Big Shiny Shield

Blizzcon predictions

2011-10-21T11:37:00.001-05:00

Another Blizzcon is upon us. The opening ceremony is only hours away. What do I think is going to happen?

1. Pandas......oh yeah, there will be Pandas.

2. A MASSIVE talent overhaul.

This is a win-win

2011-08-16T15:03:00.001-05:00

First off, go read this. Go ahead, I'll be here when you get back.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3300854#blog

Back? Good, now my thoughts.

I've really got no problem with these changes, and let me explain why. . .

Threat multipliers

If you look at the state of the game, today, most agree that threat already doesn't matter. Either you have hit a mob and have threat on it, or you haven't hit a mob at all and don't have threat on it. The whole system is very binary right now (sure there are those first 2-3 GCDs of a fight where you may lose threat, but only if an ability misses). Blizzard changing the base multiplier from 3x to 5x changes nothing except help low geared and new tanks hold threat against raid geared DPS.

This is a win-win.

Active defensive abilities

I don't know how many of you remember tanking as a paladin in BC. The name of the game was to keep Holy Shield up at all times or be one shot (and subsequently replaced by a warrior).

End of story.

The thought of adding more active (read button pushed) defensive abilities makes me a happy and more engaged tank. Anybody who can read a guide can put together an adequate gear set that will let them survive a boss fight right now. But it will take a good player to use the right abilities at the right time.

This is a win-win.

Conclusion

Back in the day, you could tell a good tank from bad tank by their ability to not threatcap (or at least have a higher threatcap for) the DPS. That is why I have already seen a lot of crying on forums about this change. People are stuck in the notion that threat generation is the only way to show how skilled of a player you are as a tank.

I took up tanking 6 years ago because, when the chips are down and the shit hits the fan, I pride myself on being able to eek out those few extra seconds of survival that gets us that boss kill. It feels good to do that now, imagine how much better it will feel when those few extra seconds were directly tied to how good of a player you are, and not your ability to follow Mr. Robot's gear suggestions.

Going forward, the good tanks will be separated from the bad not by threat, but by their ability to mitigate damage and survive a pull. I welcome this change.

The way I see it, anyone who is actually enjoys playing a tank should be praising these changes.

PVP, shadow style

2011-08-04T09:41:00.001-05:00

I've never been a huge PVP'er in this game.

I think that goes back to my early days in WoW levelling in STV on a PVP server. Getting ganked by lvl 60 players while you are lvl 35-40 sucks. What sucks more though, is that same lvl 60 character corpse camping you. They are not even getting any HKs out of the deal. You know they are just doing it to be a dick. So, that may have soured me to PVP quite a bit, because I subconciously have always associated participating in PVP with being a dick.

Until now.

PVP'ing on my priest is a blast. I'm not quite sure how I have missed the boat on melting faces with a shadow priest until now, but man is it fun.

I may be late to this party, but I am hooked.

Considering that fact that priests wear cloth, I have amazing survivability, and the damage output is just mindboggling at times. If I can get off three Mind Spikes, then you are toast. Plain and simple. Because those three Mind Spikes with be followed up with three instant cast nukes. And, if you don't give me the time and space required to get off those three Mind Spikes, then I will just dot you up and keep you off of me by other means.

The classes I have the most trouble with are Frost mages (mostly because of their stupid pets) and Rogues (the good ones who keep me stunned). But even against them, I have a 50-50 chance.

Now, I know I have a LONG way to go before I am actually good in PVP, but at least I am having fun while learning.

DXE? Can it really be you?

2011-07-22T16:13:00.002-05:00

So I was perusing a thread over at Maintankadin about Boss Mods and it came up that DXE was updated and available for Cataclysm.

How did I miss this momentus event?

When I first started raiding during BC, I used Big Wigs. And I loved it. As far as I was concerned, Big Wigs was the only boss mod for me. Wrath came out, and all the way through Tier 7, I still used Big Wigs.

Then I changed guilds, and started raiding Ulduar-25. I was still using Big Wigs, but I quickly started noticing that Big Wigs gave me alerts that DBM wasn't giving, and vice-versa.

For instance: On the Kologarn fight in Ulduar, Big Wigs would make a big audible alert whenever the Kologarn tank had 2 stacks of "Crunch Armor". Basically, Big Wigs told me exactly when to taunt the boss. However, I learned that everyone else in the guild was using DBM, so I switched to DBM as well. At least that way, we would all be working with the same set of timers. After I switched to DBM, I screwed up the Kologarn fight the first time, because DBM didn't give me the "Crunch Armor" alert that Big Wigs did. Regardless, I liked a lot of the features of DBM, and stuck with it until well into ICC.

That is when I discovered Deus Vox Encounters (a.k.a. DXE). I instantly loved DXE. I liked the options interface better that DBM, the little "dock" with the boss health, the sounds (although they took a little getting used to), the 3D arrow, the whole "sh'bang". I got so used to the different sound alerts from the Lich King fight, that I still hear them in my sleep sometimes (quick, pickup the Raging Spirit before it kills someone!).

So, as I stated at the beginning of the post, DXE is available and up to date for Cataclysm. Guess what i am downloading as soon as I get home tonight?

I'll give you three guesses, but only the first one counts.

Two Months Gone

2011-07-18T14:42:00.001-05:00

Wow. It’s been two months since my last blog post. Where does the time go?

Let’s see, what has happened since I last posted?

Patch 4.2 has hit.
Paladins got Holy Shield redesigned (which included lots of crying by the window lickers on the official forums).
EF took another month+ off of raiding because of the persistent attendance issues.
I have started playing my warrior a lot more, not because of any nerf to my paladin, but just because he is fun.
I’ve also started doing a ton more PVP in the last couple of weeks (we’ll see how long that lasts).
I finally power leveled my leatherworker to 525, so I can start providing my own leg armors now

EF did get back to raiding, and with the nerfs that came in 4.2, were able to down Cho’gall on only our second night working on him.What I am doing a lot of, is dailies. I login every day and do my Molten Front dailies. I tell you, the day I can stop healing Wounded Guardians of Hyjal cannot come soon enough.

The Heroes Return

2011-05-17T08:56:00.001-05:00

After a forced hiatus of over a month and a half, due to attendance woes, Empyreal Fray fielded a raid team last night and actually raided. It felt good. It also felt a little odd. It has only been a month and a half but I know, at least on my part, that there was some serious rust that needed knocking off.

We started at Baradin Hold, where I momentarily forgot where my taunt button was. I'm not sure what happened there, but when it was time to taunt the boss off of the other tank, I instead hit my interrupt button, and then proceeded to question in my mind why the boss hadn't turned toward me. Luckily I figured it out before he did his big thing again.

Then we moved on to Blackwing Descent and proceeded to one-shot the big worm (Magmaw), the fours statues (Omnotron), and captain chemistry (Maloriak).

We did have to pug one DPS, a warrior, and he played pretty well. Although, he did get two pieces of gear off of three bosses and then, without much warning, left.

But such is the price of pugging.

Regardless, it was a great night, and it felt really good to be raiding again. Here's hoping that we can repeat tonight.

Of Trolls and new Tiers

2011-05-03T09:00:00.001-05:00

I really need to get better at this blogging thing. I don't post anywhere near enough. Anywhoo . . .

Attendance is still our biggest problem in EF. We have picked up a couple of new players, but at the same time, lost a couple of our core raiders, so it was a zero-sum action. Anyone interested in joining a raiding team that is good, just perpetually short-handed?

Of Trolls

Cataclysm has done something that no other expansion has ever done before. It has continually made me feel sub-standard. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the harder content. It is just the virtual kick to the junk when you wipe in a 5-man. And let me tell you, I have been doing a lot of wiping in 5-mans of late.

Of the two new (new = recycled) troll instances, I have only seen Zul'Gurub. On raid nights, when we are short, we are just running random troll instances instead. I have queued for a random troll instance three times now, and have gotten Zul'Gurub each time. That also means, I have spent three nights in Zul'Gurub. I have yet to finish the instance. Not due to giving up, but just due to running out of time.

The boss mechanics are . . . unforgiving. Anyone who knows us EF people, we have traditionally been weak when it came to mechanics, and tended to just power through fights. In the Wrath era, that was possible, in Cataclysm, not so much. It is funny, most of the bosses we can one-shot (even on the first night). But others, whose mechanics are more brutal (like Zanzil) we wiped again and again on.

Tonight is another scheduled raid night, and while I am holding out hope that we will see 10 people online, I am planning on going back in and finally finishing Zul'Gurub.

New Tiers

Also, a few days ago, Blizzard released the new artwork for the Tier 12 Paladin gear. At first glance, I didn't like it at all. It doesn't even look like plate armor. It seems more like something a Warlock would wear. Much like Tier 10, as I have looked at it more and more, it has grown on me. At first glance, I didn't like Tier 10 either, but when it came time to get rid of it, it was hard. I had really come to love the look of the burning skulls on my shoulders. Maybe it will be the same with Tier 12. We will see.

I do recognize the similarities in style between Tier 12 and Tier 2. It very much has that Inquisitor feel to it again. This time with an added fiery theme.

Me, a Starcaller?

2011-04-08T13:05:00.001-05:00

As has been well documented in this blog, Empyreal Fray has been plagued with attendance problems all throughout Cataclysm. Now, we have seen the return of one of our originally planned healers, and times are looking up. However, we still missed two out of three raid nights due to lack of attendance last week. My co-tank, and our regular raid leader was on vacation for one night, so that night was expected.

Anyway, I didn't want another soul draining raid cancelation, so I suggested that we go do all of the hard modes in Ulduar. Sort of a night off, while still spending time to gether as a raid team. Most people in our guild never got their Proto-Drakes out of Ulduar, so I thought that this would be easy, and fun. And, we could knock out the Guild Achievement for Ulduar while were there.

Also, only a couple of the guildies had seen Algalon, so this would allow that as well.

How did it go?

In a word, fantastic.

Flame Leviathan was easy sauce, even with all four towers up. Razorscale only took three attempts to finish off the Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare achievement, and only that because the boss has an enrage timer, and you don't get 25 dwarves in a single fight to begin with. Ignis keeled over without much of a fuss. XT-002 was a snoozefest. Steelbreaker was chosen, and found to be lacking. We got robbed of the Disarmed achievement on Kologarn, but would come back and get it on our second night in Ulduar. The crazy cat lady went purr-fectly. Hodir's hallway trash took longer than Hodir himself. Thorim, was interesting, because the debuff he puts on the tank still reduces defense skill by 200, even though no tank has defense skill anymore. And, to close out the night, we killed Freya, after having to remember the fight mechanics on the fly.

On our second night of the week, We blew through Uludar at a record pace. We skipped Razorscale and Ignis. Disarmed Kologarn, and did the hardmodes of Hodir, Thorim, and Freya again, as I was collecting the parts for the Algalon key. Then we moved on to do Firefighter. Afterwards we continued on to General Vezax, where we smelled saronite and loved it. Then Yogg fell.

We closed out the night with me completing the key to Algalon, and then us killing him as well. Guild Achievement gained, personal achievement gained. New mounts and new titles for most of us. But most importantly, we had a really good time doing it. It was a nice break from Cata raiding. I know, for me at least, it sort of re-filled my tank.

I am chomping at the bit to get back to raiding current content this Sunday night.

Let’s just imagine for a moment

2011-03-23T13:50:00.002-05:00

I've been chewing on this for a while, and decided to go ahead and post it.

Not that this has any chance of being implemented, but let's just imagine for a moment. I think that each paladin spec should have its own single target and AOE HoPo finisher, unique to that spec. I also think that each spec should have a single target and multi-target HoPo generator. Something like this:

	Single	Multi
Prot Generator	Crusader Strike	Hammer of the Righteous
Prot Finisher	Shield of the Righteous	Blinding Shield (the old abandoned level 81 Cataclysm ability modified to use HoPo)
Ret Generator	Crusader Strike	Holy Storm
Ret Finisher	Templar's Verdict	Insert AOE spell here (how about Inquisitor's Tempest for a name?)
Holy Generator	Holy Shock	Insert small AOE heal here (how about Virtue's Illumination for a name?)
Holy Finisher	Word of Glory	Light of Dawn

I am a really big believer in symmetry, and believe that the paladin class could use a little more.

A Rifting we will go . . . or will we?

2011-03-22T15:16:00.001-05:00

Attendance problems are killing us in WoW. We have three scheduled raid nights a week, but are lucky if we can actually raid once a week right now. It is really a catch 22, as we need more people to join so that we can raid more often, but who wants to join a guild that is having problems putting a raid together on a consistent basis?

So, to pass the time, several guild members have bought and started playing Rift. As I mentioned in my last post, I have done the same (because I am weak).

Now, I know this may come as a surprise to many of you, but I decided before I ever set foot in the game, that I wanted to play a tank.

I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment that way.

