Two down, none to go

Only cost 300g and had to get a guildee to buy it off the Alliance AH, but 3% damage reduction is worth it dammit.

One down, one to go

Just bought Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous for 99g on the AH. Score.

First night in Ulduar brings the pain

I logged on last night to some good news: one, that the instance servers were much, much more stable than they’ve been in the last few days, and two, apparently no one was saved from the guild’s two previous Ulduar attempts because they never got a shot at the Flame Leviathan. This was promising because it meant putting together a 10man would be a little easier.

As the two group leaders were wrangling in officer chat over who would take whom, it was proposed that, hell, since so many people were on we should try 25man Ulduar.

In hindsight this was a terrible idea.

But, first, some initial impressions. Ulduar, from what I’ve seen so far, is an awesome place. The scope is amazing, the art is gorgeous, and the design is fun in a way few instances in WoW are. The vehicle part, which I thought would be an annoying clusterfark was actually a nice change of pace (although I can definitely see it getting old a few months from now when we have the place on farm).

FL was basically a loot piñata, we wiped once while learning the mechanics, and the second time were easily took it out while only causing one system shutdown. The loot was a dps mail piece, cloth dps gloves, and the Leviathan’s Coil. Alas, Fortune did not smile and that delicious morsel went to Taunty the DK tank. Grrr.

At least I got my first Emblem of Conquest. 57 more until I can buy a T8 piece…

After Flame Leviathan, I was absolutely shocked to see there was only one trash pull between us and Ignis, and then no trash before Razorscale. I could see XT in the distance, but I didn’t see trash. Is any back there?

In any case, we decided to do Razorscale, since concerns were raised if Ignis was still bugging out and meleeing whoever was in the slag pot. Personally, I was really curious and wanted to see if that trash was as hurty as it’s been said. Considered a quick ninja pull, but then decided that’d probably not end well. Oh well. Next time, I suppose.

Now overall, Razorscale was a massive pain the butt. We never managed to down him because we were having major dps issues (at least, in my opinion). The way the fight goes is that during the air phase Iron Dwarves emerge from drill pods randomly in the area, three at a time. Tanks need to pick up the adds when they pop near them before the adds kill the fleshy dwarves that are trying to fix the harpoon guns.

Occasionally an Iron Vrykul comes out of a pod (you can tell cause they are much taller than the dwarves) and proceeds to whirlwind all your melee and healers. Once we figured out the deal with those guys, they soon began evoking “SENTINEL” cries of horror in vent.

While in the air, Razorscale will launch fireballs at the raid, and some of those fireballs will leave a blue aoe flame. These things hurt a lot and are impossible to heal through. Of course, despite “Don’t stand in the bad shite” being a primary lesson of WoW since before TBC, we still had a lot of unnecessary deaths to the stupid flames.

I think our major issue was the gear in our guild right now isn’t up to par with what Ulduar25 requires. I mean, Uld25 is generally iLevel 226 encounters, at least, that’s the gear expectation. Most of the people in my guild are mostly decked out with iLevel 200 gear with a smattering of 213. Only a few of us are full 213 with some 226 stuff from Maly/KT.

We really need to focus on Ulduar 10 for now, where our gear is a better fit. Then, when we know the fights and we have a healthy amount of iLevel 119 gear, we’ll come back to 25man with a screaming and terrible vengeance.

We can do it, just need to build up a little and break ourselves free of the complacency that Naxx falsely insulated us with. Training wheels are off!

Lastly, after the Razorscale wipes some people had to go, so we went to Emalon and proceeded to wipe on that too because we didn’t have enough dps to kill the overcharged adds.

I’m starting to sense a pattern here, haha.

Prot pally 3.1 build, tips and warnings

I’ve been noticing a lot of hits coming my way from people searching for talent builds for their prot pallies. I’ve already laid out how I’m going to spec in this blog, and in fact you can see my build here.

