The Ret Pally

1400

2011-02-24T20:15:00.000-05:00

My 2v2 team broke 1400 last week. I know this may not seem like a big achievement to hard core arena junkies but for a retribution paladin and shadow priest that hadn't teamed up together until cataclysm it has been an uphill battle. Both classes offer a large amount of support abilities in exchange for dps. With this latest patch we both got dps increases. With that and getting more familiar with what my partner needs and when we have both been able to raise our game up a notch.

One bit of advice that I have for folks is at the start of the match as you run to your starting position is to change your aura to match who you are fighting. Your resistance aura may not help you if that shadow priest has stacked spell pen but, I guarantee that devotion aura is going to do anything to lower the damage he does. My recommendation would be if there is one person that does physical damage the use devotion aura. The reason being that devotion aura always lowers physical damage where as resistance aura only lowers damage if the opponent doesn't have spell pen. Retribution aura is pretty much useless and concentration aura is geared more towards healers (which may help out your partner sometimes but, generally not) not retribution paladins.

I just read the patch notes and all I have to say in this post is what the hell? More later.

Progress

2011-02-17T00:52:00.000-05:00

It's been a couple weeks since my last post and Blizzard has implemented quite a few changes to the Retribution Paladin with the latest patch. With all the changes I decided to change up my spec a bit. I went with a more PvP spec and added the support talents. This has done a couple of things for me:
1. I can throw heals to my partner and they hit harder, have chance to not use Holy Power and give me a buff if I use WoG. (Due to Divinity, Eternal Glory and Selfless Healer)
2. I can heal my self and the heals hit harder and have chance to not use Holy Power.
3. My HoJ has a shorter cool-down. (Due to Improved Hammer of Justice)

Also I have gotten a couple upgrades to my PvP kit:
1. Pants
2. Shoulders
Upgrades in PvP always mean more damage (if your a damage dealer) and more survivability.

With our new Mastery the added damage was significant. Against a training dummy in my PvP gear I saw a 30% increase. This was with the same gear, the same rotation and reforging into mastery and out of crit/haste.

The Sacred Shield addition was a definite gain to our survivability. How can you complain about a ~25K shield every 30 seconds while below 30% health?

Now lets talk about the Crusader Strike nerf. I know what your thinking they buffed the damage output of it. This is true. But, the main reason CS is one of our top priority abilities is not for its damage. It is now our only source of Holy Power. Before the patch CS awarded holy power on cast. Now it awards on hit. The difference is that since the majority of PvP players ignore expertise when we face someone who has a ton of dodge we a don't land many of our CS's. If we don't land a lot of our CS's we get less Holy Power. No Holy Power no WoG and no TV's. One of the blue posters on the official forums tried to say that this was a bug fix. This is not the case. Ghostcrawler stated specifically that CS generating HoPo on cast was by design. For raiding retribution paladins this should not cause much issue since they are usually expertise soft capped. The main problem is the delays we will be seeing from the slowing of holy power generation. For other classes that have attacks that do not land the resource that was used is refunded (at least partially refunded). Since the resource that retribution and protection paladins use is cool downs then my recomendation would be to reset the cooldown on the CS. My personal opinion is that this was a serious nerf.

All in all I feel the patch was a net gain for retribution paladins. Definitely could have been better without the CS nerf but we can't have everything.

Arenas and a new trinket

2011-01-29T11:56:00.001-05:00

We finally got our 2's arenas done. Did not go great but, I got my new chest piece after the first win. Enchanted and gemmed it for a very nice upgrade. Also got a new honor trinket to replace the last green in my PvP set.

We are only up to 1350 or so, and already I am noticing problems with some classes just ignoring me and I am not able to change their minds. If a warrior is on my priest there is really nothing I can do about it except HoP the priest which the good warriors pop. If I use HoS he lasts a few extra seconds but, dies any way. What I am noticing is that the comp we fight has more influence on the outcome then how well we execute the fight. Either that or we need more practice on the comps we are having difficulty with.

Not much in the way of PvE lately. Mostly still just working on closing out all the zones to get max rep before dungeon running with tabards.

I did get my therazine rep up to honored so, I can at least get the lower shoulder enchant. Not finished with their starter quests yet so, may be able to get to revered and get the PvE rings soon.

This weekend is SotA battleground holiday. Looks like randoms since I am not that fond of that one.

I made a spread sheet to help me calculate what I can reforge. This helped me get my PvP hit to exactly 5% or 600. This helps to free up more points to put into crit and haste. I have looked a bunch of places to figure out whether expertise is needed in PvP and it is fairly even between the yea and nay votes. So I wont worry about it for now.

Enough rambling for now. Some day I will actually post some usefull information instead of a journal of my activities.

Long Break

2011-01-26T14:34:00.001-05:00

Apologies for the long break in posts. Things have been up and down for me on the paladin. I have pretty much given up on retribution in dungeons and raids. Mainly due to my guild not raiding. Also due to not having the required patience to wait in 45 minute ques.

I got on a 2's and a 3's team as retribution. I am liking the damage I can put out if I can sit on a target for long enough to ramp up my damage. Unfortunately these occurrences are few and far between. My self heals are awfur and my ability to take hits sucks. Oh yeah my mobility is a lot better but, unfortunately to maintain that I spam cleanse every gcd. For those at home this means my main damage source during these times is auto attack. I have found that I do fairly well versus healers due to rebuking every cooldown. Unfortunately this means the healers partner is pounding on my partner which doesn't work out well after HoP wears off. The best times are when they focus on me for a few seconds which allows my partner to lay the hurt on them until they peel. Unfortunately I don't have the DPS to return the favor when they focus on him. Sometimes HoP works to peel but most times they wait it out.

As for PvE, I have finished off the first 2 zones and the last one. Currently working on deepholm while in que for bg's. I have not successfully completed a single heroic instance yet. I dont feel comfortable tanking one yet and don't want to sit in que for 45 minutes. We will see how it goes when I have gotten all the rep gear and the regular dungeon drops.

Intelligence versus Twitch

2010-10-28T09:23:00.000-04:00

One of the things that annoys me is that somehow a lot of people have gotten it in there head that twitch reflexes are the same as intelligent play or skill. What I am referring to is the new retribution paladin "rotation" versus the old "rotation".

In the wrath era of retribution paladin (pre 4.01) a ret knew what they were going to be casting when. They knew their priority and as things came off cool down they hit the highest priority spell for that situation. The were procs to a point and there were some times when your priorities changed mid fight but it was fairly straight forward.

In the cataclysm era of retribution (post 4.01) a ret has no idea what they will be casting from one second to the next. The framework is built around a proc system more than anything else. The "rotation" as I previously discussed is basically hit you CS until you have 3 HoPo then TV. You throw fillers in empty GCD's based on priority. But, the largest effect you will have on your DPS is by watching your procs. If HoL procs hit TV. If AoW procs hit Exorcism. If DP procs an extra HoPo point that pushes you to 3 then hit TV. Why not just set up Power Auras to flash a big 4 (provided thats where your TV is bound) if your HoPo >= 3 or if HoL = true? Then set up another that flashes a big 5 (again provided your Exor is bound there) if AoW = true.

I am not trying to complain about the new "rotation" I am just saying that hitting a button when something flashes on your screen does not equal skill or intelligence. If it did, would that make a mouse that successfully hits a button to get food when a bell rings intelligent or skillful?

Quick Update

2010-10-25T14:29:00.002-04:00

Not much to talk about. So far I am still getting used to the new rotation. I do ok in PvE. In PvP it is still ok when the enemies are not dispelling. As soon as they realize that they can dispell most of my offensive power I am done for. One thing I am noticing is that the alliance in my battlegroup don't PvP much. So, I get to sit in queue for 30 to 45 minutes waiting for random bg's.

A friend of mine asked me about the ret PvE rotation such as it is. Being that most fights in PvE haven't been lasting for more 30 seconds I have dropped off Zealotry due to lack of usefulness. Then I evaluated the differences between my PvP and PvE specs and realized they were close enough to not warrant using both my specs for ret. As for the rotation, CS, filler (judge, exo if art of war, HoW if under 20%, HW), repeat until 3 HoPo or HoL procs then TV. This is pre cata since we don't have inq yet.

First few days of 4.01

2010-10-18T19:33:00.001-04:00

I have been running battle grounds as much as I can. The problem has been that queue times are crazy. I sit in queue for an hour sometimes just to be into a bg that is all but over.

So far my opinion of the changes are that in disorganized PvP retribution does fairly well. When ever I run across people who know what is what and/or have decent PvP gear it goes very bad. I haven't had a chance to go in with a healer in my pocket yet though. I am still of a mind that retribution doesn't bring anything to the team that others can bring better. Ghostcrawler said we were going to get something for our mobility but, as far as I have seen that hasn't happened yet.

