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The Light and How to Swing It: The new tanking gear of patch 4.3
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Last week, we talked about what you needed to know to prepare for the dawning of the Hour of Twilight. Now let's talk about what shiny new purples you can expect to rip from the still-warm carcasses that will lie in your wake as your cut a swath through the new content. Our itemization goals haven't changed since 4.2. Mastery is still king, and threat stats are still to be avoided. In the list below, I didn't list the gear in any particular order, so don't expect the top choice to be the best. Indeed, the best piece will depend on how much mastery you have and thus how close you are to block cap.
The Light and How to Swing It: Raid gear for ret paladins in Dragon Soul
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 talking about upgrades in Dragon Soul, we need to discuss the three separate tiers of raid gear available in patch 4.3. Thanks to the introduction of the Raid Finder, a lower tier of the same gear that drops from normal and heroic Dragon Soul is readily available to those who queue for it. This lower tier is of ilevel 384, the same level gear that drops from Ragnaros on normal difficulty. If you had done any heroic Firelands raiding and got some gear, you will find that the Raid Finder tier is seven ilevels behind that gear. For most pieces, you will want to upgrade as normal (from 378 to 384, for example). For tier gear, however, it appears that the new two-piece T13 set bonus overpowers the itemization difference between heroic T12 and Raid Finder gear, at least for now. If you're available to do additional testing, I'm sure the theorycrafters at the Elitist Jerks retribution thread would adore you for contributing. For the time being, I would pick up some lower-ilevel tier and test it out while still holding onto your heroic T12. Remember, four-piece T13 is our ultimate goal here, so don't skimp on those loot rolls.
The Light and How to Swing It: The best patch 4.3 gear for your holy paladin
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 why paladins are so awesome. The itemization team at Blizzard has been especially stingy when it comes to holy paladin drops in Dragon Soul. While there were hundreds of items added in patch 4.3, very few of them are ideal for holy paladins. We're used to this sort of treatment though, as we're the only special snowflake spec that requires its own set of gear. No other class wants to wear intellect plate, and there's nothing more frustrating for a raid group than seeing the same plate healing gloves drop every single week. A few character slots have a limited number of items available, but there's an upgrade for every single piece of gear you have today. Between blacksmiths, the valor points vendor, and Dragon Soul bosses, there are still plenty of gear for us to lust after. There are also new epic gems available from the Dragon Soul bosses that we can adorn our gear with, making us more powerful than ever. Our overall gearing strategy hasn't changed much since the last patch, although mastery rating is a bit better due to the new design of Holy Radiance. I am favoring spirit as the best secondary stat, with haste close behind. Critical strike rating and mastery rating are a toss-up; you can pick your favorite.
The Light and How to Swing It: 3 things tankadins need to know
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Patch 4.3 is upon us, and the Hour of Twilight has come. Once more, it falls to us rugged men and women of plate-covered action to strap on our Bulwarks of Azzinoth (because, seriously, what other shield would you transmogrify to?) and march into the fray. Deathwing's assault on Azeroth is coming to a head, and to make sure we're ready for the challenges beyond, we need to be as prepared as possible. 4.3 is a pretty tame patch when it comes to class changes -- no nerfs or buffs galore ... my kind of patch. Nonetheless, there are three key things you need to know about the patch to bring your absolute best to the table. Let's dig in.
The Light and How to Swing It: Latest holy paladin preview for Mists of Pandaria
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 why paladins are so awesome. The official Mists of Pandaria talent calculators were released by Blizzard recently, including a list of each talent tree's abilities. By diving into the skill list and analyzing the talents, there is a lot of information available. Most of the information is old, as we learned about many of the changes at BlizzCon and in the developer question and answer sessions. It's hard to draw any concrete conclusions from the talent preview because the Blizzard team has stated that everything is still up in the air. Since the information is still in a pre-alpha state, I can guarantee you that what we're seeing today will be changed dramatically by the time Mists of Pandaria is released. While we can't make any firm predictions, we can gain some insight into the direction that holy paladins are headed, and we can offer feedback to the developers on that direction.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 trends for tanks apparent in the new MoP talent calculator
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. On Wednesday, Blizzard released the preview of the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, and while other classes were gleefully ripping through it like kids under a Christmas tree, the paladins were scrutinizing and trying to figure out exactly what had changed -- looking for interesting divots in the chunk of coal, if you will. I guess Blinding Shield is confirmed as our level 87 spell (though we've been there before, yes?), and Speed of Light is even more obviously the best first-tier talent choice. There are some minor things here and there, however, that tend to point toward larger trends that will hold sway over our beloved spec in the next expansion. In today's column, I'll dissect those trends along with all the evidence that points toward them and forms the foundations of what we can expect.
