Friday, September 26, 2008

Numbers I like Numbers

Okay hoping with no basis for hope i went off to the ptr late last night early this am. What I found out made me happy. Ill maintain crit immunity and have loads yes loads more spell damage.


Ok here are the important stats.


LIVE: PTR:
STR: 142 STR: 302
AGI: 89 AGI: 89
STAM: 1075 STAM: 1036
INT: 135 INT: 135
DEF. RAT: 515 DEF. RAT.: 491
ARMOR: 16353 W/DEVO AURA ARMOR: 16783W/DEVO AURA
DODGE: 17.73% DODGE: 22.86%
PARRY: 16.60% PARRY: 15.24%
BLOCK: 27.45% BLOCK: 24.72%

Some gains some losses nothing earth shattering above the crit cap so happy tank. Now for the numbers that made me double check that I did take the free re-spec to Prot.

SPELL DAMAGE

Kings Defender +93 Kings Defender +368
Crystalforge sword +254 Cyrstalforge sword +529
Shard of Virtouis +236 Shard of Virtious + 594

So I wanted a quickie test of some of the new talents/spell changes so went out to Nagrand. Must say love the BoSac changes with healing myself thrown in and judging wise/light depeneding on what I need more I solo'd Banthor and Durnn. Self healing and self mana regen had to sit after each attempt but overall i like the direction of the prot tree thats heading or way.


*Sorry for poor formating wont accept my tabs for some reason*

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Since we last caught up

Hello again everyone, anyone? Apparently the part of the brain that likes to write has been away for a bit, but fear not occasional reader the mouse is back on the wheel. Actually been kind of sensory over load around the old place; school functions have begun again and of course all the things that go with that homework(John's not mine), dinner and just trying to sneak in everything. Add into that a healthy douse of Brewfest and an ol' pally forgets hes supposed to be writing.

Summary of games news, have been made a class leader for Sidhe Devils goodness watch out people may try and take me serious now, but that started the old mouse wheel going full speed. As I jokingly say that had I known now what I didn't know then i would have done many things different with Grai. For starters I was prot pre-bc; (pause for laugh track), figured if i lived longer that sounded good. Had no idea about leveling guides,gear lists, any of the stuff alot if not all of us use today. So i played him my way and made tons of mistakes along the way but wouldn't honestly change it a bit. I learned what worked( no corpse run), and what didn't(corpse run) had a spell cycle down before i knew thats what i was supposed to do.

What has this to do with anything well earlier today Ishvi was gonna do a protection pally leveling guide, my response was why waste the effort. In 2 to 3 weeks when we get the pre-patch for wrath of the litch king everything will be moot. I'm not to concerned I'll adapt might grumble for awhile but in 10 levels ill most likely complain about the conditions pre-wrath. Why? You might ask its because I'm can be fickle with talents,spells etc.. the game changes and some are great some stink. But i will also go back to Grai as the main he was 70 before anyone else and unless he gets ran over by roaming motorcyclist in wrath he'll be 80 first.

As some of you know I had a chance to play the first couple beta builds. I have had all 3 dk specs to outlands,blood is definitely the speed program, unholy made me feel warlockish, and frost oh goodie duel wielding tank nah for me at least. Also at this time seal where broke in the beta so playing as a pally was tough,but again played around with the "new" at the time talent builds. Discovered I could play Ret (Ok yes I have hated on Ret but even this old dog can learn a new trick), kinda nice to kill one mob fast when your used to killing 6 slow. Holy I can have heals that work on more than one person woot. The finally prot yes the one I'll be because I do like to tank. But in the short time i spent on the beta there where 2 builds at least so the every changing flux+lag+ a big dose of need to level alts i stopped playing it.

So yes Paladin got some love for all 3 trees this time, so old stand-byes will not be used as much; not running with BoK always up will be odd. Not running with BoSac always up is silly. So i have lots of excitement looking forward to wrath. Having 3 at 70 and possibly a 4th will give me distraction and tons of fun as Grai blazes the trail they will follow, Ill have better notes this time about what and where so leveling the alts will be faster. Padrad and Carack may be bound for PvP at 80 while Fal and Grai are mashing/getting smashed in Naxx.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Been Busy Busy Busy

Well since last we meet I have a couple of things to share. First of Grai finally got his t4 helm and gloves from kara, between lousy rolls and being on thew wrong toon just never ever got lucky so woot got em just in time for re itemization. Secondly and a much more fun thing Pad hit 70 late Sunday night and had a few presents waiting for him. He has his season 2 shoulders and gloves and a nice old pally made him the netherdrake breastplate, so he turned 70 with decent gear. Still many holes that need to be filled in on him but that's part of the fun. So Auchidon instances here I come. Well short post must grind dailies dang 70 again and its still expensive.

