Revisting the Fifth Man

In one of my very first posts, I wrote about how I believe that paladins were not part of the typical MMO triad of tank-healer-dps, and that they were something else: a fifth-man class. And that the ideal 5-man group was: tank, healer, dps, dps, fifth-man.

I no longer think this is case in The Burning Crusade.

Indeed, I think that the ideal party has become: tank, healer, dps, dps, dps.

There are three reasons that I am now leaning towards this. First, healing in most TBC instances seems to have become easier. Perhaps it is the increased stamina, perhaps it's just the way the fights are set up, but it seems much easier to heal than in WoW 1.0.

Second, there seems to be a greater emphasis on crowd control, with several pulls consisting of five or more mobs, something which was very rare in WoW 1.0. Crowd control is mostly the province of the dps classes. Having three dps classes gives you three options of crowd control, which makes a lot of the fights easier.

Third, and most importantly, a lot of fights are timed, or require you to kill adds quickly. I generally find that there are many fights where you need one dps class killing adds, and two dps on the boss. A paladin just cannot deal with the adds fast enough. Example fights include Grandmaster Vorpil in Shadow Labyrinth, Kargath Bladefist in Shattered Halls, and the entire instance of Black Morass.

Yes, it's probably possible to do these instances with 2x dps and a fifth-man, especially if they are geared, but it seems to me that 3x dps is a superior makeup.

I feel rather sad, because I really liked playing the fifth-man role, and I used to feel like an essential part of the group, providing the right solution at the right time. But now--if I'm in a fifth-man slot--I can't help but notice how much easier it would be if I was replaced by a dps character.

There are a lot of ramifications to this change. The changes to healing, and new Holy tree make paladins a lot more viable as main-healers, as do the changes to Protection for tanking. However, I'm not what the Retribution tree can do. Can they take a dps slot?

For the sake of argument, pretend that Retribution's damage matches a "real" dps class. Even then, they have no crowd control. Add to that the fact that their damage does not match an equally-geared dps class, especially if they do some healing, and it's no wonder that Retribution paladins are looked down on.

Shadow priests, in contrast, are acceptable because their damage does match that of the dps classes, they provide a *lot* of addition utility in health and mana regen, and they have crowd control in the form of Shackle.

With the passing of the paladin as fifth-man concept, I think that the Retribution tree has lost its way. Holy and Protection have been strengthened and drop into the healer and tank roles, but Retribution doesn't really have a purpose in 5-man content anymore.

Oddly enough, I would say that Retribution is a decent spec for raiding, because there is--in my Karazhan experience--a lot more room to act as a fifth-man, and crowd control becomes much less important. Additionally, the utility that Retribution does possess (Sanctified Crusader, Improved Sanctity Aura) becomes more and more powerful as the size of the group increases.

Playstyle with a Flying Mount

It's interesting how my playstyle has changed ever since I got my flying mount. I'm still questing in Shadowmoon Valley, but how I approach my quests has greatly changed.

Before, I used to run to the quest area, fight my way to the quest target, kill them or recover the item, and fight my way back out. As a paladin, you really don't have any tricks to avoid any of this. It's a very straightforward process.

Now with a flying mount, it's very different.

Step 1: Aerial Recon - Scout out the location and find the quest mob.
Step 2: Paradrop in - Hover directly above the quest mob and dismount so you fall to the ground right there.
Step 3: Kill the target, get the quest item.
Step 4: Jump out - mount up and take off.

Very commando-style gameplay. It's interesting because there are a lot of design implications for this playstyle. For example, I'm probably going to miss any quests that start between the base and my target. I'm just not going to see them.

I'm also going to kill a lot less mobs. Before you could count on having to kill many mobs while getting to the target, and that has implications on how much gold and xp I will get (or would have gotten if I was still levelling).

I mean, it's not a "bad" playstyle. A lot of the fun factor in having a flying mount comes from being able to do things like this. And I think Blizzard realizes this. There's a couple of quests in Shadowmoon Valley that seem specifically designed for this playstyle (Setting Up The Bomb, in particular).

But at the same time, I think it has a lot of future implications for how Blizzard is going to design expansions. Blizzard is, in a lot of ways, masters of "directed" gameplay. You get a quest to go to X, and on your way you get a quest to go to Y, and Blizzard carefully leads you around the world, allowing you to experience everything. I think we're going to see fewer quest NPCs wandering the roads of the world, and more quests at the various quest hubs.

Tanking in Karazhan

I respecced to 20/41/0 today. Not a full tanking build, but something that should allow me to heal decently and act as an off-tank if we need an extra tank.

Well, it turned out that we only had one warrior in the raid tonight, so I got to off-tank! It was a lot of fun. I off-tanked trash until we got to the Maiden, where I swapped into healing gear and healed that fight.

Next we went to Moroes. Moroes is an interesting fight. One of the things about Moroes is that he will gouge the tank and go after the person with the second-highest threat. So we have two tanks building threat on Moroes.

Because a lot of paladin threat is based on Holy Shield, we decided to make me the main tank for this fight, and the warrior would build secondary threat and offtank the adds.

So I got to main-tank Moroes!

I did pretty well, I think, especially considering my gear level (go, go 467 defense!). I held Moroes, and lasted until he Enraged, at which point he promptly killed me. But the warrior held him for the rest of the fight, and the raid killed him.

It was a really good raid. I healed, melee'd, off-tanked trash, and even main-tanked a boss. Hopefully I wasn't too much of a stress for the healers.

As well, this was probably the first time one of our guild paladins has really tanked anything, and I think the warrior officer was happy with how I did. Hopefully, I'll be used as an off-tank in future fights. Either way, it's one more option for our raid, and more options are always good.

Now I just have to figure out how to get to 490 defense. I'm actually collecting 3 sets of gear at this point, and it gets quite difficult when you are presented with a choice of one really good tanking item, or one really good healing item.

I also need to get better at watching my health and using trinkets and consumables appropriately.

Back to Raiding

I finally finished my Karazhan key and joined my guild for a Kara run last night.

About the keying processing, I really like Black Morass. It's an inventive and fun instance. It is not, however, an instance that you can really do with a random pick-up group. It's ideal for a group of five friends to just go and practice, to fine-tune their strategy until they are successful. But when you are doing Black Morass in a pickup group, people leave your group after one try, new people join, it's just a big pain.

Anyways, back to Kara. It was good being back in a raid. I've really missed hitting mobs, and was actually very tired of healbotting. I think my Holy spec is a little extreme though, and I'm switching to a Holy/Protection mixture.

I'm seriously considering a Retribution spec, but my warriors love Kings, and I haven't really been able to make a Retribution build that incorporates Kings and enough healing to satisfy me. Given that I'm often the only paladin in a 10-man, having Kings is a necessity. I may go Retribution when we start trying the 25-mans, though.

Karazhan itself is a pretty nice instance, so far. I haven't seen very much of it. We killed Attumen the Huntsmen, and then wiped a lot on Moroes. Good times. The instance itself is an interesting place, less like a dungeon, and more like an actual house (albeit a very big house).

Retribution Talent Idea

Actually, the post below gave me an idea for a Retribution talent:

Spirit and Steel (5 points)
Requires 20 points in Retribution Talents
Gives you a 4/8/12/16/20% bonus to Physical and Holy damage you deal for 8 sec after you cast Holy Light or Flash of Light.
Gives you a 4/8/12/16/20% bonus to the amount healed by your Holy Light or Flash of Light for 8 sec after you deal a damaging melee attack.

The truth of a paladin is that whenever you cast a healing spell, your damage-per-second goes down. And whenever you swing your weapon, your healing-per-second decreases. And it is this trade-off that causes most of the problems for paladins who want to melee.

This talent offsets that loss. Healing feeds damage, and damage feeds healing, which is how it should be for a paladin.

You could tweak the numbers, or even make them dependant on each other. The amount of extra healing could be determined by the amount of damage done by the last melee attack, and vice versa (though you'd have to be careful about getting into a positive feedback loop). But I think this might be a decent way of getting to the Vampiric Embrace ideal, without directly copying VE.

Edit: Clarified the dependancy idea. Also changed it to a five point talent and reduced the duration slightly.

Vampiric Embrace

I think I found where all the priests and druids went. I joined a group for Tempest Keep - Arcatraz. We had one priest and two druids. Guess who ended up main-healing?

It was still a good and successful run. And I got to play with a Shadow priest for the first time in TBC. Shadow priests really complement Holy Paladins, to an almost rediculous degree. All that extra mana fueled my larger heals, and the group healing through Vampiric Embrace took care of all the splash damage that makes paladin healing hard.

In many ways, Shadow priests are the one hybrid that Blizzard really got right. Unlike a paladin, a Shadow priest does not choose between healing and doing damage. They heal by doing damage. Vampiric Embrace is the critical talent that makes the Shadow priest work. And the amount healed is linked to the amount of damage done, which gives large incentive to maximize damage capabilities.

What a lot of paladins really want is our own Vampiric Embrace. (Angelic Embrace, maybe. Though Blizzard would probably call it something silly like Embrace of the Naaru.) Imagine a Retribution talent where you healed your party for a certain percentage of the damage that you do. That is the precise solution that would make many Retribution paladins happy, because it gives the extra, obvious purpose to their meleeing. We are a melee hybrid, and so we should support by meleeing.

Judgement of Light does not work as well as Vampiric Embrace because JoL is independent of the paladin. There is no support incentive for the Retribution paladin to maximize his damage in the same manner as the Shadow priest.

This solution to the paladin role is fairly obvious, and I think that is the reason that Blizzard has been resisting this. It's really too close to Vampiric Embrace, and I think that Blizzard does not want to just copy themselves. But I think all their other attempts have not truely restored the paladin class to the melee zone for the large majority of players.

But so long as casting a heal reduces your dps (which it does, as time spent casting takes away from time spent meleeing), I think paladins will always have this tension between being allowed on the front lines or being forced to healbot.

Thoughts on Holy

I bit the bullet and went Holy. 47/14/0, to be precise. It started off as 41/14/0, and then I couldn't figure out where to put the remaining points, so I decided to try out Blessed Life. Not sure if Blessed Life is really helping, but it seems good enough. The build is pretty good for healing, I find.

