Damned kids and their flashy pictures. Get off of my lawn!

Oh, the woes of leveling. I haven’t had much time to write until recently, seeing as I needed to do the l33t content that’s out. Since people are starting to trickle into 80, I think it’s a good time to go over some concerns that PvE Rets have at 80. This is of course talking about the content “that matters”, 10/25 man raid bosses. Most of the things I’ll be going over can be found in this post.

Even though we’ve warned Blizzard time and time again, they didn’t seem to learn their lesson when it comes to class balance. I know I was writing my face off to try and convince a soul or two at the overlord mines at Blizzard HQ to try and reconsider the changes they were wanting to implement. Many of the hits that Ret took barely softened the domination that was happening in PvP - many will describe it as going from “1 to 2 shotting” people to “3 to 4 shotting”. Ret PvP at 80 could use a bit of balancing even with the magical 11 point Protection talent that’s going to be released. It still feels a bit too bursty and RNG reliant, certainly something I don’t want the Paladin class to be when it comes to competitive arena.

Most of the theorycrafters saw the nerfbat coming to Rets @ 80. Mana is still an issue, and damage is subpar. Certainly not the “5% away from a Rogue’s DPS” that the developers promised every hybrid class could do. I’m not sure if this is the case with Druids and Shamans, so I’m sorry if I left you guys out too. With itemization wacked, and mana being an extreme problem outside of your 3 button rotation, Rets better be glad that they bring a tad of utility to the table. I urge you to join the thread I linked above and join the discussion for bettering a Ret’s PvE life at 80.

Alas, I’m sure that a lot of people are going to see this post as demoralizing. I’m sorry folks, but I don’t try to go out of my way to ruin days. I’m just concerned for Rets at the moment, there are a lot of promises that have yet to be fulfilled by Blizzard, and I don’t want to see you all stuck in the same pit as you were pre-3.0. Well, come to think of it, Ret DPS was actually superior before at level 70 compared to 80. It also was a lot more interesting to DPS, with seal twisting. In my eyes, Rets only got a slight PvP buff whilst their PvE game suffered. I’ll keep cheering for all of you guys, I hope that with enough people some real changes could get started!

Site Updates:

As many of you know, the site needs a new facelift and some updated WotLK content. Since I’m finally 80, and Slayton is getting there (don’t know about Ferarro, she smells), we can start pounding out new sections that are WotLK friendly. They don’t just magically appear out of thin air! I guarantee that everything will be in tip-top shape sometime soon, a couple weeks if you need a timeline.

Just going to leave this here. You know who you are.

- Megaphone

Ferraro, your friendly neighborhood Paladin here!

How y’all doing? Everyone enjoying the amazing expansion? Most of you should be at least 74 by now. Some of you are already 80 and hitting Naxx. In about a week or so the big rush will finally be over, and when the dust settles it’ll be back to raiding and gathering and farming for epics as well as hitting Battlegrounds again for honor and marks. That said, it’s time to start looking at the finer aspects of leveling and playing your class. First up: Glyphs.

When Ghostcrawler makes a glyph…

It’s no secret: Most of our Glyphs are… mediocre to say the least. The ones that really bug me are Glyph of Crusader Strike, Glyph of Blessing of Kings, and Glyph of Sense Undead. The first two may seem like odd choices considering mana is an issue with us (more so in certain specs than others). But reducing the mana cost of Blessings is flat-out pointless since 99.9% of the time that you’re handing out Greater Kings, you’re out of combat anyway, and mana isn’t an issue. Glyph of Sense Undead? 1% extra damage when Sense Undead is active? It’s just uninspired for the potential it could have. I could see it being useful if it was something along the lines of, “Reduces damage taken by Undead by 3% when Sense Undead is active,” or something like that. Prot Pallies didn’t get much love as it is anyway, and it would help close some of the mitigation gap from Warriors through the first big raid, Naxx. And even though Glyph of Crusader Strike isn’t out-of-this-world terrible, it just hurts considering what it used to be, which was bonus damage on stunned targets.

[Warning: Rough napkin math ahead. Hard hats, everyone.]

On my level 70 Paladin, CS costs me about 170 mana, give or take. So 20% off that is, what… 34? So I’m saving 34 mana every 6 seconds. Now assuming I pop CS whenever it’s up, over a 5 minute fight that’s about 1700 mana - Or in other words, a little more than two Consecrates. You can see how this isn’t really that big of a deal, especially considering we get Divine Plea at 71. With a 6198 mana pool, Divine Plea kicks back over 7,747 mana over the course of those same 5 minutes. And none of this is taking into account what Replenishment, Judgements of the Wise, Spiritual Attunement, various uses of Seal of Wisdom, Judgement of Wisdom and Blessing of Wisdom can do. The last thing we need or want on a DPS Glyph is any sort of mana reduction. Give us burst, give us a higher coefficient, give us a chance to proc an extra attack, give us anything. And what’s even worse is that this is a Major Glyph. *sigh* But the option to reduce the mana cost on one of our key attacks is Blizzard’s admission that we have a slight mana problem.