I figured it’d be best to point out for our new tanking brethren in a quick and dirteh fashion which talents you should grab, which you shouldn’t grab as much, and which you should avoid completely.

As an aside, I should point out, I tend to favor a threat-heavy build. Others might lean towards one that dips into the Holy tree. Honorshammer has a great build like this. If you want to see some big numbers, or be the kind of OT that nips at the heels of the MT, I recommend my spec.

Go only 1/2 into Spiritual Attunement. Between Divine Plea and Blessing of Sanctuary, only one point in SA will be enough to keep you rolling in mana.

Avoid Divinity. Reasonable voices may differ on this, but personally I think this talent is woefully underwhelming. 5% +heals isn’t as good as it sounds, and more often than not you’ll find that extra percentage will end up being overheal.

Stoicism is a pvp talent. Sure, it sounds useful, but you’re really only going to encounter stuns and dispells in pvp. It’s a waste of points in pve.

Get Divine Sacrifice/Guardian if you’re an offtank. If you’re MT, you won’t be popping these enough to justify the 3 talent points.

Reckoning is weak. It’s our weakest threat generating talent by far. You’ll be better served putting those points into the Ret tree where the real threat gen talents roam.

Seals of the Pure is also weak. 5/5 SotP is as much threat as 5/5 Conviction, and points in Conviction allows us to get Crusade for even more threat. Skip SotP, get Conviction.

Only go 1/2 Improved Judgements. I don’t want to get into a whole spiel about it, but our best threat rotation is 969 (more info here). Having a 10 second or 8 second Judgement throws off the rotation. One point is all you need!

Crusade is good, very good. Even when you’re not fighting humanoids/undead/etc. Crusade is a huge threat boost. You want this talent, trust me.

If you have any speccing questions, feel free to ask them in the comment to this post or email me at rhidach [at] gmail [dot] com. I don’t mind answering emails.

Happy tanking!

This is getting old(uar)

Still haven’t set foot in the titanic prison/city yet. Grrr. I think this patch picked the worst possible week to drop, and by worst possible, I mean most inconvenient to me. Clearly none of you matter in this calculus. So there.

Last night I logged on around 7 server just to start playing around with all the new doodads that the patch hast wrought. I bought my fancy dual spec and started putting points into Ret, but then realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and put the whole matter on the back burner. I’ll do some research and come back to it.

Naughty secret: I’d like to make my second spec a dps sword and board hybrid. Dare I dream? Yes, I know it’d be awful.

In any case, after that I hearthed back to Dal and flew off to try the new fishing daily. I have a love-hate relationship with fishing dailies right now, the Outland one being completely unwilling to give me the Captain Rumsey’s Lager recipe after a solid year of attempts.

Supposedly this new daily can also give the recipe, so at least that ups my chances.

Following that it was finally time to check out the Argent Tournament. I picked up the dailies and collected a chunk of Aspirant’s Seals. I’m itching to start collecting Champion’s Seals so I can save up for the Argent Hippogryph (so help me god if there’s no walking animation…).

Argent Tournament looked like a lot of fun, but it was getting old being challenged to a duel every 7 seconds as I was running around looking for the training guys.

Also checked the AH last night, and surprise surprise no Glyph of Divine Plea or Glyph of Hammer 0f Righteousness. Thanks to the RNG it’ll probably be some time before those two make it into the general economy. I don’t care about pricing, but I’m also not going to pay more than a few hundred gold for those.

And lastly, once again, I wasn’t able to hang around long enough for the Ulduar raid. My time will come tonight though, I have the whole evening dedicated to raiding and all the bugged-out Ignis attempts I can stomach. Plus 25man this weekend, for good or ill.

I’ll report back tomorrow on how my first night in there went.

The waiting is the hardest part

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to jump into Patch 3.1 last night, but apparently I didn’t miss much. The server itself didn’t come back online until like 7:30 eastern, and by the time my guild got its 10-man expedition into Ulduar, the raid server collapsed like a wet cake, stranding the GL’s toon in the nether between instances.

