Posts with tag Divine-Plea

The Light and How to Swing It: Keeping the tank alive

by Chase Christian Feb 21st 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 situations where the tank is getting destroyed, and we're tasked with keeping them alive.

Tank death. It's one of the worst ways for a raid encounter to end: abrupt and usually absolute. In a dungeon, you've typically only got one guy who can take a few blows, and so the enemy will start cleaving your soft DPS. Blizzard balances each raid encounter around the idea of having two tanks, so the other tank is often busy with their own duties, and can't survive the double duty. With this era of multiple enrage timers and tight DPS requirements, there's really no room for bringing a spare tank for the 'just in case' situation.

Holy paladins are uniquely designed to be the masters of tank healing. We've got multiple cooldowns we can use to reduce their incoming damage, and the most potent HPS toolkit available. A tank has to actually try to die when we've got the Holy Light firehose aimed at them. However, even with all these abilities at our disposal, a tank can still eat dirt halfway through an encounter if we're not playing our best. Read on for a discussion on how to keep your tank up during high damage situations.

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

Paladin changes in Patch 3.1 PTR build 9722

by Zach Yonzon Mar 24th 2009 at 1:00AM

A new Patch 3.1 PTR build went up earlier and while there aren't any official patch notes, our data-mining friends over at MMO-Champion have dug up some goodies as usual. There aren't too many changes for Paladins in this build, but there are interesting stuff in there, not least of which was the unintended revelation of the internal testing on Crusader Strike. The more down-to-earth changes are as follows:

Holy
Divine Plea - now only reduces the amount healed by your Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Holy Shock spells.
This properly reflects Blizzard's intention of nerfing Divine Plea for Holy Paladins. The change allows healing from Seal of Light and Judgement of Light to go unimpaired, the latter particularly useful to Protection Paladins and Retribution Paladins. Considering that Protection is now designed to have maintain a 100% uptime on Divine Plea, this is an important distinction.

Aura Mastery - tooltip has been modified to properly reflect its 10 seconds duration.
The excellent new ability confused a lot of players who thought it was a permanent, passive ability. Don't freak out, people! It's an activated ability that lasts for 10 seconds and has a two minute cooldown. The tooltip should help dispel the cloud of confusion.

The rest of the changes after the jump...

Filed under: Paladin, Patches, Analysis / Opinion

The Daily Quest: Of Ruby Voids, Hunter podcasts and life without Spiritual Attunement

by Dan O'Halloran Mar 23rd 2009 at 6:00PM

We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

The Sacred Duty Paladin blog looks at skipping Spiritual Attunement with the change to Divine Plea in Patch 3.1.
The Hunter's Rhok blog details the strategy used to successfully complete the Ruby Void achievement. And they perfected it in a PuG!
Tanking Tips has a Strafing 101 guide up for tanks that also includes Strafing 102. Some interesting tips in the comments section as well.
All Things Azeroth has podcast #105 ready for your listening pleasure. They cover many topics this time including the Glider ruling, Ulduar achievements and the difficulty of becoming Immortal.
Big Red Kitty has also posted his latest podcast.

Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.

Filed under: Paladin, Podcasting, Achievements, The Daily Quest

Are Paladins going to get nerfed?

by Zach Yonzon Feb 18th 2009 at 8:00PM

There's a cloud of gloom hanging over our collective Paladin heads over here at WoW Insider, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that Divine Plea still works. Even with the 50% healing penalty, Divine Plea is still a critical spell that's used without much of a second thought. Now it's just used a tiny, tiny bit less. Of course, Ghostcrawler also mentioned in his explanation of the new mana regeneration changes that they're going to nerf Spiritual Attunement for "non-tanking Paladins," too. So yes, there's that cloud.

Here's the thing, though... that change will hurt Retribution Paladins more than it will Holy Paladins. Retribution Paladins rely on the synergy of Spiritual Attunement and Seal of Blood / of the Martyr in addition to Judgements of the Wise, Replenishment, and Divine Plea. We'll probably have to see exactly what the incoming nerf looks like before we panic, but considering how Paladins have a history of getting beaten by the nerf bat, it's not an altogether rosy proposition. In fact, I think Paladins are probably going to get nerfed beyond the current Divine Plea and the future Spiritual Attunement. My thoughts after the jump.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, Arena

Ghostcrawler gives specifics for patch 3.1 mana regen changes

by Alex Ziebart Feb 18th 2009 at 7:00PM

One of the big changes coming in patch 3.1 is the change to mana regen, and it has a lot of people pretty frantic. The last thing healers want is for their life to become harder, right? Well, Ghostcrawler hit the forums today with some clarification on the subject.