For those of you that don't know, in Rift, there are only four classes. Warrior, Rogue, Mage, and Cleric. Sounds boring, right? Each class has eight "callings" to choose from. However, you are limited to three callings in your spec. And initially, you are limited to the first three callings that you choose at level 1, 2, and 4. So imagine that you are new to MMOs in general. This system could get REAL confusing, REAL fast.

That aside, obviously, I am NOT new to MMOs. So what class do I choose? Why warrior of course. Duh! What calling do I choose at level 1? I'll give you three guesses (but only the first one counts).

*crickets*

No one? Okay, I'll give you a hint. It starts with the letter "P" and ends with "aladin".

I know, you're all shocked.

I rounded out my spec with Void Knight (for more magic damage reduction), and Reaver (for more AOE threat). And I started playing with ferver.

Things were moving along well, I got to about level 16 or so, and was getting ready for my first foray into a Rift dungeon, when something strange happened.

I started to resent Rift.

Everytime I login to WoW, things are just stressful and depressing…a.k.a. not fun. Rift, on the other hand is perfectly fun. I just don't want to play it anymore. Not because it is a bad game, it is probably the best MMO I have played outside of WoW, but because deep down inside, I think I blame Rift (fairly or not) for our WoW attendance problems. So now, I have a $50 game that I don't even want to play. And that makes me resent it even more. Because not only is Rift destroying my ability to have fun in WoW, but it also tricked me into paying out $50. I am not only weak, but apparently I am also a moron.

I DO know, that if my WoW guild falls apart, and we quit raiding, I will most likely just quit playing MMOs altogether. I really have no drive to go raid in Rift. As it stands right now, I can't even stand to login to Rift. I would rather go watch TV.

Maybe Star Wars: The Old Republic will capture my interest.

Holy Power Woes

2011-03-14T14:32:00.002-05:00

Man, the nerf to HoPo generation that I wrote about in February is both worse, and better, than I initially thought.

Worse, in that I have seen as many as three to four Crusader Strike misses/parries/dodges in a row at times. Let me tell you, that REALLY slows down the inflow of HoPo. It also makes the playstyle feel odd. It's just "off" somehow.

Better, in that I haven't really noticed any practical difference in my ability to tank, because after the first 25-30 seconds, nobody is catching me on threat anyway. It feels sort of like a return to the way Paladin threat was in BC. Back then, a paladin could drop a Consecrate and then go get a sandwich. In Cata, it is similar in that I can do the rotation for about 30 seconds, and then just auto-attack my way to victory. Once Vengeance is stacked up, there is no way I can lose threat.

I wish I was joking.

Back on topic. My HoPo inflow has plummeted in the past few weeks, and other than the annoyance of missing with Crusader Strike over and over again, It has had no measurable effect on my ability to successfully perform my job in a raid situation. We could almost completely ignore one of our resource mechanics if we wanted. Sure, we need to cast something every 20 seconds to keep Holy Shield up, but that is nothing. This is not how I believe Blizzard wants tanks to function.

During Cata development, Blizz stated that they wanted there to be a bigger separation between good and bad tanks. If that is really what they were going for, they have failed. They didn't make the Paladin rotation any harder than it was in Wrath, they just made if less elegant.

One of the big changes in the upcoming patch is that if you use Avenger's Shield within six seconds of a Grand Crusader proc, it will generate a HoPo. So, instead ignoring GC procs, and just sticking AS in its assigned slot in the rotation, we will actually want to use it when it pops up. That would be a welcome change, except that following your rotation/priority system to generate maximum threat is pretty meaningless right now.

Marry the potential increase in HoPo generation with the announced 20 second cooldown on Word of Glory, and Paladin tanks will be forced to use HoPo for threat, when the last thing they need is more threat.

So, what do we do? Well, since we will not be able to use our primary resource system for survivability, and we don't need threat, then the only thing left is to increase our DPS. Also, the increased HoPo income might allow us to perform the taboo and forbidden interweaving of Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous.

Welcome to the New World Order, where tank DPS actually matters.

With patch 4.1, the "skunk line" will get a lot higher.

I am weak

2011-03-14T10:12:00.001-05:00

After all of my big talk about not buying Rift, you got it, I bought Rift. I have only played about as far as I got in the open beta, so nothing new to report yet. I did get together last night and form a guild with several other guildies from WoW to form a guild in Rift. Guess I will give it 30 days and see what comes out of it. I can say this . . . it is the best non-WoW MMO I have ever played.

New beginnings

2011-03-11T09:33:00.001-06:00

I have a new pet project.

Empyreal Fray currently only raids on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights. On the other nights, the guild is sort of a ghost town as people are either doing other real life things, or have decided to play Rift on our off nights.

I am intrigued by Rift, but personally, I don’t need another subscription to another game right now.

So, what to do?

I started wracking my brain, trying to decide what to do with my Wednesdays and Thursdays. I started weighing my options and came up with the following:

1. I could go back to LoTRO. They have gone free-to-play, so no financial commitment needed there.

2. I could try out Champions Online, as they have also gone free-to-play.

For those of you that don’t know, I played a bit of LoTRO before. I had a sub, I bought expansions, and it was a really good game. But somehow, for me at least, it didn’t measure up to WoW. So I decided against going back.

Champions Online I downloaded and played through the first ten levels or so. I quickly decided that I did not like it. The graphics and sound reminded me too much of City of Heroes (which makes sense since the games are made by the same company). And the gameplay just didn’t jive with what I wanted. On a side note, I think Champions Online is the first MMO I have ever played where I believe you have way too many appearance choices when it comes to character creation.

So those two choices didn’t fly.

I have a druid alt that I have already leveled to 85. And a warrior one that is lvl 85 as well. I have a priest that is lvl 83. Hey, I could finished him off!

Nah . . . I think I am done with the 80-85 grind for a little while.

No character has ever engaged me as much as my paladin, hence, why Gathorc is, and has been since 2006, my main. But, my first characters I played in WoW, were Horde. I have a lvl 44 Undead Rogue that I haven’t played since sometime in 2005. So, that got me to thinking how the story line has progressed on the Horde side. Then it hit me. Create a Bloodelf paladin on a different server and level him up from lvl 1! And just to make it interesting, I’m gonna stick with the default UI (at least for now).

So that is what I am going to do. See how the other hold lives. I hear Orgrimmar is really pleasant this time of year.

With all of that in mind, I would like to introduce . . . Khur.

Now, before anyone makes any comment on the name, “No, I did not ‘steal’ it from Khor, of Retributionpaladins.com”. It came up in the random name generator and I had gotten to level 9 before I noticed the similarity.

No heirloom gear. No loans of gold from a main with tons of money. No friends to speak of. No fancy shmancy UI.

Just a lowly lvl 1 paladin learning how to make his way in the World . . . of Warcraft. LOL

Oops, did I forget to mention that I was nerfing you?

2011-02-09T11:24:00.001-06:00

So,

I started the day today, just like any other. Get up. Go to work. Start perusing blogs and informational sites about WoW. Nothing special (well, except the new OOTS today). Nothing out of the ordinary.

That is, until I come to my daily reading of MMOChampion, where I am greeted with this (Source):

Paladin Bug Fixes

Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and Hammer of the Righteous no longer incorrectly grant Holy Power

Now, this doesn't sound like much, but it is a real kick in the junk to the feel of playing a paladin. For a Ret, it is not a huge deal, they should be hit capped anyway (or at least really close). For a Holy paladin, this is not a huge deal, because more often than not, they are using Holy Shock on a friendly player, so they can't miss. But for a Protection Paladin, this makes our rotation even more clunky than it was already. The one thing we could count on before was the "pulse" of our rotation. That every 9 seconds, we could ShotR, WoG, or Inquis.

The worst part is, I (and many other paladins in the community) can remember that Ghostcrawler himself made the change during Beta to allow our Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous to generate Holy Power regardless of if it hit or missed. He felt, then, that the protection rotation didn't feel right, and needed be stabilized a little bit.

There are many other blogs and forums that are exploding over this situation. It is not really the change that has us up in arms, so much as the way it was labelled at a "Bug Fix", even though it was an intentional change in Beta.

Oh well...I have played my paladin through all of the ups and downs of this game for over 6 years, but it may be time to finish leveling my Warrior.

We will see.

A kick in the junk, indeed

2011-02-03T12:54:00.000-06:00

So,

Many things have happened since my last post. We didn't raid on Tuesday, the 25th, because we were short people. That combined with all of the stuff from my last post was pretty deflating.

Then, Wednesday came around, which is not a normal raid day for us, and lo and behold, Alliance actually controlled Tol Barad. There were about five of us online, so we started putting out phone calls and texts to guildies. We wanted to get in there before our 2 hour window was up and get some shots in on Argaloth. After much poking and prodding, we got 10 people online and in a raid. We then headed to Baradin Hold to kill this guy. We figured that he is a pretty easy boss, and we wanted our shot at free T11 gear.

So, we go in, and our raid leader starts explaining the fight and the strategy that we are going to use. Seems easy enough. First pull, we get to about 20% and wipe. People (including myself) are having a little issue with the fire. We come back and wipe a few more times. Then we look at our timers, and we only have 13 minutes until the next Tol Barad battle.

After everything that we had gone through in the previous few days, I started getting that "here we go again" feeling. I really started doubting my skills as a player. I mean, I killed the Lich King on 25, but I'm not good enough to kill the "lol" boss in Baradin Hold? Seriously?

So, long story short (too late), we downed Argaloth on that last attempt. There was a collective sigh of relief by everyone in the guild. We ended the night on a high note, and it felt great to finally get a raid boss down. Our raid leader, and my co-tank, even got his T11 gloves. Grats.

Our next scheduled raid night was the following Sunday. But we had to cancel again because of being short (so frustrating). But Monday night came around, and we actually had enough people to raid. So, we headed to Magmaw. We were pretty optimistic, but there was still a tangible sense of tension. We buff up, pull the trash, and then our raid leader starts going over the strategy once more. We pull it, and surprise of surprises, we one-shot Magmaw!

We were on a guild high now. So we go and take a few looks at Omnitron just to get comfortable with the rhythm of the fight.

Then we decide that we are going to go take some shots at Halfus. Because of the drakes we have up, we decide on a three tank strategy (odd in a 10-man, I know). We didn't get him down, though. We did however make some very solid progress.

Then, Tuesday night rolls around. So, first thing is we go to Magmaw. Even though we had our boomkin DC in the middle of the fight, we kill Magmaw on our third try. Then we headed back over to Bastion of Twilight to put some more work in on Halfus. We discussed our strategy with the different drake combination, and pulled. We got really close on the first try, but ultimately wiped. Then, on our second try, down he went.

That is two progression boss kills in as many days. We took one stab at the double dragons, but that was ugly.

So, when progression kicks you in the junk, the only thing you can do is kick it right back.

Progression is a kick in the junk

2011-01-24T13:36:00.002-06:00

I tell you what. I am not a "Wrath Baby". Anyone who reads this blog (all 3 of you!), knows that I have been playing since Vanilla. I bashed my head against a wall with the best of 'em. But, starting a new guild with the idea of raiding is really hard. On top of that, the fact that we are consistently one healer short makes trying to progress that much harder.

Last night was a great example.

Last week, we worked on Halfus, and finally got some good solid progression on him. At the beginning of the night, we were getting one drake down, but wiping before we got the second down. Then as the night went on, we were getting two drakes down. Then, on the second to the last pull, we got all three drakes down, but hit the enrage timer at 4.5 million remaining health. Then, on the last pull of the night, we got all three drakes down and hit the enrage timer with 3 million health left. We were obviously making solid progress, but we hit out ending time.

Fast forward to last night

After our progress on Halfus last Tuesday night (we got him down to 3 million health when enraged) everyone was coming into this week's raid with high spirits. Unfortunately, Halfus kicked out butts "six ways to Sunday". We weren't even getting one drake down. It was ugly. Things were just not clicking. The only difference was the pug healer that we had to run with (see above statement about being short healers). Now, the pug healer we had last night is good. I know and trust her, and her numbers were good, but still we were having major issues.

So, we decided to go work on Magmaw instead. Now, this is a 1 tank fight, so I have to go heals (did I mention that we are perpetually one healer short), while our bear tanks the boss. It didn't take long before this fight started kicking us in the junk as well. We couldn't do even the most simple things, it seemed.

Then, just when the raid leader and I were talking about quitting early for the night, we gave it one more try, and FINALLY things started to click. We didn't kill Magmaw, but we did get him to 37% (our best attempt thusfar).

The worst part is, neither the raid leader or myself could figure out WHY we were doing so bad. All the numbers seemed inline with the numbers we were pulling last week, but we were getting no where near the successes we saw last week.

I was ready to quit last night. I really was. The frustration was so high, I just wanted to walk away and do something else. That has really never happened to me before during a raid.

I guess we will see how if goes tonight . . . if we have enough healers online.

Holy Paladin! (Re-visited)

2011-01-06T10:23:00.000-06:00

This is gonna be a long one (for me anyway).

