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The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Ragnaros
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. What is it with bosses in WoW not learning from their mistakes? We've had to put an end to Kel'Thuzad's sick experiments in two different expansions, while Nefarian actually rebuilt his sister so that we could fight the two of them again. Nobody can forget Kael'thas' infamous return, and I know I've killed Anub'arak like 12 different times now. It seems now that Molten Core was merely a setback for everyone's favorite Elemental Lord, Ragnaros the Firelord. Ragnaros must've missed the memo about Al'Akir falling to our might, or else he might've hired a few more majordomos. Ragnaros isn't a difficult fight for healers, at least not specifically. There's plenty of damage getting tossed around, but nothing terrible life-threatening. I would liken the encounter to Heigan of Naxxramas, where positioning and reaction times were more important than raw throughput. Ragnaros has two types of damage: damage that's simple to heal through, and damage that will instantly kill you. If you can teach your raid to avoid the one-shot abilities, then you'll have no problem dealing with everything else.
The Light and How to Swing It: Guide to tanking Alysrazor for protection paladins
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. Just kidding. We're actually going to kill it. As tragic as the idea is of murdering a newborn creature that has Imprinted itself on to you -- it thinks you're its mother; chew on that! -- you'll need to do the dirty deed to eventually pluck the real from the skies. Alysrazor is one of those rare fights that is a blast to tank. Maybe it's just me, but the most fun I've had in Firelands thus far has been pushing myself to the upper limits of my damage dealing potential while not making myself any harder to heal. It's a crazy balancing act, one that requires an acrobat's precision and a daredevil's bravery -- but it can be done. And it is so rewarding!
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Majordomo Staghelm
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. Illuminated Healing is a tricky mastery bonus to quantify. I've talked about how it's still our weakest throughput stat, even after the most recent round of buffs. We've also discussed how some holy paladins are completely changing the way we're able to heal by stacking as much mastery rating as possible. Mastery's biggest weakness is that it only works with a handful of our heals, limiting its flexibility. Illuminated Healing can be a valuable ally when facing Shannox or Baleroc. Illuminated Healing is nearly worthless against Majordomo Staghelm. The Majordomo encounter favors holy paladins who stack haste rating. You'll be especially potent if you can break 1,860 haste rating, which is the breakpoint that grants you an extra Holy Radiance tick when you don't have any special buffs active. The Majordomo fight will challenge both our AOE healing throughput and our reaction times. While our mastery bonus has its uses, it simply can't compete on a fight where AOE healing is paramount to our raid group's survival.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Alysrazor
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. My 10-man raid team has three healers, but none of us has an off-spec. Once we mastered the fight, Alysrazor feels like an encounter that only really requires two healers. We loved having three healers while learning, but now that it's on farm, I decided to try out a shockadin hybrid build for this encounter. I actually spent the majority of my time spamming Exorcism on the adds and Rebuking their casts. The reason that I'm able to be in melee range of the casters is Beacon of Light's massive 60-yard range, which allows me to heal a tank even when I'm way past any other healer's effective range. When you first engage Alysrazor, your entire raid is knocked back and blasted with fire damage. I immediately assumed that the encounter was going to revolve around heavy AOE damage, and I readied myself to use Holy Radiance on cooldown while bracing myself for a good crying session once it was over. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Alysrazor actually doesn't require that much AOE healing outside of her final phase. For the majority of this fight, holy paladins get to focus on what we do best: single-target healing. I like to use a Divine Favored Holy Radiance to counter the opening AOE blast, as Divine Favor will be up again for the AOE phase later on.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking Beth'tilac and Rhyolith
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. In previous columns, I've talked about how to tank Shannox and Baleroc, two of the early bosses of Firelands. Three bosses remain before you can cross the bridge to the Sulfuron Keep: Beth'tilac, Rhyolith, and Alysrazor. That latter of the three demands a column of her own, considering the nuances of that fight and the special requirements and responsibilities one assumes when tanking it. But the first two -- a walk in the park, comparatively speaking. Despite the general breeziness when tanking them, they still have their own slate of nuances. Allow me to offer a raft of tips to make your tanking duties as breezy as they should be.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Rhyolith