I have made some gold on glyphs since the patch. As people begin to fill in their books that will taper off I am sure. Especially since I have already seen it start to fall some. Add to that blizzard has implemented a change where each different item you post or cancel requires a hardware action. This significantly slows down the posting process. I have simply stopped undercutting so, the ones who pay the price is the consumers. Glyphs that were sitting at 15 gold are now at 50. I sell mine for 250 across the board so I only get the sale if the others sell out. But, I only have to repost on a sale or 48 hours. It all really is silly.

Patch day

2010-10-13T12:20:00.001-04:00

Ok now that I am done ranting about how they have broken the retribution spec I will try to chronical my experiance as I try to make something usefull out of it

Yesterday was partch day. After a couple hours of updating I finally got on the servers. I logged into Saraphina and checked out my spec choice. I also looked at my glyphs and wrote down all the ones I thought I nigh use. Then I went to elitist jerks and arena junkies to look into possible spec choices. I found that I didn't really like the specs I found as is so I copied a basic pvp spec and made a couple changes.

I will link my current spec in each of these posts for future referance.

I decided against getting zealotry since I don't think I will have enough up time to make effective use of it. I will probably change my spec frequently so, it wont be the same for long until I zero in on an "effective" spec.

I logged over to my scribe, made the glyphs I wrote down plus a couple and mailed them off. Also threw some on the AH at stupid high prices to account for that source of income going away soon.

Logged back into saraphina and glyphed and talented. Also had to go to the trainer for new spells. Put some deal on my bars and qued for a random bg. I saw that wintergrasp was in progress so, I figured I would start there. Had a little fun running around killing allies but not really all that telling since no one knows their class yet. We won so I went back to dalaran to wait for my bg. It never popped. So, I guess I will have to see tonight.

Another look to the future

2010-10-06T18:46:00.001-04:00

I haven't been posting of late because with the 4.0 dropping soon and the Castaclysm coming soon after I really haven't anything positive to say. The pretty much gutted all melee and buffed most casters. The asshole CM ghostcrawler (or Greg Street) does nothing but lock threads when someone steps over the line or even comes close to it. Apparently it is not going to be a good idea to try and play a retribution paladin in cataclysm since all the moron ghostcrawler can think of is nerfs to the spec. When people post constructive feedback he ignores it. When people ask questions the fanboys flame it as a qq and he ignores it. When god forbid someone complains, lock and some assholic snide remark from shitbird Greg Street. Screw him and his horse. The only reason I am posting here now is because if I try to post on the moron ghoscrawlers forum he will lock/ban if I state my actual opinion about where they are going with the retribution class right now.

As of right now I have not been banned. I would like to keep it that way so I won't post there.

Alts and no arenas

2010-09-08T10:32:00.001-04:00

I haven't really been spending a whole lot of time on my main paladin lately. Instead I have been working on an alliance paladin on another server that my guild has taken to playing on. I am kind of disappointed that my arena team hasn't been playing much. We just can't seem to get five people online to do matches. I blame it on the end of exansion blues.

I decided to add a screen shot of my main as the background for the blog but not sure if I like how it shows up. Also, when I did it my site mere got broken. I will have to look at that. Though in reality there aren't a huge number of people coming around these days anyway. It probably has to do with the lack of content. I think I may try to talk about some addons I like or something.

Well, that's all for now.

Arenas

2010-08-24T14:07:00.001-04:00

My arena team didn't get to do five mans this week. I did get with one of my teammates and did some two mans so we did get some points at least. What i have determined is teams with a healer and a hybrid caster/healer have a pretty distinct advantage. Since there is now just one type of spell power when a caster stacks spell power and intellect the result ends up making them do pretty decent heals and not go out of mana like when a ret pally tries to heal. I would really like to know how a ret pally/disc priest can counter a disc priest/boomkin. Anyway I think I need to spend more time in PvP on my main and less time on alts. My reflexes are starting to slow which is not a good thing in PvP. As anyone who does PvP on any class knows if you think "should I xxx?" it is probably too late.

PvP alts and the AH

2010-08-23T21:45:00.000-04:00

I haven't been playing all that much lately. At least not the paladin. Over the last few months my guild has not been doing very much in the way of content. My arena team has managed to get up to ~1660 or so but unfortunately my rating is only 1585. I have been leveling some alts for fun and to try and learn more on the different classes to see how to beat them. I have also tapered off on the auction house somewhat.

As a guild we got the first part of ICC 10 through Deathbringer Saurafang but, other than that not much.

The group I do arenas with was being insane and doing three teams. A, B and C teams. My paladin is on the A team of course. My alts that are 80 are on the other teams. Did those mainly to get gear but topped out on them when we hit rating requirements. The "A" team managed to get some fair matches (within 100 of our rating) one week while I was on vacation and went 9 of 10 which is why my rating is below the team. But, I did manage to get the 1550 achievement. Unfortunately I am currently 15 points below 1600 so hopefully we can get that soon so I can get the PvP chest before the season ends. Also, we are holding on to a high enough ranking to get the challenger title if we don't screw it up or the scale pass us by.

I have my alts moving slowly up:

Paladin, Warlock, DK, Hunter and Rogue all at 80. Mage at 44 Priest at 42 Warrior at 23 and Druid at 21.

Ah has gotten boring so I stopped making glyphs and enchants and basically just selling my stock off. Sitting around 86K My scribe has all recipes in the game.

Thats all for now. I will try to post more in the future.

A look to the future

2010-04-20T17:52:00.003-04:00

I have been holding off on this since I really don't know how to say anything about the changes without sounding like whining. So, I will post my opinions on each thing as I see them:
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.
Opinion:
meh. While this may be interesting to some of the protection paladins out there it is another http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53600 (useless to me)

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.

Opinion:

meh. If as a retribution paladin I need to be a healing stream totem I think the battle is already lost. Add to that the fact that I am GCD limited, my burst nerfed and and health pools that supposedly will be increased significantly more than damage output I think this just gets thrown in the Holy bag of tricks.

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).

Opinion:

Looks interesting. We get a pet. (I don't care that they say its not a pet, it is) 16.7% uptime DoT. We'll see how the damage works out. I will call this a buff
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.

Opinion:

Bad (for ret paladins). Read above about GCD starvation. Or at best meh.

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

Opinion:

Bad (for ret and prot paladins). We already have problems if we are fighting someone who is halfway decent at kiting. From what blizzard said before the above listed effect is for holy paladins. rets and prots lose the magic debuff removal. Unlike the other classes that are losing something in their non-healing specs paladins get no coresponding buffs or additions.

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.

Opinion:

meh. speeds up starting of BG's, arenas, instances or raids. Caters to whiny bitches who either don't know their class enough to know which would benefit them more or are so greedy they want both. You whined enough to get http://www.wowhead.com/spell=20217 baseline so, take it and shut up.

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

Opinion:

meh. If a ret needs this you're screwed anyway.
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.

Opinion:

Bad! Personally I think the rated battleground thing as it has been described so far is stupid. I really don't want to see another place for the moron elitist raiders to take their large groups of script following cattle to get better rewards as an improvement for the game. But, I digress. Lowering the DS duration is bad for all paladins.

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.

Opinion:

Bad. We already play whack a mole. Now you want to add a line to the whack a mole table. And make it one that if you hit the wrong one a boot comes out of the front of the game and kicks you in the nuts. /sarcasm THANKS! /sarcasm off. Ok now one question I have is how else does anyone win at PvP? the whole freaking point is the either out last your opponent or to burst them down before they burst you down. Is blizzard going to make a chess board to PvP in?

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.

Opinion:

Good. Now I can cast SS while I am preparing for arenas.

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.

Opinion:

Meh. Not holy.

Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.

Opinion:

Meh at best. Bad in reality. Holy paladins should be different from other healers. They wear plate for craps sake. Why not just make 3 stats Damage, Healing and Protection? that way I dont have to think at all when choosing gear.

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.

Opinion:

Meh. Not tanking anymore. Though I will say they really don't like paladins to be better at anything do they?

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.

Opinion:

Meh. Or bad as it sounds like they are lowering the damage/threat on this core paladin tank ability.
Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

this is already a wall of text so, suffice it to say a whole big pile of meh. Bonuses to what ever stat they want us to focus on. Ok thanks for the creativity. /sarcasm off.

My over all opinion is somewhere between this sucks and meh. Probably closer to sucking. They want to reduce the protective nature of ret in PvP but add to their utility? Added some healing and prot crap that i don't want to use. I really wish that someone at blizzard actually played retribution in PvP. If they do then they should not purposefully gut the tools that we use and stop adding stuff that has little to no use for us.

Well, there you have it.

