Holy crapballs! Karazhan preview.

Sweet stuff! Karazhan might become one of the favorite and popular dungeons in the Burning Crusade for two reasons: 1. it's humongous (gives a lot of things to do and places to go). 2. It's a ten-man dungeon, making it easy to get a group for it.

This blog is alive... With some new 1.10 info!

I'm happy. Finally something real newsworthy! Finally something real newsworthy for Paladins all over the world.

A friend of mine just told that 1up.com has some new info on 1.10 and the "casual" Dungeon 2 sets! Click here to read about it! What does it say? It says that to get the Dungeon 2 sets you upgrade the regular set items you have. For example, for us Paladins, we would upgrade our Lightforge in to Soulforge. That article also gives some more info about 1.10, such as the upcoming weather effects. Short movie clips.

Tigole's given some more information on this patch as well:

We’ve been hard at work at Patch 1.10 and I’m excited to bring you a small sneak preview of some of the content. We’ll be offering a series of quests for maximum level players so they can obtain a really good, class-specific armor set. This should prove to be a great way for non-raiding players to upgrade their gear. Here are some highlights:

• Characters follow a new quest line to obtain an armor set
• The armor sets contain 4 rare and 4 epic pieces
• Some of the pieces can be obtained by soloing (including one of the epic pieces)
• The most difficult pieces to obtain require a UBRS level group
• We are adding new bosses to existing dungeons
• Some of the existing dungeons are being re-itemized

OMG! Holy crap. Does that mean that our Lightforge Gloves will be MOVED to some other place than the dreaded Emperor it is now at? Seriously. I only need those gloves and I complete my entire Lightforge set. I've seen the drop once during all my thousands of raids of BRD and I lost that roll. Fun? Nope. I actually use the Valor gloves now, and that's kind of sad cause I don't like being accused of being a Valordin.

Hehe. Also, check out the screenshot up there to the right. It gives a sneak peak at the Paladin set, dubbed Soulforge. Heh. The helm actually got some stat nerfs: slightly reduced stamina, and the agility was completely removed. The +spell damage though really shows you in what direction they're taking our class.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised at all if in 1.10 both the original Lightforge sets (and others) will get slightly changed to suit our new style (more mana, more +spell damage and +spell/melee crit) as well as the replacement of the Lightforge Gauntlets. This is of course huge speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if they thought about doing this.

Reality vs Vision Counter

Check above, added a day counter for how many days it's been since the waited response from Caydiem. Why? For fun. And it's kind of handy too!

Props to my man

Just wanted to say grats to my fellow guild member Skalagrim who made the front page of Worldofwarcraft.com!

He even got tributed with his own page!

Guild of the Monkey/Whale ftw!

Ahn'qiraj Epic Event in a Nutshell

Edit: The guy on our server who had the Scepter was JUST next to the gong, said in general channel "Uh, you ready?" -- and the server crashed. Lololololololol!

Edit: The gong has been ringed. Here are some screenshots.

Syko's Paladin Talent Survey

I got recommended to post about this; Syko's completed his writings and has now posted his findings on the Paladin talent study. The results are very interesting and it's overall a very nice read that gives insights at how us Paladins play our characters.

Cenarion Hold rep. awards update.

The official site has been updated with the reputation awards you get now from Cenarion Hold (just like with Zul'gurub).

The sets are a combination of one ring, one mantle and one weapon. The 3-set bonus for Paladins is interesting: 20% chance on Judgement to gain 100 mana.

It was expected.

Nooooooooooooooo! Best armor in the game, slated for nerf in 1.10.

Three little piggies...

- The AQ gate counter has been given a facelift, much cooler now.

- Medivh is completed with the turn-ins. The rumors about waiting five days were true for the "supplies" to arrive in Silithus. It was incredibly laggy at the gate.

- This will be my Shield Hearth macro from now on (used to have the bubble boy-moops quote from Seinfeld).

Blizzard has no foresight

I'm on the Medivh server.

