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The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.1 for the protection paladin
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. Assumedly -- hopefully -- we're a week away from the release of patch 4.1, and with it all the various tweaks to our beloved tanking spec. Some are buffs, some are nerfs (including one fat nerf to Word of Glory), and the others are changes of various import that'll have some subtle but important effects on our tanking. The troll hunt will be on, but before you queue for that first Zul'Gurub or Zul'Aman 5-man, you'll want to get your house in order. I'll give you the ins and outs of 4.1, what it means for us in terms of every little affected facet, and how to cope with the hardballs that Blizzard tosses at us, so you can hit the ground running with hardly a stumble.
The Light and How to Swing It: Choosing holy paladin major glyphs
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, and you can catch me weekly on the Matticast. Prime glyphs have been designed by Blizzard to be no-brainers; they're powerful, and their purpose is clear. While there are four different prime glyphs that a holy paladin can choose from, most holy paladins will neglect the Glyph of Divine Favor and pick the other three. Some of the high-end paladins (such as Diamondtear) swear by the Divine Favor glyph, as they rely on their cooldowns heavily during the hardest heroic encounters. If you find yourself ignoring Word of Glory, you can sacrifice its glyph for Divine Favor as well. Minor glyphs are largely irrelevant for us, as they only cut down the mana cost of spells that we normally cast while out of combat. It's cool to save mana, but the minor glyphs are really automatic and almost pointless. The major glyph situation is quite different for holy paladins. We have a smorgasbord of major glyphs to choose from, with each offering unique benefits. I find myself changing my major glyphs quite often, as many of them are only valuable in certain situations.
The Light and How to Swing It: Streamline your prot paladin tanking with macros
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. Tanking successfully often hinges on control -- control over your surroundings, the enemies around you, your damage intake, the threat ceiling, and so on. The more drops of tanky goodness you can squeeze out of your every one movement, the better. And that means that the more efficient you are with your GCDs, the better your performance will be. One of the easiest ways to make your actions more efficient is with the judicious use of macros. No, I'm not talking about the heresy that was the oft-paired 9 macro and 6 macro back in Wrath, but rather some neat little tricks that can give new forms to your abilities, prevent disastrous side effects from others, give you better raid utility, or even allow you to dominate the interrupts chart on a certain fight.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution paladin gear in patch 4.1
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 Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub's loot for retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Patch 4.1 will be hitting live servers ... well, eventually. We don't really know. It's been on the PTR since later February, and it never feels any closer, does it? Regardless, patch 4.1 is bringing the revamped Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman heroics which have both been (more or less) fully itemized in recent weeks. That's what we'll be looking at today. Do note that this is content that is still on the PTR, so itemization changes could still happen before the patch hits live realms, though it is unlikely. We can all be reasonably sure this list will work just fine come patch day. Do note, however, that what bosses these drops come from isn't concrete quite yet -- but that's fine. They're not raid zones; you don't need to save up your DKP. Plus, knowing that they exist within these two dungeons narrows it down pretty well already. The list is also going to be fairly short. It's only two dungeons, after all.
The Light and How to Swing It: Illuminating holy paladin stats
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. Intellect has been our best stat for quite some time, and Cataclysm has only reinforced that. We get spellpower, mana, and critical strike chance from every point of intellect, which makes it valuable for every aspect of holy paladin play. We want to gem for intellect, enchant for intellect, use intellect consumables like Severed Sagefish Head and the Flask of the Draconic Mind. All of our spells scale off of spellpower, which makes it an amazing throughput stat. The fact that it gives us critical strike rating is just icing on the cake. Divine Plea's mana regeneration scales off of our maximum mana, and so stacking intellect gives us both mana at the start of the fight and then additional mana every time we use Divine Plea. My only advice is to be sure to use all plate gear, as we receive a 5% intellect bonus when wearing all plate. Mail caster gear may seem attractive, but the intellect loss isn't worth it. Intellect is designed to be our best stat, and that's why we can find it on all of our gear. Even if you hated intellect, you can't get rid of it. The real gearing decisions come down to choices between the secondary stats.
The Light and How to Swing It: To cover the combat table
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. Block-capped, unhittable, uncrushable, combat table coverage -- all these terms (some deprecated, some still relevant) refer to the same basic principle: achieving 102.4% block and avoidance in order to push normal hits off the combat table. Now, what I just said in that last sentence might be an arcane mishmash for some folks who are new to tanking, and I aim to fix that. One of the most potent things you can do for your gearing is hit that magic 102.4% number, to achieve full combat table coverage. Doing so, you're looking at least a constant 40% damage reduction for any melee hit. This is the holy grail for shield tanks right now. Let's talk about how to make that happen.
