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

The Light and How to Swing It: Where did they go?

by Gregg Reece Sep 1st 2010 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 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.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: The holy paladin checklist

by Chase Christian Aug 29th 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 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.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: On gap-closers and empty GCDs

by Gregg Reece Aug 25th 2010 at 5:00PM

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 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!

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladin gear diversity

by Chase Christian Aug 22nd 2010 at 6:00PM

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 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?

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Prot talents in Cataclysm

by Gregg Reece Aug 18th 2010 at 9:00PM

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 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.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: How to heal different tanks

by Chase Christian Aug 15th 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 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?

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Power hands-on

by Chase Christian Aug 8th 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 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.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Ret talents in Cataclysm

by Gregg Reece Aug 4th 2010 at 10:00PM

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

The Light and How to Swing It: The Val'anyr effect

by Chase Christian Aug 1st 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 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.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Healing on the run

by Chase Christian Jul 25th 2010 at 2:00PM

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 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.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Powah!

by Gregg Reece Jul 21st 2010 at 7:00PM

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

Well, Chase decided against using "Holy Powah!" as the title for his paladin article on the subject for healadins, so I am selfishly going to grab it.

For those of you who haven't been keeping up with paladins since the Twitter developer chat on Friday, we're getting overhauled yet again and more deeply than ever before. Not only are things being simplified and condensed again like we saw at the beginning of Wrath, but we're getting an additional resource system on top of mana. That's right, additional and on top of mana, which means we're going to be the second (or third?) mana-based class with an extra resource bar to watch.

This new system is called holy power, and no, it isn't referring to a talent in the holy tree that adds crit. It is a mixture of combo points and runic power. This whole conversation is going to take a while (and a couple of blue quotes), so let's continue after the break.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Healing from the front line

by Chase Christian Jul 18th 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 discuss the new holy paladin information from the latest BlizzChat.

I'll be honest with you, I wasn't expecting this. With the release of the new 31-point talent trees in the latest beta build of Cataclysm, I immediately realized that the paladin trees were woefully out of date. It was simply another cycle of news without any real information about what was in store for holy paladins. We were promised a major redesign, but it felt like Ghostcrawler, lead systems designer, was simply playing as the Wizard of Oz. We were told that big things were happening but that we shouldn't look behind the curtain.

A seemingly innocuous developer chat on Twitter changed all of that. While their informal Q&A sessions on Twitter often provide unique pieces of insight into the minds of the developers, they very rarely served as a source for any sort of serious information. Last week's BlizzChat broke that mold, and some revolutionary paladin information was shared with the world. Paladins are gaining a new resource in addition to mana: Holy Power. While my fellow paladins argued between the names "Holy Powah" and my submission of "HoPo," the fact is that this is the most major change to paladin design since we were introduced into the game.

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

Cataclysm Beta: New talent trees for paladins

by Gregg Reece Jul 14th 2010 at 5:00PM

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 soon, an entire flight of black dragons.

Last night, Blizzard released the new talent tree system onto the beta realms for people to take a gander at and test out. Each class is at various stages of done-ness, with some needing pruning, others needing tuning and still others just need another iteration or two before truly being ready. Paladins fall into that last category, along with three other classes.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the beta patch notes, with bold added for emphasis:

Cataclysm Beta Patch Notes - Build 12479

While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations.

...

Paladins
* We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.

source

Things like more healing abilities for holy, Holy Shield moving from a maintained ability to a tanking cooldown, and three new planned but unimplemented attack abilities for retribution are all in the pipeline, as well as a shakeup of the talents we've already been provided. So, without further ado, I present a first draft of the paladin talent trees.

[ Holy ] [ Protection ] [ Retribution ]

The Light and How to Swing It tries to help Paladins cope with the dark times coming in Cataclysm. See the upcoming Paladin changes the expansion will bring. Wrath is coming to a close and the final showdown with the Lich King is here. With Cataclysm soon heating things up, will you be ready?

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Healing through Halion and friends

by Chase Christian Jul 11th 2010 at 2:00PM

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 discuss how to tackle Halion and his twilight cronies in Ruby Sanctum.

In order to bridge the gap between Icecrown Citadel's release late last year and Cataclysm's eventual launch in months, Blizzard released a short raid instance to give raiders something to do until Deathwing breaks through. Ruby Sanctum is a transitional raid, which ushers out our major conflict with the scourge and introduces us to our new threat-dragons. Specifically, our red dragon allies have been assaulted by the Twilight Dragonflight, and it's our job to go clear out their pad before Alexstrasza comes home and gets really mad.

With just a trio of mini-bosses and some scattered mobs to clear, the instance looks pretty sparse when we first enter. However, once we've cleared out the trash, Halion appears to stomp on us. He looks a bit like a melding of a catfish and a dragon, but mostly dragon. I'm fairly certain that Blizzard's art department hired a team of pre-school girls to choose the color palate, and so we're faced with a pink and purple dragon who's apparently supposed to be a pretty serious threat. Right. That's our color, and we've come to take it back.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: New talent system changes for melee paladins

by Gregg Reece Jul 7th 2010 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 soon an entire flight of black dragons.

Blizzard dropped a bombshell on us today and no, it has nothing to do with Real ID. Talent trees as we know them are going to change much more in Cataclysm than we could have ever predicted. You will now be locked into a talent tree until you reach 31 points in that tree and you only get talents every other level or so. This is going to cause much smaller talent trees overall as well as afford them the opportunity to differentiate specs more from an earlier point.

How will less points and smaller trees differentiate you as? Why, because you get a bunch of passive bonuses as well as an ability for putting that first point into your initial tree. That means at level 10, you'll receive a lot of defining perks and bonuses baseline. There isn't much information available to us at this point and what we do have is sometimes rather vague. But that being said, we're going to make some guesses on what this means for us melee paladins (sorry, healadins, but I'll let Chase cover what this will mean for you).

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

WoW Insider Show

Subscribe via iTunes for our latest show.

Hot Topics

Put WoW.com headlines on your site
Follow WoW.com on Twitter
Find us on Facebook

Upcoming Events

Event	Date
Call to Arms: Eye of the Storm	9/3 - 9/6
Darkmoon Faire: Elwynn Forest	9/5 - 9/11
Call to Arms: Alterac Valley	9/10 - 9/13
Harvest Festival	9/16 - 9/22
Call to Arms: Warsong Gulch	9/17 - 9/20
Pirates' Day	9/19
Brewfest	9/20 - 10/5
Call to Arms: Strand of the Ancients	9/24 - 9/27
Call to Arms: Isle of Conquest	10/1 - 10/4
Call to Arms: Arathi Basin	10/8 - 10/11
BlizzCon	10/22-10/23