Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

We're doing a quick series on what it means to be a paladin in Cataclysm for people either coming back to the game after an absence or trying out the class for the first time. If you missed last week, we covered retribution paladins and some beginner info for them, and hopefully we'll finish them up next week. But first, we're talking about protection paladins and their 101 introduction.

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Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) 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. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

Earlier this year, I wrote up a little article on what you need to know about retribution paladins. The problem with this is that when Deathwing decided to break the world, he also changed how every class in the game played in some way. Paladins were one of the ones that changed the most in this shift. We got an additional resource bar, new talents, new mechanics, new abilities -- and now we're getting new levels.

As retribution paladins, this doesn't faze us that much. This happens every expansion to our spec, and we're used to it at this point. Anyway, we're going to spend two weeks on this and move over to protection. Let's get to the good stuff.

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

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

In recent news, yet another Sanctuary talent bug has been hotfixed. I'm really starting to get annoyed at this wonderful talent that keeps us crit-immune. This time, the issue was that it would de-talent itself for players under level 30 when they logged off, zoned, changed continents, etc. This should now be fixed, for those of you who've been leveling new tauren paladins as protection.

As far as the column this week goes, we're talking about addons. From holy power tracking to gear swapping to buff reminders (like the one shown above), there are a lot of things that can make our day-to-day dungeon running a lot easier. These aren't the only addons for each solution (and I hope our commenters will point out any good ones I missed), but they're a few of the more popular, and each has its own features and limitations.

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Filed under: Paladin, Add-Ons, (Paladin) 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. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to gregg@wow.com.

Hey there, paladins. Sorry I missed you all last week, but I caught something after visiting family for the weekend. Traveling hundreds of miles just to catch the flu. Ugh.

In other news, the world has shattered with patch 4.0.3a. The good news is that we should have some tauren paladins at this point on the live realms, or people who are about to either race/faction-change to them or roll up new ones. The bad news is that there still aren't going to be worgen paladins in Cataclysm. I had thought Blizzard would have reconsidered its poor decision by this point, but Blizzard's devs still haven't accepted the fact that werewolves with glowing wings are cool. Oh, well.

Today, we're talking retribution glyphs. A lot of you probably have your glyphs set up at this point but might be unsure of what you ended up picking. Others of you might be looking for alternatives that match up better with how you're playing the spec. And others are here because you read all of the articles on the site or are interested in rolling one of those cowadins I mentioned earlier.

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Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) 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. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Oh, and I still love the Grand Crusader proc graphics even though they're unrelated to today's article.

One thing that we've been taught as tanks throughout most of World of Warcraft is that you had to be capped at something in order to not be insta-killed by bosses. Back when I started playing, this was referred to as reaching uncrushable. You would have to stack up 102.4 percent avoidance in order to push the dreaded crushing blows off of the boss's list of possible attacks he could hit you with. This also meant that all incoming hits were avoided or mitigated in some way, shape or form. That primary form was blocks, and abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield at that time were custom tailored to this environment.

With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, crushing blows were deemed a thing of the past and bosses would no longer be employing them against tanks. However, we quickly had a new cap to deal with instead of that called the defense cap, aka reaching uncrittable. This meant accumulating 540 defense skill against raid bosses in order to remove bosses of being able to hit us with a critical melee attack. In early raiding tiers, this was a constant balance between gems, enchants and trinkets, as each piece of gear we accumulated could change how the scales tipped.

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

Civilization Fanatics forum-goer Maze has designed a map pack for the recently released Civilization 5 that looks very familiar, and for good reason: the map mimics that of classic World of Warcraft, with the two main continents and the Maelstrom in the center.

The map is actually very accurate, with precisely placed bodies of water and coastlines and small details like purple creep in Silithus. There are also details like Thoradin's Wall and the Deeprun Tram pointed out.

Maze has created two versions of the map, with differing sizes for faster- or slower-paced games. Even if you aren't a fan of the game and don't plan on playing it, the graphics and attention to detail are pretty awesome. Check out some shots of the map in our gallery below.

Filed under: Arts and Crafts

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

We've recently looked at builds for protection and retribution, so let's continue that trend and take a look at glyphs. I'm going to review all of them, as we're getting pretty close to Cataclysm, and I'm going to also review them in a more global context instead of talking about what is going to help you on hard-mode Lich King.

The way I've set it up is that everything that you're likely going to want without question has an asterisk next to it; those are pretty much things you'll want to take. If you look through the major and minor glyphs, you'll notice that there aren't very many marked as such. There's a reason for that. We just don't have that many spectacular glyphs that are useful in all situations for those types. That's not to say the other glyphs are bad (well, some are, but we'll get to that), but they're more situational and require some choice on your part.

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

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

So this is pretty much going to be a collection of blurbs from the BlizzCon 2010 class Q&A panel. Some questions that were asked throughout the day were things that have come up in the past, but others had new information that hadn't even hit the beta servers yet. The panel members from left to right consisted of Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (WoW lead systems designer), Kris Zierhut (WoW senior technical game designer), Owen Landgren (WoW game designer), Ion Hazzikostas (WoW game designer) and Chris Kaleiki (WoW associate game designer).

I went back and tried to do a much more thorough job at transcribing the information than we do in our live blogs (because none of us can type as fast as Ghostcrawler speaks). Also, I've added a "too long didn't read" (TLDR) version of each question at the beginning for those of you who don't read the whole post before commenting. For the rest of you, there is a full transcript as well as links I've found to videos of the panel on YouTube and linked directly to where the question is asked, if you want to actually see what was happening. This isn't official video, so it might get pulled for copyright issues, but until then, it's a great reference.

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

The female worgen dance appears to have finally been finished and put into the latest beta build. She is going to be doing Lady Gaga's Poker Face. Wowhead has datamined the dance out of the latest patch files and has a few animated .gifs up on its site showing the dance moves. You can also see it in the video above.

For those of you keeping score at home, the female worgen model has been delayed, put in, pulled out and generally not finished for most of the beta. It appears Blizzard is starting to get things ready for Cataclysm's ship date. Now, if only it would fix the really strange way her jaws sit.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Filed under: Cataclysm, Worgen