Posts with tag guide-to-pallies

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!

I almost feel a bit guilty talking about Inquisition so often, but unfortunately this ability seems to be a source of major division within the ret paladin community. It has been the ire of many players, old and new, and remains one of the only major complaints about ret from the beta. I have to admit that there is something going on when such a huge subset of the retribution community remains in violent disagreement over the implementation of this buff.

What can we do about it, you may ask? While sometimes it may feel like we are just along for the ride and have to endure every nerf that Blizzard throws our way, player feedback is one of the greatest engines of change within the game. Ultimately, yes, the decisions are in the hands of the designers, but the players hold the true power through our financial support of the end product. After all, if we aren't having fun, why would we continue playing (and paying)?

The blues can make educated guesses about what we perceive as fun and exciting, but they won't truly know what we like unless we tell them. Therefore, if we don't like Inquisition, let's tell them why. One way of doing this is by writing constructive forum posts that illuminate our reasoning and attempt to impart an understanding of what we see on our side of the fence.

Another way, which may be a bit more convoluted but works just as well, is to make suggestions for changes, essentially putting ourselves in the designers' shoes and, working within the concepts of the game, show them what we want. I definitely lean more toward this mindset, so I am going to share with you some of my thoughts on how to "fix" Inquisition.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

If there's one thing in WoW that's a major sticking point at the start of every expansion, it's the constant change in each class's abilities at launch. We all know the pain: Some abilities come in, some are changed to a whole different creature, and others just fade away. People hate the idea of having to relearn their class, for sure, but most of all what I hate is the idea of losing some old friends to the march of time.

We all fondly remember one ability or another from auld lang syne in WoW. The game feels a slight bit emptier without it, though you'll cope, because there's really no way to turn back the clock. Once an ability hits the chopping block, it seldom comes back. (Unless it's Blinding Light -- that one definitely got a second chance.)

Let's talk about a few of the amazing paladin abilities that were tossed out on the heap, as well as what's currently getting its head jammed in the guillotine.

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!

When I was young, I had an appointment with a doctor and three syringes for some vaccinations before I started school in the fall. I clearly remember the feeling of anxiety and reluctance as each foot took another step toward the entrance to the clinic. I screamed, I kicked, and I may have even cried a little bit (OK, maybe a lot). But once all was said and done, and after the aching in my arm subsided, I reflected on my experience and realized that it wasn't as terrifying as my overactive imagination had built it up to be.

This very much reflects my experience with the changeover to holy power from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm. I was really, really hesitant and was not looking forward to relearning how to play my class, but once I got the hang of things it started growing on me. Big changes tend to make us anxious, even angry, but there's something about starting over and learning new things that makes the whole experience worthwhile in the end.

With this in mind, I let my imagination run wild between trash packs in Bastion of Twilight the other night and thought of three crazy design ideas for redefining retribution.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

When it comes to a custom UI, information is king. Sure, there are ancillary benefits, like the pursuit of a pretty user interface, or a minimalistic one, or (be still, my beating heart) both. But when you get down to the real meat and potatoes of building a UI, the most successful are the ones that are most effective at presenting information to the player in an efficient and useful manner.

And of course, many players are perfectly happy with the stock UI, which is totally fine if that's your cup of tea. For many others, myself included, the preference is for a custom viewport into Azeroth that can distill everything at your disposal into a package that can be quickly digested by the brain, as well as all sorts of bells, whistles, and dinglehoppers that make for a more aesthetically pleasing interface. Because that's half the fun.

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!

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of the beta and what's coming our way in Mists of Pandaria -- so easy, in fact, that we lose sight of what we stand to lose in this transition. Retribution isn't undergoing as extensive of an overhaul as warlocks are, but amid the improvements and buffs are abilities, talents, and mechanics that are going by the wayside. Unfortunately for many of you, Inquisition isn't one of those mechanics, but below are a few things that I will look back on and yearn for in the coming expansion.

