Like a broken record

Alright I really need to stop talking about loot. This blog is starting to resemble a LiveJournal-esque cavalcade of exuberant bragging. Not really the direction I wanted to take it!

Here’s my to do list for the near future:

1. Tank etiquette tips (probably a series)

2. Gemming guide for tankadins

3. Best-in-slot gear guide

4. Enchants guide

5. A guides tab up above when I have enough guides

I’ll post a raid summary of what went down last night in a bit. And, annoying loot wooting will be kept to a min.

Need more fury

Over at Blessing of Kings, there’s a great post responding to a question about Righteous Fury. I just wanted to get my 2 copper in.

Righteous Fury being a buff is by far the most irritating thing I have to keep track of while tanking. This is more so now that seals are 30 min long and I don’t have to sacrifice GCDs to them in-fight.

Where RF really grinds my gears is in a situation where I’m in the middle of a fight and for whatever reason forgetfulness takes a hold of me and I don’t notice that the buff drops off. Suddenly it’s “crap, why can’t I hold aggro?” Followed by “oh crap oh crap.” And then there goes a quarter of my mana mid-fight.

Now mind you, this doesn’t happen a lot, or really ever, but when it does happen it can cause huge problems.

The other annoyance with RF is in raids I tend to click it off on boss fights where I don’t have to worry about the warrior MT going down and I just want to get my measly 1700 dps in without the worry of ripping aggro. Case in point, last night for Thaddius I clicked it off before we started Fuegen and Stalagg. Both go down and we jump to Thaddius’ platform.

The warrior MT misses the jump and lands in the slime. Not good.

I run in to pick up the boss, completely forgetting RF is off.

Immediately I notice that the ret paladin has a HUGE aggro lead on me (gogo retadin burst) and then that’s when it clicks, Righteous Fury. I turn on the buff, nuke my mana bar, and after some fancy taunting I regain aggro and take the lead.

Anyway, moral of the story: I’m lazy, forgetful, and hate to watch my mana bar get nuked. Blizzard, please act accordingly.

S-U-C-C-E-S-S, that’s the way you spell success

Well, I don’t particularly believe in luck, but I do believe in irony. And irony tends to rule my life.

After compiling a collection of emblems of valor over the past few weeks in order to purchase the token for the Valorous Redemption Shoulderguards, I entered Naxxramas last night with 51 emblems in my currency tab and thus 9 away from my goal. We cleared the spider wing first, and I accumulated 3 more emblems. I was closing in on my prize.

Soon my shoulders would be adorned with golden, glorious wings. And my gundam suit would be one more step closer to completion.

Plague wing next. Noth down with no fuss, another emblem. Heigan smote, and another badge collected.

And wouldn’t you know it, we down Loatheb and he drops not one, but two Mantles of the Lost Conqueror. Oh my. And the only two people who still needed those tokens were myself and a warlock.

So, I got my shoulders. And I walked out of Naxx with 61 emblems of valor, which means 14 more until I can buy the Valorous Redemption Legguards. Considering I also picked up the Greaves of Turbulence and the Cloak of the Shadowed Sun, I would say all and all I had a great night.

Actually, funny enough, it seemed like only tank gear was dropping. Two Heritages on two different bosses, the warrior MT got his Sabatons of Endurance (remember: expertise typically means not a pally item, pass to a warrior or DK) and another piece whose name eludes me. The DK got nothing, which is good, because he’s a taunt-happy jerk (something I need to use for post-fodder in the future).

Tonight military wing (wtb Broken Promise), saph, and KT are on notice. I expect we’ll be able to burn through all that with little difficulty, now that we seem to have conquered the slump from the last two weeks.

Better Late Than Never Friday, 2/13/09

As part of a new regular feature I figured I’d take some of the Google keyword searches that brought people to this blog and answer the questions that they came here with. Obviously they are long gone, and that is why this post is Better Late Than Never.

quickest way to emblem of valor

There’s really no quick way to get Emblems of Valor, unfortunately. You should at minimum be sure to run Heroic Obsidian Sanctum every reset for 4 badges (9 if you win the Bag of Spoils), and the Heroic Vault of Archavon for 2. That’s 6 badges easy for, tops, an hour and half of work.

Moreover, a full clear of Naxxramas gives 16 emblems (3 for spider wing, 3 for plague wing, 4 for construct wing, 3 for military wing, 1 for Sapphiron, and 2 for Kel’Thuzad). So reasonably you can farm a good number evert week from there depending on how progressed your guild is.