Since then I've main-healed Sethekk Halls, Durnholde, and Shadow Labyrinth. I think this was a good decision, if only because I haven't seen a priest or druid yet. As far as healing difficulty goes, I think the increased health available in TBC has really helped the paladin healer. You seem to have a lot more time to react, to cast Holy Light. Before TBC, I almost never cast Holy Light, as the target would usually die before the cast finished. But now, thanks to the 2 second Holy Light talent and the increased health, it's actually a useful spell again.

Speaking of talents, the 41-point Holy talent, Divine Illumination, is very strong. It's not a stylish 41-pointer, like Crusader Strike or Avenger's Shield, but it is incredibly useful. I try to pop it often, at around the 70% mana mark, and then go to town with Holy Light. Indeed, I think that builds that only put 40 points into Holy are shortchanging themselves if they want to be healers.

Of course, paladin healing is very group dependent. I had an awesome group for Shadow Labyrinth, probably the best pick-up group I've been in, and that made it much easier to heal. With a worse group, I could easily see Shadow Labyrinth being hard to heal.

The other advantage of being the only healer is that you get all the healing loot that drops. I've picked up four or so blues for my healing set. Sadly, I'm wearing a bit of cloth, leather, and mail, but hopefully I will replace them eventually.

(As an aside, you gotta love tells that begin, "Are you happy with your current guild?" Heh, I guess they liked my healing in Shadow Labyrinth. If I did take them up on the offer, it would probably be a big shock for them when I started meleeing in the raids. ;) )

Debating going Holy

For some reason, I am having a terrible time getting groups for instances lately. In particular, it is really hard to find a primary healer. I'm not sure what's going on with them, but I'm considering switching to Holy, so I can at least try to be the primary healer in a 5-man.

I don't really like primary healing as a paladin, though. I love it as my priest, because I feel in control of the situation. I usually have time to pick and choose my healing spells, and it's like I always have the right tool for the right job as a priest.

I never have that same feeling of control when I'm main-healing on my paladin. I'm just praying that my Flash of Light/Holy Light spam is greater than the incoming damage. Either it is, and we survive the fight, or it isn't, and we don't. It's very nerve-racking, personally.

It's a bit annoying, because I think that the paladin is better suited to a 5th-man role, than as the primary healer. But what can one do? If there are no primary healers, I'll have to become one, or I'll never get an instance group off the ground.

To any Holy Paladins, what are your experiences main-healing the level 70 5-man instances, without a secondary healer? Is it doable, does it require significant gear, or are there some instances where you simply cannot primary-heal?

It's actually kind of frustrating. I haven't even been able to complete Mana Tombs yet, let alone any of the higher instances.

Thoughts on the Forbearance Nerf

For the upcoming patch, Blizzard was planning on making the Forbearance debuff (gained when you use Divine Shield, Avenging Wrath, or Blessing of Protection) give a -15% penalty to damage. They withdrew the nerf in the face of the large outcry.

I'm not too thrilled with the nerf, as it does hit paladins hard, but I do see the problem. Using BoP on a mage, who gets 12s to freely nuke a melee class, is insanely powerful, especially in Arenas where it is to the first death. So that could stand to be nerfed. But by hitting Forbearance, you hurt paladins--who already have the lowest DPS--even more. Especially when you consider that the debuff lasts 3 to 5 times longer than the ability you used. It's really over-kill, and I think that a more targetted nerf would be more appropriate.

Here's what I would suggest:

1. Blessing of Protection grants the Forbearance debuff, which gives -20% to all damage and healing spells.

2. Avenging Wrath and Divine Shield do NOT grant Forbearance.

3. Avenging Wrath and Diving Shield share the same cooldown. You can't use both of them back to back, or at the same time.

I think this restores some balance to the situation. It returns Blessing of Protection to an emergency cast, and does not allow multiple paladins to chain BoP. A paladin can now chain BoP and Divine Shield, but her healing and damage will be significantly reduced for a full minute. A heavy price, in my opinion.

Paladin Burst Damage Philosophy

One of the Blizzard CMs recently posted something about how Blizzard was looking at toning down paladin burst damage. And of course, the paladin boards erupted in outrage.

Now, I don't know if paladin burst damage needs to be toned down. It may be excessive, or it may be fine. But I think there is a deeper problem at the heart of this issue. One that will not be solved by the devs nerfing a specific skill.

For some reason, whenever paladins get abilities, they almost always get powerful abilities with long cooldowns. It's like that is Blizzard's first instinct when it comes to paladins. The problem with this design, is that you can line up all your cooldown skills and use them in a row to a huge effect. The paladin sees the 90% of the time they are without these skills, and considers them underpowered. The person who was on the receiving end the other 10% of the time is unhappy, and considers paladins overpowered.

Take the Crusader Strike nerf. CS used to have a 6s cooldown. That was deemed overpowered. Rather than reduce the damage, Blizzard chose to increase the cooldown to 10s. Thus the problem with burst damage remains.

Almost all of the paladin abilities are like that. Very powerful, but with long cooldowns. If anything, the paladin needs less powerful abilities, but usable more often. It would tone down our burst damage potential, and would also make playing a paladin a bit more interactive.

Pickup Group Weirdness

I was trying to do Mana Tombs yesterday. I finally got a halfway decent group consisting of a hunter, a priest, a druid, and a paladin (me). The group leader goes to look for a fifth. This is what I see in General chat:

[Group Leader]: LF1M Healer

Apparently, I was Protection, the priest was Shadow, and the druid Feral. And 3 of us wasn't good enough for the leader. Honestly, that's just crazy.

70!

Finally hit 70 today in Blade's Edge Mountains. I ended up doing the entire run using rested XP. I haven't seen most of Blade's Edge, Netherstorm, or Shadowmoon yet.

I did run down to Shadowmoon and picked up my white gryphon. Pretty cool, even if I have almost no gold yet.

Now, I just have to get keyed for Kazarahan.

Burning Crusade Instances

I've done a few of the Burning Crusade instances (Hellfire Citadel, Coilfang Reservoir, one wing of Achindoun, and one wing of Caverns of Time) now, and I have to say that I really like the new style of instances. They are short and sweet, with only 3 or 4 bosses, and very doable in 2 hours or less.

I especially like that most of them have shortcuts back to the beginning after the final boss. That was a very nice touch.

About the only complaint I have is that there doesn't seem like a lot of loot. Usually you get one blue per boss, and given that it's only 5-man, you can usually count on at least one blue going to waste. A couple more blues would not go amiss, I think. I know that I personally only have one dungeon blue so far (though it is a nice one - [Amani Venom-Axe]).

But then again, the instances are short enough that you could easily do several in a week, or even a couple back to back.

The boss fights themselves are fairly creative, especially given the limitations of 5-man content. I especially like the hunter boss who tamed a druid in Coilfang Reservoir. Hilarious! I usually get the job of kiting the bear, which is pretty amusing. Paladin kiting for the win!

I also tried the Caverns of Time instance of Old Hillsbrad. This was very neat, and quite different from most other instances. Thrall needs to learn to slow down, however. He's crazy, Leeroy Jenkins crazy. Also, being so heavily scripted, the instance does seem a bit vulnerable to glitches. During the final fight, Thrall died during the wave of dragonkin, but we survived the wave. He didn't respawn and we couldn't pull the boss, so we were just stuck.

Ah well, so far I really like the instances, and am looking forward to doing a more of them. I can't wait to see what the raid instances are like.

Guild Governance

Tobold recently wrote a post on Guild Governance. In it, he talks about democracies vs dictatorships vs communists and how different forms of guild leadership fits into these things. It's an interesting post, and worth reading.

But one thing struck me, and I've noticed it in previous discussions about this topic. Why do we keep comparing guilds to nation-states?

If you think about it, other than being an organization of people, nations and guilds really have nothing in common. Nations are orders of magnitude larger than guilds. Moving between guilds is far easier than moving between nations, and there's no real defensive purpose to guilds. (Well, in most games. I'm sure Eve Online might be different.)

Perhaps it's because civics and politics generate so much noise and attention, and thought and study, that we automatically start to view all groups of people in terms of politics and political ideas.

However, political systems are not the only systems for organizing human groups, and I think there are other real world systems that would be a better match. For example, take small businesses.

In a small business, you have a few founders, and the employees. Everyone works together and earns profit together, but few would argue that the founders are somehow dictatorial for giving orders. It's generally understood that they are the ones who put in the capital and lots of time and effort. They lead because they started the business, and the employee chooses to be employed by them.

In many ways, guilds are very much closer to the small business model than natrion-states. You have a group of founders, the officers. They don't put monetary capital into the guild, but they put in the MMO equivalent, which is time. Your group does activities together and earns profit (epixxx!), which is distributed in rough proportion to the amount of effort put in by all parties.

Like small business employees, regular raiders can and do quit and join other companies. New raiders apply and can be "hired". It's not so naked as I am discribing, but there are a lot of similarities. In my opinion, far more similarities than to democracies or communist societies.

Looking at it this way implies that if you want to make a better guild, rather than trying to apply different political theories, you should look at ideas dedicated to improving small businesses. And I am sure that there are tons of such books and discussions out there. It's just not as sexy as politics and doesn't get as much ink.

There are other models that may apply as well. A guild could be modelled after a small military company, and the dynamic could be examined in that light. However, the guild as nation-state idea is really misleading, and is not really that helpful when trying to improve a guild.

I Blame the Burning Legion

I'm level 66. I have exactly 6666 health.

I need a stamina enchant. Or an exorcism.

Left Behind

I haven't had a lot of time to play over the last month. I'm in a relatively hardcore guild. As a result, I'm way behind everyone else. Pretty much everyone else in the guild has gotten to 70. In fact, I think that I have the lowest level main character in the guild.

This experience has made me really understand the desire to power-level characters. I really want to play with my guild, to see new content with them. I like levelling, and I don't really want to skip content, but I do want to play with my friends.

Levels and progression are both boon and bane to this genre. The idea of slowly improving your character is a major attraction, and just the process of levelling up is fun. But when levels are out of sync, they are annoying because they are preventing you from playing with your friends.

I have a couple of real life friends on the server as well. One just started a month ago, so all of our levels are out of whack. To be honest, there's probably no real way we are all going to be able to play together until we all hit 70. When levels no longer matter.

