exorcism-dps
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The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysm 101 for holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how awesome Exorcism is. Paladins have always been a flexible class. Our hybrid nature is one of our greatest strengths, and it gives us a variety of ways to solve any problem. We can use our raw might to crush our enemies, we can defend ourselves from our opponents' onslaught, and we can save our friends from certain death. The massive class changes in Cataclysm have brought us another role to fill -- that of the avenging cleric. We can now use our holy nature to cleanse Azeroth of evil (and the opposing faction). Holy paladins are lucky enough to have two different roles they can fill with the same set of gear, and this gives us a great opportunity to be flexible while leveling. You can easily queue for the new dungeons while also churning your way through quests, maximizing your experience gain. With the new Light of Dawn at our fingertips, healing groups in dungeons is nearly painless. A shockadin build also allows us to wreak havoc upon our enemies -- and quite efficiently, too. How can we utilize these two halves of the spec to create the best leveling experience?
The Light and How to Swing It: Real numbers for future shockadins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. On Sundays, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how awesome the Draenei casting animations are. I have heard from a plethora of patient paladins who are very excited about the new shockadin spec. Holy paladins have traditionally missed out on the fun of dealing ranged damage due to various issues with our abilities and talents. Now that Blizzard added some support for the build, we are now tasked with figuring out if it's even viable and how exactly to best play the spec. We're discovering new territory here, boldly going where no paladin has gone before. While we're sure that holy paladin DPS is going to be at an all-time high no matter what, the question is exactly how powerful we're going to be. Luckily for us, the Cataclysm beta servers are still active, so I took the opportunity to run some tests on exactly what type of damage we can expect to be doing. Obviously, if we're just killing mobs for a daily quest, time isn't exactly of the essence. However, if we want Exorcism and Holy Shock to be viable options in PvP or a raid environment, their damage needs to be substantially larger than it has been in the past.
The Light and How to Swing It: Hot talents and glyphs for holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered. The holy paladin talent tree has historically had issues with its filler talents. While many of the talents and abilities were spec-defining, there were other talents that literally had no purpose and were never taken. I'm talking about Sacred Cleansing, which actually didn't work at all throughout most of Wrath. How could we forget Purifying Power, whose usefulness was completely negated by the Glyph of Holy Wrath, which itself was only used to exploit a difficult encounter? Even with all of these junk talents in the tree, we also had a distinct lack of DPS talents, leaving holy paladins nearly helpless when left to fend for themselves. Cataclysm's new truncated talent trees resolve many of the issues our previous talent tree had, as well as providing several DPS talents to give us some flexibility when we need to up our damage output. Exorcism has finally become the spammable attack we can use from range to nuke our targets, and Crusader Strike gives us some DPS presence while we're in melee range as well. The core focus of the holy paladin will always be healing, but it's nice to see that Blizzard created talents and glyphs to support both the healing paladin and the pseudo-shockadin that's emerging in Cataclysm.
