Honor's Code

We still had some time left, so we decided to head over to Sunwell. My goal had always been Illidan so anything in Sunwell would be pure gravy at this point. Dominion had been in Sunwell Monday night while I was offline. Sunwell Plateau is very similar to Magister’s Terrace. The art team really outdid itself and the place is just beautiful. There is a ton of trash to wade through to get to the first boss, Kalecgos. During the trash I was usually tanking a Vindicator. This is a melee mob who hits decently hard and it was pretty easy to tank. As we explored Sunwell, people in the raid started asking about the various things going on, like who Avenna was, and I was happy to explain. Someone suggested that I need to get my LoreMaster title. I’m not entirely sure it was meant as a compliment. Next thing you know, I’m staring down a big ole dragon. They had already made attempts on Kalecgos with Vlad/Kee/Cuch tanking so I tried to stay out of the way and be a backup. The Kalecgos

(Congratulations to the Philadelphia Phillies and their fans on winning the World Series. I used to follow the Phillies when I was a kid, but I haven't follwed them closely in years and years. I don’t really follow baseball anymore. The NFL is my passion these days. GO PANTHERS !!!) We had a bit of unfinished business with Illidan in Black Temple. I always knew I would be a Flame tank for Illidan. Very few guilds would allow a Protection Paladin to Main Tank Illidan as we had very few tools for dealing with his Enrage in Phase 5. Some guilds mistakenly believed that his Shear attack was only preventable with the Warrior’s Shield Block skill, but with sufficient gear, a Paladin could be equally immune to Shear with Holy Shield. So I worked diligently to prepare myself. I read strat after strat and watched at least a dozen different YouTube videos of Druids, Paladins, and Warriors tanking Flames of Azzinoth. I farmed up over 100 Badges to buy the entire Fire Resist

Over on BRK , he posted a screen shot from Hallows Eve 2006 , and asked the innocent question: "Do you have screenshots from 2006 or earlier?" I'm glad you asked: June 2006. I was young Paladin of level 43 traveling through the lovely zone of Feralas. I came across one of my heroes from Warcrft 3: The Frozen Throne. Rexxar, Champion of the Horde. I was Retribution at the time using an odd build that was Retribution with a Sword and Board. It relied on using Vengenace and white damage to kill your foe while you kept yourself going with Seal of Light and Judgement of Wisdom.

Dominion cranked up the Raid Machine last night and headed over to Black Temple. Before the Raid, I headed over to Burning Steepes in hopes of finding an Invasion Point and farming up some additional Necrotic Runes. I really want to get a Tabard of the Argent Dawn. I couldn’t believe my luck when I rode up to the point and saw it was completely empty. No one was around. I spent a good half hour rounding up packs of undead and taking them down. With Blessing of Sanctuary and Judgement of Light, I finished each fight with over 80% health and mana. Soloing as a Protection Paladin is a blast. I left for the raid with nearly 50 Runes. The Mail Undead Slayer Leggings dropped by I ended up vendoring them. Nerf Temple was as simple as ever, but for the first time since THE Patch, I noticed a couple of DPS really riding the threat of all the tanks, particularly Mages and Rogues. Hand of Salvation came in very handy. We used it on one of the mages during Mother and he was pretty much s

"Let me explain... No, there is too much. Let me sum up." Man, it is nice to be back. My synapses are firing and I can actually make a coherent thought. The medicine the doctors had me on was great but it made it a little hard to think straight. If you are at all concerned over the recent Paladin nerfs, I strongly recommend you check out Josh's blog, http://e4ae.blogspot.com/2008/10/chicken-little-sky-is-not-falling.html We really don't know how the Seal Nerfs will affect Protection threat. We know on Beta we are still doing 'enough' threat so as to not cap the DPS. I'm going to put my confidence in Blizzard that if Protection Paladins start having issues with maintaining threat, they will address it. One idea would be increasing One Handed Weapons Specialization or increasing the percentage on Shield of the Templar (the talent that increases the damage of our 'Shield' spells, i.e. Shield of Righteousness, Avenger's Shield and Holy Shield)

Brain, brain, it's Honors. I need you. Sleep... rest... hush, you go away now. No, I need you. Meds, we need meds, and pillows There is all this amazing stuff going on right now. Zombies, Invasions, Seal Nerfs. I need my keen ability to analyze, and commentate. Commentate? Where did you even come up with that? See Brain, this is why I need you. You know, Honors, people are going to see right through this whole spiel? Probably, but without you, it's about all I got. I'm going back to bed.