Base regen (which is an equation that factors in both Intellect and Spirit) will be nerfed by about 40%. This means the mana you would regen while just standing around doing nothing will be quite a bit lower than it currently is. However, in exchange, regen-while-casting talents such as Meditation, Intensity, Spirit Tap and many others, whille be buffed so your in-combat mana regen shouldn't be harmed very much. It'll essentially prevent you from trying to wiggle in and out of the 5 second rule for big regen ticks, while not terribly bothering your mana regen while you're actually doing things.

Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Patches, Analysis / Opinion

A plea for Divine Plea

by Zach Yonzon Feb 8th 2009 at 8:00PM

Blizzard is going to swing the nerf bat and it's going to hit Divine Plea. With the intended changes to mana regeneration mechanics in Patch 3.1, where Spirit will be nerfed to curb mana replenishment in raid scenarios, Paladins stand to be unfazed. Spirit isn't a useful stat for Paladins, so Blizzard is looking into raising the healing penalty that comes with Divine Plea, a spell intended to help Protection and Retribution Paladins recover mana. Even with the 20% healing penalty, Divine Plea gives Paladins such phenomenal mana recovery that they don't think twice about using it. Used in conjunction with Avenging Wrath, the penalty isn't even an issue. See, that's a problem.

Blizzard wants the decision to use Divine Plea to be a tough one for Holy Paladins, not a no-brainer. Needless to say, Retribution Paladins and their 5k mana pool use it every time it's up. But when a Holy Paladin with 20k mana can recover 25% of their mana every minute, it's kind of an obscenity. So Blizzard is going to nerf Divine Plea by raising the healing penalty to 50%. Some people think this won't be enough to stop Holy Paladins from using the spell every time it's up, though. Rohan over at Blessing of Kings thinks the spell should not have a healing penalty but be canceled when the Paladin casts a healing spell.

Changes coming to Paladins in patch 3.1

by Alex Ziebart Feb 6th 2009 at 12:15AM

As I'm sure you've seen already, Eyonix dropped more class changes, Paladins being amongst this latest batch. Not many Holy changes, only minor Ret changes, but a whole crapload of Protection changes. Delicious, delicious Protection changes. A lot of the Protection changes serve a dual purpose- the changes are pretty good steps toward making Protection Paladins PvP-viable like Protection Warriors are becoming, but those same changes make the tree even stronger in PvE than it already is. It's beautiful.

Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

This is very, very awesome. It's a wonder this didn't happen earlier, actually. I think many of us expected this to happen back in the Wrath beta, but instead it was turned into a 5 point talent in the Protection tree. The unanswered question is whether or not we'll get the full 5 talent points baseline, or if we'll still need to spent talent points to improve it. Personally, I'm going to assume we'll get the 10% BoK baseline, it's the only way this would even remotely make sense.

Filed under: Paladin, Patches, Analysis / Opinion

Don't panic: Paladin changes in Beta build 9014

by Zach Yonzon Oct 2nd 2008 at 11:00AM

I know I'm a bit late posting this, but it took me a while to calm down enough. Alright, some of you might have already read this and most of you might have crouched into a fetal position when you heard of the change to Divine Plea. In it's first appearance, Divine Plea was a phenomenal, channeled return of 50% total mana over 6 seconds. Of course, that was simply too powerful and was subsequently "tuned" in further builds. That tuning has resulted in gutting the ability, with the latest version granting a buff that regenerates 25% of total mana over 15 seconds but reduces healing by 100%.

A moment of silence, please.

It reduces healing by 100%. This means that it makes the one spec that needs it absolutely useless for 15 seconds. I seriously have no idea anymore where Blizzard is going with this. Ghostcrawler issued a quick revision, however, stating that the healing penalty will only be 20%. That's good news, but it's scary that such a massive nerf was even applied to what is a key spell for Holy Paladins considering that their only source of mana regeneration is a crit-based gamble.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, Talents, Wrath of the Lich King

Divine Plea changed once more

by Alex Ziebart Oct 1st 2008 at 8:00PM

Last night's beta patch introduced a quite absurd change to Divine Plea (which you can see in the tooltip there), rendering it more or less worthless for Holy Paladins, useful only to Retribution and Protection. In one of the faster turnarounds in the beta, Ghostcrawler has already posted a new version of the spell.

