Titles for your Pally

WoW offers numerous ways to define your character and add a little flair. While you can give your character that “Pally” feel with a large mace and some auric armor, nothing is more prominent than an appropriate title adorning your character’s name.

Here are several titles you can get on your Pally to add a little more definition to your toon and sync it up with the Lore behind the class:

The Argent Champion: Achieve exalted with the Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade, and you can adopt this moniker. Considering the Argent factions are primarily devoted to eradicating the Scourge and were founded by Paladins, it’s an excellent choice.

Crusader: When exalted with all your faction’s home cities and allowed to represent each in the tournament, you can display this name. Great Pally name and definitely something you want to show when burning through the Lich King’s armies, be it in Naxx, or eventually Icecrown Citadel.

The Seeker: Believe or not, this is a very Paladinesque title. In Warcraft 3, Paladin units would have randomly generated names, and several of those names included this title. For completing 3000 quests, this can be yours.

Justicar: Alliance only, unfortunately for me (or maybe not). I don’t envy the time required to grind this out. Exalted with Stormpike, League of Arathor, and Silverwing Sentinels… good luck, you’re braver souls than I.

So now I put it you guys, what title does your Pally sport? Which do you think is the best fit?

A Boy and his Hawkstrider

A scene from the most boring Naxx25 ever last night.

Great success!

Phew! My fears were alayed and doubts subsided after the raid we had last night. Without going too much into the drama the one-group policy engendered (another topic for another day), it was definitely a good idea to make an “A-team.”

We entered Ulduar last night at about 7 server. We streamrolled through every both we had already seen before (FL, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Iron Council, and Auriaya) and about an hour and a half later we were sitting outside the entrance to Hodir’s wing, rested, readied and fully ready to wipe and learn the Keeper fight.

Oh, small loot digression: I picked up the Stormtempered Girdle, finally replacing the only non-BiS Naxx piece I had. Sa-weet. Of course, now I’m 1.4% away from being melee hit capped, so obviously I need to tweak my gear a bit. But, I digress.

Anyhoo, we were expecting some serious wipe-learning. And then we two-shot Hodir.

Of course, we did it easy mode, the primary goal being to learn the fights first,  and worry about the purps later. I think it’s fair to say we have Hodir pretty much down now.

With Hodir down we then switched focus to Thorim (who I was heavily pushing for because I want those shoulders so damn badly… I’m such a sucker for Tier sets).

This fight… hrm… how to sum it up? Ok, so assuming you’re tanking the Arena–which, believe me, if you’re a paladin you probably will be–it’s like you died and went to Tankadin Hell.

Never-ending waves of adds until the Gauntlet team makes it to Thorim. Adds jump randomly down into the arena, seemingly always bee-lining for the healers. You need to be fast with taunts of else they’ll go squish. Hand of Protectioning is a must. And, to top it all off, there’s a delightful silence that will occasionally limit you to only HotR for a few seconds.

Delightful.

This was an interesting fight to say the least, and required every ounce of me. You can see from the screenshot above I may have been a wee bit frustrated, but in the end, we prevailed and Thorim went down.

And in his cache were the Conqueror shoulders! Eek. Of course, not to build up a long story for nothing, I didn’t win them. Moral of the story: always roll last. It seems to be less disappointing to fail to top someone else’s number than to wait in horrible, gnawing suspense for your number to be crushed like so much volleyball.

So Night One is done, and we have 8 of the 13 (let’s be realistic and not count Algalon) bosses down. Thursday we roll back in for Freya, Mimiron, Vezax, Yoggy, and the cherry atop the Ulduar Sundae: Ignis.

No, we haven’t attempted him yet…

Calm before the storm

Sorry for the lack of posting today. I honestly cannot think of anything to write about. Most of my day has been spent thinking about the awesomeness potential of tonight’s raid, assuming it goes according to plan and we get the A-team formed and in Ulduar at a good time.

In any case, I shall be posting some good stuff tomorrow.

Getting caught up with recaps

There’s really not much to write about in terms of Ulduar raiding. This is going to be another lost week, but for different reasons than last week.

