Paladin Smash!

2009-07-22T16:01:00.003-04:00

/lootdance

2009-04-23T08:47:00.003-04:00

Well, after trying to get runs into Utgarde Pinnacle for what seems like ages, I finally got in there twice in the last week and last night it happened, the phat lootz that I've been waiting for dropped:

Red Sword of Courage.

If you run Naxx regularly or are getting drops in Ulduar already, then you are thinking, "Phhht."
For you others I would like to take this opportunity to say ....

"EAT IT!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

That is all.

On a more interesting note, there have been some major changes to encounters in Ulduar. It seems as if it was tuned a little too hard for most players so alot of the encounters are getting nerfed a bit. See this WoWInsider article for more.

Cheers.

Info Regarding Ulduar Fights

2009-04-21T10:18:00.002-04:00

Both from maintankadin, but slightly different focus on each.

Very Concise Raid Strats.

In-depth Strats Focusing on Tanking.

That is all for now.

Move Successful and other changes

2009-04-06T10:15:00.004-04:00

Well, Knales made his move from Norgannon to Fenris successfully. The move was completed late last Wednesday night and I immediately ran a PUG heroic Violet Hold, and that went well.

That Friday night I ran 25 man Naxx with my new guild and that was a success, however we had to PUG in at least 8 people so that made things a little slow and slightly less organized than I think the leadership would have liked. I picked up 2 tanking pieces in there, which I was very happy about. Gauntlets of the Disobediant, from Noth the Plaguebringer and Bindings of the Hapless Prey from Maexxna.

I have also made some significant changes to my UI in anticipation of more raiding. Normally I run without any changes to my base Blizzard UI, just additions really. Now things are different.

When running 5 mans I use Healbot to keep up on buffs both for my party members and for myself. I currently have 4 self-buffs I need to reapply everytime we wipe.

In a raid however, this can get a little too screen-filling. Plus I would really like to be able to change what I do and do not see on my screen a bit more. So I've made 2 major additions.

X-perl changes the way you see almost everything on your screen, but it does not mess with your action bars. It gives you much more flexibility to deliver more information, in a more precise manner to yourself. I am really liking it alot.

The second change I've made is for my action bars. I have added Dominos. This basically scrubbs away the Blizzard bars and makes way for nearly complete customization of your bars.

Both of these addons will require to play around and experiment extensively before you get what you want, but as you play with them they will help you to define what exactly you are looking for in action bar and unit frames addons.

I am still not sold entirely on either of them. There are still a few things that I want to change, but I think with some more tweaking I can get there with these 2 addons.

I am still using Healbot for my buffs, which is gonna blow when I raid, but I am going to be giving Pallypower a test run this week at some point. The biggest problem with PP is that it does not support Seals or Auras, which is something that I can get healbot to keep track of.

If anyone out there has any suggestions as to where to go with these addons or if I should try something new and exciting, please let me know.

Cheers.

Moving

2009-04-01T11:02:00.004-04:00

It's official. I am moving my main, Knales, the paladin tank from Norgannon to Fenris. I have a RL friend there who is in a guild that needs tanks and they raid regularly, so I'm moving.

I've been agonizing over this decision for weeks now, but finally it came down to one question: Where would I have the most fun?

My answer to that had to do with raiding, not being the only tank around and mostly just being able to get stuff that I want to do done. Plus I have spent some time with the guild that I will be moving to, and they are a shit-ton of fun to play with. Even if you're just on guild chat it's good times.

Of course, there are a number of people I will miss on Norgannon. People from my guild and players from our allied guild. I've only been with my still current guild for a little over 3 months, and while I have run up to raid leader and high level officer in that time, I think they'll get by without my tanking skills -- after all there are tanks a plenty out there. Plus I want to just throw an idea out to my guild leader -- throw some tanking leather on your druid and get in there, I bet you'd make a great tank!

So tonight after the scheduled Obsidian Sanctum run (Sarth+0) I will be hitting the transfer button. I have already cleared out my bank character, leaving some gold and items for my 73 hunter who will be remaining behind for the foreseeable future.

I want to end this with a fond farewell to someone else I will miss -- Big Red Kitty. He has decided to re-dedicate himself to his wife and family and while I applaud that decision, I will miss his good cheer and fun posts. Reading his farewell post got me a little misty thinking about my own 7 month old daughter (I hope my play time is balanced with my family time, but only time will tell I suppose).

WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN!

2009-03-26T08:45:00.001-04:00

This site is the win-ing-est! You gotta check it out. Please please please -- just do it. You'll love yourself more for having done so -- and not in a dirty way ... mostly.

WoW Bash.

DO IT.

I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going to Take It Anymore!

2009-03-23T11:11:00.007-04:00

Well, I'm not that mad. Although it IS interesting to note that what this guy is saying holds true today, even the Russians are a problem again, albeit not quite what they were in the early eighties.

Anyhoooo. Yes, I'm a little bit pissed. I'm angry at the people I play with in the game. This is a social game and sometimes people step on other people's toes, I get that, but I'm tired of my current situation in-game.

I am a tank, I am currently my guild's only heroic/raid geared tank. I am one of two geared tanks in our guild alliance. This means that for raids the both of us must have 100% attendance for things to happen. It also means that if I want to run 5 man heroics all I need to do is find a healer and we can pretty much get it on. However, that also means that if I'm not the in mood to wait around for someone and I decide to just get something started -- I am the focus of bad feelings because someone gets left out. It also means that if you whisper me about running something and I'm getting whispers from 10 other people, you might get missed and so you miss that run as well.

This I find bothersome.

I join guilds so it's easier to find groups and to have people to be social with. I don't join them so I can feel like I have another job. I join guilds that are casual in the hopes that someday I will find one that has a chilled out relaxed atmosphere, but that also likes to get instance runs and raids going.

My guild has recently created an alliance with another guild -- one that I really like the members of. If I had my druthers we would merge our two guilds but as both guild leaders really like their independence that is not likely to happen. But things are starting to come together a little bit -- we have run Vault of Archavon 10 successfully and PUGed 25 with no problem as well. This coming week we are going to give Obsidian Sanctum a visit and kill Sartharion with his attendant drakes already dead AKA Sarth+0. So things are moving.

But that's not really the problem. The problem is that I feel pressure every time I log on to the game. I feel pressure to make sure that everyone who wants to run something is included. I feel pressure to not show anyone any kind of favoritism. I feel pressure to show up all the time so that I can be someone's meat shield.

Now our guild leader wants to start adding all sorts of leadership roles to the guild roster. This means we would have a tank leader, a paladin leader and a herbalism leader -- along with all the other professions, roles and classes. With our guild being so small, maybe 15-20 actual regular players and a crap load of alts. We only have 5 MAYBE 6 people at 80 who can walk into heroic 5 mans. So this all boils down to people taking on multiple roles.

What will my roles be? Well, currently I am the raid leader. I am also the most experienced tank, but not officially the tank leader -- although the funny thing is that my advice is not taken when I tell people that so-and-so is not ready to tank something. Guess I'm REALLY not the tank leader. And I suppose I could be the alchemy boss, but so could our guild leader.

Really, I don't want any more titles or roles to play. I want to tank in heroics and raids and if I have to organize such things, then so be it. After that I just want to play, and not be bothered with much else. I'm responsible for enough shit at home (7 month old baby) and at work.

All this has lead me to spend more time on the PTR messing about as well as logging into low level alts that no one knows. Which is OK, but doesn't get me into more interesting content. I could honestly care less about the epic items, I just want to play content I haven't seen before and I want to skill up on that stuff.

So what to do, what to do. The extra roles in the guild should not be such a big deal (I would hope) -- just tell them that I'm not interested. The crap dealing with groups and emo kids who don't get their runs ... harder.

What really makes this an issue at all is the fact that there is a casual raiding guild, in which I have RL friends, and who I know are chilled out and cool people -- and they want me. They are running Naxx on a regular basis and they need more tanks. Also I have had a toon running with them for a couple weeks, just to check them out -- DK, of course.

One of their members even offered to pay half of the transfer fee. Ugh.

Of course, if I didn't have at least one person who I really think is a cool person-- a person who I could see really becoming RL friends with, this would all be a non-issue.

Now, I've been in perhaps 15 guilds on 5 or 6 servers so /gquit is not a new thing for me. Nor is transferring. But I've never left one guild for another. Usually a guild will just self-destruct or I'll quit playing that toon for a while and get kicked. So this is all something new for me.

Alrighty, that's all for now. More when I know more.

New Talent Tree Info from PTR

2009-03-19T10:23:00.005-04:00

I am going to focus on 2 changes to the protection tree -- for this current build they are, in my mind the most significant changes (and maybe the only ones for protection? not sure).

Filling out the talent with 32 points in protection we now have Spiritual Attunement -- working much like it used to when bought from trainers.

"A passive ability that gives the Paladin mana when healed by other friendly targets' spells. The amount of mana gained is equal to 5/10% of the amount healed."

There is a lot of talk about this move and what it does for all 3 specs. At the moment it is a definite nerf to both Holy and Ret, although Holy can probably get away without it because they aren't receiving many heals from friendly players. Ret however is currently counting on this mechanic to get mana back because of the Seal of the Martyr/Blood self-damage mechanic (this takes a bit to explain -- if you want to know more check out any of a number of the retribution paladin blogs).

Eat dirt Archavon!

I think this is a great move on the developers part -- although it most likely means that they will need to do some extra work in the Retribution tree. It makes sure that when tankadins need mana they will have it.

Speaking of having mana when you need it there is another interesting change in the protection tree. Fully talented at 42 points is Guarded by the Light.

"Reduces spell damage taken by 3/6% and gives 50/100% chance to refresh the duration of your Divine Plea when you hit an enemy. In addition, your Divine Pleas spell is 100% less likely to be dispelled."

Jigajiga-what? Alright. Now this talent used to be insanely useful: Did the same work on spell damage, but lowered the mana cost of the 3 most used tanking spells. Now it gives more uptime to our biggest mana generating spell, Divine Plea.

I am not sure this is so great anymore. Sure it gives us the ability to be generating mana like crazy, for ourselves, but I think it may be too much. With Blessing of Sanctuary and Spiritual Attunement I generally have more mana than I know what to do with -- ending many boss fights with full mana. This WILL help tankadins when it comes to trash fights I suppose, when they're not getting healed quite as much, but my experience has shown me that normal unbuffed Divine Plea works just fine.

Of course there is still the reduction to spell damage, which is always nice, but I am of the opinion that this might not be one of those HAVE TO HAVE talents anymore. Testing will prove one way or another. I hope to get on the PTR tonight to get a look at just that.

Cheers.

First Foray onto the PTR

2009-03-18T13:54:00.004-04:00

Well I copied my character, waited the 2 days and finally logged into the PTR.

When I copied my toon he had logged out in Borean Tundra and so I immediately flew over to Coldarra to test out the silencing mechanic newly built into talents deep in the Protection tree.

LOVIN IT! This was great, finally I can pull a caster to me instead of having to use line of sight mechanics or rushing in on them. As I was fighting, I realized that the 3 second silence may not be long enough. I would rather go with a 5 or 6 second silence, but hey, I got something which is better than the nothing we all had before.

While there I ran into my first bug. It's only an animation glitch, but it was more than just annoying.

