pally-talents
Latest
The Light and How to Swing It: Deciphering holy paladin talents
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 comments or awesome holy paladin screenshots you have. I was planning to talk about how Conviction was broken and only affected self-healing, but Blizzard's crew has hotfixed that bug already. Conviction now grants the proper healing bonus when we heal anyone. The end result is that our healing done is going to go up significantly. I'm actually wondering whether or not we're going to see a nerf because of it. A 9% boost to healing done is certainly enough to throw off whatever balance we had achieved with the other healing classes' performance. Between the first time I heard of the Conviction issue and the recent hotfix, I have respecced about a dozen times. There are so many viable talent options available for our final flex points that I simply can't decide what I want to pick up. I couldn't even make up my mind when I had three free talent points after dropping Conviction from my build. I love the flexibility that we have when speccing our holy paladins.
The Light and How to Swing It: Fresh patch 4.0.6 PTR notes 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, or with any screenshots of huge LoH crits. When Wrath was released, there were just over a dozen bosses available to fight immediately. Most of them were found in Naxxramas, which fell to the superguilds so quickly that not all of them were even level 80 yet. A few achievements like A Poke in the Eye and the first "hard mode" of Sartharion with three drakes were all that the talented raiders had to keep them company during the first few months of Northrend. By the time that Ulduar was released, nearly everyone was clamoring for new content. Cataclysm's launch hasn't shared the same fate. With heroic raids now the de facto form of progression and miles of new non-raiding content to explore, the content available at release has definitely lasted far longer. Even the most difficult bosses are still not on farm for the big guilds. Blizzard's developers have used this opportunity to start working on the first major patch after Cataclysm's release, which is of course includes plenty of holy paladin changes to keep us on our toes.
The Light and How to Swing It: One heal or two
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. On Sundays, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email Chase with any questions you want answered, like how to party with Thrall. There's no need to be ashamed. Many people have felt how you're feeling right now. Let's get it out in the open: You're concerned about mana efficiency. Running out of mana is not a nightmare -- it's a reality. If you choose the wrong heals, your mana pool plummets. Being inefficient with your heals isn't the status quo; it's a death sentence. Mana went from our least important stat to our most thought-of concern. I have been working on different techniques to refine my healing strategy within the confines of our new healing paradigm, and I have come up with a method for saving mana and maximizing your healing done. One of the mechanics that makes holy paladins unique from other healers is our talent Protector of the Innocent, while another is Beacon of Light. When we combine the two abilities, we can achieve far more healing than would normally be possible through the method of splitting holy power points.
The Light and How to Swing It: A year to remember 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 Chase with any questions you want answered, like how awesome 2010 was. In early 2010, WoW Insider decided that it was in our readers' best interests to start breaking up our weekly class editorials into separate columns for some of the hybrid specs. Instead of trying to tackle the responsibility of covering all three paladins specs, Gregg and I split the paladin duties. He covers the specs that love strength while I cover the spec that stacks intellect, and we occasionally dip into each other's territory when applicable. Writing about healing was a brand new experience for me, as my rogue columns were really focused on the cut-and-dry topic of maximizing DPS. I figured that covering a healing role was a much more nebulous topic, as there is usually more than one way to do the job. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for holy paladins, as our love-hate relationship (mostly love) with intellect dictated just about every aspect of our playstyle.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladins make a trade
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 about how Blizzard finally fixed the Light of Dawn animation. I'm not going to sugar-coat it: Holy paladins saw a massive stealth nerf delivered recently. Tower of Radiance, once the pinnacle of a holy paladin's healing strategy, was reduced to rubble. ToR previously granted us an extra holy power point any time we used a core heal on our Beaconed target. The new version only works with Divine Light and Flash of Light, our two most expensive heals. Our holy power generation mechanics basically limit us to one holy power point every 6 seconds. Daybreak can help by letting us snag extra Holy Shocks, but not in a predictable manner. Tower of Radiance allowed us to control our holy power generation by using Holy Light to pick up a few extra points whenever we wanted. The key to Tower of Radiance's potency was the cheap price of Holy Light. If we needed extra AoE healing, we could generate holy power points and then spend them on Light of Dawn. When low on mana, we could use our cheap Holy Lights to build points towards a zero-mana Word of Glory. ToR gave us the flexibility to do something productive with our Holy Lights during downtime and allowed us to exploit our free holy power-based heals. To make matters worse, the developers nerfed us from the other direction, by lowering Light of Dawn's potency by 40%.