Glyph of Hammer of Justice seems a bit blase as well. One extra second? For a Major? 3 seconds, definitely. 2 seconds, maybe. One? Meh. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in plenty of Arenas where the fight has been decided by a single extra second of CC or one moment of action or mere inches of distance. But to take up a slot with this instead of, say, Glyph of Judgement isn’t going to fly with me.

Glyph of Falcon Punch would solve all of our PvP problems. FOREVER.

With the recent nerf to Hammer of Wrath, using it’s Glyph to add some distance ain’t so bad for tagging those Rogues trying to sprint away with your RV DoT on it. And Glyph of Turn Evil - which makes your Demon and Undead fear spell instant - is pretty money. Nothin’ like trying to fear a Warlock or it’s Felhunter only to get locked out at the last milisecond. That, and Glyph of Exorcism are situational, but when that situation arises, they’re invaluable. As for Glyph of Seal of Blood, isn’t that 10% of… 10%? So wouldn’t that mean 11% from SA? If it is, that’s pretty awful.

But the Glyph that’s getting the most attention both positive and negative is Glyph of Flash of Light. A lot of people hate it. I’m not one of those people. On the same token, I don’t think it’s the end-all be-all Glyph for Paladins of any spec. I currently have a three 72+ Paladins of each spec, and oddly enough the one I get the most use out of Glyph of FoL is Holy. Now before you grab your pitchforks and torches and kick my door down while screaming, “HERETIC!” at the top of your lungs, let me clarify: GoFoL (Glyph of Flash of Light) IS NOT a primary choice for a Paladin Glyph going into healing, especially while leveling and doing 5-mans. It’s a highly advanced Glyph for Holy Paladins, and really only useful if you’re not the assigned MT healer. I wouldn’t suggest this Glyph for cutting-edge content raiding since min/maxing is so important. However, in certain scenarios, GoFoL is a blast. My guild had KJ on farm months before the Nerf Patch hit, so you can imagine how boring Sunwell and buying other guild’s Illidan raid ID became. So stepping aside to let the other Paladin be MT healer, I popped in GoFoL and went in as OT and raid healing. Not only was it fun due to the refreshing change in play style, but also surprisingly effective. I topped meters on trash, and topped all Paladins on boss encounters by a long shot (i.e. +7%). But do I use it now, from 71-80? No. Will I use it in Naxx and beyond? Probably not. Down the road? Absolutely. Still, the Glyph needs to be improved to be legitimately viable in all circumstances.

But this isn’t Holypaladinstuff.com, right? This is Retpaladin.com. So is GoFoL good for Ret? Well, considering Sheath of Light coefficients, most say no. It’s widely known that doing anything outside of our DS-CS-J rotation puts is in a bad spot quickly with mana, and counting on an Art of War/FoL with only half it’s initial kick is kinda rough. Still, the HoT is okay, if not underwhelming. SoL procs off crits, so having 2k+ AP would help tremendously in FoL’s effectiveness. Plus, it adds yet another magic buff on you that gets in the way of a dispeller or pet that tries to eat it’s way to your Hand of Freedom. So it can have it’s uses if used by a resourceful player.

Glyph of Bauer Power would make your life suddenly miserable once an hour for plot purposes.

So what do you guys think? What’s your favorite Glyph? Which ones do you hate and have no idea why they exist? And more importantly, if you could either make a new Glyph or alter the mechanics of an existing one, what would you do? There’s a catch though: It can’t involve direct damage (+20% to RV ticks, etc.). That would be too easy. Something along the lines of, “Glyph of Avenging Wrath - Your wings give you the ability to leap to a target every 10 seconds. Range - 10 yards.” That’s a ridiculous example, but that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Adding damage is boring; Gimme something clever and full of utility here. Even funny. The person with the best idea get a super-cool neato-special totally-keen and far-out Cracker-Jack prize from King Slayton himself. What’s the prize you ask? It’s a bomb that makes people dance for one minute from the Warcraft Card Game. 50 charges. And it works on raid bosses (not really, but how cool would that be?).

Maybe if that were a Glyph…

So there’s your contest for some amg phat lewtz: Best suggestion for a new Glyph of alteration of an existing one. Get to it! And don’t forget to visit our forums!

♥ Ferraro

First I’m going to counter the femaleness on this page. Yes, by popular demand

Ya what now Ferarro?!

Anyhow, I’ll get to the real point of this post. God I suck at leveling. First day of WotLK and I just can’t stop killing horde. I feel so powerful to, because all those horde who stopped playing a long time back, picked up the game are in Northrend, which means they all have horrible gear. Hardly anyone wears resilience while leveling.