As you can see, I'm no longer fighting anything, but my arms a oddly akimbo as if I'm dodging or getting ready to slash with my sword or shield. And this effect lasted until I summoned my Red Drake and flew away, but came back again once I set down and fought some elementals also in Borean Tundra.

This was when I noticed the new cooldown on the Hearthstone. It's now only 30 minutes!! Even though I hadn't used it since logging in, as soon as I got to Dalaran and had puttered around there for a few minutes I was shocked to find that I only had 10 minutes until I could hearth again.

Since I was on the PTR and nothing I did would have any permanence I decided to zone into Wintergrasp and spend some of my Stone Keeper's Shards on a Black War Mammoth. While this isn't REALLY PTR type stuff, I took some video of it's glory. Not sure if I'm going to allow myself to buy one on my live server, but hey, it was fun for a little bit.

More PTR goodness to come.

Public Test Realm-ing

2009-03-16T10:56:00.005-04:00

Because I have recently been writing mostly about PUG aggro or personal issues with the game I decided it was time to jump into the PTR for 3.1.

I really want to be able to write about interesting things happening in the game, and although there are still arguments raging about whether or not Reckoning is worth spending points on, or if Pursuit of Justice in the Retribution tree is pointless (hehe) or not -- I feel like those arguments may continue to rage until the end of time. Or at least the end of WoW (shudder).

Also I am not a mathematician (I can hardly balance my checkbook) so I have little interest in trying to write about current theorycrafting -- check out Elitist Jerks for all that.

I want to be able to report on the reality of upcoming changes to the class and most especially to the Protection spec. So I've downloaded the PTR client and have put my toon in the queue for copying to the PTR. That is supposed to take a couple of days, so I won't have anything new to say on this front for a few days.

IF there are any readers out there who would like me to check something specific out on the PTRs and talk about it, please leave a comment and I will do my best to do so.

I am most psyched to play around with the Shield of the Templar talent change. While we are losing +30% damage in that talent to Shield of Righteousness, Avenger's Shield and Holy Shield that damage is being folded into the base damage of all those spells and being replaced with the ability to SILENCE with Avenger's Shield. HOW FRIGGIN COOL IS THAT? Finally. Seriously.

I also heard somewhere that Shield of Righteousness was no longer going to generate a high amount of threat, but as I cann't find the source for that, I would like to hop into the PTR and get the scoop.

Looking at the latest talent calculator on MMO-Champion, it looks like I will be going Holy 3, Prot 55, Ret 13. And that's quite weird at the moment to look at.

I also want to check out the dual spec deal and also I am wondering about mana issues with the changes to Blessing of Sanctuary and Spiritual Attunement. I believe that I will have no problem keeping my mana up, but I would really like to see what's going on.

So, dear reader, look forward to some interesting articles about what's coming up for paladins and tankadins in the 3.1 patch.

Auf wiedersehen!

Busy busy busy

2009-03-12T10:57:00.003-04:00

In case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty busy right now and have had trouble writing.

Work is keeping me quite busy. Home is always busy with 6 month old baby, girlfriend, dog and various other things. And then there's Warcraft.

As it stands I am on a streak of trying to run as many heroics as I can as often as I can. So on the nights that I know I have more than a few hours, I try to run at least 2 heroics. Alot of the time, unless it's scheduled ahead of time that means trying to put together a PUG, which can be great or insanely awful at any given moment.

Plus I have just been elected as the raid leader for our guild, so I have to work very closely with the raid leader of our allied guild, Remains of the Fallen in order to get some stuff done. And that takes up time.

Along with the scheduling of the raids and deciding composition numbers from each guild -- here's hoping we can keep it to 5/5 -- there are the gear/experience/skill factors with the membership of my guild.

I am totally sure and confident of 3 of our players. 100%. No worries. At all.

One of those is me, and yeah, I guess there is some hesitation for me on new content, but I know I'm geared and I have the right skills to figure most fights out (given that I've done some research).

And there are really some bright stars that are rising quickly in our guild, both in skill and gear (there experience is usually not something I worry too much about in the beginning).

Anyhoooo. So I might not be writing as much as I'd like, or you my dear reader(s).

Cheers.

Not Warcraft or Paladin related in any way!

2009-03-10T09:44:00.003-04:00

This is my daughter, Dune. She's so cute it's painful to look at sometimes.

I will most likely write something Warcraft related later.

This just needed to be added.

This is Easy. Fail.

2009-03-05T17:24:00.006-05:00

"But this is easy."

How many times have I heard that from a dpser?

Yeah sure it's easy for you, you just have to stand there and hit your buttons and what? Not pay attention to threat meters, not pay attention to incoming adds, not pay attention to the healers mana, not pay attention to the tank moving the mob.

Argh, this subject makes me so angry. When someone comes into a group and just assumes that whatever they are doing will be easy and they can proceed with no cares in the world.

When grouping it is important to remember that there are 4 other people in the group with you. They all have differing levels of gear, experience and skill -- all three of which are insanely important in how "easy" anything is.

I can't tell you how many times I have run with a PUG in an heroic and someone keeps saying that this should be a breeze and that, "any 80 will have 1300 dps." Then, when I remind them that people are always leveling alts or new toons they take a step back and I can hear them gulp a little.

Yeah, we might have some under-prepared members of our group -- people who aren't geared enough or don't have any idea how to deal with the first boss in heroic gundrak or just aren't very good at their class.

You just don't know until you hit that first boss.

Just, please please please remember: Unless you're in a guild run or with good friends, you never REALLY know the capabilities of the other people in your PUG. The Armory can't tell you that they're watching Dollhouse on hulu while running heroic Azjol-Nerub.

And there isn't a spell for healing stupid.

What? You mean I have a blog to write?

2009-03-04T15:34:00.004-05:00

Well things have been pretty slow in my WoW life recently. Not much sweet gear, although unless it's truly friggin awesome I wouldn't post it anyways. Heroics runs have had the same chance to be great or to fail epicly depending on group makeup.

I've also been very busy at work, and that bleeds over into the blog writing.

I keep playing, and when I can't get a group I mostly farm for herbs or do the Hodir daily quests.

Sometimes I kill something randomly just because I want to. This is one such instance (not dungeon).

I really love the models on these guys -- with their toothy grins!

One thing that is happening that I will be excited to see come to fruition, (if it does) is the alliance between my current guild, Elven Fellowship, and our friends over at Remain of the Fallen. We have just created a chat channel in-game that we all share, so that should build relations between the two groups.

My understanding is that they are in much the same place as our guild. We don't have the numbers to really field a 10 man group, we don't want to change our focus to hardcore progression and we don't want to be swallowed up by a large guild just so we can raid. So we're just going to get together with another like-minded group and hope it all works out.

I know that that Remains has some great players, and so have we, we'll just have to see how the two can come together.

On a totally different note, I screamed through a 44 minute Heroic Nexus run last night with a nicely heavy dps group.

I died at the end dragon when she was at 2% because I thought to myself, oh we got this, and then stopped jumping and promptly died. The rest of the group spanked her down so it didn't matter much -- just a slightly higher repair bill.

Oh well that's all for now.

Cheers.

Still Pissed Off or Group Dynamics 101

2009-02-26T08:19:00.008-05:00

Some things from the past still piss me off when I think about them.

I still get angry when I think about that priest that stole the mining node out from under me when I was fighting mobs in a cave in Winterspring. I had actually hit the node once, and then was attacked. While I fought them off she came up and clicked away. (slow simmering anger)

I still get mad at the many many times my very first toon wiped in Gnomer because of stupid people and those dwarves with their mines.

And I get mad by road-ragers in PUGs, and that anger stays with me for a couple of days.

Last night I logged on with the express purpose of getting my last two heroic badges so I could purchase my sexy Waistguard of Living Iron. Just two badges, how hard could that be? Well, let me tell you:

Got onto LFG channel and put myself forward as tank for Heroic Gundrak, Utgarde Keep and Nexus, mostly because I am familiar with their heroic bits and pieces. I also asked what the heroic daily was and instead of a reply got an invite. The invite was, in fact, to the daily which was Culling of Stratholme, Caverns of Time. Alright, I know I'm statistical ready for that instance, even though I have never been on a heroic run.

I told the rest of the group that this would be my first heroic run, to which they mentioned that they intended to make it a timed run. Which means that we have to run through the instance as fast as possible in order to get a boss that goes away after ... 25 minutes I think (?). I mentioned that this would, of course, be my first timed run, but that I was up for the challenge -- only thing, "If I start going the wrong way, just ping on the mini-map or yell at me." No one said anything and we traveled to and started the instance.

We got to the first boss, the abomination guy, and things had been going quite smoothly. He was downed and we moved on.

I had been moving quite quickly, not even bothering with any non-elite mobs, as I was told. We turned and rushed to the other side of the instance only we were moving just a little too fast I guess because the new elites had not spawned yet and we passed their spawn point (everyone but one member of the group was following me without question). The last member of our team was waiting for us at the appropriate spawn point for the next set of elites and said so.

I turned us around and run up to him, but BOOM the elites spawned and downed him. We got into the fight and things were totally disorganized at that point. I concede that was partially my fault, but I DID tell them that I might need some direction. Slam slam slam -- full wipe. I wasn't all that bothered, but one of the members just started yelling and yelling calling me a f*cking noob etc, etc, etc. At first I thought, "Ok, he's just got to get that off his chest, then I can re-explain that I had told them I was going to need some help in navigation."

But this guy just kept berating me, and after the third "f*cking noob" I knew I was done with this B.S. I told them that next time they should look for another tank and promptly left the group. I was so angry. I really wanted to get through that instance and prove to myself that I was not only statisically ready (right stam, enough armor, uncrittable), but play-ready as well. I guess I wasn't. Nor was I with the right group.

Sometimes it's all about the group.

As soon as I hearthed back to Dalaran I put myself back into LFG and was immediately invited to an Heroic Gundrak run. I sighed, hoping that I would not need to deal with any grief and accepted the invite. Within 5 minutes we had a full group and within 15 we were zoning in. The run went well. We had some problems as I think some people had never run it on heroic, and perhaps some of our dps was a little low, but we got through it with the minimum of fuss.

And no one called anyone a NOOB.

I got my two badges, and then some, ported back to Dalaran and got my new shiny purple belt. I was just about to port back to Ironforge and gem it up when some friends whispered that they needed a tank in Gruul's Lair for the achievement.

I accepted their invite and summons and we downed Gruul with 17 people and only a few deaths.

Really, it comes down to the group dynamic. When in a group try to be polite, you never know what's going on in the background for any person. And if someone screws up, it should not be that big of a deal, unless, of course they throw blame around and start calling everyone else a f*cking noob.

And seriously. Listen to your groupmates. They will tell you things that you never knew before, or tell you that they really don't know what they are doing, so you can find a more experienced player for that instance or encounter. If you're not listening, how can you know what is going on?

If you're not listening, then when something bad happens, at least some of the blame falls squarely on your shoulders. Really.

My World of Warcraft History

2009-02-25T11:40:00.000-05:00

I started playing Warcraft on June 13 2005. I mostly got interested in the game because my roommate was obsessed with Star Wars Galaxies at the time (pre-nerf), and I found the idea of a MMO to be really cool. I really wanted to buy a new computer and it needed to be a Macintosh.

