by Gregg Reece

1. Typical PvE talent setup
The base talent build we’re going to look at is a very retribution build of 5/5/55 which gives us six points to do with as we wish. Now, there are generally two viewpoints on what you should do with these depending on which type of utility you want to provide. If you want access to Divine Sacrifice then you’d go 5/11/55 with those six points all in protection. However, if you’d rather provide a little debuff to your target’s attack power as well as have a wee bit more survivability, then you’d take Vindication as well as fill out the rest of the retribution tree with 5/5/61.

2. Talent overview
Talents in italics are optional, and you can flex your build to pick up or drop these based on utility you want to provide. If a talent is struck out, avoid it, as it provides little or no benefit to you as a damage dealer. I’ll only be covering the protection and holy talents that are relevant for a ret paladin to pursue.

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by Chase Christian

Tank death. It’s one of the worst ways for a raid encounter to end: abrupt and usually absolute. In a dungeon, you’ve typically only got one guy who can take a few blows, and so the enemy will start cleaving your soft DPS. Blizzard balances each raid encounter around the idea of having two tanks, so the other tank is often busy with their own duties, and can’t survive the double duty. With this era of multiple enrage timers and tight DPS requirements, there’s really no room for bringing a spare tank for the ‘just in case’ situation.

Holy paladins are uniquely designed to be the masters of tank healing. We’ve got multiple cooldowns we can use to reduce their incoming damage, and the most potent HPS toolkit available. A tank has to actually try to die when we’ve got the Holy Light firehose aimed at them. However, even with all these abilities at our disposal, a tank can still eat dirt halfway through an encounter if we’re not playing our best. Read on for a discussion on how to keep your tank up during high damage situations.

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by Gregg Reece

Retribution. This is what every paladin begins as. No shield to hide behind. Just a big two-handed weapon slung on your back and grim determination as your guide. And, sadly, the spec that took the longest to become completely viable.

It’s been a hard road for the retribution paladin. In classic era, you only used retribution to level up and then you were expected to heal or play blessing-bot for raids. In the days of Burning Crusade, retribution was a little better and could be okay if you stacked your raid the right way. However, they’d rather you be the adds tank or heal. Then Wrath hit and retribution came into its own… or should I say ‘pwn’ (bad joke, but absolutely true if you remember early Wrath). After some balancing, retuning, and all of those other euphamisms for ‘nerf,’ we’re a still a fairly decent force along with the rest of the pack. Let’s take a deeper look into the good, the bad, and the ugly of the ret pally.

1. What is Retribution?

Retribution is the damage dealing and main leveling spec for the paladin class. Being a paladin you have some utility as well, but your main purpose is to beat things over the head with a big stick and you do that quite well.

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by Zach Yonzon

Ah, Paladins. Otherwise known as the game’s God-class. Paladins, next to hunters, arguably have the lowest skill to success ratio among all classes in the game. This means that many players with low familiarity with the game can pick up a paladin and play the class with relative ease and have moderate success in the battlegrounds. Retribution paladins, in particular, are so easy to play that it can be addicting. Many players easily get the delusion that they’re good. This is what prompted Blizzard to call out the spec, saying that it issuccessful in lower Arena brackets but significantly less so against tougher competition.

Paladins also enjoy a significant psychological edge against a lot of players because of their reputation, giving them an advantage even before the fight begins. Well, today we’re focusing on how to fight paladins in our series of guides aimed at teaching players basic strategies against particular classes. We’ve discussed death knights, druids, hunters, and last week, mages. After the jump, we’ll break down a paladin’s strengths, discuss their frequently used skills, and eventually their weaknesses. As fearsome as paladins can be in combat, they suffer from glaring weaknesses, too. As long as you keep those weaknesses in mind, you should fare better against them on the battlefield.
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by Matt Low

The professor has a masters degree in potions and a Ph.D in raid wiping. Even the most stalwart of healers will have face a barrage of obstacles that will affect healing ability. This guy is my personal Achilles heel in Icecrown so far. Not more than a few days ago, I went an embarrassing 8 for 8 on Malleable Goo deaths. Talk about my pride being wounded. I’m supposed to be good at dodging stuff that comes flying toward me not running into them or getting drilled in the face by this green exploding goo.

