Progress

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

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.

PvP alts and the AH

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.

Update

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.

Ulduar, ToC and a new tool

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

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.

Raid Night

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

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.

Naxx-10 and Sarth-10

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

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

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

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.

Three days and one drop

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

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

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.

Holiday break

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.