You can't play SWG on a Mac so I looked around for other games that were available (MMO preferred). If you own a Mac, you know that there isn't a whole lot out there. Except World of Warcraft.

I started doing some research, and ended up spending a whole afternoon going through EVERY screenshot that was posted on the official World of Warcraft website. I was hooked.

It took me 3 more weeks to save up the money and finally buy my computer. By the time it arrived I had already read every page to the Brady Games guide to World of Warcraft. I had done all the research I could and decided on a tauren hunter.

I really liked how huge they were and they didn't look quite as funky as the trolls. (I also found the classic idea of a troll [ew yucky] to make me not want to play that race.) As for hunter, I was really excited about the idea of having a pet to hang out with me.

Gnok was created. I levelled Gnok to around 30 having only gone to one abortive attempt at an instance: Wailing Caverns, and I really didn't want to go through that again. Gnok got to 1000 Needles and I got bored with him. To this day he has only leveled to 40.

The second time around I decided that perhaps I should go with a toon that was a little more normal looking and so I opted for a human. After that I wanted a class that could heal itself and that was very tough = PALADIN. Knales was born (although the spelling of his name has changed a few times over the years because of realm jumping).

I really liked the paladin and leveled him quite quickly to 50 and then got bored. This was in the days when 60 was level cap and, even though I was quite close, I still found it to feel a million miles away. My guild had also blown up and I'd had too many instance runs that were just disasters. At that time I dabbled with other toons, but none that made it past level 20 and none that haven't been deleted.

When the Silithus patch came out, I went back to Knales and finished him off. DING 60. I found some good friends on my server and we started running 60 instances on a regular basis in order to get some good drops.

At that time some of those aforementioned friends decided to experiment with an RP server, so I followed them and created a mage from scratch. Eventually I was in a really good guild and we were all leveling like crazy. Knales jumped to this new server and he was the highest level we had. I got my mage to about level 40 and then got bored again.

This is when the hunter class was re-born for me. I rolled a dwarf hunter and powerleveled him to 40 so I could use him instead of my mage to hang with my friends. By 50 most of them had disappeared, but I had no trouble getting him to 60. Kalel and Knales were constantly getting switched out when the needs of the group matched them (Knales was holy at this time).

Somewhere in here my roommate -- the SWG geek got into WoW, got his own account and wanted to hang with me in-game, but didn't want to level an Alliance toon. We started taurens on a PVP server. I went druid, he went shaman. I ran around with Kreskin in PVP land until he hit the mid-30s and I got bored again.

I went back to my old Alliance server to find that all my old friends had come back, and they were levelling again. Sweetness. I played both my hunter and my pally toons and was starting to get some great gear.

A month later The Burning Crusade came crashing into my life. Honestly my hunter was my first toon to zone into Outland, but that lasted for about 2 hours before I realized I wanted my paladin to really HIT something. Knales came out and I leveled him extremely fast to 70 and was the first in my guild, by far, with a flying mount.

After some time an old friend from my first server re-surfaced and we decided to make Draenai shaman together. Jole was born and he was quickly leveled to 50 before I got a little bored with the leveling grind.

I went back to Knales and was having a lot of fun healing level 70 instances and getting ready for heroics and Kara. Before I could ever run Kara further than Maiden, I had some personal and financial issues and quit the game completely.

Two weeks after Wrath of the Lich King came out I signed back into World of Warcraft, with the expansion in hand. I told myself that I was going to level my hunter first, because of all the fun changes made to that class. That lasted about 3 days, and I decided to try out my paladin again in the Retribution tree.

WOOHOO! Was that fun! But I was still not satisfied. I really wanted to be doing something both useful in groups and interesting to me. I read around on the changes to the different specs and re-rolled to Protection.

This is where I belong. I really have enjoyed protection and I believe I will stick with it -- unless and until I have no options but to respec to Holy in order to be useful at all. At least until dual specs drop. And that's going to be great.

I am an idiot, but it's OK! (3.1 PTR Notes)

2009-02-24T08:27:00.012-05:00

The Public Test Realm went live last night apparently. The official 3.1 PTR notes are a little hard to find, as Blizzard doesn't update them all that quickly on their official website.

What I will be discussing is information posted by MMO-Champion. The notes are either directly from the patch notes in the PTR or have been data-mined by MMO-Champion, check out their post here. All of this information is liable and likely to change.

Picture from MMO-Champion

So what's in store for paladins and prot paladins in specific? Well some things we knew about and have been discussed before, like Exorcism working on all mobs but criting on undead and demons. Others are totally new and interesting, here are the new ones:

The reason for the above title is this first point. Auras will persist through death. You know you've done it. You step into and instance and wipe on some boss, then you step back in and buff everyone. 20 minutes later someone whispers you and wonders about your Devotion aura or Retribution aura, or ANY aura at all. You've totally forgotten to turn it back on! In fact, I did this just last night in a Heroic Halls of Stone run. I tanked a boss without any aura on, and while it did seem a little harder we made it though. The other paladin in the group whispered me about it afterward -- oops how embarrassing.

Shield of Righteousness now deals 130% of block value + 520 at the highest rank. It no longer causes a high amount of threat. (Previously increased damage by a set amount)
This is what I like to call a nerfing buff. It nerfs our high threat on that spell, but gives us what could turn out to be a crapton more damage, so well, that's more threat built in. We'll have to see how testing goes to know if this changes much or helps immensely.

Blessing of Kings is gone, now a trainable skill and is replaced by: Divinity:Tier 1 protection talent, increases healing done by and to you by 1/2/3/4/5%. This is something nice that Holy pallys can pick up, but that will help out when you need healz, and you always need healz.

Guarded by the Light (Tier 9) now reduces spell damage taken by 3% and gives a 50% chance to refresh the duration of your Divine Plea when you hit an enemy. (Previously reduced the mana cost of your Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield and Shield of Righteousness spells by 15%.)
This is a good buff because Divine Plea will make it so if you were ever having trouble with keeping up your mana, now you won't. As usual though, you'll have to remember to hit this button before you're totally out of mana.

I'm not the biggest fan of Divine Plea, it's another thing that I have to remember to hit, but which is not part of my normal tanking arsenal. This is mostly me crying in my beer, but I wish that as a tank I never had to worry about mana generation, only mana management. Slight difference but more than just semantics IMHO.

Glyph of Exorcism -- Increases damage done by Exorcism by 20%. (Old: Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.)

This is a change that I kind of anticipated. When they announced that Exorcism was going to be able to be used against ALL mobs they were going to have to change this glyph somehow, otherwise it would have been too overpowered in PVP.

Glyph of Divinity -- Your Lay on Hands grants twice as much mana as normal and also grants you as much mana as it grants your target. (Old: Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target.)

I'm gonna love this. I am often using LoH -- sometimes just to get mana back in a hurry and I really think this is a great buff for anyone using LoH. BUFFALICIOUS!

Glyph of Lay on Hands -- Reduces the cooldown of your Lay on Hands spell by 5 min.(Old: Increases the mana restored by your Lay on Hands spell by 20%)

I like this too, and with the newly freed up points in the protection tree, perhaps I can shorten the cooldown to, what like 11 minutes? Can be used for every boss fight now. Neato.

Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous *new* -- Your Hammer of the Righteous hits 1 additional target.

This is kinda nice. Just gives HotR a little added utility. 4 targets instead of 3 -- yes please.

Honestly there are so many new and interesting changes in this PTR its hard to really get through them all. I have a feeling that, just like the Wrath beta, there will be lots of interesting stuff at first, and then they'll get changed or nerfed as real players start using and abusing the talents and spells.

Guilds and recruitment

2009-02-23T09:37:00.004-05:00

My guild is pretty small. We have around 70 toons, but alot of them are alts or people who don't play very regularly. We have 10 level 80s, but at least 2 are alts, one hasn't played in over a month and one does not group. That leaves 6 players at 80.

So, now that I've been 80 for a while, I'm ready to set my sites on raids, as are a few other of our other members. But with only 6 players that just won't wash unless we PUG the other 4 slots -- something I am loath to do as I have enough trouble with PUGs in heroics, much less a raiding environment.

So we are trying to recruit.

If you've never done so, try to avoid recruiting as much as you can. It kinda blows. If you're posting to trade chat, you probably want to create a macro to make it a bit easier, however you only get 250 characters with which to represent your guild. That limit kills me as I want to say so much about our people and what we are looking for.

We have a really great group of people, players who have been with the game for years, and played with each other for a while as well. We are really tight knit and we want people who are interesting, respectful and who play well to fit in with us. We are not a progression guild, but we do want to progress.

I really think that at this point in the expansion it is hard to recruit people who have not done alot of raiding or who know how to play. Either you're a good player and have been at it a while, in which case you're probably already in a decent guild that raids at least occasionally. Or you are just making it to 80 now and you might be somewhat inexperienced.

Or you're not in a guild because you've been kicked out of your last one because you're a jerk.

Now, I know this is oversimplifying things somewhat, but that's what it feels like when you are recruiting -- everything is stacked against you.

When talking to people about our guild I try to be as honest as I possibly can. I don't want someone signing up for something that we just can't deliver. We had one new member leave us I think because they were told that we were starting raids soon. Well, as I mentioned above, we are at least 4 players away from raiding, and that's only if the 6 we do have are geared and can all play at the same time (a detail that we haven't 100% worked out yet).

All that said, if you are reading this and you are on the Norgannon server or are likely to transfer, and are seeking a guild, check us out at http://elvenfellowship.blogspot.com

Have a nice day.

P.S. Guilds are not only hard to recruit for, they are hard to keep together, with that said, my sincerest condolences to a paladin blogger who I've read for a long time now, Honorshammer, for the demise of his guild.

Boss Video

2009-02-23T09:30:00.004-05:00

Ran Heroic Nexus last night with a PUG. It was not the smoothest run, everyone was a bit less uber than they thought they were. All the dps wanted to do the Achievements (which are pretty hard IMHO), but we just couldn't pull it off. Our rogue was convinced that he was the best in game, but he died every single boss fight -- pretty sure that wasn't entirely his fault as I think that the priest was slightly undergeared, but still -- learn to get out of AOE or whirlwind damage.

Here is video from the Anomulous boss fight. This is my first boss video and truthfully I might not do too many more -- my comp lags hugely when recording. Although I will try lowering some of my effects to help that out.

As you can see I'm not the world's best tank. With quick new spawns it takes me a second to tab over and then engage -- perhaps I just don't have the trick of it. If anyone has advice about quicker ways to tab and target, please let me know. Enjoy.

"Tired of wall o text."

2009-02-18T10:01:00.003-05:00

Even though this is not all that exciting, it's all I did today before going to work.

I was struggling to get my Unarmed skill up to 400 in order to get that achievement.

Here is some video to that effect.

I love how I can punch with my shield hand.

Can't Not Read

2009-02-17T16:07:00.002-05:00

I just read a post, that lead me to two other posts, and they were all very excellent and insightful.

I was not planning on writing again today, but I can't let these posts sit still.

The posts that I will link to are all about why World of Warcraft is successful and why it will be hard to create a killer for the game.

They mention the awesome community both in game (your guild and friends list) and out (all those bloggers and WOWwiki and wowhead etc.).

