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The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 4
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. Here we are again with the final section on the low level paladin tanking guide. You can go back and read parts one, two, and three if you need to catch up. This final part deals with consumables, macros, and addons. As a dungeon runner, you don't have the high requirements usually associated with raids, but there are a couple things you'll want to keep an eye on. You'll want to keep reasonably buffed, have some useful macros to fall back on, and have some addons to help organize some of the more procedural steps. Let's take a look after the break.
The Light and How to Swing It: The Paladin of 2009
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week we're taking a look back at 2009 and the ups and downs we've felt as paladins. Well, it's after Christmas and another year is almost behind us. Two-double-zero-nine was a particularly frustrating year for paladins, because we felt we were either at the top of the pile or the bottom and it changed from day to day. The development team has even been quoted as saying that paladins have been the hardest class in Wrath to balance even when taking death knights into consideration. Let's walk down memory lane and see where we were and where we're going.
The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank, part 3
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. We've been doing a series on playing a low level tank. We started out with talking some theory and stats, worked our way into talents, and this week, we're going to delve into the world of skills. Paladins, as a hybrid class, have a wide variety of skills available to them. Some of these can be useful, some have no part in a tank's skill rotation. We'll take you through your initial buffs and what skills to keep within reach if things get ugly.
The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 2
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week he's trying to help those of you crazy enough to tank Gnomergon when it's still a level appropriate instance. We're doing a much longer than expected series of articles on the low level dungeon runners now that the new cross-realm Dungeon Finder is up and running. This is part two of our series on the low level tank. Last week we talked about the basics of threat, avoidance, mitigation, and what stats to be on the lookout for when choosing gear. We did promise to get into talents and skills this week, but that would have ended up being three pages long. So we're going to leave skills until next week and just concentrate on talents this time around. If you're extremely new, take a look at this nice article explaining talents for new players. If you've got that down, let's start move on to more paladin specific info.
The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 1
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. For the next couple weeks we'll be taking a look at low level dungeon runners. Cross-realm instancing is coming in patch 3.3 and along with it will be the ability for low level characters to finally find those level appropriate groups for old world dungeons. Being that those parties will need tanks, we thought we'd take a look at what an up and coming paladin needs to know about dungeons as well as what types of gear and stats to be on the lookout for. We're going to start with tanking and then move on to healing and damage-dealing in the weeks to come.
The Light and How to Swing It: A little less hybrid
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. Ghostcrawler has been doing a lot of talking pertaining to paladins and Blizzard's vision of them for the future. A lot of this has been spawned by some of the changes the developers have been toying around with on the public test realms. In the current build of the PTR, Lay on Hands causes Forbearance on its target which has prompted quite an uproar from the playerbase. This cuts a leg out from our two major defensive cooldowns making us choose either health or invulnerability during a fight. Holy paladins are getting some text tacked onto Sanctified Light which will allow them to reduce the chance it will cause Forbearance on others by 33/66/100% to allow it to still be useful when healing in groups. As this is the PTR, we don't really know how much of this will end up on the live realms. The developers have been toying around with several different ideas and at the moment we're not sure which one or ones they'll end up going with.
The Light and How to Swing It: Divine Sacrifice
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week we're going to talk about trying to not take one for the team. While some of you might be looking at the skill in the title and not know what I'm talking about, we paladins have a nice little talented ability known as Divine Sacrifice. A lot of holy and protection paladins should already know about this cursed little gem. Depending on your spec setup, you might even be aware of it as a retribution paladin. If you're not familiar with the skill, it's sitting on the left in the third tier of the protection tree. Go look, I'll wait. For those of you that didn't go over to look, it is essentially a raid-wide version of Hand of Sacrifice and often nicknamed the "raid-wall" for its shield-wall-esque capabilities. It allows the casting paladin to take 30% of the damage from every person in the party or the raid for 10 seconds. Luckily, it can be used in combination with Divine Shield so you don't instantly die from all of that incoming damage. Currently, it's a fairly dangerous little skill. With it you can either be savior or martyr of your raid group depending on how you use it.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tier 10 thus far
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week, he ventures into the unknown depths of the Mines of Data to bring you information on the upcoming tier 10 paladin armor.Being as paladins, along with half of the other classes, still don't actually have models for their tier 10 gear yet on the PTR there isn't much we can actually show you other than a dwarf in his boxers. What we do have is the set bonuses which may or may not change by the time patch 3.3 actually hits. Both holy and retribution have been changed a couple times throughout the test builds thus far, so they should be getting fairly close to what we'll see. Protection hasn't had much change in it thus far, but the bonuses are in line with what we should be expecting. After the break, we'll look at each spec's set bonuses and do a little theorycrafting in some cases to see what they'll mean for us in Icecrown.
The Light and How to Swing It: 3.2.2 means re-balancing... again
While I'm not one to whine about incoming nerfs and changes for any of the classes I play, it sometimes gets a little annoying to see the developers tweaking things here and there trying to get the balance just right. Ghostcrawler recently said that in comparison to other classes, "... paladins (all 3 kinds) have been a bigger headache to balance this expansion, usually in the favor of the paladin." While we might not always think this is the case, there are several times since the moment 3.0.2 hit to start the expansion off where things just felt too easy. From ret pallies in substandard gear out performing all other classes to holy pallies being able to chain cast Holy Light with little regard for mana, the class has been a little off at times.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking the Northrend Beasts
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How To Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps out with the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown on the weekends. This week, he takes a look at tanking the fantastic and terrible beasts that the Argent Crusade has collected for their Trial of the Crusader event.The Argent Crusade has assembled a number of trials for champions, crusaders, and grand crusaders alike to fight through as they decide what forces they will take in their assault against Icecrown Citadel itself. Today, we'll take a look at the first of the events in Trial of the Crusader which is the Northrend Beasts encounter. They've assembled Magnataur, Jormungars, and Yeti (Oh My!) to test the mettle of those wishing to compete. We'll take a look at tanking each of these beasts after the break.
