and How to Swing It: The Fall of Deathwing, ret edition part 1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Well, here we are, the first two of the final four bosses of the expansion. That is, we think Deathwing is the final boss of the expansion -- it is still unclear whether Blizzard will pull another We're not done with the next expansion yet! raid on us like it did in Wrath with Ruby Sanctum. Regardless, we have a raid that needs a conclusion and a guide to go along with it, so let's get started! Please note that this guide, like many others I have written, is for the normal version of each encounter. Some mechanics, like Fading Light and Twilight Sappers, either work differently or have been removed on the Raid Finder difficulty. Ultraxion I really wish I had more to say about this fight, but Blizzard isn't having it. Simply put, Ultraxion is this raid's Patchwerk with the addition of a button. Yes, you really do just stand in one place, run your rotation train on him, and hit a button when the situation calls for it. I honestly wish there were more to this fight, but there it is.
The Light and How to Swing It: Secondary stat discussion for the discerning ret paladin
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Since we're approaching what should be the final content patch before Mists of Pandaria, now would be a good time to discuss secondary stats. We saw in Wrath that things like haste and crit got out of control near the end of the expansion; a mage in my guild longs for the days when he could get his crit up past some absurd number and make fire "good again." I don't have the heart to tell him that no amount of crit will ever make him good -- but I digress. Let's take a look at those stats on our gear other than King Strength and how they work together to give us some big numbers.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in the Firelands, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Dan Desmond walks you through the Firelands. Before we delve into some strategies for dealing with another two bosses within the Firelord's domain, let's have some quick words about the most recent Censure hotfix. Yes, it's a marginal DPS increase, made even more marginal if you need to switch targets often and drop your stacks -- but the important thing is that Blizzard's working on it. Trust me, more buffs are coming. Last time, we covered some tips for dealing with Shannox and Lord Rhyolith. This week, we continue the two-for-one deal and bring you two very add-centric fights, Beth'tilac and Alysrazor.
Retribution paladin buff and other hotfixes incoming tonight
A number of hotfixes have been (or will be) applied to live realms today. One is a particularly noteworthy PVE retribution paladin fix intended to bring ret DPS up to match the competition in the Firelands, as paladin DPS has fallen a bit behind in this raid tier. Paladins will be receiving a +40% damage boost to Censure, the stacking DOT associated with Seal of Truth. The other hotfixes are aimed at quest-related bugs that may have been interfering with players' solo progression. The explanation for the retribution buff and the details of these quest hotfixes can both be found after the break below.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in the Firelands, part 1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Dan Desmond walks you through the Firelands. Firelands has been out for a couple of months now. Many have gotten their hands dirty fighting against the minions of Ragnaros; a few have even beaten the elemental lord himself. But many more are just rolling up their sleeves, waiting for their friends and guildmates to get bored of playing in the sun (seriously, it's going to be there for another 5 billion years -- I think you can play a little Warcraft here and there and it won't mind). Well then, what better place to start than at the beginning?
The Light and How to Swing It: Basic retribution cooldowns -- when to pop your wings
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. With the Light as his strength, Durin Mundahl takes on the foes of Azeroth with all the wrath of a retribution paladin. Feel free to send your retribution questions or comments to durin@wowinsider.com. Hello, my Light-wielding brethren. Let me start off by saying that all of this information applies to patch 4.2 and the current state of retribution paladins. In future patches, this information may become outdated. Use your own Judgement when reading. Some side effects may include increases of a few thousand DPS on target dummies and an overall feeling of ecstasy. Working as intended. After my last article, I got a few emails asking basic questions about retribution paladins and how to play them. I get questions like What's my rotation?, How is your damage so high?, and Why do you keep pulling aggro? pretty frequently. When I'm not trying to convince my guild it's the tank's fault I'm pulling aggro (even though it isn't), I try to explain to people that the key to doing good damage nowadays comes mainly from cooldown management, much like a lot of other classes -- but I'm not writing about mages or warriors here.