They mention equipment accessibility: that you can play on a Mac and a Pc and that those computers just don't have to be top of the line to get into the game.

They even mention that Blizzard may just have an unfair advantage because they've been making kick-ass games for over a decade.

Whatever you think is the reason for WoWs success, I think you'll find these articles interesting and informative.

Banana Shoulders.

Leafshine.

Big Bear Butt Blogger.

Please do enjoy.

Ulduar Info

2009-02-17T15:20:00.002-05:00

Wow Europe has a new page that gives some background information on the new Ulduar raid zone and also some hints as to what's going to be happening there.

One thing that I find VERY interesting is the vehicular raiding -- using vehicles to take on an entire army just to get into the next section.

I know I'm not a big raider, but the raid content seems kinda fun and I would really like to get in on it at some point.

So, I welcome 3.1 -- bring it.

Getting There

2009-02-17T11:15:00.005-05:00

So my guild and I have instituted 2 weekly instance days, Friday and Monday. We are planning on some progression. Woot.

I am very excited by this possibility. It means that we can plan on instance runs every week that get our people leveled and geared -- then those of us who are somewhat geared can ramble on into our heroics of choice and get the gear and badges we need.

We have also started to recruit more, but I think this will be hard. I really like the people in my guild, it is like a little family and, so far, relatively drama free. But the thing is, we ALL move fairly slowly. Here it is 4 months into the expansion and we are just now really starting serious heroics runs. That's pretty slow for alot of people. So while I think the core group of our guild -- which is really only 5-7 people -- will stick it out, it will be hard for us to recruit and then keep people who really want to progress. We need to figure out some way to recruit the right kind of people.

Now, just how do we go about that? Honestly, I am not sure. I think it's important to be honest with people about where we are, how many players we really have and what we intend to do. We just got a new tank the other day, who seems to be as geared as I am (I believe he was a server transfer) and right now he seems content to run PUG heroics. But if it were me, that would get old, and it has (for me). It is my fond wish that he holds on long enough for us to be able to field 2 5-man heroics teams and then start to really build that into a nice 10-man raid team.

I know that we have good players. Our core group is pretty solid, and they all want to do their part. One of our pally tanks just respecced to Ret because he wanted to hang our with our core people and not have to pull together his own groups. And that's great. One of our other tanks has set that toon aside and leveled her 70 shadow priest nearly to 80 at this point as well.

What really makes me happy is knowing that a guild I enjoy socially may actually be able to pull off getting some progression done. In the past it's always been the social guilds that have never been able to get organized and the raiding guilds that have never been all that much fun.

How to Figure Out If You're Ready

2009-02-16T09:15:00.001-05:00

There are always questions being thrown around forums and in comments sections of blogs about whether or not you are ready for an instance.

For some things, like tanking heroics and raids there are some hard and fast rules. You MUST have 535 defense in order to be uncrittable for heroics and 540 for raids. MUST. But then there are some not so easy to answer questions like, "Is my stamina high enough to tank heroic Utgarde Pinnacle?" Everyone seems to have a different answer to this, based mostly on how hard they think a given instance is.

If you ask me, I don't have any real true answers for you either -- other than what my GM told me. "Give it a try, if you fail then oh well, it's just a game."

He also mentioned to me that there were sites out there that help to rate your gear and you'll get an idea of where you should be instancing and where you should be getting your gear. Imba is one, but I'm not sure it's the best. So far, my favorite is WoW Heroes.

It's got me rated as yellow for Naxx 10, which I believe means I could tank it, but that it wouldn't be EASY. And that Eye of Eternity 10 I am just not ready for at all. Which I would totally agree with.

Now I would not say that this site -- or any others like it are the end all be all. You have to understand that they are built on certain parameters which you may or may not agree with (most I think do) and the numbers are based on your current Armory set. Which, hopefully you know is itself based on what you were wearing when you logged out of the game (with some updating exceptions).

So go on out there check out Wow Heroes, and read around on forums and such to find out just what's going on.

Comments on Dual Specs

2009-02-13T12:08:00.003-05:00

Ok so I am really excited about dual specing. I would really like the ability to tank an instance OR heal it depending on what is needed, and I REALLY hate the idea of paying for respecs as they stand now.

I must say I think that one part of Blizzard's plan regarding dual specs is sorely lacking.
Ghostcrawler: Players who have reached the maximum level will be able to set up dual specs.
This, to me, is bogus. Come on -- one of the greatest thing about having 2 specs is that you can switch in-between -- you can have a dps spec for leveling and another for instancing. Why oh why is it so hard to find healers? In my opinion it's that they don't want the hassle of trying to down mobs while soloing on a healing spec. This is true at max level, which this rule is fine for, but is incredibly true when it comes to leveling! Especially now that we have 10 newish and still somewhat fresh levels that people are putting mains and alts through, they want to do instance runs and its incredibly hard to find healers because they are all speced into dps roles. I think this rule needs to be changed. No ifs, ands or buts.

Nethaera: How will you be able to set up a dual spec?
Ghostcrawler: Players will be able to visit their trainer and pay a one-time fee to be able to use it.
This sounds good at first blush. Alright, I'm willing to pay for this service, it doesn't need to be free for all. But wait a second. How much will I have to shell out? There has already been a troll post on the WoW forums about some crazy 5k gold shell out, to which a Blizzard employee never did say whether or not it was true. If it is indeed something around 5k I am against that. While I know that is not hard to get money of any kind in Wrath, unless it's higher than say 10k gold, I still think that 5k will make it hard for a lot of players to be able to get this going. It took me about 2 weeks of focused saving of gold in order to come up with the 5k I needed to get my epic flying training (just never got around to it in TBC). While that isn't game killing, it does tend to crimp my "fun gaming" time. 1k gold might be alright, but I just don't want to see this being some crazy huge gold sink. No thank you.

Well, really that's all I have to say about this right now. I think all the other details given are pretty neat and cool. Scribes will be happy to have something truly indispensable for customers, and it's something that can be done without a scribe's assistance in a city, so that's cool by me.

All in all, sounds good, I just hope that it's not too expensive to set up and that they make it available to at least level .... 60s or something.

Cheers.

Dual Spec Information

2009-02-12T16:52:00.002-05:00

Really ... enuff said.

Here's the link. Enjoy.

Open Letter to DPS

2009-02-12T14:11:00.010-05:00

Dear DPS,

I am a tank, I get hit hard and I do it so that you can continue to kick the crap out of whatever is hitting me. I thank you for hitting it harder and faster than anyone else can.

I do wish, however, that you could all learn the basics of your role. For melee dps there is a great list on DPS Plate that you should read, but I want to focus on macros. Gimme a sec, I'll get to the good stuff.

When I am hitting something and I am focusing its attention on me -- there is a purpose to this. The purpose is to allow you to melt the face of THAT mob. The one that I am hitting. Not the one next to the one that I am hitting.

More often than not, when in a group (mostly PUGs), when pulling more than one mob, I find that I need to keep on eye on what the dps are doing because they are not hitting that which I am. How often is it that a hunter will be targeted on a mob only to pull them off me? Way too often. And why does this happen? No, it is not because I'm not uber enough -- or that hunter is too uber. It is because that hunter (sorry I'm picking on hunters) has targeted a mob mistakenly. You heard me. You are dpsing down something that you should not. Yet.

You should only and always be targeted on what I, the tank, have targeted. Now, some people mark every single mob and have a set and established kill order -- and that can work great, but, as we all know, things are not always working as intended. Things get out of hand -- pats are added, someone dies or there is a runaway with low health -- yeah go ahead and one shot that sonofa .... but what I'm talking about is MOSTLY dps just being sloppy.

What I'm about to show you can make EVERYONE's lives easier -- even yours, you dps machine.

First let me give credit where it is due -- these both came from BRK, a hunter blogger. The original article is here, at WOWInsider.

Ok so macro one. This is the simplest really doesn't need to be put on your hotkeys. Its something that you'll use every time you engage a new tank. You are using this macro to make your tank your "focus."

Are you ready? Here it is:

/focus target

That's it. That's the full extent of your macro.

What this means is that even though you manually target something else, you can always come back easily and re-target your tank. Because that's what this is meant to do. You click on your tank, hit this macro and that character is saved.

Why would you want to target your tank? Well that's where this next little gem comes in.

/assist focus

That's it -- that's all for the second macro. Pretty easy huh? Hotkey this one -- you will use it alot. What this does is automatically set your target to be the same as the target of the tank (if the tank is your focus -- which they would be if you used the previous macro in the beginning of your instance run). So if you fire off that Frostfire blast -- it will hit the same thing that the tank is hitting.

At the end of the day, all the above is about not pulling aggro off the tank -- because what they are hitting hardest, and therefore aggroing hardest on, is also what you are dpsing on, so there should be no way that you pull aggro off of them. Then, when that one dies, it only takes a split second, most likely faster than tab targeting the next mob, to hit the assist macro and BOOM you are slamming that which your tank is tanking.

I have heard alot about Wrath content and how easy it is, and also how easy it is to AOE tank all of those trash mobs. While this is true, especially when you get to slightly higher end content, when (and I say "when" intentionally) you, as a dpser, pull aggro off the tank and you don't have a Feign Death, or some kind of other aggro wipe, that mob will come at you and if your tank is AFK tanking, or doesn't like you much, it come over to you, not say nice things to you, and not leave you alive to help kill other mobs. You will be dead, and it will definitely be your fault.

So, what have we learned here? Hopefully you've learned one important lesson in HOW to play a dps character (dps what the tank has aggro on) and a few lessons in how to make THAT easier (use those macros or something like them).

Have a good day.

Yours truly,

Tank.

3.0.9 or whatever

2009-02-11T10:07:00.003-05:00

Yes I'm aware of the new patch and I've played it a little. My thoughts on this are quite simple.

Woot for the 30 minute seals. That's a great new mechanic and without having ever wanted it in the past, I realize now just how much I should have. It helps to clean up my bars, since I can put them into my Healbot, just like buffs. Now I can move stuff around and not have to worry about those darn seals any more.

Boo hiss for the Divine Plea nerf. It doesn't affect me much -- I'm not Holy and I don't normally run with Holy paladins, but any nerf is no fun. I agree with Siha over at Banana Shoulders -- it's too soon and not well thought out.

Cough-Cough, Argh, Ugh

2009-02-11T09:58:00.003-05:00

Yeah, I've been sick. My daughter got a bug while over at a friend's house and brought it back to our place.

I have lain in bed for most of the last 3 days. LOTS of sleep. In that vein I have not been WoWing much either. I will have something posted later today or tomorrow and intend to keep up the posts from then on -- unless I'm stricken by some other nasty bug. Tired of being sick.

Quick note though. One of the tankadins that I was neck and neck with as far as gear goes has retired his shield for a while and picked up a 2 hander. He re-rolled Retribution, and while I'm sad to see him switch, it seems like a better move for him. He really wanted to contribute to guild runs without getting onto his rogue.

Downside: Now we only have 2 players specced to tanking and one of them is not def capped and has been leveling their shadow priest. That kinda means I'm the main tank in our guild now, which on one level is great, means I will be in demand, but on another level, means that I will be in demand. I do play almost every day, but I'm just not always available what with the baby and girlfriend aggro and such. Oh well, I'm sure we'll figure it out -- I'm thinking about trying to institute regular 5 man instance runs. Level 71+ only. That way we can get everyone's alts up and hopefully gear everyone to heroic levels. I'm ready to progress in heroics and I think except for a mage and maybe a lock, that's it.