Update

2010-04-20T16:49:00.000-04:00

I have some opinions on the upcoming changes to the paladin class but, I am gathering my thoughts before I post them so for now I will just post about the status of my toons.
Total gold 70K
Paladin 80 wowhead GS in PvP 2758
Lock 80 wowhead GS 2067
DK 80 wowhead GS 1749
Hunter 80 wowhead GS 1468
Rogue 60
Mage 38
Priest 30
Warrior 23
Druid 20

Still working on my PvP gear for the paladin.

Hmm... What to say

2010-04-07T18:37:00.002-04:00

Well, for those who read this, I have decided to start writing here again. (In case this post didn't clue you in).

As far as a status update i have been working on PvP on the paladin and gearing the alts in PvP and PvE. I currently have 3 80's (Paladin, Warlock and Death Knight) 78 Hunter, 52 Rogue, 38 Mage, 30 Priest, 23 Warrior and a 20 Druid. I don't have a shaman because I want to make a goblin shaman when Cataclysm comes out.

I have also been working on making gold. I have around 60K spread out on my toons and all 4 of my toons that can fly have epic flying.

As you may see from my armory I have been building my PvP set (you might not see since I don't pay attention to whether i log out in PvP gear or PvP gear). I currently am missing 2 pieces of gear that i can get at my rating (~1100). I only fight on my 5's team currently because I haven't found 1 or 2 people who have my same mentality for arenas and a similar schedule. I am able to get the 5's because my guild decided they wanted to work on arenas for gear. I want to get a good 3's team going so I can see how good I am at PvP compared to how good I think I am.

Well, that's all for now.

Ulduar, ToC and a new tool

2009-08-20T17:41:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday we went to Ulduar and we did H-ToC 5-man Tuesday and Wednesday. I learned how to make the Wowhead pop up things.

My guild leader logged on on Friday around 9:30 Pm or so on Tuesday and after running H-ToC realized we had 11 80's on line so he started the invites for Ulduar. I personally have never been and I don't really know if the guild had run it before or not. I volunteered to drop out to allow the other person to go but, the guild leader asked me to stay. The other reason I was willing to drop was due to knowing the it would take an hour or more to get the run started. I was right. Around 11PM or so we finally roll into Ulduar. While the people who know what to do explain everything we run around killing the adds and column things. The first fight is explained and here we go. One shot on Flame Leviathan, one shot on Razorscale and two shot on Deconstructor. Might of the Leviathan drops and I win the roll. Very nice replacement for my Collar of Dissolution. Both the other bosses dropped something that would have been an improvement but, I passed on one since it was a minor improvement and I had just one the neck piece and lost the roll on the other piece. Overall a 14.5 DPS increase. Every bit helps right?

On Wednesday we ran H-ToC 5-man and The Edge of Ruin finally dropped. Which is a large improvement of my Wraith Spear. Around 100-150 DPS increase depending on what you go by.

In case you haven't noticed I figured out (read: finally looked up on wowhead) how to make the pop things when you link something from wowhead.

I still plan on making a list of improvements to get. I just haven't had time to do it yet.

Dailies Heroics and other games

2009-08-18T15:41:00.004-04:00

It's been a week since I posted anything but, in all fairness I did not get much time in game due to personal life and a birthday (not mine) during the weekend. Since I last posted I have done dailies, ran some heroics and starting calculating to figure out what gear I can get based off of maxdps and rawr. I also have to limit the gear based on not doing any raids.

As far as dailies go I have dropped the fishing and cooking dailies to cut my daily time consumption down. So, I am left with tournament and venom hide dailies. I am still only champion for 2 cities so I am stuck doing the dailies to get those valiant seals and the starter champion seal dallies. Venom hide dallies are still boring after you do each one once. I still have over two weeks until I am get the new mount and 12 days until I get the Crusader title.

I have gotten in some heroics which showed me that I need to work on my gear since I was out DPS'd on a couple PUG's by both the other DPS. I did get Legplates of Relentless Onslaught from H ToC 5-man. Very nice upgrade over Legplates of Bloody Reprisal

With 3.2 out now I realize I have to evaluate my gear to see what I can improve on without counting on any raids. That means maybe one or two drops from regular ToC 5-man, H-ToC 5-man and badge gear. Luckily both my gear BiS sources allow for filtering based off source. Unfortunately neither of their filters work great. So, I am currently compiling a list of BiS for a retribution paladin without going into a raid. Then I will figure out the change in DPS for each piece to figure out what to buy first. Of course this is all while trying to do H-ToC 5-man as often as possible and adding the daily heroic in when possible and then adding as many other heroics on top of that whenever I can.

Now in other news I am trying out the new Champions Online game here and there. I think that as far as character customization goes the game is incredible. I took way to long in designing my toon. When I got in the game it seemed fairly straight forward for someone who has played MMO's. The interface seems fairly simple. As far as combat goes I am not sure as I only got through the first dozen or so quests. I only have three abilities: block, short range attack and long range attack. I hope that more depth comes into play as I progress. My main concern for this game has to do with the payment model. They are going for a subscription AND micro transaction model. From everything I have heard they are sticking with the 15 USD and adding MT's. I don't see this game as being worth more than any other game to start with. I personally think that the game will have problems picking up people when they want more money than games that have years of development behind them. Well, that is enough non WoW related news.

Personal patch results

2009-08-11T16:23:00.004-04:00

After trying out the new battleground, five-man and some dailies (including the new mount quest-line) I am kind of underwhelmed.

It does seem like the DPS drop wasn't as bad as I had feared. This is probably due to the last minute change to the SoCor to make the damage actually ramp. Though I did notice an overall DPS drop in all fights but extended boss fights. The PvP burst loss does hurt though I still can handle most people.

The new five-man has some interesting mechanics in it though I think a little more time could have been spent on the scenery. It is only one room. It was cool the first time I went in and the announcer guy called out my name and went through his little speech. But, the third time and beyond I was just wishing he would skip it. The drops are good but, overall most of the dungeons in Northrend, outlands and even the old world had more thought put into them.

I will say the new battleground is pretty fun to play. The new idea of launching or dropping into the enemy keep is pretty neat. The different capture points for different vehicles and resources are interesting. I should probably read about the idea behind the battleground to get a better idea of what is going on though.

I am currently champion for 2 cities (Org and Silvermoon) and working on UC. The dailies are starting to wear on me though so I am not sure if I will get the crusader title. I have the ambassador title already so all I need is the valiant seals and the argent crusade rep. I wish there was some other way to build up those things. We will see if I make it the 14 more days it is going to take.

I am currently two days into the path for getting the venomhide mount. That is annoying to have to go back to ungoro, silithis or tanaris to quest those. I found a short cut in sholozar basin in that waygate thing. I just go through that jump down the mountain and ride over to the flight point or southern ungoro to do the daily. Not sure if that waygate thing works for everyone or not. But, it is worth a try to save the run from CoT (the first short cut I tried) to, at the closest, western tanaris but possibly farther.

In case anyone is wondering I have not set foot in a raid since my return to the game. My guild went once or twice but I didn't have the block of time to commit to a raid. Maybe someday. Until then I will just continue heroics and dailies.

Patch Day Yay

2009-08-04T11:16:00.002-04:00

Not much going on with me. Real life has me busy so, I haven't gotten much time in game. What I have been doing is some Wintergrasp, BG's and the occasional heroic. One of the things I have found is that while Ret Pally burst is significant there are definitely classes out there with more. I was running around with a warlock friend and saw some impressive burst coming from his destruction spec. 80 elites dying before I could get to them to hit them once. Some PvP battles where I target someone and as I close the gap I see one-half to three-quarters of their life go away. I am not saying that warlocks should have less DPS then paladins but, that was fairly impressive. My gear is Naxx-10 purples and his is mostly blues a couple greens and a purple or two.

My thoughts on the retribution changes are not good. I personally think that it is a significant nerf. Yeah if you do the numbers it looks like a minor bump to over all DPS but that is only if you look at the math without actually paying attention to how we do our DPS. If all I did was CS until the mob was dead then yes my DPS would go up. If I actually hit every mob 6 or more times with a white damage swing my DPS would go up. But guess what. That's not how I fight. In PvE I use rotations based on the situation (none of which involve using just CS and white damage for 20+ seconds.) In PvP I pretty much use the top three damage dealers since mobility makes it fairly hard to maintain a long rotation. Actually calling it a rotation is misleading. Retribution paladins use a FCFS with different attacks having different priorities. JoW, CS, DS, Cons, Exor and HoW are the main attacks. All of these have cooldowns that prevent spamming the one that does the most damage. So I pick whichever attack is off cooldown that is the higher priority.