The Light and How to Swing It: A holy paladin guide to Bastion of Twilight, part 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. As we delve deeper into the Bastion of Twilight, each boss is more powerful than the last. While Halfus Wymbreaker and the dragon twins aren't the easiest raid bosses by far, the Ascendant Council and Cho'gall are on another level of difficulty. They're not only more complicated, but simply more punishing as well. You're going to use your full spectrum of abilities on these fights. The Ascendant Council encounter emphasizes the importance of good positioning and healing on the move, while Cho'gall will stress both your AoE and single-target healing throughout the fight. Holy paladins have several abilities that are uniquely suited to each encounter, and knowing how to use those spells will be crucial to healing effectively.
The Light and How to Swing It: Enhancing your prot paladin's tanking gear
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 got your gear, and you're ready to hit that raid or heroic 5-man, but there's still one major obstacle between you and tanking glory: You've got to doll up your pieces to squeeze every last stat out of them. Socket those gems, sprinkle Hypnotic Dust liberally, and reforge that delicate line between dodge and parry. Once that's done, you'll be ready to hit the ground running. Gemming can help you maximize your gear's potential through focusing on the best stats; enchants can also help boost your survivability. Reforging will help you get the most out of your avoidance and minimize diminishing returns as much as possible.
The Light and How to Swing It: Essential retribution paladin addons
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 addons for retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Today's topic was requested by a reader, and I must admit it took more effort that I'd have liked to assemble the piece. I'm one of those players who tries to use as few addons as possible. As an expansion progresses, I continuously shed my mods until I use almost none at all. I use them as teaching aids. If I'm having difficulty performing a particular task, I use an addon to make it easier on myself -- until I'm more comfortable with that task. "Okay, I did it with the addon," I say to myself. "Now I'll turn it off and see if I can do without it." It's not that I don't believe in addons -- they're great! It's just that I have a hard time calling any of them essential. Still, I'll try to outline a few addons that I believe will be beneficial to your performance as a retribution paladin.
The Light and How to Swing It: A holy paladin guide to Bastion of Twilight, part 1
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 all of Halfus' drakes don't wake up when they hear us fighting. I always have a tough time deciding how to compose my healing guides for raid bosses. Talking about holy paladin theory is fun, but at the end of the day, we're actually being thrown into real raid encounters. We're expected to know how to heal through the incoming damage and handle all of the boss' special abilities. Knowing the specific healing per second of Divine Light isn't going to help you keep your tank alive. At the same time, there's no point in turning the holy paladin column into an esoteric version of StratFu by giving you a play-by-play review of every boss encounter. Instead of boring you with a list of boss abilities that your raid leader is going to repeat anyway, I am going to try breaking down only what's specifically important for a holy paladin to know. You'll want to know when it's safe to use Divine Plea, when Holy Radiance is going to be most effective, and what you're supposed to dispel. Who should you put Beacon of Light on? Are any of our "Hand of" spells worthwhile on this fight? In addition, please feel free to ask any additional questions that you'd like to see answers to or add any suggestions.
The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing your tankadin for raids
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 gearing for heroics: what stats to focus on, which ones to avoid, and what sources you can exploit to gear yourself quickly for that first step into the endgame. Well, here we are just a week later (wow, you geared fast! ... er, right?), and now it's time to take that next great leap forward smack dab into your first raid. There's a whole new set of priorities that you should carry into Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, or any of the other tier 11 raids. Dig into the wealth of tanking gear available in the heroic 5-mans, and then we'll explore the deal with threat and how best to boost your survivability. And in no time, you'll be standing before the dripping mandibles of Magmaw, shield in hand, prepared to survive a good chompin' while lesser tanks are munched into something resembling a squeezed can of spoiled Spam.
The Light and How to Swing It: An interview with the all-business Diamondtear
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 the pillars that support every raid's healing roster. As long as there are tanks to heal, there will be paladins dropping Light bombs on their unit frames. Unparalleled single-target throughput and powerful defensive cooldowns have solidified our position as the foundation of any healing paradigm. While our shockadin DPS may be laughable, our healing capability speaks for itself. For the last few tiers of raiding, holy paladins have been ever-present guardians. We ensure that our group makes it through the shadow and flame unscathed. I had the opportunity to speak with one of the most successful holy paladins, Diamondtear of Paragon. He's survived the toughest encounters that WoW has to offer, helping his guild push towards world first after world first.
The Light and How to Swing It: Basic retribution paladin macros
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 macros for retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Retribution is a spec that has a lot to gain from intelligent use of macros. We have so many abilities that share cooldowns that there's no reason not to consolidate them. As hybrids, we have an enormous spread of abilities that we may not use often, but when we do need to use them, we need to use them at a moment's notice. And properly. This article will cover basic retribution macros -- mouseover macros, focus macros, modifier macros, and that sort of thing. Macros hold an incredible amount of potential for customization, so it would be next to impossible to list everything a paladin might potentially use. Once you know the basics of how these macros are built, you can do whatever you please with them. Onward!