Anyway, keep reading for my awesome mistakes and what I learned from them.

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a basic understanding of the Professor Putricide encounter. This article is meant mainly for the healers.

Alright, on to phase 1!

Phase 1

Pick two tank healers to cover your tank on Professor Putricide. If one of them gets focused by a green slime or has to kite the orange cloud, at least you’ll have one more for support. In any case, this early phase is a light one and there isn’t a whole lot of healing that needs to be done. You can probably get away with five healers. If your DPS is jaw-droppingly amazing, take 6 with you instead.

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By Rhidach @ Righteous Defense

Lovely Charms are somewhat of a rare commodity–going for huge chunks of gold on the auction house (as bracelets), and being divvied up sparingly by various miserly mobs. For the achievement alone I needed 120 of these random drops, and was looking for the quickest, least painful way to get them.

I first tried Ulduar on Tuesday, but apparently Blizz moved exceptionally fast and hotfixed that tactic (along with any other mobs you kill with a vehicle). I put out some feelers for a spot with lots of meleeing, aoe-able creatures. A guildie offered up a spot suggestion: by the Avatar of Freya in Sholazar Basin.

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by Gregg Reece

This week we’re taking a look at the paladin loot from the Frostwing Halls as well as the Lich King fight itself. As we come to the heart of the Citadel and the close of the expansion it’s been a long journey for us paladins. We’ve been on top and on bottom and sometimes that was differing from day to day.

We’re at a point where all three specs are powerful in their own right in PvE and two of which can definitely hold their own in PvP. Other than death knights, we are the most popular class on both faction sides and soon we will be welcoming a new race into our fold. Whatever the future might hold, we’ve been present at the center of most of the lore surrounding this expansion. I only hope that we can be the class to help shape more of the story in the expansions to come.

Now, let’s get on to the loot.

Valithria Dreamwalker’s dream booty…

Holy paladins, they’ve designed a fight specifically for you. Keep healing her and she’ll take all of that extra that Holy Light normally over heals. Oh, the ret and prot pallies might toss a spare Lay on Hands her way as well. Every little bit helps.
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?by Chase Christian

Holy paladins have come a long way since our days in vanilla WoW. Back then, we were a three button class: Cleanse, Flash of Light, Holy Light. The infamous addon Decursive even did all the dispelling for us, leave the human user simply casting Flash or HL for hours on end. Seals and Judgments were for retribution and protection: we were standing 40 yards away filling up life bars. Things didn’t improve much in TBC either: while Holy Shock was fun to finally use, we ended up being purely FoL bots in most raid situations.

Blizzard took a new approach to healing in Wrath, including completely revamping each existing healing tree to make sure each one was balanced, viable, and most importantly, enjoyable. Holy paladins now enjoy a complexity that is multiple times more entertaining to play than anything that we’ve seen in the past. However, with this added functionality comes added complexity. To help us lighten the load, we can use a few amazing addons and macros manage our “holy 3.0″ paladins; this allows us to focus on keeping people alive.

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by Chase Christian

This is intended to be a guide to the holy paladin’s basic principles and tenets, not an in-depth guide into high-end raid healing or specialized gearing choices. If you’re new to the holy paladin or want to discover what the spec is all about, read on.

1. What is Holy?
Holy is the only healing talent tree available to the paladin class. You focus on healing and supporting your party, with a special focus on tank healing.

2. Holy Benefits

• Simple playstyle with few buttons to push
• Potent healing even at lower gear levels
• Massive healing throughput is required on certain encounters and can allow you to “brute force” certain fight mechanics
• Amazing buffs and cooldowns, including the only 60-yard heal

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