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.

Personal patch results

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

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

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

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

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.