Stuff to say!

I have a bunch of stuff to say and it’s going to take me a heck of a long time to say most of it, but I hope to have an epic-length post with regards to paladin stuff by the morning. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I have taught approximately 6 tanks in the last three days how to deal with Pound or Dark Smash. /sigh. What makes me curious is how on earth none of them realize that being stunned or taking insane amounts of damage isn’t a BAD thing. I mean, I asked this tank to run through Anub’arak today after he was stunned after the first pound and he’s like “kk” and he did. I don’t think he understood why, though. How is this game so very difficult for people to understand? :( There are some basic concepts about people’s roles in the game that just don’t seem to be getting through to people.

Sigh.

Anyways, more holy pally-specific stuff to come. And I do think there is a need for some holy pally-specific stuff out there, based on some stuff I’ve seen recently.

Off to go play in TOC/TOGC 25. Hooray?

Quick Q&A response!

Okay, this search term that led someone to my site CANNOT WAIT until Monday’s regular Q&A post.

“do i need defense to tank regular dungeons”

Yes. Let me say that again. Yes.

Granted, you’re not going to have much defense gear to tank Deadmines, but if you’re talking about regular dungeons from 70-80, or even 60-70, defense does matter.

Here’s the deal. If you want to tank, figure out what level the end boss is in the instance through WoWhead. Say you’re 74 and you want to tank regular Violet Hold. Well, Cyanigosa is level 77. You never want to tank mobs 4 or more levels above you, due to crushing blows becoming a possibility, but 3 levels is about average. So you can do VH at 74.

But what defense do you need? The number you are looking for, when you hover your mouse over your defense rating is the chance to not be hit/critically hit by 5.6% for a boss 3 levels higher than you, 5.4% for a boss 2 levels higher than you, 5.2% for a boss 1 level higher than you and 5.0% for a boss of your own level. This is because bosses (all mobs, really) have a base 5% chance to crit and this number increases by .2% for every level the creature has above you.

If you don’t have the required numbers mentioned above, try real hard not to go to an instance with mobs that are higher level than you.

The numbers at 80 are:

535 defense to be NOT critted by a boss 2 levels higher than you (heroics) and 540 defense to be NOT critted by a boss 3 levels higher than you (raid bosses).

If, of course, you are a druid with 3/3 Survival of the Fittest, you cannot be crit unless the mob is something like 5 levels above you, so you do not require any additional defense. You CAN, however, be crushed by mobs 4 or more levels above you, so stick to 3 or fewer levels of difference between you and the mobs you’re tanking.

It’s part of why I actually enjoy tanking on my druid. I know that as long as I go to a level-appropriate instance, I can’t get crit. :)

Holy How-To #1 – Specs and Glyphs

— Important! This post has not been updated for Cataclysm, but has been re-written here! —

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the first of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Today’s post is about that which makes us holy paladins different from our protection and retribution cousins — our talents. Sure, you could argue that our glyphs, enchants and spell use is what separates us from the tanks and the DPSers, but really, it comes down to what is available to us as a result of our talent choices.

Continue reading “Holy How-To #1 – Specs and Glyphs”

Maybe ignorance IS bliss / Divine Plea offsets

I admit it. I remain almost entirely ignorant when it comes to the Blood Prince Council fight. And yet…

Basically, I heal the living crap out of my target while having a beacon on another tanking person and stay away from anything I see that is obviously bad.

And I get an achievement for my ignorance and I beat out the other holy pally on the meters, even though he used Judgement of Light, haha!

Speaking of numbers, I really have to remind myself, frequently, that meters suck. It’s kind of hard not to put faith in them, though, when you’re doing well. ;D Honestly, it just means that people weren’t healing my target and sniping my heals. I know that. But it looks so pretty! I mean, look at this from an attempt on Blood Queen Lana’thel!

Truthfully, I have to say that the two-piece Tier 10 bonus for holy paladins has changed my entire playstyle.

It is this:

While your Divine Illumination talent is active, your heals are 35% stronger.

I have a keybound macro to take advantage of that. Shift-S pops Divine Illumination and then Divine Plea. So I’m at 85% of my ability instead of 50%. This almost certainly means a tank will not die when I pop Divine Plea. Not only that, but everything is super cheap to cast! AND I’m regenerating mana?! Hi, two-piece, I love you. Marry me.