Our guild is having a serious crisis of a healing sort. As in . . . out of our entire roster, we only have ONE mainspec healer. That makes it a little hard to raid.

So, being the team player that I am, I have volunteered to change my second spec to Holy.

You know, take one for the team.

Now, it has been documented before, and you may, or may not have read it before, but . . . I HATE paladin healing.

I have tried it a few times throughout my WoW career, and it has always felt . . . "Too hectic!!! Not enought time to get heal off!!! GAH!!!!"

Well, that was under the old healing model. Where throughput was everything. I understand that Paladins have never had throughput issues, but all I know is . . . Healing on a Disc priest is easy, and healing on a Paladin is hard.

That was until last night. Our one dedicated healer had other plans last night, so I was the only "healer" available for our nightly heroic runs. After a little cajoling, off we went.

I realized very quickly, that my UI needed some adjustment. When I first started working on Rotface in ICC, I was always the ooze tank. And, since I was a paladin, I was also the ooze cleanser. So, I had made a mouseover macro for my Cleanse, so that I could Cleanse the targets in the game world instead of having to Cleanse a unit frame. It is bound to one of my thumb buttons on my mouse, and has served em well ever since. however, for some reason, and I still can't figure out why, my mouseover Cleanse macro just refused to work on the party unit frames. I was even using the default (raid style) unit frames. It always did before, so I am not sure what gives there. Oh well...I just left the mouseover macro keybound to the thumb key on my mouse, but also assigned the normal Cleanse from my spellbook via Clique to the same button. You know . . . double dip.

Once I got that sorted, I realized that I need to move my party frames. As a tank, you need to see your party frames, but they don't need to be the center of your attention. Has a healer, your party's unit frames are EVERYTHING. So, unit frames moved from the bottom right of my screen to pretty much dead center. Lined up right below my toon's feet.

Now keep in mind, I was adjusting all of these things WHILE we were running heroic dungeons. So making quick adjustments and such between pulls until about 3/4 through the second dungeon of the night.

Conclusions?

I was actually having a lot of fun. Hectic at times, but in a good way. I need to get out of the WotLK mind set of keeping everyone healed up to max all of the time. There were a few fights where my mana got dangerously low. The Beauty fight in Stonecore (for example), I ended the fight with 2100 total mana (keep in mind that my in-combat MP5 is just over 2000).

I was using cooldowns constantly.

I was involved.

I was entertained.

So, the Big Shiny Shiled may have a little more shine and a couple fewer dings in the coming expansion.

We will see.

Long Time...No Post

2011-01-03T09:43:00.002-06:00

It has been along time since I posted anything here. But that is okay, because I don't have any readers anyway.

What has happened since my last post? Let's see.......

1. Cataclysm has been released. Just in case you guys weren't aware.

2. I have leveled Gathorc to 85 and have begun running heroics. I have also levelled the warrior and priest to level 81 each.

3. Have started a new guild with several of my closest friends. This was planned long before Wrath was over, but now it is done. What was not part of the plan was the fact that, somehow, I ended up being the Guild Master.

4. Have had to work much harder than I originally thought in order to get enough people ready to raid with this new guild. Had some folks who were part of the original plan drop out, which left us short on people, but we are getting there.

5. Have spent much money and time levelling up mining and blacksmithing to 525.

6. I got a sexy new 24" monitor for my birthday. My UI has been completely rebuilt, and I like it a lot. I may make a post on it later this week.

I am already sporting 160k health buffed in heroics, and only currently have one purp...the BS crafted shield. First guild raid is this week, and I am really looking forward to that. It is time to get back in the groove of progression again. I realize we are weeks behind, but that matters little. I am here to have fun with my friends, and that has already been accomplished.

I will be posting much more often now that raids will be starting up again (hopefully).

oh, and . . . . . Happy New Year!

Shield of the Righteous nerf

2010-10-27T13:35:00.004-05:00

Remember a couple of posts back, I talked about the PVP cries resulting from me getting a 77K crit ShoR on Festergut? Just to show how "not leet" I am, there have been several reports of ShoRs hitting Festergut for over 100K by better players than I.

Well, a new Beta patch today fixed that issue:

Shield of the Righteous now deals 609/1828/3656 damage depending on Holy Power. (Old - Deals 20%/60%/120% of Attack Power as damage)
Source

Now, we don't know what the attack power scaling this new version will have, but regardless, I bet we can kiss the massive ShoR crits goodbye. We shouldn't be surprised, this same exact thing happened to warriors with Shield Slam during the WotLK beta.

This just in from Blizzcon!

2010-10-23T17:07:00.002-05:00

We changed it so Divine Plea will generate 3 Holy Power when used so you can start with Holy Power on the pull.

Sexy.

No more nine second build up to our big threat move. We can roll in on a boss and smack him with a 3 HoPo Shield of the Righteous right off the bat.

I'm digging it.

Blizzcon is today...cont'd.

2010-10-22T14:52:00.001-05:00

And the "Big" announcement is . . . Defense of the Ancients map for SCII and Demon Hunter class for Diablo III.

Seriously?

Is that it?

Color me disappointed.

Blizzcon is today

2010-10-22T09:42:00.003-05:00

So, just in case none of you have heard . . .

Blizzcon starts today

Every Blizzcon has a "big" announcement, so what is going to be the "big" announcement this year?

Many people have speculated about what it will be, and I have my thories, but I'm keeping them to myself. Mainly, because I don't want to look like an asshat when I'm wrong (when have I ever cared about that before?).

Oh well, we'll find out soon enough.

I can hear the cries in PVP now

2010-10-14T07:02:00.008-05:00

Don't mind the UI (it is still a work in progress after the patch). I had to just go with it, as it was raid time.

Anyone notice something a bit off here? How about that 77142 over the bosses head? Yep, my ShotR with 3 HoPo and a 7 stack of Gastric Bloat crit for over 77k.

Incoming nerf to ShotR due to PVP concerns.

sometimes, this game feels like a kick in the . . .

2010-10-13T14:23:00.000-05:00

So,

4.0.1 was released yesterday, and with it comes all of the systems and class mechanics changes for the upcoming expansion. There are posts all over the place about which stats changed, were added, or were removed, but not many people have been talking about the changes to gear and how that effects their ability to tank. Let's look at my unbuffed stats before and after the patch.

3.3.5

armor = 35778

health = 52849

dodge = 27.63%

parry = 21.69%

block = 14.88% (44.88% with Holy Shield up)

4.0.1

armor = 27365

health = 51706

dodge = 23.88%

parry = 19.71%

block = 21% (36% with Holy Shield up)

Effective Health

So, my armor went down by ~24% and my health went down by ~3% also.

Avoidance

My dodge went down by 3.75%. My parry went down by 1.98%.

However, my block went up by 6.12% without Holy Shield, but went down by 8.88% when the Holy Shield buff is up.

Sucks to be me.

Prot Pallys . . . The Next Generation

2010-09-17T16:31:00.003-05:00

Just in case any of you don't know, the PTR for patch 4.0.1 (a.k.a the pre-Cataclysm patch) is available. This is the patch that will bring all of the class mechanics changes, as well as, the new talent trees that we have all been so fervently debating since the NDA was lifted.

A small aside

There has been a considerable amount of "sky is falling" sentiment on the forums over the way HoPo (Holy Power) has been shoe-horned in and how Grand Crusader procs conspire to destroy the protection paladin's beautiful and elegant 969 rotation. I have mostly tried to avoid commenting on how the rotation felt because I wasn't in the beta, so I didn't really know. I didn't feel there was any reason for me to just regurgitate here what other people were saying. I have made a post or two about how we can map out the "rotation". But have tried to spend my (often infrequent) posts on things that were not opinion, but were hard dataz.

Also, I do really like the new "power auras" that Blizzard has added to the game, but they need to add one for when paladins are at 3 HoPo (more about this in a moment).

What it is

For those who have been living under a rock, Paladins now have a secondary resource called Holy Power (HoPo) and here is how it looks in the UI.

How it feels

Between my raiding schedule, and other, real life, issues, I haven't been able to spend as much time on the PTR as I would like. However, last night, i got to spend about an hour beating on taget dummies in trying to get comfortable with our new "rotation". This is all in reference to the single target "rotation". I'll have a later post to discuss the AOE "rotation".

My initial thoughts . . . it is mostly okay.

It doesn't feel as "clunky" to me as it first did. And it certainly doesn't feel as "clunky" as it looks on paper. It mostly feels awkward when you get the rare two GCDs in a row with everything on cooldown and without a Grand Crusader proc.

I have a couple of ideas that could go a long way toward fixing this spec, though.

First, as I mentioned above, Blizzard have added a ingame "Power Auras" functionality to the game. I think this is great! But they need to add a "Power Aura" for whe you get 3 HoPo. The one big drawback to the way the "rotation" works now, is that you really have to watch your action bars to know which button to push when. As a result, you can easily miss the fact that you are at 3 HoPo (since the default unit frames are nowhere near the default action bars).

Next, either Grand Crusader needs to proc more, or one of our 15 sec cooldown abilities need that cooldown lowered. I think adjusting Grand Crusader is the better way to go. I found that I never remembered to cast Avenger's Shield unless I:

a) hit a patch of two GCDs with nothing to do, or

b)had Grand Crusader proc

When Avenger's Shield would just come off cooldown naturally, I found I would forget to use it right then (even though I probably should just to reduce the chance that a Grand Crusader proc is wasted.

There are two ways Blizz can go about this:

1. Increase the proc rate from 20% to 30-35%

2. Leave the percentage at 20%, but add Judgement to the list of spells that can proc Grand Crusader

I prefer option 2 above.

That is all for now. Comments?

PVP -- Alliance versus Horde and the Vengeance Battlegroup

2010-09-07T15:19:00.001-05:00

Months . . . I mean Years Behind.

I spent pretty much all day Sunday and part of Monday PVPing in battlegrounds and Wintergrasp. It is the first serious PVP I have done in the entire expansion (I am years behind, I know). The last time I PVP'd this much, was around the end of BC, when I was PVPing like crazy on my druid. Most people will tell you that many things have changed in PVP from the end of BC until now, but I argue that it is really just "more of the same".

Every Battlegroup is different.

Now, I know that every battlegroup is different, but on Vengeance Horde owns all battlegrounds except Alterac Valley (Alliance wins about 85% of AVs, don't ask me why). On Monday, I did Random Battlegrounds for 4 1/2 hours straight (yes I played WoW most of the day on Labor Day), and still hadn't won one . . . single . . . battle. It was pretty pathetic. So pathetic, in fact, that I had to log off for a little while just to get away from it. I came back a few hours later and finally won ONE battleground (and barely at that) to get the daily random competed. One thing that I noticed that boggles my mind is the fact that Horde is just more organized than Alliance. They run together, work as a team, generally have good healers, you know, all the things it takes to win in group play.

The family that stays together, OWNS!

Why is it that, on my battlegroup anyway, Horde are very good at staying together and moving as a cohesive unit, and Alliance just run around looking for something to hit? It is not uncommon to see Horde players split up into sub-groups and move together all over the battlefield. I haven't rarely seen a solo Hordie in a battleground. I never run into one, but generally 4+.

Go for the Healers first!

A lot of people don't like to admit this, but healers are the key to winning in organized PVP. In the Vengeance battlegroup, it is not uncommon for Alliance to queue up for a Battleground and very have few healers. I got a Warsong Gulch yesterday with literally NO healers in it. Where as the Horde had three very solid heals.

Another thing I need to know is why, more often than not, do I witness Alliance players blindly pounding away on a prot warrior, instead of his pocket healer? In my experience, Horde players do not have this same problem. Kill the healer, kill the team.

The law of averages.

It just boggles my mind that there is such a difference in mentality between Horde and Alliance when it comes time to PVP. I mean, there are sensible, intelligent people playing on both sides, right? Some people may say that the more mature people gravitate to Horde side, but I know that is not always the case, as I know several people on Alliance side that are good PVPers in their own right, and plenty mature (and I am ,of course, not one of them). But everything that I learned studying Anthropology tells me that if you take a group of people as large as a WoW battlegroup is, and divide them into two groups, there should be a pretty even split between the two in ability to perform a specific function, unless you divided the group based on the ability to perform said function.

I think an Anthropologist or Sociologist would have a field day trying to explain the phenomenon that I witnessed over the weekend.

Prot Paladin rotation in Cataclysm?

2010-08-25T15:19:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I posted...been super busy at work. In addition, my A/C broke down last week. No to some people that is not that big a deal, but in Texas, no A/C in August is also known as HELL. This summer has been brutal on A/C units. Mine has broke down twice, and I know at least four other people that have had theirs broken down as well. Anywho.......