In response to player feedback (mana issues, boredom) Divine Plea will now only reduce your healing by 20% (instead of this patch's 100%), but the tradeoff is that it will be able to be dispelled. As someone who primarily plays PvE, this seems like a much, much better version of the spell. I mean, come on. Last night's version of the spell was, "You take a nap for 15 seconds while some of your mana comes back." That's not exactly how you make an engaging and entertaining class. People who PvP heavily may disagree with me, but I'm not sure. I have a feeling naptime is as unwelcome in PvP as it is in PvE.

Paladins also seem to be concerned about mobility while healing. There are some potential changes that could come, but Ghostcrawler and the developers seem to want to see the current state of things in action a little more before they make any updates there.

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King

The Light and How to Swing It: For the love of all that's Holy

by Zach Yonzon Sep 15th 2008 at 3:00PM

With all the love that Protection and Retribution has gotten, a lot of people might feel that Holy has fallen behind. To a degree this is true. It's important to understand, before anything else, that for the longest time Holy was the only truly viable tree for the class. Protection has come into its own in The Burning Crusade, while Retribution needed a lot more work. Now that Blizzard has done its homework and tweaked the trees to scrumptious, tempting playability, it's time for us to revisit the Holy tree. Exactly how good will Holy be in Wrath of the Lich King?

The answer isn't a simple one. For one thing, Holy is still an incredibly powerful tree and Holy Paladins are still the best single target healers in the game, with Holy Lights critting for ludicrous amounts in the Wrath Beta. It is also now more capable offensively, with ranged Judgements, better coefficients, and a lowered cooldown on Holy Shock. Even then, there are many indications that Holy has fallen behind on many respects, and many Paladins are considering speccing Retribution or Protection because of it. That's not a good thing at all.

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

[UPDATED] Paladin changes in Beta build 8926 part I

by Zach Yonzon Sep 11th 2008 at 2:45AM

This is one of the biggest patches to hit Paladins in a while, and it's a mixed bag. Let's get the bad news out of the way first -- all of Seals have been nerfed. All of them. Seal of the Martyr / Blood, Corruption / Vengeance, Wisdom, Light, Justice, Righteousness and even Command have all had their damage reduced. The formulas are tweaks of the values of attack power, spell power, and weapon speed -- a bit complicated to explain in detail -- that result in an overall damage reduction. Now, before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, let me say one thing: don't panic.

We can probably consider this patch the nerf patch, which is an essential part of the tuning process. The developers traditionally start from a high power scale and fine tune it downwards -- I mean, look at the poor Death Knight. This is still the Wrath Beta, and while there is a chance these numbers might stick through to live, testing these lowered numbers are vital to getting everything right for release. If you're in Beta, log in, play with it for a while, and give feedback. If you're not in Beta, hold back a bit from making a ruckus and exercise a little patience until the testing is done. Let's take a deep breath. Now where'd I put my inhaler...

Filed under: Paladin, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Wrath of the Lich King

Ghostcrawler's late night Paladin news

by Alex Ziebart Sep 9th 2008 at 10:30AM

Ghostcrawler displays her dedication yet again as she popped up on a few of the Wrath of the Lich King Beta forums in the wee hours of the morning today. Or would that be late last night? What does 2 AM qualify as, again? Anyway! Ghostcrawler popped into the Paladin forums to check in with some concerned players, and brought some fun news. She says herself that it may not be 100% what Paladins want, but it should prove to be good stuff regardless. Let's dig right into it, shall we?

From Ghostcrawler:

We'd like to do something else with Kings. I don't know that a core ability is the answer, but burying it deep in Prot, when Prot paladins would just as soon play with BoSanc, doesn't feel great either.
We'd like to mess around with the top 2 tiers of all 3 trees, still encouraging you to cross-spec a little, but making that initial bite into the upper tier more tasty instead of just an icky appetizer to get the what you really want down deeper

Filed under: Paladin, Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King

The Light and How to Swing It: The shocking truth in Beta

by Zach Yonzon Aug 16th 2008 at 3:00PM

Ok. So Paladins rock in Beta. There are a whole slew of abilities and talents that make life a whole lot easier and a lot more fun. One popular request on the comments has been to test drive the new Wrath Shockadin, with improvements like a 6 second Holy Shock and ranged judgements from Enlightened Judgements, it really does seem like the spec has finally come into its own.

Of course, what looks good on paper doesn't necessarily translate into actual gameplay. With the reshuffle of talents and the consolidation of spell and melee crit, what used to be a fringe off-spec with a loyal following might actually turn into the spec of choice... for healing Paladins. Before anything, though, let's make one thing clear -- this is Beta, so everything we'll be taking a look at today might (and is likely to) change by the time Wrath of the Lich King is live.

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

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