I generally pop it when I realize my mana is at about 60-65%, will probably refresh Beacon and Sacred Shield and continue spamming merrily along. Then when Divine Plea is up again, I’m usually down to about 35-40% of my mana. So I pop Divine Plea with the Talisman of Resurgence to offset it. So instead of healing for 12-13k, I’m healing for around 10k. Totally worth it.

Then, next time Divine Plea comes up, I still have Avenging Wrath if I really can’t wait another minute for Divine Illumination to be up again. Instead of 12-13k, I’m healing for about 8k. Less worth it, but it’s better than not having any mana, particularly in a situation where I can’t melee to regen or can’t even spare the globals to judge in the hopes of a Seal of Wisdom proc.

Thinking about it, I should probably pop DivIll/Divine Plea around 70% mana to ensure that I CAN wait a little between DP coming off cooldown and using my trinket and then waiting for Divine Illumination to come back up after DP comes back up after using the trinket with it.

Anyways. Healing meters are bad and I feel like a bad player for not really caring enough to know the details of the Blood Prince Council fight and I should adjust my Divine Plea usage just a wee bit.

Oh, and in brief other news, Maj, my brother and I pretty much ruin Old Kingdom, Drak’Tharon and Violet Hold. No kidding, my brother does leet hunter DPS after a quick respec. And Maj got a couple of upgrades today to render him uncrittable by a boss 3 levels higher than him. And my tree got nothing except experience, which is fine. I’m level 76 now. And totally out of rested! WOE IS ME, people. WOE.

… I need to stop posting stuff at 6-7am.

Awesome.

So my good ol’ buddy from Eldre’Thalas, Majikmarine (who was my mage officer, the original founding member of Apotheosis, who has always been my partner in raid-leading crime), reactivated his WoW account and transferred his level 73 death knight over to Proudmoore so that he could level up with my brother’s hunter (72) and my druid (75).

He specced some form of tank (haha, I know so little about DKs, I’d have to armory him to look it up) and so we queued up with him as a tank, me as a tree and my brother as leet DPS.

We OWN Ahn’Kahet. It is our itty bitty little bitch.

I showed Maj the pulls for the most efficient clear the first time and when we queued up and got it again, we tore through it.

All the while, we were on Vent.

It was really a lot of fun and I hope to make it a regular, daily happening, for at least the month that Maj’s account is active. The queues are close to instant, the instances take no more than a half hour at the most, Maj is learning to tank on the DK, I’m getting the hang of healing a tank who isn’t quite crit-immune, but is DEFINITELY not uber squishy…  I have people with whom I can bitch about idiot ret pallies and idiot DKs!! Ecstasy! :D

Haha?

Okay, I clearly need to look at the logs in depth, but, uh, this amused the living crap out of me.

Basically, those graphs show me doing over 8k effective HPS, over 12k raw HPS over the course of a 1m 23s attempt on Queen Lana’thel. The first graph shows me, then the resto druid and a resto shammy. The table shows me, the druid, the shammy, the RET pally (JoL), the other resto druid, the SHADOW priest (VE) and the other holy paladin.

Sure, it doesn’t matter because we all died real fast. But damn me, how hilarious is that? :D

Edit:

Bwahaha, look at these numbers! I got seriously lucky with my timing. Look at the utter lack of overheal in this 8 second snippet. I was healing the bear tank with my beacon on the warrior tank.

[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1414
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +0 (O: 1333)
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +12698
[23:40:55.832] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +11768
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1235
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +450 (O: 786)
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +11768
[23:40:57.455] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +11551
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +0 (O: 1213)
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +11551
[23:40:58.687] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +*6481*
[23:40:59.389] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +6481
[23:40:59.612] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +5236
[23:41:00.325] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:01.183] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +*20051*
[23:41:01.183] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +458
[23:41:01.542] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 2 +2106
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +2105
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +2106
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +2105
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +2106
[23:41:01.729] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +16267 (O: 3784)
[23:41:02.353] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +458
[23:41:02.541] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:02.993] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +13362
[23:41:03.257] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +459
[23:41:03.585] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567

Kurn's Q&A #3

Time for another browse through my site stats and the keywords that brought people here!

