Filed under: Paladin

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 soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

Before we get on to business, I need another batch of screenshots for headers if anyone feels like tossing a couple my way.

A lot of abilities have been either renamed, revamped or removed in the Cataclysm beta. This is part of a consolidation process to remove a lot of buttons off of our bars. Other abilities were changed to remove durability and healing from retribution.

However, in the interest of explaining where things went, I decided it might be best to make a list of our lost and renamed abilities, for those of you who haven't been able to keep up with all of the changes.

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 how to mentally prepare for every encounter.

Way back in the day, before any of us had the opportunity to actually play the game, Blizzard was in the process of developing the classes of WoW. Rogues were designed to be sneaky stabbers and priests were based around doing heal-y things. Shamans and paladins were created to be in direct opposition to each other. The designated shaman archetype was the offensive hybrid, giving their friends extra damage potential and eventually Bloodlust.

Paladins were the antonym, created to help defend their raid and party from damage and to provide useful buffs. While much of the original intentions have been diluted via homogenization, paladins are still the ultimate defensive class. Unfortunately, in order to perform our role in the face of constantly changing opponents and venues, our toolbox of abilities has become fairly large. We've got a utility spell for nearly every situation, and there are a vast number of situations out there. The key to being an effective paladin is to do your homework and to come prepared.

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 soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to gregg@wow.com.

For a couple of weeks on the beta forums, PvP paladins were constantly asking for a gap-closer -- all of this in the middle of the new holy power implementation. The developers did listen to the requests, and with some of our hybridness cut out, our prayers have been answered somewhat in the recent beta builds.

On a completely unrelated note, not pressing buttons isn't fun. Having a global cooldown with absolutely nothing to do is so foreign to me as a paladin that when it's happening on the beta, I'm convinced I'm not seeing a button. We'll touch on that a bit later. Onto the article!

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 examine how holy paladin gear is evolving.

I think that holy paladins have been pretty blessed this expansion, pun definitely intended. Our holy tree has been very solid throughout Wrath, and we've even got a few flex talents that we can use to pick up Improved Lay on Hands or even Blessed Hands. Our massive healing throughput has also made us one of the healers of choice for Anub'arak and the Lich King on heroic mode and even for bugging out Yogg-Saron's heroic mode, as well. Our progression throughout Northrend has settled holy paladins into a pretty comfy healing niche. Even with all of the development our class has seen in the past few months, a few questions still remain.

For example, why are we still using the item level 200 Libram of Renewal instead of one of the shiny new librams from the Emblem of Frost vendor? The reason is that our old libram is too strong, and our new librams are poorly designed. Specifically, the Libram of Blinding Light just doesn't mesh well with our playstyle. It forces us to use Holy Shock on a regular basis to keep it active and only provides extra spellpower. Of all the stats possible, spellpower is probably the one that holy paladins need the least of. What can Blizzard do to get things right the next time around?

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 soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to gregg@wow.com.

If you saw my column last week, you'll notice that I've been less than thrilled with the way the protection tree had been progressing in the beta. Sure, things have been getting better, but it has felt as if the whole tree is fairly unsettled. With the latest build, we're finally starting to see things get a little smoother and the mechanics to make a little bit more sense. Keeping Holy Shield up is easier than in previous builds, and a lot of depth to the types of strategies we can have while tanking has greatly improved. Also, our mastery bonus has been official revealed.

I'm going to use the same type of disclaimer that I did on the ret talents article. These may not be the talents we'll end up seeing when the expansion hits, but they're getting there. Some talents will look pretty close to how they exist currently, while others have absolutely nothing to do with their current versions. Let's go take a look.

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 examine how to handle healing the different tanking classes.

I've recently started leading a 25-man pickup group that raids Icecrown Citadel. A few of the DPS classes in my guild are focused on obtaining a Shadowmourne, and so I offered to set up a run so that they can start collecting the legendary shards. While just about everyone has been to a PUG raid, leading them can be quite different from simply participating. The biggest difference for me is deal with the variety of personalities that come together.

Once nice thing about having such a diverse group of people in the raid is it allows me to talk with other healers that I normally wouldn't interact much with. Recently, in our group 5 party chat discussions, the topic of "favorite tank to heal" came up. I had a few particular players in mind, but the healers actually started talking about the tank classes that they preferred to heal. While there's more to tanking than simply picking the right class, the fact is that the tank classes take damage in different ways. Who's your tank of choice when healing?