I get side tracked so easily. I’ve been having a lot of fun mind you, but I really should level. Obviously the players that want to stay on top, need to put in the time to be on top. I’m sure everyone realizes that, it’s probably the first excuse used by people when they don’t want to admit they aren’t at that level yet. They just don’t have or want to put in the time for it.

Just wanted to update you guys, keep this front page going even though we are all busy leveling. We are going to have t-shirts on sale coming up soon enough, and they actually look pretty cool. So keep an eye out for them. In addition to the t-shirts we also have a new website look that should be coming soon. We didn’t really care much about the look of the page before, but since we are becoming so big thanks to the community we are going to be able to expand. Once we hit 80 our retpaladin.com streams will also be put back up.

Question for those who are here though; How do YOU make it easier on yourself to level?

-Slayton

My first post. The oooohs and ahhhhs may commence.

Evening everyone, Ferraro here! First off, I’d like to thank Slayton and Megaphone for not only hiring me and giving me the wonderful opportunity to voice my opinions, thoughts and facts about Paladins, but also for having the faith in me to do so (they probably don’t want me to tell you this, but they’re totally sweet guys). I promise to them and to you, our readers, to do my best to bring you the highest quality of news and ideas via anecdotes, theorycrafting, musings, and of course, humor. A lot of you may know me from my other blog Paladin Schmaladin. I’ll be trying to bring some of that same spirit from there to here.

With that said, we’re roughly a day away from the moment we’ve all been waiting for: The Wrath of the Lich King. Many of you joined after Burning Crusade was released, so this is going to be your first “expansion experience”. And let me tell you, as a player of four years, it’ll be a hectic time. There’s going to be people who have mapped out everything in Beta and will hit level 80 by Friday morning. Cliques will implode and friends of yours will play Musical Guilds, if they haven’t already. The auction house we’re enjoying right now thanks to the fire-sale on mats, is going to bloat and burst; As will the prices (remember when Blade of Misfortune was 1000g?). But most of all, everyone and economy aside, you, me - us - Paladins will have evolved and changed the more then any class in the game.

Holy gained some new tweaks for Holy Shock that are useful if not crucial now, and Judgements are actually part of our rotation (who would’ve guessed?). Protection was polished up very nicely, and finally gained a much-deserved scaling spell power talent, not to mention Hammer of the Righteous. And of course, we have our beloved Retribution Paladins. We all know how crazy we were when 3.0 came out and all the punches to the gut we’ve taken since then. I know, I know, it feels like we were nerfed into oblivion and there’s some issues in PvP Blizzard has admitted they’re still working on addressing. But think of it like this: Prior to BC, Rets were 3/10, at most. BC came out and we jumped to maybe a 5? When patch hit, we skyrocketed to a 15. *laughs* So the nerfs just ripped us apart back down to mortality so to speak, and we’re back to 8/10 overall. So while we were nerfed in half, half of amazing still has zing. *rimshot*

No one can argue we’re light years ahead of where we were a mere month or so ago. It’s a great time to be a Paladin of any spec (dare I say best time ever?), and no spec more so than Retribution. Blizzard finally handed us some shiny new toys, and now they’re is giving us a brand new playground to kick ass in; Go out and do it.

And come back with Frostmourne.

♥ Ferraro

First off, this is more of an update then a blog post. With that said;

Congratulations to Keelval, who defines a skillful paladin the best in my opinion, with the closing statement of the paladin needing to master every trick in his bag. Honestly could you disagree with that statement? It’s very very true, but it wasn’t even that, it was some of his examples.

Many of you rivaled his amazing post. Please keep in mind that even if you didn’t win, I did appreciate your comments, and reading them, and I hope some of you continue to read and post in future contests where we ask you questions like that.

Keelval please contact me via retpaladin.com PM. Please include proof that it is you, because you didn’t leave me a place to contact you.

I’d also like to touch base on our new writer. I’m not announcing yet who I have chosen. I had some AMAZING applications, but a few blew me out of the water. Honestly I thought I was just going to pick up some skilled retadin, and pull them into writing. That however is not the case.

I will be releasing who we picked in a later post, right now we are just polishing the details. I will also be writting back everyone who took the time to e-mail me, let them know whats up incase you didn’t get to read this post. Keep in mind, the bigger we get the more writers and/or moderators we need. There will be more spots in the future.

I’d like to touch base on a question asked to me in my recent post; “Slayton did you quit?”

No. People that are wondering about Slayton4 I put a rain check on it till wotlk. Honestly, the buffs where so massive that pvp is a joke right now, requires little skill and I don’t want to hand you a video of me 2 shotting people. It’s fun to watch, but my dog could 2 shot someone by slamming his paw into the keyboard.

Did I quit WoW though? Nope. Just nothing for me to do. I only really play WoW when I have something big to do. Grinding a rep out completely, getting an item, and so on, otherwise I play very casually outside of our raid times due to my addiction to varies activities.

-Slayton