Hmm... What to say

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.

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.

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.

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.

hardcore or softcore

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.

History part 2

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

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.