Heroic Malygos drops 2 … good luck with that.

wow, how much hp does essence of gossamer give a bear tank

Well, I’m not a druid, so I can’t tell you how much our furry compadres get from this trinket, but I can tell you how much stam a pally gets from it. The Essence of Gossamer is +111 stamina, which for a paladin comes out (when talented correctly) to (111×10) x 1.14 = 1265 hp. This is also works out to 33 additional spellpower … just in case you were wondering.

Aftermath from 3.0.9

Since the patch came out Tuesday, there’s been some questioning of Seal of Righteousness since the glyph for that ability was changed to offer a 10% damage buff. Would it be possible that glyphed SoR would be better than Seal of Vengeance/Corruption for tps generation?

The fine minds at Maintankadin did some number crunching, and as far as I can gather from this thread, it seems like the jury is still out on this. The two abilities come very close together in tps, yet with SoV/C still prevailing.

However, if one was expertise/hit capped, then with a high dps weapon (like Broken Promise) and frequent use of Hammer of the Righteous, SoR would come out on top. With Reckoning talented into this would give SoR more tps generation capabilities as well.

They haven’t settled this definitively, however. I’m looking forward to see what they come up with for the final numbers. It’d be nice to have some leeway in which seal to choose while tanking.

Luck be a lady

Alas my unlucky streak when it comes to T7 continues.

We did Sarth25 last night, which was nice and smooth. Left no drakes up, unfortunately, since I think we could easily handle one, and maybe a second with some practice.

Oh, as a side note, something I really really need to be more careful with. Everytime the main tank (warrior) pulls Sarth and drags him into position.

I, like an idiot, dash over and immediately burst out 20k threat (judge, shield slam, hammer of the righteous). Invariably, this pulls aggro. I always forget how huge a pally’s burst potential is.

So, note to self there.

In any case, Sarth goes down without much of a fight (I don’t think we lost anyone), and loot is revealed. Aha the Val T7 gloves token! It will be mine.

And then I rolled a 10 for it.

Bah. Well, things looked up. We rolled on the bag of spoils and everyone rolled all over the place. Warrior tank gets a 99, and I think it’s all over. I /roll and get a 100. Holy crap.

I’ve been given the nickname Rhihax now.

So I got the bag of spoils, and all the gold and the five emblems of valor that entails. Now I am (with the two I got from Vault25 last night) nine badges away from being able to buy the Val T7 shoulders token. I think I’ll hang on until Loatheb goes down this weekend, just to see if I can save those badges for the boots instead.

Even though we know how my luck in those situations goes!

Another abortive night in the ol’ citadel

I love my guild, let’s just preface everything with that. However it gets infuriating how we can swing from being a highly honed raiding machine to a bumbling Keystone Kops-esque circus depending on the phase of the moon that night.

Two weeks ago we full cleared Naxx25, and last night we stepping into the dread citadel for the last time this raid period with Thaddius, Gothik, 4HM, Saph, and KT still up. It’s pretty embarassing.

[...]

Patch 3.0.9 inc? And more raiding nonsense

First things first, according to mmo-champion (and this could just a rumor, mind you) the 3.0.9 patch is supposedly dropping on Tuesday and will include an extension of all seal durations to 30 minutes. This would also be the patch that will be nuking Divine Plea’s utility for holy paladins.

Nominally this won’t hurt tankadins all that much, but the Divine Plea change is going to kill the usefulness of judging light in a raid while DP is up. In any case, the seal change is welcome albeit unexpected. Though it makes some sense, to reduce a major mana inefficiency for holy paladins and make it so they don’t have to recast a seal every two minutes to get the benefit from a glyph.

Anyways, moving on, I did some raiding this weekend, including a very fun drunken Naxx10 Friday night. I’m currently coping with the fact that as the only raiding paladin the guild has right now, the last two times I’ve been in Naxx I’ve left with only holy gear (e.g., Libram of Tolerance). /cry

Half the reason I keep getting screwed on loot is my terrible luck. I can get the stuff to drop, but when it comes to winning it… that’s where the process falls apart. For example, last night in 25 man Naxx, the Inexorable Sabatons and the T7.25 leg token dropped off of Gluth.

