Thursday, December 25, 2008
Happy Holidays!!
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.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Important Stats to your Paladin
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.
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.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Gnomeregon
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. =(
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. =(
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Pick Up Groups
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Getting Closer All the Time
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.
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.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Why I Love Being a Paladin
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.
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.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Public Test Realm Notes
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.
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.
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.
- Divine Protection: The penalty has been removed.
- Divine Shield: The penalty has been changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% in place of an attack speed penalty.
- Hand of Reckoning(NEW): Available on trainers at level 16. It’s a 30 yard range taunt that causes Holy damage.
- Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.
- Judgement of Wisdom: Now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.
- Sacred Duty: Interaction with Divine Shield and Divine Protection removed, but stamina bonus increased.
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.
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