This server is the one that's currently in the lead of opening the Ahn'qiraj gates.

Imagine playing on a great server.
It's fun to play.
Then imagine queue times.
Think 2-3 minutes.
Then 15 minutes.
Then 30 minutes.
Then one full hour.
Is it fun to play then? No.

One hour of a complete waste of time.

Then imagine that you want to participate in the event that will take place in Silithus.
It's something you've been waiting for two weeks to do.
Then imagine people creating level 1 alts and parking them in Silithus.
Think one, two and three at first.
Then four, five and six.
Then ten, twenty, thirty.
Then an entire guild that has 250 members called "AQ Opens".
Is it fun to play then? No.

One laggy event and one crashing server.


I don't mind at all events like this. This is great. This is what people have been begging Blizzard to do. This is why it said on the box "Epic World Events" (which doesn't include the stupid Elemental Invasions). But really, when they designed this and created a list of which servers were in the lead they should've really considered a situation like this happening. This is just lunacy.

And it's not that which is what makes me mad as well. It's the slow response. Signs of this has been bubbling all over for several days now. Server queues have been steadily growing larger and larger. Petitions have been sent to Game Masters over and over... And it seems to me that it's not until TODAY that they realized that they have to do something.

And ironically, nothing has been done as far as I can see.

1.9 Paladin tanking in MC

Theras has movies of him tanking MC, among others such as Ragnaros, very cool. Click here to check it out. Downloading it I'm typing this.

Centrality and Class

Nice find by L'Emmerdeur on how well-connected an individual is in a social network (per class). Click here to read.

You can pretty much guess which class is in the bottom of all the charts.

Dead community?

People who play their Pallies are playing it without talking that much about it.

Players who didn't like the patch are gone, playing other characters.

The Community Manager's aren't posting in the Paladin forum anymore.

I've really been trying to find stuff to post and write about these latest days, but it's getting tough, real tough.

What a two-week ride!

Weird.

These last two weeks have been pretty interesting for my Paladin. Odd that all of this happened during the short time I've begun to settle in the US.

#1 The Paladin changes
After one year of constant nagging it's released. Refreshing changes. I still haven't given final judgement yet though, but I can say to you that I've actually begun switching auras more now for some weird reason.

#2 Epic mount.
Get the epic mount after a long story. Can jump over the Ironforge gorge now.

#3 First epic item.
Spend DKP and obtain the Finkle's Lava Dredger. Woot! I actually manage to do some nice damage now. The spinning is awesome. I can't decide which enchant I want so I settled with the weapon chain for now.

#4 I finally get that damn helm.
Yep. I got it. I said to myself that statistically the odds were in my favor since I had done so many runs that this had to be it. I said it before we did Gandling, I said it before Gandling was about to die. And you know what? It finally dropped. Would you want some fries with that?

I'm just so relieved now. If my Paladin would ever be retired, I couldn't pick a better time for it than today. I consider my Paladin to be a "finished class", the rest is just frosting and sprinkles on the top really.

Patch 1.9.1

With todays maintenance we got a patch. Here's the bit for Paladins:

Paladin
- Silence effects should now work properly with Improved Concentration Aura.

Poorly worded, but I guess it means that the silence-effect resistance is now working properly, I have it and I don't think I've ever have it work for me.

Sad to see no stuff on that SoC doesn't proc when silenced.

Edit: Excellent. This fix doesn't seem to fix anything. I haven't extensively tried it, but from early reports it seems it's still not working.

Medivh's going strong!

My server just passed 50% on the war effort, just in time for the fact that 1.9's been up for a week. View total progress here.

Midnight notes.

I've decided to not write anything lengthy about tonight's raid, mainly due to that I don't think I could add anything relevant except three minor bits:

- I beat the MT in damage, and that's including a moment of AFK and not concentrating on using SoC with JutC all the time (due to the fact that many of the casters demanded JoW!). I'll upload the list later...
- While the Greater Blessings are awesome it just seems to me that because we now have all this free time to do whatever we want to do we Paladins keep forget to bless! I know, it's crazy, but it's true. Happened to us several times. A Druid even came in to our syndicated Paladin channel and complained about the lack of Salvation... Hehe! Man, them casters sure love Salvation.
- The Ragnaros fight seems to be less about trying to throw heals and more about annoying clipping problems when trying to get your butt out of the lava.