Guild policy right now is to do T7 first, and then normal loot. They didn’t, so rather that using my one main spec winning roll on the boots, I held on for the legs token. The warrior tank won the boots on a free-for-all off spec roll and then I went on to lose the leg token as well. It was such a tease too, a priest rolled a 4, I rolled a 28. Two seconds pass, a few congratulatory tells roll in, but oh boy did I know better. A warlock then rolled a 98. Denied.

Eh, c’est la vie. I’ll get all my T7 eventually, mathematically. Hopefully.

Prot Paladin buffs in 3.1

I can honestly say I did not see this coming. This is huge, huge news, and if 1/3 of these changes make it to the live servers I will be a happy, happy pally.

Here’s what was announced for tankadin class changes last night:

• Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
• Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.
• Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.
• Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.
• Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.
• Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

I need a moment to process the awesomeness.

Okay… okay…

One more second…

Alright, I’m good. Now, here’s what this all means:

1. We won’t have to dump 5 talent points into Blessing of Kings anymore. There’s a possibility they’ll make the  2% version baseline and you would have to talent to get it up to 10%. I really hope this isn’t the case, but at least that’d be a talent point freed up. The more talent points we have to spend the better.

2. Exorcism will not be very, very useful. Glyphed to cause the 2 sec spell interrupt, we’re looking at the pally version of Earth Shock. I expect Retadins to go overboard with this and get it nerfed. But if it survives to live… oh boy… look out.

3. A ranged silence. I’ve been looking forward to this change since early TBC. ShoR getting a silence too is just a thick frosting of awesome of the woot cake (apologies for the terrible metaphor, irrational exuberance abounds). This change will kill one of my favorite strategies, LOS tanking, but at the same time will make my life that much easier when I can worry less about a warrior charging right into a pack of casters rather than waiting behind the pillar with me.

4. The ranks reduced note confuses me, only because we don’t know if this means we’re getting the same bang for fewer points, or if they’re nerfing the effectiveness of each talent. For example, would One-Handed Weapon Specialization go from 10% damage at 5/5 to 10% damage at 3/3, or would it go to 6% damage at 3/3. Have to wait and see on this, though I suspect the former. Er, strongly, the latter would be an uncharacteristically large nerf.

5. Ghostcrawler was talking about how he didn’t want tanks to have to have Blessing of Sanctuary on at all times, and would prefer to fold the mana/rage/rune regen into baseline talents or abilities, so tanks wouldn’t have to choose between Sanc and Kings. The change to Guarded by the Light seems to be the reaction to this statement. Now instead of getting mana from avoidance/blocks, we’ll be getting it from using our normal abilities. Seems like a fair trade to me. Although, along with the announced nerf to Divine Plea that reduces healing to 50%, that would make Judgement of Light pointless to keep on a target.

6. The Judgements of the Just change confuses me. Stuns are nice, but this seems like a tad overkill. I can’t imagine this will make it to the live server, or else we’ll start seeing Stunlockadins in pvp.

All in all, I am very excited about these changes. Hopefully they emerge from the PTR unscathed. And hopefully Ret doesn’t ruin this for us …

Ah, just kidding, I love you guys.

Expertise and you

Paladins are lucky in that, due to our threat generally being generated via spells, we don’t have to worry much about expertise. Moreover, because of Holy Shield, and the fact that we can easily (well, compared to other tanks) because block-capped, the threat of parrygibs is nonexistent.

When it comes to expertise, a Paladin if talented and glyphed correctly will have baseline 16 expertise skill. 6 skill comes from the Combat Expertise 3/3 talent, and 10 comes from the Glyph of Seal of Vengeance. That 16 skills works out to 4% reduction to your attacks being dodged or parried. A boss has a baseline 6.5% chance to dodge attacks, and a baseline 16% chance to parry attacks. So, to start, Paladins are sitting pretty.

But what are the expertise caps for Paladins, you say?

To prevent a boss from dodging attacks, you need 26 skill, or 214 expertise rating. Due to the 16 skill we already have, we really only need an additional 10 skill, or 83 rating.

To prevent a boss from parrying (which again we don’t need to worry about–seriously, don’t work towards this number), you need 64 skill, or 525 rating. With baseline you only need an additional 48 skill, or 394 rating.

A personal beef of mine is seeing Paladins go out of their way to take gear with expertise on it. 83 is very easy to come by and can be picked up here and there on our tier pieces or items that are already considered excellent for us. There’s no need to dip into the other tanking classes’ sandboxes and take toys better suited for them.

Lastly, for the love of pete, don’t gem for expertise. Ever.