Ok where I see the biggest problem is in PvP. Right now I can unload on someone and if they are a scrub they die in the initial unload. If they are decently geared they can fight me. Chances are if they are any good and have decent gear they will stop me sometime in the initial unload and root/cc me or engage me in melee. Then because my sustained DPS isn't nearly what I unloaded with and I have no gap closer I need that heavy hitting CS to do anything near the damage I need to in order to compete. Now they lower the damage of CS and drop the cooldown. How does that help me at all in PvP? It doesn't. It hurts.

Now for PvE well, CS has a lower CD with a lower damage %. The net change would be positive. But, wait we have to figure out how to fit that into our rotation/FCFS priority. Cooldown clashes are going to be a big problem.

In PvE I will miss the SoB and its judgments a lot. I will have to play around with SoCrap and SoComplete crap to see which sucks less for my DPS. I foresee everyone toping me on the DPS meter now. I will also more than likely have to respec in order to get something worthwhile out of SoCrap. (side note: 5 stacks really!?!)

In PvP I will miss CS having good damage. I will also miss a judgement that does good damage. Now I get to run around and chase classes with countless gap openers (snares or teleports) or stand toe to with others in plate with my now almost completely melee arsenal being mitigated by his armor. This will be fun.

Oh yeah, I also really like the fact that since blizzard can't manage to balance 2v2 they make it pointless to play. I really think the developers need to come back from the unnamed new blizzard game and work on the one that we are still paying for.

Well, they did make a new BG with little lore and no faction. I guess making up a new faction is too hard for them. Great I get to go get owned in a new place like I did when I was in quest greens fighting in AV for the first time.

While I understand that at times a class needs to be nerfed due to being too powerful. I really don't see that rets were that overpowered. Not enough so to totally kill our burst and give us little to no additional sustained DPS. I have read MANY posts on the results from PTR and the sustained DPS on a target dummy went up marginally while burst went down tremendously. I thought rets carried large slow two-handers for a reason.

I guess blizzard wants us to reroll. Screw them, the only class they made that I like is the retribution paladin. It is the only class that can be self sufficient other than the druid. I don't like cows (except to eat) or playing alliance (except to beat on). I guess I will just suffer through the craptastic DPS and wait for someone at blizzard to actually play a ret.

Achievements

2009-07-14T16:37:00.002-04:00

I have been somewhat of an achievement junkie this last week. At the beginning of the week I decided I wasn't going to wait any longer and went to Ice Crown and got my last 3 quests for Ice Crown: The Final Goal by soloing some more 5 man quests. These were the ones were some ghost chick hovers above an arena floor and you take the quests and she flies up and you kill a bunch of baddies, turn in, pick up another quest and so on. This in turn gave me Loremaster of Northrend.

This weekend I decided to work on some old world rep by doing the starter quests in Trisifal Glades which got me to exalted with Undercity and as a side benefit got me the explore Trisifal Glades Achievement. Now, I know I could get me rep by just doing the Argent tournament dailies. Meaning NOW I know I didn't when I started.

One of my guildies made level 80 on one of his alts this weekend so he wanted to do some heroics I was able to influence the choice of Heroics and after a couple of hours Halls of Lightning, Oculus and Old Kingdom are scratched off the list and bam I have the Heroic Dungeonmaster achievement completed. Along with that we got the Lightning Struck and the Timely Death achievements done. Meanwhile I got exalted with Kirin Tor for that achievement.

I started working on the Argent Tournament thing and got Argent Valor last night along with learning that now when I do the dailies I will be getting Horde city rep (small amounts right now since I had to start with Silvermoon who I am already exalted with)

I was doing my cooking and fishing dailies everyday so, I got the 500 fish achievement. With the Emblems I got from the heroics we were doing I got the Libram of SoC which gave me the superior achievement.

All in all I got 14 achievements in 7 days. We'll see if I can get anything like that this week.

If someone is hitting people with a big hammer it is always better to be the one who is swinging the hammer.

Back

2009-07-10T14:46:00.000-04:00

Apparently I can't stay away from the game. I have returned to WOW after a few months. I will probably not post too often this time around. Especially since I will probably be posting from my blackberry now.

After reloading and setting up my ui I logged on and ran a couple instances with my old guild. Even with my lack of practice I still managed to lay the hurt on some mobs. Along with gathering up a good amount of aggro. I downloaded the new rawr program and found that without going to 25 man naxx or ulduar Saraphina won't be getting any better gear yet.

A couple of my guildies invite me into their 3v3 team. I got to do 5 matches and walked away with 5 wins and no deaths. In fact none of us died in the 5 fights I was in.

Well, that's all for now.

Remember to always keep the pointy end away from you!

The End

2009-03-23T19:48:00.001-04:00

The End
When I started playing WoW two and a half years ago I never thought I would be playing this long. Historically I played a game for a few months and then quit. One of the reasons I keep playing the game is because of the helpful nature of a lot of my fellow players. The relatively open nature of the game was another one. When people say why should (insert add-on developer name here) make any money off their idea or their hard work it makes me sick. When blizzard says that people can’t even ask for a donation in game it pisses me off. Whether I pay a developer for something that make my enjoyment of the game go up is my decision. This game was developed by a group that had a good idea and put time into developing it. The scale may be different but it is the same idea. Innovation and hard work should ALWAYS be rewarded. The free loaders that say an add-on should always be free should take a look at the world. This has nothing to do with blizzard trying to make the game better or trying to protect its user base. It is all about them trying to make more money. I understand they are a business and that is what they do but, to strong arm the little guys does is just evil. Anyone who has written code in almost any form knows that writing it is not just picking up a microphone and telling the computer to route me a path that efficiently accomplishes 25 tasks with 3 or more steps each in the proper order. Nor is it clicking five times on your screen to add another pane to your character frame that has all available equipment grouped into meaningful sets. I have written code it does not work like that. A company that has a history of absorbing the work of dozens of authors without even acknowledging them should start with an “M”. Some add-ons are simple others are complex which is actually irrelevant to their value. Their value is solely defined by what can be obtained by someone for giving it to another. I value my time. I am sure that most people value their own time. If this program saves you 1 minute of time every time you use it does the person who wrote it not deserve anything? What if it saves you an hour every day? I think those people who say that it is blizzard’s game and they deserve every dime that is made from are just plain silly. 26 months x $15 = $390 + $20 for the original game + $20 for BC + $70 for WotLK CE = $500. I am one of 11 million users plus. If I am average then that means they have made $5.5 billion. Wait they didn’t write lua or C+. They didn’t invent dwarves or elves or mages or warriors. They didn’t create an operating system or invent microprocessors. Should they receive money for what they have done? Yes they should, they innovated. They put together a group of things in a way that no one else did or no one else marketed the way they did. But, if they are so greedy as to say some other developer can not innovate in a way that involves their program then I am done with them. They have gotten their last dollar from me. I like their game but, I refuse to let them have anymore of my money.

Raid Loot Policy

2009-02-26T14:19:00.002-05:00

I heard general grumblings about the clarity of my previous loot policy so I changed it up a little bit though kept the same general idea.

Rank 1
Tanking Gear
Healing Gear

Rank 2
DPS Gear

Rank 3
Off Set Gear

Tanking gear is defined as anything with a defensive stat (Defense, Dodge, Parry or Block)
Healing gear is defined as anything with spell power and no hit
If the piece is not an improvement you are automatically dropped to Rank 3

Point System
The basis of the point system is that for progression we need to gear our tanks and healers first but not ignore others. Also, you will notice that there is no mention of how much of an improvement a piece is. This is to not penalize people who spend the time an effort to gear their characters outside of raids. The raid we are trying to progress in is not the place to gear up for the raid we are trying to progress in. It is not a DKP system. Your main spec is defined as out of the last 10 raid bosses you have downed you have been on this character in this spec more than half the time. In order to not penalize those who help the group by healing or tanking your main DPS spec ignores bosses you have tanked or healed.

Tank Gear Points
You are capable of tanking (+1)
You are spec’d to tank (+1)
You are currently tanking (+1)
This is your main spec (+1)
You have received a piece of gear this raid ID (-1 each)

Healing Gear Points
You are capable of healing (+1)
You are spec’d to heal (+1)
You are currently healing (+1)
This is your main spec (+1)
You have received a piece of gear this raid ID (-1 each)

DPS Gear Points
You are spec’d to use this piece (+1)
This is your main spec (+1)
You have not received a piece this raid ID (+1)
You have received a piece of gear this raid ID (-1 each)

Basics
First determine which Rank the gear is: Tanking, Healing or DPS.
Second determine who gets to roll on a piece using the appropriate point system: TGP, HGP or DGP. The people with the most points get to roll on the piece. If one person has more points than anyone else they get the piece.

