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The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in 5.4

by Dan Desmond RSS on Jun 19th 2013 (1 year ago)

The Light and How to Swing It Retribution in 54
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Earlier last week we got our first glimpse of the 5.4 PTR as Wowhead and MMO-Champion mined a massive amount of data from the latest update to the test realms. With new features like virtual realms, proving grounds, and flex raids, it's easy to be overwhelmed. As for myself, the first thing I did was hit Ctrl+F and searched for "Paladin" to see what, if any, changes we were due. Truth be told, I wasn't expecting a whole lot of changes for retribution -- we seem to be in a nice place, comfortably in the middle of the pack for DPS with heaps of utility to boot. Boy, was I mistaken.

Before we get into the discussion, do remember that none of these proposed changes are finalized. The "test realms" aren't named that by chance; the developers want to see how things like this play out on a large scale, larger than their internal testing can accommodate, and sift through player feedback from the community. So while we shouldn't get too worked up over one thing or another on the PTR, it's always beneficial to react to changes, at least in a civilized and logical manner.

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

Two great things about the contemporary ret paladin

by Dan Desmond RSS on Jun 4th 2013 (1 year ago)

The Light and How to Swing It These are some of my favorite things
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Patch 5.3 has turned out to be a great time to be a ret paladin. Well, in my opinion it's always a great time to be a ret paladin, but this new patch and the changes it brought with it really drive the point home. Granted, the only change we saw was a buff to our weapon-based damage via Sword of Light, which, while being a welcome boost to our DPS, isn't necessarily the most earth-shattering, game-changing thing in all of Azeroth. Still though, it opens some doors and allows us to be more competitive in the DPS game.

I have to admit, my inspiration for this column came from reading Matt Rossi's warrior column, The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Survival and the modern warrior. As I was reading through the piece, I found myself unconsciously caressing my keybind for Divine Shield, no doubt a realization of how blessed we paladins are when it comes to self-preservation mechanics and abilities. Some of the troubles that Matt detailed I have either sidestepped or easily handled with our generous toolbox, and his angst has given me a newfound appreciation for the veritable arsenal of useful spells at our disposal.

This week I'll be touching on a couple of our newer abilities that have proven time and time again to be so valuable and effective that I can't imagine playing a paladin without them.

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

Retribution cheat sheet for the Throne of Thunder

by Dan Desmond RSS on May 14th 2013 (1 year ago)

Retribution cheat sheet for the Throne of Thunder
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Throne of Thunder has been out for a good long while now, and many of us have been raiding its depths every week. Personally, though, I took a short break from raiding at the launch of patch 5.2, and had only seen many of these fights on LFR. It wasn't until recently that I picked the raiding game back up and joined a new group, though with them working on their second heroic boss I was a tad behind in terms of progression. So I did a bit of research and, through trial and error each week, have crafted a short list of notes for each boss, including talents, glyphs, and special abilities to look out for.

Usually my "default" talent build is something like 221223, with Mass Exorcism, Double Jeopardy, and Templar's Verdict glyphed. In my summaries below I will try to emphasize the usefulness of certain talents and glyphs, whether they deviate from this core build or not.

Also, these tips are primarily for normal mode encounters in Throne of Thunder, though some of them may be applicable to LFR and parts of heroic.

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

Bringing the SW:TOR legacy system to WoW

by Dan Desmond RSS on May 2nd 2013 (1 year ago)

Last names in WoW
I had a lot of fun during my brief stint as a Sith Inquisitor in Star Wars: The Old Republic. The leveling was great, the storylines were compelling, the instances were interesting, but I eventually went back to World of Warcraft in the end. SW:TOR didn't feel very unique, it didn't have enough to grab me and hold me, to suffocate me with its content and keep me away from Blizzard.