In many ways, this is the central paradox of the MMO genre. Levels are the carrot, the reason for playing. They represent effort and achievement. But levels also prevent you from playing with your friends. This Penny Arcade comic sums up the dilemma perfectly.

I know different games handle it differently. WoW has the level caps and the slow-down in level speed, as well as rested experience. EvE Online has skills based on real-time, rather than in-game time. I believe that City of Heroes has a 'side-kick' system to temporarily boost a lower level character up. But I don't think any of these solutions truely solve the problem.

I have no idea what the perfect solution is. It may well be that there isn't one, that this is just a total paradox, and the best you can do is make a reasonable trade-off.

Main Tank Today

I hit 65 and main-tanked an instance for the first time. It was just Slave Pens in Coilfang Reservoir, nothing special, but it was a pretty interesting experience. I got to put a lot of theorycrafting to the test.

The group was me (65 paladin), 2 warlocks (a 67 and a 62), a 64 mage and a 64 priest. Decent group, everyone knew their stuff and played well.

Keep in mind that I am fully Protection spec, and that's how I'm looking at this run.

First off, holding aggro was not a problem at all. Between Avenger's Shield, Holy Shield, Consecration and Seal of Vengeance, I easily held the attention of all the mobs in a groups. The only time I had issues is cases where a mob bypassed me entirely and ran after someone. Even then taunting with Righteous Defence took care of most problems. As well, Avenger's Shield is very good. Pulling with AS and having the mage sheep a dazed mob is so much easier and cleaner than the mage pulling by casting sheep. And when the sheep is broken, the mob comes straight for me.

Where the problem lies is damage mitigation. I think I was much squishier than a warrior would have been, and my health level seemed to be much more unstable than normal for the main tank, especially in the last two boss fights. Of course, we didn't have a secondary healer, and every group I've been in other than this one has had at least one secondary healer--me--to smooth out the healing.

In fact, during the last two boss fights, I was casting heals on myself half the time. It seemed to be necessary to keep myself up.

We completed the entire instance, with only one wipe at the final boss. I didn't get any loot, but I haven't gotten loot in a TBC instance yet.

My conclusion for paladin tanking so far is that I need to concentrate less on threat generation and more on damage mitigation. One thing that I have noticed is that quests which have warrior tanking gear as rewards rarely have paladin gear as well. It would probably be worthwhile to save up some of those warrior pieces for the next time I have to tank.

Small touch, Seal of Vengeance

Another small touch I noticed is that the Captain at Allerian Stronghold will refer to you using your PvP title. It's a neat touch, bringing the PvP game into the PvE game a little bit. It's sort of like the NPCs recognize your title, and that is a bit amusing. In some ways it makes PvP a bit more "real", part of the main game, rather than just a sub-game within the game.

I also hit 64 today. I was feeling unhappy with my spec (mostly because Vindication is completely useless--elite world quest mobs are now immune to it as well), so I respecced to Retribution. I also picked up Seal of Vengeance as well. When I got back to questing, I realized that SoV was amazingly suited to my previous 1H/Shield build, as it does not depend on weapon damage at all. So I went back to Stormwind, and respecced again, this time to 10/45/0.

It's a pretty nice build so far. JotC -> SoV -> Holy Shield -> JoV when fully stacked (usually around 10-12 seconds) -> Holy Shield and/or SoR if the mob is still alive.

I quite like SoV at the moment. Apparently it doesn't scale as well as Seal of Righteousness, but for the moment it does the job quite well.

Killing Slaves

In the Outlands so far, there's been a persistent slavery sub-theme. The demons and the naga often have Broken slaves and they will force the slaves to attack you when you fight them.

Maybe it's just because I play a paladin, but I've always felt a little uncomfortable killing the slaves in places like Blackrock Mountain. I tend to go out of my way to avoid aggro'ing them.

So when I got to Outlands, and saw the linked overmasters and slaves, I had a sinking feeling that I was going to have to kill some of them to complete my quests. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that the slaves run away after you kill the overmaster, allowing you to complete the quests without killing the slaves. It even adds a bit more challenge to the affair, as you can't use reactive damage (Holy Shield, Ret Aura, etc.) safely.

It's a small touch, but it made me happy. In many ways, Blizzard excels at these small effects, and its a major reason I love their games.

Aldor versus Scryer

I haven't had a lot of time to play (still only level 63), but I've made it to Shattrath City and seen the whole Aldor/Scryer faction debate.

It's a pretty neat idea, acutually, having two opposing factions, and having your choice be meaningful. However, the execution of making that choice could have been improved.

As far as I could see, you go to Shattrath City, take the tour, and then are presented with the choice of which faction to join almost immediately. I found that I simply didn't have enough information to make a choice that I was happy with. All I knew was that Aldor = draenei and Scryer = blood elves. So I went with Aldor. I didn't really see any other place you could find out more.

I'm sure that you could have looked up the rewards online, and picked a faction that way, but that seems very clinical to me.

What Blizzard should have done is have a couple quests where the two factions are actively trying to woo you to their side. I'd go with two quests for each side (four total). One quest shows the good side of the faction, and the other quest shows the dark side of the faction. Rep changes would be fairly minimal to allow people to "taste" each faction.

Then, after doing these initial quests, you could make a meaningful, and more permanent, choice.

Quick Musings

1. I love Crusader Aura! Greatest paladin ability ever! (Heh, I seem to be saying that a lot lately.)

2. I saw a pure white gryphon, and thought it was the epic flying mount. I asked in guild chat, and was informed that the real epic flying mount was brown and had armor. I don't know, seems kind of wasteful. Just putting armor on something does not an epic make. I think that--in general--we associate the starker colors as rarer. A pure white horse is rarer than a piebald. If I recall correctly, Blizzard made the same mistake with night elf cats.

I think it is one of the few mistakes Blizzard makes with art. Almost all the time, they denote power with complexity. Sometimes the opposite is true, and high end armor becomes overly ornate when it should tend to stark and simple.

The other mistake is that high end plate shows far too much skin. Seriously, the sexiest (and all-around best) piece of armour that Blizzard has ever made was Judgement, and it covered everything. Plate is supposed to protect the wearer, and skin-revealing plate armor is just an oxymoron.

Heh, not really sure why it bothers me. It just seems that my character seems less than compentent by choosing armor that doesn't do its basic job, and incompetence is unattractive.

Vindication

I decided to spec Coriel as Protection/Retribution, to see if Improved Retribution Aura did anything. On my way to Imp Ret Aura, I picked up Vindication. I knew it wouldn't work on raid bosses, but I figured it might be a handy talent for 5-man instance tanking, and that I could always respec at 70.

This was a mistake.

Vindication does not work on raid bosses, 5-man bosses, or random instance trash mobs. Heck, at this point, I'm surprised if it does work on a mob.

Honestly, why even have this talent if it's not going to work on anything? If it's overpowered, scale it down, or remove it and replace it with something useful. Right now it's just a complete waste of talent points.

The worst part is that you can't even guess what Vindication will affect. It seems almost random.

TBC First Impressions

I haven't really had a great deal of playtime with the Burning Crusade. I've mostly been wandering in the Hellfire Peninsula with my warlock doing the initial quests with a friend.

I've respecced Coriel to Protection. It's a really nice spec, and I've always been a fan of Holy Shield and going sword-and-board. One interesting side-effect is that you can get a great deal of mana regen with the new Reckoning. Fast weapon + Seal of Wisdom + Judgement of Wisdom and wait for Reckoning to proc. So much mana! Reminds me of the good old Seal of Fury days.

The loot in TBC is pretty good. I really like how the first few quests are "replace all your gear" quests, so that everyone gets bumped up to a nice starting level gear-wise. I've even replaced half of Coriel's gear. It's quite amusing to replace epics with greens.

The TBC gear is much better suited for paladins than anything short of Judgement. Point-wise, it's possibly a small downgrade, but the allocation of stats is so much better. Strength, Intellect, Stamina, Spell Damage, and Mana Regen is a glorious combination.

Other than that the expansion looks pretty neat. It's nice to get back into the questing mood. I'm looking forward to trying out one of the new instances sometime.

As well, major props to Blizzard on pretty much a flawless launch. I had zero problems, even though I installed on Tuesday.

On a final note, I feel sorry for all the new human paladin NPCs. They have to wear Redemption, and they just look terrible. Seriously, how can you respect someone wearing Redemption? Meanwhile Arator the Redeemed gets to walk around in Judgement looking awesome.

Casuals vs. Raiders, Part VI

If you take a look back at previous posts, I think one trend you will find is that whenever casuals and raiders clash, I tend to take the side of the casual player. And this might seem a little odd. After all, I am a raider myself. Why then do I side with the casual player?

Firstly, I do so because I like this game, and I have fun, and I would like everyone to have as much fun as I have. I love raiding, and I would love to see more people discover what a thrill killing a raid boss for the first time is.

But secondly, and more importantly, in a lot of ways casuals are more important to this game than raiders are. There is an attitude among many raiders that they are the "chosen of Blizzard." Because they play so much, and have so much invested in this game, they feel that raiders are more deserving of Blizzard's time and attention. Any casually complaints are worthless, "QQ more" as the forum post goes.

I think this attitude is arrogant and completely wrong. The deep truth of WoW is that:

Blizzard makes more money from casuals than raiders.

Casuals outnumber raiders by a significant margin. Yet both a casual player and a raider pay the same amount of money per month. Casuals play far less than raiders, eating up much less processing power and server resources. They file far fewer customer service tickets. And most importantly, they go through content at a far slower rate.

Raiders devour content, and content creation is expensive. The extremely large casual population of WoW ensures that Blizzard has the resources to satisfy the hunger of raiders. Leaving aside all other considerations of fairness and decency, it is in the raider's best interest to keep casuals in the game because casuals subsidize raid content.

Of course, given the above, the obvious question is why should Blizzard cater to the raiders at all? If all the money comes from the casuals, why not let the raiders go and just reap the profit?

I think this option is just as misguided as the other side. Raiders, although they are fewer in number, also have their uses. They serve as aspirational models, something that lower level players can strive towards. If you've ever seen what General chat is like when someone walks by with a Legendary weapon, you understand the effect it has.

