paladin-gems

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  • Next steps after boosting a paladin tank to 90, part 2

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    02.28.2014

    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. It's always weird coming to the end of an expansion and seeing the road before you suddenly much shorter than you remember it was the last time you gave it a serious look. Very soon things will radically change -- the gear that made us gods will be obsolete, health pools will be laid low, and the stats that we had come to loathe will be no more. As they say, all good things must come to an end. Pandaria is no different. This is a path we've walked before, in the twilight of every expansion. As the content winds down in its own interminable fashion, and we run that end raid for the umpteenth time, we find solace in trying new experiences through the prism of alts. As I discussed in last week's post, with the advent of the boosting feature, many folks will be trying out paladin tanks for the first time -- especially since they now have the advantage of skipping the (painful) journey of leveling a tank entirely. This guide is for them.

  • Next steps after boosting a paladin tank to 90

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    02.22.2014

    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 the introduction of level 90 boosts on the horizon, many players are going to be trying new characters, classes, and specs they may have never tried before. I expect this means that many folks are going to give protection paladins a go for the first time, which is a very exciting prospect, because the spec makes for a very fun tank playstyle. In order to help those new folks hit the ground running, I'm kicking off a two-part "quick start guide" that'll break down the spec in the 101-iest way possible, to give those new tankadins a barebones foundation that they can use to jump right into getting their faces pounded in. For today's post I'm going to talk about why one should choose to spend $60 or their free Warlords-given boost on a protection-specced paladin, and what they need to know to safely jump into that first dungeon.

  • Mists of Pandaria: Guide to protection paladins

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    08.09.2012

    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 August begins, we are rapidly approaching the end of beta. Blizzard has indicated they are in the final stages of tuning for Mists of Pandaria, and with that comes the confidence to report on what we can reasonably expect our spec to look and perform like in the next expansion. Mists will be a pretty monumental expansion for us. We have some massive playstyle changes coming, as well as the game-changing new talent systems. Active mitigation, as well, will require prot paladins to adjust to a new style of tanking. This guide is intended to be a 101 introduction to the prot paladin as it stands in Mists of Pandaria. It'll cover everything from how to handle active mitigation and your rotation to how to spec, how to gem and enchant your gear, and everything in between. As we get closer to launch (and even after then), I'll continue to update it, so be sure to bookmark and check back in the future.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Customizing your retribution paladin

    by 
    Alex Ziebart
    Alex Ziebart
    02.16.2011

    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: Holy PvP basics

    by 
    Chase Christian
    Chase Christian
    04.18.2010

    Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we discuss the basic tenets of holy paladin PvP. When Wrath of the Lich King was released, Blizzard stated that it was one of their major goals to make raiding more accessible to every type of player. I'd say they achieved that goal, with just about every player who wants to able to experience a raid instance to see several of the bosses in each tier of raiding. With the easily obtained emblem and crafted gear, it's not hard for even newly 80 players to be raid-ready in a couple of weeks. Even the hardest instance in the expansion, Icecrown Citadel, is partially open to the most novice of PUGs. I think we can agree that Blizzard has figured out how to make raiding more accessible. Their next project in Cataclysm is to bring that same level of accessibility to PvP. They've already planned world PvP zones with the explicit purpose of promoting PvP, namely Tol Barad. We can also expect the new rated battleground feature to allow larger groups and guilds to participate in PvP without being under the arena microscope. Add in slower PvP pacing via an increase in life and decrease in healing power, and it's clear that the Horde and Alliance will be slaughtering each other in new and magnificent ways when we're not busy fighting against Deathwing and his minions. If you want to be ready for Cataclysm's new PvP environment, your best bet is to start practicing now!

  • The Daily Quest: Of gemming, Bloodlust and MoonkinTV

    by 
    Dan O'Halloran
    Dan O'Halloran
    03.03.2009

    Moonkin Raiding Basics 101 from Amanda d on Vimeo. The Daily Quest brings you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. There are quite a few good explanations of the gear stats raiding Moonkin should pay attention to, but Foofy of Foofy's CupCake Factory made her guide an instructional video (see above). And she promises more to come! The Rawrbitchrawr blog continues to pump out great Ulduar info. This time with a video of mounted combat from the Argent Tournament event. The Righteous Defense Paladin blog has a great article on gemming for Protection Paladins. The Hunter's Mark (written by our very own WoW Insider Hunter columnist Larissa) also has a new gemming guide for Hunters. Honor's Code posts a set of gear Protection Paladins can get for the DPS off-spec if they choose to go that route when dual specs arrive in Patch 3.1. Forever A Noob continues his Naxx-10 guides for Rogues. His newest one focuses on Thaddius. Blessing of Kings demystifies the math behind when to fire off Shaman Bloodlust in a raid presented in this Elitist Jerks' thread (warning: algebra!)