Even so, there were a few differences between Bioware's entry into the MMO space and our site's namesake, one of them being the concept of a server-wide legacy. SW:TOR's legacy system, if incorporated into WoW, could be a great way of introducing leveling bonuses and the like, something WoW has historically done via heirlooms and guild perks. Personally, heirlooms have always left me feeling a bit too overpowered and take some of the fun out of the leveling process -- I've even leveled characters without heirlooms, just because it's more challenging and, thus, rewarding.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Mists of Pandaria

Four transmog sets for today's retro-bution paladin

by Dan Desmond RSS on Apr 24th 2013 (1 year ago)

Four transmog sets for today's retrobution paladin WED
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Before we jump into our completely serious, no-nonsense discussion this week, I suppose we better touch on the one piece of retribution-related news coming from the 5.3 PTR:

Sword of Light now increases damage with two-handed melee weapons by 30%, up from 15%.

Naturally I, like many of you, got a warm fuzzy feeling reading that particular sentence. Higher overall damage from weapon-based attacks? Sign me up!

While I don't mean to bite the hand that feeds, I am concerned that this is merely a bandage meant to keep ret from lagging too far behind until 6.0 and, as such, ultimately fails to address the cause of the problem.

I'm just spitballing here, but there was talk at the tail end of Cataclysm and the very beginning of Mists that in our calculated stat weights for T14H BiS, strength was already somewhat devalued in comparison to secondary stats, especially haste, and that this could lead to ret scaling much less efficiently than other melee using similar gear.

Regardless, the buff is appreciated, but I'm more looking forward to what the next expansion has in store for our spec.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: No hybrid taxation without representation!

by Dan Desmond RSS on Apr 10th 2013 (1 year ago)

The Light and How to Swing It
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Lately I've been browsing the paladin forums, usually with a stiff drink in hand. I'm not quite sure what draws me to those forums – almost every ret post is about PvP or Inquisition, but over time I've managed to find a few that validate my searching with their thought-provoking, insightful, and sometimes humorous nature. The other day, for example, I stumbled upon a post that made me scratch my beard stubble, put down my watered-down gin, and think. In it, the author briefly introduced the notion that he or she felt that players trying to heal in ret spec shouldn't be summarily votekicked for offending the linear sensibilities of the patrons of the Random Dungeon Finder.

Reading through the back and forth provided some good entertainment, and a few individuals earned my respect for being able to heal or tank effectively while also sustaining decent DPS numbers (if their stories are true, of course), but all of this got me thinking: should paladins (or hybrids in general, for that matter) be unshackled from the "one spec-one role" dictum that has dominated the thought-space of WoW players for years?

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Swap seals, not sandwiches

by Dan Desmond RSS on Mar 28th 2013 (1 year ago)

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Not being particularly captivated by anything in patch 5.2 so far, I've recently picked up a prot warrior and have carried him through some of the lower level areas. This isn't the first time I've tried leveling up a warrior; back in Wrath I had a level 80 fury warrior that was loads of fun, at least until Blizzard nerfed Titan's Grip and my poorly equipped berserker cow lost his ill-gotten mojo.

Since then I've tried to recapture that magic but there was always something that bugged me about the warrior playstyle: stance dancing. Being forced to choose between creating complicated macros or increasing my number of keybinds by some unseemly factor, I have typically opted for the hidden choice that was retiring the character. Thankfully this aspect of the warrior class seems to have been toned down a bit in Mists, so I figured I'd give our shielded brethren another go.

As paladins we don't have to deal with stances that lock us into or out of certain abilities (though many have pleaded with Blizzard to change that), but we do have something similar -- the seal system.

The Swiss Army seal

If you happened to pick up the paladin class sometime after vanilla WoW, you were fortunate enough to level up under the new seal regime. Under the old system, seals were a short-duration buff that was immediately consumed upon casting Judgement (back then they didn't skimp on the vowels!) I vaguely remember this mechanic, back when my friends first introduced me to the game. I very much disliked having to recast my seal so often, as many others did, I'm sure.