Off-set or off-spec
If you decide to gear up for an off-set or off-spec the first piece you decide on rolling for follows the above rules but every off-set or off-spec piece you win after that costs you one shard or half the going price on the AH for a shard. This situation is defined as a piece that falls into rank 3 or is not your main spec or is not your current spec. If the piece is an improvement to your current or main spec this rule does not apply.

Raid Night

2009-02-10T11:11:00.002-05:00

Naxx-
I logged online last night at around 5 minutes before the scheduled raid start time only to find that it got pushed back a half hour again. See, I am not the only one that is late. So I figured I would fly down to dragonblight and fish for a bit for some strength fish. I got a bunch of them and I asked one of my guildies if he had any flasks or elixirs. He made me a couple and I met him in agmar’s hammer to get them. After trading a bunch of things with him I started flying towards naxx to get ready for the run. My computer decided this was a good time to reboot. After manually rebooting (the button) and then ctrl-alt-del rebooting I finally got back in game and we started the military wing. We wiped once on instructor and then downed him with no drops for me. During this fight our freshly minted holy paladin (he healed our guild all through BC but decided to take a break from the paladin for awhile) told me he put beacon of light on me and left it there during most of the way to the boss. I guess seal and judgment of blood do a bunch of damage. It probably doesn’t help that I pulled aggro a couple times. Anyway, we make our way to harvester which is one we haven’t beat yet. After some discussion I go over to the undead side ( I had to remind the RL I do a crap ton more damage to undead) and we one shot the fight. It was pretty nice but, alas no drops for the retribution paladin. The new holy paladin did get a piece as did the shaman healer. We then went towards the four horsemen and made it there with a couple of scares from accidental pulls but no wipes. We tried to do the horsemen but, after two attempts neither one of which lasting more than a minute, we decided to try with another healer later.
Arch-
We decided to try the vault as a guild but it was close to time for wintergrasp fighting to start. While inside the vault the fight started and we ended up doing that as a guild.
Wintergrasp-
We had a pretty good time doing the wintergrasp fighting. We invited some others that were there into our raid. We ended up successfully defending the keep from the allies. I got some of the quests done and went to fight some more allies to finish the kill x allies quest. I think there were multiple raids going on but, we still won so it was all good. I ended up getting like 5k honor which is cool.

Weekend Report

2009-02-09T10:37:00.003-05:00

Another weekend gone and what have I gotten done?

Quests-
I am still working on the Icecrown quest achievement. I am at 133/140 now and all the quests I have left are group quests. I got some guildies to help me with a few of them but, several of the ones left now are in phased areas of the map. And one of them requires more than one person in the group to be on the quest.

Reputation-
I got exalted on Knights of the Ebon Blade by running a bunch of heroics and also the quests in Icecrown. I also made it to honored on Sons of Hodir doing the dailies. I am not sure which tabard to wear in instances now since I didn’t see much in the way of reputation gear for the other two factions. I am just wearing the Kirin Tor tabard until I decide since more rep with them lowers repair costs in Dalaran.

Gear-
I got my new bracers enchanted and put some gems in them so I wear them now. Those replace my vengeance bindings bringing my epic count up to eight. Because of my new reputation with the Knights I was able to get some new boots which replace my crafted ones. More than likely I won’t replace my helmet since it is in the top three in the game right now. I finally made a list of heroics to do to replace my blue armor to best pre-naxx in slot. I also helped one of our enchanters to make his runed titanium rod so he could put massacre on my polearm and greater assault on my boots.

PvP-
While doing the daily for the Viking women a rogue and DK tried to kill me. Both of them were level 80 so, I figured I was dead. Well, it turns out that they should have left me to do my daily since they both got to do the flight of shame about 60 seconds after they attacked. Then after they resurrected they ran away. Sometimes people are just amusing. The next day a mage tried the same thing, attack me while I am doing the pit fighting. He ended up fully following their example by making his flight of shame in around 45 seconds. Also last night I did a Wintergrasp defense, unsuccessfully I might add, and got like 3000 honor. That puts me around 19k honor. Maybe I will buy something soon.

Heroics-
We ran a few heroics (HoL, UP and UK) and I have to say I have not successfully killed Loken on heroic yet. It is really annoying that we can’t get that one done. We tried the stand and fight method and the healer died every time. We tried the up and down path and we could only do like 4 times up and down before we screwed it up. We tried the right left method and didn’t even make it to the right before we died. I don’t know what to do. I need to finish that one but, I hate dropping 75-100 gold on attempts. That’s more then I usually spend on repairs for a raid night.

Alts-
I ran my lock a little bit to try and get him up in level and work a little on his tailoring. I really want to get his tailoring up so I can make bigger bags for my main. I just can’t get enough interest in him to level him up.

Spell Rotations

2009-02-06T17:08:00.000-05:00

Since paladins are a first come first served rotation DPS class, I have a priority of casting as I am sure most of us do. With global cooldowns at 1.5 seconds it is very important to cast the best spell you can cast as soon as you can cast it. Basically I start at the top and cast the first spell that is off c/d and meets the special requirement in parentheses. to arrive at these rotations i did a lot of reading and practicing. There are different circumstances which vary what I do but here are the basics.

Elite pulls-
Divine Plea (mana is less that 90% and not wearing my wings)
Avenging Wrath (tank has agro locked in and mob will be there for 10 seconds)
Trinket (tank has agro locked in and mob will be there for 10 seconds)
Judgment of Wisdom
Hammer of Wrath (mob is 20% or less)
Holy Wrath (there are undead or demons around me)
Exorcism (target is undead or demon)
Crusader Strike
Divine Storm
Consecrate

Non-elite AoE pulls (instance)-
Divine Plea (mana is less that 90% and not wearing my wings)
Holy Wrath (there are undead or demons around me)
Divine Storm
Consecrate
Judgment of Wisdom
Crusader Strike
Exorcism (target is undead or demon)
Hammer of Wrath (mob is 20% or less)

Solo small group pulls-
Divine Plea (mana is less that 90% and not wearing my wings)
Judgment of Wisdom
Holy Wrath (there are undead or demons around me)
Divine Storm
Crusader Strike
Exorcism (target is undead or demon)
Consecrate
Hammer of Wrath (mob is 20% or less)

Solo large group pulls-
Divine Plea (mana is less that 90% and not wearing my wings)
Holy Wrath (there are undead or demons around me)
Consecrate
Divine Storm
Judgment of Wisdom
Crusader Strike
Exorcism (target is undead or demon)
Hammer of Wrath (mob is 20% or less)

Single non-elite (not prefered)-
Judgment of Wisdom
Divine Storm
Crusader Strike
they should be dead

Naxx-10 and Sarth-10

2009-02-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

Naxx-10
Last night we farmed the four bosses we have on farm in Naxx. We closed the arachnid wing which gave me some new bracers which are a slight improvement on my vengeance bindings. For some reason we had a little trouble with Grand Widow last night. We actually wiped two or three times before finishing her. One thing I learned was I am not the worst one for starting early on a mob or boss. When we downed patchwerk I got the healing plate to use for my holy set. Even with the changed glyphs from last week I am still running into mana issues with patchwerk. When he got down to around 40% or so I had to pop a mana pot. Not sure if I am doing something wrong here or not. One of the contributing factors in this is that I am not being healed so no mana from SA. I do the same rotation as I have read in most places: JoW, Exorcism, CS, DS, Consecrate, DP and pop wings and trinket. I repeat these as often as their cooldowns allow using pretty much that as the priority.

Sarth-10
Since we got a late start last night due to one of the tanks showing up late, we left Naxx and went to Sarth for some badges and loot. I actually made it on time last night in fact I was 30 minutes early. The 22-slot bag dropped along with the bag of loot. Some other stuff dropped but, not for me. I lost the roll on both of the bags. I just took my badges and signed off.

Net result-
I ended up with some healing gear and eight badges for the night. Not bad for 25 or so gold in repairs. Hopefully I can get a couple heroics in so I can move closer to some more badge gear.

Things I have observed-
One bad thing about being a retribution paladin in a raid is that I don’t get to see very much. I pretty much have to watch my cooldowns fairly close so I don’t miss one. Death Knights can put out some serious DPS. The more the tank moves around with the mob I am trying kill the lower my DPS goes. I can really pump out some serious DPS when I am standing still. Trying to maintain a full set for all four of the roles I want to takes up a ton of bag space. No one, including me, likes to be told to change the way they play their characters.