**Abbv used in this post:

CS=Crusader Strike

J=Judgement

HW=Holy Wrath

SHoR=Shield of the Righteous/Shield of Righteousness (whatever they decide to call it)

AS=Avenger's Shield

WoG=Word of Glory

So, from what I read, the Prot Paladin rotation in Cataclysm is still clunky. I have been following the beta information religiously, and have been trying to model out the possibilities on how the rotation is shaping up. Theck over at Maintankadin has summed it up the best (imo). The rotation falls basically as follows:

CS-J-X-CS-HW-X-CS-J-X-CS-X-X ... Repeat

The "X" in the rotations are for ShoR, AS, and any other utility abilities. Now, the ShoR we only want to use at three HoPo. So the first "X" after a third CS. Which shapes up like this:

CS-J-X-CS-HW-X-CS-J-SHoR-CS-X-X

With the talent Guarded by the Light, a Prot Paladin's Word of Glory will hit for 30% more, and any overhealing will be converted into a damage absorption shield. Kinda nice for a tank, right? So, to take advantage of that, and to stabilize this rotation more, we are gonna throw a 1 HoPo Word of Glory into the rotation.

CS-J-AS-CS-HW-X-CS-J-SHoR-CS-WoG-X ...Repeat

With the 1 HoPo Word of Glory put into the rotation, the rotation suddenly balances out and is repeatable.

But what about AS you say? Remember, with Grand Crusader, the AS in the rotation will move as GC procs. But disregarding AS's cooldown altogether, we still have the following repeatable rotation:

CS-J-X-CS-HW-X-CS-J-SHoR-CS-WoG-X ...Repeat.

Just put an AS in to any "X" position in the rotation whenever GC procs.

Yep, this rotation seems to be shaping up pretty well.

What do you guys think?

I almost forgot Holy Wrath

2010-08-10T11:12:00.001-05:00

There is an absolutely EPIC thread going on right now dealing with Prot Paladin theory, in which Ghostcrawler has discussed the thought process behind the paladin changes in Cata. Here is the latest:

process behind the paladin changes in Cata. Here is the latest (Source):

Here is the current design we have in our local builds. It might not appear in the next beta build, but could be the one after that. There's also a chance we will have changed it again before you get a chance to try it.

Holy Shield is a 15% block buff with a 20 sec duration. It no longer has stacks and can be overwritten to refresh its duration. It is caused by both Shield of the Righteous and Inquisition. You can Crusader Strike -> Shield of the Righteous over and over if you'd like, but the Shield of the Righteous will hit for much less without 3 stacks (it will hit softer with <3 stacks than it does today, more like TV does in the beta). Likewise, Inquisition will fall off pretty quickly without 3 stacks (with 3 stacks it lasts 12 sec for Prot and 30 sec for Ret), so there is some motivation to go for the longer buff.

The idea is that you can use Shield of the Righteous for single targets or use Inquisition to buff a larger variety of abilities when AE tanking. Furthermore, if you ever let Holy Shield drop off, you should be able to get it back up pretty quickly at full strength.

There is a chance we will allow Word of Glory to also proc Holy Shield, but we're very concerned about the right way to play becoming to just spam heals on yourself. We still don't want you to have to keep up both Inquisition and a 3 stack Shield of the Righteous at once, because we think that crosses the line into being too maintenance-y, and once you can do it, you'll feel like you have to do it.

So, in the current model, Holy Shield is a buff that is maintained by casting SHoR or Inquisition that lasts 20 seconds. Its stacks were removed, and now it is a flat 15% block as long as it is up. Let's look at how this change will effect our rotations.

Crusader Strike is our HoPo generator and has a 4 second cooldown. So, we should be able to hit a 3 HoPo SHoR every 16 seconds (which will reapply the Holy Shield buff). Even if we miss one of our Crusader Strikes, we should still be able to reapply our Holy Shield with a 3 HoPo SHoR just as it is falling off (at the 20 second mark).

If, we miss two out of three Crusader Strikes, then we have to make that interesting choice that Ghostcrawler keeps talking about...mitigation vs. threat. We could go for mitigation and and just cast a 1-2 HoPo SHoR (less threat) to make sure our Holy Shield doesn't drop, or we could go without Holy Shield for ~4 seconds, and wait for our 3 stack of HoPo to hit our SHoR for more threat.

Also, Inquisition is in the Prot mix, but much more limited than the Ret version. For Prot Paladins, Inquisition will last for 4 seconds per HoPo to a max of 12 seconds. Inquisition will also put up the Holy Shield buff. So, Ghotscrawler's idea is that we will cast SHoR when tanking single targets, and cast Inquisition on when tanking many targets (since Inquisition would buff the damage of our AOE damage abilities).

This is a further refinement to the "different rotations for single and multi tanking" mantra. Instead of just replacing Hammer of the Righteous with Crusader Strike, we will now also replace SHoR with Inquisition.

After modeling out our possible rotation, there is something that I think still need work...Crusader Strike is a 4 second cooldown, but the GCD (as we all know) is 1.5 seconds, so we end up losing .5 seconds out of every 5 in order to cast CS as soon as it is available.

I also thought that we had too many free GCDs, and as such, we needed some other ability to be a "filler" ability (akin to a warrior's Devastate).

But then I remembered Holy Wrath. We are going to want to hit this every cooldown to make sure our physical damage reduction debuff stays up on our target(s).

I actually am really starting to like how the rotation is shaping up.

What about you guys?

Star Wars!

2010-08-05T09:00:00.002-05:00

I got some very cool news yesterday afternoon. I have been invited to participate in a three day beta event for Star Wars: The Old Republic this coming weekend. Any plans I had for this weekend just got cancelled.

Having played (and LOVED) both of the Knights of the Old Republic games, I cannot begin to explain how excited I am to have the opportunity to help shape this game's development.

The beta is still under a strict NDA at this time, so I will not be able to post any thing else about the game for you guys, but rest assured that I will be playing this pretty much non-stop all weekend and giving all the insightful feedback and commentary you can come to expect from me (LAWL).

May the Force be with you.

A small side note

2010-08-04T10:30:00.002-05:00

New look around here.

...also...

Someone needs to buy me this RITE NAOW!!!!!

http://www.thegamerator.com/index.htm

Guilded again . . . and a little back story.

2010-08-04T09:24:00.004-05:00

I first joined Nerd Rage in May of 2009. Ulduar was still pretty new, and they had just downed XT. Many of the people in Nerd Rage were people that I raided with in BC. Some are also real life friends.

So, once I decided that I was ready to commit to a raiding guild, I app'ed to Nerd Rage, and was brought in that very night to roll into Ulduar. I was wearing a mix of blues and Naxx-10 loot at the time, whereas everyone in Nerd Rage was decked out in full sets of Naxx-25 gear. So, like I said, I walked in that Tuesday night, and started out as DPS (my gearset for which was even worse). I DPS'd through the first four bosses, getting a huge upgrade to my shoulders from XT in the process (I still love how those shoulders looked). Then we got to Kologarn, and I was asked to switch to my tank spec and tank the adds from the arm. Largely because of the gear difference, I had to bust my ass to grab and hold aggro on those piles of stone, and I was still losing one every now and again.

This was the night that I realized that consecrate was no longer the mob glue it was back in BC. We didn't get Kologarn down that night, but we would the next week. I would go on to be present for each and every progression boss kill in 25-man all the way through Sindragosa (except Professor Putricide). I was a member of Nerd Rage, and I was proud of wearing that guild tag.

Anyway, I ramble. So when most of my friends left Nerd Rage, I left Nerd Rage as well, but I didn't join the guild that they all went to, because the scheduling didn't match up with my availability.

So, last night I get a whisper from one of my friends saying that she was trying to convince her raid leader to invite me to raids if they have room. I'm game, because otherwise, I'm just twiddling my thumbs until Cataclysm. So, I get the invite, and they are doing Halion 25. I think, "cool, I haven't downed this guy on 25-man yet".

So, after the second pull, I get a whisper from the guild leader asking if I would mind if he sends me a guild invite. I think to myself, "Am I really that good?"

I tell him that as long as he is okay with my being late to raid some nights because of my conflict with their starting time, then sure, send the invite. He says he is cool with it and, long story short, I am now a member of a guild again.

So then we proceed to work on Halion-25. I never got this kill in Nerd Rage, so needless to say, once we got the kill (on the last pull of the night, btw), something popped up on my screen (ignore the date, I pulled this pic from the internet, as I didn't take a screenshot) :

Now, if I could only get Lich King-25 down and work on some ICC hard modes (other than Gunship).

Holy Shield Slam!

2010-08-03T09:01:00.009-05:00

According to Ghostcrawler, here is the latest Prot Paladin design (Source):

Here is how Prot paladins are working in our current beta build. You might not see these changes in the next beta build, but in the one after that. Things are still in a high degree of flux however.
Shield of the Righteous -- Now consumes Holy Power to cause damage.
Holy Shield -- Now a passive ability that causes your Shield of the Righteous to provide 5% block per stack of Holy Power consumed. In other words, you never click Holy Shield. You just click Shield of the Righteous and buff yourself.
Hammer of the Righteous -- Now generates Holy Power but shares a cooldown with Crusader Strike. Almost all talents that affect one or the other will affect both. The intention is you use Crusader Strike -> Shield of the Righteous for single target and Hammer of the Righteous -> Shield of the Righteous for multitarget.
Avenger's Shield -- No real change, but it still hits pretty hard. Both CS and HotR can proc Grand Crusader to lower the Avenger's Shield cooldown.
Vindication -- can be caused only by Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous.
Holy Wrath -- With the above changes, we think Prot paladins have enough rotational buttons to hit, so we are downplaying Holy Wrath. Holy Wrath is really intended as a Ret filler spell (for when other attacks are on cooldown). Prot could technically use Holy Wrath, but we aren't providing any talent hooks.
Consecration -- Now on a 10 sec duration with a 30 sec cooldown. The Hallowed Ground talent makes it cheaper and hit harder -- it does not affect duration. Use Consecration when you need it, but you can't spam it. This is consistent with the AE changes we are making to all tanks.
With these changes in mind, Prot will be thinking about buttons such as these:
Single Target: Judgement, Crusader Strike, Shield of the Righteous, Avenger's Shield.
Multi-target: Judgement, Consecration, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of the Righteous, Avenger's Shield, possibly Exorcism.
None of this includes things like Seals, Inquisition, defensive cooldowns, Word of Glory, etc.

What I like:

I kinda dig the fact that Holy Shield is going away as a button to push, and becoming a buff to block granted by Shield of Righteousness. Hopefully that stays.
I also like the "use CS on singles and HotR on groups" setup.
Also interesting, is the intended inclusion of Avenger's Shield into our rotation (it's not just for pulling anymore).
The removal of Holy Wrath as our de-buff spell, changing back what had become almost a direct clone of Thunderclap

What I don't like:

Consecration being a 10 sec duration with a 30 sec cooldown. I don't mind the cooldown, but it will have to hit like a truck in order to do it's job if we can only keep it up 33% of the time. I mean, if it is not going to be up 100% of the time for mobs to "bake" in, then it will need to hit a LOT harder than it does now, or else I fore see prot paladins never using it.
Vindication is only applied by CS or HotR. Each of those is on a cooldown (and share a cooldown with eachother). I still don't like that warriors and druids can put their attack power debuff on all mobs in one GCD. Death Knights can do it in two. Paladins, however, can only put their attack power debuff on one mob at a time. Seeing as how we are the "AOE tanks", doesn't that seem a little bit odd to you? (I understand that AOE tanking is going to be toned down quite a bit in Cata, but still, I feel my point is valid)

Then when someone asked about how hard ShoR was going to hit with three stacks of Holy Power, Ghostcrawler went on to say (Source):

It will be a hard-hitting button, especially with 3 stacks. I'd guess your highest damage ability.

That makes me happy. I, personally, miss our "Holy shield slam" being our hardest hitting ability.

Here is my build....

2010-08-02T10:34:00.001-05:00

So, messing around with the Talent Calc from wowhead, I decided to try to build up a raid tanking spec.

**Yes, I know these trees are not final, and are subject to change**

Based on previous Blizzard comments, I assume that Cataclysm will treat tanks much more like ICC than any of the other raids in Lich King. Meaning...tanks will face slower, trickle-down deaths, as opposed to burst death. So with that in mind, here is the build I came up with:

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#scbbZcrhfRrRRGo

It is a 7/34/0 build. Some notes:

2/2 Guarded by the Light (5th tier Prot tree) to create self shields to help supplement the healers trying to keep us up
3/3 Divinity (1st tier Holy tree) to help boost incoming healing as much as possible
2/2 Last Word (2nd tier Holy tree) to make most (if not all) of our Word of Glory's crit, which by extention, will increase the size of the shield we create on ourselves through Guarded by the Light

Obviously, this is a max-mitigation spec, and it (or something like it) will be the spec I roll into Cataclysm with. Once I feel like I am not squishy, then I might change my spec for more threat (like Crusade 1st tier Ret tree).

