Posts with tag paladin-gems

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.

As August begins, we are rapidly approaching the end of beta. Blizzard has indicated they are in the final stages of tuning for Mists of Pandaria, and with that comes the confidence to report on what we can reasonably expect our spec to look and perform like in the next expansion.

Mists will be a pretty monumental expansion for us. We have some massive playstyle changes coming, as well as the game-changing new talent systems. Active mitigation, as well, will require prot paladins to adjust to a new style of tanking.

This guide is intended to be a 101 introduction to the prot paladin as it stands in Mists of Pandaria. It'll cover everything from how to handle active mitigation and your rotation to how to spec, how to gem and enchant your gear, and everything in between. As we get closer to launch (and even after then), I'll continue to update it, so be sure to bookmark and check back in the future.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Justicar Alex Ziebart tackles customizing your retribution paladin for raiding. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author.

This edition of The Light and How to Swing It, where we'll discuss gemming, enchanting and reforging your retribution paladin, was in the works a few weeks ago, but I made the decision to hold off on it for awhile because we weren't entirely sure when patch 4.0.6 would launch at the time. Patch 4.0.6 flipped paladin stat priorities upside down. Haste, which was our favorite stat ever, is no longer so important to us. Mastery, which was some sort of bad joke previously, is now the best secondary stat for us.

It didn't make a lot of sense to release a guide to customizing your paladin's stats when all of it was going to change within days. Now that patch 4.0.6 is here, we don't need to worry about that any more.

Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we discuss the basic tenets of holy paladin PvP.

When Wrath of the Lich King was released, Blizzard stated that it was one of their major goals to make raiding more accessible to every type of player. I'd say they achieved that goal, with just about every player who wants to able to experience a raid instance to see several of the bosses in each tier of raiding. With the easily obtained emblem and crafted gear, it's not hard for even newly 80 players to be raid-ready in a couple of weeks. Even the hardest instance in the expansion, Icecrown Citadel, is partially open to the most novice of PUGs. I think we can agree that Blizzard has figured out how to make raiding more accessible.

Their next project in Cataclysm is to bring that same level of accessibility to PvP. They've already planned world PvP zones with the explicit purpose of promoting PvP, namely Tol Barad. We can also expect the new rated battleground feature to allow larger groups and guilds to participate in PvP without being under the arena microscope. Add in slower PvP pacing via an increase in life and decrease in healing power, and it's clear that the Horde and Alliance will be slaughtering each other in new and magnificent ways when we're not busy fighting against Deathwing and his minions. If you want to be ready for Cataclysm's new PvP environment, your best bet is to start practicing now!

The Daily Quest brings you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• There are quite a few good explanations of the gear stats raiding Moonkin should pay attention to, but Foofy of Foofy's CupCake Factory made her guide an instructional video (see above). And she promises more to come!
• The Rawrbitchrawr blog continues to pump out great Ulduar info. This time with a video of mounted combat from the Argent Tournament event.
• The Righteous Defense Paladin blog has a great article on gemming for Protection Paladins.
• The Hunter's Mark (written by our very own WoW Insider Hunter columnist Larissa) also has a new gemming guide for Hunters.
  
• Honor's Code posts a set of gear Protection Paladins can get for the DPS off-spec if they choose to go that route when dual specs arrive in Patch 3.1.
• Forever A Noob continues his Naxx-10 guides for Rogues. His newest one focuses on Thaddius.
• Blessing of Kings demystifies the math behind when to fire off Shaman Bloodlust in a raid presented in this Elitist Jerks' thread (warning: algebra!)