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An introduction to the holy paladin's healset
Seasoned paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine, now with a strong hint of holy. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Some say that hell is other people. Still others claim that hell is repetition. As for myself, I ask, why not both? I recognize now that resolving to level this paladin solely through the Dungeon Finder was a decision fueled by the type of naïveté only afforded to the impetuous. "Surely it can't be that bad," I assured myself as I began my journey at the eager level of 15. Now, fifty five levels later, I can only shake my head at my own hubris and rock myself to sleep at night. Granted, I may be waxing a bit melodramatic here, but don't judge me until you have spent as long as I have "randomly" queuing into the same section of Blackrock Depths. There is a silver lining to all this, however; repetition, although tedious, helps reinforce muscle memory. I could map out every Clique binding I have while mumbling in my sleep. One thing that I made sure to do while making my way up the leveling ladder was to really get to know my heals: how they functioned and in what situations they would be most useful. Therefore, this week I'd like to touch on those most important of abilities to the holy flavor of paladin, our heals.
So you want to be a holy paladin
Seasoned 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! On a clear day, just after the sun has set and there is no moon in the sky, if you are very, very lucky you can just make out the approach of Warlords of Draenor. People with expensive telescopes and bucket hats will insist that it's Mercury, but I've learned to never trust anyone wearing a safari vest. Let's address the question that is undoubtedly burning in your mind: should I use the "boost a character to level 90" feature on a paladin? Well that's a very good question, thank you for asking it. If you don't already have a paladin at max level and want one, Warlords provides a great opportunity to hit the ground running with your new favorite class. Personally, I'm not entirely sure what I will boost. One thing I've always wanted to try was a holy paladin, which would seem to be an easy option given that my protection offspec saw about as much use as Denver's offensive line during the Super Bowl. But just jumping into a completely new role with mostly new abilities never appealed to me, especially if that first jump happened during raid time. I like to be able to prepare for my inevitable failure so that I can write up a short list of excuses why I Beaconed a hunter pet and healed only myself for four consecutive attempts. Scenarios like that are why I try to learn a class from the ground up. Not everyone is like this though; many people prefer to go on the internet and read about these things. Therefore, as I'm leveling I'll recount what I've learned - my triumphs, my mistakes, my body count – in the hopes that should you choose to exalt one of the Light's blessed warriors out of the dregs of the single digits to the heights of the nonagenarians, you might find the transition just a tiny bit easier.
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.
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!
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.
The Light and How to Swing It: Paladining at BlizzCon
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! Wow, what a weekend. Not only was the convention a lot of fun but it was great to meet fellow paladins and non-paladins alike. Most of my time was spent meeting people, watching panels, and playing demos. Amidst the chaos I didn't allocate much time to mulling things over, how the proposed changes in Warlords of Draenor would affect how I, and so many other ret paladins, approach the game, so now that I've had a decent night's sleep and my liver is mostly alcohol-free, I'm spending my day off in blessedly quiet reflection. We didn't see much of any class discussion this year, and unless I missed an entire panel there wasn't a single paladin-related question throughout the entire convention. There are some big questions that it would be nice to have answered, like the permanency of holy power, the relative weights of our stats, the deletion of the warlock class, etc. We did get a few overall changes, changes that will affect ret in turn, so let's see how some of these could impact our day-to-day facesmashing in Warlords of Draenor.
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!
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution after patch 5.4
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! Back in June (Wow, seriously? Tempus fugit, I suppose.) I shared my thoughts on some of the changes coming in patch 5.4. As is typical for me when it comes to change, I was a bit harsh in some of my pre-judgments and, now that we are well into the newest content Blizzard has to offer, I'd like to revisit a few of those points. Inquisition's longer duration Originally I was not very happy about this change. I felt that maintaining a relatively shorter duration buff was part of what distinguished a "good" ret paladin from a "bad" one, as if squeezing out a tiny amount of extra DPS would make a dramatic difference in performance, and that making it easier to maintain would make the spec utterly boring and unchallenging. Boy, was I wrong. It took some getting used to at first, for as Inquisition's duration doubled the WeakAura bar that I used to track it remained the same, resulting in far too many early refreshes than I care to admit. But after the honeymoon I had settled into our new relationship pretty well. It may only be an additional 30 seconds, but it did wonders for setting my mind at ease when I went to refresh it. I still wonder if this is where the devs will stop with it, or if they'll eventually make it passive or allow other abilities to extend its duration (essentially making it passive anyway). I would like to think that Blizzard has learned a great deal from how much tanks are enjoying active mitigation and realize that, on the whole, "active" is fun whereas "passive" is not.
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.
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.
