paladin-talents

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  • The Light and How to Swing It: The prot paladin 5.0.4 survival guide

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    08.25.2012

    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. Here we are, less than a week away from the pre-release patch of Mists of Pandaria, that moment before the expansion finally drops and we actually have something to do in WoW once again. It's an exciting time -- and, for sure, kind of a scary time in that change is always a little bit disconcerting. Like starting in high school for the first time, there's little comfort in having to navigate newly incognita terra. The pre-release patch dropping on Tuesday marks a new hill for us to conquer. Everything is changing, from our talents to our glyphs to our rotations to (at the most basic level) how we keep ourselves alive. In order to hit the ground running and be able to tank just as well (or hell, better!) than you were under the 4.x rules set, it's critical to make sure you know everything you need to know about the upcoming patch and do everything you can do in advance.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Customizing your ret paladin in Mists

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    08.22.2012

    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! Last week I unveiled my retribution guide for the upcoming launch of Mists of Pandaria. I covered an exhausting number of topics, but I found that a couple items might be better as a separate post -- races and professions. For anyone starting a new paladin in Mists after hearing how awesome it is on the beta, or for anyone looking to change your races or professions, this article is for you. Let's dive right in, shall we? Choose the right race Generally, my advice for selecting which race you want your paladin to be is to pick one you will be able to watch running around and hitting things. If you don't like the look of your character, you probably won't like playing it regardless of how awesome the class or spec may be. With that out of the way, there are some really good DPS options out there if you're a member of the Alliance. And if you're Horde -- well, at least you can look good.

  • Mists of Pandaria: Guide to retribution paladins

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    08.15.2012

    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! The mists have parted, the continent of Pandaria is open, and new foes await us in the numerous raids and dungeons that the lost continent has to offer. Whether you're leveling a ret paladin for the first time or min-maxing your way to the top of the charts, now is the perfect time to become acquainted with all of the changes that a new expansion inevitably brings. This guide will bring you up to speed with what being a retribution paladin in Mists is all about, from what our talents look like to what food we should be eating. It is my intention to update this guide continually with any major changes we may experience. [Last updated for patch 5.4.0, build 17359 on 9/12/13.] What's new in Mists? New talent system With the intention of cutting down on cookie-cutter builds, Blizzard redesigned the talent system so that it was based around player preference and situational usefulness. Players now receive their core abilities automatically when selecting a spec, and talents serve to supplement different styles of gameplay. New abilities While our class has not received another violent makeover like what we saw in Cataclysm, we did receive a few goodies: Absolve Bolstering our defensive arsenal, Absolve removes all harmful magic effects from your target when Hand of Sacrifice is cast. Blinding Light Reminiscient of Eadric the Pure's ability in Trial of the Champion, this AoE CC is our level 87 ability and will probably see more use in PvP than PvE, though it could have some usefulness in controlling large packs of mobs, provided you have a tank ready to pick them up after the CC is over. Boundless Conviction This passive allows us to carry up to 5 holy power at one time. With the increased cap, we don't have to worry as much about "wasting" holy power when we use Judgment or Exorcism from range. Devotion Aura No longer just the domain of holy paladins, this revamped version of Aura Mastery carries a little more oomph than before with the addition of 20% magic damage reduction. Keep this button handy. Emancipate With the loss of 1/2 Acts of Sacrifice, ret needed a snare removal tool to replace it. Enter Emancipate. Hammer of the Righteous Protection was kind enough to loan us their AoE holy power generator. Divine Storm will be our new AoE holy power finisher. Higher holy power generation The holy power system has been improved upon for Mists, with Judgment, Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Exorcism, and Hammer of Wrath all generating the resource. Hopefully this will make our playstyle more proactive and engaging than before.

  • 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: Where tankadins stand in Mists

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    08.04.2012

    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. Last time ,we talked about the basics of what paladin tanks are going to be working with when Mists launch. What we didn't talk about was the remainder -- whether it be how certain mechanics feel or how we're shaping up with regards to the other tanks classes and the content itself. The TL;DR version is that we look to be in a pretty good place overall. Our rotation is miles ahead of our current Cataclysm rotation in terms of quality of life, and on the opposite side of the planet from that drinking bird practice regimen known as the 969 rotation in Wrath. There's a little more to play with and balance in our toolbox these days, thanks to the pick-'n-mix of the new talents system, which is definitely a good thing if variety and engagement is your bread and butter. In terms of actual gameplay balance with regard to the game and the other philistines competing for our jerbs, we're in a decent place as well. That is, we're no longer in the Wild West days of Wrath, where patch cycles saw one tank class after another get brokenly good (except warriors, womp womp). The general trend of Cataclysm continues -- keeping the balance to a reasonable level among the classes -- though when it comes to the highest levels of the hardest content, the disparities start to emerge with gusto. Anyway, that's the 50,000-mile view. Let's get down in the mud and talk turkey.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Mists reputations for retribution paladins