Friday, September 12, 2008

My take on Paladin tanking changes

Looking at the latest beta build currently available at all the usuall places we see some interesting changes coming to Paladin tanking. I know alot of tanks are worried about the defense cap and being able to maintain crit immunity currently 490 defense rating. While I think we all understand that while leveling we dont need to be capped defense rating wise what about the time between 3.0.2 coming to live servers and the release of wotlk.

Blizz has reworked the stat allocation on tier gear(4-6) and some badge gear adding strength and lowering defense rating numbers. One of the things that I believe that is being overlooked by the players is how the mechanics of tanking are gonna change. With BoSac every dodge,parry,block with return mana to us; strength is now going to give us 1 block for every 2 strength, greatly increasing our block holy shield has 8 charges for ten seconds once talented. How I see this affecting the defense cap is that we may have to regem redo some of our enchants/enhancements on our gear. We have access to vindicators armor kits +8 defense rating to hands,legs or feet; steelweave for our cloaks +15 defense rating. An enchant where we can get +12 defense rating to our bracers and/or +15 defense rating to chest piece. Plus the new Isle epic gems which can be cut for + 10 defense rating.

Also as we quested to 70 we had access to trinkets for increased defense rating Dabiri's Enigma a quest reward from netherstorm which has +30 defense rating. Also the adamantine figurine which also has + 30 defense rating and is a drop from Black Heart the inciter.

Yeah if we have to change armor kits regem our gear and or change back to old trinkets we are gonna loose some stamina how much depends on personal gear level, gems, enchants etc.

But now for what I see as the good side of all of this. If we are blocking way more we are reducing incoming damage greatly, with the BoSac changes I already mentioned we will still see a decent amount of mana regen and dont need to take a hit to get it, so we should still have decent mana regen and lets hope less healer stress.

Earlier in the beta, we removed the Defiance talent. It was a mandatory talent since encounters were designed around the very safe assumption that all Prot warriors had it. So Defensive Stance ended up generating more threat.

More recently in the beta, we did a similar thing with Salv. We pulled Salv as a blessing some time ago, so we baked even more threat into Defensive Stance (and equivalents for other tanks).

If this makes it easier to understand, imagine that everyone except the tank always has Perma Salv up and every tank has Defiance as a core ability.

This makes me very happy because some of the tooltips were saying no longer greatly increase threat.

* Shield of Righteousness now deals holy damage equal to 240% of your block value. (Up from 200%)

Yeah a solid single target aggro maching that is gonna scale with the changes to our block

* Righteous Defense is now a 10 sec cooldown and cost no mana

just in case we do lose threat somehow.

So over all I dont see us being gimped between 3.0.2 and the release of wotlk we may have to re learn a couple ways we do things and adjust to a new rotation but we will survive this I'm sure.
We have had a insanely great run through TBC and now we have to relearn somethings but we had to when TBC pre release patch came out anyways

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Random thoughts about 2 of my favorite writers

I have always been a huge fan of two writers; non fantasy writers but great story tellers, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. Both of the men wrote of a life lived in society but on the fringes they lived. I was raised by my grandparents they were born in 1901 and 1905 respectfully and didn't think that my choice of authors good for me but they encouraged me to read anything and everything just read was their standpoint. On the Road Jack Kerouac tales from his travels across the country with his friends was inspiring to 13 year old teenage boy in a small upstate new york town. Here he was writing about life a life lived without increasing the heroic or downplaying the tragic just life. Often funny always riveting just the travels of a group of young post college aged men. I wanted this for myself the freedom the adventure the opportunity learn about me and the places I wanted to see by seeing them.

Then I found Hunter S. Thompson, long before Johnny Deep ever made a movie about him. Reading him you can see a influence of Kerouac but as with everything Thompson touched he had to star in. He is credited or discredited depending upon your viewpoint for Gonzo Journalism, did he inflate his importance to the story I'm sure he did but he was rebelling against the system which appealed to that same kid who was stuck in that small town. He choose to in my opinion show some of the fallacy of some of the intuitions he choose to attack.

They both had life long alcohol problems and Hunter S. Thompson also used illegal drugs and choose to write about those experiences as well. Hindsight being what it is maybe this is why I shouldn't have read them according to my grandparents.