The Light And How To Swing It: Retribution changes and new gear in 4.2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. With the Light as his strength, Durin Mundahl takes on the foes of Azeroth with all the wrath of a retribution paladin. Feel free to send your retribution questions or comments to durin@wowinsider.com. Where do retribution paladins stand now that 4.2 is here? Let's look at the current state of the ret pally. In future patches, this information may become outdated, so use your own Judgement when reading. Side effects may include increased raid AOE damage and an overall feeling of satisfaction. Working as intended. Let's get down to business, shall we? Seal of Righteousness now can be activated by any melee ability, not just single target melee abilities. This adds Hammer of the Righteous (the physical component) and Divine Storm to the list of abilities that can activate this seal. In addition, Seal of Righteousness procs can now be critical effects. Inquiry of Faith now increases Inquisition duration by 66/133/200%, up from 50/100/150%. The Seals of Command talent now makes Seal of Righteousness hit an unlimited number of melee targets, instead of only 2 additional targets. Selfless Healer can no longer be dispelled and cannot be stolen via Spellsteal; and, in addition to its current effects, it lowers the cooldown of Word of Glory by 5/10 seconds. Glyph of Seal of Truth expertise bonus now also works when Seal of Righteousness is active. source
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution paladin gear in 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 Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub's loot for retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Patch 4.1 will be hitting live servers ... well, eventually. We don't really know. It's been on the PTR since later February, and it never feels any closer, does it? Regardless, patch 4.1 is bringing the revamped Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman heroics which have both been (more or less) fully itemized in recent weeks. That's what we'll be looking at today. Do note that this is content that is still on the PTR, so itemization changes could still happen before the patch hits live realms, though it is unlikely. We can all be reasonably sure this list will work just fine come patch day. Do note, however, that what bosses these drops come from isn't concrete quite yet -- but that's fine. They're not raid zones; you don't need to save up your DKP. Plus, knowing that they exist within these two dungeons narrows it down pretty well already. The list is also going to be fairly short. It's only two dungeons, after all.
The Light and How to Swing It: Essential retribution paladin addons
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 addons for retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Today's topic was requested by a reader, and I must admit it took more effort that I'd have liked to assemble the piece. I'm one of those players who tries to use as few addons as possible. As an expansion progresses, I continuously shed my mods until I use almost none at all. I use them as teaching aids. If I'm having difficulty performing a particular task, I use an addon to make it easier on myself -- until I'm more comfortable with that task. "Okay, I did it with the addon," I say to myself. "Now I'll turn it off and see if I can do without it." It's not that I don't believe in addons -- they're great! It's just that I have a hard time calling any of them essential. Still, I'll try to outline a few addons that I believe will be beneficial to your performance as a retribution paladin.
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: Customizing your retribution paladin
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 customizing your retribution paladin for raiding. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. This edition of The Light and How to Swing It, where we'll discuss gemming, enchanting and reforging your retribution paladin, was in the works a few weeks ago, but I made the decision to hold off on it for awhile because we weren't entirely sure when patch 4.0.6 would launch at the time. Patch 4.0.6 flipped paladin stat priorities upside down. Haste, which was our favorite stat ever, is no longer so important to us. Mastery, which was some sort of bad joke previously, is now the best secondary stat for us. It didn't make a lot of sense to release a guide to customizing your paladin's stats when all of it was going to change within days. Now that patch 4.0.6 is here, we don't need to worry about that any more.
The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.0.6 for retribution
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Justicar Alex Ziebart heralds retribution's triumphant return. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Patch 4.0.6 is right around the corner. Isn't it about time we discuss what this means to the retribution paladin? You've all waited for this long enough, so let's skip the pleasantries and get right down to it. We're going to go through the paladin patch notes relevant to retribution paladins one by one. Do note that we are not covering all of the paladin patch notes, such as the mana cost changes to heals or those that impact holy and protection talents. While some of those things may technically impact retribution, we would all much rather talk about issues very specifically related to hitting things with a righteous vengeance until they die. Let's dig in.
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.