Only Council and Illidan remained alive in Black Temple. Dominion was out to change that. At first, it seemed like the universe itself was conspiring against me. First, it was Wednesday night. Wednesday is my usual night off, but I was able to get clearance to log on. Okay, first hurdle avoided. The next was I was (and still am) sick. I hate to admit I was sick, but the 100.2 on the thermometer is sort of hard to argue against. I apologize in advance if this isn't too coherent. I'm still running a fever and I have taken my body weight in pharmaceuticals. Undaunted I logged in. I knew we would get a shot at Illidan, and I didn't want to miss it. We started out with Council. I was once again offhealing our Druid tank. I really wanted to see if I could hold the Rogue since I do so much more physical threat now, but this might have been our last foray into Black Temple. I simply decided it wasn't worth the time or effort to try to argue with my Raid Leader over it.

When Patch 3.0 hit, most of my mods stopped working, and really no one could do much for a couple of days. I decided now was the time to tame my UI. I have wanted to clean up my UI for a long time, but I knew it would take a period of adjustment and I didn't want to hurt my Raid performance any by adjusting to a new UI. BEFORE This was what my old UI looked like: AFTER And this is my new one: Now let me explain how I got from BEFORE to AFTER. It started with a post from Anna of TooManyAnnas where she had posted her UI. It was beautiful. Then Josh over at EyeForAnEye posted a UI as well. It looked great, too. Both posted a laundry list of mods they used to make their UI. That was great. I went and downloaded the Mods, installed them and brought up WoW. You ever bought something and you get it home and you look at what you've got and then you look back at the picture and you think 'this doesn't exactly look like that'. That was my

So I was going through my normal morning routine and checking on a couple of WoW Blogs during my morning break. One of the Blogs I read is called Shadow and Light . This morning he had a Blog post detailing an announcement by Bioware and Lucasarts that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic aka KotOR Online was officially in the works . He links to a website for the game. No release date has been given yet. You have to understand that I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I can quote entire scenes from the movies which I’ve watched countless times. (By the way, Classic >>>> Prequels). I’m dating myself a bit, but my parents had no clue how much they were about to warp their little 5 year old when they took me to the opening of Star Wars in May of 1977. Before I was introduced to Blizzard games like Starcraft and Warcraft III, nearly every computer game I played was made by Lucas Arts. My first major computer game was X-Wing Versus Tie Fighter back in 1995. From there I got

I'd bet it all on a good run of bad luck Seven come eleven and she could be mine Luck be a lady, and I'm gonna find love Comin' on the bottom line I don’t know how she did it, but my Raid Leader, Vlad, has managed to get Dominion raiding again. We really want to see Illidan dead before the Expansion. I know it probably doesn’t always come across in the blog, but I do have a ton of respect for the work Vlad does for the guild. I think our success on Thursday may have helped. People can see that Black Temple is severely nerfed. Raiding is much more relaxed, and everyone was having a good time. I was given the Main Tank job on Najentus. I made sure to time my Bubble Wall up for when we broke the shield. He was dead before he could bubble a second time. We went to Supremus. For some reason, he just ignored me at first and killed one of our DPS Warriors with Hurtful Strike. I know I was in melee, but he didn’t seem to pick me for a target. Our raid has returne

Allow me for a moment to take off the mask. October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. In the Cancer world, I'm what's called a Co-Survivor. That is the family, friends, health care providers or colleagues of those who have survived Breast Cancer. In my case it was my Aunt who survived Breast Cancer. I would encourage you to participate in the many fund raising efforts going on this month to help find a cure for Breast Cancer and to fund Mammograms for those who can not afford it. You can donate money to the Susan G Koman For the Cure, a grassroots organization of survivors working towards a world without Breast Cancer. You can find their site here: http://cms.komen.org/komen/Donations/index.htm Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Tankadin programming.