Now if you managed to stay with me through all of that I'll finally get this around to wow and blogging now. Are my Journeys thru Azeroth and Outlands worthy of comparison to On the Road? No, nor is my writing even in the same category . I guess the only and a poor comparison is that the are just what they are stuff that has happened. Will Grai or any of the gang ever be banned from a site because we wrote unkind things about them, (Oakland Raiders circa late 60's H.S. Thompson) I hope not. Do I have a few gonzo moments one comes to mind from last year. This was during arena season 1 yeah that long ago. The team i was on had just gone 8-2 for the evening and we were very happy, so we decided to have some fun in Ironforge. What was intended to be us being silly turned into alot more. The guild I was in at the time had a myspace page, our guild leader was at the time in Australia on Marine Corpse reserve maneuvers. So we got drunk and decided to have a dance party with the totems from SMV. He a day or so after this got a chance to log in and look at our myspace page, where we had a few photo's posted and to say the least he wasn't a happy GL.




Thursday, September 4, 2008

Interesting stuff for me thats in the news today

Couple things jumped out at me as I was going thru the wowinsider post today. Major changes to prot tree for Pally's hopefully unbloating and giving us a few new toys to play with. Macro's and UI's to be stored server side, and the leveling curve will be lessened post 3.0.2.

Without any hard data to go on I have a few assumptions and or wishes for the Prot Pally tree, ghostcrawler has said they are gonna remove unused(useless) talents and possabily rework some others for mitigation and fun. Going on the basis that death knights are to be the magic tank of choice I think/hope that spell warding will be gone and maybe we can get another more beneficial talent to AoE tanking. Will reckoning go away? Its a useful leveling talent but hardly used when raiding. Combining one-hand weapon special with combat expertise seems kinda natural. Boom 10 to 12 talent points saved and available for a new ones. Who knows but it is a hope.

The changes to macro's and ui's sounds good for those that play on multiple machines and have either custom ui's or cant live with out macro's. For me it will be nice because I can write shrinn's macro's on my machine and she will have them and or design a ui for her and be able to be on my machine where i know where i have stashed everything. The big official news for me is the lessing of the xp required to level thru outlands. I have 2 70's currently and Padrad is 20% of the way thru 68 currently and will be the next 70. Now I can hopefully have Carack and Fanabb a little closer to be wrath level ready all thanks to 3.0.2. Yes I'll be trying out new talents and spell rotations attack sequences etc. come 3.0.2 but thats gets old quick so being able to have all my toons at least half way thru to 70 pre wrath has me excited.

No breaking news and some might be destined to change but the closer wrath approaches it appears Blizz is taking some of the BC lessons to heart and also giving as many people a chance to get to the new content as possible. While cynically I could say that they want whatever they increase in subscriptions fee's for wrath are I hope the changes were made to help those of us that are altaholics out.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Pally's Please dont be trolls

Yesterday as i was reading wow insider I came across the shifting perspectives column and it was about doing Kara in a all druid raid. Now i have a real baby druid level 22 so I thought sweet what an accomplishment, but apparently i read the article wrong because all the comments were about how leet pally's are and how easy a pally raid could wipe out kara. I have one question for all the commenter's; here after called trolls, did you ever play a Pally pre bc. Hell pre 2.0 patch that changed pallies and made us capable tanks; or did u just ebay your toon because of a you tube video.

Graimerin my pally went 1-60 pre bc as prot, I tell ya all a secret it sucked out loud. AoE grinding sure find plate gear that had stam and int in decent quantities in the old world, not now that gear got re itemized around 2.2 but back then it was dam hard to find. We were wanted in groups if you were Holy then half your dam gear was cloth. We were cross dressing holy men (thank you illegal danish). Blessing of Kings was a ret talent we had 5 minute buffs for lesser and 15 minute buffs for greater. A prot specced pally was wanted in raids about as much as a narc at a biker rally. Pulls sure let me get close enough to judge someone oops pull whole group shit another wipe.

So we went to the forums and we whined and we cried and the finally Blizz gave us something, maybe they gave us to much. Most outland dungeons and almost all of the level 70 instances and first raids where designed to be AoE tanked and finally we were wanted. Warriors couldn't easily AoE tank the good ones could and still do but not the majority. Then the first outland raid many of us experience is Kara honestly a Pally playground on par with if not better than strathhome and we have the balls to tell a different class that we are leet because we can shine in a raid designed around undead.

Are dps'ers the ret crowd finally got some love in the beta but oops that got nerfed now also with judgement of wisdom not returning as much mana our holy brethren HoT got nerfed also so please trolls stfu. We finally got a niche can we continue to enjoy it without all this l2p and we leet your a scrub nonsense going on.

I love my Prot pally hell I love him as holy when i spec that way. I remember the bad old days and fear the giant blizz nerf bat . The squeaky wheel may get the grease as the old saying goes but the braggart gets the nerf bat. So why cant we all get along, feel happy for the druid raids that whoop kara, and share the joy knowing that other classes and players may share ours. SO share the love some hell we waited long enough for ours.

So in closing grats if any class and raid comp is successful because as one progress we all do.