In a related note... As you probably know now, the War Effort now has an official counter up. I just have to say that I'm damn proud of being a player on the Medivh server. We're doing it strong. The Alliance side I know have now completed the turn-ins for Thorium as well as Rainbow Fin Albacore just tonight. I hope our server is the first server to open the gates, and I think it will be.

My raid experience.

This is with my fire resist gear (arguably not that much), unbuffed:

Fire resist: 50.
Crit rate: 11.81%
HP: 3556
Mana: 3767

My spec is 20/31.

Head: Avenguard Helm.
Neck: Drakefire Amulet.
Shoulder: Lightforge Spaulders.
Back: Sergeant's Cape.
Chest: Energized Chestplate.
Wrist: Emberplate Armguards of the Boar.
Hands: Fiery Plate Gauntlets.
Belt: Highlander's Lamellar Girdle.
Legs: Lightforge Legplates.
Boots: Crystal Lined Greaves.
Finger: Ring of Demonic Guile.
Finger: Blood of the Martyr.
Trinket: Sanctified Orb.
Trinket: Royal Seal of Eldre'thalas.
Weapon: Zulian Stone Axe.

Yep. Not a single epic. Why? I haven't raided much at all, mainly due to timezone differences. That's not an obstacle anymore, and I'm saving DKP now since I really want the Judgement Helm next time it drops from Onyxia. I really want a plate helm with +int, and I've given up on Lightforge Helm a long time ago (25+ runs, not ever seen it drop).

Anyways, my guild began with doing Onyxia tonight. Since I was dirt-poor I could only afford buying Greater Blessing of Kings, so that was my blessing. God dangit these greater blessings are awesome. Really, really, really great improvement. The largest, most boring task in the entire game has finally been fixed. I wasted about 191 Symbol of Kings (including giving away 48) during this night.

The first phase went smooth. Ran up to her, judged her with Judgement of the Crusader and whacked away with Judgement of Command, judging SoC every time I could. At phase 2 I support-healed and threw up Blessing of Protection and Salvation on the Mages/Warlocks who AoE:d the whelps. At phase 3 I really didn't know what to do... Go melee or backup heal? First I healed, then I realized many of the casters were out of mana (which they were also saying in the raid channel), so I hurried up to the back of her and judged Wisdom. It was a bit tough since the fears she did would occasionally force me to rejudge due to the 10 second timer runnning out, but nevertheless tried to keep it up on her as long as possible. At the end when Onyxia was at about 20/15% I retreated back to the side for some reason -- not sure why. Anyways, the only things I did then was to heal and throw Hammer of Wrath's.

We killed her pretty smoothly with not too many deaths. She dropped two Dragonstalker helmets. Many complaints about that.

This is really what I continued to do in Molten Core. We took down Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas and Garr. I just continued doing what I did with Onyxia on these guys as well. I tried to stay in melee range as much as possible for as long as I could.

It was really fun to switch auras, and for once it was worth it... Getting hit with fire? Switch to Fire Resist. Safe from fire damage? Turn on Sanctity to up the DPS. And as a bonus, since not many of the Paladins were up front I had the freedom to pick whatever judgement I wanted (so much for the use of the Lasting Judgement-talent!).

I begged to get the damage meter list, since I really wanted to see how much damage comparatively I did in the raid. After some asking -- or bitching rather, in guild chat I got the list. Click on the picture for a larger image. (Notice: I've really, really trying hard to make sure I don't mention names of anybody or anyone else on this blog unless I've asked them about it or that they've wished to be mentioned. I really try to respect the privacy of others. But I think not posting the damage list would be tough to do.)