1) “does shadow ward stack with acclimation”

I actually had to look this up. Shadow Ward is a warlock spell in the Demonology tree. Acclimation is a death knight spell in the Frost tree. They are self-buffing spells only, so Shadow Ward does not stack with Acclimation as a warlock cannot get Acclimation and a death knight cannot get Shadow Ward.

If you mean the buff you get from the Blood Prince Council fight, Shadow Resonance, I do believe that Shadow Ward would stack with that. (And since it’s a buff from being the ranged/caster tank on that fight, it doesn’t matter if Acclimation stacks with it.)

2) “flask mastery”

There is no “flask mastery”. It’s Elixir Mastery in alchemy that will proc flasks. It’s been this way since The Burning Crusade and has continued into Wrath.

3) 70’s regular dungeon dk defence

Hi there, Mr. or Ms. Death Knight Tank. Thank you for doing research into defense rating! I presume that you were looking for the number your defense rating should be to render you crit-immune as you level.

540 is the number you’re looking for at 80 when fighting level 83+ (raid) bosses. 535 is the number you’re looking for at 80 when fighting 82 level (heroic) bosses.

Of course, the ratings change as you level and so level 80 numbers don’t help terribly much. What you’re looking for is when you hover over your defense rating is:

Decreases chance to be hit/critically hit by 5.6%

That’ll let you tank a boss or mobs 3 levels higher than you. Any higher than that, and you get into crushing blows, so don’t go tanking a 76 when you’re 72. You’re going to die quickly.

Remember to check your defense rating whenever you ding, because it will change due to the way the rating system works. You need less defense the lower level you are and more of it the higher level you are. That’s why 490 was the magic number for raid bosses at 70 and 540 is the magic number today.

Or something like that. Have I mentioned that I don’t do math very well?

4) “are priest still good healers? 3.3”

In a word, yes. That’s the short answer. The longer answer has to do with what you want to do with your priest. If you want to repeatedly drop 20k crit heals on your party members, then no, priests aren’t good for that. You want a pally in that case. If you want to roll Renew on the raid and pretend you’re a resto druid, then no, priests aren’t great for that, either.

Priests can have two main strengths, using Discipline and Holy specs. If you’re a disc priest, you are suddenly AMAZING at mitigating damage and do very solid single-target healing. If you’re a holy priest, you are pretty fantastic at helping to maintain the health of the raid, via Circle of Healing, Renew, Prayer of Mending and such. Both holy and disc priests come with valuable cooldowns, Pain Suppression for the disc priest and Guardian Spirit for the holy. Both specs of priests are an integral part of any raid composition. In fact, my ideal group makeup is:

2 holy paladins, 1 disc priest, 1 holy priest, 1 resto shammy, 1 resto druid

Granted, I’m biased because I’m a paladin. ;) But priests are necessary pieces of the healing composition puzzle. A disc priest is invaluable on Saurfang and Putricide for damage reduction, a holy priest is almost mandatory on heroic Anub’arak for Body and Soul and both types of priests are always able to be used in any healing situation.

So yes. They are still good healers. In fact, my guild is currently looking for a disc priest with a holy offspec, so drop a line in the comments if you’re interested.

5) “can you get rhok’delar now that they changed onyxia?”

Well, according to WoWHead, the Mature Black Dragon Sinew will be a 100% drop off the black dragonkin mobs in the Burning Steppes IF you have the quest from the Ancient Petrified Leaf. So go to MC, get the leaf from Domo’s chest (50% drop rate) and then start the quest. Once you get the quest A Proper String, you should then be able to kill dragonkin to get the sinew.

Some notes about fighting the demons, since I did this back in the day:

– you MAY be grouped when you do the demons, but no one — not even your pet, and that includes the snake trap — can do any action during the demon fights that would cause them to get on the demon’s aggro list

– you MAY be buffed prior to your engaging the demon, so long as the buff is something that just sticks on you (no renew/rejuv/etc — but kings, mark, fort, they’re all fine)

Hands-down, this was the most fun I’ve ever, ever had on my hunter. I wish I could do something like this again. And yes, that even includes the 13975 deaths I had to Franklin the Friendly/Klinfran the Crazed. That bastard.