The Light and How to Swing It: Strength DPS gear 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! A new patch means more gear, and more gear means another gear list. Let's get to it before I change my mind and write about how awful it was trying to solo Valithria Dreamwalker in 10-man heroic Icecrown Citadel as holy -- I still can't shake the nightmares. Unless otherwise noted, the following gear can be found within the Siege of Orgrimmar raid. Non-tier pieces appear in normal, warforged, heroic, and heroic warforged varieties, similar to the gearing scheme in Throne of Thunder. Oh, and although I covered Siege of Orgrimmar two-handed strength weapons in a previous article, I will briefly repeat their drop locations for the sake of completeness. Head Helm of the Night Watchman – drops from the Spoils of Pandaria encounter. Thranok's Shattering Helm – drops from Galakras. Helmet of Winged Triumph – token drops from Thok the Bloodthirsty. Magdalena's Murderous Crown – drops from Ordos on the Timeless Isle, and named after death knight theorycrafter and community member Magdalena. Neck Juggernaut's Ignition Keys – drops from Iron Juggernaut. Malkorok's Tainted Dog Tags – drops from Malkorok. Anafielle's Spiked Choker – drops from Ordos on the Timeless Isle, and named after ret paladin theorycrafter and community member Anafielle.
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.
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.
Why ret's tier 16 bonus isn't as bad as everyone thinks
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! As we enter what are surely the twilight builds of the patch 5.4 PTR we are approaching the "speak now or forever complain about it afterward" part of the marriage between test and live servers. Feedback, I would argue, is more important at this stage, the mechanics stage where general ideas are taken from someone's brain and sculpted with pixels and code, than during the tuning stage, which is more or less a giant equation in need of balancing. So I donned my lead-lined undergarments and pillow armor and plunged headfirst into the PTR Discussion forums, looking for posts featuring ret discussion. What I found was disappointing, to say the least. Instead of discussing the nice buffs to Inquisition, Guardian of Ancient Kings, or Unbreakable Spirit, most every forum entry I stumbled across was decrying our tier 16 four-piece bonus. For the unaware, Wowhead shows the current iteration of our tier 16 bonuses as follows: Tier 16 two-piece bonus: When Art of War activates, all damage is increased by 5% for 6 sec. Tier 16 four-piece bonus: Holy Power consumers have a 25% chance to make your next Divine Storm free and deal 50% more damage. The four-piece bonus was reworked once, boosting the free Divine Storm's damage by 50%, but has otherwise remained untouched since. After some initial skepticism I began to really look forward to the bonus, something reminiscent of our tier 10 two-piece ("Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to reset the cooldown on your Divine Storm ability") from a time when the ret paladin reigned supreme. As such I had a hard time understanding how these players could scream for change from their soapbox daises. I read through soul-crushing thread after soul-crushing thread, expecting to find some sort of logic I could latch onto in an attempt to see where they were coming from. The remainder of this article contains the main points I was able to glean from their diatribes, followed closely by why exactly I think these individuals are off their gourds.
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.
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.
3 things retribution paladins should borrow from windwalkers
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! After about a dozen or so failed attempts, I am finally leveling a monk. I'm not sure I could even tell you why I failed to push myself past level 20, but almost every jade-colored Grid square I had started would eventually meet the business end of the word "Delete" before learning how to ride a bike. Now I am jabbing and kicking my way into Outland and, somewhat shamefully, am having a complete blast. I almost feel bad that my weekly playtime on the monk is exceeding that of my paladin by a significant margin, though after reading through the forums and seeing many posters make comparisons between ret paladins and windwalker monks, I don't feel quite as bad. Indeed, in many ways my monk reminds me of my paladin -- a melee class using a secondary resource reminiscent of combo points and maintaining a damage-increasing buff feels right at home. Still, though, there are a number of major differences between the specs, enough to make me a little jealous of what monks have that paladins don't.
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.
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.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in 5.4
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! Earlier last week we got our first glimpse of the 5.4 PTR as Wowhead and MMO-Champion mined a massive amount of data from the latest update to the test realms. With new features like virtual realms, proving grounds, and flex raids, it's easy to be overwhelmed. As for myself, the first thing I did was hit Ctrl+F and searched for "Paladin" to see what, if any, changes we were due. Truth be told, I wasn't expecting a whole lot of changes for retribution -- we seem to be in a nice place, comfortably in the middle of the pack for DPS with heaps of utility to boot. Boy, was I mistaken. Before we get into the discussion, do remember that none of these proposed changes are finalized. The "test realms" aren't named that by chance; the developers want to see how things like this play out on a large scale, larger than their internal testing can accommodate, and sift through player feedback from the community. So while we shouldn't get too worked up over one thing or another on the PTR, it's always beneficial to react to changes, at least in a civilized and logical manner.