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    08.01.2012

    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! We have a launch date. Of course, we'll see if Blizzard sticks to it -- I'm hoping they do, because otherwise I will have taken those days off work for nothing. For just the next few minutes, however, let's pretend that Sept. 25 will be the day that the continent of Pandaria opens up to us and all of that shiny new loot becomes ours for the taking. As we level, quests and dungeons will offer the majority of our gear. When we reach the level cap of 90, another option opens up to us: reputations. Sadly, raising these reputations won't be as easy as running a handful of random dungeons with a tabard on like it was in Wrath and Cataclysm, but getting to know your allies in Mists is still very important. I have risked life and limb (and repair costs from running through high-level zones, getting dazed off my mount and pummeled into a paste) to seek out the various quartermasters to see what they have to offer. Before I begin, a couple of notes: Without solid stat weights to go off, determining the quality of a piece of gear in the Mists beta is a bit more dubious than it is on live. Until we see those numbers, I will withhold judgment and merely present the options. A few items (mostly profession patterns) cost gold, but most are purchasable with valor points (VP). All gold costs are before faction discounts. This being a beta, anything is subject to change. I cannot be held liable if you spend 5,000 valor points on what turns out to be a giant foam sword. Finally, spoiler alert! There are screenshots after the break, as well as brief descriptions of the different factions you will encounter.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: A look at the changes so far coming in Mists

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    07.20.2012

    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. It seems like we're in the closing stretch of the beta cycle, and we have a fairly clear picture of how we're going to be tanking in the next expansion. There are some amazing changes and some disheartening ones. Nonetheless, they are the cards we are being dealt, and it behooves us to flip up that corner and peek at what we have so we can make informed decisions in advance, before anything can sneak up on us. There's a lot to go over, so I'm just going to jump right in. Active mitigation While this was initially sold to be a much bigger deal, it's still going to make a difference in how we tank. In addition to doing damage, Shield of the Righteous now reduces physical damage taken by 30% for 3 seconds and applies the Bastion of Glory effect. Bastion of Glory in turn buffs Word of Glory by 10%, and the effect can stack up to five times. Shield of the Righteous is now only usable at 3 holy power, so it's more than ever a finisher. You'll want to use as often as possible -- which shouldn't be too hard, since the ability is off the global cooldown and can be woven in between other abilities. Our survivability (thanks to Bastion of Glory) will be heavily tied in to how we use Shield of the Righteous.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Fixing Inquisition

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    07.18.2012

    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! I almost feel a bit guilty talking about Inquisition so often, but unfortunately this ability seems to be a source of major division within the ret paladin community. It has been the ire of many players, old and new, and remains one of the only major complaints about ret from the beta. I have to admit that there is something going on when such a huge subset of the retribution community remains in violent disagreement over the implementation of this buff. What can we do about it, you may ask? While sometimes it may feel like we are just along for the ride and have to endure every nerf that Blizzard throws our way, player feedback is one of the greatest engines of change within the game. Ultimately, yes, the decisions are in the hands of the designers, but the players hold the true power through our financial support of the end product. After all, if we aren't having fun, why would we continue playing (and paying)? The blues can make educated guesses about what we perceive as fun and exciting, but they won't truly know what we like unless we tell them. Therefore, if we don't like Inquisition, let's tell them why. One way of doing this is by writing constructive forum posts that illuminate our reasoning and attempt to impart an understanding of what we see on our side of the fence. Another way, which may be a bit more convoluted but works just as well, is to make suggestions for changes, essentially putting ourselves in the designers' shoes and, working within the concepts of the game, show them what we want. I definitely lean more toward this mindset, so I am going to share with you some of my thoughts on how to "fix" Inquisition.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: The shrinking paladin toolbox

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    07.07.2012

    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. If there's one thing in WoW that's a major sticking point at the start of every expansion, it's the constant change in each class's abilities at launch. We all know the pain: Some abilities come in, some are changed to a whole different creature, and others just fade away. People hate the idea of having to relearn their class, for sure, but most of all what I hate is the idea of losing some old friends to the march of time. We all fondly remember one ability or another from auld lang syne in WoW. The game feels a slight bit emptier without it, though you'll cope, because there's really no way to turn back the clock. Once an ability hits the chopping block, it seldom comes back. (Unless it's Blinding Light -- that one definitely got a second chance.) Let's talk about a few of the amazing paladin abilities that were tossed out on the heap, as well as what's currently getting its head jammed in the guillotine.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: 3 crazy design ideas that would turn ret on its head