The Light and How to Swing It: Pre-raid gear for holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. On Sundays, 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 I'm wielding a stick in my off hand. Has your holy paladin reached level 85 yet? I was able to dedicate enough time to finish up the job, and I've been hard at work ever since. While Holy Shocking and Exorcising my way to the level cap was a blast, we have to get back to reality. Shockadins aren't really viable at any competitive level once 85, and so we're going to revert to our healing ways. I changed my spec into a more traditional holy build and got to work running dungeons and heroics. I even got an opportunity to knock out a couple of raid bosses, which was eye-opening. With Blizzard's new in-game version of GearScore controlling your ability to enter dungeons or heroic groups, it's important that your holy paladin is geared properly and quickly. We don't have the same infinite mana pool to lean on, and Holy Light's throughput is maybe a quarter of what it was at level 80. When we first reach the level cap, we're feeble and frail. Our old epics are meaningless, and we're left scrambling for any gear we can find. If we take a bit of time to plan out our gearing strategy, we can apply a method to this madness.
The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysm 101 for protection paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. We're doing a quick series on what it means to be a paladin in Cataclysm for people either coming back to the game after an absence or trying out the class for the first time. If you missed last week, we covered retribution paladins and some beginner info for them, and hopefully we'll finish them up next week. But first, we're talking about protection paladins and their 101 introduction.
The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysm 101 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 how awesome Exorcism is. Paladins have always been a flexible class. Our hybrid nature is one of our greatest strengths, and it gives us a variety of ways to solve any problem. We can use our raw might to crush our enemies, we can defend ourselves from our opponents' onslaught, and we can save our friends from certain death. The massive class changes in Cataclysm have brought us another role to fill -- that of the avenging cleric. We can now use our holy nature to cleanse Azeroth of evil (and the opposing faction). Holy paladins are lucky enough to have two different roles they can fill with the same set of gear, and this gives us a great opportunity to be flexible while leveling. You can easily queue for the new dungeons while also churning your way through quests, maximizing your experience gain. With the new Light of Dawn at our fingertips, healing groups in dungeons is nearly painless. A shockadin build also allows us to wreak havoc upon our enemies -- and quite efficiently, too. How can we utilize these two halves of the spec to create the best leveling experience?
The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysm 101 for retribution paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Earlier this year, I wrote up a little article on what you need to know about retribution paladins. The problem with this is that when Deathwing decided to break the world, he also changed how every class in the game played in some way. Paladins were one of the ones that changed the most in this shift. We got an additional resource bar, new talents, new mechanics, new abilities -- and now we're getting new levels. As retribution paladins, this doesn't faze us that much. This happens every expansion to our spec, and we're used to it at this point. Anyway, we're going to spend two weeks on this and move over to protection. Let's get to the good stuff.
The Light and How to Swing It: The relationship between intellect and spirit
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. "Stack intellect." All you had to do was ask any question about holy paladins in Wrath, and you'd receive that infamous answer. Intellect was the solution to all of our problems, and it was through intellect that we conquered our corner of the healing game. Intellect allowed us to cast indefinitely without ever running our mana wells dry, and intellect allowed us to cast our most powerful heal without even a moment's pause. It was a matter of fact. Holy paladins would simply overheal in massive amounts, and nobody cared. I suppose intellect was only half of the problem. Holy Light clearly scaled too well as our gear improved. It was meant to be expensive but powerful, a necessary evil for dire situations. Once the scare of running out of mana was debunked, there was no reason not to use the most potent tool in our arsenal. While the developers may still blame the imbalances in Icecrown Citadel on the extra tiers of gear they had to add to accommodate heroic raid encounters, when an errant DPS class' performance scaled out of control, they were quickly reined in. Holy paladins' power was left unchecked because we were merely healers. The hammer would drop on us in Cataclysm, anyway.
The Light and How to Swing It: Prot and ret paladin addons
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. In recent news, yet another Sanctuary talent bug has been hotfixed. I'm really starting to get annoyed at this wonderful talent that keeps us crit-immune. This time, the issue was that it would de-talent itself for players under level 30 when they logged off, zoned, changed continents, etc. This should now be fixed, for those of you who've been leveling new tauren paladins as protection. As far as the column this week goes, we're talking about addons. From holy power tracking to gear swapping to buff reminders (like the one shown above), there are a lot of things that can make our day-to-day dungeon running a lot easier. These aren't the only addons for each solution (and I hope our commenters will point out any good ones I missed), but they're a few of the more popular, and each has its own features and limitations.