We'll see how things work out.

Cheers.

My Thoughts on 3.1 Patch Notes

2009-02-06T14:05:00.006-05:00

I dunno. I'm gonna side with BRK on this one. Even though he's mostly talking about his hunter changes -- I think that a good bit of this stuff is going to end up on the cutting room floor. You know, somewhere ON THE GROUND in Ghostcrawler's office. Here we go:

Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

Alright. Finally, yes this is pretty exciting and I really don't think this is going to change. What is up for debate, however, is whether or not that ability will boost stats by 2%, 10% or something in between. Some believe "we'll get the 10% BoK baseline, it's the only way this would even remotely make sense." I'm not so sure. I actually think that we are going to automagically get BoK for 2% and then it can be talented up to 10% -- and those talent points will be in the first tier of protection (although, really they could go easily into any of the trees).

Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.

Sshah. As if. This will never stand. Even if the intent behind this change lasts there will definitely be some kind if nerf to this. With the Glyph and a little skill (really miniscule amounts of skill) paladins will be unstoppable in PVP. I have zero doubts in my mind that this will change somehow. I DO think it's a great idea though -- another general purpose ranged spell is wonderful. I just don't think it will make it through testing without some nerf bombs.

Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.

I think that this silence effect is pretty awesome. I was just saying how paladins would give their mommas away for a chance to deal with casters -- and this does it. This will make it much easier to deal with casters on PVE pulls, but also taking down that annoying warlock who just eats your brains and there's nothing you can do about it. Folding in the extra damage will be nice, but since most of us have it already, it shouldn't change much.

Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.

Does this actually mean that they are freeing up more points in the prot tree for some new talents? I truly do not know the answer to this. If you do, let me know. It does not say that the effects are changed, just less ranks. So, I guess I'm all for this one.

Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

This one also seems to be a little lacking in true details. So if I put max points into this talent what procs the refresh? Does just having DP up mean that it's never going to end? It'll just keep on going? I'm not sure I totally understand this one, but if it means more mana regeneration I'm all for that. It will make a huge difference for non-main (offtanks or just someone who is trying to dps a bit) tanks in PVE and it will mean that prot pvpers will feel a bit better about their insanely low MP.

Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

This feels like a mostly PVP talent change. This means we'll have our awesome stun available to us, with talents every 10 seconds. I must say this also feels a little overpowered. With the Exorcism change and now this, ALONG with the Shield of the Templar silencing effect -- we'll be able to stand tall against casters -- they will run in fear from our holy might. I think this will also get herded into the ole nerf pen too. It's just a bit much all told.

Truly I think that these changes are great and I would love to see them get to Live and then stay. I fear this is just not the case though. The Exorcism buff alone will be high on the nerfing target list. If these do manage to make it all the way into the game it will mean a lot more utility for maintankadins, and it will give protection paladins true viability in PVP, something they really never had before -- despite their massive HP.

3.1 New Paladin Stuff

2009-02-06T11:29:00.003-05:00

Everyone and their brother, and sister, has already reported on this. Here is the link if you want to check out the original post -- I will have more to say on these changes a bit later.

Have a nice day.

Death Knight-adin

2009-02-05T14:18:00.007-05:00

Firstly let me say that I'm an awful blogger. I can't for the life of me remember to take screen shots and screen films. And my posts are regularly wall of text. This is especially interesting in light of the fact that I'm a multimedia producer at my job. I do video and digital photography all the time -- why is it that I can't remember to do that at all while playing? We may never know. On to the post.

Death Knights ARE cool.

I played my DK last night for a while -- he's only level 60, but this is my third DK that I've taken to 60 (I just enjoy the opening quest and the event at the end, I just keep re-rolling). I logged in and really did not want to face the uncertainty of an heroic PUG. Good or bad, I just wasn't in the mood.

So I played my DK -- he's frost spec, but not yet with tanking talents. As I'm going along facemelting, pulling multiple mobs, kicking arse, taking names something begins to occur to me.

Death Knights are the heroic version of Protection and Retribution paladins. Sorta. Having been a paladin for so long I feel I can say this. If you wanted to sit down with paladins of those 2 specs and figure out what they really want out of their class -- you'd get pretty close to the current Death Knights.

One thing that paladins have been wanting for freakin ever has been a ranged spell. Granted that you can spec into Holy Shock, or Avenger's Shield or .... what, Repentance, (does that count?), but there has never been a long range base ability until just a little while ago. Right out of the gate DKs get Death Grip and Icey Touch -- which are pretty awesome and you don't need anything to get them started.

Next up -- a way to deal with freakin' casters. Paladins still cry when they think of trying to tank Scholomance (at level) with all the casters and no way to silence them or get them to shut up or anything. We still have no real way to deal with them -- although we can stun them, we can only do that once a minute and you have to be within melee range -- phht. Along come DKs and they have, again, Death Grip and the juicy Mind Freeze. Casters can now eat my shorts (as a DK).

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there is the runic power and runes mechanic. As long as their health is not too low, a DK can keep fighting, given the right rotation etc, until their player's eyes bleed and their fingers fall off. Paladins, on the other hand can keep going as long as they still have mana -- and mana runs out pretty quickly (unless of course you're dodging and parrying and you've got Blessing of Sanctuary up).

Am I going to stick with my Death Knight and allow my paladin to gather dust? Will this plog be re-named Death Knights Smash! or DKPWNZMOAR?

No. NO. No. I love my paladin and have a hard time leaving him behind to level any of my other toons. Especially because it was soooo hard to level him in the first place. But I must say, DKs are kinda fun, and REALLY don't they have a kind of evil uber paladin feel to them?

Friends are Important

2009-02-04T11:01:00.008-05:00

I did something last night that I had told myself I would not do.

I allowed an undergeared dpser to fill a slot in a heroic run.

I had just finished running a guildie through Scholomance (undead ftw) and decided that I wasn't tired enough for bed yet. I realized that the daily heroic was one that I knew very well and was confident in, so I thought that I would put together a group.

There are currently 4 level 80 tanks in my guild, but only 2 have hp over 20k and defense over 530. Me and my friend %*#$)%(. Since about 75 I feel that he and I have had a nice relationship trying to help each other gear up to be the best we can be in tanking situations. Perhaps later on we might become competitive with one another, but that's a ways away.

My friend also has a level 80 rogue alt. He and I often play at the same time, but not often together because who really needs 2 tanks on 5 man content. So when we can and he's not busy tanking something else I invite his dps to whatever I'm doing.

I had decided to run heroic Utgarde Keep and wanted to bring my friend. Without asking about his dps or experience in heroics I sent him an invite which he accepted.

He did immediately tell me that if his dps was not up to par that I could kick him with no hard feelings. I told him in a whisper that I didn't want to do that, but if it became necessary, I would. He didn't know his dps off the top of his head, but I knew him as a good player and someone who tried really hard, and to me that makes a huge difference.

As we got the run together I realized that the other 2 dpsers totally outgeared the instance so was even less worried about my friends output. Though what I did not realize was that the healer was less geared than I was lead to believe -- we were not CCing based on their belief that they could handle me getting hit (I knew I could handle it, but without heals it's another story).

We ended up wiping twice, both times I believe it was the healer just being in the wrong spot at the wrong time (being pushed back by the dragons into a nearby group and dying).

As soon as the first boss died it became clear to me that my friend had never been in this instance on heroic setting, and, in fact, had never been in ANY heroic when he got the Badge of Heroism achievement. At that moment I closed my eyes and hoped that I wouldn't be getting whispers from the other members who had noticed that as well and wanted me to boot him. It didn't happen, I sighed in relief and we moved on.

Throughout the rest of the run I could tell that the others had been there and didn't need explanations for the bosses, so I just whispered my friend instructions. I knew that he had been to Utgarde Keep before and knew the bosses, just not on heroic difficulty. So when I told him about the encounters I made sure to focus on what was different in the fights.

Most of the run was pretty easy, and we finally got to the last boss -- the heroic daily quest target. I told my friend rogue to watch out for the bosses cast bar and to get out of the way whenever he cast anything. Now, perhaps that's not totally needed, maybe it's a bit of an oversimplification, but as he was the only melee class and his dps was hovering near 980 I figured it wouldn't gimp our encounter too badly.

He said he would do his best and I aggroed the boss. Within 30 seconds my friend had hit the floor. In a whisper to me he laughed and apologized, but I told him it was no big deal. He got a battle rez from our druid and we continued into the undead phase with no problems. He promptly got out of Dodge when he needed to and we took our guy down.

In all honesty our healer and one other died during that last part -- but as I saw it happening I Layed on Hands and Avenging Wrathed and with our remaining members we got it done.

No true rogue gear dropped but the epic crossbow did, and because he's a good guy he did not need it, even though I knew that no one else wanted it. He did win the greed roll and I was ecstatic for him. It was a massive upgrade even though it wasn't a main weapon or armor.

As we were leaving some members were discussing running straight over to heroic Utgarde Pinnacle without missing a beat. I was surprised and happy to see that no one really felt my rogue friend was a liability -- and truly I never thought it myself. I decided that I was too tired and that I believed I was not geared for it yet and so we all parted ways.

This whole wall of text is to say that bringing my friend, while not adding a significant boost to dps, made him and I happy and didn't ruin anything for anyone. "Bring the player, not the class (or spec)" is something that we hear a lot lately from Blizzard. I say, "bring who you want, and hope for the best."

Change

2009-02-02T08:55:00.008-05:00

A wise man once said, "The only thing that does not change is change itself."

Well, it's true. My last post I was pissed off by lame pug members, but today I must say, that has changed.

I ran heroic Utgarde Keep (no, my sword did not drop) and there were no wipes and no deaths. There whole thing ran rather smoothly. Well, not totally smoothly.

The person who put the group together was a rogue who really wanted a purple crossbow drop. When he invited me to tank he even asked me if I was going to roll for it if it dropped ........... (sigh).
"I'm a paladin." I said. It took that a moment to process but he finally got it.

Then, because he wanted this drop so badly, he turned on master looter and kept it on the whole time. He would not pass leader to me, he would not mark. But, as it turns out, we were somewhat overpowered -- DPS burned all the bosses down in what felt like record time, and I never ever worried about my health bar. Gotta love those awesome big-love heals.

In the end, because the rogue had master looter on and set to Epic level, when the last boss died and a Frozen Orb dropped, the first person to loot got it. We all cried foul and they, graciously, gave it up for a /roll.

The rogue kept talking like it was no big deal, and that he had it under control. The healer and I both agreed that it would have been nice to have let him die at some point -- too bad he never had that much aggro. It wasn't until he said he was going to disenchant what none of us wanted that things went really insane. He looted the pieces, of which there were maybe 2 -- DE'd one of them, and only then found out that he could not DE the other. (sigh).

That's when I put him on /ignore. The instance was over, we didn't have anything else to do, but I seriously just couldn't listen to that j*ck*ss wail and whine anymore.

I added the healer and one of the dpsers to my friends list with their permission. (For whatever reason, I know I don't have to, I always ask people if it's ok for me to add them to my friends list. I think I just want to know that maybe they'll respond if I whisper them later.)

