Filed under: (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Essential addons and macros for holy

by Chase Christian Feb 7th 2010 at 4:00PM

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 the addons and macros that can be used to make your life easier.

Holy paladins have come a long way since our days in vanilla WoW. Back then, we were a three button class: Cleanse, Flash of Light, Holy Light. The infamous addon Decursive even did all the dispelling for us, leave the human user simply casting Flash or HL for hours on end. Seals and Judgments were for retribution and protection: we were standing 40 yards away filling up life bars. Things didn't improve much in TBC either: while Holy Shock was fun to finally use, we ended up being purely FoL bots in most raid situations.

Blizzard took a new approach to healing in Wrath, including completely revamping each existing healing tree to make sure each one was balanced, viable, and most importantly, enjoyable. Holy paladins now enjoy a complexity that is multiple times more entertaining to play than anything that we've seen in the past. However, with this added functionality comes added complexity. To help us lighten the load, we can use a few amazing addons and macros manage our "holy 3.0" paladins; this allows us to focus on keeping people alive.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Holy 101

by Chase Christian Jan 31st 2010 at 5:00PM

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 the basics of a holy paladin, from gems and enchants to talents and spell usage.

I have always been of the belief that the paladin is a healer at heart, with their hybrid nature simply an extension of their healing capability. In vanilla WoW, paladins were the Alliance's healing all-star, with our tier sets and raid utility focusing on the restorative arts. Retribution and protection both have abilities that heal in some way, and their talent trees even have pro-healing options. If you want to experience the purest distilled essence of the paladin class, you have to try holy.

This is intended to be a guide to the holy paladin's basic principles and tenets, not an in-depth guide into high-end raid healing or specialized gearing choices. If you're new to the holy paladin or want to discover what the spec is all about, read on.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Looting the Crimson Halls

by Gregg Reece Jan 28th 2010 at 6:00PM

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're continuing our looter's guide to the Icecrown Citadel. This week we're delving into the Crimson Halls. This is the vampire wing of the citadel and they're kicking it up in style. There are the pretty-boy vampires complete with glitter as well as the vampire vixen leading them. If only Buffy Summers were in my guild, this place would be cake. However, she'd probably end up in love with one of the blood princes and then they'd become good guys for a while which makes us start to care about them only to find out that it was all an elaborate ploy to trick the slayer into a ritual to turn the high school into a demonic portal to hell. Wait, I think I've actually seen that one.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Looting in the Plagueworks

by Gregg Reece Jan 23rd 2010 at 4:00PM

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.

A quick service announcement: We will be moving The Light and How to Swing It over to Thursdays. We'll still have the weekend spot as well. How are we doing this you might ask? Chase Christian will be doing a holy paladin only version of TLaHtSI during the weekends with my coverage of retribution and protection on Thursdays.

A looting we will go. A looting we will go. Hi-ho the merry-oh, a looting we will go. This week, we're delving into the geist filled section known as the Plagueworks. Precious and Stinky aren't technically bosses, but they're still fun little encounters, so I figured I'd give at least one of the puppies center stage in today's header. Last week, we looted our way through the lower spire in Icecrown if you want to go back and take a look. Otherwise, onto the loots!

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Looting Icecrown's lower spire

by Gregg Reece Jan 17th 2010 at 2:00PM

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.

Sometimes, you just have that maddening compulsion to make your wish list of various things you want to acquire. I've got one on Amazon for a woodworking shop and another of things I want on WoW (which does happen to include a pony, Ghostcrawler). However, with the last of the loot being divvied up in these final days of Wrath, let's go through Icecrown Citadel and make a shopping list of gear we'd kill for.

Filed under: Paladin, Items, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It, Wrath of the Lich King

The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 4

by Gregg Reece Jan 9th 2010 at 8:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, Add-Ons, Instances, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: The Paladin of 2009

by Gregg Reece Dec 26th 2009 at 4:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: The Paladin of 2009 part 2

by Gregg Reece Dec 26th 2009 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: The Paladin of 2009 part 3

by Gregg Reece Dec 26th 2009 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank, part 3

by Gregg Reece Dec 19th 2009 at 8:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 2

by Gregg Reece Dec 12th 2009 at 8:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 1

by Gregg Reece Dec 5th 2009 at 6:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, Leveling, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: A little less hybrid

by Gregg Reece Nov 7th 2009 at 8:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Divine Sacrifice

by Gregg Reece Oct 29th 2009 at 2:00PM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

The Light and How to Swing It: Tier 10 thus far

by Gregg Reece Oct 14th 2009 at 9:00AM

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.

Filed under: Paladin, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It, Wrath of the Lich King

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