As well, raiders are sort of like very unpredictable NPCs. They do the crazy stuff, like training dragons to Orgrimmar, organizing epic 40 paladin vs 40 shaman battles, and other similar silliness. They also tend to be the most enthusiastic about the game, answering questions on the forums and making websites, blogs, and videos about the game. They create buzz and word-of-mouth to get new people interested. They're the ones constantly running the dungeons and forming groups which casuals can join.

In a lot of ways, raiders and the hardcore tend to be at the center of the web of relationships that bind an MMO together. I think without raiders, WoW would feel a lot more empty, and a lot more like a single player game than an MMO. And without that feel to it, I think that the game would soon wither as the casuals drop away.

Without casuals, Blizzard makes a lot less money, and the game will begin to suffer from lack of content. Casuals in many ways also provide the "audience" for the raiders, just as raiders provide the spectacle for the casuals. Raiders and the hardcore provide the enthusiasm and bind the players together. Both are necessary for a truely successful game.

However, in the WoW 1.0 endgame, Blizzard catered too much toward the raiders. In particular, casuals found their progression blocked by the introduction of 40-man dungeons, and that caused a lot of animosity. The truth is that if you are in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, you don't care if Blizzard makes Naxxramas. You are on the path to Naxx, and eventually you will get there. On the other hand, if--like the majority of the WoW population--you can't even get into Molten Core, seeing Blizzard spend enormous amounts of time and money on a raid dungeon like Naxxramas is a slap in the face.

Hopefully, the Burning Crusade will rebalance things a little better and both casuals and raiders can enjoy the endgame.

Identity

s4dfish and Wiffle both tagged me with the "Five Things You Don't Know About Me" meme that has been wandering the blogs.

It occurs to me that most of you don't really know anything about me. Do you know my name? Gender? Race? Occupation? Where I live? Democrat or Republican? Liberal or Conservative? Labour or Tory?

I'm sure that most of you can make guesses for most of these, and some of those guesses might be close (heh, given my views on loot distribution, it's pretty unlikely I'm a hardcore communist). But realistically, all you should know for sure is that I play a paladin in World of Warcraft. And to a large extent, this is deliberate.

When I started this blog, I decided to make it as focused as I could. Concentrating solely on WoW, and not discussing anything else in the world. As well, this is the Internet, and--as legions of forum posts about men playing women playing elves will attest to--identity is a very complex topic.

Does knowing more about me change the meaning of what I write? Does realizing that I'm a time traveller from the future working on restoring Canterbury Cathedral change anything? (If it does, I'm probably in a world of trouble.) Or is identity an essential piece of context necessary for truely understanding my position?

I'm not really sure what the answer is either, and in some ways this blog is an experiment in many things, one of which is writing semi-anonymously.

I guess this is just a long way of saying that I will not be participating in this particular meme. However, many thanks to those who tagged me.

Server Splits vs Freezing Character Creation

One item of controversy recently is the news that Blizzard is testing server splits to reduce the number of people on several of the more popular servers. After seeing queues of 400+ people on Skywall last week--and knowing that other servers have even worse queues--I think it's a good idea.

If voluntary free transfers didn't solve the problem, it's clear that Blizzard needs to take more drastic steps. As well, Blizzard's proposed implementation seems pretty decent to me. They seem to be trying to keep guilds together as best they can, and having guild members default to the guild leader's new server is a very good idea.

However, there are a lot of other people who don't like this idea, who think that splitting servers would destroy a server's unique culture. And this may well happen. But the other solution most often proposed, freezing the creation of new characters, is worse than server splits.

To see what I mean, consider how you chose your first realm. I rolled on Burning Blade because a real life friend had rolled there. And I suspect that most people had similar reasons. They chose their first server in order to play with friends or family.

Freezing character creation on specific realms directly prevents new people from playing with their friends. That stops them from playing the game before they even start. New people are the lifeblood of this game, and Blizzard has to make sure their experience is as pleasant as possible.

Preventing people from rolling characters to play with their friends is one of the surest ways to turn people off this game, which is why Blizzard will chose to go with server splits instead.

Of course server splits have the potential to prevent you from playing with some of your friends. But you can still play with the majority of them. As well, having a little more experience with the game means that we can adapt to the situation better.

A game without new players dies eventually. Word of mouth is still the best way to get new people into the game. But for word of mouth to work, new people need to be able to play with their friends, to roll characters on even the most crowded servers. (After all, if the servers are crowded, that's a lot of people who could be introducing new people to WoW.) And this is more important than the need for the elites of the game to maintain their server culture.

Of the three choices--500+ queues, server splits, or frozen account creation--I believe that server splits offer the best trade-off, and is the least damaging to the long term health of the game.

Is Loot Changing Me?

Loot corrupts. Epic loot corrupts to an epic degree.

My guild held an "open" Molten Core run last week. You could bring your alts and your friends to the run, and all loot would be randomly rolled on. You could win one item from any of the first nine bosses, and one item from Ragnaros. I brought Coriel, because I don't have any alts anywhere near that level.

One of the non-guild friends who came on this run was a paladin. This paladin, who I will call JC (not his real name), had *really* bad gear. He was wearing a [Triune Necklace] from Scarlet Monastery, and the rest of his gear was a mixture of 40-50s blues and greens.

I think you see where this story is going.

We get to Golemagg, and [Azuresong Mageblade] drops. JC wins the roll, and gets his shiny sword.

Then we get to Ragnaros. [Judgement Legplates], the single item in Molten Core that I want, drops. I roll, and Lady Chance laughs at me. JC wins the roll and gets his Tier 2 leggings.

My reaction to this surprised me. I was actually physically upset that I had lost out on the T2 legs, and worse, someone who I thought did not deserve it had won it. And this kind of shocked me. After all, I say I raid for raidings sake, and not for loot. I am an Explorer, not an Achiever, and I am happy with that. Or so I thought.

And further more, it's just pixels on a screen, data in a server, ephemeral and transistory. I know all this, and still I felt upset.

Finally, JC was actually a decent paladin. He judged, healed and cleansed, and generally did a good job, considering his gear level. He did his best, and played by the rules. Maybe allowing the second roll on Ragnaros loot was a bad idea, but that was our call. If Lady Chance smiled on JC that day, I really can't hold it against him.

I've thought about it a lot since then, and I've resolved to try and be less concerned with loot. Somewhere on Skywall, there is a paladin running around with a [Triune Necklace], [Azuresong Mageblade], and [Judgement Legplates]. It's actually kind of funny, and I can kind of laugh about it now.

Still, this episode has perfectly illustrated to me why rolling on scarce loot is a bad idea, and why God created DKP.

New Looking For Group System

I've been playing a couple of alts over the holidays. One is a 38 Priest on Skywall, and the other is a 36 Druid on Bronzebeard. Both are Alliance, and are specced for healing. But they've had a vastly different experience when using the new LFG system.

Since both characters are roughly the same level, faction, and role, it's interesting that there is such a disparity. I tend to be looking for Scarlet Monastery runs.

On Skywall, I flag myself as looking for SM - Library, and I get a full group within a minute or so. Though none of my groups have had the "optimum" make-up[1], they all function pretty well, and we clear the instance. My priest has an [Illusionary Rod] and a [Whitemane's Chapeau] (even though I can't wear the hat yet).

On Bronzebeard, I flag myself as looking for SM - Library, and I can't get a group at all. Maybe after 15 minutes, another person will join the party, but I have yet to actually get a run going. And this is for Scarlet Monastery, which is one of the most popular instances!

So for some reason, the LFG system is doing fine on Skywall, but has failed to achieve the critical mass needed on Bronzebeard.

To be honest, I've never really had the terrible experiences with pick-up groups that so many other people seem to have had. I really like this new system, as it saves me time and effort. However, it needs more people to use it.

If this tool had been in the game from the very beginning, I think it would have been a resounding success. But now, a lot of people are nervous about changing their habits. Perhaps with the introduction of the Burning Crusade, a lot more people will start using the tool, and it will be effective for everyone.

Heh, maybe Blizzard should give a small bonus in gold or xp if you are in a group formed by the tool. A Pick-Up Group bonus, if you will.

[1]Yay for druid and paladin tanking. Of course, it's helped by the fact that I'm playing a primary healer, which converts almost any group into a reasonable one. :)

One Year Mark!

It's been exactly one year since I started this blog. It's been an interesting year. I've travelled across three different servers, joined multiple guilds, become a raider, gotten epics, and gone through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair.

It's interesting, looking back at the old posts. My first post (after the introductory post) was about what a paladin is, and the idea of a "5th man" class. It's somewhat ironic to see that post as the old paladin is being changed into something that more easily stands inside the tank-healer-dps trinity.

It's also interesting to see how my attitudes towards paladins in raids have changed. At the beginning, I'm very much inline with the conventional wisdom that paladins need to be healbots, standing back and spamming Flash of Light. And somewhere along the line that changed, to the point where I'm rather militant that a paladin--regardless of spec--should be on the front lines, swinging her hammer in between tossing heals.

I think I've learned a fair bit about other issues as well. High-end guilds in WoW are governed by this strange interplay of game mechanics clashing with human nature, and it's been extremely interesting and enlightening to see how the two interact and what results.

Anyways, thank you to everyone who's read or commented on the blog. It's been great to have such illuminating conversations with everyone.

Thanks to Scumdogs of Eitrigg, who introduced me to the joys of raiding, even as I was a casual noob. :)
Thanks to Wandering Alliance of Eitrigg, who showed me how much fun being a paladin in raids could be, if only I was willing to stand on the front lines.
Thanks to Asperity of Skywall, even though I did not get to join you, thanks for showing me what a very successful high-end guild was like.
Thanks to the Winter Court of Skywall, for showing me how hard it was to recruit and start up my own guild, and how truely important basic logistics are.

Special thanks to Excommunicated of Skywall, my current guild, for being what a raid guild should be, pushing hard and killing bosses with a minimum of drama, even though it would be very easy to stop and wait for the expansion.

Special thanks to Defender of the Crown of Bronzebeard. Thanks for shepherding me through the first part of WoW, thanks for letting me go to find my own way in this crazy WoW endgame, and thanks for always welcoming me warmly whenever I ventured back.

Here's to another interesting year!

Nefarian and the Hybrid Paladin

As an example of what I mean by hybrid style of the paladin, consider what I did on our first Nefarian kill last week. Remember that this was really our first night of Nef attempts, and while the content may be old to many of you, it was cutting edge to us. Certainly not farm content.

