The Pally Wall!

A lot of Paladins have overlooked one of the most interesting and unheralded changes to class mechanics, and I felt this worthy of a post; it's an old skill that used to be dumped to the spellbook as soon as its replacement came along, but now is a powerful skill in it's own right...

Divine Protection and Divine Shield are no longer on the same cooldown, so that they can be cast independently of each other. No, that's not the important change, but this was done because Divine Protection has a slightly different affect now; instead of giving you shorter term immunity and an inability to attack while active, it instead reduces all damage taken by 50% and the 100% increase to your swing timer that Divine Shield has (which will soon be, for both skills, -50% damage done).

What, still not a big deal? Well, here's the reason it actually is a big deal: 1) this gives you an extra bubble in between DS cooldowns (though a less powerful one, certainly), and 2) it gives you a shield wall.

Obviously, the reason you can't bubble while tanking is that when a mob detects you as immune, it backs off and kills someone else instead. That's bad. But if you only reduce damage taken, that mob is still hitting you. This is a massive boost to Paladins of all stripes, as we all end up with mobs hitting us at some point, and many of those times we'd rather them hit us than a squishy. In those situations, or in situations with a bubble on CD, we can now make use of Divine Protection again; it's no longer simply the precursor to Divine Shield. Those 12 seconds of DP give you the mitigation of a tank and can easily mean the difference between a difficult victory and a wipe.

Of course, keep in mind the forbearance rules, as you don't want to lock yourself out for 2 minutes from casting the main bubble if its up in 10 seconds and you can survive anyways. But with this around, you may very well be able to keep Hand of Protection around solely for use on party members.

Soloing With Seal of Blood

I was involved in a bit of a discussion on the whinefest idiocy of the standard WoW forums (I don't recommend being as foolish as me and actually reading those blasted things) about Blood/Martyr vs. Command for leveling.

There was a quite strong belief on the part of many that Blood while soloing will leave you drinking every other fight, and/or dead. While there have been times I've questioned that maybe its efficiency is not as strong as I'd like, to suggest that Blood rolls up devastating consequences for the Paladin unwise enough to turn it into his everyday seal is ridiculous.

For those who don't use it regularly outside of instances (and you hardly notice its damage while inside one), most of Blood's self-inflicting damage is actually quite minor. I'm taking about 50 or so damage at the worst on most swings, which adds up to far less damage than mobs are doing to me. Judgment of Light in and of itself has been more than sufficient to cover for any damage received in that method, and as such my health is never at risk with regular swings.

The real risk of Blood is the Judgment damage, which amounts to roughly 30% of the damage caused. As I've seen a 7k crit in an instance with Blood, and can regularly crit for 4.5-5k with the skill, that can add up to quite a bit, to say the least; you should expect to lose 1,000-1,700 health whenever you judge the seal.

But! Here's where the fun comes in. An Art of War-inspired insta-Flash of Light will immediately heal all or nearly all of the damage you inflicted upon yourself, and if you just crit on your Judgment, Art of War is already up anyways.

As long as you're killing mobs that don't inflict overly large damage themselves, wherein you'll need that FoL for the damage being inflicted on you and thus extra healing will be needed (pretty rare), you should find Blood to be an excellent nearly-all-purpose seal.

But still, don't PvP with it.