First visit to VoA

2009-02-05T12:42:00.002-05:00

I finished changing out my gems for all blue level gems on Tuesday just in time for one of my guildies to ask in guild chat if anyone wanted to tank or DPS heroic VoA. I volunteered to DPS and about 15 seconds later I got an invite. Now let me say this, I have never done a VoA (10 or 25) nor successfully done any 25-man raid. So, I accept a summons because for some reason I haven’t seen the portal from Dalaran appear when we have Wintergrasp in a long time. I ran into the instance and waited with the group for the rest of the people to show up. While waiting I figured it would be a good idea to read the strategy for the fight. It seemed fairly simple: stay out of the spikes, stay out of the cloud things, once in awhile the boss will grab the MT and the OT needs to pick him up and he will random charge someone occasionally. We wiped several times which surprised most of the people in there because apparently it is the easiest raid boss in the game. I was worried I wasn’t doing my part but, with full raid buffs I ended up hitting around 2.3 kDPS. This ranked me around #7 on the charts. So, I was doing my part of the DPS. So, I looked at damage and healing taken and mine was a little higher that other DPS types but, with SoB that is to be expected. We tried three times and failed then the RL said he was dumping people who were not performing and I figured I would be gone but, nope we got some more people in and wiped once and then got it done. I got some gold and a couple emblems. One thing I didn’t like was a ton of lag as soon as spells started flying. Not sure if I should or even can do anything about that.

After returning to Dalaran I bought my badge belt. I put a buckle on it and added a gem to that. I am considering changing out my gloves but I have replaced a lot of my hit with crit rating and am fairly close to the hit cap so I am not sure.

One of our main healers was on so, I was hoping to get a heroic in but, he wanted to work on his holy paladin to better heal raids. We ended up going to HoS and walking through that easy. After that I signed off for the night.

Weekend questing and Naxx-10 raid

2009-02-03T16:17:00.000-05:00

Weekend Questing-
I decided to try to finish off the quest achievements in Northrend this past weekend. I got Stormpeaks done and the other zones were already done and got a good chunk of Icecrown done. I only have around 20 or so left to get that achievement done. Unfortunately I may run into issues without a group as it appears that a lot of the quest chains require a group. During the process of doing these quests I made around 2000 gold so I am doing ok on money again.

Monday Raid-
We went back to Naxx-10 again and gave Instructor another shot. This time we did it no problem. Our GL/RL thinks that when we tried it last Thursday it was bugged since he didn’t have any problem using the controlling crystals this time. We got him down in one shot this time. Nothing dropped for me this time. Next we tried Gothik the Harvester. After about 5 failed attempts we called it and went and gave Sartharion a try. Cleared the adds and engaged the boss. We died the first time but, on the second try we succeeded. The drops were a 22 slot bag, a bag of emblems, tier 7 shaman chest, and a spirit trinket. I rolled on the bags but, lost both. After that we called it a night.

Observations
One thing of note was that before the raid I went ahead and changed my glyphs to the ones recommended in most places I have looked. I also changed out a couple gems to blue level ones. During some of the trash pulls around sarth I noticed my DPS meter going up to 3500. I have not seen anything that high except in those gimmick fights where some mob or another gives you crazy buffs. I definitely like that number. I think I will go give some GC some gold and finish out putting the blue gems in my slots. I think I will also get the T-7 gloves for emblems and enchant and gem that up. Hopefully I can pull off some more numbers like that.

Monday raid

2009-01-30T14:53:00.000-05:00

I logged on for raid night right about start time again (I really need to do something about that) and I find out that our raid start got pushed back an hour. Apparently one of our tanks had to work late so we had to delay. When I log on the raid leader tells me I need to confirm my raid invite which I didn’t even see. Anyway, I tell him I am here and will go. Since we weren’t starting right away I bounce over to my AH mule and post a few auctions. Then I log over to my enchanter and send a stack of infinite dust and a stack of greater cosmic essences so I can get my polearm from Monday enchanted. Now, I ask one of our guild’s GC’s if he has the Sovereign Twilight Opal. It turns out that this recipe is a world drop as well. I am not happy that both this and the blue level orange gem are both world drops. That is really annoying. So I get the purple rock cut with AP instead. I grab some dragonfin filets and strength elixirs from my bank and head out to naxx.

We finally get started in the arachnid wing and it is a relatively smooth run. I am pretty sure we didn’t have any wipes in that wing. I got the neck from Anub’Rekhan by out rolling a rogue on it. It probably would have been a bigger improvement for him but, I wasn’t feeling generous. We rolled on it and it was in accordance with our stated loot rules. Then Maexxna dropped the polearm again and the DK got it. I was a sport and gave him mats to get it enchanted and he was able to use it right then. We did Patchwerk again and downed him fairly easy. Ok that was not bad. Now, we try a new boss. We go to the military wing and start in instructor raz. No one in the raid has tried this guy before but, the RL had read the strategy and seemed to have an idea of what to do. After many wipes we ended up calling it a night. We had some issues with initial controlling and releasing of the apprentices. And it was getting late so, we just called it. Hopefully we will move further in on Thursday.

I have enough badges for a couple pieces but I am not sure I want to get them as they may not be much of an improvement. Another thing I am not happy with is that there are no useful librams between the venture co one and a couple in naxx-25. That is a pretty big gap in my opinion.

Damage meters

2009-01-27T13:48:00.001-05:00

OK, quick post on my opinion of DPS numbers and the importance of these numbers. While the fact that these numbers are relative to specific fights and roles in these fights should be recognized. Also, it should be noted that group composition will have varying effects on the end result of DPS for a given fight. Example: moonkin aura, retribution aura … These numbers do have importance in that if the group doesn’t have enough DPS they will not finish a fight. All of the little sayings being passed around are true to some extent. If a healer dies it’s the tank’s fault. If a tank dies it’s the healer’s fault. If a DPS dies it’s the DPS’s fault. The exceptions are important as well. If melee DPS dies on a boss that does AoE or in a fight where the boss will strike the person in melee with the most HP whose fault is it? If the tank dies because the healer ran out of mana whose fault is it?

While healers and tanks don’t like seeing the damage meters being flashed up, since they are not high on them, the numbers are still important to let people know where they stand in comparison to the rest of the raid/party. Attention should be paid on whether the DPS in question has other duties assigned (sheep, trap or banish to name a few.) But, the blanket DPS numbers are not important comments or the sarcastic “oh that’s important” remarks are just as unproductive as rubbing people’s noses in their lower DPS numbers

Monday raid night

2009-01-27T12:52:00.001-05:00

Monday night is raid night in my guild so, last night we went to naxx-10.

Anub’Rekhan-
This boss has turned fairly easy since we figured out that the tank needs to tank him outside of the ooze stuff. The fight went well. We didn’t lose anyone. The DPS plate dropped but I lost the roll to our DK.

Grand Widow Faerlina-
It only took one shot on this boss as well. I didn’t get any drops from this one. This is an interesting boss. I am glad that someone figured out that to beat her you need to kill one of her minions every time she enrages. On the first enrage timer I had to go help the OT DPS the first sacrifice but, after that one the OT had to turn his back on the others for most of the fight or risk killing them to early.

Maexxna-
We ended up wiping a couple of times on this one. One problem in being the highest DPS in the raid is that when the tank dies you follow him to the grave pretty quickly. Our OT was able to pick him/her up fairly fast but, not fast enough for me to live. After two wipes we were able to time the web wraps enough so that the tank didn’t die and next thing you know we have the spider wing done. Then I had to argue with myself for awhile on whether I wanted the polearm or not but, in the end decided to take it and play around with it to see if I could get more DPS out of it. Since I am hit capped and the purple mace I have has a bunch of hit on it I might be able to get a little more DPS. I don’t like the fact is has no strength on it but I will have to give it a try in the world to see how it works out.

We had to talk for a few minutes on which wing to do next since we weren’t sure if we had the DPS for patchwork yet but, after one of the healers dropped to run his hunter we figured to give it a try.

Patchwork-
First try we had everyone jump in the slime except the main tank. The problem with that is when you do that your mana drops as well. Since we weren’t sure about this strategy one of the healers jumped in as well. I ran out of mana. The healer ran out of mana. Then we all ran out of life. The next try I didn’t jump in and the healer didn’t jump in since I would not my own life down with SoB and if he hit me once with the strike thing it would be ok as I could live through one of them and that would make me not get another one. We died one more time and then we were able to kill him. I can’t remember the drops unfortunately. Except that our priest healer got some boots.

We then tried Grobulus but only got two tries before the priest and both called it. Maybe we will actually get our Thursday run in and advance a little bit more this week.

Weekend report

2009-01-26T10:00:00.001-05:00

Another weekend is gone. I decided to do the entire honor your elder quest series and realized that that is a large time investment. I ended up finishing all of them except a few the ones in the Northrend instances. I will try to get those done fairly soon. I wouldn’t mind getting another title besides Jenkins. While doing the quests I ended up getting exalted with org and getting close on UC.

We ran some heroics as a guild but, I didn’t get any gear ups for my main spec. We did AN, Gundrak, Drak’tharon keep.

I have been doing the daily cooking quest everyday and for the last 6 or 7 days it has been the same one. I am about sick of making a plate for the gathering at the legerman.