For one, we split off into two separate 10man groups on Tuesday, thinking that the more people we get in there, the better. That was a bad idea, because availabilities were inconsistent at best between the two groups, and both have only made it up to Kologarn.

It also did not help that Taunty decided to make a third group Tuesday night only accomplished downing Flame Leviathan and saving people to a fail group that could have run with the first two had they had a little patience.

Not to be completely negative, on Tuesday we also ran FL on 25man quickly to farm a quick Emblem of Conquest and some 226 loot. What should appear in the loot window was none other than:

Wisely, the GL passed it to Ildara, who is the healer with the best raid attendance and also is the best healer in the guild. No one deserved the fragment more.

So anyhoo, next week we are not taking any chances on Uld10. We’ve decided to form one “A-team” group that is made up of the best raiders with the best availability, with the sole purpose of getting as far as possible into the instance. Then, with some new loot and a whole lot of experience, we can go back to running two groups with much more success.

Tuesday is Day 1 for the A-team. I expect good things, but we shall see.

Shifting v Regal Twilight Opal

With the addition of the Shifting Twilight Opal in 3.1, we should take a look now at whether this will be a better choice for your red sockets than the Regal Twilight Opal. (Sorry if my numbers aren’t exact to 3 decimal places, I rounded up to keep the math clean).

Regal Twilight Opal (with Kings)

8 dodge rating

• .2% dodge

13.2 stamina

• 150 hit points
• 4.4 spell power

Shifting Twilight Opal (with Kings)

8.8 agility

• .17% dodge
• 17.6 armor [.111% physical damage reduction]
• .17% melee crit [affects everything but taunts]

13.2 stamina

• 150 hit points
• 4.4 spell power

So, switching between the two, you gain 17.6 armor and .17% melee crit, but lose .03% dodge. Not a bad trade, and the avoidance losses are probably so minuscule as to make up for the damage reduction and threat gains.

Tankadin loot from Ulduar10

I’ve found the loot in Ulduar10 has been lackluster at best thus far, which of course makes sense, considering I’m sporting 213-226 gear, so not in all cases a 219 will be an upgrade. Just my luck, every pieces that’s dropped so far for tanks has been something I have a 226 piece for: weapon, shield, and neck.

Well, no matter, there is some phat (and non-phat, as you’ll see) purpz to be had, even in 10man!

Flame Leviathan

• Flamewatch Armguards. Lacks the gem slot of the Bracers of the Unholy Knight, but it has more stamina and the hit rating is a nice threat boost. Unless you have a Solid Dragon’s Eye in your Unholy bracers, these are nice.

Ignis

• Gauntlets of the Iron Furnace. Armor pen, what in sweet hell?! This is totally a warrior/DK piece. Our armor pen is called Holy damage.
• Furnace Stone. I’m torn on this trinket. Arguably, the proc is a nice oh-crap button for times when you’re going to take huge chunks of physical damage, and 2.67% avoidance is nothing to sneeze at… buuuut no stamina. I’m probably being spoiled by my Monarch Crab. Worth taking, but pass to a Bear if they want it too.

Razorscale

• Stormtempered Girdle. Considering I’m still stuck with the Waistguard of Living Iron, this is a nice upgrade for me.

XT-002 Deconstructor

• No tank lewtz.

Iron Council

• Cloak of the Iron Council. I’ll probably still with my Platinum Mesh Cloak over this, because I’m not sure I’ll get full value out of that block rating when fully buffed, and expertise is a huge meh.

Kologarn

• Stoneguard. Definitely an upgrade to Slayer of the Lifeless, and an upgrade to Broken Promise if you’re ok with the defense loss. Of course, stick with Last Laugh if you have it.
• Shoulderguards of the Solemn Watch. Not absolutely terrible. But, in my case, the gem slot in the T7.5 shoulders makes them slightly better, so I’d probably pass.
• Mark of the Unyielding. Awesomely itemized neck piece, and better than just about every T7 neck, other than Nexus War Champion Beads (duh).