The Light and How to Swing It: Leveling your new Sunwalker
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 awesome tauren paladins are. After The Shattering hit Azeroth, it was clear that the world was never going to be the same. Entire zones were torn asunder, and everyone who can take up arms to combat Deathwing has stood up to fight. The Horde recently inducted the Sunwalkers into the fold, and they're eagerly training in the way of the Light. Now players won't be stuck with blood elves when they want to play the paladin class. If you've been on the general forums in the past few days, you've seen some of the clever names that people have come up with for their tauren paladins. Retbull (gives you wings), Skim (Light milk), and Bovinity (divine cows) were among my personal favorites. I decided to start a new tauren paladin myself, figuring I could heal my way through the low-level dungeons and try out the new starting quests and zones at the same time. It's been years since I've played a new paladin, and it was time for a refresher course.
The Light and How to Swing It: Real numbers for future shockadins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. On Sundays, 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 awesome the Draenei casting animations are. I have heard from a plethora of patient paladins who are very excited about the new shockadin spec. Holy paladins have traditionally missed out on the fun of dealing ranged damage due to various issues with our abilities and talents. Now that Blizzard added some support for the build, we are now tasked with figuring out if it's even viable and how exactly to best play the spec. We're discovering new territory here, boldly going where no paladin has gone before. While we're sure that holy paladin DPS is going to be at an all-time high no matter what, the question is exactly how powerful we're going to be. Luckily for us, the Cataclysm beta servers are still active, so I took the opportunity to run some tests on exactly what type of damage we can expect to be doing. Obviously, if we're just killing mobs for a daily quest, time isn't exactly of the essence. However, if we want Exorcism and Holy Shock to be viable options in PvP or a raid environment, their damage needs to be substantially larger than it has been in the past.
The Light and How to Swing It: Light of Dawn's latest rebirth
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 pull off an awesome dive heal, as pictured above. Gregg, my fellow paladin columnist, and I like to make jokes about Blizzard's strategy for naming paladin abilities. Holy This, Something Retribution, and Divine That. Their creativity can only stretch so far, as paladins have a very defined set of lore, and there are only so many words that relate to their holy upbringing. Paladins have the additional downside of being a hybrid class, and so this means that the number of available ability names depletes faster than ever. Blizzard changed Healing Hands' name to Holy Radiance, which is probably a great move, considering that we already had a heal named Lay on Hands. Duplicate names didn't stop Blizzard's team from christening our second AoE heal with the same name as one of the game's most prestigious achievements and a title, Light of Dawn. Light of Dawn itself isn't safe from the instability, either. Its function went from a simple heal that was boosted by holy power, to a regular AoE heal that had no target cap, and it has even been changed again. The new version of Light of Dawn is a smart heal that consumes only holy power, which completely changes its functionality and usefulness.
The Light and How to Swing It: No more avoidance caps
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Oh, and I still love the Grand Crusader proc graphics even though they're unrelated to today's article. One thing that we've been taught as tanks throughout most of World of Warcraft is that you had to be capped at something in order to not be insta-killed by bosses. Back when I started playing, this was referred to as reaching uncrushable. You would have to stack up 102.4 percent avoidance in order to push the dreaded crushing blows off of the boss's list of possible attacks he could hit you with. This also meant that all incoming hits were avoided or mitigated in some way, shape or form. That primary form was blocks, and abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield at that time were custom tailored to this environment. With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, crushing blows were deemed a thing of the past and bosses would no longer be employing them against tanks. However, we quickly had a new cap to deal with instead of that called the defense cap, aka reaching uncrittable. This meant accumulating 540 defense skill against raid bosses in order to remove bosses of being able to hit us with a critical melee attack. In early raiding tiers, this was a constant balance between gems, enchants and trinkets, as each piece of gear we accumulated could change how the scales tipped.