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. Firelands and the Molten Core have a lot in common. Ragnaros is the end boss of both raids, with a majordomo in place as his last line of defense. We fight Flamewaker bosses in both zones, and the skinning professionals in your guild will be complaining that nobody is looting the hounds. There's plenty of fire to stay out of, and you'll fall into lava if you leave yourself on autowalk. While the developers don't have any issues reusing old idea, they also create their fair share of new designs. Lord Rhyolith is the perfect example of an encounter that implements new mechanics and forces us to think outside of the box. Every fight has its unique flavor, but Rhyolith (at least phase 1) is nowhere near what we would consider to be a standard tank-and-spank encounter.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking Baleroc (and somehow surviving to the end)
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. Perhaps it's just me, but I find Baleroc to be one of the most intense fights to tank that I've thus far encountered in Firelands. You have three phases featuring varying degrees of speed at which you'll be mashed into a fine gruel, all performed by a dual-wielding boss with a swing speed that barely lets you catch you breath from the one-punch before the subsequent two-punch comes screaming in across your sweat-drenched brow and knocks whatever remaining molars you've managed to hold onto right out of your bloody maw and into the general direction of the profanity-uttering feral druid beside you. Or at least, that's how my active imagination likes to picture it while I'm laying on the ground waiting for my battle rez. It doesn't have to be that way, though. Despite his bag of tricks, Baleroc still comes up short in comparison to the raiding paladin, if only because our bag of tricks is actually a massive steel tool cabinet, and each drawer is packed with amazing tools that can cut right through whatever the boss might throw at us. We're like the iPhones of tanking -- there's a cooldown for that. Continue on, and I'll detail how to use each of your abilities to their optimum effect and thus achieve that hallowed nirvana of the boss fight: not having to get rezzed at the end.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Shannox and Beth'tilac
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 only seven bosses to claim, Firelands is one of the smallest raid tiers we've seen over the past couple of years. I've found that the raid can seem much larger than it actually is due to the massive size of the zone. We're able to explore the terrain and advance in any direction that we please. The first five bosses can be killed in any order, and we fight each on unique terrain. There's also a plethora of interesting trash mobs and mini-events along the way. Two of the easiest bosses in Firelands are Shannox and Beth'tilac. If you're just starting in Firelands, it's highly likely that you raid will be facing one of these two bosses first. The encounters are very different for healers, at least until their final phases. You'll want to spend most of your time conserving as much mana as possible, as healing against these bosses gets more difficult as the fights progress. Your ability to keep the raid alive will buy your DPS the time they need to finish the job.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 ways to improve your threat without sacrificing survivability
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 to improve your combat table coverage through four easy tips. This week, I'm going to swing the pendulum to the other direction, away from survivability and toward the Candyland that is threat. Truthfully, in this age of Vengeance, there sometimes doesn't seem to be a particular need to work on augmenting one's threat, but corner cases exist where your personal damage output can be crucial to the success of an encounter. When it comes to boosting threat, the usual advice is often to gem differently or wear some hit or expertise trinkets. The downside to that, of course, is that you're trading survivability for an increase in damage output. While that might be kosher for heroics or farm content, when the bosses are still dangerous, you want to play it safe. As I'll be detailing in today's column, it's very possible to bring the pain without shooting yourself in the foot.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to rock Baleroc