When it comes to it if you look on the list, I technically came in to the bottom of all damage dealers. The 1% difference between me and Nushu (Holy or Discipline Priest I think) is the giveaway. Soulpatch who's above me happen to be the raid's maintank (he's almost completely decked out in epics).

Am I disappointed at my standing? Yes. Could I have performed better to improve my DPS? Sure. Do I think my stats were bad? Not really. Putting things in perspective I guess this is the place where they want the Paladin to belong: at the bottom of the DPS list. Really, when thinking about it, it's not too bad. I mean, I get to to do damage -- one percent more than main healers. I also get to do my fair share of healing on top of that, augmenting the raid in more ways than just standing there waiting to throw a heal.

Actually, I'd dare to say that the best Paladins are the ones who are in the front. Why? We're never going to be anything else than backup healers. It's best if we DPS when we can, but when needed we pull back and do our Healadin-routine. Just don't stand there and idle! Let's say all Paladins in the raid had my build; that'd be an additional 459,500 damage added to the pool. Not bad considering circumstances. Heck, I'd dare say that it'd be make more of an difference to the raid than having them as Healadins in the first place.

What really what makes the Druid class so appealing is the ability to switch roles, adapting to the situation. As a Druid, one second you're a Cat dishing out damage, then you *bam* switch to Bear to off-tank a mob, and so forth. I have to say that this experience sure existed now when I was playing tonight. It wasn't as strong as it is when I play my Druid, but it is there nevertheless. This is fun!

The biggest gripe, which definetly is a huge limiting factor, is that the damage I dish out with Judgement of Command is really bound upon the principle of stunning the enemy. In raid dungeons this simply is impossible because all of them are immune to stuns. This leaves my to rely on Sanctity Aura and Vengeance to be able to at least pump my Judgement of Command to a decent high amount. It's tedious since all you're doing really is just standing there auto-attacking, waiting for the Judgement cooldown to refresh.

It just feels like, what I got out of this, was that Paladins are really best for dungeons and small raid dungeons. We dish out our damage based on stunning, our tanking abilities are impossible for Molten Core but very possible in UBRS and the only thing is that stands out is that our main healing which I'd guess just descent all-around.

I'm dirt tired now, so sorry for grammatical errors. It's 4 AM. I'm happy of what I experienced this night so far and I'd like to see your input on this and what you've experienced -- if you're just like me or just the opposite. My guild's going to do the rest of Molten Core tomorrow which will allow me to write a follow-up on this later that night as well.

More Paladin bugs...

Caydiem confirms that being unable to proc with a seal after being silenced is a bug.

AQ Progression

In the official Raid forum, a guy made a thread that links to a mod and a website to download and upload data on how much servers have progressed in opening the AQ gate. Good stuff!

Check out the toplist here.

Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be..

A guild member pointed this out. It doesn't say exactly from which date the poll was conducted, but I can pin-point it to at least less than a year ago (around february 2005).

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

The Epic Story: When I got my epic mount and crit over 1000.

I actually finally got my Pally epic mount today. Yep... I know it might seem a bit late, but I was a huge slacker and couldn't decide whether to get it or just a regular epic mount instead. This, really, is the the top for my character. I don't have anything else to accomplish with her now. The two goals I set for her approximately one year ago is complete: Get her to 60 and get an epic mount. I am happy that I have achieved this now.

For a very long time I was weighing the Paladin Epic vs Regular Epic against each other: first it was 800 gold manaless mount vs grind-my-butt off for a Pristine Black Diamond plus do hard-ass quests for a mount that cost 500 mana to cast.

Then as Pristine Black Diamonds dropped in price by 280 gold, getting it suddenly became much more lucrative... But still, the mana cost was annoying and I didn't like that you had to five-man Scholo do to a really hard single-attempt event. I had even done it to help out guildies, which we wiped on... made me really turned off from doing it for quite a while.