The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysmadin
Every now and again, Zach takes you through musings of truth, justice, and the Azerothian way in The Light and How to Swing It before the new guy -- someone who'll actually write regularly -- steps in.Holy cow. You'll be hearing that lame phrase a lot once the next expansion rolls around and Taurens start dispensing their own brand of divine -- or should I say, bovine -- justice. All jokes aside, Tauren Paladins are just one of the big changes for class once the Cataclysm hits, and it's a pretty cool one. Blizzard seems to have planted the seeds of lore to explain the rise of "Sunwalkers", the flavor name for Tauren Paladins. Character-wise, Taurens are the most sensible choice, as well, considering they are arguably the Horde's noblest race. Undead Paladins aren't in the cards, unfortunately, even though it's something some fans have toyed around with because of lore reasons.But no, the whole "risen from the dead to wear plate" role has been filled up nicely by Death Knights. Instead, we've got the Sunwalkers, which is pretty cool for Horde players who've always wanted to try out the Paladin class but perhaps didn't want to play Blood Elves. Worgen and Goblins, Cataclysm's new races, aren't eligible to become Paladins, which rules out experiencing the new starting areas as champions of the Light. The good news is that Azeroth will be reshaped -- good news for us players, anyway... seems like a bad deal for Azeroth -- which means that we're likely to get new starting areas to experience the thrill of leveling once again.
The Light and How to Swing It: Levels 71-80
Every week, The Light and How to Swing It preaches word about the champions of all that is good, true, and totally badass. This week, we take a time space warp as we complete a long forgotten series that should help prepare your Paladin for the next chapter in the World of Warcraft.What? A leveling guide from 71-80? Nine months after Wrath of the Lich King has been released? Well, sure. Obviously this won't be geared towards players who use Paladins as their main. One of these days, maybe next week, we'll probably get around to talking about Crusader's Coliseum and the Trial of the Crusader. Then again, didn't you just one-shot all those bosses last week? Anyway, just for this week we'll pick up where we left off when we last hit Level 70 (or so). The excitement seems to be pointing towards the next batch of content - from reawakened black dragons, to the inevitable opening of Icecrown, and of course, the advent of a new expansion.Actually, there couldn't be a better time to dust off that Paladin alt (probably once your main, who knows?) because... well, what class would you really want to bring to a face off with the freaking Lich King? A class that knows how to lay the smackdown with the freaking Light, that's who! Besides, when they finally allow paid race changes some months after the next expansion (come on, you didn't really think they'd let you pay to switch to a max level Goblin or Worgen right off the bat, did you?), wouldn't you want a high level Paladin standing at the ready to be transformed into a badass werewolf? Alright, I'm just teasing you. It probably won't happen, but if it did, at least you wouldn't be kicking yourself in the head. Ok, so, you're Level 70 and sailing off to Northrend. Let's hit it.
The Light and How to Swing It: Five things every Paladin must do. Period.
After a unintended long hiatus, The Light and How to Swing It is back with a message from the Light. Inspired by a recent post by our very funny Christian Belt who writes the Mage column, we'll go and pick up his great idea and twist it a little bit, just like how Blood Elves used to siphon power off M'uru and twist it around. For today we'll go over all the things you have to do in the game in order to get the best experience out of your Paladin.Now, I'll preface the column to disclaim that I'm nowhere near as funny as Mr. Belt (regular readers rub that in among all our other writers with the exception of Allison Robert) - I'm actually quite humorless - and that obviously this list isn't going to be the definitive guide to playing a Paladin. It's just that for this exercise, I'm going to pick out several things in the World of Warcraft that should make your Paladin more, ah, complete.
Breakfast Topic: What will your last meal be?
I would not, could not, in a Citadel.I could not, would not, with someone so magical.I will not eat them with an elf.I will not eat them in a house.I will not eat them at Northrend or here.I will not eat them in Azeroth anywhere.I do not eat green eggs and ham!I do not like them, Lich King–I–am!While Dr. Seuss may never have imaged his work being set to the poststructuralist lamentings of an evil-incarnate Paladin, they time is quickly arriving in which your character will sit down and have his last meal in Outlands.For me, I'm going to be enjoying what's left of my Spicy Crawdad. I built up a large supply of the stuff six or so months ago. I think I've only used about half of it, so there'll be plenty to eat while leveling through Northrend. But on Wednesday evening when I group up with my friends of Eldre'Thalas for the last time to grind that final bit of Honor Hold rep I need to get exalted (sorry if you didn't know we were doing this guys), I'll be eat my spicy crawdad. My last meal seems a bit fishy.
Paladins nerfed on the beta
MMO-Champion is showing a good run down of the recent paladin changes. We knew these were coming. While many of the changes don't seem like they're nerfing the Paladin class to the ground, the changes are definitely a nerf.Most of the changes are centering around the Retribution tree. Some are pretty crazy, like Seal of Corruption dealing holy damage, and Divine Storm dealing physical damage. There is no indication if these changes will make it into patch 3.0.3 or arrive in a later update.There's a couple of other changes that stick out for me. Seal of Command lost about 20% of it's overall damage Most other seals were reduced by around 13% to 21% Judgement of the Wise grants 15% of base mana instead of 33% Most other judgement effects are reduced by about 15% Art of War was retooled to increase damage of Judgement, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm instead of increasing critical strike damage In the glyph department, the Glyph of Crusader Strike now reduces the mana cost of Crusader Strike by 20%, instead of increasing the damage dealt by 20%.And finally, Blessing of Might now increases AP by 306. It used to be 305. So it's not a total nerf...