When Patch 3.0 hit all my gear was changed. I wasn't sure what to wear anymore. Since I wanted to use the best gear for the job I went about making a spreadsheet to compare the items as they were reitemized. Here is the full spreadsheet, formulas included. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxRKUgjn9TRr-KY-8OzuQRQ . I could have used WoWhead Item Weight formula, but the one they had for Protection Paladins was not properly weighted. If you'd like to download the spreadsheet, change formulas or add items, you can get it here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxRKUgjn9TRr-KY-8OzuQRQ&output=xls This assumes you are not hit capped and will have Touched By the Light, and the new Redoubt. Where a piece had slots, I used Epic gems from Badges. You will see in parentheses next to each item what gem was used (sta = stamina). The ranking was based on a series of formulas that looks at how the item budget contributes to Mitigation (Armor, Defense, Block Rating, Par

I apologize for the somewhat misleading title, but you gotta admit, it made you click the link. So I tried my hand as a Retribution Paladin this weekend. I had heard all the complaints about how overpowered Retribution was at the moment, so I thought I would get some first hand experience for myself. Let me give you a little bit of background so you can see the world through my eyes. My Ret gear is pretty decent (S4 Gloves, S3 Helm, Legs, Chest, S2 Mace, S1 Shoulders with various other PVE pieces thrown in). I am not a very good PVPer. Pre-patch, I was hovering in the 1400 braket in a 2v2 with a Shadowstep Rogue. However, I have been playing as Ret on Beta so I was already familiar with the new tools Retribution has received. After extensive playing time this weekend, I have come to the conclusion that I agree with Blizzard that Retribution needs adjusting. I do not make video games for a living so I don’t have any good ideas on what to change to bring Ret back into line, but

Last night Dominion put together a raid into Black Temple. I think the hardest part of the entire night was finding 25 people who actually wanted to raid. I was Prot spec, and working on Netherwing Dailies when I got the invite. I used to hate these dailies and rarely did them as Prot. Now Prot soloing is so much nicer, I am doing them again. Black Temple is now ridiculously easy. We downed 3 Bosses in 90 minutes, and the only reason we stopped was that we started too late, and it was getting onto midnight. Paladin Blessings are easier to coordinate because we only have 4, but 2 of them are talented. I had to ask each Paladin if they had put talent points in Blessing of Kings. Actually, I should have let the Paladin class officer do that. He was on his Shadow Priest so I had kind of taken over. Nobody said anything to me, so hopefully I didn't upset anyone by overstepping my bounds a little. Eventually we got it all sorted out. I had so much fun in there. It was great to c

I was planning a short night last night on WoW since I had promised Mrs. Hammer we would watch a movie. So I decided to do a little soloing in the Netherwing mines as Prot. Sure, I could have been Ret, and I will likely be Ret for leveling, but I wanted to see how soloing was as Prot. Wow. I did my normal run in the Netherwing mines, meaning I went and pulled a bunch of Flayers and Ravagers and started Consecrating and using Holy Shield. Only now I had Hammer of the Righteous, and I was using Seal of Vengeance instead of Seal of Righteousness or even Seal of Wisdom. See before, I could start getting really low on mana after a while and I would need to drink after each combat. Not last night. I actually ended up Judging Light instead of Wisdom because I rarely had a mana issue thanks to Blessing of Sanctuary. I was using my unenchanted Suneater. I really should be using Kings Defender, but I think the two swords are close enough and I really dig the skin on the Suneater. Pr