Healing on the priest

2010-07-28T14:35:00.001-05:00

I have found, that healing on a Disc priest in a 5-man, is ridiculously easy. At a 5.1k gear score, my shields absorb so much damage, I can heal (even undergeared tanks) while sleeping. Throw a shield, and a PoM (Prayer of Mending), and go afk for the rest of the pull. I have healed on my paladin, my druid, and now my priest. Neither Paladin or Druid healing compares to the the Disc priest in my mind. The amount of breathing room that Power Word:Shield affords you, makes healing much less stressful.

Since I am now guildless, I think I might respec the paladin's second spec to Holy again (it is Ret right now). Maybe I just need to spend some extra time healing on the paladin in order to get more comfortable with the Holy Paladin style. I know, that the paladin's holy gear is 5.1k gear score (same as my priest). But one, seems SOOOOOO much easier than the other.

Anyone have any opinions, tips, or tricks?

No more Nerd Raging . . .

2010-07-28T13:29:00.001-05:00

Today I said farewell to my guild.

I don't want to get into specifics, but needless to say, I felt like I didn't belong in Nerd Rage anymore. It certainly is not the guild that I joined a year and a half ago. Maybe it is just the summer doldrums, or maybe too many of my long time WoW friends have already left, but for whatever reason, Nerd Rage just doesn't feel like home anymore.

New Beta Build, New paladin mechanics...again

2010-07-23T07:39:00.003-05:00

Well, a new Beta Build was deployed last night, and paladins are once again seeing sweeping changes. Here is the list according to MMOChampion.com:

Holy
Divine Plea is now trained at level 44, down from 58. Now reduces the amount healed by all your healing spells.
Concentration Aura is now trained at level 42, down from 54.
Holy Wrath is now trained at level 28, down from 50.
Lay on Hands is now trained at level 16, down from 38.
Seal of the Pure is now named Seal of Insight.
Tower of Radiance - Directly healing the target of your Beacon of Light has a 33/66/100% chance to generate Holy Power.
Healing Light - Increases the amount healed by your Word of Glory and the damage and healing of your Holy Shock by 10/20/30%.

Protection
Hand of Protection is now trained at level 18. Down from 42.
Divine Protection now reduces all damage taken by 20% for 10 sec. (Down from 50% for 12 sec) Cooldown lowered from 5 min to 1 min. Spells restrictions (Divine Shield/Divine Protection/Hand of Protection/Avenging Wrath) removed.
Devotion Aura is now trained at level 18, down from level 22.
Blessing of Kings is now trained at level 22, up from 18.
Hammer of the Righteous now causes 160% weapon damage as holy damage. (Old - 3 times your main hand damage per second as Holy damage.)
Shield of the Templar has been revamped - Reduces the cooldown of Avenger's Shield by 2/4 sec, Guardian of Ancient Kings by 10/20 min, and increases the amount absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10/20%.
Holy Shield now Holy Shield - Consumes Holy Power to grant 5% block per stack of Holy Power and deals 97.8 Holy damage for every attack blocked. Lasts 15 sec. / 10% of base mana, Instant cast
Sacred Duty has been revamped - Increases the critical strike chance of your Hammer of the Righteous by 5/10%. In addition, your Hammer of the Righteous critical strikes have a 50/100% chance of making your next Judgement a critical strike. /
Grand Crusader - When your Crusader Strike deals damage, it has a 10/20% chance of refreshing the cooldown on your next Holy Wrath.
Ardent Defender is now a Tier 7 talent (Up from Tier 4). Cooldown increased from 2 to 3 min.
Judgements of the Wise is now a primary skill.

Retribution
Inquisition is now Exclusive with Holy Shield.
Seal of Vengeance is now named Seal of Truth and its Holy Vengeance renamed to Censure.
Zealotry now has a 2 min cooldown, down from 30 min. Now lasts 15 sec. (Down from 30 sec)
Wrath of the Lightbringer gone.
Acts of Sacrifice *New* - Decreases the cooldown by 10/20/% and mana cost by 10/20% of your Hand of Freedom and Hand of Salvation.
Righteous Vengeance is now Inquiry of Faith - Increases the periodic damage done by your Seal of Truth by 20/40/60%.
Swift Retribution now also increases damage by 3%. Moved from Tier 6 to Tier 5.
Sanctified Retribution is gone.
Improved Crusader Strike is gone.
Heart of the Crusader is gone.
Sanctity of Battle no longer reduces the cooldown of Exorcism.
Templar's Verdict is now a primary skill of Retribution.
Communion *New* - Your Judgement grants the Replenishment effect to up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 1% of their maximum mana per 5 sec for 15 sec.
Improved Judgement no longer decreases the cooldown of Judgement.
Judgements of the Wise is now a primary skill.
Selfless Healer (Tier 5) - Increases the healing of your Word of Glory by 30/60% when used to heal others.
Divine Purpose is now a Tier 4 talent - Your Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm and Inquisition have a 40% chance to generate Holy Power.
Divine Storm is now a Tier 3 talent.

What a wall of changes. My thoughts:

The whole "Inquisition" vibe in the Ret tree is very cool. Finally, Rets get talents and abilities that seem to match the coolness factor of the Tier2 Judgement Armor.
Divine Protection (a.k.a. bubblewall) cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 1 minute. Damage reduction reduced from 50% to 20%. This is very analogous to the Warrior's Shield Wall.
The OP version of Holy Shield (I touched on in this post) has been changed to something much more reasonable, but still cool.
Ardent Defender is now our 31 point talent.

Speaking of Ardent Defender...It doesn't mention it in the notes above, but if you go look at the new talent trees here, you will notice that the "below 35%" requirement on Ardent Defender has been removed. THANK GOD. It retains it's Guardian Spirit like effect which is also cool.

Another thing not mentioned in the notes above, but notated here, is the fact that Righteous Fury will now apply the threat multiplier to ALL damage, not just Holy Damage. This makes it okay for us to use Crusader Strike (which is pretty clear what the Devs want us doing).

Also mentioned in a previous post by Ghostcrawler, is the fact that Spiritual Attunement is gone. No more mana from heals received. We will now regen our mana the same way the Ret does, with Judgements of the Wise. This is a big change, and we will just have to see how it works out. Obviously, I don't think that Blizzard wants to gimp our ability to generate threat, but it may take a little more thought on the part of the player now (a.k.a. not a bad thing).

The Cataclysm Paladin

2010-07-21T14:58:00.008-05:00

So . . .

It would appear by my comments in the previous post, that I misunderstood what the Devs were saying about the introduction of Holy Power. It is not replacing mana, rather, it is an additional resource that augments certain abilities.

Lots of other bloggers have already talked about it, but the best explanation I have read is that Holy Power is kinda like a reverse combo points (that only go to three). Instead of stacking on your target, they stack on yourself. Some of your abilities generate Holy Power, some of them drain Holy Power and are improved based on the number of stacks you have. For instance, the tooltip for Holy Shield reads:

Increases your chance to block by 30% for 10 sec, and deals 79 Holy damage for every attack blocked. Consumes Holy Power to extend duration by 10 sec per stack of Holy Power.

So, we have a 1 minute cooldown that (if used with full Holy Power) will last 40 seconds.

Think about that. In Cataclysm, every block will knock a straight 30% off of damage taken (source). This looks to me like we are going to be able to keep that straight 30% reduction up for 40 out of every 60 seconds.

Yikes!

Can you say OP?

I don't see this going into Cata as is (unless the other tanks have similar abilities that I haven't noticed)

This just in from the Dev Chat

2010-07-17T11:43:00.004-05:00

Q: What is the goal when re-designing the paladin class? How do you plan to change rotations, talents, etc?

A. All of the paladin specializations will make use of a new resource called Holy Power. Holy Power accumulates from using Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and some other talents. Holy Power can be consumed to augment a variety of abilities, including:

An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

We also introduced several new heals for Holy Paladins including Healing Hands (an AoE heal-over-time that is applied to all players standing near the paladin), Light of Dawn (a cone heal with a 30-yard range), as well as a new heal called Divine Light, which is similar to a priest's Greater Heal, and the new instant heal mentioned above, Word of Glory.

Whoa. . .

That is pretty startling news. They are changing the resource system for paladins. So, according to the above quote, Paladins will no longer use mana. Even Holy Paladins.

I am going to have to let my brain chew on this for a while. I'll be back with thoughts later.

Halion and Pursuit of Justice

2010-07-12T12:09:00.001-05:00

So,

We were working on 25-man Halion last night. I am the Twilight realm tank. Which, means I do LOLPROTDPS in phase one. Ah well, such is the life of a tank.

In phase two and three, I tank Halion in the Twilight realm. Now, the strategy we have settled on is as follows . . . I take the portal, aggro Halion, turn him 90 degrees so he is not facing the portal, and then watch for the orbs circling the room. Meanwhile, the rest of the raid all group up on Halion's left rear leg. Now comes the fun part. I hit the "/" key on the num pad to switch from running to walking. Then, once I see the orb just to the right of my toon's right shoulder, I start strafing left. Now walking speed on your toon is the exact same speed as the orbs' travel speed around the edge of the circle. So, once you have the orb in the correct position, then you just strafe left for the rest of the encounter.

Now this is a perfect example of the need for one of the skills I brought up in my Tanking 101 article. Being able to perform your threat rotation while moving.

But I have encountered a problem with this strat. And the problem stems from one talent that is only available to Paladins. Pursuit of Justice. Now, there have been countless times through out this expansion that I have been very happy that I specced into Pursuit of Justice. However, on this fight, it screws with me. Since my movement speed is 15% faster than normal, my walking speed moves 15% faster than the orbs move. So the big question is . . . do I just suck it up and deal with having to adjust on the fly (what I did last night) or do I spec out of Pursuit of Justice and replace it with 2% more crit?

Decisions, decisions.

I don't want to hear it.

2010-07-09T16:35:00.001-05:00

So, I have one extra thought related to the previous post. I don't want to hear anyone say that Blizzard doesn't listen to their customers, or any "Blizzard doesn't care about their customers" remarks.

Here is the evidence that Blizz does pay attention to what we say. Pretty much everyone hated the real name forum thing, so they decided to make a change so that real names are not required for forum use.

Good Game Blizzard.

Sorry about the small posts recently, but I have been pretty busy IRL lately. Hopefully, I will throw up a priest related post soon. :)

RealID and the forums...SIKE!

2010-07-09T13:49:00.001-05:00

Breaking News!

Nethaera on Regarding real names in forums (Source)

Hello everyone,

I'd like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We've been constantly monitoring the feedback you've given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we've decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It's important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it's clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you'll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that

Every Voice Matters, (http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html)and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard's success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime

CEO & Cofounder

Blizzard Entertainment

So, it seems reason has prevailed. The WoW forums are no longer going to require you to display your real name.

All I can say is . . . GOOD.

Please disregard my previous comments, as they no longer apply. :)

RealID and the forums + a new addition to the family!

2010-07-07T09:18:00.001-05:00

Seems like eveyone is talking about this nowadays, so I give you my thoughts.

This is a BAD idea.

I don't post to the official forums often, because the ratio of good, insightful posts to shitty, trollish posts is pretty bad. However, I do know, that if this goes live, then I will definitely NOT be posting to the forums at all. The idea that I have to give out my real name to 11 million potential viewers is pretty terrifying. Now, I am not worried about anyone cyber-stalking me. Though, I do worry about my wife and other friends be stalked. The bigger concern to me is the possible repercussions to my future employment opportunities. We all know that employers do facebook, myspace, twitter, and web searches on potential employees. If your real name is attached to a forum post, then it will show up in a google search of your name.

So, to clarify, if you are applying for a new job, and you posted with your RealID, then your prospective employer will KNOW that you play WoW.

Many people, myself included, like to keep their real life and their game life separate. You spend time with your family and friends outside of the game, and you spend time with your WoW friends and family inside the game. I have lots people who I would consider friends in WoW, whom I do not know IRL. I won't RealID friend them. So far, I have only added two RealID friends (and one of them is my wife). I can really only think of about three more people I would consider adding.

I think the think that really gets my goat (so to speak), is the fact that when RealID was first introduced, it was touted as "optional". You didn't have to participate, but could if you were so inclined. Now, if you want to post in the Technical Support or Customer Support forums, you MUST reveal your real name to the world. Even if you call Blizzard for tech support, more often than not, they direct you to the tech support forums.

*On a happier note*

The wife and I got a new dog over the holiday weekend. He is a 3 month old chocolate lab named . . . Leroy. We got him so that Tika (our 6 year old Malamute/Pyrenees mix) will have a playmate/companion for when we are gone all day.

Also, I would like to take this time to introduce Wisdom, my priest. I got to take him into ICC last night (with a 4k gear score) and he scored a new belt and his rep ring, plus lots of frost badges. He has a long way to go, but I really enjoy playing with the priest. So, I may make some posts about the priest form time to time, at least until Cata comes out.

That is, if the RealID changes to the forums don't drive me away from the game altogether.

Making progress

2010-07-02T11:39:00.001-05:00

Despite horrible attendance issues, and the release of Ruby Sanctum, we are still working on getting our 25-man Lich King kill. The majority of the guild has gotten the kill on 10-man, but we are primarily a 25-man guild, so the 25-man kill is important to us.

