Joel's Scattered Thoughts

Notes on things that interest me

Posts Tagged paladin

Overcoming the Fear of Tanking

Dec 17

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Spinks had a good post on  Overcoming the Fear of Tanking.  This is a great time time to learn how to tank or heal if you haven’t already.  Here’s why:

  1. Tank and healers are in demand! You will have as much opportunity to run instances as your little heart desires.
  2. Effort to find groups is pretty much nil. Click the Dungeon finder icon, sign up, keep busy with the usual stuff till your dungeon pops, run the dungeon and get a free port back to continue on your way.
  3. Tanking or healing lower level instances is easy. If you lack confidence, join the queue for specific dungeons 10 levels lower than you are.  Even if you screw up big-time, you’re still likely to keep your group alive.  Run instances progressing in difficulty till you reach instances at your current level and you’ll be more than ready for those.
  4. If you fail, you can try again. Sometimes you’ll just be off – DPS is AOE pulling every mob in an instance, the healer or tank is sleeping,  or you just can’t remember which button does what.  No big deal.  No-one in the group is likely to remember you tomorrow and finding another group is a cakewalk.  Analyze your mistakes, shake it off, do a few quests, and try again with a new group.

My current goal is to run my death knight through all regular Northrend instances, then move through the heroics.  By the time I finish that I’ll be more than ready to tank anything on him.  Depending on my level of enthusiasm, I’m thinking of doing the same thing healing on my shaman and tanking/healing on my druid.  My warrior and paladin have already done their tanking through instances and I’m not very interested in straight up DPS in a group.

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Turtles All the Way Down!

Aug 15

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

turtles

My paladin was out fishing for Dragonfin to finish skilling up cooking when I got this lovely bonus!  It just so happened that this was the same toon I’d gotten Speedy on.  I made Alec’s day to see the mama turtle and the baby turtle. 

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March Sadness

Mar 22

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Doofy the Paladin is suffering from March Sadness. Progress has ground to a halt as their roster of raiders has disappeared. We’re in much the same situation with our guild alliance. Historically we’ve run 2-3 nights per week, but we’ve lost about 9 of our 18 raiders. Some may come back but for now we’re lucky if we raid one night a week, let alone doing any progress raiding. On the bright side, I’m having fun gearing my toons up for dual specs and raiding.

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Mount farming for fun and… well, fun

Mar 19

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

If you’re short a couple mounts for the achievement, Big Bear Butt Blogger has a suggestion in Mount farming for fun and… well, fun. Jaimie and I did this last week and it worked pretty well even with my fury warrior tanking. We managed to pick up 2 mounts and Jaimie’s holy paladin nuked me when we took a poke at the first boss.

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Protecting Your Allies

Mar 17

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | 1 Comment

Eye for an Eye has a list of tools retribution paladins can use for Protecting Your Allies. Most of these are the standard Protection abilities that I keep forgetting to use as Retribution. About the only one I remember is the taunts to pull aggro away from the healers and hopefully drag the mobs closer to the tanks.

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My WoW Resume (early 2009)

Feb 23

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

resume I was reading Matticus’ post, What GMs Want to See on Your Guild App, and I stared thinking about some of my accomplishments in WoW.  Since many of these were pre-3.0, I don’t have the achievements for them which makes me a little sad.

Healing

  • Raid healed all of Zul’Gurub and Molten Core, and most of AQ-20 at 60 and roughly the first third of Kara at 70
  • Leveled a holy priest from 1-60 in vanilla WoW, then to 70 in BC
  • References: Anath, Legionofone, Balm

Tanking

  • Tanked Naxxramas-10 (Arachnid Quarter, Plague Quarter, Patchwerk, Grobbulus, Thaddius) and Sartharion 0 drakes.
  • Leveled a protection warrior and protection paladin from 1-70 in BC, then to 80 in Wrath
  • Tanked Karazhan and the first 3 bosses in Zul’Aman in BC
  • Tanked BC Heroics with bear druid
  • References: Mazzarella, Beeferino

DPS

  • Progression raided Naxxramas with Retribution Paladin
  • Raided BC farm content on BM Hunter, Enhancement Shaman,  Warlock
  • References: Shamaniac, Jusy

Raid Leading

  • Helped organize a guild alliance
  • Raid led through Karazhan, part of ZA, and Naxxramas-10
  • References: Zurdante, Mornal

PvP

  • Obtained Knight title in classic WoW
  • Hit Exalted with Stormpike Guard back in the days of 12 hour AVs
  • I don’t PvP anymore

That’s all that comes to mind right now.  It’s fun to look back on the stuff I managed to get done.  I would say that raid leading is probably the most challenging part of the game – not the fights themselves but all the dealing with people and their issues, balancing things so that it all works out. 