6) “wow needle encrusted scorpion automatically passed”

That would be because you (or whoever automatically passed) already have it. It’s a unique item, not unique-equipped. So check your bank or your bags, because you can’t get a second Needle-Encrusted Scorpion. Sadly. :)

7) “how do i get to dalaran”

Well, Dalaran is the major city in Northrend, so I get why you want to go there. :) If you’re low-level, the best way is just to get a mage to port you there. If you want to be able to fly out of there, however, you’ll want to make sure you have the flight point at Wyrmrest Temple, too. That’s a good hub and definitely links up to Dalaran. What I like to do is link the following (Alliance-only, sorry!) routes as I’m levelling (from West to East):

Valiance Keep (Borean Tundra), Unu’pe (Borean Tundra), Star’s Rest (Dragonblight), Wyrmrest Temple (Dragonblight), Wintergarde Keep (Dragonblight), Amberpine Lodge (Grizzly Hills), Westguard Keep (Howling Fjord), Valgarde (Howling Fjord). That allows me to fly from one start zone to the other, and will give me a connection to Dalaran as well.

As a mage, at level 71, you get a quest to go to Dalaran and you learn the Teleport: Dalaran spell. Everyone, I believe, gets a quest to go to Dalaran at level 74 (which is when a mage gets the spell for Portal: Dalaran).

As to where it actually is, it’s in Crystalsong Forest, north of Dragonblight. :)

8) “tanks who taunt on pull”

They’re dumb. No, really. They are. They go in and taunt, which has no real effect, and then their taunts are on cooldown when the over-eager DPS opens up. Splat goes the DPS and the tank tries to get aggro back as best they can. Unless the taunt has a damage component to it (like a paladin’s Hand of Reckoning), this is a super dumb move. And even then, it’s not like a paladin doesn’t have better ranged pulling options. Seriously.

I refer you to Kurn’s Guide on How to Behave as a Tank in Dungeons, point #4.

9) wow gemmin t9 paladin

Well, T9 is pretty good gear. I mean, coming from the perspective that this used to be available solely through badges earned in TOC/TOGC and off Koralon, it’s pretty good. Now you can get all your emblems from heroics and buy ilvl 232 without ever setting foot in TOC.

That said, I don’t know what spec you are, random T9 paladin, looking for gemming advice.

However…

Holy: Probably want to gem all 20 intellect gems, called Brilliant King’s Amber, (unless you’re a FoL spammer stacking spellpower, in which case, I doubt you would google for gem advice) with 1 orange gem (Luminous Ametrine) and 1 green gem (Dazzling Eye of Zul) to satisfy your meta requirements. Or, get a Nightmare Tear for the meta requirement and gem intellect everywhere else.

Prot: Make sure you’re at 540 defense, that you have met your meta requirement and then gem 30 stamina with Solid Majestic Zircons.

Ret: Make sure you’re not ignoring your hit and expertise caps, meet your meta requirement, then go nuts with the 20 strength gems called Bold Cardinal Ruby.

10) wow icc 10m composition

Basically, you want 2 tanks, 5 DPS and 3 healers. You ideally want one of the healers to be a direct healer (pally/disc priest) and one of them to be a raid healer (holy priest, resto druid, resto shammy). You want the third healer, not the single direct or a single raid healer, to have a DPS offspec.

You do the first four bosses with 2 healers, then switch to 3 healers for Rotface, have 2 for Festergut and then 2-3 for Professor Putricide. For the Crimson Halls, you’ll DEFINITELY want 3 healers for the Blood Prince Council and probably 3 for Queen Lana’thel. (Haven’t done her yet.)

Apart from that, things you’ll want to include:

– Blessing of Kings (1 pally or Drums of Forgotten Kings)

– Gift of the Wild (1 druid or Drums of the Wild)

– Fortitude (1 priest or Runescroll of Fortitude)

– Replenishment. I don’t care if it’s even a frost mage, Replenishment is soooo good.

