For The Paladin

As you can see from the above image, I love intellect gems. The guild jewelcrafter and I don’t even have to speak anymore. I hand him a stack of King’s Amber, and he knows exactly what I want. “You sure you want ALL of these cut as Brilliant?” I laugh at his skepticism, he comes from the idea that gems are used to balance caps and maintain certain levels of ratings. Holy paladins have the easiest gemming strategy ever: Brilliant in every slot, every time.

If you’ve been reading this column very long, you know that I blame the current paladin playstyle on intellect alone. Because of its massive benefits, we really reduced our healing toolbox from two spells to one and a half: Holy Light and whatever else you decide to use when you’re bored and the raid is at 100%. But oh no, what’s this i read on WoW.com? Cataclysm brings with it a major stat rebalancing and intellect is in the cross-hairs?

Continue reading Cataclysm: Stat and system changes for holy paladins

Filed under: Paladin, Cataclysm

Cataclysm: Stat and system changes for holy paladins originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

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

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Keeping the tank alive originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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 difference between throughput and longevity, and how intellect skews the scale.

Paladins have an incredible amount of what I call ’support’ spells: things that aren’t part of your rotation but provide us with quite a bit of flexibility. All of our ‘Hand of X’ spells would fall into this category, along with several other unique abilities that set us apart from other healers. Our healing toolbox has also expanded significantly, with Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light completely redefining how a holy paladin heals in WotLK. My actions bars are filled with macros and various support spells that I may need on a moment’s notice.

Even with the sheer number of abilities that paladins have to deal with different situations, we are left with only two true healing spells to rely on. Holy Light and Flash of Light are our workhorses, with nearly all of our actual healing coming from one or the other. Holy Light provides us with an essentially infinite source of throughput (see the above graph from Valithria Dreamwalker), while Flash of Light’s efficiency gives us a longevity that has other healers green with envy. Trying to reconcile the difference between these two paradigms, massive throughput vs persistent longevity, is one of the most intensely discussed topics in the holy paladin community. Read on for my thoughts on the topic.

Continue reading The Light and How to Swing It: It’s all intellect’s fault

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

The Light and How to Swing It: It’s all intellect’s fault originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

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

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Essential addons and macros for holy originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

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

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Essential addons and macros for holy originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading The Light and How to Swing It: Holy 101, page 3

The Light and How to Swing It: Holy 101, page 3 originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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