Just a quick post to digest anything pertinent to our beloved spec!

The new talents system

Firstly, when they were gave prot paladins as the example for the new system in the WoW Preview Panel, they gave a quick list of what abilities we’d receive automatically as a result of our spec. No surprises here, except that retribution will have Hammer of the Righteous too.

(Apologies to mmo-champ for stealing their screenshots.)

As for the actual talents they offered for prot paladins later in the talent panel, I played with the wowhead calculator a little bit and settled on this spec. There’s not much reason to go terribly in depth, since these will likely all change before we even reach beta, but to briefly bob and weave through the six tiers …

Tier 1 – Level 15

First of all: HALLELUJAH — a gap closer at last! During the preview panel when they mentioned how the new talents would include a helpful amount of utility enhancements, I immediately thought that this could feasibly lead to the long-deferred dream of a tankadin gap closer to be fulfilled. So imagine my joy when that first screenshot came up on the screen showing an overview of paladin talents and the first tier was the three movement-enhancing talents in our current trees.

But I digress! Speed of Light is the obvious choice here. The fastest speed combined with a short cooldown makes it the most useful of the three choices. You’re not going to be constantly zipping around, so you want that burst of speed to mean the most it can when you choose to use it.

Tier 2 – Level 30

The stun is the only real choice I see here. CC is nice, but it has a cast time, and that’s not the kind of thing you’ll want to be playing with in combat. And, likewise, there are plenty of other CCs available. As for Seal of Justice, total PVP choice.

Tier 3 – Level 45

This is a wonderful tier, but despite the temptations of the first two, hands-down nothing can beat a cheat death.

Tier 4 – Level 60

Don’t make the mistake I first did when I saw this, the wording “friendly target” also includes the player (see Word of Glory, for example; same verbiage) so Holy Shield was be self-usable. It’s the only real survivability choice. Eternal Glory remains lackluster, and Selfless Healer focuses itself on a heal with a cast time, something we won’t be dirtying ourselves with.

Tier 5 – Level 75

Clemency seems like the best choice. The ability to get two BoPs out, for example, feels pretty powerful. Reduced cooldowns are boring, by comparison. Being able to choose the end of the cooldown will always be more powerful. Veneration likewise feels like a PVP talent, but you never know if a PVE fight may require switching to it if there’s some kind of raid-wide slowing debuff, or something of that ilk. You never know.

Tier 6 – Level 90

Holy Avenger gives us a burst of survivability: the ability to cast WoG/Holy Shield 6 times in a row — especially if WoG’s cooldown disappears in 5.0. That’s incredibly powerful, especially when choice of timing is the name of the game.

All in all, I know it’s stupid to dig through these when they are nowhere near final. But I love the new system, I’m very excited about it. For the same reason I enjoy flipping around my major glyphs fight to fight, I love the possibility of customizing my talents depending on the needs of the encounter. I really hope they stick with this to the end. (Not the numbers, mind you, the big picture framework.)

Sidenote: I think it’s cute that Blizzard is aiming for this new system to kill cookie-cutter builds. The truth of the matter is, if numbers are included on a talent, you’ll be able to crunch our its survivability value. We’re going to have a list of proper talents for each encounter, there’s no way around it.

The return of Blinding Shield?

At the class Q&A, Ghostcrawler imparted that Blinding Shield (originally a new spell for Paladins in Cataclysm, but later removed) is penciled in as the level 87 spell. As he went on to disclaim, that could very likely change, so don’t consider it remotely set in stone.

Hope burns eternal

I would love to see an orange shield.

- Ghostcrawler, when the panel was asked about a tanking legendary

Cosmetic librams soon?

When talking about hunter quivers, the panelists also brought up librams as a similar cosmetic option for paladins. I wonder if they’ll turn the soon-to-be deprecated ranged slot into a “cosmetic item slot”. You equip a libram, or a totem, or quiver, or whatever and it appears slung to an appropriate spot on your character. It’s something I’ve wanted to see since Burning Crusade, so here’s hoping we see that in MoP.

What we didn’t hear about

On Thursday, Miri texted me to let me know that she asked Ghostcrawler about active mitigation/tank changes during the charity dinner and he said there was not going to be any news about it during BlizzCon. Likewise, as the convention continued we didn’t get a single inkling of any news about the subject. I’m a little disappointed, but as long as it makes it to 5.0, there’s not much of value in worrying about not getting news about an early design iteration.

I am currently posting this from the Dallas airport, waiting for the eventual departure of my flight. I have a long day of travel today — 8 hours and change — but at least it’s almost done!

In any case, I’m very much excited for BlizzCon and especially to see a lot of great friends and folks from my guild, Twitter, and elsewhere in the WoW community. If you want to meet and say hi at any point, hit me up on Twitter and let me know — I’d love the chance to say hi to any readers!