And that was that. It really wasn't all that bad. We got through it in, what seemed like, record time, and nobody had to be rezzed.

I guess the real lesson here is, somewhat similar to weather and baby's attitudes, if you don't like what's happening in your PUG, just wait for the next one, and hopefully you'll like it better.

=)

Not awesomesauce

2009-01-29T13:55:00.007-05:00

I am going to whine. I just want you to know this so if you want you can skip this post right now.

This is my PUGS SUCK rant.

I will readily admit that I'm not in a progression guild, I've still not been to Naxx, and I've not run all the heroics yet -- I'm just a slow progressor (I can put about ... 10 hours a week into the game).

One of the reasons that I've not been to all the heroics I would like, is that the PUG heroics groups that I've gotten into SUCK ASS. Almost all of them.

Granted, sometimes I'm with a group that has run H Nexus a bunch of times and it's a breeze, but then I'll get 3 dpsers (I'm still a tank) and none of them do above 1k dps. Zero. I must say that most of the healers I've run with have been pretty good, seems like they know they have to gear up a little after dinging 80 in order to run heroics -- just like tanks.

Now this isn't really a rant against DPSers, although they have been the ones that have given my pugs trouble. Really it's about how alot of the time, these instances are really not as easy as you think they are -- and that gear matters ALOT. To all classes and specs.

With the tank gear I have I feel set to tank H Utgarde Keep and the Nexus. I have not tried anything above and beyond those both because I want more stamina and because I fear the pugs.

Even in H UK and Nexus I've got dpsers who refuse to CC and they just want me to take all the hits from all the mobs (which I can do provided the healer is awake). I've got hunters misdirecting and pulling when I'm not ready -- but they just want to move quickly. And, and this one drives me batty, I've got people wanting to start boss fights without even checking to make sure that all members of the party know what the deal is.

Random screen shot. =)

Yes, indeed, there are a bunch of those bosses that can be considered tank and spank fights, but really there are some really great strategies to ensure that everyone survives the fight without adding to the repair bill. Stack up on Prince Keleseth in order for the adds to be easy for the tank to grab and so that it's easy for everyone to pound on whoever has been iceblocked. But, noooooo, the healer and the mage HAVE to stand at range because they are what? Uber? I don't think so, if you were uber you wouldn't still be farming H UK. And so the mage dies. And so the healer is iceblocked when I need a big heal and I blow my CD for Lay on Hands on myself (which, I'm glad to do, but it could have been avoided by just a little strategy, just a little planning).

Same thing with Keristrasza, the final dragon boss in H Nexus. This one can actually be really rough if people don't know it at all. I ran it the other day with a rogue and a fury warrior who both said they knew the fight and didn't need the run down. When the ice debuff hit, the one where you "jump around" alot -- BOOM both dead. "WTF?, wth wuz that?" (sigh) We all wipe and I explain it to them, and the second time around we get it right. But come on people, it only takes a few extra seconds to simply explain most fights -- if you've NEVER been in the instance, even on normal, then you really do need to hear what happens.

And the final boss in H UK, Ingvar the Plunderer. I really hate that fight because so many groups just want to tank and spank it -- and, truly if people are geared enough, then it's not too bad, but if people are even slightly unprepared then it's a full wipe guaranteed. [If anyone is reading this and has a foolproof way to deal with this boss -- other than "just heal through it" -- please let me know.] So many people think they have the uber-answer to this guy, but for the most part there are still bodies on the floor at the end of the fight.

So, yeah, just like in The Burning Crusade when they lowered the reqs to get into heroics, and everyone thought that were ready and able -- it was a wipefest. People need to know the instance and gear for it.

And speaking of gearing .... the interview process is getting a little weird. I get DPSers asking me about my hp and forgetting to ask about my defense. I even try to turn it around and ask them about their dps and INVARIABLY they lie about it. I had a ret pally tell me that she was 2k+ dps on my recount showed her barely topping 1.5k. Honestly 1.5k is fine for the lower heroics, why bother with the lie? And since when is 22k hp too low for the easier heroics? I've been turned down a number of times for that. (sigh) It's just tiresome to me.

But I will continue to put myself in LFG, and I will continue to build my friends list, and I will hope that the 10 people in my guild will get their toons heroic-ready. But my faith is shaken. Just like in TBC.

How I wish I could have been hanging out with the first round of 80s and blasted through this content -- but, alas this was not to be.

Hope it's better out there for you than it's been for me. QQ.

Adios.

P.S. And I DO know that one possible way to get around my problem is to get my arse into a larger guild, one that can put together heroic groups easily on the fly -- but I really like my small family-like guild.

Second Try

2009-01-29T11:42:00.004-05:00

Hello again. I am back and am going to try something a little different than before. Initially I was trying to make all or most of my posts be mini-guides to paladin issues. That doesn't seem to be viable for me. There is so much to write about certain subjects and I need a little time to do honest research into some things before posting it as the gospel, as I see it.

I was attempting to shy away from any posts that were quick one offs because I thought that was too lazy. You know, those posts that say, WOOT I got this piece of phat loot. And that's it.

I have had small posts in the past, mostly with some video attached, but not much as I really did think that was cheap.

But I read alot of blogs and I realized that it's part of blogging -- sometimes writing small posts just to have something for your readers to chew on until you can compile all the info on your latest opus piece.

Currently I'm sure I don't have any readers anymore, hehe. I think I had a few returning for awhile to see what I was up to, but a month of silence in the blogosphere is like a mortal strike. I am going to return to writing, as that's what this blog was going to be all about for me -- and to write about something that I knew, which was the paladin class.

I hope that anybody out there who reads this takes this as a bit of an apology and also a repurposing of my intentions. I really want to make my voice heard. And here I am saying that I'm not giving up, not giving in.

Thanks for your patience. Hope you have something interesting to say to me in the future. =)

Happy Holidays!!

2008-12-25T20:08:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas from me to you and yours. Hope this holiday season is bright and cheerful for all of you -- and I hope you get a chance to PWN all that is PWN-worthy!! Take care. I'll be back with more regular posts next week.

Important Stats to your Paladin

2008-12-19T09:07:00.001-05:00

tSo. What are the most important stats to you as a paladin? Well, of course it depends on what you are doing and how you are doing it.

Quite simply you can break it up into talent specs and say this:

Holy needs Intellect.

Protection needs Stamina.

Retribution needs Strength.

Those ARE the most important stats for those specs. But that's a bit oversimplified -- those stats are the most important for those specs when your toon is AT or NEAR level limit. And of course, there are hardly ever only one stat that you want to pay attention to.

PROTECTION

Protection, the spec that I am most familiar with really does want to stack on the stamina -- both for survivability and also because of the wonderful Touched by the Light talent (which you can get, at the earliest at level 50). This talent takes 10/20/30% of you stamina and turns it into spell power and since most of our talents use spell power that's a great bonus.

After stamina, though, where do you go? Well that depends on what you are going for: uncrittable or just awesome. If you intend to tank anything in heroics and/or raids you need to work towards the uncrittable number which is 535 defense in heroics and 540 in raids. If you are purely a soloer and/or you only do normal instance runs the next stat you want to stack is strength (although if you are tanking ANY instance getting high defense will heighten your survivability greatly).

Strength is great for us as well because it ups our white melee damage on auto swings greatly but when you get Shield of the Righteous the damage it causes works off of block value which is calculated off of strength. The more strength you have, the more Holy damage SotR does.

So, just to clarify: your basic important stats for protection are stamina, defense and strength -- some people will argue that defense is more important, at least initially, than stamina, but really the two come hand in hand and you need certain amounts of both in order to survive your encounters. Additionally, Intellect is always nice, and it's not something you should scoff at, but with our basic talents and skills, even if we don't have ANY +int, we should still be doing pretty well with our mana.

RETRIBUTION

Strength is the first and foremost among the stats to stack for a retadin. No question, no arguments. After strength, there are some differing ideas.

+Hit. In my opinion, this should be your next stat to be looking for. You want to be "hit capped" so that every time you swing that big old 2-hander of yours, it actually hits something. In order to be hit capped you need at least 8% (or 9% depending on who you ask). And the hit rating you need is apparently 262. There is still some debate on the ACTUAL FACTUAL numbers, but you get the idea. Testing is always ongoing at Elitist Jerks.

After +hit, I believe you should be for +crit. That way each time you hit, which should be always, you have a much better chance of doing double damage. My understanding is that you should have a minimum of 20% to crit. Really, just pile on the +crit and some Agility if you can -- +crit is more important as it gives you a higher percentage for less points than agility will.

Finally, as a retadin, you'll want a bunch of stamina in order to survive the occasional hit and also wide range AOE spells. Armor will not mitigate this, so pile on the stamina as well.

HOLY

First off, you are a caster now so you need mana up the wahzoo. Pile on the Intellect first and foremost -- this charges up your mana pool, gives you a higher crit rating with your spells and through the nifty Holy Guidance talent, (at level 45 minimum) raises your spellpower by 4/8/12/16/20% of your intellect. Go INT go.

See this post by Banana Shoulders: I totally agree.

After that there is some discussion about what you might want next. It kinda depends on what you are trying to do. If you are trying to heal, then you want to use your healing talents to their fullest -- and many of those talents work off of spell criticals. So pile on +crit first.

If you are just questing or doing something else in an odd way as a holy paladin (I'm not judging) you might want to pile on the MP5 as a secondary stat in order to keep your drink time down.

After that -- probably stamina. It's always nice to survive that one shot that gets through your threat management team. (Not that it ever happens.)

There is the matter of +haste for Holy paladins, but from what I've read it really isn't going to do much for you. Pick it up if you'd like, but if you've really got enough +crit and intellect, the haste won't matter that much -- you'll be kickin arse all over the place.

So yeah, there ya go. As always you can check out the official WoW forums, Elitest Jerks, maintankadin or the forums at wowhead for more information or more opinions.

Enjoy.

Gnomeregon

2008-12-18T14:12:00.006-05:00

Walked into Gnomer, a level 25ish instance and spanked the final boss in there. I was actually surprised at how quickly the fight went. Yeah, I know I'm over twice the level for that instance, but I still thought he might put up more of a fight.

Am cleaning up instance achievements for vanilla WoW. Also ran naked into Orgrimmar in order to kill the boss of Ragefire Chasm -- got killed by an 80 mage looking like a gnomish elf right before the zone-in. And last night I spanked Wailing Caverns as well -- it's annoying how easy you can get lost in there when you aren't clearing out all the mobs.

Earlier last week I took down all the bosses in Blackrock Depths in solo mode. That was kinda fun -- especially with all the trouble those guys used to pose when 60 was the level cap.

Next up: Shadowfang Keep -- just killed Arugal in Northrend the other day, so it might be nice to kill him again, for the first time (at least according to the achievements page).

Hopefully I'll remember to record some of the stuff -- I keep forgetting that it's even there as it stands now. =(

Pick Up Groups

2008-12-17T11:11:00.011-05:00

I am, really, not a fan of PUGs. That said, I really love it when I finish an instance run with a PUG and it went well -- that means that, against all odds, people paid attention, listened to strategies and played well and we finished. How often does that happen?

