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The Light and How to Swing It: 3 crazy design ideas that would turn ret on its head
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: Wearing metal dresses
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 what's in store for our precious plate dresses in a post-mastery world. If you've been following along with Blizzard's release schedule for holy paladin information, it's clear that there are going to be some serious changes. Imagine if you rounded up the four healer classes of WoW side by side, in terms of playstyle and capability. I am certain that paladins would stand out in the lineup. Trying to normalize us into the universal healthcare -- I mean, universal healing system is going to be a difficult task. Because of this, it's not a surprise that the other three healer classes received their talent previews this week, while paladins are left wondering what's in store. The previews for the other classes show us that Blizzard intends to make nearly all caster gear come with spirit, while adding talents for the DPS casters to convert spirit to hit. I remember the complaints when healing power and spell damage were merged into spellpower, but I can say now that I think it was a great change. Not having to shard a piece of cloth gear with hit on it because none of the healers needed it will be a welcome change as well. All casters will be able to share gear with their fellow cloth/leather/mail wearers. The question is: Where does this leave holy paladins? We're still stuck sporting plate armor, and there are no other casters around to use the same gear.
Death to spell power plate
In a recent set of posts on the subject of Prot Paladins wearing holy gear in PvP, Ghostcrawler mentioned that Prot Paladins are not intended to be able to out heal Holy Paladins in the same gear and that fixes are intended that will remove their ability to do this. I'd like to offer a suggestion: destroy all spell power plate. Destroy it! Destroy, destroy, destroy! Exterminate it! Extirpate it from the surface of Azeroth! Perhaps in a Cataclysm of some kind. (Except Judgement. That can stay.)My reasoning isn't to nerf Holy Paladins as healers. I love all healers equally. Rather, my idea here is to incorporate a class design that's been picking up steam since the end of Burning Crusade. Back before patch 3.0 dropped, two Paladin specs wore spell plate, Holy and Protection. Since that was two specs out of a possible six plate wearing talent specializations (2/6 = 1/3 = roughly 33 percent, I'm not doing a repeating) that meant that there was a fairly sizable minority that wanted the stuff.Flash forward to Wrath of the Lich King. There are now three plate wearing classes. Two of them (six total talent specs) have absolutely no use for spell plate. The one class that does use spell plate? Well, the Protection tree was revamped, so tanking Paladins don't wear it. Retribution has been giving spell plate the stink eye forever. So we now have 1 out of 9 possible specs wearing the stuff, and yet it drops everywhere. There's no reason spell plate needs to exist, much less be a protected species by Blizzard when they went out of their way to do away with tanking leather, for example.