I really need to figure out a gear upgrade plan for my paladin instead of just saying I need to do it. My plan is to make a list of all my gear. Find what the best gear I can get from a heroic is. Use a formula I got from somewhere to rate the amount of improvement each gives. And finally, rank the gear by amount of improvement. My fear is that there is not going to be that many pieces that give an improvement in heroics.

Right now my plan is:
1) Finish the lunar festival achievement
2) Make a gear plan
3) Work on finishing the quests in Northrend
4) Run heroics to achieve gear plan

Three days and one drop

2009-01-23T17:09:00.001-05:00

Three days go by and what have I gotten done in WoW? Not much unfortunately. Wednesdays are an off day for me.

Tuesday was patch day and with the disconnect issues going on I spent most of my time on my DK. I realize now that some people have no business trying to PvP. My DK was level 60 at the start of the night and in the starter gear you get for the initial quests. I am running around in hellfire and I end up in a bad pull. I had about 6 mobs on me beating me about the head and shoulders. I do OK and end up killing off three of them when another DK grabs me and commences to attacking me. So, I turn my attention to him and kill him. I look at his level and he is a 62. What?!? OK must be a fluke. I finish off the last three mobs and have to resummon my pet since he did actually kill that. Then I decide to see if I can kill some more mobs and stack up 5 more. Halfway through the same DK attacks again. He ends up with the same fate as last time. This time I did end up turning into a ghoul but did not die until I exploded myself so I could rez into my normal body. The he commences to attack again with no mobs on me. I really don’t get it. He couldn’t kill me while I was fighting a bunch of mobs and now he attacks me at full health and read for him. He died. Again and again. I think KoS said like 10 times I killed him that night before he gave up. I finally continue on and make level 61. Then I am fighting three of those ravager things to get their eggs and a retribution paladin hits me. I figure I am done now he’s level 63. Next thing I know I am standing there with his corpse, and the corpse of 5 ravagers ( got some adds in the running around fighting) and at like ¾ health. He didn’t come back for more. Lesson to be learned if you can’t PvP don’t attack people who are not bothering you.

When the servers finally came back online and stayed working I logged on my pally and did my cooking daily and logged off.

Thursday, our designated raid night came and when raid time came around I was online with 8 others waiting for one of our tanks to come online. Long story short at like 0100 he still had not come on. We ran heroic Gundrak and the purple ring dropped. The funny thing is I replaced the ring I had just gotten from heroic nexus on Monday.

We got into some PvP before the run in the crystallized fire farm in Borean Tundra. Those guys were good. We were not so much. They had titles we do not. You know the titles like Brutal Gladiator and the flawless victor. We finally ran the three of them off when our fifth showed up. We need to work on our coordination a bit on that. Didn’t help they made the sky’s not so safe with one of them being a shaman and the other a priest. The shaman knocks me off my mount and the priest gives him levitate. The hunter was plinking away as I am falling. And then right in front of the instance we jumped some people.

No Raid last night

2009-01-20T15:46:00.001-05:00

Last night I logged on late (to minutes before raid time) due to work running over and causing my Monday basketball to go late as well. I figured I would get a ration of crap for being late. I should have known better. I had some flasks already and a few plus foods so I could realistically just go to the raid and get started anyway. So I log on and look at the guild list there are three people online (including me). What!?! Oh well, guess were not raiding tonight. I log off and log on my banker/AH character to check some auctions and when I get back on 5 minutes later there are 10 online including me. Wow, talk about bell tappers. Any way I look at what members are online and only two healers and no tanks are on. After I log in i see in guild chat "only need tanks and we are good to go for naxx." So, I look again at the guild list and see that only four of the members are level 80. Granted that several of them have 80 alts we don’t have enough for a naxx run. I say this and get annoyed comments.

So my arena partner logs on and asks if anyone wants to run some arenas. I let him know I am ready let’s go. We end up running some 3vs switching people in and out for points. Then we start our 2vs. Personally I like 2v2 arenas the best. A retribution paladin teamed with a frost mage is a pretty fun combination. The only problem is that last night we had four to five minute queues with our matches lasting less than a minute it was a lot of sitting around waiting for a quick flurry of activity. What I have found is that our cap right now is around 1400. As soon as we went above that we got smacked back down. It was still a lot of fun. By the way, I really need to get some better PvP gear. I really think it is funny when a druid shifts to kitty form and I drop HoJ and proceed to burst them from 100% to corpse before the stun wears off. Let this be a lesson for druids that don’t know, don’t shift to cat form in front of a paladin who has you targeted. The worst match we had was an elemental shaman and an enhancement shaman team. 8 totems make it hard to target who you want without clicking. And for those that don’t know those shamans can throw some serious DPS out. If they FF they can burn down you down before you can say uhh ohh. Anyway we ended around 1400 as I said.

After we finished up with the arenas the guild leader had come on and wanted to discuss raid schedules. We set up a schedule, much to my chagrin. As fun as raids are when they get scheduled it veers closer to the work zone then I prefer. I do understand that when you are dealing with more people it makes sense that you schedule things but, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I also brought up some loot rules. I had written out a simple looting rules plan a week or so ago and posted it on our guild site and a total of 2 people read it. By the way, that is kind of annoying. I explained it (again annoying to explain something I had already typed up) and after some discussion my policy was for the most part accepted. A couple said they would like to look into DKP and a couple others said that if we used DKP they didn’t want to go on the raids. I will hammer out a few details of my looting rules plan and post it here later on.

While we were having this meeting I was down in dragon blight farming fish for strength food and some idiot level 80 horde warrior starts fishing the node I was on. I mean come on the lake down there has like 5 or 6 spawn points and they respawn fairly quickly. Sometimes I wish they allowed me to hit another horde upside the head. So, I posted his name in guild chat and to our sister guild. I hope he doesn’t need anything from anyone of us.

Finally done with the meeting and with not enough guild members on to run naxx I wanted to run Heroic Gundrak for the ring I need to replace my last green quest piece. But, unfortunately two of the people that would go had already ran it since it was the daily. So, I got everyone to go to heroic nexus. And when we went to the tree boss low and behold the blue ring dropped for me so I am all blues and purples. Now I just need to start replacing my lower blues. I wish there was a good replacement for the venture co libram.

cya

Catch up

2009-01-19T16:35:00.002-05:00

Well, I haven’t posted in awhile. I have been finding that when I log on in the evening after work I want to advance my main character (the paladin). So, I look to see who is on in the guild and most times we have ten people on plus or minus two. Then when I look to see who it is there is one or two people on that have tanks and the rest are all DPS types. I know I shouldn't say anything as I am on a DPS character right now as well. Seeing as I want to make my character better I go and do some quests for reputation and gold and make sure to do the dailies for the Wrymrest Accord. At some point someone with a healer gets on and we go do a heroic. I guess no one wants to run a healer now. I am glad that we can usually find a tank to run but, as the only thing I have ever done with my paladin is DPS and tank, it makes it hard to do a run.

I could try to round up a healing set and spec holy but, that’s not the type of paladin I am. I have never gone further into the holy tree then tier 2 or 3 for some divine strength and some off healing junk to get into some groups before paladin could do the massive amounts of DPS they do now.

OK as for an update since I haven’t posted in awhile. I got exalted with Wrymrest and got my pants and the drake. I finished exploring Northrend to get the tabard. I upgraded most of my gear by doing heroics. There is only one piece of my gear that is still a quest reward. The only good rings I have found are in heroic Gundrak and heroic nexus so, I have been trying to do those as much as possible. I haven’t had enough time to see what the proc rate is on the mirror of truth yet even though I went ahead and got one. While I was questing in storm peaks I went ahead and used the polearm from the rep gear and topped off that weapon skill to give me my fourth weapon to 400 for the achievement.
Now I need to get my warlocks tailoring skill up so I can make some new bags to get more storage space. I might do some leveling on him so I can get some cloth to make that stuff since I spent 1.6k gold on a dragon mount.

hardcore or softcore

2009-01-07T14:54:00.001-05:00

I was listening to a podcast today and heard more of the hard-core/soft-core debate. I figured I would post my opinion on this. I personally can’t figure out which side of the line I am on so, I will present what I like to consider a neutral point of view.

If your goal is to complete all the content of a game as fast as humanly possible then have fun doing it but, don’t complain when two months after release you don’t have anything left to do. Also, I am not sure where I stand on the achievement thing yet but, I do think it can be a good tool for those who think they have done everything there is to do in the game. In other words, just because you have finished the current highest level raid on heroic doesn't necessarily mean you have “finished” the game. Have you done all the instances in WotLK? Have you done all of them on heroic? Have you done all of the raids on 10-person? Have you done all of them on 25-person? That is just WotLK dungeons. There are also the BC instances and raids. Oh yeah don’t forget there was an entire world before BC that had instances and raids too. So, you’ve done all of the instanced content? Have you done all the quests in all the WotLK zones? Good job. How about the BC zones? Again don’t forget the old world zones. You finished all the quests in all the zones? How is your reputation? Are you exalted with everyone? Great! Have you explored all the zones?