– At least 1 person to cleanse curses for Deathwhisper (moonkin/resto druid, resto shammy, mage)

– At least 1-2 ranged DPS for Saurfang kiting of the adds

– At least 1 ranged DPS who can tank on Princes

That’s the bare basics. What is also nice, but still basic:

– Heroism/Bloodlust

– Blessing of Might/Battle Shout

– Blessing of Wisdom/Mana Spring Totem

– Hand of Sacrifice/Pain Suppression/Guardian Spirit

– Strength of Earth Totem/Horn of Winter

– Flametongue Totem/Totem of Wrath/Demonic Pact

– Swift Retribution Aura/Improved Moonkin Aura

– Rampage/Leader of the Pack

That’s just my two cents, really. I don’t even go into Trueshot Aura/Abominable Might and Windfury and all that jazz. The possible combinations are really hard to be “bad” as long as most of the basics are taken care of.

On a related note, I’m getting a LOT of search terms regarding strats, so I’ll be posting basic strats for the Lower Spire and the Plagueworks in the coming days, which should be workable for both 10 and 25-man groups.

New header image.

So since I’m doing more than just talking about Kurn and Madrana, I thought I’d include shots of my toons. Kurn’s up top left, Madrana is top right, then we have the priest, the mage (yes, she looks exactly like Madrana. Shut up.) and then my two druid roles, then my shammy.

The new armory is spectacularly awesome in that if you log in, you can then SAVE your toon’s position. It’s so cool! All those shots were taken from the armory except the druid forms, which I snagged from elsewhere. WTB armory that shows you stats and appearance while in forms, PST.

Druid and Priest levelling

I spent a little while running a few random dungeons on my now-level-72 Disc priest over on Eldre’Thalas on Friday and ran a couple randoms on my level 73 resto/feral tank druid today, with my brother on his level 72 hunter.

Some observations:

1) Priests are excessively squishy. Like, ow.

2) Also on the priest, I ran with a tank who refused to allow the hunter with us to tame a wolf in Utgarde Keep. That’s the bad news, that he (or she) didn’t read party chat AT ALL. Or if they did, they didn’t understand English. The good news is that every single time the hunter pulled the wolf he wanted off the tank, the tank would Death Grip it riiiiight back. So… good tank. Except that they didn’t read party chat.

3) Mass dispell is pretty freaking phenomenal. Properly specced (with 2/2 Focused Power) that’s a .5 second cast. Awesome. And the area of effect on it is HUGE.

4) I’ve only cast Greater Heal a couple of times. PW:S + Flash Heal + Flash Heal, with a Renew already there… Honestly, it works well. I’ve used Power Infusion on myself a couple times for a hasted Prayer of Healing and I always forget about Prayer of Mending for the first few pulls, but I think I’m starting to adjust to disc healing.

5) I was strongly expecting to tank on my druid on Saturday afternoon with my brother tagging along as DPS on his hunter, but apparently, healers were in demand today. So we got Nexus. With a tank so dumb that… that I lack a witty punchline that would properly convey his stupidity to you. I’m okay with doing things slightly different here and there, but when you go RIGHT down the Nexus hallway from the start and then clear to the entrance of Anomolous’ wing and keep going for HIM, INSTEAD of going to Ormorok, then I’m going to question your sanity.

The other hunter in the group died at some point. I can’t remember why I didn’t rez him. I think he may have released and zoned back in while we were still in combat. But because of the direction we’d gone and the seriously SCREWED UP path we took through trash, he died twice more while coming to us.

I actually feel badly about this, but I vote kicked him for not staying put and letting us come to him. We got a mage who promptly got himself killed by going left and not seeing the trash. Then he died again while trying to invis through trash to us. What on EARTH is so complicated about “Stay there. We’re coming to you. Don’t move.”??

We eventually wound up killing all the bosses, but the run took close to 45 minutes.

6) My brother dinged 72 while in The Nexus and I was four bars from 74, so we requeued and got Azjol-Nerub. With me healing. Again. Considering how rarely I get to heal on any toon who can tank, I was confused.

So we blow through AN, which is my brother’s first time there. I’m seriously getting used to druid healing. The way I’ve got my Clique setup means that it’s almost like playing the piano. Ctrl-click that, alt-click that, shift-click that. I don’t even know the binds by heart, but it flows really naturally when I’m playing. And I love that I rarely have to use Regrowth or Healing Touch, although I did use Tranquility once in each instance today.

7) Standing in Hadronox’s poison is bad, just FYI. If you are glowing green, you are standing in poison that is going to kill you. Sorry.