Some relics -- sigils, idols, librams, and totems -- were unearthed in the latest beta patch that work in a fundamentally different way from how relics work currently in the game. They are now stat items with sockets. Currently, relics are non-stat items that confer a special effect specific to a common ability used by a particular spec, such as the restoration druid's Idol of the Black Willow, which only affects Rejuvenation. While unique and creative, relics weren't always optimal and proved difficult to balance.

The change makes relics more like other items that fit in ranged slots except that they remain class-specific, with stats tailored to a particular spec. This should be a welcome change for many players who play hybrid classes and found it difficult or constraining to use ability-specific relics. A list of the relics for death knights, druids, paladins and shaman found in the latest beta can be found on MMO Champion.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgen to mastery and guild changes, it's all here for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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The new paladin combat resource holy power just became significantly easier to track and use in this evening's Cataclysm beta patch. Whereas previously it was simply a buff you had to eyeball along with every other other buff up in the top right of your UI, it now has its own UI element directly beneath the character frame. The holy power gauge starts out as an empty, lifeless shell. As you generate holy power, it lights up in thirds (as you would expect) and glows a bright yellow once you've filled it completely.

I still expect that we will see extensive community modding of this bar once Cataclysm goes live, but it won't be nearly as mandatory as it seemed previously. It was extremely difficult to see holy power as a buff, so this increases its ease of use dramatically. If you want to see how it looks first hand, we have a gallery of the gauge in action below or a video embedded above. Go ahead, pick your poison.

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 how holy power works and what we'll be using it for.

If we look at the resource systems of WoW over its lifetime, it's clear that Blizzard has been trying to diversify the mechanics. We've seen warriors' rage system constantly tweaked, rogue energy regeneration altered in every expansion, and hunters returning to their old focus resource from back in the original beta. The inception of death knights also introduced not one, but two resource systems to the game. Warlocks are even getting a new soul shard system in Cataclysm that will give them a brand new resource bar.

Paladins of all specs have been having problems with their ability usage. Retribution paladins could use a castrandom macro and do nearly full DPS, protection paladins have an incredibly static "969" rotation, and holy paladins have been stuck using nothing but Holy Light since Naxxramas. We needed something to help us break the cycle of repetitive ability usage. The dev team looked at ways to give our class a little more flavor, and came up with the concept of holy power.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

I'm living a dream that many guys out there have: My girlfriend is actively learning how to play World of Warcraft and is enjoying it. After a couple of false starts, she finally found a class that suited her.

First, she tried a warlock. Too many things to remember. Keeping DoTs up, keeping up with soul shards and collecting them, keeping tabs on her demon in battle. It was too much for her.

She tried a hunter. Taming her own pet was cool at first, but then she had to feed it and manage it in dungeons. Throw Feign Death, Deterrence and Disengage into the mix, and it was not her cup of tea. She's flying back 10 yards into other packs of mobs and feigning death every time the cooldown is up because she's afraid of the tank yelling at her for "doing the aggro thing." I was dismayed that a hunter didn't work out, because I always deemed it the default starter class for new players. At least it was for me.

Then came the paladin. Oh, blessed paladin, how she loves thee. At first, all she had to do was run up to the mob and hit it with Judgement of Light. The only "tricky" thing I had to teach her was when the Judgement of Light button was dark and wouldn't let her use it, it meant she needed to apply her Seal of Righteousness again. I even put the Seal right above the Judgement so she wouldn't forget. She was actually having pure joy with her new class. She didn't wonder if she was doing it right. She didn't worry about forgetting something. Just kill, kill, kill and love every second of it.

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 soon, an entire flight of black dragons. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

Yes, yes. I know the last time I wrote about retribution talents that Blizzard came out the next day saying that it was scrapping essentially everything in those versions of the trees. Since then, all three trees have undergone massive (and I'm not exaggerating here) overhauls. However, things have started to stabilize and while these talents may not be final, the tree is a lot closer than any of the previous revisions to what we'll see when the expansion hits.

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 how our new mastery bonus will affect the class.

Every class was designed with a specific flavor in mind. If you read Blizzard's official descriptions of the classes, you'll see that skills and abilities were not assigned at random. These paradigms of thinking for each class pulled from fantasy archetypes and characters from Warcraft's rich lore. Each class had a purpose, and those purposes were what made the game diverse. With 40 people in a raid, you could easily assume that every one of these crucial roles was filled. Unfortunately, that doesn't carry over to today's raiding scene. With the seemingly constant shrinkage of the de facto raid size from 40, to 25, to 10, it's become more and more difficult for the developers to ensure that we'll have all of the tools and abilities available in the game.