I’ll be able to hop on tonight to finally play with my new spec, buy dual speccing, and start hunting down the enchant/glyphs I need. I heard from a few people, Logan in the comments on another post among them, that Glyph of Divine Plea is impossible to find right now? If so, grrrr.

I hope Ulduar went well for anyone that managed to get in there.

I’ll report back tomorrow on what, if anything, I accomplish tonight!

Tuesday’s coming, did you bring your coat?

Finally, patch 3.1 is upon us! Here’s my to-do list for once I finally get in there:

1. Respec! The age of 0/58/18 is upon us…
2. Reglyph
3. Track down an enchanter with Blade Ward

I’m officially pumped!

Ugh, what a terrible weekend

This weekend was just overall a bad time in Azeroth. Bad enough my usual play time was limited by the holiday–seeing your family, who wants to do that?–but also most of what gaming time I got in was marred by various annoyances or disasters.

It started Friday night where a bunch of us were logged in but with not much to do. A Naxx10 was scheduled for the following day, so I couldn’t get saved, not enough people for a 25man raid, and not much interest in anything else. Eventually the guild leader saw a Black Temple pug forming and asked some of us if we wanted to go. I agreed, because I needed the achievement, have yet to see an Illidan kill, and have dark, dirty desires for the Bulwark of Azzinoth (coolest looking shield in all of WoW, by far). I was totally game.

The GL got a few of us into this raid, but had to split soon afterwards. In the end the raid composition was about 12 people from ES and the rest scattered from various other guilds. Just about everyone was lvl 80, except for the raid leader, who was a lvl 72 warrior. The RL had one Warglaive and was aiming for the offhand. Same deal with one of my guildees who needed the same glaive.

Anyways, raid starts and we’re basically steam rolling the whole place.

Slight aside: the most absurd Death Knight ever is main tanking for us, who apparently only knows how to communicate in all caps. Perhaps my favorite line of his was when he was explaining some boss and warned us all that if we wiped he would “STAB [us] IN THE NECK WITH A STRAW FROM MCDONALDS.” As you can imagine, he provided much entertainment for those of us in ES. We spent most of the time in vent making fun of this weirdo.

Now in about an hour’s time we reach Illidan, and the first attempt we wipe, mostly due to me. Like I said, I’ve never done Illidan, and I was told to kite the flames during phase 2. So I do, and drag them away from the glaives which I guess enraged them? I got one shot and the raid wiped. Anyways, once Capt Capslock actually used his big boy words and told me to kite the flames around the circle, I was good to go. We downed Illidan in short order and dontcha know on his corpus is the Bulwark itself. Glory be.

A mainhand Warglaive dropped as well, and that went to a rogue from ES, which was pretty cool, but I didn’t really care about that. I wanted the shield.

The Bulwark of Azzinoth is the absolute dead-sexiest shield in all of WoW. If you’ve never seen it before it is this massive slab of spiked metal that rests horizontally across your back. Just absolute sex, it is.

The RL calls out for rolls, and people start furiously typing their /rolls. RL gets a 10, a couple of warriors get between 15 and 35. Some guy rolls a 40. Then I roll, and get a 60. Oh man, the high roll, it was going to be mine! Ages pass as I wait for further rolls, and none more are produced. The RL then says in raid, “LOL well I’m taking it anyways.”

Feck.

The guy then ninjas the Bulwark of Azzinoth, stating that as a lvl 72 he has better claim to it. Absolute bullshit. Somewhere nearby a flock of birds flees their perch as I loose a torrent of obscenities against the heavens. And of course, completely enraged, I had to call it a night.

So then Saturday morning I wake up and log in for what little WoWing I could do that day, and find out that two of our guildees were hacked in the dead of night, officers both. As you can imagine, the Gbank was cleaned out of anything of worth. One guy’s toon was server transferred (probably to facilitate a gold shuffle), and is still trapped in limbo elsewhere (but at least has control of his account). The other guy is waiting to get his account back.