In phase 1, I was assigned to the blue drakonid door, so I stood back with the non-melee people and spot healed. I had Righteous Fury up. When a drakonid got loose and ran to the cloth, I blasted it with Judgement of Righteousness and dragged it back to the warriors and AoE spot.

When Nefarian landed, the priests ran to cover the main tank, and I started healing full-time as the raid cleaned up the remaining drakonids.

After the drakonids were all killed, I started meleeing Nefarian, keeping up Judgement of Wisdom, and using Seal of Wisdom to get back mana from phase 1. I was spot healing occasionally, cleansing during the mage call. When a priest/druid call came, I dropped back and started pouring heals into the main tank. After that call ended, back to meleeing.

At phase 3, when the undead zerg came, I fired off a Holy Wrath and healed the raid until the zerg was destroyed. Then I went back to hitting Nefarian until he was dead.

("This cannot be! I am the Master here! You mortals are nothing to my kind! DO YOU HEAR? NOTHING!")

Nefarian is the prime example of how I feel a paladin is best played. I off-tanked a bit, healed a lot, and melee-ed a lot, seamlessly switching between the roles as needed. Was it the single most efficient use of the paladin possible? Maybe, maybe not. Was it effective? Yes. Was it fun? Heck, yeah!

In the new specialized world is this going to be how a paladin plays? Or are the Holy Paladins going to heal with the priests, the Retribution Paladins do damage with the warriors and rogues, and Protection Paladins tanking the drakonids or even Nef himself?

Of course, weighted against my experience is that fact that many other paladins in other guilds went through Nefarian casting a single spell, Flash of Light. If this change, this specialization, enables the vast majority of paladins to do more than spam a single spell, it will be well worth it.

The Price of Specialization

I was looking at the Paladin Tier 5 armor on Paladinsucks.com, when it actually struck me that paladins have really changed in 2.0/Burning Crusade. There are three different versions of T5, one for each tree.

Previously, in my opinion, there wasn't a lot of difference between the paladin talent trees. Sure they changed how you did things, but in the end you ended up in the same place. Melee a bit, heal a bit, off-tank a bit.

This was a great situation for me, because I loved respeccing and playing with new talents. The fact that I may have respecced Protection just meant that I would be more likely to be casting Kings or Sanctuary on the raid. Otherwise, I'd still be meleeing/healing/off-tanking, same as if I was Holy or Retribution. Maybe slightly better at one aspect than another, but not enough that it made a real difference.

But now we have real specialization in talent trees. And armor to back up that specialization. Armor which will cost DKP and significant amounts of effort. This means that it is coming time to pick a specialization and stand with it. No longer truely standing outside the tank-healer-dps trinity, but taking up a spot within it.

I'm sure the prospect delights a lot of paladins, who were in guilds which never really understood them, and tried to force them into the trinity. Now, their path will be laid out, and expectations will be clear. Yet I'm going to miss the paladin of old a little bit.

Part of this is that Protection is my favourite tree, and the one I was planning on speccing into for the Burning Crusade. Yet, when I saw the armor, I realized that I was not sure I wanted to be a tank. Previously, I would have just been a protection paladin, and would still be doing paladin duties while someone else tanked the boss. Yet the Protection armor is not just armor for a paladin, it is armor for a tank. Someone who's role in a raid is fundamentally different than that of a paladin today.

Tomorrow I will have to choose: am I a healer, a tank, or a damage dealer[1] ? Yesterday, I was a paladin. Nothing more and nothing less.

On the whole, specialization is a big gain, yet I think that we will still lose something in the process. But judging by the reaction of my fellow paladins, this too seems a price worth paying.

[1]Well, whatever Retribution is supposed to be. Maybe it's damage, or maybe it's the one tree that corresponds to my current vision of the paladin.

Edit: Why does everyone miss the "price is worth paying" part?

I will miss the hybrid role of the paladin, but I was one of the few paladins who really got to play as a hybrid. (And this was deliberate. After my first raid guild, I sought out guilds that would allow me to play as a hybrid.) Most paladins got pidgeonholed as healbots, and didn't even get a chance to hit things. For them, this change is an unmitigated win.

Heck, if you look through the comments on this blog, there are a lot of comments disagreeing with me, and asserting that paladin-as-healbot is the best and most efficient use of a paladin in a raid.

The Legend of Leeroy Jenkins

Pretty much everybody that plays World of Warcraft has heard of Leeroy Jenkins. (If you haven't, here's the video clip.) It's one of the defining moments of WoW history, and references to it have even appeared in places like Jeopardy.

It begs the question: why did this video become so popular? When all is said and done, staged or real, it's just a video of a wipe on Father Flame in Upper Blackrock Spire. I'm sure that there's been hundreds of wipes filmed, on all sorts of bosses. Why did this one become a touchstone of WoW culture?

It is a funny video, and the name "Leeroy Jenkins" as a battlecry has a style all of it's own. But I think the real reason Leeroy Jenkins became so popular is that it captures a deep truth about World of Warcraft.

In many ways, instancing in WoW is a cold, mechanical endeavour. We plan, laying out everything in minute detail, for maximum success. And sometimes we wish that we didn't have to plan so much, that we could just charge in and revel in the chaos and battle. But charging in recklessly usually leads to wipes, and so we restrain ourselves, giving ourselves over to the methodical process for success.

The first part of the video illustrates the cold nature of instance planning amazingly well, even down to the absurdity of calculating the odds of survival. The fact that the plan is terrible is just icing on the cake. We've all been in this situation, where we keep going over and over a plan to a degree that is simply unnecessary.

This is the duality that the Leeroy Jenkins video captures perfectly: we are terrified of being in a group with a Leeroy Jenkins, someone who runs off and wipes the group needlessly; yet at the same time we want to be Leeroy, to have the guts to throw caution to wind, and charge in recklessly, a battlecry on our lips, with our friends charging behind us.

That too is an important part of the video. If the rest of the group had just stayed outside and watched Leeroy die, I don't think it would have been anywhere as popular. We would have chuckled, called Leeroy stupid, and forgotten about the video the next day. But Leeroy cut the planning short and led his group into battle, and into WoW immortality.

And if it ended badly, well, at least Leeroy had chicken.

(That could possibly be interpreted as a metaphor for life in general, but sometimes chicken is just chicken.)

Dry Runs

My guild killed Nefarian for the first time tonight. Almost precisely two months after we killed Ragnaros. This accomplished our major goal of clearing Blackwing Lair before the expansion. So the guild was happy. No shaman loot dropped.[1] So the guild was estatic.

One interesting thing about this guild is that our raid leader spends a lot of time explaining things and going over the fight. He makes us do things like practice running to different spots during transitions. We spent over half an hour going over the full Nefarian strategy. (We earlier spent 15 minutes on Phase 1 only, because the raid leader thought it would take us a few tries to get to Phase 2.) Heh, sometimes I joke that the reason we do well is because we want to avoid going through the lecture again.

But it really works. It's one thing to be told, "When X happens, run to the collapse point", and quite another to actually do it. Actually practicing the moves before the fight starts helps give you an idea of how long the transition will take, and what the range will be like (very important for healers, who need to keep a moving tank alive). Dry runs are a very useful tool, and this is the first guild I've been in that has really made use of them.

[1] Unlike Ragnaros last week - 2x Ten Storms Legs for the loss. :(

PvP'ing with my Warlock

I've been PvP'ing a bit with my warlock lately. I figure that given the new Honor System, I should be able to get him some decent gear. I probably won't be able to play enough to get him any epics--work is very time-consuming lately--but I should be able to get him his blue PvP set.

I went Affliction spec first. Affliction spec is insanely powerful. There were many battlegrounds where I would be number one or two in total damage done. However, you are very fragile, and you really need the gear to back it up. In particular, hunters were absolutely destroying me. I really think that, for a somewhat geared PvP'er, Affliction spec is the way to go.

As an aside, I had two points left over when I was making the build, so I took the talent that decreases the cast time of Howl of Terror. I didn't realize it made it instant cast! That is such a powerful talent.

But since I'm not geared, I respected to Demonology. This is a pretty good spec in general, but it is very good for an undergeared warlock, like mine. I last quite a bit longer. I may not do as much total damage anymore, but at least I don't die every 15s.

Heh, I may have to change tactics with my warlock. I usually defend, often running into Drek'thar's room at the end. I fear the puller, hopefully into all the warmasters, who run outside and proceed to wipe the Alliance raid. It is--or perhaps I should say was--a good tactic. Today, I tried the same thing and managed to trick the Alliance into pulling four warmasters at once. However, the Alliance raid killed all the warmasters! This, quite frankly, shocked me.

Maybe the alliance had insanely good tanks and healers up, but prior to this patch I would have sworn that pulling four warmasters at once would lead to a wipe. Ah well, I'm going to have to change tactics a bit.

A Warlock's View of the New Paladin

I love warlocks. They're slightly insane, but every so often they come up with something that is absolute genius. From Slark, of Shattered Hand, comes this description of the new paladin (exactly as posted on the WoW Forums):

i dont even knwo what paladins are doing anymore

when im up against a paladin theyre throwing gigantic shields in m yface hammers are falling from the sky on my head hammers are being tossed to hit me in the face their blessings lag my entire computer while hammers are hitting me from every direction and shields are preventing me to run away b/c apaprantly magical shields stop u from running

combine that with their immune shield and shields and hammer s being tossed at u from god knows i dont evne knwo what the @!@! is going on anymore i npvp when i face a pally

A brilliant description of the new Paladin. We're now shiny, and that is the best change Blizzard has made to us.

Raiding with the New Spec

I finally managed to attend a raid (Molten Core) and try out my new spec. All in all, it wasn't much different than my previous spec, save that I hit Crusader Strike whenever I remembered about it.

It's pretty hard to tell if you are actually doing more damage, or if Sanctified Crusader helped. I think it helped, as mobs seemed to die faster, but that may also have been because we are gearing up, or the new specs. I did get a 1K Crusader Strike crit in healing gear, so that's good enough for me.

I really wish I had a meter running for the last few raids, though. I find it hard to actually tell how my damage is changing in raids, mostly because I'm usually paying more attention to the raid's health than to my character. Actually quantifying the change would have been a good idea.