The Light and How to Swing It: Dealing damage in Dragon Soul heroic dungeons
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! This new series of heroics runs akin to the Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection trio of Wrath in that you must complete them in a specific order. In the interest of fitting all of these encounters in one post, I will need to truncate a lot of descriptions and irrelevant details. If you have any questions or suggestions for your fellow ret paladins, please feel free to drop a comment below! Warning: This post contains strategies and brief descriptions of the new heroic dungeons in patch 4.3 that may or may not be spoiler-esque. As always with my columns, proceed with caution.
The Light and How to Swing It: Adjust your healing in patch 4.3
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 why paladins are so awesome. With patch 4.3 looming on the horizon, holy paladins need to be prepared for all of the changes that are headed our way. Both of our AoE healing options have been significantly altered, along with several of the talents and glyphs that support these abilities. Retribution paladins are also looking forward to a few buffs to their sustained DPS, but their ability to help with AoE healing is being greatly reduced. Our core mana regeneration mechanic is about to be completely scrapped. In fact, if we continue using Judgement without making any adjustments, we'll actually have less mana in patch 4.3 than we do today. We've been healing with holy power for nearly a year now, but many of the habits we've picked up along the way will need to change.
The Light and How to Swing It: The storied history of the paladin tank, part 2
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Last week, we talked about the beginnings of the protection paladin spec and the stirrings of the infancy of the "tankadin conscience," as it were. To briefly recap: In vanilla, we were presented with a series of hurdles ranging from terrible gear choices, to poor threat potential thanks to limited mana (after the Righteous Fury change), to terrible talent trees that didn't offer the tools needed to tank effectively. Then The Burning Crusade launched, and the game changed completely. Suddenly we had real tanking tools -- a taunt, for example -- and were finally primed to explode upon the tanking world with all the sound and righteous fury we could muster. That's where our story begins today, with the prot paladins of yesteryear preparing to make a name for themselves and their spec in earnest.
The Light and How to Swing It: Putting our Hands to work
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 why paladins are so awesome. If healers were defined by their heals, then holy paladins would be the strong, silent type. Our roster of healing spells has always been meek. The three-heal model of Cataclysm and the introduction of our holy power heals definitely increased our selection, but we have nowhere near the healing spell diversity of a priest or druid. We're only now receiving a true AOE heal in patch 4.3 with Holy Radiance's redesign. Rather than leaning on a variety of healing options, holy paladins like to keep it simple. We're able to compensate for our undiversified healing tool box by drawing on our numerous other abilities. We might not have as many healing spells as the other guys, but we certainly have more utility spells than they could ever dream of. Our "Hand of" spells allow us to go further than any other healer can.
The Light and How to Swing It: The storied history of the paladin tank (part 1)
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. I've been playing this class for an awful long time, since the beginnings of The Burning Crusade. Prior to that, I played the special class known as the huntar (this is a distinct entity from the common hunter, I assure you). Since then, I've been firmly strapped into this roller-coaster ride that we all lovingly call the paladin class, experiencing all the terrifying lows, dizzying highs, and creamy middles. It's been a wild experience and one I'm very interested in sharing with those who might be new to our beloved spec. To be a prot paladin is to be like that famous picture of human evolution, starting with the hunched-over monkey with Seal of Fury applied, all the way to the present-day man with Divine Protection, Ardent Defender, and Guardian of Ancient Kings all up at that same time -- just because he can, something that that the monkey could only hope to dream of. Let's take a trip back in time, shall we?
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: How to use holy cooldowns efficiently
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 why paladins are so awesome. Holy paladins are blessed with a robust selection of cooldown abilities, which improve our performance for a short period of time. Other classes like the restoration shaman have far fewer options for increasing their healing output on demand, which makes holy paladins one of the most flexible healing classes. In addition to boosting our single-target throughput, our cooldowns can also vitalize our AOE healing and reduce incoming damage. When faced with such a large number of cooldown options, it can be difficult to pick the right ability for the job. Each of our cooldowns works in a unique way, with different strengths and weaknesses. By choosing the right opportunities to use each of our cooldowns, we can maximize our healing and minimize the chance of someone dying. Because of how powerful our cooldowns are, you should be using them on every boss encounter. They become especially important on heroic fights, as our healing capacities will be put to the test.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking the three intro heroic Firelands bosses
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. So you've slain the minions and lieutenants of the Firelord and cast down Ragnaros himself, as well. The heroic versions of all seven bosses are now open to you, each with varying degrees of difficulty, starting with the walk-in-the-park Shannox to the much more dangerous remnants. These fights require you to step up your tanking game to a whole new level to survive everything the fights throw at you. In this column I'm going to start with the first three easiest heroic fights: Shannox, Majordomo Staghelm, and Alysrazor. I'll give you tips and tricks on proper cooldown usage, glyph load-outs, and trinket choices to maximize your performance against each so that you can stand up long enough for the raid to topple each.