Holy Wrath and Consecration The loss of these two abilities isn't so much about how our AoE toolbox is going to suffer in their absence. No, Hammer of the Righteous and Divine Storm should more than make up for these relatively weak filler abilities, and I'm sure our mana pools won't miss Consecration in the slightest. When I first started playing the spec, I had visions of my character being not only a powerful warrior but also an adept wielder of the Light. There's just something about a paladin using generous amounts of holy magic to battle demons and the undead that just seems so right and makes the departure of these abilities hurt the overall feel of the spec. Yes, we still have Exorcism, Judgment, and Hammer of Wrath, but aside from Exo, these spells just seem like they have holy damage added on to them after the fact.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

When thinking about the biggest perks to being a tank, I keep getting stuck on the intangibles. It's much like the reasons why Indiana Jones would rob old men in yachts of their jewelry: fortune and glory. Well, perhaps more the glory -- fortune is awfully tangible.

But yes, glory. Glory is a powerful drug. For a tank, the thankless job that it is, glory can be all the fuel needed to keep going, to keep chugging along while various DPS players sip their piña colodas and sling insults at you from the safety of their deck chairs for not tanking to their exacting specifications.

And what better glory is there than those moments when it's you versus the world and all the odds are arrayed against you? Whether it's a moment when the entire raid has kicked the bucket, and it all falls to you to see the boss take his own fall, or (like a digital Leonidas) you hold off a boss for as long as possible so the rest of your comrades can flee past the reset point without accumulating a repair bill -- those moments of personal glory pop up from time to time.

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!

Like many people, I honestly tried to get into SWTOR. I attempted to approach the game unbiased, but my experience with MMOs had already been colored by about five years of World of Warcraft. Now don't misunderstand me, SWTOR is still a good game in many respects (1.3 million other players certainly think so), but WoW set up a number of expectations that the fledgling MMO at least in my eyes failed to deliver on, not the least of which was a customizable user interface (UI).

Over the years, addons have become a core part of the World of Warcraft experience, their functions and purposes as varied as the players and fans that create them. While it is certainly possible to play the game without using a single one, addons are meant to improve your playtime and maximize the enjoyment you get out of your time in Azeroth. In today's post-Sundering world, a ret paladin stands to benefit from picking up at least a couple of them. Let's check out some situations where having a little extra help would go a long way.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

The biggest change for players with every expansion is undeniably getting acclimated to the new and different buttons that one has to work with, ie, the new rotation. If you poll players on their least favorite part of the next phase of the game rolling over, invariably a large percent will shout how annoyed they are with "having to relearn their class." Some abilities which were juggernauts are suddenly akin to balloons with the air rushing out of them, others that were middle of the road also-rans are suddenly hot tickets. Getting to the point where you once again have a good sense of your class is often a pain.

While the beta is far from final, and the numbers are (of course) subject to change many times over, we're still at a point where we can begin to make some sense out of the design-equivalent of watching sausage being made. We won't know be able to say with 100% conviction which fillers are best when and where, but we can assuredly say what the framework of the rotation will be.

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!

Back in October, the blues issued a challenge to themselves, a goal for their new talent system in Mists of Pandaria -- there would be no mandatory talents, zero "no-brainers" or similarly choiceless situations. The same has been said for glyphs in the past, straight from the mouthparts of the head crab himself.

Now we all know that there has always been a chasm of varying width separating what the designers intend for a system and what we as players experience. Sometimes the devs do really well and the gap is but a crack in the sidewalk, while others look more Springfield Gorge, and others still like Valles Marineris on Mars. Even so, we can hardly blame them -- we players, as a whole, are a fickle bunch. It is only natural that a group numbering in the millions would have diverse opinions on what works and what doesn't, particularly when it pertains to how each of us play the game.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

I still remember the unmitigated joy I felt, sitting in my crummy seat far off to the left of the main stage at BlizzCon 2011, as Blizzard began to go into the new talent system for Mists of Pandaria and a screenshot of the paladin tree was shown. Sitting at the top of the new tree was a tier of familiar names: Speed of Light, Long Arm of the Law, Pursuit of Justice -- all the names of the various speed enhancements that the class currently had. Sweet fancy Moses, it was a tier of "gap closers"!