Spiritual Attunement is awesome. I was not running out of mana at all. I even switched to healing with Holy Light for most (non-ranged) fights, and I didn't really have issues with mana.

Actually, healing was kind of weird in this raid. Perhaps it was the HoTs stacking, but health bars seemed to change in a different fashion than normal. Normally, they fall and increase in visible chunks, and in this raid they seemed to be a lot more stable. For example, a rogue would drop to 75% and I'd Flash of Light her, expecting another priest to drop a Flash Heal or something. However, the Flash Heal never really came, but her health would not drop further, maybe even increase a few percentage points, but not a great deal for the rest of the fight.

I think the priests and druids were using HoTs more heavily, resulting in a different rate-of-change for health bars than I am used to. It was oddly disconcerting. I switched to mainly casting Holy Light every so often, with longer intervals between casts. It seemed like a good strategy, especially with the mana provided from Spiritual Attunement.

The lack of decursive was amusing. I'm out of practice, but it's not too bad, especially since I use sRaidFrames, which dims people who are out of range to you. The one thing we need to work on is tunnel vision. For example, on the Sulfuron Harbinger fight, we were concentrating so much on keeping the tanks cleansed that I think a couple of priests died from DoTs. But so far it doesn't seem that bad.

I am thinking about trying a click-cast mod, and binding Cleanse to my right mouse buttons so I just have to right-click the correct frame. Of course, most mods seem to be in a state of flux at the moment, so I may have to wait a few days.

Hopefully, I'll be able to give this spec a whirl in Blackwing Lair sometime soon. I should also find a decent damage meter so I can actually quantify performance.

Burning Out in Zul'Gurub

I think I'm beginning to suffer a little bit of healer burnout. Curiously, it's not because of Blackwing Lair or the high-end raiding, it's because of ZG.

My guild does casual ZG runs, and I've been on several of them. Lately though, I've begun to not want to go on these runs, even though ZG is probably my favourite raid instance. The problem is that we now outgear ZG--basically just running it for fun, reputation, and profit--and so people are slacking off.

And when other people slack off, the healers have to step up and pay even more attention. And this is kind of annoying. It seems excessive that I have to be in full raid healing gear, or spamming Holy Light, for a ZG run. But it's nuts, people pulling aggro, mages suicide AoE'ing*, not bothering with crowd control, etc. And because we do outgear ZG, and the healers step up, we survive this silliness.

Personally, I find efficient runs to be more fun. Crowd control, tank properly, and focus fire. Killing swiftly and efficiently. Minimize the amount of healing, and the number of people to be healed. Take care of the little things, like making sure the bat boss is tanked far enough away from the raid so that the casters aren't hit with the AoE Silence.

As an example, take the Bloodlord fight. My guild likes killing the raptor first, and then healing the tank through the Bloodlord's Enrage. This strategy, while it does work, is hell on the healers. Yay for an enraged Bloodlord running around 2-shotting people! I find having a couple off-tanks ping-pong the Raptor between them while the rest of the raid kills Bloodlord to be so much easier and less stressful. But because the previous strategy is simple, and we have the gear and healing power to do it, it's what we do.

I've really begun preferring the harder raids. Maybe ZG is easier, and we wipe more with higher repair bills, but people are trying their best, and not making the raid harder than it needs to be.

The worst part about it is that I know that the people in the raid are better than this. That if they actually cared about having an efficient run, we could go through ZG like a hot knife through butter.

* Honestly, if you died the first three times, maybe that's a sign that this is not a good tactic.

Patch Day!

It's Patch Day! Here are some quick notes:

Spirtual Attunement - This works with overhealing!!! Greatest paladin ability ever!

Enchanting menu - much, much needed change. Being able to sort enchants by slot was sorely needed.

Looking For Group menu - looks pretty nice. As always, depends how people use it.

New paladin animations - Blessing of Wisdom is so pretty. I like!

Faster backwards walking - rather unexpected, but pretty nice. Much easier than doing strafing tricks. Should be nice with a mage and Frost Nova.

Buying new spell ranks automatically upgrades your icons on your bars - I love this. I missed this so much when I rerolled from warrior.

Buffs automatically cast correct version on low rank people - Yay for drive-by buffing!

More detailed character info - Very, very nice. More information is always good, and this should stop the debates and guesswork about things like Int to Spell Crit.

All in all, it looks like a very solid patch. Lots of little changes as well.

I respecced 10/0/41, but haven't really gotten a chance to try it out. I have high hopes for Sanctified Crusader and Improved Sanctity Aura. I may end up switching back to something else, but none of the other paladins seemed interested in going Retribution. I really want to see the effect of Sanctified Crusader in a raid.

The biggest decision is still to be made: do I enable my PvP title (Knight-Captain) or not? It is a good rank to display, and has a good sound to it (Knight-Captain Coriel), but it's not a very prestigious title (like Grand Marshal, for instance).

Heh, I haven't even looked at the options for my warlock yet.

BWL Progress

I've been working a lot lately, and haven't been able to play as much WoW as I'd like. It looks like the reshuffle of the schedule did the trick, as we've downed Vaelastraz the Corrupt, Broodlord Lashlayer, Firemaw, Ebonroc, and Flamegor over the last 3 nights. It looks like we might give Chrommaggus a shot if we get enough people on Saturday.

I missed a lot of the kills, but was present for the Broodlord and Flamegor kills. I was even the 6th paladin on Flamegor. I love being the 6th paladin, because then I can go crazy with Blessing of Sacrifice. I really, really wish the tactical blessings didn't overwrite the Greater Blessings.

As an aside, does Flamegor even do damage to non-tanks? I was meleeing him for JoLight, and the only damage I was taking was Sacrifice damage. I thought he actually did damage to the rest of the raid, but I may be confusing him with another of the drakes. Or maybe it was because I was in full FR gear. (He's named Flamegor, I figured it was a reasonable precaution.)

The funniest part about the Broodlord kill is how I joined the raid. I got summoned to the raid while the raid was inside the Suppression gauntlet. I don't even think I had a chance to change into most of my raiding gear before I was plunged into combat. Heh, my guild is slightly crazy, but it's all good.

Scheduling

WoW is very quiet lately. Everything appears to be in a holding pattern, waiting for the next patch and the Burning Crusade.

My guild is still trying to move forwards, but we're running into scheduling problems. We have a small number of raiders, which is great because you can always get into a raid, but now that we are working on Vael we need a full raid to show up. We usually do MC Tuesdays, and sometimes Wednesday, and reserve the rest of the week for Blackwing Lair.

Unfortunately, Saturday is the day we've always had the lowest attendance, and that's making Vael attempts hard. (People aren't avoiding Vael, we get good attendance on the other nights, but Saturdays we just have lower attendance.)

I think we're going to try and juggle the schedule a bit, and do MC on Saturday, and BWL on the weeknights. Hopefully that will lead to more progress.

It's amusing, but in many ways a good chunk of a raid guild leadership's time is taken up with logistics.

In a lot of ways Blizzard makes the process harder than it should be. Take the reset times of Onyxia and the 20-man raids. Onyxia resets on a 5-day timer, and ZG and AQ20 are on three day timers. This means that they change from week to week, causing havoc with schedules.

For example, there was a post from a small guild on the Raid Forums, asking if there was any way to set up a consistent weekly raiding schedule for ZG such that they could clear all the priests on Raid Day 1, and do Hakkar and Jindo on Raid Day 2.

You can't do this with only 2 raiding days, but you can with 3:

Day 1 - Raid
Day 2 - Raid
Day 3 - skip
Day 4 - Raid

This schedule guarantees that at least 2 of the three raids will be in the same lockout period. Probably be a different two each week, but still. The 3rd raid will also be in a different lockout period, so you can get the maximum number of bosses possible per week.

Onyxia also causes juggling, but it is mitigated by the fact that Onyxia is fairly quick to do.

All of this is just petty annoyances for a guild. I like the idea of lockouts, because they allow a guild to work on an instance over several nights, and also allows Blizzard to slow down the influx of high-end loot into the world.

But lockouts should be based on the natural schedules of people, rather than arbitrary numbers. And the natural schedule for most people is the week. My preference would be for ZG and AQ20 to have a 3-day lockout followed by a 4-day lockout. And Onyxia could go to 7 days or the new ZG schedule. All instances reset at the same time each week.

Being able to make simple, predictable schedules would be a great boon to raiding guilds, or guilds looking into raiding. Hopefully lockouts in the Burning Crusade are based around the week, making for natural scheduling.

Quests That Should Have Been Epic

The one thing WoW has done really poorly is rewards at level 60. Restricting epics to raids was a mistake in my opinion. For most of the game there was a decent balance between rewards for instances, and rewards for quests. However, at 60, the balance swings way too much towards instances. There are some questlines that are epic in scope, and really deserve epic rewards.

Here's my list of quests that deserved epic rewards:

1. Tirion Fordring questline

This is one of the best loved questlines in the game. It takes you across Eastern Plaguelands, to Stratholme, and to Hearthglen as you help Tirion Fordring seek redemption. It's a gorgeous questline, and the rewards are quite good, but if they were bumped up a notch, this quest would be perfect.

2. The Lich, Raj Frostwhisper questline

This quest takes you from Scholomance, to Stratholme, and back to Scholomance as you seek the key to defeating Raj Frostwhisper. It's quite long and involved, and very few people actually do the whole questline. I've actually gotten more whispers about my Warblade of Caer Darrow than any other piece of gear. By the time most people would have completed the questline, they've moved on to raiding instead.

3. Hero of the Fallen Horde questline

This one has you fighting in the Blasted Lands, seeking to destroy Razelikh the Defiler. I remember forging the Sword needed to defeat his Servants, and the questline culminates in an awesome battle atop the Defiler's Rise.

4. Dawn's Gambit questline

I'll be honest, I haven't even finished this questline yet. It's the one where you have to collect the eggs from Upper Blackrock Spire and then go to Scholomance and defeat Vectus and his students. I just don't feel like going back to UBRS.

---

Personally, I love these long, involved questlines. They are a fair amount of work, and really deserve to have better rewards. Hopefully, end level questlines in Burning Crusade will have improved rewards.

Loot!

Loot always seems to come in waves for me. I go a long time without seeing anything, and then I get lots of stuff at once.