I’ll also be at the WoW Insider Meetup on Thursday and the after-party at the Hilton on Saturday (hooray for being centrally located). And, of course, I’ll be camping out at a lot of the panels this year. And now that I’ve finally ditched my iPhone, I should be able to tweet while inside the Convention building — so I can offer inane commentary on any big reveals as they occur.

Looking forward most especially to some tantalizing details on how active mitigation is going to work, and any other changes we can expect for tankadins in WoW 5.0. Hopefully there’ll be some big news!

I am an engineer no longer… for the third time now.

This is a familiar journey for me, I’ve ditched the profession two times previously. The first time was while leveling Rhidach and not even at max, so no skin off my nose. Then, while gearing for TBC raids, I picked it up again for the Tankatronic Goggles — I still remember that grind really well, I had mining as the profession I was going to replace, so I went on a massive ore-fest. I gathered all the mats, dropped mining, and worked on leveling engineering into the wee hours, finally hitting 375 around 3 am.

Going into Wrath, I dropped it again and managed to stay away for a good year. But then only to pick it up again in May of 2009 when it was shaping up to be a massive EH boost due to the armor gloves tinker.

In my longest stretch of being an engineer in forever, I held on for dear life as long as I could. Through nerfs a-plenty going into Cataclysm, and after that. There was never going to be as good a time for Engineering as right after 4.0 when tinkers stacked with enchants and weren’t balanced around that consideration yet. It was all downhill from there.

Now armor is nigh-useless as a bonus stat, our belt tinkers will invariably kill us, and the glorious promise of a pseudo-gap closer has been squashed.

When I first mentioned on Twitter that I was strongly considering dropping the profession, I was interested at the people that dubbed me one of the last major holdouts for engineering. I think they’re giving me too much credit — I’m simply the last dope to realize I could steal an orphan and make an end-run for the life boats, rather than go down with the ship.

As to what to replace engineering with, for a long time I’ve been eyeing alchemy with a greedy look. The idea of a bonus that actually helps in PVE — whether it’s the extra 40 mastery and 15 resistance from elixirs, or the 120 extra stamina from flasks — is all kinds of awesome.

So, on Thursday last week I spent the better part of the day herbing on my level 75 druid and gathering a huge stockpile as recommended by one of those profession powerleveling guides. I was also helped by Ildara, the most amazing friend in the world, who gave me all the Cata herbs I needed as well as access to the leftovers of her Wrath-era stockpile.

By the end of the night I easily had all the Vanilla/TBC herbs I needed, plus extras, and was able to grind out the whole deal in about two hours. Including the time needed to run Black Morass for Elixir Mastery — and thanks to Antigen for willingly tagging along and making it much less boring to trudge through.

Next steps for me are definitely to get the druid up to 85 so he can start farming current-level herbs for me, that way I don’t have to continue to rely on the kindness of strangers for my supply.

In the end, I’m happy that I’ve got a second useful raiding profession again, though I’m deeply unhappy I had to drop engineering to do it. It’s become apparent though that any use engineering had during Wrath was a fluke, and it’d be follow to expect for a repeat performance.

On Tuesday after (finally) having the Mirrored Boots crafted and picking up the shoulders off of Alysrazor — while still stabbing that Domo voodoo doll relentlessly to compel him to drop enough Conq tokens for me to win one — I finally amassed enough surplus mastery to be able to drop a mastery trinket.

To cross the finish line, I had to swap around six gems: four Puissants into blue sockets, one Fractured into my relic socket, and one Fractured Chimera’s Eye into a yellow socket. With that done, I picked up the last 183 mastery I needed to cover for removing the Spidersilk Spindle from my default kit.

I’m not block capped with the assumption of the Mirror of Broken Images being equipped, and I chose that particular trinket to be my default so that if I want to use the Spindle instead, I won’t suddenly be a chunk of mastery under the cap.

In return, I now run the Scales of Life (which I’m training myself to use like a cooldown, a mini-WoG) in my second trinket slot. If it’s Baleroc, I’ll swap that out for the Spindle to have the extra mastery needed to reach Baleroc’s special super-CTC requirement. If it’s Alysrazor, a dps trinket goes in. If it’s a primarily physical damage fight (like Shannox), I’ll swap out the Mirror for the Spindle and keep the Scales.

This is why I hope we’re allowed to continue to block cap in 4.3. All this dancing around the cap and gearing intelligently and effectively depending on the fight while keep our necks above the caps is fun. At least, to me. I might be a masochist when it comes to stuff like this.

But truthfully, I’m very proud of the guild for killing Ragnaros for the first time. Despite my disappointment of not being there.

Still, what more can you say about the nerfs that we were able to down him — as sloppily as they did — on the first try of the night? … I suppose it was also the eighth try of the week (or so), so perhaps it’s not that dire.

But, whatever. Heroic modes next week. Woohoo.

Made a quick change: dodge and parry inputs now require your ratings, rather than the undiminished percents. This will hopefully make the sheet a little more intuitive for folk’s first use. I know the majority of the questions I get about it is that the numbers look way off, and it’s almost always because the wrong percents were put in. Hopefully this makes it more simple.