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    07.05.2012

    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! When I was young, I had an appointment with a doctor and three syringes for some vaccinations before I started school in the fall. I clearly remember the feeling of anxiety and reluctance as each foot took another step toward the entrance to the clinic. I screamed, I kicked, and I may have even cried a little bit (OK, maybe a lot). But once all was said and done, and after the aching in my arm subsided, I reflected on my experience and realized that it wasn't as terrifying as my overactive imagination had built it up to be. This very much reflects my experience with the changeover to holy power from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm. I was really, really hesitant and was not looking forward to relearning how to play my class, but once I got the hang of things it started growing on me. Big changes tend to make us anxious, even angry, but there's something about starting over and learning new things that makes the whole experience worthwhile in the end. With this in mind, I let my imagination run wild between trash packs in Bastion of Twilight the other night and thought of three crazy design ideas for redefining retribution.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: 4 necessary elements of a successful tank UI

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    06.22.2012

    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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. When it comes to a custom UI, information is king. Sure, there are ancillary benefits, like the pursuit of a pretty user interface, or a minimalistic one, or (be still, my beating heart) both. But when you get down to the real meat and potatoes of building a UI, the most successful are the ones that are most effective at presenting information to the player in an efficient and useful manner. And of course, many players are perfectly happy with the stock UI, which is totally fine if that's your cup of tea. For many others, myself included, the preference is for a custom viewport into Azeroth that can distill everything at your disposal into a package that can be quickly digested by the brain, as well as all sorts of bells, whistles, and dinglehoppers that make for a more aesthetically pleasing interface. Because that's half the fun.

  • 3 things I'm going to miss about retribution in Mists

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    06.20.2012

    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! It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of the beta and what's coming our way in Mists of Pandaria -- so easy, in fact, that we lose sight of what we stand to lose in this transition. Retribution isn't undergoing as extensive of an overhaul as warlocks are, but amid the improvements and buffs are abilities, talents, and mechanics that are going by the wayside. Unfortunately for many of you, Inquisition isn't one of those mechanics, but below are a few things that I will look back on and yearn for in the coming expansion. Holy Wrath and Consecration The loss of these two abilities isn't so much about how our AoE toolbox is going to suffer in their absence. No, Hammer of the Righteous and Divine Storm should more than make up for these relatively weak filler abilities, and I'm sure our mana pools won't miss Consecration in the slightest. When I first started playing the spec, I had visions of my character being not only a powerful warrior but also an adept wielder of the Light. There's just something about a paladin using generous amounts of holy magic to battle demons and the undead that just seems so right and makes the departure of these abilities hurt the overall feel of the spec. Yes, we still have Exorcism, Judgment, and Hammer of Wrath, but aside from Exo, these spells just seem like they have holy damage added on to them after the fact.

  • Hero Moments: What it means to be a tank

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    06.09.2012

    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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. When thinking about the biggest perks to being a tank, I keep getting stuck on the intangibles. It's much like the reasons why Indiana Jones would rob old men in yachts of their jewelry: fortune and glory. Well, perhaps more the glory -- fortune is awfully tangible. But yes, glory. Glory is a powerful drug. For a tank, the thankless job that it is, glory can be all the fuel needed to keep going, to keep chugging along while various DPS players sip their piña colodas and sling insults at you from the safety of their deck chairs for not tanking to their exacting specifications. And what better glory is there than those moments when it's you versus the world and all the odds are arrayed against you? Whether it's a moment when the entire raid has kicked the bucket, and it all falls to you to see the boss take his own fall, or (like a digital Leonidas) you hold off a boss for as long as possible so the rest of your comrades can flee past the reset point without accumulating a repair bill -- those moments of personal glory pop up from time to time.

  • 5 reasons your ret paladin should be equipped with addons

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    06.06.2012

    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! Like many people, I honestly tried to get into SWTOR. I attempted to approach the game unbiased, but my experience with MMOs had already been colored by about five years of World of Warcraft. Now don't misunderstand me, SWTOR is still a good game in many respects (1.3 million other players certainly think so), but WoW set up a number of expectations that the fledgling MMO at least in my eyes failed to deliver on, not the least of which was a customizable user interface (UI). Over the years, addons have become a core part of the World of Warcraft experience, their functions and purposes as varied as the players and fans that create them. While it is certainly possible to play the game without using a single one, addons are meant to improve your playtime and maximize the enjoyment you get out of your time in Azeroth. In today's post-Sundering world, a ret paladin stands to benefit from picking up at least a couple of them. Let's check out some situations where having a little extra help would go a long way.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: The framework for our Mists rotation