Auriaya

• Shieldwall of the Breaker. Unless you’re wearing the Wall of Terror, this is worth taking.
• Archaedas’ Lost Legplates. No defense! And too much expertise to boot. Pass.

Hodir

• Token for Valorous Aegis Legguards. Ugh, a dress.
• Signet of Winter. Good ring if you’re already crit-capped.

Thorim

• Token for Valorous Aegis Shoulderguards. (Is this right, I thought shoulders dropped off of Yogg, or is that 25man only?)
• Legacy of Thunder. Equivalent to Stoneguard, but you’d want Stoneguard more so no itemization is wasted on expertise. This also looks ridiculous.

Freya

• Token for Valorous Aegis Handguards.
• Ironbark Faceguard. Considering our T7.5 helm has expertise as well, that makes this an upgrade (believe it or not) due to more avoidance and stamina.

Mimiron

• Token for Valorous Aegis Faceguard.

General Vezax

• Wowhead doesn’t have any 10man loot listed yet, alas.

Yogg-Saron

• Wowhead doesn’t have any loot listed yet, but I think the token for the Valorous Aegis Breastplate is a fair assumption.

Monday night Ulduar raid recap (now with 100% more screenshots!)

Sorry for the delay in this post, my raid recaps are officially a day behind.

If you’ll recall in my last post, I talked about our group’s multiple attempts to down Iron Council, and despite all the wipes, I boasted that the following evening (aka Monday) we would down them easily. Well, we did. Second try and we downed them! Amazingly, it appears that Blizz nerfed the fight starting yesterday, so some of the things we ran into like the short enrage timer and the huge range of Overload, will be less of an issue moving forward. Still, I’m glad we downed the fight pre-nerf.

They dropped Stormtip and the Runetouched Handwraps.

It being wonderfully early, we marched on to Face Boss (aka Kologarn), to avenge his eating Demogar the previous night. Justice would be done.

It took a few wipes to learn the fight, but the strategy we settled on was myself and Demo tanking Kologarn’s body, and then dps switching back and forth killing arms, with calls going out for grips or eye beams. When the arms die they create like five adds, which we found easiest for a (dps) DK to switch to Frost Presence and pick up and kill away from the raid, because of the aoe damage they seemed to be doing.

Kologarn was promptly smashed to bits and his corpus was splayed all over the chasm he was standing it, forming a bridge to the next section of Ulduar.

Unfortunately, in our exuberance to cross, several of the raid members tried to make it to the other side, but instead fell through a bugged bridge and to their death in the pit below.

After about three people died that way, I decided I could do better. Alas, hubris got the better of me, and I joined my comrades in the pit, but somehow survived the fall. I had to DI someone on the edge so I could release my body and get out of there.

Thankfully we could use the teleporters to cross to the other side, haha.

And as for loot, Face Boss relinquished Stoneguard and the Mark of the Unyielding. The sword was inferior to both my and Demo’s Last Laughs (much to my chagrin, I love swords… axes are so un-Paladin-like), so we passed that to the DK for his DW tank set. The Mark of the Unyielding we then dithered back and forth on, because it had some things that made it better than the Nexus War Champion Beads (more defense, no block rating), but no gem slot. Ultimately I won it, but I don’t think I can figure out a way to use it really.

Once we were all across the bridge Auriaya was in our sights. First we would have to deal with two trash pairs on either side of the wide circle, since she had a fear mechanic, and the last thing we needed was to get feared into those.

The pulls turned out to be pretty fun though, they had this mechanic where they needed to be a certain distance from each other, and if pulled further apart they’d get enraged. However, you didn’t want them too close, because every so often a spark will form at one and travel to the other, and if it reaches its destination, the mob will get a huge damage boost. So when a spark formed, we’d walk both at the same time so the distance was maintained, but the spark couldn’t reach its target.

Gotta say, I appreciate all the thought Blizz put into the trash–more than just another AOE-fest!

As for Auriaya, she was a little bit more difficult because of her fear mechanic. Thankfully, we had a shaman, so Tremor Totem was used to keep the healers from scattering. We wiped a few times, but once we fine-tuned our approach she went down easily.