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Alts and the Raider: An Officer’s Perspective

Jan 13

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Sydera at World of Matticus discusses Alts and the Raider: An Officer’s Perspective.  We just went through some of this entering Naxx.  It hadn’t been a big deal before Wrath as we had Karazhan on farm by the time we started to bring in alts to do more than fill in temporarily in key roles.  

With Wrath, we’ve had an overfull raiding roster pretty much every raid night.  Deciding who can come and who can’t has been a major headache for me and has led to hard feeling a couple of times.  Some hadn’t decided on their spec and are willing to respec as needed which then leads to loot issues.  Does a paladin without a declared spec get to roll on DPS/Tank/Heal loot?  We ended up adding a new rule requiring raiders to declare a main toon and spec even if they are not playing that toon/spec at the moment.  Farm content is going to be more of a free-for-all, but we’re a ways from having anything on farm at this point. 

It’s naive of me, but I hadn’t even thought about this till someone brought it to my attention.  Probably one of the reasons I hadn’t thought about it is that the loot didn’t affect me directly.   I had blithely assumed the more alts, the merrier.  With more alts we could have multiple people for any given role and we could pull in different toons to give everyone a chance to play.  I missed considering the politics of loot distribution, especially in these early progression days when one piece of loot can make a big difference to someone’s raid viability. 

epiclewtz

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Ret Paladin

Jan 10

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

ret_paladin I’m thinking of taking my paladin ret.  I don’t like tanking with her as much as I do on my warrior and right now our guild alliance has a surfeit of tanks.  I don’t think I’d raid or even instance with her, so it might be fun to try something new. 

If I do decide to pursue this, here are a few resources I’ll be consulting.

I have a pile of toons still to level and our raids don’t need more melee DPS at the moment, so those factors are somewhat of a disincentive. 

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Pawn Scales for Wrath

Dec 28

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | 2 Comments

pawn Here are the Pawn scales I’m using for my toons in Wrath of the Lich King.   As always, Pawn is for quick comparisons, not for squeezing every last point out of your gear.  Read Skeleton Jack’s post on Pawn for some of the things to watch out for.  I have tweaked some of these scales and I have no strong theorycrafting proof behind their effectiveness. 

A few more points to note:

1. Each rating is relative only to itself.

Some pawn users assume that if they have two strings, that the rating that has the higher value is what the gear is better for. This is NOT the case. You should only use a rating to compare two items together, rather than using ratings to determine what an item is better for. (Note: This rule can be counterfeit, but that requires balancing points)
2. A rating that gives you numbers in the 100’s is no better or worse than one that gives you points in the 10,000’s
Remember, this is a relative comparison tool. So 900 – 1000 may be better than 90,000 to 95,000.
3. Pawn doesn’t account for everything
Raid buffs, gear changing, and Talents factor in here as well. These are static values to help determine relative value, but raid buffs, talent changes, and changes from blizzard will affect the relative value of these statistics, so these strings will more than likely be dynamic.

Warrior

Protection

Balanced

(Pawn: v1: “Balanced”: CritRating=0.89, Agility=8.47, ExpertiseRating=9.22, DefenseRating=11.13, BlockValue=4.86, ArmorPenetration=1, Dps=3.56, Strength=3.84, ParryRating=8.24, BlockRating=8.42, DodgeRating=9.61, HitRating=1.98, Stamina=14.29, Armor=1, HasteRating=0.62, Ap=0.43 )

Survival

( Pawn: v1: “Survival”: BlockRating=8.49, Strength=2.91, ParryRating=8.56, Agility=8.02, ExpertiseRating=7.22, DefenseRating=11.61, Stamina=14.25, Armor=1, DodgeRating=10.09, BlockValue=4.98 )

Threat

( Pawn: v1: “Threat”: ArmorPenetration=4.54, CritRating=4.03, Dps=16.15, Strength=4.66, ParryRating=0.41, Agility=3.26, HitRating=9.56, HasteRating=3.02, ExpertiseRating=9.56, Ap=2 )

Based roughly on Elitist Jerks Tanking Spreadsheet.  Needs to be edited for sockets.