To me, Lich King is a great fight, where, regardless of gear (or ICC buff), you have to master the mechanics of the fight to beat it. You can't just power your way through it. Which is why we are having such a hard time with it, I suppose. Nerd Rage may not be the best guild on our server, but we DO have the best DPS on our server. That is one place where we excel. Take last night for example. In our many tries against LK last night, we routinely had 6-8 players over the 10k DPS mark. We can almost blow through phase1 only getting one Shambling (...almost...).

Despite a freak wipe one Phase1 once, we really do have that phase down and clean. The first transition is getting cleaner just about every time we do it as well.

Now, Phase2. That is where the test is. The second set of Valks, immediately followed by the Defile is rough. But even that is getting better (if only we could get people to stop dropping Defiles in the middle of the platform).

The big news, though, is that we finally pushed LK into the second transition on 25-man. Last night was the first time that we got through Phase2.

There is definitely some progress being made. I truly feel like we are only a few more pulls from a kill.

This just in...

2010-06-23T09:56:00.001-05:00

Extended downtime sucks! No raid last night, because Eitrigg wasn't up at 7:30PM. Or 8:00PM. Or 8:30PM.

I understand the need for downtime, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating when it happens.

The Kingslayer!

2010-06-15T08:24:00.001-05:00

It has been a while since I posted (mostly because I can't post at work anymore), but I hope to start making more regular posts.

Finally! After battling this boss for months. After battling attendance issues. After all of the people unable to figure out Defiles.

I am finally Gathorc the Kingslayer.

So what if I have only killed him on 10-man at this point . . . I killed that bastard!

My expansion is now complete. Not that I am planning on quitting until the x-pac. I will still play, and raid, every week. We got hardmodes to work on, and I just LOVE raiding.

What 15% will do for ya

2010-05-13T16:40:00.001-05:00

Monday night, we have our “last chance” ICC 10 that one of our healers runs every week for people who have not gotten around to doing an ICC 10 earlier in the week. I was slated to go as DPS, as by the time I signed up, there were already 3 other tanks signed up.

“Great”, I thought, “I could use some time on the ‘ole 2-hander”

You know, I was really looking forward to working on my DPS chops, because I have problems pulling the numbers I should considering my gear level. My Ret set has a 5520 GearScore, and I average about the same in DPS.

So raid time comes and goes, and only ONE of the three signed-up tanks is even online. 30 minutes later, I am changing specs and putting my EH set of gear on.

Ah, the life of a tank.

It is now getting close to one hour after scheduled raid start, so we start pulling trash with only nine in raid. No biggie, we are just gonna clear some trash while we wait for more people to logon. With a raid of 3-4 mains, and the rest alts, we commence to one shot Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship, and Saurfang. Not a bad start.

Then our 10th (which is also an alt) logs on.

Next up, Plague wing. One shot all three of those bosses. We are on a roll! Then, we go to do Dreamwalker while we have the heals (you never know when someone will have to logoff, you know). Gravy. Then, the RL announces that we are gonna go ahead and head to Sindragosa. Another one-shot.

At this point we have cleared the first four bosses, Plague, and Frostwing without a single wipe in about 2 hours and 20 minutes. So we head over to the Blood wing, and Blood Queen is the weekly. As a side note, in our 25s, every time Blood Queen is the weekly, we wipe on Blood Princes. We can’t explain it. Any other time, we can one-shot Princes without issue, but if Blood Queen is the daily, we wipe every time. It’s some kind of mental block.

Anyway, so we get the weekly, and head in. Clear the trash without too many problems. Then we commence to one-shot Princes. I got to dps this fight as you don’t need two physical tanks on 10-man. So, curse broken, we move up the ramp to start on the trash leading to BQL and, BAM, wipe. Our first wipe of the night is on a trash pack.

Figures.

So we then down BQL without too much of a problem. Now it is 11:40PM and raid is scheduled to go until 12 midnight. So there is only one thing lift to do. Let’s go have a look at Lich King. Now, this is not the first time I have pull the Lich King, but it is the first time I have done it on 10-man.
So we pull it, get through phase 1, first transition, and into phase 2 before we wipe to defile.

Not too bad for a couple of mains, and a bunch of alts just looking to farm a few badges.

Holy Paladin!

2010-04-30T19:04:00.000-05:00

So . . .

Attendance issues are slowing killing our raid progress, and by extension the morale of the guild in general. It makes me sad. I have been with Nerd Rage since May 2009, and I have come to like quite a few of my fellow guild mates. Two weeks ago, we downed Sindragosa on 25 and took our first look at Lich King 25. Morale was at an all time high.

I knew that we were at least a couple of weeks away from a LK kill, but I was also confident that we would get that kill. The one I have been waiting this whole expansion for. To finally get a chance to take down the Lich King is something that I have waited for since Warcraft III.

What has changed since then? People stopped showing up. We went from having 30+ people online on Tuesday nights to having 13-14 people online. All 25 man raids have stopped for lack of bodies. It seems people have taken their “pre-expansion” breaks before we were even done with this one. I don’t understand this personally. I can’t stand to leave a job unfinished.

So last night was another no-show raid night. 13 people online at “pull” time. So, since I had cleared my schedule for raid night, and no raid was happening, I thought I would respec my second spec as Holy, and try a pug as a healer. This would mark the first time I seriously healed on my paladin since WotLK launched. My holy gear is a mishmash of ilvl 200-264 pieces that I have picked up on offspec rolls when no one else wanted them throughout this expansion. So I queue up for my first healing duty in WotLK, and what heroic do I get . . . Halls of Reflection. I immediately think, “oh shit”.

Surprisingly, it went pretty well. There were ZERO deaths throughout the entire run. I figured out that I didn’t even have all of my abilities key bound when I tried to cleanse someone, and couldn’t find the button. Then, during one really intense moment, I tried to drop a Lay on Hands to the tank, and couldn’t find that either. Good times! Regardless, we got through the entire instance without a single death. I credit the other four people in my party for this, because, I was certainly not up to form for Halls of Reflection.

10s vs. 25s

2010-04-26T14:23:00.001-05:00

Does anyone else feel like World of Warcraft is becoming the test bed for Blizzard's new MMO? This has been an idea floating around in the back of my mind since Ulduar. It seems like every patch, there is some big change; something that effects raiding a great deal. For instance . . .

Today, Blizzard announced their changes in raids for Cataclysm. To sum up:

1. 10s and 25s will share a lockout. So you can do the 10-man version or 25-man version of a raid each lockout, but not both.

2. 10s and 25s will drop the same gear. Not just the same ilvl, but literally, the SAME gear and the same type of badges. 25s will just drop more of it per kill. (Source)

Now, I don't have a problem with these changes. As a matter of fact, I kinda like 'em. When WotLK dropped, I was in a very casual guild of RL friends. We never had enough people online to even think about 25-man raiding, so we came into WotLK looking forward to the ability to progress through the entire expansion on 10-man. As it turns out, just after Ulduar dropped, I left that guild and joined the one I am in now.

All things considered, I still think I prefer 10-man raiding. It feels much more like a team, like a close knit group working together to solve a problem, and much less like a job where you have to tolerate people you don't like because you need them to get the job done.

The one thing that made dealing with 25s worth it was the higher ilvl loot that 25s provided. In Cataclysm, that will be gone. I honestly think that both formats being equal, most people would prefer 10s to 25s.

So the big question is . . . come Cataclysm, why would anyone run a 25-man again?

Initial thoughts on the Paladin Preview

2010-04-14T10:57:00.003-05:00

New Paladin Spells

Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin's shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

Interesting . . . A nice AoE snap aggro tool. Very similar to warrior’s Shockwave, but still retaining the paladin flavor

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

Effectively does the same thing as having Consecration heal friendlies. The paladin still has to physically go to where the healing is needed. In 5-mans, this is awesome. In raids, it will need to be used a little more judiciously. All that said . . . I like it. A paladin, being a holy warrior, SHOULD be wading into battle even if it is just to heal his compatriots.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

This spell seems pretty cool. I love how it is a single spell, but has a different effect for each of the three specs. Hopefully, the artwork on this temp pet will be new (not a rehash of the Val’kyr art).

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.

I like the Crusader Strike change, but it is not a surprise at all. Regardless of the post I made yesterday, I pretty much thought that Crusader Strike would become the low level “strike” for paladins. The big question is . . . what is the talented improvement/replacement strike in the Ret tree going to be?

Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.

The Cleanse change is pretty much old news.

Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.

Further simplification of the Blessings system is more a quality of life change than anything else. Also, it helps make bringing 3-4 paladins to a raid seem less mandatory.

Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

Holy Shock becomes a core ability (I called it yesterday!!!!!). Although it seems it is going to be all healing – all the time.

New Talents and Talent Changes

We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we're considering is lowering Divine Shield's duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.

I knew this was coming, so I go nothing to say at this time.

We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.

/agree . . . Make it so.

We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don't feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.

Another quality of life change. But one that I am fond of.

We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.

The thought of a “heal bomb” that is bigger than Holy Light is a little disturbing at first. But this is not an unexpected change.

Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.

No news here

Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.

Again . . . Called it yesterday.

Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

So we are going to be further cemented into the “block tank” niche.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
These are all pretty much as expected, and as such, I have nothing new or interesting to add.

Today is the day

2010-04-14T09:07:00.001-05:00

So today, we will find out if my predictions from yesterday are even close (probably not).

For now, all we have to do is wait . . .

One little change that can fix paladins . . .

2010-04-13T19:10:00.001-05:00

It was announced earlier today on the European forums that the paladin preview, originally slated for release on Friday the 16th, will now be released Wednesday the 14th. So I am getting this in right under the wire. (source)

I have one, single change that could go a long way to fix many of the Paladin’s issues.

What is it?

Holy Shock becomes a trained ability. First learned at level 10. But, it is reverted to the original version of Holy Shock, where it only does damage (there will be a talent deep in the Holy tree to add the healing component back to it).
This adds another button to the Ret/Prot rotations. So, this one move makes the Ret rotation more complex, and at the same time, kills the 969 rotation for Prot. This also follows the trend we are seeing with Blizz giving low level players more buttons to push.

I do believe that Blizz wants us to choose between different spells whether we are tanking a single mob, or a pack of mobs. So, we Prot paladins need a new single target threat generator. Hello Holy Shock.

Because of this one change, Beacon of Light moves up to the spot in the holy tree where Holy Shock is now, but is otherwise unchanged. In Wrath of the Lich King, Beacon is pretty OP. In the new model of mana management we will see in Cataclysm, it will be a real and serious choice as to whether or not a paladin can afford to keep Beacon up through an entire fight (I doubt they will be able to).

Then, an AoE heal spell (named Aura of Radiance or something like that) is added to the top of the Holy tree (where Beacon of Light sits now).

Thoughts on other changes or new spells . . . .

Paladins need a Gap Closer of some sort. Not that I want a clone of Charge, per say, but we need an ability to get to the mobs quickly. I mean, over the years I have become pretty good at face pulling, but come on.

Paladins need a reliable interrupt that is off the GCD, and that has a short cooldown (8-10 seconds).

Unlike most people, I have no problem with our two “cooldowns”. So one of ours is automatic . . . so what? It comes into play right when you need it to. I can’t tell you how many fights have been salvaged and downed because of Ardent Defender kicking in (I am positive we downed Heroic Gormok sooner because of Ardent Defender). I don’t think it is OP, though, because we only have the one cooldown that we can reliably use for scripted events. So do we need another cooldown? Not in my opinion.

That is all I got for now. I guess we will see tomorrow.

Tanking 101

2010-03-25T17:15:00.001-05:00

I have been tanking as a paladin in WoW a long time (since about 2005). Not as long as some of you, but longer than most. I regularly tanked Blackrock Depths, Stratholme, and Scholomance before Burning Crusade launched. I tanked Kara and Zul’Aman pre-nerf during Burning Crusade. I have tanked every encounter in Wrath except Algalon, Sindragosa, and the Lich King himself (so far).

Over the past couple of months, using the Random dungeon tool, which is awesome (thanks Blizz!), I have encountered many people who either don’t know how to play, or don’t care to know how to play. While leveling alts, I usually queue as DPS. In the randoms that I have done as a DPS player, I have seen some truly terrible tanks. I have also seen some good ones, but those seem like they are getting few and far between as the need for Frost Emblems dimishes.

So I decided that I wanted to do my part to try and impart some wisdom to the new tanks in the game. Sometimes these are converted DPS’ers that enjoy the quick queue, sometimes these are new players who have only recently gotten their first character to level 80. Either way, there are certain things that every tank (regardless of class) needs to know and do.

Here are my top 10 keys to being a successful tank:

10. Do your homework – Right or wrong, as a tank you are generally looked at as the leader. This means you need to know the bosses abilities. You more than anyone else need to know the fight’s mechanics. This is the role you have chosen. Take some extra time and make sure that you perform at your best by preparing beforehand.

