Honor's Code

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but this was a Blog Azeroth shared topic. "What would be the theme song for your toon? " I thought about it, and while I had a couple of ideas ultimately, I went with "Voice of Truth" by Casting Crowns. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwsvqVmFV6Y ) I think this comes out of the time when I was still struggling with tanking, and felt the need to prove myself to every Druid, Warrior, and Boss going. It was a time when few believed in Paladin tanks and comments like "Paladins can't tank 25 man raids" were common. Ultimately, I didn't listen to them. Here's a short except of some of the lyrics. Oh what I would do to have The kind of strength it takes to stand before a giant With just a sling and a stone Surrounded by the sound of a thousand warriors Shaking in their armor Wishing they'd have had the strength to stand But the giant's calling out my name And he laughs at me Remind

I was fortunate enough to be selected to join the Raid to Black Temple last night. Our night started out with the Horde in control of the stone. As I hovered over them in my Gyrocopter, I was thinking how cool it would be if Blizzard let Engineers drop bombs from their flying mount. But those thoughts soon gave way to fighting for the stone. After we zoned in, it wasn't long before I started noticing a problem, and it's name was Omen. I simply wasn't producing the same kind of threat numbers that I'm used to seeing. I checked all the usual suspects. Righteous Fury was on, Blessing of Salvation was off. I don't know what has happened to all our Paladins because we only ran two last night so it was Kings and Salv across the board. One issue I had was some small four legged creatures known only as Sheep. These Sheep make it difficult for me to use Consecration. Apparently, Sheep have a problem with Holy ground and break. Broken Sheep makes my Raid Leader very gru

Our break ended last night and Dominion threw ourselves into Mount Hyjal. We had little trouble with Rage and her flunkies. I had decided to use Anetheron's Infernals to test out my Fire Resist gear. The gear works great. I resisted most of the damage from the Infernal, but I also ran into a threat problem. My Fire Resist set is lower on spell damage than any of my other sets and producing good threat was a problem. I was also having to position the Inferal before I could really open up on them. I would pull them with Exorcism and lead them away from the Raid so they wouldn't take damage from the Fire Aura. Twice a Hunter pulled aggro on the Infernal and another time a Mage managed to pull. I'm not overly concerned about it for the Anetheron fight, but I am greatly concerned how this will translate in the Illidan fight. The Flames of Azzinoth are considered Demons, so I can use Exorcism every time it's off cooldown to help. I've got to be constantly moving t

Heroic Shadow Lab, the story of a mage whose gone to the dogs. My good friend, Aoesrus, sent me this screen shot of him in Heroic Shadow Labs last night. I don't know I think it's an improvement on his looks.

I logged in last night knowing that we were taking the night off of Raiding. My first goal for the night was to get the mats to have a guidmate make me a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond. After today's maintenance, I can purchase the Vengeful Gladiator's Scaled Helm and I will need the Diamond for the meta slot. After I got that out of the way, I took a quick flight through Nagrand, doing the Shattered Sun Daily and looking for Mote Clouds. I checked around with Dominion, Heroes Inc and Mal Katai, but no PVP groups were going, so I decided to dive in solo. I was about 4k honor short of being able to get the Season 2 Two Handed Mace. Somehow I managed to lose 4 straight Alterac Valley matches. About this time, I received a tell from Sevenn, an old friend in Heroes Inc. He was trying to put together a Heroic Mana Tombs run to complete a quest he had gotten, and was looking for a tank. He managed to find a Priest, who was the alt of a Hunter from Mal Katai, and a DPS from Dom

Back in September of last year I listed out my various gear sets and what makes them up. I had intended to update that post much sooner, but today you have the next update. What you see here is not actually how these suits look today. I felt like showing my sets in this state would be helpful to a larger audience. This is my 'Main Tank the Boss' set. Uncrushable, and maximizing on effective health, and avoidance. Survival above all else. Going to be fighting a Boss, so uncrushability must be maintainted but for whatever reason, threat is more important. I would use this in a fight that's a DPS race or I need to be second on threat. Gruul and Void Reaver are both situations where I might pull this suit out. I also use this anytime I am not tanking the boss, but I feel there is a chance the Main Tank might go down so I would need to try to grab the boss before too much damage is done to the raid. This is the set I would use for easy Heroics and 5 mans. This also became my &#