This past weekend, I picked up:

[Zandalar Freethinker's Belt] - ZG
[Hand of Edward the Odd] - AQ20
Holy Light: Rank IX - AQ20
[The Immovable Object] from AV

Pretty good haul for one weekend. Makes up for the last couple months. The Hand of Edward the Odd is pretty interesting. It's almost a perfect weapon for my playstyle. It's fast, has decent DPS, good caster stats, and makes some of your heals instant cast. I've enchanted it with Crusader and it is a great deal of fun.

It actually makes me want to respec back to Protection. I'll probably stay the same until the next patch though, and the free respec. It's interesting that Blizzard is releasing the new talents before the expansion. I wasn't really expecting that. I was expecting the new honor system and such, but I didn't think they would release the talents separately from the increase in the level cap.

Ah well, the cynical among us can look upon it as an extra month of intensive beta-testing.

Edit: Heh, I forgot the one item I actually spent DKP on: Onyxia's Head. I got it more for the quest and getting to hang the Head up in the Stormwind Gates. But it did get me a [Dragonslayer's Signet].

SoC versus SotC

Some commenters have questioned the tradeoff in the last post. I don't deny that you do give up a significant amount of damage by not using SoC. To my mind, though, the added flexibility and regeneration of SotC make up for it.

However, not everyone will agree with my valuation of the tradeoff. So let's examine some cold numbers.

Let's take a paladin with 1000 AP, a 3.8 speed weapon with 75 DPS, and +300 dmg/heal. Assume she is fighting a mob with 40% damage reduction. Also assume that she is spending all of her time attacking.

Let A be her Attack Power.
Let s be her weapon speed.
Let d be her DPS.
let P be her spellpower
Let R be the percentage of damage that gets through the armor.

Base dps = [d + a/14]*R = 87.9 dps

SoC dps = [ds + as/14]*0.7*7/60 + 0.29*P*7/60 = 55.6 dps

SotC dps = 306/14 * R = 13.1 dps

So basically, the SoC paladin is doing 143.5 dps compared to the SotC paladin's 101 dps. So by going SotC you sacrifice about 42 dps, or about 30% of your damage.

(I am ignoring crits, talents, and time spent not meleeing. Most of this affects both sides equally. I'm also ignoring Judgement of Command, as I don't think it would really be spammed by a melee-healing paladin. It does add another 30 dps or so, if spammed constantly.)

So the tradeoff becomes 30% less damage in exchange for 40% more Light/Wisdom procs, increased chance of renewing Judgements, and added flexibility in chosing when to start a heal.

Given that paladin damage is last on my list of priorities in a raid (though it is still on the list!), it's a tradeoff that I am willing to make.

As an aside, note that in either case, the majority of a paladin's damage comes from her base damage. The numbers seem relatively reasonable to me, though the weapon DPS is a bit high. You can always use your own values in the equations and see how your personal trade-off works. SoC does scale though, while SotC does not, so the better your gear is, the more attractive SoC becomes.

Swing Timers and Seal of the Crusader

It's been drilled into paladins for a long time that "slow weapons that do a lot of damage per hit are better". But this is not always true. In my view, faster weapons are better for raiding.

Slow weapons ARE better for doing damage with Seal of Command. There's no question about that. However, damage is not the main purpose of a paladin in raids, and so perhaps looking at different weapons is a better idea.

It all comes down to swing timers. Casting a non-instant spell resets your swing timer. So to get into a rhythm, a melee-healing paladin with a 3.8 speed weapon goes something like this for every 10s or so:

1.5s - Flash of Light
3.8s - Swing
1.5s - Flash of Light
3.8s - Swing
---
10.6s

The problem with this is that it's not very flexible. You have to wait a long time between swings to get off heals. If you don't wait long enough before healing, your swing doesn't go off. If you miss once, there's a good chance that you will fail to refresh your Judgment.

In contrast, let's look at the same paladin wielding a 2.2 speed weapon:

1.5s - Flash of Light
2.2s - Swing
1.5s - Flash of Light
2.2s - Swing
1.5s - Flash of Light
2.2s - Swing
---
11.1s

With a faster weapon, it's easier to weave Flashs in between your swings. Less swings are "lost" due to casting a Flash early, and the paladin has more opportunities to connect with the opponent, increasing the chances of renewing a Judgement.

This can be even further improved by using Seal of the Crusader. SotC will reduce the swing timer even further. The 3.8 spd drops to 2.7 spd, the 2.2 spd to 1.6s. This makes it even easier to weave healing and melee together.

Additionally, SotC does add a little more damage, and increases the amount of procs you get by 40%. In a raid setting, you can pretty much guarantee that Judgement of Light and Wisdom will always be up, so you get additional procs from both.

It's for these reasons that I feel that Seal of the Crusader is actually the best Seal for a raiding paladin. It's not as spectacular as Seal of Command, but it is far more consistent, and allows a paladin to use her other abilities to larger effect.

To sum up, for Seal of the Crusader:

Pros
- more damage than Seal of Light/Wisdom
- 40% more Light/Wisdom procs
- easier to refresh judgments
- easier to weave healing and melee swings

Cons
- less damage than Seal of Righteousness/Command
- no extra damage from Judgement of Righteousness/Command

Loot Drought

Nothing new is happening. We kill bosses, paladin loot does not drop.

It's been so long since I've gotten anything really good. I've been in this guild for about a month and a half, and I've only picked up an A20 book, and two blue items (admittedly, my Gavel is just shy of epic). Meanwhile, a rogue who joined with me has gotten 5/8 Nightslayer and a Qiraji Sacrificial Dagger.

I have a lot of DKP, just waiting for paladin loot to actually drop. I almost bid on an Untamed Blade today. I pretty much would have zero use for it, but it looked pretty cool, and so was tempting. Probably would have won it too.

I'm generally pretty easy-going about loot, but seriously, this is excessive.

Nothing much else to talk about in WoW. No real issues to discuss. If you want my opinion on something, post in the comments. At least it will give me something to write about.

Razorgore Strategy

Solidstate requested the Razorgore strategy we used, so here it is. We use a pretty normal strategy.

Hunters, mages, warlocks, rogues are divided into 4 DPS groups, one in each corner of the room. They kill orc mages as they appear. They also crowd control any legionaires if they can (sheeps, stuns, traps, succubi).

We have two warriors (with speed boots) kite the dragonkin and legionaires in a Figure 8 around the room, using both platforms. They run up one ramp, and then jump off the middle in order to buy some additional time, as the mobs go back down the ramp and around. They are spamming Demo Shout and taunting any new mobs that appear.

The remaining warriors pick up loose dragonkin and legionaires and bring them to the main kiters. We usually had a warrior follow each of the main kiters, picking up any missed mobs.

The druids' primary job is to sleep any loose dragonkin until a kiting warrior picks them up. They also do a little healing.

The paladins and priests are the healers, with the priests trying to keep their aggro down as much as possible. The paladins also guard the ramps to the controller, stunning and engaging any mobs attempting to get to the controller.

There are two or three controllers who rotate controlling Razorgore and popping eggs. We don't let the orcs/dragonkin attack Razorgore. It makes the last phase a bit harder, as Razorgore is at full health, but that's just a ranged tank-and-spank fight.

Realistically, it's all about the kite and aggro management. If you have one priest who does much more healing than the other priests, she will pull aggro and mobs will swarm the center. Paladin heals are lower aggro, so priests should try to defer to the paladins as much as possible, use HoTs, small heals, etc.

That's the strategy we used last night. Of course, it does take practice. We took about five tries, progressively getting better each time, and tweaking the strategy each time (for some reason, our kiters weren't doing the full Figure 8 for the first few attempts).

Another strategy I've seen is to have the main kiter be the first Razorgore controller, and to use Razorgore's Shadow Volley ability right before the control timer expires. That transfers all the aggro to the main kiter, giving her an edge as she starts the kite.

Another Spiritual Focus Idea

I still think that Spiritual Focus is very important to the paladin class, and that having it as a Tier 2 talent is too high. It doesn't look like Blizzard will make it baseline anytime soon, but here's a compromise idea.

1. Make Spiritual Focus a baseline ability, but with only a 40% chance to avoid interruptions from damage.

2. Add the following talent to Tier 2 Holy.

Improved Spiritual Focus (3/3)
Requires 5 Points in Holy.
Increases the effectiveness of Spiritual Focus by 10/20/30%.

So we get 3 possibilities:

Untalented Paladin
- 40% base chance to avoid interrupts from damage
- 70% chance with Concentration Aura

Paladin with 3/3 Imp Spiritual Focus
- 70% base chance
- 100% with Concentration Aura

Paladin with 3/3 Imp Concentration Aura
- 40% base chance
- 90% with Concentration Aura
- 15% chance of ignoring interrupts
- 50% chance given to allies

Now, Imp Concentration Aura is much closer to SF in power. It still doesn't completely guarantee your cast, but gives an extra bonus to your allies to make up for it. And it makes 2 paths viable for paladins: one with Holy, and one with Protection.

As well, since we've reduced Imp SF to 3 points, there's room in Tier 2 Holy for a small 2 point talent. Perhaps something like:

Evil's Bane (2/2)
Requires 5 Points in Holy.
Increases the damage done with your Exorcism and Holy Wrath spells by 15/30%. Increases the duration of your Fear Undead spell by 5/10s.

Razorgore Down!

And we start our march into Blackwing Lair. No paladin loot dropped, as usual.

Razorgore is a neat fight. Aside from the actual mechanics of the fight, its placement is very interesting.

In many ways, Razorgore is one of the most complex fights in BWL, and to have it as the very first encounter is a real shock. It's like Blizzard is putting the raid on notice, "This is NOT Molten Core. It's a brand new game." It sets the tone for the whole instance.

It is an unexpected decision in many ways, and I have a lot of respect for Blizzard for structuring BWL in this manner. A more conventional decision would have been to have a steady ramp up in complexity. Instead, having a very complex fight first forces raiders to shake off the complacency of Molten Core, and stretch their abilities in new directions.

Week 2 on Ragnaros

Back into MC again to kill Ragnaros. On our first attempt, Ragnaros hits the raid with an AoE knockback right before he submerges, when we were all gathered at our collapse point. That leads to a heart-breaking 1% wipe.