I thought it would be a smart idea to PVP to get my mount, realizing well too late that it would take an insane amount of rep grindning and battlegrounding to get one. Especially when I got really bored and didn't PVP for days was when I just had to face it that I wouldn't be able to get it through that way due to many factors among rank decay.

Over a month ago I realized I had well over 300 gold, so I said to myself "Eh, what the heck." and payed the money to begin the quests. The reason for the delay of doing it until today was mostly due to Arcanite Bars: Instead of asking guild members or paying someone to transmute them for me I just took my Druid who didn't have a profession and leveled her up to 275 Alchemy in about two days (and it only cost 40 gold total I think). After transmuting everything, I finally got my barding blessed this weekend and scheduled up a run for today with two of my fellow guild members. A Priest and Mage were awesome to help us out with this as well.

I mean, seriously... We tore that place apart. It was really, really fun to try out how the new Paladin worked... As I've mentioned I specced for total Retnoob and up to Improved Hammer of Justice in Protection. Get this: I actually did so much damage that when we got to the death knight after the fourth wave he just wouldn't stop attacking me! I eventually got killed right at the end due to being both oom, using my Lay on Hands as well as still having the potions on the cooldown.

One of the Paladins in the group was full Protection up to Holy Shield. Props to that since I know it won't be the most popular build. I just want to mention that.

I've never done damage that got over 1000 with my Paladin. NEVER! When I grind for mats with my Druid as Cat Feral I crit for 1200 very often with Ferocious Bite. Every time I do this I say to myself "Damn, I'll never get tired of critting over 1000!". So you can guess my surprise when I critted a Judgement of Command for this during this run:

What the hell? (this is without a single piece of epic gear)

So in conclusion I would guess I accomplished a third goal I wanted to do with my Paladin: crit over 1000. And boy, I sure did it! Woot. Tonight I have to say I can go to bed and sleep comfortably, feeling good of what I've achieved today.

Improved Concentration Aura-bug confirmed

Gamemaster on the EU WoW forums posted a list of known issues, among it was one regarding Improved Concentration Aura:

Paladins:

Improved Concentration Aura (Talent):

Interrupting spells with silencing components, such as Improved Kick or Shield Bash seem to behave inappropriately with the Paladin talent "Improved Concentration Aura".

We will be correcting this as soon as possible.

Phew! I'm happy I saved those last three points! I was about to use them for another talent...

Cool trick.

A fellow guildmember found this out:

/cast Seal of the Crusader(Rank 6)
/script SpellStopCasting();
/cast Judgement

Works perfectly if in range!

Judgement Day.

Todays scheduled maintanance is going to take two more hours and the PTR patch notes said 1/3 would be the day.

Come with me if you want to live!

What's your New Years Resolution?

Welcome to 2006. Warning, below is a non-Warcraft post!

Mines that I'll try to loose some weight, yeah, that tired old resolution... It's going to get tough though considering that I am in the US, the worlds fattest country. The stereotype that the white man has sugar in everything is pretty much true. Sugared Popcorn -- what the heck is that?

Once when I was in China, me and a friend of mine decided to eat some lunch at a restaurant. Since they didn't know English and since my friend was Chinese, he got to do all the talking. I told him to order some meat for me and he did. When I finally got around to eating it I felt the taste was... a bit... weird. I asked him "Does your food taste any weird? Cause mine does". He said "No" and then it struck me -- my meat had been sugared. I asked my friend "What the hell is up with my food being sugared?" and he said "Yeah, they came and asked if you wanted your meat to be sugared and I said yes", which promted me to respond "Why the heck did you say that?" which he said something like "I dunno". After a bit of more eating I wondered "Why'd they sugar my food and not yours?" and he said "Cause you're white!".

There it is folks.

In other news, I'm almost at 50 000 hits now through the two-three months I've had the visitor counter up. Not bad!

Tomorrow 1.9 will be out. It's going to be a great patch, regardless of what you think of the Paladin changes. I've been trying to stack up on nature resist gear now. I need that trinket from the goblin in Maraudon... Dang! Why didn't I roll on it when I had the chance?