Posts with tag Glyph-of-Divine-Plea

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, and you can catch me weekly on the Matticast.

Prime glyphs have been designed by Blizzard to be no-brainers; they're powerful, and their purpose is clear. While there are four different prime glyphs that a holy paladin can choose from, most holy paladins will neglect the Glyph of Divine Favor and pick the other three. Some of the high-end paladins (such as Diamondtear) swear by the Divine Favor glyph, as they rely on their cooldowns heavily during the hardest heroic encounters. If you find yourself ignoring Word of Glory, you can sacrifice its glyph for Divine Favor as well.

Minor glyphs are largely irrelevant for us, as they only cut down the mana cost of spells that we normally cast while out of combat. It's cool to save mana, but the minor glyphs are really automatic and almost pointless. The major glyph situation is quite different for holy paladins. We have a smorgasbord of major glyphs to choose from, with each offering unique benefits. I find myself changing my major glyphs quite often, as many of them are only valuable in certain situations.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered. Hey you, retribution paladins! Get off my lawn!

I've been finding that there's a cycle to the holy paladin changes we've seen in Cataclysm. The latest bug with Conviction serves as the perfect example. Conviction's 9% extra healing wasn't being applied to our heals on other players, and so our healing potency was less than advertised. Holy paladins were still relatively good, even with this bug still around. Top guilds have been using holy paladins as their go-to healers, and our toolbox is diverse enough to handle what any dungeon boss can throw at us.

The fact remained that Conviction was broken, and it's not good for business when you have serious bugs affecting a class. The developers quickly hotfixed the talent, and holy paladins were suddenly seeing a 9% increase in outbound healing. A class that was already good just got better, and not by any small amount. In order to prevent us from become too powerful, Walk in the Light was quickly nerfed.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, or with any screenshots of huge LoH crits.

When Wrath was released, there were just over a dozen bosses available to fight immediately. Most of them were found in Naxxramas, which fell to the superguilds so quickly that not all of them were even level 80 yet. A few achievements like A Poke in the Eye and the first "hard mode" of Sartharion with three drakes were all that the talented raiders had to keep them company during the first few months of Northrend. By the time that Ulduar was released, nearly everyone was clamoring for new content.

Cataclysm's launch hasn't shared the same fate. With heroic raids now the de facto form of progression and miles of new non-raiding content to explore, the content available at release has definitely lasted far longer. Even the most difficult bosses are still not on farm for the big guilds. Blizzard's developers have used this opportunity to start working on the first major patch after Cataclysm's release, which is of course includes plenty of holy paladin changes to keep us on our toes.

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.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered.

The holy paladin talent tree has historically had issues with its filler talents. While many of the talents and abilities were spec-defining, there were other talents that literally had no purpose and were never taken. I'm talking about Sacred Cleansing, which actually didn't work at all throughout most of Wrath. How could we forget Purifying Power, whose usefulness was completely negated by the Glyph of Holy Wrath, which itself was only used to exploit a difficult encounter? Even with all of these junk talents in the tree, we also had a distinct lack of DPS talents, leaving holy paladins nearly helpless when left to fend for themselves.

Cataclysm's new truncated talent trees resolve many of the issues our previous talent tree had, as well as providing several DPS talents to give us some flexibility when we need to up our damage output. Exorcism has finally become the spammable attack we can use from range to nuke our targets, and Crusader Strike gives us some DPS presence while we're in melee range as well. The core focus of the holy paladin will always be healing, but it's nice to see that Blizzard created talents and glyphs to support both the healing paladin and the pseudo-shockadin that's emerging in Cataclysm.

Delicious new glyphs and some rework of old ones in this massive content Patch 3.1. In the midst of all the excitement, let's try to look at the Paladin glyphs and what they mean for the class.

Glyph of Exorcism - Increases damage done by Exorcism by 20%. (Old: Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.)
You really didn't think they'd let us keep the interrupt now that it can be cast on any target, did you? Of course not. However, this glyph is a solid choice for the third glyph slot for every Retribution Paladin, who will have Exorcism firmly in their rotations. While we pine for the loss of a possible spell interrupt, the DPS increase is pretty solid.

Glyph of Divinity - Your Lay on Hands grants twice as much mana as normal and also grants you as much mana as it grants your target. (Old: Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target.)
The mana returns are great, but there are better glyph choices out there, specially the new ones introduced in Patch 3.1, particularly the next one...

Glyph of Lay on Hands -- Reduces the cooldown of your Lay on Hands spell by 5 min.(Old: Increases the mana restored by your Lay on Hands spell by 20%)
Now this is an awesome glyph. Without talents, this allows the use of one of the best emergency buttons ever every 15 minutes. With Improved Lay on Hands, that gets cut down to 11 minutes. It still won't be usable in Arenas, of course, but the change makes it excellent for raiding. We'll probably need to use it a lot in Ulduar, anyway. Also, expect Blizzard to change the 4-piece set bonus of the Tier 3 Redemption set, designed during a time when Lay on Hands was on a one-hour cooldown.

More glyphs of pure win after the jump...