I apologize for the lack of updates this week. All my free time has been devoted to preparing for this weekend when my Fantasy Football League will be holding it’s annual draft. Yes, I play WoW and Fantasy Football. There should be a support group or something. I watched the trailer for Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard’s art department has some amazingly talented folks in it. It was a really cool introduction. I still hold out hope that in the end the players actions in the battle at Ice Crown Citadel against the Lich King (who is a being of a fused spirit of Arthas and Ner’zhul) will ultimately redeem Arthas, and severe his bond to the Lich King. Much like the player character Death Knights, he will become free and ultimately help the players destroy Ner’zhul and the Frozen Throne. Dominion has decided to take last night and Monday off of raiding. Several of the officers are feeling fatigue from the push we’ve made recently. Every top guild on Altar of Storms has eventually blown

Last night Dominion was back in Black Temple. We were working on Terron Gorefiend. I have not had the opportunity to tank Gorefiend yet, so my contribution is usually dispel duty. This frees up a ‘real’ healer to help heal the raid. The past couple of times my Raid Leader has been asking me to improve the speed of my dispel so less ticks of the Incinerate get off. My set up right now is using the Addon GRID. I place Grid near the center of my screen and hover my mouse over it. As soon as I see the debuff in Grid, I click on the square (which targets the person) and spam my 9 key (bound to Cleanse). I don't know anyway I can do it any faster. My reaction speed is pretty good. We have two dedicated dispellers and I beat the other guy to the punch about half the time. I am dedicated to dispelling. I don’t throw any heals except immediately after the dispel. Incinerate must have some sort of cooldown, so I can generally throw on or two heals without a problem. It especially gets rough

One of the most difficult decisions to make as a Protection Paladin comes in the area of Glove Enchants. There are two enchants that appear to be strong choices for adding threat: 20 spell damage, and 2% more threat. So which one is superior for a Paladin tank? Luckily, those fine folks over at Maintankadin have the skinny on this question. Check out the entire thread here: http://www.failsafedesign.com/maintankadin/viewtopic.php?t=7257 The thread actually examines every possible enchant you could put on your gloves. For the cliff notes version : 2% threat will grant you more aggro than +20 spell damage as long as you are generating more than 500 TPS.

(This post has nothing to do with WoW.) When I'm not running around Outland and Azeroth righting wrongs and slaying evil doers, and Horde, I consider myself a pretty big professional (American) football fan. One of the annual events I look forward to is the release of the new Madden game to play during season. Somewhere in their infinite wisdom the knuckleheads who run EA sports have decided to not make a version of Madden 2009 for the PC. I think EA has made a very poor decisions, but I'm basically powerless to change it. No one from EA will ever read my blog and they had to know they would upset thousands of PC Gamers with this decision and decided it was 'just good business' to do it anyway. EA has said in so many words, 'We don't care about our former PC Gamer customers.' Basically I am disappointed, and mad and I can't do a thing about it. So putting aside what I can not control, I must concentrate on those things I can control.

Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volley'd & thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred Dominion has been back at it again this week. Even with a couple of new faces in the raid, we did another fantastic one night clear of Mount Hyjal. I picked up the plate bracers off of Rage Winterchill for my Ret set. All of the Warriors in the raid already had them. We had another Hard Heart drop off of Kaz’rogal. It went to one of our Holy Paladins. I think that's about our the fifth for the guild. May Illidan be as gracious with Shields when we reach him. Azgalor was more interesting than usual when I got picked for Doom. We use the phrase “pick so and so up” to tell Druids to Battlerez. Well, when I got doomed, the Raid Leader told our Feral to pick me up. Actually, she said pick up the Doomguard I would spawn, but in the chaos