8) Okay. Tanks, listen up. How to avoid Anub’arak’s POUND ability and, as a special bonus, Ingvar’s DARK SMASH/SMASH abilities:

Three words: Run through him. Neither one changes direction once the cast is coming. Watch the cast bar. If you see DARK SMASH or SMASH for Ingvar or POUND for Anub’arak, run directly through the boss until you are on his other side.

You may then want to turn around so they don’t beat you from behind when they’re done casting.

We’ll all miss one here or there, but knowing how to deal with these abilities is seriously important in both regular and heroic versions of Utgarde Keep and Azjol-Nerub.

My druid is still 73, 2 bars from 74 and yet I have this overwhelming urge to throw bubbles at people…

Left scratching my head…

So, as some of you may be aware, I applied to WoW.com to be their new holy paladin columnist. Today, in their paladin column, The Light and How to Swing It, they announced that Chase Christian had been selected to be the new holy paladin columnist.

This gentleman appears to also be the rogue behind their Encrypted Texts column. It appears, after a little research, that Mr. Christian has levelled a holy paladin because his guild needed one.

Honestly, I don’t think someone who has spent the last X number of years raiding as a rogue is going to be able to do a good job in terms of helping the paladin community with the holy side of things. I have no idea how long he’s had a paladin, but I know that I don’t know all the subtleties of all of my alts. I don’t even know all the subtleties of a hunter. But I’m fairly confident that I know my stuff when it comes to a holy paladin. Much like Mr. Christian probably knows the insides and outs of being a rogue.

Out of curiousity, I listened to a few minutes of the WoW Insider show today after it had been broadcast, as Mr. Christian was a guest. They mentioned that he’ll be writing the new holy paladin column and asked what he thought he would bring to the column.

His reply was something along the lines of “well I don’t know how many times I can say stack intellect in every socket…”

Uh? Sure, most paladins do stack int in every socket. I’m no exception. But there are other raiding holy paladins who don’t stack int — they stack spellpower. They are the Flash of Light spammers who use Seal of Light and its associated Glyph and stack spellpower and basically use that. So you have a Holy Light bombing paladin, stacking int and being responsible for the big incoming heals, and you have the Flash of Light spammer who is responsible for keeping the 1-second FoL heals coming constantly.

Further, what about new-to-80 holy paladins? You can’t just stack intellect the instant you hit 80, or even while levelling. You need to hit about 2000 spellpower first and THEN work on your intellect, or else your heals are just not going to be strong enough to keep your targets up. What does it matter if you have 25,000 mana if your Holy Light doesn’t hit for enough to keep your tank up?

Yes, I realize that Mr. Christian’s comment on the WoW Insider show was likely a joke, but I am not at all convinced that he’s the right person for the job. Maybe I’m not either, but I’ve raided as a holy paladin for all of Burning Crusade and all of Wrath and chunks of pre-BC. I think I know how my class works.

Having said that, what on earth was the point of WoW.com calling for applications for the holy paladin column if they were going to consider an internal candidate? I’m not a business genius, but convention has it, in many businesses, that a job goes around internally first, then external applicants get their shot.

I have no idea how many people applied to the holy paladin column, but let’s imagine (and I think I’m probably low-balling it) that 150 people applied.

That’s 150 people who took the time to sit down and come up with:

– 10 sample topics

– 1 sample article of about 500 words

– 1 pretend letter to Blizzard about their class/spec of about 1000 words

That doesn’t include your background and why you think you’d do a good job.

I spent approximately 4-5 hours on my application, re-reading, re-writing, editing and trying to cut my sample article down from 920 words to 500. (I got it down to 606 and honestly couldn’t snip another word.)

Assume not everyone of those estimated 150 people spent 4-5 hours on their application. Imagine 150 people spent an average of 2 hours on their applications. I don’t think that’s too far-fetched, because you needed approximately 1500 words in terms of sample writing in order to apply.

That’s probably 300-some hours of work. That’s 12 days and 12 hours of work by what I think is an obscenely low number of potential applicants.

So you’re telling me that WoW.com basically wasted two weeks’ of people’s collective time and then decided to get the rogue writer to do the holy paladin column?

Nice.

I’ll read a couple of Mr. Christian’s paladin columns, but if I am not absolutely blown away by his work, I’m going to start going elsewhere for my World of Warcraft news.

In the meantime, look for some holy paladin-specific material to crop up right here.