As a tank (or a healer to some extent) you are saved certain problems that DPSers have to contend with when it comes to PUGs. Tanks are usually the ones that are running the show, with marking and "going". They can make the run as quick or as slow as they like (excepting for people dropping group because they don't like the pace). Plus, as tank, you are usually the leader, or can be made the leader quite easily ("Hey, make me lead, I gotta mark.") and can kick unruly or truly evil players at your discretion.

Last night I ran The Amphitheater of Anguish with a PUG, didn't put it together, didn't even pay attention to roles and levels or gear and it was smooth, like a baby's bottom. Granted the fights aren't all that hard, but still -- it was very nice to know that you can count on most players who are in their mid-70s to pull together for a few quick fights in order to attain mucho XP and perhaps some decent gear.

I was surprised and delighted at how little communication was needed or, really, desired for this event. We all pretty much knew our jobs (tank, healz, dps, dps, dps) and the fights are pretty straight forward tank and spank. Seriously, though, I think I may have exchanged 2 sentences with the other players after the invite, and that was "Rdy?" on the first fight and "Thanks alot all. Seeya around."

Normally at the end of an instance run, even when I was a healer I had a standard farewell that included a "good job" and "fun" -- but most importantly I would let most if not all the players in my group know that they could call on me anytime to tank (or heal). Truly if it was a good group and if I'm available then I will tank for almost any instance I am leveled for. It's good practice and it gets me introduced to more and more players (fairly new to this server) and, more importantly, more HEALERS. It's always nice to have a friends list full of healers as a tank, because, as we all know, it's not so hard to find DPS.

In the end, unless you have a good group of friends that are always on at the same time, or a nice big guild, you will have to PUG at some point or another in your progression to level cap. I find that if you go into it with a positive attitude and do your best things have a way, most times, of working themselves out. This is not to say that a 4 hour Gnomer run can't end in total disaster, with players coming in and going out and finally after the fifth wipe people just giving up, BUT I find, especially with the short and seemingly easy instances in Northrend this is the exception, not the rule.

Happy hunting.

Getting Closer All the Time

2008-12-16T11:06:00.005-05:00

I just dinged 77 last night. Got my Cold Weather Flying and added some new gear. I have reached a point where the uncrittable-at-80 idea is within sight.

My defense is now 496 with my tanking gear on and I have 15,978 HP. Very nice. With the help of people over at maintankadin, as well as Kaliban's Loot List, I really feel like I will make my goal of uncrittable VERY soon after hitting 80.

GEARING IN WotLK.

I must say that this expansion makes it quite easy to gear up. In TBC I spent weeks farming 70 instances before I felt like I was ready to head into heroics. Now it feels like a very steady progression, and that provided I pay attention the least bit, I can readily find doable quests and instances that will provide me with the gear I need to be competitive (with other tanks for that slot) and viable in heroics and, at some point, raids.

Why I Love Being a Paladin

2008-12-15T09:10:00.003-05:00

I really enjoy the paladin class. I've been playing a paladin for just under 4 years now and I've taken a character in every class to at least 20, but never loved anything like I love the toughness and flexibility of the paladin.

Below you will see one of my very favorite reasons for being a paladin. The Bubble.

This is my character, Knales jumping out of the sewer outlet in the floating city of Dalaran and surviving. I love the bubble.

I am often getting from one point to the other by jumping off cliffs (especially in Howling Fjord). I love the uber down elevator that paladins can pull off.

I must admit though, there have been a few times that I have leapt from a huge height only to have been in Forbearance, and unable to bubble up. Splat.

Cheers.

Public Test Realm Notes

2008-12-12T12:30:00.002-05:00

The new patch notes are out for 3.0.8 and there are some major changes all around. And some interesting things for us Paladins.

Paladins

Avenging Wrath: Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Hand of Protection, and Avenging Wrath cannot be used within 30 seconds of each other anymore. Forbearance removed from Avenging Wrath.

WOO HOO! We've been asking for this for some time now. Avenging Wrath no longer causes Forbearance. Now it's only a seeming 30 second cooldown before you can use it again.(Although you might be able to use AW again within those 30 seconds, it's not entirely clear to me.) AND you can bubble if you need to right after. I think this is great.

Divine Protection: The penalty has been removed.

There is currently an attack speed decrease here. This means that this can be used by and on tanks and they don't need to worry about losing threat. I think this is great.

Divine Shield: The penalty has been changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% in place of an attack speed penalty.

There currently is an attack speed penalty of 100%, less if you have talented for it. Now it looks like it's just a plain old damage decrease -- which I guess was to lower spell damage coming out of the bubble, and it seemingly helps Holy paladins because their spellcasting is no longer slowed (or at least that's how I've come to understand it).

Hand of Reckoning(NEW): Available on trainers at level 16. It’s a 30 yard range taunt that causes Holy damage.

I and all Paladins should be thrilled with this. We now have a ranged attack with which to pull mobs!! Granted the dmg of this spell is probably going to be very minor, but it's great that we don't have to body pull anymore before we reach Holy Shock in the Holy tree or Avenger's Shield in the Protection tree.

Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.

I wonder if this is in addition to its current effects or in replacement of ... Right now it says "Your Judgement spells increase you casting and melee haste by 3% for 1 minute." If so, it's a nice buff to this talent. Well done.

Judgement of Wisdom: Now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.

This is good news to all paladins except Holy. Sorry guys. This basically means that you will be getting more mana back quicker if you have less +Int. Because of the "BASE" part there.

Sacred Duty: Interaction with Divine Shield and Divine Protection removed, but stamina bonus increased.

This follows the above changes to DS and DP, but low and behold MORE STAMINA. Never a bad thing.

All in all, I think this is a nice set of changes for Paladins. I'm very excited and can't wait for this to go live.

Paid Character Re-Customization

2008-12-12T09:05:00.001-05:00

So this is the latest breaking news. If you visit any WoW related site today, you will most likely be seeing this as a big headline.

My feelings on this are pretty straightforward -- meh.

I kinda don't care that much. I think that the in-game Barbershop was cool enough. Changing everything else is just cake to me.

The only thing that I can really think of to use this for is my girlfriend. She is not a fan of the leveling grind and so perhaps I could give her one of my alts and she can make it look the way she wants. That way I might be able to get her interested through the much cooler quests in Northrend. And maybe we can finally play together. (Even then it's not a guarantee.)

That's about it.

I actually spend a lot of time working through the different faces, hairstyles, skins and so forth before I'm ready to finalize my characters. I always choose male toons, I don't like pretending to be something I'm not and I don't enjoy the idea of staring at this female toon's ass for 80 levels -- it's feels too lecherous.

CAN I CHANGE KNALES TO LOOK LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME?

All in all I think this is probably a good thing. It lets people make some changes that perhaps they've been wanting to make for a while now, and it, along with all the other paid changes, gives Blizzard another line of income.

Hopefully this, and the other paid changes, will ensure that real microtransactions for items and in-game gold will never happen. That, in my mind, would truly ruin this game.

FACTION CHANGES

On a slightly different note, I would really like to see the ability to change factions. Much like is done in Everquest. I don't think it should be something you pay for though, but a long and difficult questline involving becoming gaining reputation to Exalted with a specific neutral faction. A questline to become a traitor to your faction, and then the need to raise your reputation to at least Honored with the new faction before you can get regular quests from that factions questgivers. And, of course, this should not be available until level 60 or higher.

I think if you looked at what might be the reality of life in Azeroth, you would find people who would naturally gravitate to other ways of being, ways of thinking -- these people might just decide that even though they were born Tauren, they might agree with the gnomish way of life (although that is a highly amusing thought).

Wrathgate Questline = Awesomesauce!

2008-12-10T10:31:00.001-05:00

For any of you who have not leveled at all in Dragonblight -- DO IT!

There is a extremely long, but highly entertaining questline called Wrathgate in which you get to participate in the battle against the Lich King on a personal level.

At the end of the questline you get an achievement as well as a wonderful cinematic cutscene that shows a great battle and Arthas, the Lich King himself, makes an appearance.

I really can't recommend this questline enough. Not only is it great XP, great lore and great fun, but you get nice Achievement at the end -- and it gets you closer to the Dragonblight zone quest Achievement as well.

This is taken from forum text at Wowhead.

For the Alliance! Here are the quest steps you need to go through for this achievement. "Optional" quests are those that can be done with the main quests with little to no extra effort.

I cannot recommend enough that you take the time to read the quest text. Seriously, this is one of the best questlines in the game, hands down. It's worth taking the extra time to read everything.

Part 1:

1) The Lost Courier
2) Of Traitors and Treason
3) High Commander Halford Wyrmbane
4) Naxxramas and the Fall of Wintergarde
5) Flight of the Wintergarde Defender
6) Return to the High Commander

At this point, the High Commander will give you two quests.

Part 2a:

1) Rescue from Town Square (optional: The Fate of the Dead)
2) Find Durkon!
3) The Noble's Crypt
4) Secrets of the Scourge (obtained from the tome to the right of Necrolord Amarion)
5) Mystery of the Tome
6) Understanding the Language of Death
7) A Righteous Sermon

Part 2b:

1) The Demo-gnome
2) The Search for Slinkin (optional: The Bleeding Ore and Not in Our Mine)
3) Leave Nothing to Chance
4) Understanding the Scourge War Machine

Then, everything meets up again at the High Commander, and you go back to one line of quests.

Part 3:
1) Into Hostile Territory
2) Steamtank Surprise
3) Scattered to the Wind
4) The Chain Gun And You
5) Plunderbeard Must Be Found! (optional: Breaking Off A Piece)
6) Plunderbeard's Journal
7) Chasing Icestorm: The 7th Legion Front
8) Chasing Icestorm: Thel'zan's Phylactery
9) Finality

Part 4:
1) An End And A Beginning
2) To Fordragon Hold!
3) Audience With The Dragon Queen
4) Galakrond and the Scourge
5) On Ruby Wings
6) Return To Angrathar

As soon as you complete the last quest, you will be shown the Wrath Gate cinematic, and when it's over, you'll receive the achievement. If you want to finish the questline, it's only five more quests:

1) Reborn From The Ashes
2) Fate, Up Against Your Will
3) A Royal Coup
4) The Killing Time
5) The Battle For The Undercity

Healadins. Christmas is early!

2008-12-09T14:00:00.001-05:00

No, I don't mean that healing has been fixed, or that you've now got some uber sweet HoT or AOE healz. Nothing that awesome.

Over at Banana Shoulders is a nice article about level cap gearing BEFORE entering into raids and such. It is a little heavy on Heroics drops and badge rewards, but in the alternatives sections are nice "entry level" pieces that anyone should have access to without too much farming or grinding.

Hopefully this can help all you Holy Pallys out. Have fun out there.

D ... a ... l ... a ... r ... a ... n

2008-12-08T09:15:00.002-05:00

ZOMG! My paladin made his first trip to Dalaran the other night and it was a mess.

I started out in Dragonblight, had just finished AN and had recently dinged 73 so I thought I might go back to vanilla Wow and get some training and hit the Auction house. Well, my hearthstone was still set to Shattrath because getting to Howling Fjord from there was no big shakes. Portal to Ironforge, then fly to Menethil Harbor, hop on boat, boom. But getting anywhere else with flight times and such was going to be a major pain in the butt. So, let's go to Dalaran.