Well, great.

And then last night when I got home from Easter dinner with the fam, I logged on to do some relaxed Disgusting Oozeling farming (I mean that ironically), anticipating that the scheduled raid probably would not happen. The rank and file had other ideas, and after about opening about 40 Ooze Bags with no pet to be seen, I found myself in Naxx.

We were finishing up a raid that was started Saturday, and right from the beginning I could tell we were cursed. One of the tanks last night was Taunty the Impatient DK, and he was in rare form. Running ahead of the pack and pulling without a healer in sight, pulling more mobs while healers were attempting rezzes, complaining why he wasn’t getting heals, etc. I saw him during Kel’Thuzad just sitting in the middle of the circle during Phase 1, not even moving. Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered to dps the Aboms or whatever. He’d only move when I picked up KT and dragged him into the middle of the circle. Ugh, I hate that guy, he’s a blight.

Long story short, we got to KT, but we couldn’t down him. Too many stupid mistakes on the part of melee, rogues weren’t coordinating kicks, people were dying to voids, unlucky mind controls. It was just chaos. After a few wipes it was pretty late, so we called it.

Hopefully this week turns out better.

Better late than never Friday 4/10/09

Aha, so Better Late Than Never Friday has returned, if only because I sat on three weeks worth of search terms. Again, I question the longevity of this column, but like the saying goes: post, quaff, and be productive, because tomorrow you’ll run out of easy material to make weekly columns out of. So true.

paladin stamina spellpower conversion

The talent Touched by the Light converts 30% of your stamina into spellpower with three ranks. The best way to determine how much spellpower you’re getting is to either check your character sheet or take your stamina number and multiply it by .30. The result you get is your spellpower.

tankadin reckoning or conviction

Conviction will point for point give you more tps than Reckoning. Check out this post for more.

seal of righteousness better than seal of corruption

No, SoC (or V, if you swing the light that way) is our best threat seal while tanking. Even glyphed, SoR is inferior.

paladin wow rhyme bubble hearth

If my memory serves me correctly it’s something like:

I’m a little pally short and stout
This is my hammer, that’s my free mount
When I get in trouble watch me shout
Pop me bubble and hearth right out

how much hp does +24 stam give to paladins

Assuming you have both stamina increasing talents you should be getting a 14% increase to health over the normal stam > hp conversion rate, use this formula: hp = (stam*10) * 1.14. Works out to 274hp.

does conqueror tokens drop in naxx

Yes, just in my experience very rarely. RNG > all.

+16 dodge gem

Thankfully the design for the Subtle Scarlet Ruby will be added into the game in patch 3.1. I can’t find if it’ll be sold by the vendor for tokens, or if it’s a world drop. My money however is on it being a drop, like all the patterns that were added in the last patch.

How I’ll be glyphing next patch

3.1 is bringing some welcome changes to our glyphs, finally making more than a few actually useful for tanking. Here’s how I’ll navigate this brave new world of glyphing when the next patch drops:

Major

• Glyph of Divine Plea — Pretty much mandatory at this juncture. 3% DR is nothing to sneeze at.
• Glyph of Seal of Vengeance –  SoV is our primary tanking seal, so the extra threat/mitigation of the 10 expertise skill is something we’ll just about always have up.
• Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous — This one I’m dropping Glyph of the Righteous Defense for, because after some hefty soul-searching I decided that I’d rather have extra threat in situations with four or more mobs over an addition 8% chance to hit on a taunt that I now have a backup for.

Minor

• Glyph of Blessing of Kings — A helpful mana saver, and considering how generally bad our minor glyphs are this’ll at least get some use.
• Glyph of Lay on Hands — Definitely looking forward to this one. Remember the days when LoH had an hour cooldown? Now it can be as low as 11 minutes. Signs and wonders, my friends, signs and wonders.
• Glyph of Sense Undead — Eh, like I’m never setting foot in Naxx ever again. And Northrend is still crawling with undead.