It was definitely a night for tanks, because she dropped the Shieldwall of the Breaker and Mantle of the Preserver. Demo took the shield because he was still stuck with that blue table-thing that Malygos 10 drops, and I had the Wall of Terror. It was definitely an upgrade for him, which was exciting.

After Auriaya we took a break and then cleared the trash to Hodir to give him a few shots before people had to go. Word to the wise about the Hodir hallway: avoid snow mounds when they have a fog above them, because if you get too close like 7 worms will spawn. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to give Hodir any serious attention, but we definitely could have done the fight.

I must say I am very excited about Ulduar now, after the awful start we had there earlier this week. I fully expect we’ll be able to clear the place in a few weeks once we know all the fights.

Oh, and let’s say “hi” to Sara.

Pimped my UI

Sunday morning, one of the first things I did was completely rebuild my UI from the ground up. I had some annoying issues I wanted to take care of, the least among them being how little real estate I had on my screen.

This is what I came up with:

New mods I added are BasicMiniMap, Grid, Classtimer, Quartz, and TankadinTPS.

I used BasicMiniMap and Grid to clean up my clunky raid boxes and get the minimap out of the top right corner. I like how much svelter everything looks now.

Classtimer I have to the right above the minimap now and it’s where I keep track of my self-buffs like Seal, Righteous Fury, and above all Divine Plea.

Quartz I love right now because it puts my targets cast bar right in my field of vision. For example, last night in Ulduar I knew immediately that Steelbreaker was casting Fusion Punch and was ready with a GCD to Cleanse off the crazy-awful dot before it could get one tick in.

And TankadinTPS is great because it’s like a mini-recount. It keeps track of your recent targets and tells you what kind of threat you’re doing on each, what moves cause the most threat, etc. It’s pure awesome.

I still need to tweak a few things, like change Focus so it’s just the focused target’s health (since I use it to track healer HP and for easy taunting) and make the bar take up less real estate on screen.

Now that I’ve shown my UI I issue the following meme challenge to my fellow Pally bloggers who read this site: what kind of UI are you running with? Please share a screenshot and detail it (… so I can steal any cool ideas)!

The pain… the pain!

I must have a masochistic streak, because I’ve been actually enjoying the wiping, prodding, testing of each boss in Ulduar… within reason (but I’ll explain what I mean by that shortly).

There’s been some guild drama this week over what direction we want to take the guild in for Ulduar for a couple of reasons. One is right now all the guildy-come-latelies have been logging back on, clambering for raid spots, and willfully ignoring that they completely abandoned the guild this last month or two. Now new content is out and it’s just like WoW was paused in their absence, right?

As you can imagine, with all these people intent on raiding we’ve been trying 25man Ulduar fitfully. Three times this lockout period we’ve gone in and only managed to down Flame Leviathan, with an ungodly number of wipes of Razorscale. Let’s not even talk about Emalon.

I think people are finally coming around to my conclusion that the approximately 15 geared, regular raiders can’t carry the others through Uld25. Not at this juncture at least. We need to focus on 10man if we’re going to do any progression. Of course, the pendulum swung the other way, and to compensate we wasted way too much time on old content. Naxx25 was cleared (BoH went to a Ret Pally new to raiding, lawl roll system), OS25 cleared with no drakes of course, and Malygos25 downed as well.

Two weeks ago this would have been routine, but honestly, we shouldn’t even be touching Tier7 content. Outside of maybe Malygos25, which is 226 gear, there’s no reason to run those raids.

Honestly, we’ve been running Naxx for almost four months now. If you’re not almost completely 213 geared, something is wrong.

But I digress! On a positive note, Uld10 has been a great success compared to 25. FL, Razorscale, and XT-002 down, and down in such a way that we should be able to easily replicate the kill the following week. XT-002 itself was very fun to learn, despite the repair bills.