I whispered a high level mage in Dragonblight, offered a meager tip and they agreed. I met up with them and clicked on the portal that was created. ............... Two minutes later I arrived in Dalaran, sort of. I could not even turn my character in a circle without lag jumps and snags.

Seeing that lag was going to be an issue I changed my video settings to their lowest and tried again. Barely was there an improvement. It ended up taking me about 20 minutes with all the stuttering to get from the arrival room to the flight point and then to the Alliance city portals. Sheesh.

Now, I know that my video card is not the best, but it's not all bad either. I know that I could have more RAM, but here's the thing. ALL OTHER ASPECTS OF WOW WORK GREAT. Why should I have to upgrade my machine just for one small part of the game?

So, could Blizzard do something about this? Honestly I do not know. I wish they would. I found my first experience in DALARAN ( a place I've been wanting to go to since my little hordie hunter -- first toon -- flew past it from the Undercity to ... somewhere). I was really excited to see what the big city had to offer.

What Dalaran offered to me was disappointment and despair. I wanted to leave so badly. And I did. I truly felt like some po-dunk hick from the sticks who made their first trip to NYC in their mid-forties and couldn't handle all the stuff. Except this time, it was not me who could not handle it -- it was my machine and/or the WoW server.

Yuck.

By the way -- in order to help with the lag issues, I set my hearthstone to the sewers, where it seems, many fewer players are found. My lag issues are slightly better -- but I still need to come up to the city for the flight master and the other city portals. Either way, I guess I'll get by for now.

Tankadins Attention Please

2008-12-05T11:19:00.008-05:00

Quick post.

Over on Honor's Code is a great article on what you need in order to tank high level content: how to become uncrittable, how to make all the hits you take blocks (block capping), hit capping (so you never miss) and Expertise (so you can't be dodged or parried).

They also mention a link to maintankadin, which I will give you here, that tells you how to become uncrittable through quest rewards and reputation rewards only. No drops needed.

Some sweet news for tankadins.

Enjoy.

My Favorite Addons, Part Two (Neato)

2008-12-05T09:07:00.000-05:00

This is a continuation of my discussion of addons. The addons below are ones that I have found very fun and/or useful at times, but that I can live without if I need to. Enjoy.

Recount.

This is a damage meter. It can measure your dps in a fight or over a long period of time, tell you how much damage you or party/raid members do in total, and you can spam it to any chat channel you want. There is a ton of functionality to this addon, much more than most people have time to figure out.

Gatherer.

If you are an herbalist or a miner then you freakin need this addon. Every time you tap a node it records where you are in the world and how much of whatever you get out of the node. Then on your main map or mini-map you will have little pins telling you where to go to get all those mats. I absolutely love it -- but if you're a skinner or tailor, you're SOL. Sorry.

OmniCC.

This is a cooldown counter. Instead of watching your action bars closely for that nice little animation to finish, you get nice big numbers counting down, telling you exactly when you can button mash that spell again. It's great for maximizing your spells and their cooldowns. I find that it really helps me to get in a rythmn with my spell rotations.

Wardrobe. OR Outfitter.

Both of these do basically the same thing -- help you to keep track of your gear. If you're like me you have a few extra pieces of armor in your bags, some with more stamina, others with more intellect or whatever. You can assign those armor pieces to sets and then switch back and forth almost instantly. One set for Solo Questing, another for Group Tanking. Shazam. I personally find Outfitter to be a little easier to work with, but that seems to be personal preference.

RatingBuster.

This mod helps you to decide which pieces to equip and which to discard. Sometimes it's hard to decide if the trade off between 2 points of stamina and 6 points of strength is worth it. This addon will tell you how many hit points you are losing and how much attack power and blocking you are gaining. You still need to make that decision, but at least you are much better informed now.

DeadlyBossMods.

Anyone who raids needs this addon. Or something so similar as to be nearly indistinguishable. This has internal timers to let you know when something important is going to happen in raid boss fights -- and it tells you about it. When a boss and his internal timer have decided it's time to cast NUKE BOMB FRENZY which will kill everyone in line of sight, DBM will give you a heads up. "Hey, NUKE BOMB FRENZY is about to be cast, get moving or you are toast!" Or something like that. Most raiding groups call this a MUST HAVE.

There are a couple of decent places to find your new addons. Some that you find will have websites of their own, and that's where you'll find the best information, but you'll really want to shop around a little and the clearing house websites are really quite good. I have always used the Curse Gaming website, but there are a few others out there: WoW Interface, WoW UI at World of War.net, and also don't forget to use WowWiki, they have a nice Addon page too.

Funnest Instance Ever!

2008-12-04T08:43:00.009-05:00

Last night I discovered my favorite instance in World of Warcraft. It's also one of the hardest to pronounce. As soon as you hit 72-73 you need to go to Azjol-Nerub!

Admittedly we had an awesome group setup. Me, tankadin 73, retadin 72, healadin 77 and 2 boomkins -- both 73. Nothing squishie there.

This is truly an instance to love. There are 3 bosses, hardly any trash mobs and little to no distance between the three. We seriously completed it (my first time) in under 30 minutes and came away with some very nice quest rewards: Expelling Gauntlets and Greaves of the Traitor. I spammed my new items to guild chat and another tank in our guild who is 76 now was shocked -- his stuff was of lesser uberness! He had skipped Dragonblight altogether. Yikes. Needless to say, he was rolling through there with a PUG of his own within 20 minutes.

Usually I tend to do a little research on an instance before I walk through the doors, especially when I'm tanking, but this time I happened to ding 73 right in front of the AN entrance and had just picked up both quests. I figured I would put myself out there in LFG and while waiting, look up the boss fights and see what is the what.

Less than 3 minutes later I was in a full group and summoning.

Really, it was quite easy. It seems that the whole point of the instance is to fly through it quickly so as not to get overwhelmed by the constantly spawning Nerubians. I'm not going to go into strategies because there don't seem to be any -- we just tanked and spanked the whole instance. Although the last boss fight is rather long so mana conservation is probably a good idea.

Have fun and get in there.

My Favorite Addons, Part One (NEEDED)

2008-12-02T10:53:00.016-05:00

Today I would like to discuss addons. While there are those out there that say that addons are cheating, it is my belief that if Blizzard didn't want us using them to make our lives easier or more enjoyable, then they wouldn't have allowed us to enable and use them, plus, come on they can really make things better!

There are a couple of decent places to find your new addons. Some that you find will have websites of their own, and that's where you'll find the best information, but you'll really want to shop around a little and the clearing house websites are really quite good. I have always used the Curse Gaming website, but there are a few others out there: WoW Interface, WoW UI at World of War.net, and also don't forget to use WowWiki, they have a nice Addon page too.

Titan Panel.

This is something that I just can't live without. I set it so that it only shows the bar, fully transparent on the top, and it always shows me some great information instantly. How much gold I currently have, where I am in the world by name and zone as well as coordinates, what the percentage of damage has been done to my equipment and approximately how much it will cost to repair, how much room I have in my bags (although you CAN set this to show on your bags icon through the normal UI), if I'm playing my hunter how much ammo I have left and many many more little tidbits of information. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Auctioneer.

Another addon I can't live without. This addon will scan the entire auction house (when you tell it to) and can do 2 major things that I really love. First it will help you to sell your stuff. It will analyze trends and suggest good prices to sell any items that you have in your bags. Secondly you can set it so that it will tell you that good price information for items as you acquire them out in the world. If all those quest rewards are vendor trash to you, it will tell you how much vendors will pay for them so you can get the most cash out of those rewards. There are so many different ways to use Auctioneer, different settings and it has a bunch of sub-addons that do a whole variety of things. Do check it out.
(Personally I only have Auctioneer fully activated on my bank character as I feel it slows down my UI on my main.)

Healbot Cont.

I absolutely love this addon. Even though I don't do much healing anymore it simplifies any healing that I do need to do. Just one button click and it will automatically decide which heal to give me at any given point and it can be set to cast any number of spells with certain modifiers (hold down alt+click and BUBBLE). You can also set it to remind you when buffs are about to run out and then, a simple click will recast those buffs on the correct people. You can also change the look of Healbot in so many ways, plus it has various skins included with the download. This addon takes a little work to get it set just the way you want, but once you have it, you'll wonder how you lived without it.

Omen.

If you're a tank, like I am, then you need a threat meter. There are 2 main threat meters available: Omen and KLH. I use Omen because of it's ease of setup. Right out of the box it seems to work perfectly to me. Now I know that there are tons of ways to get it going and all threat meters really only shine fully when all members of your party or raid are using, but if you are tanking and don't have a threat meter, you are wasting valuable time and thought processing unnecessarily. Get it! Got it? Good.

So You Say You Want A .... ?

2008-12-01T13:29:00.008-05:00

This post is about gearing. Some people work their way through levels by questing, taking what gear drops or the quest rewards and calling themselves lucky. Others troll the Auction House every chance they get and spend all their money for an extra point or two (I have to admit that sometimes I'm that person -- still don't have my epic flying mount).

Then there are the special people who do some research and find the next greatest piece of armor or weapon from where ever it may be (quest reward, reputation or drop from instance boss, etc.).

I would like to share with you 2 places you can always go.

1) Kaliban's Loot List.

This is a great place to find loot from quests to zones to instance drops and you can tailor it to your specific spec or class (not just paladin's). I use this all the time, and have since mid Burning Crusade.

2) The Official World of Warcraft Armory.

This is a great place to look up upgrades to your current armor. Yes, I know that when you hit the "Find an Upgrade" button you often get pages of stuff that you are unable or unwilling to get -- under most circumstances, however, there is something that makes this site extremely worth it. The FILTER button. Hit that filter button and go to town changing the results that you have. I can specify that I'm a paladin who is looking for tanking gear, and that I only want to see trinkets that are available to my toon between levels 71 and 73. Now you've got results that you really want -- and unless they are random drops you can find out who gives them, or which quest using Wowhead. I like it ... lots.

Now there are probably other places to find where to go for gear. WoW Insider has been giving up tips in gearing for the paladin starting out in Northrend here.

I personally have decided to mostly stick with questing in Howling Fjord in the beginning, but will do a few select quests in Borean Tundra for some nice stamina gear.

Newly New

2008-12-01T09:20:00.002-05:00

Because there are so few paladin blogs, and even less that are worth reading, I thought I might try my hand at writing my own.

I have been playing WoW since before there were Battlegrounds and that entire time my main has been a paladin. I love the class. I have respecced my paladin at least 50 times, possibly more because I really like experimenting with a little point here and a little point there.

Right now my paladin, Knales on the Norgannon (US) server is Protection and I imagine that he will level as prot. Feel free to look him up on the Armory and send me thoughts and comments. Sometimes I miss things, but I think I've got most of the ideas on how to play this class.

Before I get too far I want to say that there are a few places that I go to for paladin information.

Maintankadin. (Great forum site for all things tanking -- focused on paladin tanks, but TONS of stuff -- T-shirts too.)

Blessing of Kings. (Decent all around paladin site, one of the only real paladin bloggers out there.)

WowInsider's The Light and How to Swing It. (Quite informative, but I wish they posted more often.)

Elitist Jerks. (Probably the best place to find more info than you really wanted on your class and how it works -- this link goes to the Paladin forums area.)
I will start a blogroll with these links and more when I can figure out how to do so.