No worries, even though no soulstone or DI was up. A druid sneaks back to Ragnaros and begins ressing.

The second attempt is beautiful. We are destroying Ragnaros, no one is dying, I'm pumping Judgements of Righteousness into Ragnaros like there's no tomorrow. The 3-minute mark comes up, and we collapse perfectly as the Sons of Flame come up. The Sons are being intercepted by our warriors and druids when all of a sudden we hear "BY FIRE BE PURGED!" and people go flying. "DIE INSECT!" It turns out that if Ragnaros decides not to submerge, he and Sons of Flame together will easily wipe the raid.

So kind of annoyed at Ragnaros, we regroup for attempt three. Third time is the charm, and Ragnaros goes down easily. Loot is linked and he drops the [Eye of Sulfuras] to make up for our troubles. Our guild is amused by this, as we only have 3 out of the 8 or 9 [Sulfuron Ingots] needed to craft the Legendary Weapon. Because it is Sulfuras, I bid on the Eye, but another warrior wins it (we go by Total Earned DKP for Legendaries). Honestly, I'm kind of relieved that I didn't get it. I hate farming, and the mats required for Sulfuras are insane.

So that's how raiding is going. No paladin gear is dropping, but that's pretty much par for the course.

Blizzard nerfed Crusader Strike and Vengeance, so the paladin forums have descended into a pit of whining and despair (the natural state, in many ways). For some reason, people thought that Crusader Strike means that you would have three paladins judging, but only one paladin in melee spamming Crusader Strike in order to refresh all three judgements. It's like it never occurred to them that maybe we should have all three paladins meleeing and each refresh her own judgement.

CS being nerfed is expected, but Vengeance is a bit unusual, given that it has been untouched for such a long time. Current theories are that an 31/0/30 build proved too strong, or that with the additional attacks given by CS it was easier to achieve a perma-Vengeance state.

Ah well, Burning Crusade is a long way aways, so I shall not worry about it.

Ragnaros, the Firelord

It has taken me over 10 months, over 100 posts, through three different servers, and several guilds, but I have finally killed Ragnaros, the Firelord. He Who Was Ancient When The World Was Young. (I love the 'cutscene' before the fight.)

In the end, I think I did it the best way possible. With a guild who had not killed Ragnaros before. First kills are the sweetest. We did a pretty good job too. 38 people in the raid and we killed him on our second try. It was the third attempt overall for the guild, as we went to have a look after the first Majordomo Executus kill last week.

In a really weird way, it kind of feels like I've beaten the game. I know there's still BWL, AQ40, and Naxx to go, but Ragnaros felt like the end boss of World of Warcraft. Maybe because he's been the goal for so long. Or because I've been so close before, but never actually finished him.

Still, Ragnaros is dead. Bring on the Burning Crusade! (or Blackwing Lair, whichever comes first :)

Loot, Jindo, and Exploring

It never fails. I update my picture on this blog and I immediately get new loot soon after. I really should update more often.

I went to AQ20 today with the guild, and picked up a [Gavel of Qiraji Authority] from the General Rajaxx fight. This is an insane weapon. I have no idea why it isn't epic. Compare it to the [The Unstoppable Force]. It has +16 Int, +19 dmg/heal, +6 mana/5s, in exchange for -4 Str, -2% crit, and a stun. Maybe [The Unstoppable Force] is better, but not by much. The only thing is that the Gavel is a fast weapon (2.2 speed vs 3.8), but as I don't have Seal of Command, it's fine for me. Plus it looks very nice, and rather unique. I'll get a picture up before the next raid. ;)

I also got the [Qiraji Spiked Hilt] for the Exalted Cenarion reward. I do like the sword, but I'm nowhere near the exalted reputation required. I only got the Hilt because no one else wanted it. If anyone has any tips or suggestions for getting to Exalted CC reputation fast, I would love to hear them.

Boss-wise, I got to see and kill Moam for the first time. Interesting fight. We stacked the raid with warlocks for extra mana-draining to make it easy, but it was still fun.

After Moam, the guild went for Hakkar in ZG (ZG having been cleared the previous night). I sat out for the Hakkar fight (first time the guild has killed Hakkar), but came in after for Jin'do the Hexxer. Now that was a fun fight. It took two attempts, but he went down (first Jin'do kill for the guild as well). It's a very chaotic fight. Totems, invisible shades, teleports, dancing skeletons, it's hilarious. I think the reason we won the second fight is because I got mind-controlled much more. Better me than a rogue or fury warrior, after all. :)

So I got some loot, and added Moam and Jin'do to my kill sheet. Not a bad day.

Oh, I almost forgot. Way back in May, I posted about how, as a level 60, I miss the sound when a piece of the map is discovered. Well, I was exploring Deadwind Pass during the Hakkar attempts, and it looks like Blizzard has fixed this problem! The sound played and pieces of the map filled in. I don't know when Blizzard fixed it, and it's a small thing, but it made me smile. Good work, Blizzard!

Burning Crusade Impressions from the Forums

It looks like an NDA expired, and paladins who were in the Burning Crusade alpha are talking about their experiences on the forums. Some pretty interesting stuff there. For me, though, the best sign came from Tinaris:

It seems to me that the way our healing is supposed to work is when its intermingled with melee when we have the chance to hit the mob for some mana gains via JoWisdom. Hit the mob for mana a few times, cast an emergency heal, rinse and repeat. I found that this method of support healing, even as a 14/0/43 Paladin, was very helpful in terms of putting out good damage, being involved in heals, and maintaining respectable mana amounts for emergencies. Spiritual Attunement helped out in this, as the bit of AoE damage I took would get me some attention from the main healers, which would replenish my mana for more healing for others.

This is superb news. It's basically how I play now, and Blizzard has made it even more viable. This is what a Paladin is supposed to be. Honestly, this paragraph has made me eagerly anticipate the Burning Crusade.

In particular, it looks like Blizzard has hit a home run with Spiritual Attunement, which gives you back mana when other people heal you.

We also got a Strike! Crusader Strike is the new 41-pt Retribution talent. The paladin boards are rejoicing. The strike is pretty cool, but I'm probably still going to go for Captain America (heh, I don't even know what the real name of the talent is).

As well, apparently we have new animations and effects for our Seals and abilities. This is a *much* needed change. Previously our effects were very bland. The PvP people probably aren't going to be too happy, as snazzy effects tend to give information to your foes, but I think it is neat part of playing the game. As well, you need to be able to get info from your enemies in order to react to them. Makes the fight one of skill, rather than just a guessing game.

Draft Priorities, Part 2

Inframike posted a comment to the previous post on the draft priority system:

But... Shadow Priests and Discipline Priests have very different priorities :(

Exactly! That is why this system works. The mages/warlocks spend all of their picks on damage gear, while priests need to split their picks between damage gear and healing gear (can't let those uppity paladins get all the good stuff).

So what will end up happening is that the mages/warlocks will get the lion's share of damage gear, but priests will have priority on a few pieces, enough to treat them fairly.

Remember that the alternative is that mages/warlocks get priority on ALL damage gear, and priests get none. That's generally what happens now in priority-based loot systems. Free systems don't need to set priority rules, and wouldn't need to draft.

As an aside, I don't believe that there is such a thing as a Shadow Priest or a Discipline Priest. There is a Priest who is currently specced Shadow, and a Priest who is currently specced Discipline. People change specs, and thus need different gear for different situations. I was Retribution[1] yesterday, and today I'm Holy[2]. I still collected healing gear when Ret-specced, and I'll still bid on damage gear now that I'm Holy.

[1] 5/11/35 - Extreme damage (for paladins, anyways).

[2] 32/11/8 - I like to think of it as my Improved Seal of the Crusader build.

Draft Priority

I don't really agree with restriction-based loot systems. However, if you do think that priorities are necessary, here's a system I came up with a long time ago (but never actually posted about):

Have your class officers draft the items in the instance.

In a random order, each class picks one item. That class gets first priority on the item. Continue drafting items (use switchback so that the second pick goes in the reverse order). The second class to pick an item gets second priority on that item. Continue until all the non-class restricted items have a first and second priority.

Each class now has an equal number of priorities. The focused classes will probably get first priority on the very best stuff, but hybrids should be able to score some decent second priorities.

As well, it sets up little rivalries between classes who do not normally compete, such as mages and warlocks, which helps them understand what it feels like to be a hybrid.

Plus it's a fun game, and you could turn it into a guild event where everyone provides "advice" to their officer.

Restrictions and Skill

If you've read my posts, you know that I'm a pretty strong proponent of no restrictions on talent specs or loot distribution. I feel that such restrictions are inefficient, and in the long term will be detrimental to the raid. One of the major reasons that I think restrictions are bad is that they interfere with developing skill.

I'll start with a definition:

Skill is the ability to make good decisions.

A person who makes better decisions is more skilled than someone who makes poor decisions. In a raid, this can be decisions with positioning, or skills used, or timing of abilities. For a healer it can mean deciding who lives and who dies. But it can also be decisions on how to spec, or what gear to take.

Skill is not absolutely innate. It is learned. As you use your abilities you learn how to make better decisions, and thus you become more skilled.

Restrictions on gear and spec make the decisions for you. Thus you cannot truly improve your skill so long as those restrictions bind you. If you are prevented from speccing Shadow, you will never learn exactly how Shadow limits you in raids, and that knowledge is valuable for future decision-making.

I believe that a Holy/Disc priest who has tried Shadow is a more skilled priest than a Holy/Disc priest who has never gone to the dark side. A skilled paladin will have tried the different options, and makes a decision based on the knowledge gained.

This even extends to loot. If you are prevented from taking loot that you think will help your character, you will never learn how to value loot appropriately. I have an Unstoppable Force, and it is seriously annoying me. It's next to impossible to keep a Judgement stuck on a mob. The lesson learned is that I don't like really slow weapons, and they are ineffective for my playstyle.

Of course, the problem is that sometimes we only learn by making mistakes. And occasionally that will mean spending DKP on the "wrong" loot, or using the "wrong" talents. But if a player is prevented from making mistakes, how can they learn?

Choice is intricately bound to skill. Anything that interferes with a player's choices also interferes with a player's skill development. A guild that is truely interested in having skilled players would be best served by allowing members to make their own choices, understanding that this means that sometimes members will make mistakes.