Anyway I think/hope you get the point. There is probably more to do. Some of these things may or may not be things you want to do. The point is that the game has tons of content to do. I assume it was made keeping in mind that different people want to do different things.

The real question is should the developers cater to the top 5% of the players? Should they cater to the rest of the player base? The answer is yes. Without a doubt they should. That being said, I think that a proportional amount of development time should be spent based on the quantity of paying customers that are actually going to get to use/see the product.

Holiday break

2009-01-06T10:37:00.003-05:00

It has been a couple weeks and I have really not gotten much done due to spending a week or so out of town.
As a guild we have been doing some heroics and gave two of the 10-mans a try. Notice I said try. I think our DPS needs to gear up. Our tanks and healers seem to be doing fine but, the bosses stay alive too long so the healers end up running out of mana. I am not sure what DPS we are supposed to be at but, I am at around 1400-1800 depending on the fight. The next guy down (yes I am on top) is around 1300-1400. We had a couple of our guys PUG nax but, I don’t like PUG’s and there are still morons out there that think retribution paladins can’t DPS. I also got my northrend dungeon master achievement.

I got my purple crafted two-handed mace and helm. So my instance DPS set is shaping up OK. Let me tell you, that helm made a big difference in overall DPS (around +100), way more than I had expected. And that is without an enchant or gem in it yet. The mace I had expected to have a large impact and it did add around 100-150 or so. I still have not gotten around to making a plan for upgrades yet.

I am working on wyrmrest accord reputation currently. I really want the dragon mount but, the purple pants will be nice as well. Next will probably be ebon hold for the head enchant.

I teamed up with a frost mage for my first arenas of the season and we pulled off a 5-5 set of ten. My partner was the guy from our raids sitting at number two in DPS. We really had no problem with other two DPS teams but, healer-DPS teams posed some difficulty for us. Some of those healers can heal like crazy. I really can’t believe that with both of us banging away at the healer he can keep himself alive. We had problems with all the brands of healers. One of the fights was a DK/DK team both unholy far enough to get the ghoul form thing after you die. While that ghoul doesn’t last long if we concentrated on it, we both seemed to space out the fact that the ghoul might appear. So, when it happened the first one that died came around and killed the mage, I killed the other one and then both of those ghouls focus fired on me. I think with a little more practice we can do pretty good in there. We also did some 3v3 fights with a resto shaman, frost mage and ret pally. Those went ok. And we did a few two ret pally and resto shaman. Those went ok as well.

Weekend 12/20

2008-12-22T13:21:00.002-05:00

The weekend is over and what did I accomplish? Well, I made one level on my lock and one level on my hunter. I also managed to get some saronite and a little (I mean little) bit of titanium. Just to get enough titanium to smelt my daily titansteel takes forever. Someone told me the best place to get titanium is wintergrasp. Yeah that place sux. Not only can I not fly but, half the time I was there I couldn’t even ride my charger. This was due to an issue which had me stuck in combat for 10 minutes after I killed the last thing that attacked me. I finally logged off and on and I could finally mount again. Then I get attacked again and there it is again. I was ready to scream. I logged again. A little while later I fell off a cliff (yeah I am clumsy) and died (hit escape instead of my bubble and couldn’t get the stupid menu closed before splat). Low and behold when I appear at the spirit healer I am in sholozar basin not wintergrasp. After about 10 minutes of trying to find a way back in I give up. Now I can’t even find a stupid graveyard since the one showing on the map is in wintergrasp (huh?). It is a good thing I remembered the auto-unstuck thing or I would have gone batty. Took my durability loss and rez sickness and went on about my ore farming. I ended up getting around 10 skill points in BS and sent some blues to the AH for some gold.

Oh yeah one funny thing I have to say is how dumb is a DK that death grips a ret pally? I went to help some guildies that were getting ganked by a DK, a tree and a priest (don’t know what kind cause he died too quick). As noted, I killed the priest then the tree. The DK was killing my guildies at this time apparently. As I turned to start on him he grabs me a pulls me to him. Well, thanks buddy lemme give you a CS, DS and judgment for your trouble. Have a fun corpse run. By this time a couple other guildies had shown up and the losers rezzed and ran into the instance. It’s really annoying when the allies won’t even bring some friends to have a real pvp fight.

Botanica and a couple of Halls

2008-12-19T12:53:00.003-05:00

Last night I ran the daily Wyrmrest quest. I think the achievement for running a daily quest five days in a row is broken. I have run that specific quest like 7 or 8 days in a row,
Then a guildy asked for a Botanica run to finish off some alchemy quest so we started off the night back in TBC. It was pretty simple so we burned through in about 15 minutes or so and headed back to Northrend.
Two more people added to the group and we headed to Storm Peaks to try out those instances. Ran the halls of Stone first with some of their lowers 75 Ele shammy, 76 tankadin, 77 disc priest, 80 frost mage and me 80 ret pally. It was a cake walk. The priest got some drops and I think the tankadin got one as well.
Since it was so easy we decided to go across the way and burn through Halls of Lightning as well. So the shaman logged over to his 80 retribution paladin and we gave it a shot. Three of the five of had never done it before so we wiped two times on the second boss but, we figured it out and burned him down too. Everything went fine until Loken. The whole tank him in one spot, run away when he is casting his AoE then running back seemed to be too much for the group. It probably didn’t help the tank was 76 and the three DPS were doing decent DPS. The priest finally called it and I went away unfulfilled.
Summary for the night: three instances ran, several deaths, almost 100 gold in repairs and not a single upgrade. I should probably figure out what gear I need for upgrade and map out a plan to upgrade it. I will have to shoehorn that in with trying to get everything else done at the same time. I really need to get better gear.

History part 2

2008-12-18T11:06:00.002-05:00

To continue, when WotLK came out I decided to roll a DK. I did the starter zone, which I have to say was awesome, and like 3 or 4 quests in outlands. Then I parked the DK and went back to my main.

I leveled starting in Howling Fjord then Dragon Blight then Grizzly Hills. Got the achievements for all three zones and started doing quests in Sholazar basin and decided to go to Icecrown soon after I got my cold weather flying. I finished off the leveling thing on the tenth of December. This time I was number 8 in the guild to hit the level cap. Yes, still the same guild. In all this time I didn’t replace a single piece of armor from BC (2 S2 pieces 1 S4 piece and the rest S3). I replaced both trinkets and both rings. I also got the weapon from the new ring of blood type chain in Zul’Drak. Its an axe. I don’t like axes on my pally so I had to replace that quickly.
I decided I wanted to get the epic flying mount so I went back Borean Tundra to do all those quests for the gold. Got the achievements for that zone and moved on to Zul’Drak. Around a third of the way through those quests I got to 5200 gold and went and got the mount and skill for swift flying.

My next step is to get my trade skills up to max. I easily got mining to 450 but, when I went to trainer to work on blacksmithing, found that I had no gold after the epic flight thing. I did some more quests in Zul’Drak and got back up to 650 gold after getting all available patterns. My blacksmithing skill is around 425 or so now. I finally got to replace the axe with the blue blacksmithing mace. I also worked with a guildy who has a chanter and gem cutter to gem and chant the savage saronite gloves for me. I also made the shoulders to replace both the S2 pieces I had.

I tried my hand at some BG’s and found that I don’t have a chance when the odds are 4 to 1. Note to self: stay with the group. The new BG is fun and totally different from the old ones.

History

2008-12-18T08:55:00.001-05:00

OK, figured I should start with some history. I started playing WoW around 22 months ago. My first toon was a NE rogue got to level 12. Then I started my BE ret pally. At the time I think there was around 2 level 70's in my guild. As i learned to play the game the rest of the people in the guild leveled to 70. I was the 10th person in the guild to reach 70. Yes, they were all waiting for me so they could get beyond the horseman in Kara. And, yes we are a small guild. During the year and a half or so between reaching level 70 and the new expansion I was on the gear grind. Got in an arena team and hit the BG's to get purples. Found out that I liked PvP but, was not very well equipped for it (gear and skills both). Spent too much time grinding BG's and ended up leveling a BE lock for some change of pace. At the end of BC was fully purple and one of the best geared toons in the guild. At least that is what be.imba said.

The Begining

2008-12-11T16:40:00.001-05:00

I started this blog to record my experiences after leveling my retribution paladin to 80 in WotLK. Over time I will add formatting, pics and such but, for now this is how I will start.