The Light and How to Swing It: Illuminated Healing still no Val'anyr
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 Val'anyr was totally a hunter weapon. When playing a healer, there's no single "right" way to play. Tanks can adjust their gear and strategy to boost their threat or avoidance, but both of those statistics are easy to track and monitor. Damage classes are obviously optimizing for one thing: DPS. Healers, on the other hand, can both get to the same point while taking completely different paths. Checking your healing per second on a healing meter won't show all of the times that you saved someone's life or made a great decision, and it never tells the whole story of an encounter. The best example is how your total healing done will plummet as your raid group gets better and better at avoiding damage on a particular encounter. Healing meters do have a few useful purposes. They allow us to empirically test different strategies and gear choices, and we can monitor the effect of changes that we make. They also allow us to evaluate talents and individual abilities, which means we can make educated decisions about our talent and spell selection. When reviewing my healing done, I can figure out exactly what works and what doesn't. One thing has consistently stood out as negligible to my overall healing: Illuminated Healing. How did our mastery bonus end up so impotent?
The Light and How to Swing It: Protection Paladin 101
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. Since the earliest days of World of Warcraft, the protection paladin (also known colloquially as the tankadin -- or in some quarters, Why won't it just die already?) has stood out among the other classes bestowed with a tanking role. We've come a long way from being the joke tanks of vanilla or the guy with a shield and a puddle brought in to AoE murlocs in BC. Wrath was when we first really hit our stride as top-tier tanks, and we've only grown more potent since the changes brought about by the Cataclysm.
The Light and How to Swing It: Best practices 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 what to look for in your World of Logs parses. Holy paladins are doing all right. While patch 4.1's notes may have retribution and protection up in arms about the new cooldown on Word of Glory, holy paladins are exempt via Walk in the Light. We're actually not seeing any changes in the upcoming patch -- at least, none that have been announced yet. The lack of updates shouldn't come as a surprise to a healing class that's been performing relatively well. Minor balances to our mana and effectiveness have been used to keep us in line with the other healers, but we're otherwise stable. Patch 4.1 will buff our recently discussed set bonus, but that doesn't help improve the gear today. Just because Blizzard doesn't have any buffs planned doesn't mean that we can't work on improving our performance naturally. There is truly no WoW player who can perform perfectly at every moment, but the closer we get to that ideal, the stronger healers we become. As healers, we should constantly be developing our skills and refining our gameplay. There's nothing worse than feeling like the weak link on the chain, and so keeping ourselves at top healing efficiency is crucial to being successful in whatever environment you're healing in.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution of patch 4.1
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 patch 4.1's impact on retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Before we get started here, I'd like to include a disclaimer: Yes, we're about to talk about patch 4.1. However, it is still extremely early in the patch's life cycle, so anything and everything could change before the patch hits live realms. We are going to talk about the patch because I feel the few changes to retribution currently on the PTR are significant, and talking about them is a good way to gain an understanding of them. If you like (or dislike) a change but don't understand the how and the why, what good is it? With that out of the way, it's time to render judgement upon the patch 4.1 patch notes.
The Light and How to Swing It: Nobody's wearing the Reinforced Sapphirium Regalia
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 the above bowl of hot water is better than our holy tier set. While it may have been a while since you've last seen a paladin sporting it, our Lightsworn Garb set from Icecrown Citadel was once the top tier gear available. Tirion Fordring even bought himself a full set to wear. The two-piece bonus was simply amazing, as it gave us our healing a boost while Divine Illumination was active. The four-piece bonus was less than attractive due to the way it scaled with haste, but there were two good pieces of the set (helm and shoulders) that nearly every holy paladin focused on acquiring. I lamented then that less than half of our tier pieces were optimal and that the four-piece bonus was nowhere near compensating for the lack of haste. Our current tier set, the Reinforced Sapphirium Regalia, is even worse. Not a single piece is itemized with our strongest secondary stat, haste. In addition, the set bonuses are so ineffective that it's almost a joke to wear the gear. There are better-itemized options available elsewhere, and so our set is left sitting in the valor point vendor's inventory.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tackling AoE paladin 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 or awesome screenshots you may have! Superman's weakness is green kryptonite. When confronted with it, he has no option but to surrender. A Green Lantern's weakness is anything yellow, which I suppose means that they hate bananas. Aquaman's weakness is that he can't really do much on dry land, except possibly flop around some. Holy paladins, while not exactly superheroes, have been plagued by a longstanding weakness as well: We've never been able to heal a group with any sort of efficiency or potency. In Cataclysm, the developers set out to break down the barriers that were preventing holy paladins from being effective group healers. The first order of business was expanding our toolbox to include a few AoE spells, and so we learned Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance. While they've both seen some serious rebalancing and complete redesigns (as well as a rename or two), the final versions of these two spells are now our core AoE healing options. Both abilities tackle different situations, and knowing when to use which is key in being successful as a holy paladin.
The Light and How to Swing It: Customizing your retribution paladin
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.