I decided to go ahead and spec Protection when I got my talents reset last night. Paladin tanking is much more active now. I literally have no free Global Cooldowns. Every time the Global Cooldown is up, I need to hit something, especially on an Undead/Demon. Mana was not an issue, despite having less than 4000 mana unbuffed. I was sitting near full the entire time I was actually tanking something. I need to do my Island daily route and see what is different there. Not all of my Addons worked, even the ones that had said they were 'WotLK ready'. My biggest problem is OneBag/OneBank is not working. I tried Bagnon, but that didn't work either. With all the stuff I carry in my bags and bank, I need to find a replacement for that quickly. Pally Power worked fine. ZThreatMeter seemed to work okay. Someone in the raid said Omen was updated to use the Blizzard API like Z so I should check that out. Tankadin2 worked but all I could see was a huge frame listing out my ta

The build going live right now has a lot of class changes. But it doesn't have all of them. Some changes, particularly those that affect high level abilities and some of the changes we made more recently won't be in today's build. But you will get them all on or before Nov 13 when Lich King goes live. While we have done some balance testing at level 70 with the changes, we tested at level 80 a lot more, since so many players are focused on Arena combat and endgame raiding. Balance at 70 is going to feel different from 80. If you played WoW at the 2.0 version before Burning Crusade shipped, you'll remember that this can be a crazy time. You have new abilities through talents, but not new core abilities, and not enough talent points to get everything. There are major gear changes, major mechanic changes, and a lot of class changes. Some of those are going to take some getting used to, and despite our best efforts, it's entirely possible we'll find something broken

...and I was Ret spec, just out doing some dailies when I saw my old friend Celoria on her Druid. I offered her some assistance (as Resto Druids are not known for strong soloing and well, it IS a PVP server, it's safer with friends). It turns out she was just farming some Herbs for her future Inscriptionist waiting for Raistilan to log on to run a Heroic. They were kind enough to invite me along to Heroic Magister's Terrace. Raist was going to bring his Protection Paladin alt so I stayed Ret, and we had a Holy Paladin healer. The group was full Mal Katai except of course for me. Holy Paladin, Ret Paladin, Prot Paladin, Survival Hunter, and a Frost Mage versus Heroic Magister's Terrace. This isn't supposed to work. But it did. I take some sort of perverse joy in seeing a group that is 'all wrong' and making it through the instance. The Shard of Contempt dropped but I lost the roll to the Holy Paladin who is going Ret today. I have a ton to learn as

(This post has nothing to do with WoW) I've been wanting to make this post for a while, but I've always held off. Faith and Politics are such divisive issues, especially as we approach an election in a couple of weeks. I've always tried to take a "Hippocratic" approach to talking about my faith, meaning 'First, do no harm'. So many well meaning people have, with completely good intentions turned people off from listening to people of faith. You may be experiencing some of those emotions right now remembering a time when you encountered someone like that. Sometimes, a lot of times actually, I wish there was another word to describe my faith. Too many people have used my Faith to hurt people or to only further their own ends. If you've been hurt by someone who claimed to follow my faith, I want to apologize to you. I'm sorry. Not everyone who says "I'm a Christian" is truly following Christ. Not every building with the word Chu

If you haven't done so already, you need to start updating your Addons now. Patch 3.0 will break most if not all of your mods. Most of the popular Addon sites will be flooded right after Patch day. I started last night gathering mods. I found most sites (with the notable exception of Curse) made it very easy to tell if a Mod would work with 3.0/Wrath. I also have the added bonus of being a Beta tester, so I can test the mods on the Beta client. So far, I've downloaded most of the mods I need. I've only installed Xperl on the Beta client but it seems to be working just fine so far. I'm taking it slow because I really want to redo my UI for Wrath. I'm took much of a clicker right now. I don't click everything, but I still click too much. I want to build some new habits as I level in Wrath. So far I've downloaded : Auctioneer, DeadlyBossMods, Decursive, ElkanoBuffBars , FuBar , Healbot, ItemRack, OmniCC, PallyPower, Prat, RatingsBuster, SCT, SCTd, Tanka