The Light and How to Swing It: Dissecting the melee healer myth
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 why paladins are so awesome. Back in the day, the paladin and shaman classes were exclusive to the Alliance and the Horde, respectively. The two classes were designed to be polar opposites, highlighting the differences between the factions. Paladins were designed to be defensive melee hybrids with tanking as one of their talent trees and no true ranged build. Shaman, of course, were offensive ranged hybrids with a caster DPS option. Because of this original bifurcated design, paladins have inherited several traits and abilities that have caused us to be typecast as the melee healers. While the truth is that holy paladins don't need to stay in melee range to get the job done, the ideal has always persisted that paladins should be getting down and dirty with their foes. The gap between that dream and reality hasn't been a serious issue for us, but Mists of Pandaria might change that. The new mistweaver healing spec for the upcoming monk class has been described as a unique healer that relies on melee attacks to do their job efficiently. With another healer moving into our melee territory, do we have any reason to be jealous?
The Light and How to Swing It: First look at Mists of Pandaria's talents 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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. At BlizzCon 2011, we received our first preview of what the new stable of talents would be for protection paladins. The name of the game, as the devs insisted, was to break the cookie-cutter mindset and allow for more diverse styles of play between two players of the same spec and class. It remains to be seen if the former comes to pass, but the latter seems to be a safe bet. Each talent choice is (ostensibly) going to be designed to be as balanced as possible, or so Blizzard promises. At the moment, I think there is a clear cookie-cutter spec to be had, with possibilities for switching depending on any conditions produced by a specific encounter. As such, I'm going to dig through each of the 18 talents available to us and explain why I think the "winner" in each tier is the best choice in a vacuum.
The Light and How to Swing It: Ret talent preview for Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned retribution 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 compliments! This year marked my very first BlizzCon, so naturally I camped nearly every WoW class and talent panel I could manage. With bated breath and a semi-charged smartphone, I sat ready to transcribe my thoughts on any and all retribution tidbits that flowed forth like honey from the developers' proverbial beehive. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how much faith you have in the ret community to produce cogent questions), there weren't many big revelations related to our spec at any of the Q&As. There remains, however, one relevant topic that we can discuss, and that is the revamped talent system coming with Mists of Pandaria.
The Light and How to Swing It: Throttling holy paladins in PVP
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 why paladins are so awesome. Last year, Nethaera, a Blizzard community manager, informed us that the interaction between Protector of the Innocent and Beacon of Light was completely intentional. Holy paladins were still feeling out the new spells and talents that we received in Cataclysm, so it was nice to know that at least one thing was working as intended. Now, some ten months later, we're seeing Beacon of Light and Protector of the Innocent disconnected from each other on the patch 4.3 PTR. Why break a mechanic that's worked right since its inception? The developers aren't happy with healers in PVP situations. The massive Holy Radiance changes were a nerf to PVP holy paladins, and the PotI nerf affects them more than raid healers. The devs are also buffing Mortal Strike effects to allow them to cut our healing down by 25%, up from the 10% healing debuff that we've been working with for months. The Seal of Insight/Judgement changes also affect us negatively in PVP environments. Removing Holy Radiance from our Speed of Light talent reduces holy's mobility.
The Light and How to Swing It: A career guide for tanks
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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. This column is, if anything, the result of my recent switch from engineering to alchemy on my paladin. One of the biggest drivers for my decision (other than the maddening smackdown that engineering suffered after Wrath of the Lich King) was the desire to once again have a profession that bestowed some kind of meaningful bonus for raiding. Just about every facet of engineering that had some appreciable effect for tanking was neutered (as you'll see ahead), leaving the profession a dried husk and a sad remnant of previous greatness. I don't have to tell you that profession bonuses are easily one of the best ways to get stat boosts, and using certain professions can be a powerful tool in the min-maxer's arsenal, in order to squeeze every last stat point out of their characters. Some are excellent; some are even so excellent they are overpowered; some are middle of the road; and others are just horribly lackluster. Let's take a look.
The Light and How to Swing It: Working with a single school of magic
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 why paladins are so awesome. Holy paladins have several features that make them powerful healers in PVP environments. Our diverse utility spells provide us with capabilities that our rivals can only dream of, and we have plenty of cooldowns that can counter our opponents' actions. While holy paladins are generally considered to be strong PVP healers, we aren't without our weaknesses. Our most notable flaw is our complete reliance on a single school of magic -- holy. All of our spells and abilities are tied to one school of magic, which means that interrupts are incredibly potent at shutting down holy paladins. Even Judgement, which feels like a physical attack, is tied to the holy school. Interrupts are obviously potent against any caster, but holy paladins are especially hurt since we don't have any alternative spells to fall back onto. Mages can still cast Frost Nova if their Arcane Blast gets Kicked, and shaman can use any of their fire spells after getting a heal hit by Pummel. Holy paladins are useless when interrupted, which provides us with a unique set of challenges.