I was talking with a friend last night who has recently leveled a Protection spec Paladin to 70 (Gratz, btw!!) He really enjoys the play style and is having a blast. He was asking about doing PVP on his Protection Paladin, and specifically what would make a good Arena partner for 2s. The problems you will run into as a Protection spec Paladin are: Running out of Mana Spell Pushback Even in Holy PVP gear, you won’t have the starting mana pool of a Holy Paladin, however, the larger issue is that you don’t have the staying power. Without Illumination, you burn through your mana much faster as a Protection spec Paladin than a Holy Paladin does, and because your heals lack the power provided by the Holy talents, you have to cast more heals to get the same throughput. You can’t pot in Arenas, so you are in a situation of hoping your teammate can kill one before you are completely out of mana. The other major problem is spell pushback. Without the Holy talents, anything hitting you

We had already passed out the Mother gear, and Black Temple was going to reset the next day, and we had a little time left, so we figured we would go ahead and see what Mother’s trash looked like. This time the door was well and truly open. Our first issue was the Sisters of Pleasure and Pain. These are mobs that come together. On every pull we would lose at least one if not two tanks on these mobs. Is there some trick we didn’t know about to not get killed fighting them? The whole Mother area is reminiscent of Maiden of Virtue’s area in Karazhan with similar Succubus type mobs. Mother’s trash contains several AoE type pulls. The challenge is nearly every mob in these pulls has a stun. I would pick them up with Consecrate, and use Retribution Aura and Holy Shield to try to hang on to them, and then have to get the refresh of my abilities off in-between the stuns. There was a scary moment when I went into pick up the group, but they got a stun off before I could get my Consecrate out

I was running a little late last night. When I logged in, I found the raid already formed. After a couple of nervous minutes wondering if I was going to raid, I received my invite. We were going for a progression kill on Reliquary of Souls, and I would be front and center as the Main Tank for Phase 3. What mattered most was threat generation so we could kill Essence of Anger before it killed us. I’m rather annoyed that all the Essences you fight in Reliquary of Souls are uncategorized mobs. If they were Demon/Undead, I could use Exorcism on them which would be an added nuke for more threat. But that is out of my control. It was time to worry about those things that were within my control. I had my Destruction Potions ready, and I had gone for Threat with both my food, Blackened Basilisk, as well as my Flask, Flask of Blinding Light. (I’d like to say a big thank you to Lakini of Heroes Inc for making my Flask for me). This raid, instead of sporting my usual 0/49/12 spec, I went

Friday night rolled around and I went to my bank. He’s a mild mannered Tankadin during the week, crazy PVP Ret Paladin on the weekend. I turned down a couple of people who asked me to tank for them. It takes me a couple of BGs to get out of tank mode and into PVP mode, and I like to be ready when my partner logs in. I checked my mailbox, and had the new Olympic tabard, but alas, no Gold Medallion yet. This week went much like last week for us. We got off to a fast start and crested in the mid to high 1400s. Then we ran into some rough combinations, and slid down under 1400. We spent the rest of the night fighting our way back up to our original rating. We ended up playing 24 games and finishing 2 points below where we started. There were a couple of games where our team really gelled and you could see it working, but other games where we just didn’t get it together. I really feel like there is promise to this team. What I can’t understand are the people who talk like 1600

I took Wednesday off as is my custom, though I did log on briefly to do some dailies on the Isle of Quel’Danas and to make some Health and Mana potion injectors for the raid. Thursday, I was on the wait list as Dominion killed Archimonde once again. I’ve killed the guy twice and anything I would loot from him would be offspec stuff. It’s not a fight I enjoy a great deal since I don’t have an active tanking role in it. To be honest, I was glad to be doing dailies rather than fighting Archimonde. After Archimonde, Dominion was going after Bloodboil. They had killed Najentus, Supremus and Shade of Akama already. I whispered my raid leader, asking for a spot against Bloodboil. I know we have great team of tanks including Warriors, Druids, and Paladins in Dominion. Any combination of our tanks is more than capable of killing Bloodboil. I asked to come because the fight is fun for me, and there is a bit a loot I’d like to see him drop (yes, I’m talking about you, Girlde of Mighty Resolve