Update: Thanks to Rudy on Twitter for alerting me about an error in the spreadsheet. I’ve corrected it now and uploaded the fixed version 1.3.5. So sorry about the error, and lesson learned about rushing out an update right before the end of the work day!

(Yes, pun titles. How I love you.)

So Sunday night we killed Majordomo Staghelm for the first time, but in 10man mode. Which was strikingly easier than our 25man attempts and somewhat demoralizing. I understand a lot better now why 90% of the raiding guilds on Lightninghoof are 10man only now.

But that’s neither her nor there. We obviously (as a 25man guild) didn’t have a “legit” kill for our chosen raid size, so we weren’t going to even bask in the victory. We prevented a shoulder token from being left on the table, no more, no less. The real work was still left to be done with the new raid week.

Tuesday was sort of a rough raid night, but only in comparison to the previous raid weeks when we one-shot everything and rolled over all opposition. This week — horror of horrors — it took us four attempts to kill Baleroc and three for Alysrazor. Such backsliding! And as a result, unfortunately, we didn’t get any shots in on Domo on Tuesday. We just disembarked for BH as a palate cleanser and then called it a night ten minutes early.

Wednesday, the thinking goes, we’d roll in fresh and finish off Majordomo once and for all after our amazing 8% attempt the previous Wednesday.

Initially hope was strong, but then as real-life RNG intervened it began to wane. Several disconnects occurred during attempts. We had to replace one healer and bring in one that was back from extended hiatus and hadn’t even seen the fight yet. Later, another dps had to go for a family matter, so we had to replace him with the disconnecting healer because none of our other standbys were available. All signs pointed to us being quite doomed.

And yet, immediately following that replacement, our attempts started going a lot better. DPS was tightening up because we came to a big revelation: we weren’t stretching out the Scorpion phases enough. Those were our “big money” dps phases. So we went from taking the first Scorpion to 10 and fleeing to holding him up to 12. Personally, I wanted to go farther and eating two additional Scythes with Ardent Defender and Guardian Spirit, but I was vetoed.

It’s probably for the best — I’m not sure how much faster the Scythes would be getting at that point and if I’d get immediately one-shot by a third follow up before everyone could flee.

Like Zilga says, “I don’t get you people — you post this amazing attempt and you try to change what already works!”

So the first Cat phase then, we ate seven leaps, without much incident. Then it was back to Scorpion phase. And so on and so forth.

We kept taking the Scorpion phases up to 6 or so and then splitting. Raid cooldowns were used extensively for the Searing Seeds/Scorpion phase.

After the Burning Orbs/Cat phase, we somehow still have the entire raid alive — which is crazy, that phase is usually the bane of our existence, but it appears it clicked for everyone. Then hastily going into another Scorpion phase we took quick stock of our raid cooldown inventory and proceeded to mitigate our way through every Scythe. His health ticked down slowly but surely, until finally, on the fifth Scythe he was in low single digits. Zilga called for us to scatter like rats, and we quickly did. There was no way we could eat another Scythe.

We quickly switched Domo to Cat form and went to town on him. The decision was made to ignore the adds, as he was around 4%. Around 1% or so, Staghelm took a flying leap away, but that only delayed the inevitable. As soon as he closed into melee, we finished him off with a starving fury. A roar of joy went up as he switched to human form, and then dropped to the ground, coughing up his purples.

Antigen won the only Conq token, but it’s ok. We’ve agreed on a visitation scheme so I can get 12 minutes of wistful sighs in once a week. (It’s going to be a while before I can win a pair of my own.)

And then we went to go give Ragnaros a few pokes.

I haven’t been as good about detailing my race for the block cap as I had been with my pursuit of the armor cap in the latter days of Wrath of the Lich King, but I am proud to report I’ve finally achieved my goal since the start of the Cataclysm: total combat table coverage.

It’s really hard to show in game because the Visual Combat Table addon is being funky, so enjoy this screenshot from my spreadsheet.

Raid buffed, I have 13.98% dodge + 14.01% parry + 69.48% block + 5% miss. This adds up to 102.47% combat table coverage — .07% over the cap, or 6 mastery too many. I also was able to completely regem to a stamina scheme (I can’t wait for the first LFD pugger to call me a stam-stacker) and activate all my socket bonuses. I’m ecstatic!

What allowed me to go through this joyous metamorphosis was picking up three new pieces last night: the Deflecting Brimstone Band from valor points, the Essence of the Eternal Flame from the Avengers quartermaster, and the Uncrushable Belt of Fury from Shannox. Though, mostly, it was the trinket. The other two just allowed me to shed a few more hybrid mastery gems to hybrid stamina gems.

Looking at my armory now I see a Puissant gem in a blue socket. I’ll have to fix that, but I need 14 or so more mastery first. (Enter the eye twitch.)

Anyone else block cap, yet? How’d you handle overflow mastery? Or, if not capped, how close are you?