For those who haven’t tried him, a quick explanation: Our group make up was me tanking; two hunters, a mage, fury warrior, a rouge, and shadow priest dpsing; and two resto druids and one holy priest healing. We tanked XT on the stairs, his back facing the raid. The big thing with this fight is it’s a dps race, you want to kill him as soon as possible because the fight gets unwieldy as it goes on (nevermind the enrage timer).

Initially, we had two tanks, myself and a DK (who’s main is one of the hunters). He was MTing and I was grabbing the Pummelers during the add phase, and using Divine Sacrifice during the first tantrum to make it a bit easier. We were having DPS issues though, and ultimately we came to the conclusion that it just made sense to do only one tank, because the Pummelers hit very lightly and they tend to head right for the boss when they spawn anyway. No need for a separate OT just for them. In addition the extra dps would help with keeping the scrapbots away from XT.

Aside: XT’s voice? Hilarious.

We wiped like 8 times on the initial set up, getting closer each time, and then on the second attempt with only one tank, we killed him. The trick was just moar deeps. Basically whenever the heart appeared, everyone focused it while being careful not to destroy it (because that would trigger hard mode). With the extra dps we could push the boss to the first heart drop (75%) without a tantrum, dps the heart so he’d be at 51% when reformed, then quickly push him over 50% to avoid another tantrum.

Killing XT was exhilarating, and definitely what raiding in Ulduar should be like. No mindlessly optimistic wipefests, ignoring that obvious fact that the numbers are against, but instead being smart about it and raiding at the appropriate level. Once we know the fights and have better gear all around, then we’ll roll into 25man with a vengeance.

In case you’re wondering, loot was the Pulsing Spellshield and the Treacherous Shoulderpads.

So that was Saturday night, and last night we decided to ignore Ignis (have they fixed that yet?) and try the Assembly of Iron. We proceeded through the first few trash pulls, having fun with the craziness of figuring out for the first time what each mob does (Runed Flame Jets ftl) and wandered around a bit looking for the Assembly of Iron (rather than look it up).

Hilarity ensued when Demo, the warrior tank, dashed up the stairs and was one shot by the face boss (er, Kologarn) not even knowing he was there. That was a well-needed laugh.

Ambled down the corridor with the various projections of planets and killed the trash there, which dropped some tank gloves. Demo and I did our wonder out loud who this is best for, and eventually decided to both greed and let fate decide. He won them, and I’m glad he did, turns out they were a better upgrade for him than me. Plus it would have broken my four set bonus, and that’d be a pain.

So eventually we made it down the right hallway to the Assembly of Iron. At this point it was probably 11:30 (we started raid late after doing OS and some aforementioned nonsense wiping on Emalon and Razorscale). The basic of the fight were explained and we gave it a first probing try. Steelbreaker went down but we had some issues with Overload and wiped. Not a problem, now we know what to fix. Next try, Steelbreaker goes down, I peel Molgeim off of Demo and drag him back to my corner. Mo casts a gigantic Rune of Death (like consecrate on ‘roids) and that eats me. Didn’t even know that existed!

Ok, so try again–Rune of Death isn’t a big problem now that we’re looking for it. But it wasn’t perfect so we wiped. Getting closer each time, we can totally do this. Last few attempts were getting late, but towards the end we got Mo down, but were running up against the enrage. Last attempt we had Bruundir at 70% when he enraged.

One thing I’ll do tonight to make this a little better is be smart about Rune of Power positionings. Every so often Mo casts this circle of blue light under one of his two buddies or himself that gives a 50% damage increase. I’ve been pulling Steelbreaker/Mo off them, but haven’t been positioning them as optimally for the dps. I think a big key to this fight is treating them like Malygos sparks and maximizing how much dps can be pumped out using those Runes of Power.

The other thing that might make the fight easier is having the third healer be dps specced and just off heal for the first phase, and then switch to full dps for phases 2/3 where healing doesn’t need to be as intense.

I’m fully confident we’ll down him tonight.

Postscript: After this weekend I’ve come to the conclusion that I really, really need to get my ret set together and in order. It just makes sense that, if a boss only requires one tank, rather than being dead weight in a 10man raid I could swap to Retribution and contribute more than just shield slam deeps.