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

How to key-bind your retribution paladin

by Dan Desmond RSS on Mar 6th 2013 (1 year ago)

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

There are few things more frustrating while playing video games than being unable to control your character properly. In select cases this can be due to some fault in the game itself, but more often than not it tends to be a hardware malfunction. I had an increasingly difficult time playing Halo 3 when I would whip my controller at the wall in a blind rage every time someone would counter-snipe me just when I found a particularly good perch.

Recently though, my troubles have been with my mouse. My Logitech G500 has served me well for a few years but countless hours of furious clicking in games like Diablo III and Torchlight II have taken their toll. After some careful deliberation I decided to get the G500's older brother, the Logitech G600. I felt, playing as much WoW as I do these days, investing in a self-proclaimed "MMO mouse" would be sensible.

When I got the mouse and unboxed it, however, I was not prepared for just how many buttons this thing has. I sat with my spellbook open trying to find the most reasonable arrangement of keybinds for longer than I care to admit. Eventually I settled on a group of binds that I'm slowly but surely getting accustomed to, though not before I "misclick" and toss a Hand of Protection on a hunter.

This week I'd like to go over keybinds, discussing some general tips and going over two different schemes that I've used that hopefully some of you will find useful (unless you're left-handed, in which case I apologize that these tips may not be all that helpful for your sinister situation). If you have another setup you'd like to share, please do!

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Ret gear in the Throne of Thunder

by Dan Desmond RSS on Feb 20th 2013 (1 year ago)

The Light and How to Swing It Ret gear in the Throne of Thunder
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

As Notorious B.I.G. would say, "mo patches, mo gear." Well, I imagine he would have said that if he could have played World of Warcraft.

There's just something about pouring through datamined loot and finding out where it all drops that excites me. In fact, I don't get into the whole "new patch hype" until I look at the gear, and then I'm suddenly hit with the realization that we're getting new bosses, new content, and new items.

Despite how much fun I had in putting this article together, gear lists have proven to be very dry. They have their uses, particularly as bookmark fodder for a quick reference of what drops where, so instead of trying to fluff this post up, I'm going to just lay it all out at once. Before I do that, however, I need to mention a few things.

There are some discrepancies between Wowhead's data and that from the PTR itself. You might notice weird or incorrect tooltips or entries that don't correspond to data on the site or on the test realm. In all cases, I defaulted to the test realm as the final authority on the matter.

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

The Light and How to Swing It: Putting the retribution back in retribution

by Dan Desmond RSS on Feb 6th 2013 (1 year ago)

The Light and How to Swing It Putting the retribution back in retribution
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

Group dynamics are a pretty important part of any multiplayer game, and World of Warcraft is no exception. From dungeons and scenarios, to battlegrounds and raids, and multiple things in-between, learning how to work with other players is an essential part of playing the game. Friendships are made, rivalries ignite, and respect is earned through cooperation and determination.

Of course, these things look great on paper, but we all know that there's a darker side to grouping. People needing on greens, random AFKs, loudmouths, Kingslayer Orkus trying to solo a boss while the rest of the party is elsewhere -- all acts protected by the mechanics of a system that randomly matches players into a group who would never have met before, and will likely never meet again; you will never see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the Dungeon Finder.

Personally, I try to be as lenient and forgiving as I can, but everyone has their limits. Eventually you snap, and instead of trying your hardest to uphold the virtues of your order, you fight back. As paladins, our spellbooks come fully-stocked with an assortment of group-based abilities to abuse in situations such as these. Some of these tricks are easy and relatively innocuous, while others are much more complex, requiring precise timing and concentration, but have a much larger payoff.

Disclaimer: This article is satirical in nature. I implore you not to do any of these things anywhere outside of a group full of friends that will find these antics amusing to all parties. Remember, what to you may seem like harmless fun might actually be something that can ruin someone else's day. Please use caution, discretion, and good judgment when goofing around.

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

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