Honor's Code

After my night off of WoW, I got going again Thursday night. The evening started with a big all hands Guild meeting. These things generally bode ill for a guild. This particular meeting was centered around your humble author and our recent kill of Azgalor. Apparently, some people were less than completely excited about the fact that I had received the T6 gloves and had expressed their displeasure to the officers. I felt in somewhat of an awkward spot. I'm relatively new to the guild, and I don't have relationships with hardly anyone. They weren't really upset with me, but with the system. I listened as the Guild Leader and the officers explained why they had chosen to distribute the loot the way they had. Dominion uses a "Gear the Tanks/Healers" system that gives priority on Tier tokens to a group of documented Main Tanks and Main Healers. There are 4 Main Tanks and 6 Main Healers. I was chosen as one of the Main Tanks, and thusly received my Tier 6 token from o

Tuesday was reset day, so we opted to go back to Mount Hyjal. Everything was pretty fresh in our minds from the previous evening. Our target was a progression kill on Azgalor, and the first pieces of Tier 6 for our guild. I'm getting better at handling the trash waves, though I still need to get better on judging when it's safe to call for AoE. Some waves I would wait too long and the Raid Leader would call it for me, and other waves I call to early, and someone (usually a Warlock) would pull off of me. I'm also getting better timing my Holy Wrath so it hits the targets I'm after, though here as well, I could still use some improvement. At least twice, I hit nothing with my Holy Wrath which made the pickups very hectic. We managed to one shot all the farm bosses, and do so much more cleanly than we had Monday night. I know Dominion's former Prot Paladin would rip Rage Winterchill off the tank 'accidentally'. I'm not sure why he was doing

Void Reaver With the Holiday weekend coming not much was going on. I was playing on my Warrior when I got a tell from Aga asking me to go to Tempest Keep. At first I thought we were going to do Al'ar, but instead we tried Void Reaver. It didn't takes up long to figure out that our mods were not calling out incoming Arcane Orbs. We wiped on Void Reaver at about 50%. Vlad changed the location of the melee groups healers, and we went at him again. The great thing about Void Reaver is that your TPS determines whose tanking him. He does a periodic knockback on the current tank, reducing his threat by 25%, and then proceeds to the person on his aggro list if that knocked the current tank out of first place. The idea is to have another tank be #2 so he goes from tank to tank. I did very well on generating threat and soon found myself as the center of Void Reaver's attention. I was having to nearly chain chug mana potions as the gear I need to have on to be uncrushable is a li

I hope everyone is enjoying your Memorial Day!! It's back to the grill for ole Honors.

I don't know how many of you saw this interview with Jeff Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan is the lead game designer for World of Warcraft. You can see the interview in its entirety here: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/18754 Here's a couple of highlights. Jeff Kaplan: In 10 man raiding, we declare and say without a doubt, we expect you to have 1 tank there. 1 tank, and two healers. Some groups might bring 2 tanks and 3 healers, or 1 tank and an offtank. And then in 25, we've pretty much come out and said we expect you to have 3 tanks, and more healers than just two obviously. So you 10 man group in WotLK will be 1 tank, 2 healers and 7 DPS. I'd imagine in 25 mans it will work out to 3 tanks, 6 healers, and 16 DPS. This to me is an acknowledgement by Blizzard of something the players seem to have known for a long time, most people want to play a DPS. As you progress from 5 to 10 to 25 man look at how each role is represented. Tanks Healers DPS 5 Man 1 (20%) 1 (20%) 3 (60%) 10 man

Wednesday night, Dominion went after Lady Vashj once more. I logged in long enough to get sub credit and decided to go play on my Warrior. I kept listening in on Vent. My plan was to log into Honorshammer as soon as they got her down, so I could celebrate with them. After my misstep after our first night on Vashj, I was trying to be as good a soldier as I possibly could be. As much as possible I want to show my guild that my outburst was a learning experience from which I hoped to rebound with grace. As start time approached, Vlad determined she only had 6 healers in the Raid, and was debating between asking me to come, or asking a Resto Druid to come. She decided she wanted a 3rd Paladin Blessing and a 3rd Blessing of Freedom in case she lost one of the other two Paladins in Phase 1 or Phase 2. Their best attempt Tuesday had been at least in part foiled when the Paladins went down and they didn't have a Blessing of Freedom for Phase 3. She offered to pay for my respec to H