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    05.27.2012

    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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. The biggest change for players with every expansion is undeniably getting acclimated to the new and different buttons that one has to work with, ie, the new rotation. If you poll players on their least favorite part of the next phase of the game rolling over, invariably a large percent will shout how annoyed they are with "having to relearn their class." Some abilities which were juggernauts are suddenly akin to balloons with the air rushing out of them, others that were middle of the road also-rans are suddenly hot tickets. Getting to the point where you once again have a good sense of your class is often a pain. While the beta is far from final, and the numbers are (of course) subject to change many times over, we're still at a point where we can begin to make some sense out of the design-equivalent of watching sausage being made. We won't know be able to say with 100% conviction which fillers are best when and where, but we can assuredly say what the framework of the rotation will be.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Glyph of Inquisition and the myth of the no-brainer

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    05.23.2012

    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! Back in October, the blues issued a challenge to themselves, a goal for their new talent system in Mists of Pandaria -- there would be no mandatory talents, zero "no-brainers" or similarly choiceless situations. The same has been said for glyphs in the past, straight from the mouthparts of the head crab himself. Now we all know that there has always been a chasm of varying width separating what the designers intend for a system and what we as players experience. Sometimes the devs do really well and the gap is but a crack in the sidewalk, while others look more Springfield Gorge, and others still like Valles Marineris on Mars. Even so, we can hardly blame them -- we players, as a whole, are a fickle bunch. It is only natural that a group numbering in the millions would have diverse opinions on what works and what doesn't, particularly when it pertains to how each of us play the game.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: c paladin run

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    05.13.2012

    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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. I still remember the unmitigated joy I felt, sitting in my crummy seat far off to the left of the main stage at BlizzCon 2011, as Blizzard began to go into the new talent system for Mists of Pandaria and a screenshot of the paladin tree was shown. Sitting at the top of the new tree was a tier of familiar names: Speed of Light, Long Arm of the Law, Pursuit of Justice -- all the names of the various speed enhancements that the class currently had. Sweet fancy Moses, it was a tier of "gap closers"! I slap some scare quotes on the phrase gap closer because, despite that being my holy grail for the past two years, let's be honest -- the new talents aren't technically gap closers. They don't have the immediacy of a Charge or a Death Grip. But they're as close as we're going to get without some homogenized Divine Charge, and to a point, they will help us close a gap. They're acceptable substitutions, each with its own positives and negatives.

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Readying your ret paladin for Mists of Pandaria

    by 
    Dan Desmond
    Dan Desmond
    05.08.2012

    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! It's hard to believe it's already May 2012. It seems like just last week that I was standing in line at BlizzCon with my guildmates, trying to make small talk and failing completely at it. Most of our interactions involved people watching and commenting on the information put forth at the various panels like those annoying people in the movie theater who feel the need to rate every preview on whether or not it will completely suck (see above). Anyway, with any luck Mists will be released by the end of summer (I'm betting on an August launch, myself), so what better time than now to get your paladin ready so that you hit the ground running when the servers come back online? The time will come during the next expansion when your hard-earned purples will be replaced by mismatched greens, but more work put into getting the best purples available to you now will keep that dreaded day far in the future. Also, how hard you hit is dictated by the strength of your gear, and the amount of time it will take you to kill a mob is dependent on how much damage you can dish out.

  • Mists of Pandaria Beta: Paladins get Ashbringer with new talent

    by 
    Mathew McCurley
    Mathew McCurley
    05.02.2012

    Paladins, Ashbringer is yours -- well, for a short duration, at least. The level 75 paladin talent Holy Avenger, which is a cooldown that allows the player to gain 3 holy power when using an ability that generates holy power, now turns the paladin's weapon into the mighty Ashbringer for the duration of the spell. Paladins have been asking for iconic imagery in their sets and weapons for some time, with many paladins feeling left out or in an odd place when tier sets are designed around aspects of paladins in the game rather than the Alliance paladins of the traditional days. Ashbringer is about as traditionally paladin as you get. Paladins, congratulations on your badass graphics for Holy Avenger, especially with something so iconic as Ashbringer being part of your kit, so to speak. How cool is that? Blizzard has already given shaman the ability to transform into powerful ascendants, and now we see this cool new flavor for the paladin and brand new demons for the warlock. What will surprise us come next beta patch? It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

  • The Light and How to Swing It: Latest beta build shakes things up for prot

    by 
    Matt Walsh
    Matt Walsh
    04.28.2012

    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 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. There are good beta builds, and there are bad beta builds, and then there are bad, bad beta builds. Build 15640, which went up this week, is a textbook example of the latter -- specifically with regard to how it handles our active mitigation. Considering that active mitigation (AM) is the most important change prot paladins are receiving going into the next expansion, the quality of a build hinges on how it handles this topic. Needless to say, the next few builds are always going to include some new iteration of Shield of the Righteous, as the class design team works out the kinks and attempts to cobble together an effective version of the ability.