image from wiisystemreview.wordpress.com Auz writes an incredible blog over at Chick GM on Raid Leading and Guild Leadership recently did a post called her 10 List , where she writes about the top ten reasons she loves being a GM. I am not a GM, but I play one on TV. /rimshot Thank you very much, I'll be here all week, enjoy the veal, and don't forget to tip your waitresses. Anyway, I'm not a GM, so my 10 List is the top 10 reasons I love being a Tankadin. The quote at the top of my blog from Alixander of Durotan is "You shouldn't become a pally tank unless you really love it, but if you do really love it, there's nothing greater in the world." So without further ado, here is my Top 10 Reasons I Love Being A Tankadin. #10 Defensive Attack. What I mean by this is sometimes called the porcupine nature of the tankadin. We hurt people by them attacking us. To me, its the ultimate expression of an old Star Wars quote. "A Jedi uses the forces for

Bloodsky, the most progressed raiding guild on Altar of Storms has shut down. Longtime readers will no doubt recall my brief 1 week stay as a member of Bloodsky. There was a post made on our Realm Forum and much drama has ensued. It appears to have been a combination of events that led to the leadership of Bloodsky deciding to call it quits. Summer had taken its toll on Bloodsky and several of their key members were decreasing their playtime either due to a growing lack of interest in the game or real life matters coming to the forefront. Bloodsky also mentioned the difficulty of recruiting on our server. Altar of Storms is listed as a medium population server. Despite a large number of Kara guilds, we have very few raid guilds. Bloodsky was the only Sunwell guild, Alliance side, on our server. Dominion, my guild, was the only Tier 6 guild, along with Manus Domini. Manus Domini, and Mal Katai (my former guild) is making the transition from Tier 5 to Tier 6. Bloodsky was going to need

Monday night, Dominion went back into Black Temple to continue our assault on the Reliquary of the Lost, better known as RoS, or Reliquary of Souls. I was really excited when I saw my good friend; Aoesrus had managed to snag an invite to the raid. I never would have thought, all those many months ago when Aoes and I started playing WoW that we would be raiding Black Temple together. I had made up my mind to do everything I could to increase my threat, starting with my gear. I swapped in the Figurine Crimson Serpent for the Pocketwatch, and the Seal of Danzalar for one of my rings. I used the Seeker’s Wristguards over my Bracer’s of the Ancient Phalanx. Then I changed my consumable to a Flask of Blinding Light, Blackened Basilisk and Superior Wizard Oil. All told, I went into the fight with over 700 spell damage. Once Judgment of the Crusader was up, I would have an effective spell damage of over 900, and I had one more little trick up my sleeve. Aoesrus had found an old Hero

I managed to get in some Arena this weekend with my Shadowstep Rogue partner. When he logged on, I was in this marathon game of WSG. We had a druid carrying the flag who seemed to have this strange aversion to actually capping the flag. At least twice, we got our flag back from the Horde, only to have him be killed in the middle of the field, seemingly oblivious to the fact he needed to run into the base and cap. By some miracle (and some very squishy Horde Priests and Shamans) we were actually able to claim a victory in a PuG Warsong Gulch. So fresh off my victory, I started queuing up with my Rogue partner. We had both done some research on Arenas, and our particular matrix. I found a great post by Cathmor over at Eye For Eye . Following his advice, I carefully wrote down each matrix we faced, and what happened. That went really well for about the first dozen matches, then I ran out of space on my paper and we started queuing much quicker. There were a couple of matches we fe

Last night, instead of taking on Gurtogg Bloodboil or Teron Gorefiend, Dominion went straight to Requilary of Souls. I was nervous as our Raid Leader went over the tank assignments. My role would be to take a turn at Phase 1 and let Essence of Suffering smack me around a bit then back out. My role in Phase 2 would be keeping Judgement of Wisdom up and helping out with whatever DPS I could do in tank gear. My role in Phase 3 would be to Main Tank Essence of Anger. I had been reading on this fight for quite some time, and I understood the basics. But there is only so much you can learn from a video or strat guide. Eventually you have to put in the time and wipes and learn. We did the gauntlet trash without too much of a problem. It took me several attempts to get the transitions in Phase 1 down. I would be standing directly under Essence of Suffering, but the boss would basically ignore me and start running off for a Hunter. When I did get him, the damage didn't seem too bad. I