10/6 - Part 1: General Tanking 10/7 - Part 2: The New Seal and Judgement System 10/8 - Part 3: Changes to Existing Talents and Spells 10/9 - Part 4: New Talents, and suggested Trees 10/10 - Part 5: The New Threat Rotation or 96969 10/11 - Part 6: Threat Stats for Protection Paladins and Tank Gear Reitemization 10/12 - Part 7: Inscription and Glyphs 10/13 - Part 8: Comparing the 4 Tanks 10/14 - PATCH DAY! As I've gone through the Beta and watched the Tankadin develop, I've felt the full gambit of emotions. There have been highs and lows, moments when I felt like giving up and moments when I felt like we were better than ever before. As the Paladin community communicated our concerns to Blizzard one of the posters came up with this imaginary scenario. Your 25 man Raid Guild approaches RandomBoss Encounter X. In the Raid, you have a Druid, a Death Knight, a Paladin, and a Warrior. All have been with the guild a while and have established themselves as capable players.

10/6 - Part 1: General Tanking 10/7 - Part 2: The New Seal and Judgement System 10/8 - Part 3: Changes to Existing Talents and Spells 10/9 - Part 4: New Talents, and suggested Trees 10/10 - Part 5: The New Threat Rotation or 96969 10/11 - Part 6: Threat Stats for Protection Paladins and Tank Gear Reitemization 10/12 - Part 7: Inscription and Glyphs 10/13 - Part 8: Comparing the 4 Tanks 10/14 - PATCH DAY! With the release of Patch 3.0, Blizzard is opening up the new Profession of Inscription, and one of the items produced by Inscription are Glyphs. Glyphs are added to your spell book and change certain aspects of your spells. You can have 3 Major and 3 Minor Glyphs. I want to examine the currently available Glyphs for Paladins and give some tentative recommendations. Blizzard has recently announced they are going to reevaluate Glyphs so we could see some changes, but I think it's safe to assume that what we have no is what we will get in Patch 3.0. Glyphs seem incr

10/6 - Part 1: General Tanking 10/7 - Part 2: The New Seal and Judgement System 10/8 - Part 3: Changes to Existing Talents and Spells 10/9 - Part 4: New Talents, and suggested Trees 10/10 - Part 5: The New Threat Rotation or 96969 10/11 - Part 6: Threat Stats for Protection Paladins and Tank Gear Reitemization 10/12 - Part 7: Inscription and Glyphs 10/13 - Part 8: Comparing the 4 Tanks 10/14 - PATCH DAY! The purpose of this post is to examine the value of various stats to Paladins in Wrath and the 3.0.2 patch. Mitigation Stats : Armor, Def, Block Rating, Parry, Dodge, Block Value, Str. We know 1 STR = 0.5 Block Value. We know that Block Value is increased by 30% by the new Redobut. Health Stats : Stamina. We assume most Protection Paladins will have Sacred Duty and Combat Expertise, so each point of stamina equal to 1*1.06*1.06, or 1.12. Threat : Expertise, Str, Stamina, Hit, Attack Power, Spell Power. We can assume most Protection Paladins will take Touched By The Light

10/6 - Part 1: General Tanking 10/7 - Part 2: The New Seal and Judgement System 10/8 - Part 3: Changes to Existing Talents and Spells 10/9 - Part 4: New Talents, and suggested Trees 10/10 - Part 5: The New Threat Rotation or 96969 10/11 - Part 6: Threat Stats for Protection Paladins and Tank Gear Reitemization 10/12 - Part 7: Inscription and Glyphs 10/13 - Part 8: Comparing the 4 Tanks 10/14 - PATCH DAY! So how do we combine our new tools with our changed tools with our old tools to make an effecient and potent rotation. Let me introduce the 96969 Threat Rotation. Most of what you will see here is is based on some excellent work done by Psiven of Prodigy on the Moonrunner realm, and used with permission. The rotation comes from a recognition that most of our threat skills come with either a 6, or 9 second cooldown. Right now we only have 1 skill with a 6 second cooldown, and that is our new Hammer of Righteousness. At Level 75, we will get another 6 second cooldown with Shi