( Pawn: v1: “Heavy”: RedSocket=16, CritRating=0.8, Strength=1, MetaSocket=8, ExpertiseRating=0.7, BlueSocket=16, YellowSocket=16, ColorlessSocket=16, HitRating=0.7, BlockValue=0.9 )

Based roughly on Matthew Rossi’s post,The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Heavy.  This is for leveling as a Prot Warrior.  Vene has a good post for Raid DPS as a Prot Warrior.

Fury

See this post for Fury Warriors.

Paladin

Mostly from this thread on Elitist Jerks. 

Protection

Mitigation

( Pawn: v1: “ProtMit”: DodgeRating=18, BlockRating=1, Ap=1.2, CritRating=0.6, Strength=9.5, ParryRating=14.5, ExpertiseRating=1.5, Agility=14.5, HitRating=1.1, Stamina=19.1, Armor=1.2, SpellPower=0.8, DefenseRating=16.5, BlockValue=16.5 )

Threat

( Pawn: v1: “ProtThr”: Intellect=0.2, DodgeRating=15.1, BlockRating=0.9, Ap=4.7, CritRating=2.4, Strength=18.8, ParryRating=12.8, ExpertiseRating=6.1, Agility=12.2, HitRating=4.2, Stamina=16.8, Armor=1.1, SpellPower=3.1, DefenseRating=13.9, BlockValue=17.4 )

Holy

( Pawn: v1: “Holy”: Intellect=2.25, RedSocket=24, CritRating=1.1, MetaSocket=75, HasteRating=1, BlueSocket=14, Stamina=0.1, SpellPower=1.2, Mp5=2.5, YellowSocket=30 )

Shaman

Enhancement

Based on a run of EnhSim, DPS simulator

( Pawn: v1: “AEP Calc”: Intellect=1.14, CritRating=0.64, Agility=1.39, ExpertiseRating=0.67, OffHandDps=4.33, YellowSocket=32, ArmorPenetration=0.52, RedSocket=32, Strength=1, MetaSocket=16, HitRating=0.68, BlueSocket=32, MainHandDps=8.82, HasteRating=0.81, ColorlessSocket=32, Ap=1 )

Restoration

Based on this post.

( Pawn: v1: “Resto (EJ)”: Intellect=7, RedSocket=105, HasteRating=3, BlueSocket=86, YellowSocket=112, SpellPower=5, Mp5=10, CritRating=3 )

EDIT: There is something broken about these scales for weapons. Do not use them to decide which weapon to use.

Hunter

Beastmaster

( Pawn: v1: “Beast Mastery”: Intellect=7, RedSocket=128, CritRating=5, MetaSocket=168, HitRating=10, Agility=7, HasteRating=2, BlueSocket=128, YellowSocket=128, ArmorPenetration=6, Mp5=8, Ap=4 )

From this thread

Druid

Cat

( Pawn: v1: “Cat (Toskk)”: ArmorPenetration=1.0161, RedSocket=37.312, Strength=2.332, CritRating=0.83, ColorlessSocket=37.312, MetaSocket=103.21, FeralAp=1, Agility=1.6992, ExpertiseRating=1.0362, BlueSocket=18.66, YellowSocket=26.92, HitRating=1.0334, HasteRating=0.7236, Ap=1 )

From Flyv

Bear

( Pawn: v1: “Bear (Toskk)”: RedSocket=113.7, YellowSocket=101.3, ColorlessSocket=172.4, MetaSocket=329, Stamina=7.185, Agility=3.429, Health=0.411, BlueSocket=172.4, Armor=1.066, DefenseRating=1.885, DodgeRating=2.685, ExpertiseRating=1.306 )

From Flyv

Resto

( Pawn: v1: “Resto”: Intellect=5.79, HasteRating=2.87, CritRating=2.05, SpellPower=9.4, Spirit=5.13, Mp5=10 )

From this Elitist Jerks Post

Death Knight

Unholy

( Pawn: v1: “Unholy”: ArmorPenetration=0.544, RedSocket=39.7552, CritRating=1.12, Strength=2.4847, ColorlessSocket=39.7552, HasteRating=0.621, Agility=0.7336, HitRating=2.474, BlueSocket=17.3929, YellowSocket=25.2329, TwoHandDps=7.567, ExpertiseRating=1.391, Ap=1 )

From Skeleton Jack’s Post.  

Other

Other specs, Warlocks, Priests, Mages, and Rogues are out of luck here.  I suggest Elitist Jerks as a starting point. Good luck in your search!