I slap some scare quotes on the phrase gap closer because, despite that being my holy grail for the past two years, let's be honest -- the new talents aren't technically gap closers. They don't have the immediacy of a Charge or a Death Grip. But they're as close as we're going to get without some homogenized Divine Charge, and to a point, they will help us close a gap. They're acceptable substitutions, each with its own positives and negatives.

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!

It's hard to believe it's already May 2012. It seems like just last week that I was standing in line at BlizzCon with my guildmates, trying to make small talk and failing completely at it. Most of our interactions involved people watching and commenting on the information put forth at the various panels like those annoying people in the movie theater who feel the need to rate every preview on whether or not it will completely suck (see above).

Anyway, with any luck Mists will be released by the end of summer (I'm betting on an August launch, myself), so what better time than now to get your paladin ready so that you hit the ground running when the servers come back online?

The time will come during the next expansion when your hard-earned purples will be replaced by mismatched greens, but more work put into getting the best purples available to you now will keep that dreaded day far in the future. Also, how hard you hit is dictated by the strength of your gear, and the amount of time it will take you to kill a mob is dependent on how much damage you can dish out.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

There are good beta builds, and there are bad beta builds, and then there are bad, bad beta builds. Build 15640, which went up this week, is a textbook example of the latter -- specifically with regard to how it handles our active mitigation. Considering that active mitigation (AM) is the most important change prot paladins are receiving going into the next expansion, the quality of a build hinges on how it handles this topic.

Needless to say, the next few builds are always going to include some new iteration of Shield of the Righteous, as the class design team works out the kinks and attempts to cobble together an effective version of the ability.

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 begin, go take a look at the new beta build 15640 currently being mined. Some of it is a bit wonky and messed up (Blessing of Might now gives 0 mastery, huh?), but some big ret changes can be found.

Blizzard seems to be cleaning up some spell mechanics and tooltips by taking a weed whacker to those abilities that have both attack power and spell power dependencies. The new version of Sheath of Light, Sword of Light, boosts our SP by an additional 20% of our AP.

I'll wait until the number crunchers at Elitist Jerks have a chance to digest this material before I say whether or not the extra 20% conversion will make up for losing our double-dipping AP bonuses on things like Censure and Word of Glory, but really this move just strikes me as trying to clean up the mechanics so the devs don't get a migraine every time they want to tweak a few numbers. Hopefully, we'll come out of this change with most of our limbs intact, and the blues will successfully save a few brain cells in the long run.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

Ah, beta -- a time for people to begin jostling and shouting for their favorite specs and classes to receive buffs and improvements, for deficiencies both real and imagined. While the warriors are most assuredly off demanding a free sandwich or whatever slight they're currently obsessed with, let's talk about our biggest concerns going into the next expansion.

Most of these concerns, you can imagine, deal with our balance relative to the other tanks, as well as how some of our mechanics will scale as the expansion continues. And let's not forget that Mists will mark the introduction of active mitigation, and thus it is exceedingly critical for Blizzard to get that right.

Suffice it to say, there's a lot on the line for prot paladins during this beta.

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!

Well, comrades in arms, as the old Azerothian saying goes, the squeaky player gets the beta invite. I'd like to think my sobbing in coffee shops and passionate diatribes secured me a spot in the Jade Forest, where I can run around in the beautiful scenery competing with dozens of other players trying to tag one of the three quest mobs that respawns every six days, but I must admit to myself that I'm no more special than the 99,999 other players who received invites at the same time.

In short, I got into the beta. We've already been over what we expect to see when the mists part, but experiencing it firsthand is something else entirely.

The silent filler

One of the first things I noticed after rebuilding all of my macros and assigning keybinds was how disjointed the rotation felt when I was smacking the collection of wild creatures grazing around the outskirts of Dawn's Blossom. Judgment on the pull, Crusader Strike when in melee range, Hammer of Wrath under 20%, Templar's Verdict at 3 holy power ... but something was off. As it turns out, I had forgotten about Exorcism.