9. Learn to position mobs – You need to understand that how you position and move mobs will directly affect your party member’s ability to DPS those mobs. Especially if you have a melee DPS’er in your group, don’t move mobs unless absolutely necessary. The less the mobs move, the more your DPS’ers can actually DPS, and the quicker the mobs go down.

8. Face the boss away from the party – This goes hand in hand with Mob positioning, but I felt it was so important that it deserved its own entry. Most bosses have some kind of frontal cone damage ability (cleave, breath, fireball, slime spray, flamethrower, etc . . .). It is imperative that only the tank get hit by these abilities.

7. Learn to strafe – This is important to everyone, not just tanks. Moving backwards is at 50% normal speed. Except for certain specific situations, there is pretty much no reason to ever walk backwards.

6. Know your threat “rotation” – Rotation is in quotes because only one tanking class currently uses a true rotation. The others use a priority system where their abilities are prioritized from most effective to least effective when it comes to generating threat. Get to know how your class most effectively generates threat. Then commit it to muscle memory so that you can generate threat without thinking about it.

5. Learn to produce threat while moving – Once you have that whole strafing thing down, and have committed you threat “rotation” to memory, then learn to combine the two. Get good at moving the mob and continuing to produce threat while moving them. This can be the difference in holding threat or losing it if your DPS’ers outgear you by a sizable margin.

4. Be mindful of your healer – There are only few things that frustrate a healer more than a tank that can’t be bothered to wait for his healer to refill their mana pool. One of those things, though, is a tank that constantly moves out of LOS (Line of Sight) of their healer. In any challenging content, the last thing you want is a frustrated healer. So, before starting that next pull, take a peek at your healer’s mana pool. Also, don’t grab a pack of mobs and immediately then duck around a corner. Both of those are bad, m’kay?

3. Never give a boss your back – If you need to run away from a boss, or move a boss, NEVER turn your back to them and run away. You cannot dodge, parry, or block (if a shield user) from behind. Also, you can do little or none of your threat moves (depending on class) while not facing the boss. If you need to move, strafe instead. You move just as fast, but can continue producing threat and will not gimp your dodge and parry.

2. Situational Awareness – “Keep your head on a swivel.” That is what my old football coach used to always tell us. Know where you are, but also know what is going on around you. As a tank, it is your job to grab the attention of every mob that is engaged. DPS’ers tend to do more damage when they are a.) not running for their lives, or b.) still alive. If you are tanking a group and a ranged mob aggros to your healer, you have to do something about that RIGHT NOW. Any mob hitting your healer is a priority.

1. Don’t be a “Rockstar” – This is something that I never would have added before, but there is a new attitude with tanks recently, kinda like most of them think that their shit don’t stink. They figure since tanks are in such demand, that they can act like asshats and still get a group anytime they want. Remember that as a tank, you are still part of a TEAM. Whether it is a 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man, a team is only as strong as its weakest member. I know I would rather group with a tank that has a 4k gear score that is polite and knowledgeable rather than a “rockstar” with a 6k gear score.

Verdigris Chain Belt

2010-02-19T16:35:00.001-06:00

Verdigris Chain Belt

What a beautiful piece of equipment this is. I have to say that it is one of my favorite pieces of gear that I have ever gotten. Not because of it's stats, which are AMAZING mind you, but because when you put it on, it looks like you are wearing a Professional Wrestling Championship Belt (the model viewer on Wowhead is not displaying this item correctly, but you can see the screen shots).

It looks fly on my dwarf. Just thought I would share with you guys.

BG's.....here I come!

2010-02-18T14:53:00.000-06:00

Battleground and Honor Changes on the Horizon

This sounds awesome to me. I have always enjoyed doing battlegrounds loads more than Arena.

Battlegrounds are fun, and simulate the war effort between the Horde and the Alliance (some simulate better than others).

Arenas, for me anyway, are just a big ball of stress and frantic button mashing.

If the random BG option has the same effect on my as the Random Dungeon tool did, then I suspect I will me pvping a whole lot more in the coming months than I have up until this point during Wrath.

I am pretty excited about this change, and can't wait to load up the PTR to check it out.

Russian UI

2010-02-12T10:38:00.000-06:00

lkbuff.jpg (1600�1000)

This UI is freakin' sweet! How do I get it? Anyone know?

This should be required reading

2010-02-12T10:28:00.001-06:00

Big Bear Butt Blogger � Tanking Test! Druid vs Paladin II

I am struck at how accurate I feel this blog post is. I think everyone should read it (and Part 1) just to try and understand their fellow tanks better.

That is all.

To the ground baby!

2010-02-05T14:48:00.003-06:00

Tanking and Survivability Changes - Wowraid

So today Paladins got a stealth nerf while DKs got a stealth buff.

Now my first reaction (of course) is to be pissed. I mean, who likes getting nerfed?

But let's look at this logically. Paladins do scale better with stamina than warriors or DKs. There is no denying that. But there is also a reason for that. Warriors, DKs, and druids have a base health (Warrior/DK=8121 at level 80, Druid=7417 at level 80) that is higher than a paladin's base health (6934 at level 80). As a side note, paladins actually have the lowest base health of *any* class in the game at level 80 (see for yourself http://www.wowwiki.com/Base_health). So before stamina is even considered, warriors, DKs, and druids have the upper hand in health. Another thing to consider is that warriors also have a slot for extra stats that paladins do not get. The ranged slot, also known as the proverbial "stat stick". So a warrior has more health to start with, and can equip extra stamina that paladins can never get. So Blizzard gave paladins a higher stamina modifier in our tanking tree. Seems like it should balance out.

Well, at ilvl245 (the original intended top end of this expansion) it was balanced. But as we all know, the top tier of gear is now ilvl277 (there are eve some ilvl281 pieces from heroic Lich King). Now, all of the sudden, the extra stamina on the higher ilvl gear is scaling too well for Paladins.

I first time I noticed things were amiss was when I noticed that I had more health than my bear co-tank.

Now I don't want anyone to think that I am QQing because I agree that this nerf was needed. But it really didn't have to be. Back during beta for WotLK, the paladin community screamed to have our base health brought in line with that of the warrior. The Devs refused, and opted to instead give us better stamina scaling to make up the difference.

Well, I guess this will teach them.

Or not.

Ensidia gets World 1st Arthas-25 kill......not.

2010-02-04T16:12:00.003-06:00

Hit the link and then come back.....

Ensidia suspended for 72 Hours

As you can see from the link above, Ensidia got the world first kill on 25-man Arthas. Then, Blizzard promptly banned all accounts involved 72 hours and revoked the achievements and the loot. I may sound like a fanboy here, but in this case I do not think that Ensidia deserved the ban.

For anyone that does not know the details, apparently there was a bug in the encounter where the use of "siege damage" greatly minimized a mechanic in the encounter. Because this particular fight was NOT available on the PTR, how was anyone supposed to know that the fight was not working correctly? Even if they did notice some buggy mechanics, that's nothing out of the ordinary for a new boss fight.

The source of the "siege damage" was a rogue using Saronite Bombs. Now on MMO-Champion, you can see that the rogue did NOT use Saronite Bombs for this encounter only. It is an item that they use regularly. As a matter of fact, according to ElitistJerks, rogues have been using Saronite Bombs as part of their rotation for months.

I just wanted to put my opinion out there. Hopefully Ensidia still get the world first after their 72 hour ban (although I seriously doubt it).

Bang your head!

2010-02-02T10:56:00.001-06:00

Short post today, got lots of things going on at work and with school. I just wanted to chime in and say that there is really nothing like banging your head against content all night to remind you of the good ole’ days.

We went in to work on Putricide on Sunday night, and blew through our 11 remaining tries. We still can’t get him to phase three, so we got some work to do. Phase two seems to be our bane at the moment. Malliable Goo kills people who are too busy DPSing or healing to get out of the way of the bouncing goo. I don’t know. You would think that people could just glance up every time DBM squawks to see where the goo is going, move, and then proceed to go about their business.

In other news, it only took us 3-4 tries to get the Blood counsel down on our second night working on them.

Oh well, we will continue to bang our heads against Putricide until we get this done.

Why all the hate?

2010-01-29T14:37:00.002-06:00

An oldie but goodie

Rhidach and Honor’s Hammer have both blogged about this today, but I feel like I need to put in my own two cents. There has been a trend for the last 4 weeks or so where warriors are QQ’ing to no end over the perceived dominance of paladin tanks. This has perpetuated the official forums (which shouldn’t surprise anyone who lingers there), but has also found its way into much more intelligent forums (like Tankspot.com).

What we need to ask ourselves is, “Why is there such hatred from Warriors toward Paladins?” Honor’s Hammer brought up the possibility that it is because we share gear. Possible, but is that really that much different from BC? In BC, paladins who wanted to tank and who didn’t have access to tier gear largely wore warrior gear with a spellpower weapon. I know I did. Back in BC I was in a guild of RL friends and didn’t progress much (meaning I did a whole lot of Kara, and then worked on my alts). I only saw Gruul’s a couple of times. Never saw Mags. I missed all of Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. I’ve never seen Black Temple (I still need to do that at some point) or Hyjal. I did complete Zul’Aman pre-nerf (with some friends from a much more progressed guild). And through all of that content that I didn’t do, I geared like a warrior, except I used a spellpower weapon. Warriors didn’t care then. Why would they care now.

My suspicion is because they are not being propped up as the “best” tank by the devs anymore. And the less skilled warrior tanks out there don’t like losing tanking spots to more skilled paladin tanks. Notice I didn’t say anything about warriors tanks losing spots to paladin tanks on the basis of their class. The skill of the player behind the keyboard is the key. I have a warrior co-tank who is also our raid leader. He doesn’t QQ about paladin OP’ness. At least not when I’m around. I hate to admit it, but probably 50% of everything I know about tanking (situational awareness, movement, etc), I learned from watching him. He is in no danger of losing his raid spot to a tank of another class.

It’s funny. When DKs were the defacto hard mode tanks, paladins didn’t cry on the forums for a nerf. It was mostly warriors doing that. I think I see where this is going now. It is my suspicion that there are a number of warrior tanks out there who have been tanking since vanilla based on the fact that they rolled a warrior. Now that the other tanking classes are basically on par with warriors, player skill is rearing its ugly head. And many longtime warrior tanks are finding themselves out of a job.

“Don’t blame the player, blame the game.” Wait…..no, absolutely blame the player. The game is fair and balanced (within a couple of % points anyway). If you warriors want to channel your rage at another tank, point it at druids. They are like improved warriors anyway (amirite?). They use the same resource system. Have similar skills and abilities. But have more effective health and do more DPS while tanking than warriors, paladins, or death knights.

Let’s be brothers of the shield and dog pile on the druids!

Communication is Key

2010-01-15T10:33:00.004-06:00

Nerd Rage downed Rotface last night. It was glorious. But it did not come quickly or easily.

Fight mechanics are not our strongpoint as a guild. We really like to just line up, and overpower ever encounter. We have some of the best DPSers on our server, and it shows. I do feel truly blessed, as I firmly believe that our top DPSers could go play with some of the top guilds in the world should they be so inclined.

After downing Festergut on our second try on Tuesday, we took a few shots on Rotface, but all we had to show for it was 8 wipes before we called raid. So Thursday night was dedicated to Rotface. We had all seen the fight. We had all done more research and study. We were ready. We zoned in, ported up to the Plagueworks, and started pulling trash (mmmm……yummy rep). As a side note, we need to get better with the trash pull with the two big Abominations. We always end up getting all of the mobs inside the room and end up with like 6 people alive by the end of that trash pull.

Anyway, once all of the trash was cleared, we buffed up and pulled. I have the easy job. I tanked Rotface. One of our new prot paladin recruits pulled ooze duty (she’s solid BTW. She knows her stuff and is skilled). At first we were using a strat where we blow Heroism right off the bat. But doing it that way, we were hitting a brick. Time and time again, we just couldn’t seem to get him past ~20%. One of our holy paladins suggested that we save Heroism for 30%, as that is when the Mutated Infections seemed to always get out of hand. So we tried that strat, and instantly saw an improvement. We got him down to 17%. Then a wipe at 6.8% on the next pull. We were getting close. Then, during that corpse run, we had the surprise of trash respawns.

/sigh

Usually, on progression nights, if we hit the trash respawn timer, we call it. We usually take that as a sign that we have banged out heads against a wall for long enough. But it was only 10PM at that point. Our raid usually goes until 12. So we cleared trash again (mmmmm……more yummy rep). Once trashed was cleared again, we pulled again, and wiped at 16%. Now we are headed in the wrong direction. While we were running back, I re-explained the Unstable Ooze explosion mechanics. It appeared to me that the raid was running when DBM warns of the ooze explosion, which is before the “ooze projectiles” are actually fired from the big ooze, and therefore spreading the ooze explosion all over the room. So we had one of our healers call out when to move. That helped tons.