 

NOTE: No warranties, either express or implied, are hereby given. All software is supplied as is, without guarantee.  The user assumes all responsibility for damages resulting from the use of these features, including, but not limited to, frustration, disgust, system abends, disk head-crashes, general malfeasance, floods, fires, shark attack, nerve gas, locust infestation, cyclones, hurricanes, tsunamis, local electromagnetic disruptions, hydraulic brake system failure, invasion, hashing collisions, normal wear and tear of friction surfaces, comic radiation, inadvertent destruction of sensitive electronic components, windstorms, the Riders of Nazgul, infuriated chickens, malfunctioning mechanical or electrical sexual devices, premature activation of the distant early warning system, peasant uprisings, halitosis, artillery bombardment, explosions, cave-ins, and/or frogs falling from the sky.

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Who Are My Characters?

Dec 27

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I was talking with Jaimie yesterday about our Warcraft characters in a roleplaying sense.  I don’t have much of a backstory for any of them, but I do have a decent idea of their personalities.  It’s conversations such as these that have me considering an RP server if I reroll again.

Despite being a warrior that uses rage, Tristam is very calm.  Solid and reliable are words that come to mind when I’m thinking about him.  He doesn’t get angry and is very relaxed. He sees himself as the shield for the group.  “Is a shield false and only a sword true?”

Merddyn is a warlock because it’s convenient and easy.  He’s very self-centered and barely recognizes the existence of an outside world.  He’s not looking to rule the world (far too much bother), he just wants what he wants and sees no reason why he shouldn’t just take it.  “I’ve divided the world into two types of thing:  The ones I can kill with impunity, and those I have to be more circumspect about.“

Anzu is a very angry shaman.  I have no idea what he’s angry about. He quests so that he has a socially acceptable way to kill things.   Merddyn will kill you if you get in his way, but otherwise doesn’t care about you.  Anzu wants to kill you but won’t unless it’s acceptable to the Horde.  “In the beginning, the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.“

Early on, Andromache would have preferred to be an alliance paladin working with the Naaru rather than stealing the Light’s power.  She wants to do what’s right.  After having gone through Outlands, she has retained her strong moral and ethical sense, but no longer trusts the Naaru. “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through every heart – and through all hearts.“

Arthemis wants to take things apart to see how they work.  She’s chosen to be a hunter because people in cities tend to get upset when you take apart magical or mechanical things and you can’t quite put them back together.  She’s happiest out on her own thinking.  “Most things run on smoke. If it leaks out, they don’t work.”

As a druid, Emerys feels a deep connection with nature.  He fits the stereotype of the hippie druid.  He’s calm and quests because he wants to help maintain nature’s balance.  “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences.“

I don’t know why but I like having some idea of who the characters I play are. 

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Doofy’s WoW Predictions for 2009

Dec 24

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Point 4 in Doofy’s Unsolicited World of Warcraft Predictions for 2009 is a good one. I know that I’d be tempted to go for two different tanking specs, or two different healing specs depending on the toon rather than spec for tanking and healing or tanking and DPS. If I was interested in PvP, I’d definitely have a PvP Spec and a PvE spec, which would leave my off-spec role abandoned again.

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Pawn Values for all Specs – Paladins

Dec 7

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Yay! Elitist Jerks has Pawn Values for all Specs up. I’m planning to use something along the lines of Left’s Scales for my protection paladin.

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Leveling Blacksmithing

Dec 2

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

blacksmith At the request of one of the members of our guild alliance, I focused in on leveling blacksmithing last night.  Jaimie had spent way too much time mining saronite, eternals, and the odd bit of titanium so thanks to her I had the raw materials to proceed. 

I didn’t bother following any leveling guides.  If I could make an item from the Tempered Saronite set I made two so that both my paladin and my warrior would be geared for tanking.  The exceptions were the two Daunting pieces, which are better than the Tempered Saronite equivalents for tanking.  I wound up disenchanting about 8 items and now I have tons of Titanium Skeleton Keys but I’m almost at the point of being able to craft any blacksmithing item in the game.  I should hit that point tonight. 

Blacksmithing is expensive to level and so far the good stuff seems to be all BOE.  I suspect that if I had taken mining instead and used the money from that to buy the pieces I need, I’d have been way, way ahead.  Nevertheless, leveling professions is something I enjoy so that’s what I choose to spend my in game gold on.  Next big money sink is engineering! 