My guild, Dominion, made some very good progress on Lady Vashj last night. Twice, they got her into Phase 3. The best attempt was a 5% wipe when they lost the Main Tank (Kee), then the offtank (Vlad) got static charged, and rooted at the same time. My night started out kind of rough. We had a hail storm in my city. We hardly ever get weather like that. Our close proximity to the coast usually protects us from tornadic thunderstorms. My daughter was a little freaked out by the hail hitting on our roof, so I sat up with her until the storm passed. Nothing like wrapping your arms around Daddy to make you feel safe. I emailed my RL (from my cell) and let her know I would be late and to please replace me with someone else. It was a courtesy because I had already been told I wouldn't be in for Vashj, but in case she had been counting on me for Lurker, I wanted to let her know I would be delayed. I finally logged in and they were working on Lurker. I respec Honors back to Prot (yeah

The Tank Shortage Let's take 3 Guilds and see how the players in that guild would perceive the reality of the tank shortage. Guild A is in Tier 4 content. Their Main Tank just took a month long vacation from the game. They are a small guild and really didn't have anyone ready to fill in the gaps. Perhaps they had capable players, but the toons were a bit undergeared or lacked experience. This Guild sees and believes in a severe tank shortage and hopes Blizzard does something quickly to get more people to roll tanks. Guild B is in Tier 5 content. They have several players with experienced and geared tanks. One of their tanks just got ninja'ed by a Tier 6 guild. They may be a week or two bump where they get a tank up to speed on fights he hasn't tanked, but for the most part, they keep right on chugging. This Guild doesn't see a severe tank shortage, but a more mild one. While action on Blizzard's part to get more people to roll tanks would be welcome, they probab

Kaz (can I call you Kaz) has done a great post on the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King info. You can read it here . Personally I'm very concerned over how Blizzard will handle the tank balance issue. If you'll remember, Druids went on this crazy roller coaster ride in early Burning Crusade. They came out of 2.0 (the patch that started our migration to Burning Crusade) very strong (some might even argue they were overpowered), then got reduced (nerfed) and slowly brought up to about right. Warriors were always pretty good but early in tBC they had some rough times, especially with all the multi-target tanking needed in 5 mans and early Heroics. The foil to their scaling was that they started off a little weak. Paladins were something akin to a baby giraffe. They were the new tanks, and their legs were pretty wobbly at first. They were consistently behind Warriors and Druids in Hit Points (the most visible 'tank' stat), and they had a huge inertia of preconceived

Dominion is a guild that followed the advice given by Ciderhelm and others to kill the first 3 bosses in Black Temple and Mt. Hyjal, and then go back and kill Lady Vashj and Kael'thalas. So Monday night, Dominion set it's sites on Lady Vashj. Vlad (GM) had told us that she would only be taking 2 tanks to the encounter. It didn't take me long to figure out I wasn't going to be one. I went ahead and made the macro you need for passing Tainted Cores, but just to show you my frame of mind, the macro was named 'Useless'. First of all, I'm the newest tank in the entire guild. I can't imagine the drama that would have been caused if I had been chosen over a tank who had been in the guild longer. Another factor, and one I wouldn't learn about until after the raid, was that one of our Warriors, Kee, had already been in on a successful kill and knew the fight. I had never been in a group to even seriously attempt her. It's not in any way unusual for a

I returned to the 10 man scene this weekend doing Zu'lAman on Friday night and Karazhan on Sunday. Friday night, I ran with a group from Heroes Inc that included Wichita , Bacon , Lakini , Origami , Sweatyz along with a couple of new faces like Bluetide , Desirabela , Dario , and Tonkadonk . We were going to try to get as many chests as we could. The run went really well. We got to Bear and killed him with no major issues. I didn't have a single taunt resisted the whole fight. We had me on the human form and Tonkadonk doing a little Bear on Bear action. /ParisHilton: "That's hot!" We went on to Eagle. I ran the gauntlet trash with me up front tanking the two elites and all the little eagles. Wichita suggested I try tanking Eagle Boss himself. We were very heavy on melee DPS and I was concerned. We had the attempt rocking pretty good when we lost two people. Shortly thereafter I went splat. I went back and looked at my combat log, but I didn't see a crush

Dominion's raid was slow in forming last night, as it seemed quite a few of their regular 'core' people were no where to be seen. About 8:30 Vlad made the call to farm SSC instead of going to either MH or BT. You could feel a sense of urgency the entire raid. I'm very familiar with SSC, but not at all familiar with how Dominion does the pulls and bosses. One of the running jokes in MK was for someone to say in vent 'I think you can outrange the spore quake' after losing a couple of people to the Collusus after he did a Spore Quake. Dominion takes no such chance and has everyone stay at max range except for melee DPS. We had filled the raid with 5 tanks. 3 Prot Warriors, 1 Feral Druid and 1 Prot Paladin. That was way more tanks than you need for the majority of the instance, so often times, Vlad would run out of tank targets before she ran out of tanks. I was put on add duty for Hydross. This was a slight issue because since I had been the Frost Tank for MK,