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 to fly, you fools. While I hate to boil down an entire encounter to a single idea, sometimes it simply can't be helped: Baleroc is the healer fight of this tier of raid content. The developers have been throwing one healer fight at us per tier since Wrath began, making Baleroc the latest in a long line of mechanics designed to let healers play outside the box. Chimaeron and Anub'arak made us focus on keeping health pools low but not too low, while Loatheb and Valithria challenged our burst and sustained throughput. General Vezax's awful aura forced us to make every point of mana count, although our love affair with intellect helped us weather that storm. Baleroc makes us choose between healing the raid and healing the tank. It's one of the age-old questions for healers, but Baleroc has upped the ante with the Vital Spark/Vital Flame mechanic. The choice of healing targets is transformed from a simple problem to a crucial decision, as the wrong move can cause a wipe. Luckily for you, Beacon of Light will help you truly shine on this encounter, allowing holy paladins to dominate the top 40 board on World of Logs.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 tips for upping your combat table coverage
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. With the advent of the Holy Shield buff, there's simply no such thing as too much mastery -- except, you know, past the hard cap for raid bosses. That's too much. But! Up to that point, you should approach mastery the same way a grizzly bear approaches a tumultuous beehive: You want to inhale as much of that sweet, sticky mastery as you can before you get stung to death by the swarm. I've talked about combat table coverage before in one of my first columns, and while not much has changed since then, the advent of a new tier has made complete CTC all the more attainable, and the introduction of the new Holy Shield has made it all the more desirable. The more normal hits you are able to take to the face, the less potent your Holy Shield is going to be. We want to mitigate (har, har) that downside to the cooldown, and to do so, we need to stack as much mastery as we (safely) can. I add the word "safely" -- scare quotes and all -- because safety is key. If the mastery is the delicious treat, the ornery bees are the constant threat of scooping up too much mastery in your greedy paws and suffering from a survivability loss as a result. There's always a break point between just enough mastery and having so much that you're trading off too much stamina and avoidance for it. In the end, you'll have to feel that out for your own purposes. That said, in this column, I'm going to outline four easy ways to boost your combat table coverage -- by hook or by crook -- so you can scrape your way to the magical 102.4% number. I'll go over an amazing addon that'll visualize the process for you, a spreadsheet that can remove the fog of war from the whole process and make gear choices much more transparent, proper consumable choices you can make, and more.
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: Just how masterful can mastery healing get?
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. Sometimes I feel like I can't get away from Illuminated Healing. Our holy paladin mastery has been receiving nonstop tweaks since its introduction, and it's always flirting with viability. Stats like haste and critical strike rating are predictable. I can draw up some formulas to show you how many extra ticks of Holy Radiance you'll receive at a given haste level. Mastery is much more nebulous than that, as its effectiveness depends entirely on the encounter and your healing assignment. Everyone has some amount of mastery rating on their gear, and there's even some passively built into our characters. While having a bit of mastery to make our heals bubbly helps our throughput, it's certainly not overpowered. There are a few holy paladins who, in an attempt to see how far Illuminated Healing can go, have enchanted, reforged, and gemmed into mastery completely. With IH bubbles absorbing 35% of the value of the original heal, stacking mastery can obviously make something interesting happen. How potent can Illuminated Healing really become?
The Light and How to Swing It: The tankadin valor point pick order
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. Is there anything more stressful than sitting there in front of the valor point vendor for the first time in a new patch, your pockets flush with new (ephemeral) currency, and your eyes wide at all the possibilities of what you can buy with them? All those dead trolls and fire elementals were piled up to bring upon this one glorious moment. Now. What item is the best choice for you at that moment? You don't know! The skin flushes, sweat glimmers on your brow, the throat tightens, your mouth becomes arid. A horrified stasis clouds your face as Jamus'Vaz stares at you with open contempt. "Buy something, would ya?" Okay, there are things far more stressful than that. And perhaps I'm the only one who can suffer a total mental shutdown in front of a virtual shopkeep. Irregardless, such panicked madness does not need to be your fate. There is a very clear path to victory here when it comes to managing your valor point expenditures here that will result in your getting the best bang for your buck in very short order.