Blizzard's faced with the tough challenge of trying to ensure that each class stays unique, but also allowing for enough overlap that you're not forced to raid with a perfect mix. Bloodlust has always been the posterchild for this war between uniqueness and homogenization. Shamans have claimed that Bloodlust is their right alone, but the developers decided to give the ability to mages as well. Discipline priests, the sleeper healers of Wrath that went from useless bubblers to raid-shielding gods, were next in Blizzard's sights. Luckily for us, the devs chose paladins to be the recipients of this socialist disbursement.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host, Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus, is on vacation. Today, Allison Robert pens advice concerning recruitment policy that you would probably be better off not reading.

Unlike Dawn, I did not consult Matt Low prior to writing this article, because he would have told me to quit screwing around and write something helpful. I think we can all agree this serves as an important lesson to all WoW.com columnists -- namely, going on vacation leaves your column to the mercy of people like me.

Healers, like nuclear fission, are prone to instability and drama. This is perhaps understandable because the rest of the guild holds us responsible for the collapse of fishery stocks, split infinitives and the raid's survival through enormously stupid gameplay. Because we exert an equivalent amount of influence and control over all three issues, pressure eventually builds to the point where we crack and start screaming obscenities at the height of the raid hour, or else sit at our computers muttering to ourselves, oblivious to the stares of nearby friends who make a mental note to refill the Percocet when they are next in town.

So. As this process inevitably consumes most of your healing team, it will eventually become necessary to recruit. Healer recruitment is a process fraught with danger and heartbreak, as it involves the repeated casting of one's line into Yoohoo Lake in the hopes of fishing up the least terminally incompetent player therein. Officers are subsequently obliged to make distinctions between different applicants, some of whom may be legitimately crazy and nearly all of whom are lying in some respect.

The following guide should prove useful to any player who wants to know when someone can be comfortably incorporated into an existing healing team, and when an applicant should be shuffled in the direction of the nearest KFC selling two-piece and a curb stomp.

Holy power is the big conversation topic for paladins right now (well, that and mobility in PvP -- but that's always a topic of conversation for paladins). For those of you who have been out of the loop, Blizzard announced during its last developer chat that for the betterment of the class, paladins would be receiving a new resource called holy power. This would be used in conjunction with mana for a variety of new and existing abilities.

So after having played with holy power on the beta realms, we decided to ask our Twitter followers if they had any questions or concerns about this new system for us to look into.

Soranomaru asks:

"How fast does it accrue? How do you spend it effectively? Is it a mechanic to empower spellcasts or another ressource like mana?"

Short answers: Currently, every 3 seconds for ret, 4 seconds for prot, and 6 seconds for holy due to the abilities and talents they'd be using to earn it. Usually, three points is the most efficient. It's a secondary resource, like runic power is to runes on a death knight, and there are certain abilities that use it and other abilities that have nothing to do with it.

Long answers: Holy power is a secondary resource that you'll have along with your current mana bar. As retribution and protection, you'll be using Crusader Strike to build up your holy power points (HPP). If you're holy, you'll still have access to Crusader Strike, but you will also be using Holy Shock to build up that HPP. The most HPP you can build up at a time is three, so you'll be earning and spending fairly quickly. Some abilities give a flat rate based on how much holy power you put into it (Word of Glory), while others get much more efficient with the more points used (Templar's Verdict).

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 how paladins are basically healing siege tanks.

Superman is faster than a speeding bullet, but even a sliver of green kryptonite can bring him to his knees. Batman may be incredibly intelligent, but a single bullet could end his career. Spider-Man's agility carries him through his endeavors, but he's crippled when his family is in danger. Every hero has a weakness. We may not have an "S" on our chests, but holy paladins aren't excluded from this flaw. We are as weak at mobile healing as we are strong at stationary healing. While standing still, we have the strength of Atlas, pillars of holy light that can hold up the world. While on the run, flailing is about the best we can do.

While many of our mobility issues are being addressed in Cataclysm, that's still out on the horizon and no help to us. We've got to figure out how to heal while moving now. The development team at Blizzard isn't going to stop making encounters that involve motion, and holy paladins need to adapt to these environments. Even if we're not the most potent healers while running, we do have a few tricks up our sleeves that can get the job done. As great as Judgement of Light may be, we still need to actually do some casting if we want everyone to stay alive.