We were also having problems with DPS/Healers tunnel visioning and not running out when they got the infection, so we had another one of our healers start calling out who got the infection. These two things combined helped tremendously. On our next pull, we got him down to 8%. Then on the following pull, Rotface went down.

We banged our heads against this boss for about 15-20 attempts, but were only successful when we started properly communicating with each other. Look out Professor…Nerd Rage is coming.

Communication really is the key to success in a team environment.

The return of the Warrior

2009-10-02T14:04:00.004-05:00

I have been playing a Paladin tank since pre-BC. Things have not always been good for the Paladin tank, but I have always enjoyed playing it and doing things that people said that we couldn't do. I also have a 70 druid that I have tanked some 5-mans with.

Having read just about everything that is available to read at Tankspot.com (and other warrior blogs), I have recently become very interested in Warrior tanking. It seemed like a completely different style of tanking than the Paladin and I have thought for a while about trying it out.

Enter Patch 3.0. I decided on patch day (after running a couple of heroics on my Paladin) to roll a warrior. Blackwulfe is his name. I am aiming at getting him to 70 before WotLK drops, but I am not sure if I will make it, as I still have a life outside of WoW and am going on vacation for a week (no WoW!) at the end of October.

So far, I have to say that I love the way the warrior class is built. It is just all around fun. I am levelling with a prot build and am tanking instances along the way. I have to say that it has been a blast, but also a real learning experience. As it stands right now, I can't wait to get to level 40 so that I can start using Sheild Slam. That just seems fun. (Originally posted on Tankspot.com 10-21-2008)

I wrote this in mid-October of 2008. How have things evolved since then? Well, I only got my warrior up to 67 by the time WotLK hit. Then I found myself being completely sucked into the gameplay of the expansion. So he sat at 67 neglected for weeks. Once I got Gathorc to 80, then I started working on my druid. Once I got my druid to 80 I started working on my priest. It seems that the warrior got lost somewhere in the mix.

So a couple of weeks ago, I logged onto my warrior for the first time since WotLK released. I got him from 67 to 72 and remembered what it was I liked about him so much. Tools.

Prot warriors seem to have a tool for every situation. As a matter of fact, I am still struggling with how to best keybind all of those tools so that I have quick access to them when I need them. A prot warrior’s mobility in combat is second to none. I use this awesome one key macro (care of Veneretio@TankingTips.com) for Charge, Intercept, and Intervene. It is my “zoom” key.

In comparison to the paladin, the prot warrior just feels so much more involved and interactive. I can do the “969” rotation with my paladin in my sleep. With my warrior, I have to stay on my toes at all times. Is revenge lit up? Has Sword and Board proc’d? Shouts? Thunderclap? It just seems like there is so much stuff going on. Like there are never enough global cooldowns to do everything you need to do. It is a challenge. And I like a challenge.

I figure that I will have my warrior up to 80 within a week or two.

Anyone on Eitrigg up for a PUG Naxx/Ulduar?

A great night, a great week

2009-09-11T11:24:00.001-05:00

Coming off of our guild first kill of Anub’arak in 25-man Coliseum (on Tuesday), and after 3 months and 70+ attempts, Nerd Rage finally downed Yogg Saron last night. I would like to take a moment to thank the academy, and the fans…..errr, wrong speech.

Last week we suffered a heart-breaking 3% wipe on Yogg. What made it worse was that one of our best DPS’ers was not in raid because his account got hacked. We knew that had he been there, we would have downed Yogg that night.

But this night started much differently. We were actually just minutes from calling raid altogether, because an hour after start time we still didn’t have 25 people online. People were restless in vent. I know I was joking around trying to keep everyone loose (let’s just say the conversation revolved around Canadians and bacon, while being laced with plenty of healthy sexual innuendo). It just didn’t seem to bode well.

We finally get a raid put together. We pull. We pop an extra Guardian right at the beginning to help us get through Phase 1 faster. It wasn’t our cleanest phase 1, but it was good enough. Phase 2 really was a thing of beauty. We actually found ourselves with nothing to kill on occasion. We would down the crusher, kill corrupter, and stand around until the brain phase ended for more tentacles to spawn. Phase 3 started, and no one had gone insane, and all 25 were still alive. I knew right then that we had a chance. Phase 3 is among the most hectic settings I have ever tanked in. With Guardians, that will one shot a non-tank, spawning every 10 seconds or so (thankfully Hand of Reckoning has an 8 sec cooldown). All I could think about was just keeping up with the guardian spawn rate. Consecrate, hammer, taunt, shield, judge, taunt, holy shield, hammer, taunt, etc... I heard someone ask on vent what his health was at…2 million. Then 1.5 million. Then 1 million. Then suddenly the mad rush ended. Two achievements popped up on my screen. It was over. We had done it!

There was a moment of silence before vent just exploded. I actually had goosebumps. Not only had we just downed Yogg, we one-shot him! What an awesome encounter. Thank you Blizzard.

We were on a high. Then we ran into a quandary. What to do with the rest of the night. We had already cleared the Coliseum on Tuesday night, so we decided to go and do three Drakes since we had never done it either. We one shot that too.

So now let the hard modes begin. We had been extending our raid locks since 3.2 hit and focusing on killing that no-eyed, old god since long before that. The guild leadership was steadfast in its position that no hard modes would even be attempted until we got Yogg down. I agreed entirely, and I have to say kudos to our raid leaders for standing strong on that position when people were crying for hard modes.

But we can worry about hard modes another night because…Last night was a great night.

The Crusaders’ Coliseum

2009-09-11T10:15:00.000-05:00

I meant to post this blog like a month ago, but here it is anyway.

Wow….the prospect of a trashless raid instance was something that I was interested in seeing. Nobody likes killing trash, but Blizzard is correct in stating that it is one way to “Pace” an instance. Facing a raid instance with no trash at all, just feels a little strange, and definitely less EPIC.

At least to me.

Northrend Beasts

Gormok was easy-sauce (one-shot). On a side note, why is it that BigWigs can give me an alert of the debuffs on the other tanks, but DBM will not? I find myself running both BigWigs and DBM because I like features of both but neither one will do everything I want it to. Can someone in charge address this please?

The Two Jormungars was a bit tougher. It took us a few tries to beat these worms. Mostly because it took a little while to get people used to the mechanics of the different debuffs you see in that fight and how to address them. If Dreadscale is mobile, you will get paralytic poison and the only way to clear it is to get close to the person with burning bile (the Dreadscale tank). If Acidmaw is mobile, you will get Burning Bile, and you will need to go clear the person with Paralytic poison (the Acidmaw tank). It boils down to one simple phrase…If you get a debuff (regardless of which one it is), run to the tank of the mobile worm. I was on Acidmaw and our DK was on Dreadscale (why doesn’t Stoneform clear that paralytic poison again?). Despite our early troubles, on our first kill we did get the Not One, But Two Jormungars achievement.

Icehowl was tougher still. We actually didn’t down Icehowl until our second night of raiding in the coliseum, due mostly to people getting hung up on walls and whatnot when trying to avoid the charge. I don’t have much else to say about this fight, except that when Icehowl enrages, he hits REALLY hard.

Lord Jarraxus

Easy-sauce, one shot. Kill adds, heal people, kill boss. Simple.

Faction Champions

I will stand by my statement that this is actually the hardest fight in the whole instance. I am not the biggest fan of PVP, but I have done quite a bit of it. Everyone likes to say that this fight is just like PVP. I disagree. I have NEVER PVP’ed against anyone that had over 2 million health. Be that as it may, kill the healers first, using all of your possible interrupts along the way. CC is not so great in this fight (mostly because of its unreliability), but interrupts are king.

Twin Valkyries

I found this fight just engaging enough to be really fun, but not so complex as to be frustrating.

Anub’arak

The big bug is back. And this time, he’s pissed! (LAWL)

Fun fight with a pretty tight DPS requirement. Healers, for god’s sake, don’t try to keep everyone at full health in phase three. No one in the raid (other than the tanks) should ever be above 50% health once Phase three has started. The more health your raid has, the more Anub heals, and the longer it takes to kill him.

All in all, the Crusader’s Coliseum is a fun (if fast) raid instance.

On Confidence

2009-06-17T19:27:00.000-05:00

For my inaugural blog, I am going to tackle something that I think every good tank must have. Confidence.

You can study all the best theorycrafting, and you can have all the talent in the world. These will make you a good tank. But when you add confidence, you become a great tank. You see, if you are unsure about yourself, you will doubt your decision making skills, which will inevitably delay your making a decision on a course of action and executing it.

For example…Let’s say you and another tank are off-tanking in a boss fight (say tanking constructs on Ignis). Suddenly, your other offtank drops. You gotta grab that construct before he goes and one-shots a healer. It is now up to you to tank multiple constructs at once. Without confidence, you will hesitate, leaving a pissed construct running toward your healer. That will, most likely, spell your healer’s demise. If your healer dies, then there is undue stress put on the other healers to pickup healing on you (especially since you’re most likely tanking two constructs at a time now), which means that they are not healing others as much. Now DPS’ers start dying to AOE because they are not getting heals (you are getting their heals instead). With the DPS’ers dying, the whole fight lasts longer than it would have with all 25 (or 10) people up because the boss lives longer, hence further taxing the limited mana pools of the healers.

You get the point…it’s all bad.

Now Success breeds confidence. Example…last night, we got to Kologarn-25 when the main tank (a Prot warrior) and myself realized that we didn’t have a third tank for the adds. Bad news, right? We have always use three tanks on Kologarn-25. So we had to improvise. We just had me start on Kolo until I got 2xCrush, then the warrior taunted off of me. At that moment, I ran under the arm just in time to lay a consecrate for the rubble to spawn in. I tanked them until they were dead, and then ran over and taunted Kolo off of the warrior just as he got to 2xCrush himself. Rinse. Repeat three or four times (I don’t remember now) and you got a dead Kolo. 2 months ago, I would not have been able to handle this kind of demand on my attention, but now, it’s not a problem (and was actually kinda fun!). Mostly because of the confidence that I have gained by stepping into a 25-man raiding guild and being able to contribute (even though I was severely under geared for Ulduar).
I am by no means trying to say that I am a great tank. I think I am adequate. Maybe even good. But not great. I have seen a great tank in action, and it is something to behold, let me tell you.

If success breeds confidence then failure breeds un-confidence (is that even a word?). But, even worse than that is the fact that un-confidence (there’s that non-word again) breeds failure. So you can see how someone could get caught in a spiraling circle of failure and un-confidence (hey…if un-birthday works for Disney, then un-confidence can work for me). So if you are not confident in your abilities, you will tend to fail more, and the more you fail, the less confident you are in your abilities. Sucks, doesn’t it?

So how can we break this endless circle of fail?

First, research the boss fights inside and out. If any of you haven’t heard of (or haven’t been to) www.tankspot.com, then you are missing out on one of the greatest resources for a raiding tank in this game. One of the things I find the most helpful to my confidence is knowing that I will not be surprised in a boss fight. Once you are comfortable with the fight and its mechanics, you are free to relax a little bit and get into the “zone”.

Second, take a step back and honestly analyze your strengths and weaknesses as a tank. Make a short questionnaire and have some trusted guildies fill it out (as well as filling it out yourself). See how you rank in their eyes versus where you think you are. I know, that I am my own worst critic. Everyone tells me that I am better than I think I am (not just in WoW, but in lots of stuff). If you’re not sure what weaknesses you have, then go pug a Heroic. There is nothing like running an instance with four complete strangers to bring out your weaknesses (and strengths for that matter). The fact of the matter is, that your guildies (or whomever you run with regularly) will compensate for your weaknesses (whether you or they realize it or not).

Once you’ve gotten your weaknesses identified, go into a heroic or Naxx and purposely put yourself in situations that force you to deal with your weaknesses. Practice really does make perfect. As Veneretio said in his blog a while back…” Once you’re comfortable, Overwhelm yourself”.

Well…I think I have rambled on enough for one day.

Introduction

2009-06-17T15:45:00.001-05:00

So…I suppose introductions are in order.

I am Gathorc. I am a Tank. I have been prot all of my WoW life (yes, even in vanilla). Sure, I have healed from time to time, and I like to Ret-it-up with the best of them, but tanking is where my heart lies. I have more alts than I know what to do with, but my favorites are my Feral Druid and my Prot Warrior (I told you I LOVED tanking, right?). I am a former Raid leader (in my last guild), and now just a protection paladin for the guild Nerd Rage on the Eitrigg-US server. I have only been in the guild for a little over a month now, but since I joined I have participated in 25-man progression kills on Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya, Freya, Hodir, & Thorim (here we come Mimiron!) as well as a server first of the Quick Shave(Heroic) achievement. In this blog I will be ruminating on things that happen to me in WoW (and sometimes things that happen outside of WoW) as well as anything else I feel like writing about. I am new to this whole blogging thing, so I have no idea how often I will post a blog at this point. This blog is really for nobody’s benefit but my own, but if you feel like reading it, don’t say I didn’t warn you.