I took the night off of WoW. Dominion was going for progression on Azgalor, but I haven't heard if they were successful. In the meantime, I wanted to highlight a couple of sites that I think you'll find very helpful. Jewelcrafting BananaShoulders has updated his Jewelcrafting Quick Reference Guide with all the new recipes added in 2.4.2. The post contains a PDF version showing every gem and it's bonus in a quick and easy to read format. You'll find his post here . This is an incredible tool for both Jewelcrafters and non Jewelcrafters. I plan to print out his PDF and keep it near the computer at all times. Siha, if I don't know if you read my blog, but let me say a big 'Thank You' for this. Stoic Guardian And speaking of blogs, I've recently added another to my lists of blogs I regularly read. Allow me to introduce The Stoic Guardian . It's written by a fellow Protection Paladin (and a Dwarf, pass the Stout!) I find it really well writte

My job for the night would be to shadow their outgoing Protection Paladin, Taypion, and try to learn how they handled each boss in Mount Hyjal. Taypion started drilling me on my gear and stats. I sat there kind of dumbfounded as he questioned why I "only" had 492 defense. 490 is ALL you need to be uncrittable, and while Defense over 490 is not wasted, it certainly isn't need. I was also concerned when he suggested wearing a pure threat cloak (INT, STAM, SPL DMG) over a tanking cloak. We inspected each other and found we had similar gear, though he had gotten the Commendation of Kael'thalas from Heroic Magister's Terraces. /jealous He ran a bit more threat heavy than I do with about 600 unbuffed spell damage. I found it most curious looking at his talents, that he had taken Divine Intellect (increases your Intellect by 5%). There are only two situations a Protection Paladin will find himself* him, either you are taking enough damage to replenish your mana thr

Tuesday night, I received my formal invitation to join Dominion, followed immediately by a raid invite. My screen filled with green and orange text full of unfamiliar names. Thank goodness for Agamegnome, one familiar name was nice to see. I also recognized Ferg who had run some 5 man PuGs with me during my early 70 days. I had originally thought that Dominon was 4/5 Hyjal and 3/9 Black Temple. I found out they are only 3/5 Mount Hyjal and 3/9 Black Temple, having gotten their 3rd boss kill in both instances just in the past two weeks. So they are 2 bosses ahead of MK in Hyjal and 3 Bosses ahead in BT. The biggest reason I saw that they are ahead of MK is they put in 4 or 5 nights of Raiding a week to MK's 2 or 3. That's it. These guys are not amazingly more skilled or geared than the MK core. I ended up going to Mount Hyjal and learning the 2 bosses I hadn't done with Mal Katai. I've got a much longer posts I'm working on about the first raid with them, but it&#

I was once again invited to raid with Mal Katai Monday night. Our target was Leo the Blind. The information about my imminent departure was slowly beginning to make it's way through Mal Katai. The night was something a microcosm of my entire experience with Mal Katai. The only bosses alive were Vashj and Leo. We started clearing Leo trash from Fathom Lord's room. We got to one pull that has given us trouble in the past. You have to pull a group around a corner close to another group and Leo himself. Somehow, someone in the raid would pull the second group. It happened again last night. Then as we were running back, someone aggroed a group a mobs that we hadn't killed by water walking under them. They proceeded to pwn a good chunk of the raid. At this point, I'm feeling pretty good about my decision. We finally got back to Leo's room (that is a LONG walk), and decided to try to pull the mobs a little further back. The bad news was this left us in a very sm

I had an interesting tell come to me from Agamegnome, a former Guildmate of mine from my Heroes Inc days. These days, Aga, as he is called, is in the guild called Dominion on Altar of Storms. They happen to be the second most progressed guild Alliance side on Altar of Storms. It seems that Dominion's Protection Paladin has left WoW to purse a career in a game called Age of Conan. I had always worried about losing my own guildies to another game, but I never considered it could lead to opportunities for me. What was strange was that Aga had not seen my post on Tankspot where I advertised that I was looking for a guild. So far as I knew he doesn't read the blog. i had bloged a month or so ago about blowing him off for a Kara run to go with Heroes Inc, and he never commented on it. The huge advantage to Aga's offer was that it meant I could stay on Altar of Storms. I was nearly certain that I was going to have to transfer servers. I am a man of my word. Dora asked me to give h