by Matt Walsh

Do you remember what it was like to tank before Vengeance existed? It’s been a year and a half since patch 4.0.1 implemented the Cataclysm. Along with the myriad changes that followed, tanking threat was forever changed with the introduction of Vengeance. What I remember about threat generation in those halcyon days was you’d grab threat early on with an elaborate combination of burst and threat transfers from rogues and hunters, and then you’d spend the rest of the fight with one eye on Omen to make sure that shadow priest didn’t sneak up on you and rip threat away.

I know this is a song that you’ve heard me sing many a time before, but I always found that constant threat (pardon the pun) of your DPSers ripping aggro from you to be an intrinsic, exciting part of tanking. And while I’ve always argued that being robbed of that aspect of our gameplay was the biggest problem with Vengeance, the fact is there are more mechanics-oriented issues with the design.
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by Dan Desmond

The string of abilities and buttons you hit at the beginning of combat, called opening sequences or openers, are a much-discussed topic among theorycrafters and the community at large. Naturally, your first few attacks can set the pace for the rest of the fight. Fortunately, the spec is forgiving enough that even if you flub a button at the beginning of an encounter, your overall DPS won’t go straight in the toilet. Even so, I have a few pieces of advice up my sleeve from my own experiences that can help you start the fight off right.
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by Chase Christian

I love the stat break points in WoW. The idea is that at certain values of a stat like critical strike rating or haste, your character’s power improves dramatically due to some complex interaction. Not ever spell scales linearly, and so as you reach certain thresholds, your potency can vary wildly. Holy Radiance’s interaction with haste rating is a perfect example. The haste rating we acquire obviously lowers the spell’s base cast time, which is how every spell works.

However, at certain values of haste, we can actually cause Holy Radiance’s AoE HoT to proc for an additional tick of healing. The extra tick of healing tacks on an extra 10% to 15% healing to each Holy Radiance we cast, dramatically affecting the spell’s potency. The problem is that while the first haste break point for HR is easily achievable at 777 haste rating, the next break point requires nearly 3,500 haste rating to achieve.
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by Chase Christian

DPS classes have it easy. Their only goal is to deal more damage than the other guys. Their existence revolves around a single, immutable metric: DPS. There’s no ambiguity when comparing two damage classes, as their DPS speaks for itself. As a DPS player’s gear and skill improve, it directly increases their damage done, allowing them to evaluate their performance clearly and instantly.

Evaluating a healer is much more difficult. As their group’s damage and skill improve, their healing numbers will actually go down. Healers are relied on the most when a raid is attempting a new encounter and gradually become marginalized as the fight moves toward farm status. As a healer, your best HPS performance might be the very first time you down an encounter. If you’re killing heroic Ultraxion in four minutes, your raid simply isn’t taking enough damage for you to parse highly. In order to properly evaluate a holy paladin’s play, you have to dig deeper.
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by Dan Desmond

This is it, guys and girls. This is the moment we have all been training for while hitting that poor target dummy in Orgrimmar, because only repeatedly bashing a plank of wood will truly prepare you to square off against a dragon as epic as the big DW. So pick up your weapon, your bag of tricks, and your handful of cooldowns — it’s time to kill Deathwing the Destroyer.
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by Matt Walsh

I still remember how great the news was when, in the run-up to Wrath of the Lich King, we were told that some of our Blessing spells were going to be converted to a whole new tier of temporary buffs that could be used situationally. This was something that the paladin community had been clamoring for for a very long time. There were just so many Blessings, and it didn’t make sense for all the various offerings to be in the same tier.

Then, over time, our hard-fought victory was forgotten, as well as the whole idea of proactively lending a Hand — sorry, there are going to be a lot of hand puns — to your groupmates or fellow raiders. Where it used to be a common facet of paladin-ing (in any flavor) to use your then-Blessings as actively as possible, in the last few years, it’s more become a characteristic of the min-maxers and the obsessive.

Your Hands aren’t like Turn Evil. They actually can serve a vital purpose, even making the difference between a wipe or a kill in some cases. Indeed, I would posit that one of the dividing lines between good paladins and great paladins (regardless of spec) is how intelligently they use their Hands.
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by Chase Christian

Holy paladins have come a long way from the days of five-minute Blessings and WhisperCast. There’s a good kind of complexity that comes from being given choices, and there’s the bad kind of complexity that comes from busy work. The developers are constantly streamlining the game and removing outdated mechanics, and I can’t complain. Even though addons like PallyPower made our lives easier, the new Blessing system is so simple that we don’t need any external help to handle it.

Today’s holy paladin has different addon needs from the healer of yesteryear. Three of the most important holy paladin addon concerns are unit frames, holy power management, and raid-specific alerts. In Dragon Soul, there are plenty of important things that we need to keep track of. Raid encounters are only going to get more and more complex and chaotic, and we need to be able to quickly get the information we need.
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by Dan Desmond

Well, here we are, the first two of the final four bosses of the expansion. That is, we thinkDeathwing is the final boss of the expansion — it is still unclear whether Blizzard will pull another We’re not done with the next expansion yet! raid on us like it did in Wrath with Ruby Sanctum. Regardless, we have a raid that needs a conclusion and a guide to go along with it, so let’s get started!

Please note that this guide, like many others I have written, is for the normal version of each encounter. Some mechanics, like Fading Light and Twilight Sappers, either work differently or have been removed on the Raid Finder difficulty.
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by Chase Christian

Despite any arguments to the contrary, I don’t feel that spirit is a true secondary stat. I know you can reforge in and out of it and that it’s not as ubiquitous as intellect, but it’s actually closer to being our fifth primary stat. In Mists of Pandaria, intellect will no longer grant additional mana, making spirit the only game in town for improving longevity. Because of the way holy paladins function with the new Judgements of the Pure regeneration mechanic, spirit has gone from a good choice to a must-have stat.

When we start talking about the true secondary stats, we realize that there’s a lot of baggage here. Haste rating was the de facto champion due to its ability to affect all of our heals, critical strike rating was avoided after the removal of Illumination, and our master rating has gone through more iterations than any other spell in Cataclysm.
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