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Warrior Defense Gear in Wrath

Dec 1

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I actually did some leveling on my warrior this weekend as I need to catch up to the most advanced member of our static group.  We thought about running our current four instances (Utgarde Keep,  The Nexus, Azjol-Nerub and Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom) over and over to level, but we decided that would be dull and a waste of the shiny new content.  Instead we’re going to try to stay close to the same level and do a fair amount of solo/duo questing. 

I tried out Matthew Rossi’s ideas for Leveling a Protection Warrior to 80.  With Jaimie’s holy paladin beside me, it feels even faster than our paladin/mage duo.  I did a bit of solo questing and even without a healer this approach is amazingly fast! 

Anyhow, since it looks as though I’ll be hitting 80 sooner rather than later, I need to make sure I’m working on upping my defense gear.  Current target is 540 defense skill (i.e. 689 defense rating).  Ciderhelm has an Easy 540 Defense Gear Guide up.  I should have no problem getting enough of these items.  My blacksmithing is proceeding apace, so I should be able to make a pile of pretty crafted gear.  In a lot of cases, it looks as though crafted gear is giving drop gear a run for its money.  As someone who spends way too much money on crafting, this makes me happy.defense

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Paladin AOE Grind Spec

Nov 26

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I’ve been teaming up with Jaimie’s mage to level my paladin and I’m not happy with the way things are going right now.  I can still AOE grind, but I’m constantly out of mana.  A paladin that’s out of mana is really, really boring to play. 

Here’s what I’m going to switch around.  I’m going to try this build instead of this one.   I’m going to switch my gear around so that I have the following stat priority: Strength/Shield block, Intelligence/Mana per 5, Stamina/Armor/Agility.  If I’m reading things right, this should translate roughly to damage, mana, and survival.  I also need to make sure to activate my trinkets whenever they’re up.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get Figurine of the Colossus but I did get the two shield block trinkets. 

I’ll figure this out yet! 

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Redcape’s Retribution DPS

Nov 22

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Here’s what Redcape’s Retribution DPS Calculator – Elitist Jerks has to say.

Seal of Blood/Seal of Martyr are the best seals. If you cannot risk the damage Seal of Corruption is in second place even without a Glyph, though if you find 5 points for Seals of the Pure then Seal of Righteousness becomes pretty reasonable.

The best Glyph setup is CS, Judgement, Consecration. When you are running SoB in a raid situation you should have so much mana you don’t know what to do with it all.

When using SoB your DPS return on 100 of each stat is as follows:

Weapon DPS 528.10
Str 168.09
Hit rating 126.59
Exp rating 79.55
Crit rating 73.56
Agil 69.60
AP 66.36
Haste rating 41.78
Armor Penetration 37.34
SP 21.95

Here’s my retribution DPS Pawn scale based on the above numbers. I assumed all sockets get a 16 STR gem and meta sockets are worth 1.
( Pawn: v1: “Ret DPS”: ArmorPenetration=0.3734, RedSocket=26.8944, ColorlessSocket=26.8944, CritRating=0.7356, Dps=5.281, Strength=1.6809, MetaSocket=10, HasteRating=0.4178, Agility=0.696, ExpertiseRating=0.7955, BlueSocket=26.8944, YellowSocket=26.8944, SpellPower=0.2195, HitRating=1.2659, Ap=0.6636 )

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Patch 3.0.2 primer for Retribution Paladins

Nov 21

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I may take my paladin ret for a while and Patch 3.0.2 primer for Retribution Paladins gives a nice breakdown of the talents. We’ll see if I actually act on it.

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Dungeon Runs and Computer Troubles

Nov 14

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I managed to get two runs of Utgarde Keep in yesterday.  The first was on my paladin and the second was on my warrior.  They were fun runs.  The bosses have some interesting mechanics to them – adds/random ice tomb, burn down both bosses at once, and a two phase fight.  It’s raid boss mechanics brought to instancing and I like it. 

We were just about to run Nexus when my computer died.  It looks like the motherboard died.  So now I have to deal with that before getting back on – I may just kidnap my work computer for the weekend. 

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Tanking as a Paladin in Wrath

Nov 13

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I ran across these two posts and found them very useful Transition from TBC Mechanics to Wotlk Mechanics for tankadins and Frequently *Answered* Questions – Tankadin quickie basics.

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Zamach’s WoTLK Gear List

Nov 12

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Maintankadin has Zamach’s WoTLK Gear List for tanking paladins. My paladin will be one of my first three toons to level, so this is good stuff to have.

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