The Light and How to Swing It: The return of the shockadin
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 Holy Shock can change your life.. I still remember my very first character. After logging in on the first day WoW was released, I chose a paladin at the character select screen, hoping to embody the role of "holy crusader." I started leveling up my character, and once I hit level 10, I had to decide on a talent specialization. I was waffling between retribution and protection, until I saw holy's 31-point talent. Holy Shock called out to me. It was the only ranged attack that a paladin could obtain, and I was certain it would lead me to victory. Consecration's place in the tree was just icing on the cake. Unfortunately, once I hit level 40 and obtained Holy Shock, I realized just how awful it was for DPS. I never played that paladin again. We're getting two new AoE heals with Cataclysm's arrival, something we've desperately needed for years. Our holy talent tree is getting a revamp, and much of the clutter it previously contained is disappearing. We're seeing numerous quality of life improvements like the extension to Beacon of Light's duration and a newly revamped Lay on Hands. All of these changes are nice, but there's one that has me even more excited. Blizzard has granted us every single element necessary to facilitate a caster DPS holy build, featuring Holy Shock as the signature spell. While rumors and whispers of the shockadin spec have been circling around since WoW's release, it is now a reality.
The Light and How to Swing It: Paladin Protection glyphs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. We've recently looked at builds for protection and retribution, so let's continue that trend and take a look at glyphs. I'm going to review all of them, as we're getting pretty close to Cataclysm, and I'm going to also review them in a more global context instead of talking about what is going to help you on hard-mode Lich King. The way I've set it up is that everything that you're likely going to want without question has an asterisk next to it; those are pretty much things you'll want to take. If you look through the major and minor glyphs, you'll notice that there aren't very many marked as such. There's a reason for that. We just don't have that many spectacular glyphs that are useful in all situations for those types. That's not to say the other glyphs are bad (well, some are, but we'll get to that), but they're more situational and require some choice on your part.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladins are all about throughput
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 pull off an awesome dive heal, as pictured above. Blizzard has tried to give holy paladins so many interesting tools. We saw our first absorption effect in our level 80 ability, Sacred Shield. Its potency was limited due to the proc mechanics involved, and once it was limited to a single target, it became just another buff we kept active. The dev team tried giving us not one but two different HoTs. The first was via the old Glyph of Flash of Light, which took our weakest heal and cut its up-front healing in half in exchange for a weak HoT. It simply didn't make sense. The second HoT we received came from the interaction between Infusion of Light and Sacred Shield, which would put a HoT on our SS target when we used FoL on him. While more powerful than the last iteration, it was still far too weak to make any difference, and its limitation of a single target really made it untenable. Our ability to prevent damage via absorption effects or proactively heal damage via HoTs was basically nil, and holy paladins relied on massive throughput to solve every healing dilemma. It looks like that model hasn't changed today.
New changes to tanking cooldowns coming for Cataclysm
Blue poster Nethaera informed us today about a number changes coming to tanking cooldowns in Cataclysm (specifically, patch 4.0.3a). It seems an imbalance occurs in the current build when tanks stack mastery, leading to astronomical values of block. For now, specifics are only available for paladin, druid and warrior tanks. The post hints that cooldown changes for druid and death knight tanks will be coming later, once developers can get a better handle on the complexities of the classes' abilities. When asked for comment and analysis, Fox Van Allen's orc Grunk posited, "Me Grunk! Grunk fear change! Grunk smash!" Sadly, Grunk lacks the mental clarity to process the full meaning of all these forthcoming changes because as a warrior, Grunk does not stack intellect (and takes repeated physical blows to the head). If he did, the changes would be meaningless to him, as he'd have followed his dream and become an architect rather than becoming Orgrimmar's No. 3-ranked skull cleaver. In lieu of expert testimony from Grunk, we have the full blue post just after the break.
The Light and How to Swing It: BlizzCon paladin info roundup
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. So this is pretty much going to be a collection of blurbs from the BlizzCon 2010 class Q&A panel. Some questions that were asked throughout the day were things that have come up in the past, but others had new information that hadn't even hit the beta servers yet. The panel members from left to right consisted of Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (WoW lead systems designer), Kris Zierhut (WoW senior technical game designer), Owen Landgren (WoW game designer), Ion Hazzikostas (WoW game designer) and Chris Kaleiki (WoW associate game designer). I went back and tried to do a much more thorough job at transcribing the information than we do in our live blogs (because none of us can type as fast as Ghostcrawler speaks). Also, I've added a "too long didn't read" (TLDR) version of each question at the beginning for those of you who don't read the whole post before commenting. For the rest of you, there is a full transcript as well as links I've found to videos of the panel on YouTube and linked directly to where the question is asked, if you want to actually see what was happening. This isn't official video, so it might get pulled for copyright issues, but until then, it's a great reference.