The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.2's effect on holy 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. I have a feeling that the developers have a hard time balancing healers for PVP combat. How should healers be killed in PVP? Should we run out of mana eventually, or is a bursty switch the only answer? Can the focused efforts of a single DPSer be enough to topple us, or should it take two players to finish us off? Trying to balance all of these elements for four different classes with five different healing trees is a challenge by any measure. Every organized PVP encounter revolves around the healers involved, especially in the golden bracket of 3v3. Prior to patch 4.2, teams loved seeing a holy paladin across the arena from them, as holy paladins weren't exactly amazing at 3v3 matches in the first few months of Cataclysm. We have a few key weaknesses, notably our lack of any long-term crowd control like Hex and our lone school of magic, holy, which leaves us defenseless when interrupted. We weren't completely ineffective in arenas before patch 4.2, but we also weren't breaking any records or winning any #1 Healer trophies.
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: That burning sensation while first tanking Firelands
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. Here it is, the first week of the new patch, and we brave heroes have begun to roam the sulphuric wastelands that make up Ragnaros' domain. We need to wade through a sea of endless trash, smash down roaming Molten Lords, and begin to topple the Firelord's lieutenants one by one. In today's post, I want to go over my initial impressions of the new raid -- specifically, what the trash is like, an in-depth look at how my group dealt with our first boss, and a bunch of other myriad little things I noticed over the overpowering stench of burning raider corpses. I'll also teach you the fun new game that's all the rage: "Spin the DPS."
The Light and How to Swing It: Balancing holy's heals
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. When the first notes were shown for the upcoming patch 4.2, holy paladins started worrying. The mana cost of our heals is slated to skyrocket, putting fear into our typically stalwart hearts. We've been through the buff and nerf cycle before, but that doesn't make facing the music any easier. There's something painful about logging in to a character that's weaker than when you left it. While the initial news was dire, the developers had some additional changes in mind. The nerf to Holy Shock's mana cost was reversed, and several of our other heals were tweaked in our favor. Established healers should be able to handle the mana increases with more conservative play, but new holy paladins will be faced with the task of healing with less mana after the patch. When our heals are seemly rebalanced with each patch, it's difficult to constantly readjust your healing strategy.
The Light and How to Swing It: Kitting out your tank with the new starter gear of patch 4.2
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. Personally, I am really excited about being able to once again be excited about gear with the launch of 4.2. It's a chance to start fresh with your tanking kit, in a manner of speaking. It's like approaching a newly opened buffet, as opposed to right now when you're picking at whatever is left on the table. Every slot is up for grabs to be populated by new shinies. With the start of the new tier, there are several new avenues of gearing that you can pursue. Blacksmiths with have new patterns, quests will open up new rewards, the Avengers of Hyjal have goodies for the taking, and of course the new raid will provide a wealth of new purples from its myriad encounters. Some pieces are fantastic, some are so-so, some are total head scratchers. In this column I'll go down a slot-by-slot list of the new gear from iLevels 365-378 to show what's available where for your toon. With this knowledge in hand, you will have an excellent basis to plan out your gearing strategy for the following tier.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladin gear in patch 4.2
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. I'm not a big fan of patch days. I hate needing to update all of my addons, I hate the endless spam of "hay were's the new vender?" in trade chat, and I hate how overcrowded the new zones are. While I think there's plenty to dislike, patch days aren't all bad. With patch 4.2's release date closing, we can look forward to Firelands and the new quest hub in Hyjal. The introduction of new reputations and raid bosses mean that there are both new challenges to be overcome and new rewards to be obtained. The good news is that the gear we'll be seeing in patch 4.2 is much better itemized for holy paladin than what we saw in the first tier of Cataclysm raiding. Holy paladins are the only spec that uses plate gear with intellect on it, and so it's always a bit interesting to see gear that's not that good for us. Our potency should improve significantly from both the pure ilvl boost from the new gear, but also due to the better selection of secondary stats.
