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.

Blessing of Sanctuary Gone. It has been turned into simply a talented buff in the protection tree. This simplifies a lot of little issues with protection paladins' needing to choose between Sanctuary and Kings for their blessing of choice. Midway through Wrath, Blessing of Sanctuary went through a couple of changes, adding both stamina and strength scaling and thus becoming more and more like Blessing of Kings. Now, with the removal of Sanctuary as a blessing, the obvious choice for a protection paladin becomes Kings for the stamina and other stat increases. There is also the fact that the new Blessing of Kings is the same as Mark of the Wild, giving resistance bonuses in addition to stats.

Blessing of Wisdom In the rush for consolidation, this has been tacked onto the old Blessing of Might, taking paladins down to two total blessings. If you're DPS, you'll want to go with the new and improved Blessing of Might.

Divine Intervention Between short graveyard runs and teleporters inside the raid, there isn't much of a point to having DI anymore. Sure, it's great for us, because we get to skip out on a repair bill. However, we may see a replacement for it later on in the beta ... if we're lucky.

Divine Sacrifice Primarily gone, but parts of it has been split out into a separate ability. If you look at the Divine Guardian talent on the live realms, we've essentially received the Divine Sacrifice bonus half of the talent as its own ability. This means no more damage redirection. The one drawback is that it affects everyone in the raid except for you.

Frost/Fire/Shadow Resistance Aura All of the resistance auras have been combined into a single aura called simply Resistance Aura. As you don't often use two resistances at the same time, this is really just a convenience for paladins doing aura assignments.

Greater Blessing of Everything All blessings are completely raid-wide in Cataclysm. There is no class-by-class casting anymore. Also, the normal version of the blessing is the same as the greater version, which means there are no more greater versions. Say goodbye to all of your greater blessings.

Holy Shield This has been turned into a secondary effect that procs off of certain protection paladin abilities that burn up holy power. You will mainly bring this up via Shield of the Righteous (which is a talented ability now) but also using the new ability Inquisition.

Judgements of Light/Wisdom/Justice There is only one judgement again. The whole Judgement of Wisdom concept has been sacked, never to be heard of again. PvP players are probably wondering where their Judgement of Justice speed block went. It got moved into Seal of Justice itself. Otherwise, you're essentially just using Judgement of Light now with the new version.

Sacred Shield This has also quietly disappeared. One could argue that the holy tree's mastery ability is taking its place, but I really think it came down to more of an issue of reducing our hybridness. It's a pretty nice defensive ability to keep up, and removing it will make retribution paladins a little less durable.

Seal of Command Removed. The chain damage component has been attached to Seal of Righteousness via a talent called Seals of Righteousness. Part of the reason for this was we just had too many seals, and even though a couple had been brought back up to par with the others, they still weren't being used that often. This takes us down to four seals, but we'll get to the others in a moment.

Seal of Light/Wisdom This has been absorbed into the new Seal of Insight. It will be a health and mana regeneration seal, much like having up Seal of Light with Judgement of Wisdom on live currently. If you're a healadin, expect to be using this in dungeons and raids most of the time.

Seal of Vengeance/Corruption It has been renamed Seal of Truth; it also now has the same name for both Alliance and Horde. It's essentially the same ability with some of the numbers tweaked. This will probably be your single-target seal, with Seal of Righteousness being your multi-target option.

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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?

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