Honor's Code

1. Buy Libram of Obstruction 2. Buy Plantium Mesh Cloak 3. Enchant Cloak with Titanweave 4. Hope to get an invite to Naxx-25 I logged on and banged out a Heroic Vault of Archavon run. Then I ran over to the Badge Vendors and bought the Libram of Obstruction and the Plantium Mesh Cloak. I found a Guild enchanter and slapped Titanweave on that bad boy. Then I whispered the raid leader that I was available. Badaboom, badabing. Invite. Thank you, very much. We had a pretty good run through Naxx25, and knocked out Construct, Military and Spider. I was offtanking most of the night and it was something of a relief to have our regular Main Tank handling the pulls. I could pull my mob off and go to town. For Tanks it was me (Tankadin), a Warrior, and two Feral Druids. I am still amazed by the threat generation that Ferals can put out, and the seeming invincibility of our very geared Warrior. I got a chance to tank Baron Rivendare for Four Horsemen. I actually tanked his level 60

I answered a call for a PuG Vault of Archavon 25 raid. It was a good hour before Mal Katai's scheduled Naxx25 run, and we would only have Wintergrasp for another 30 minutes. Given the rarity of the Alliance actually ever having control of Wintergrasp on Altar of Storms, I jumped at the chance. They didn't say what they needed, only that they needed more people. When I arrived, the tanking assignments had already been figured out. A Warrior would be MT, and a Protection Paladin would be OT. I was a backup. This didn't bother me, I just wanted my two Emblems of Valor. As the other Tankadin walked up to the front of the raid, I saw something that immediately got my attention, a Hammer of Judgment. Uh-oh, do we have someone who hadn't gotten the memo about spell damage weapons not being ideal? I decided to inspect him. His gear looked okay, no other Spell Power pieces besides the Hammer of Judgment. He had a couple of level 70 pieces, trinkets for the most part. App

I'm trying to decide what to do with my Emblems of Valor and Emblems of Heroism. I'm currently sitting on 35 Heroism and 25 Valor. When you face this decision, you can and should go read all the pick order guides you can find. There's a couple of excellent ones on Tanking Tips . We'll forgive Vene (Tanking Tips author) for being a Red Bar. He writes some very good tanking articles and if you are a serious tank his blog ought to be part of your reading. Just ignore the Warrior specific stuff. But after you read the guides, and before you go plunk down your pretty Emblems, remember this: Tank, Know Thyself! The first thing I'm going to consider when deciding on a piece of 'badge' gear is looking for weak points in my current kit. As I examine my tanking kit, I can see that I'm weak at the Bracers (Tempered Saronite), Back (Cloak of the Enemy), and Libram (Tome of the Lightbringer, my last piece of tBC gear). My Neck, Boots and Legs would be the next week p

I found myself in what's becoming a familiar haunt to Honorshammer, Dun Niffelem. While there I saw my buddy LeeJenkins asking for an Offtank for 10 man Naxx. Because my schedule doesn't mesh well with the schedule of the 10 man Naxx groups in the guild I jumped at the chance. I had managed to grab a couple more upgrades since I last Raid tanked. The Titanium Earthguard Ring from Jewelcrafting and Bolstered Legplates from Heroic Violet Hold had been added to my kit. This pushed me into the 26k unbuffed HP range. So get my Flask of Stoneblood, and my Dragonfin Filet and start flying out to Dragonblight. I started looking around the raid group, and I got really excited. It was a bunch of folks that I ran a ton with back in Burning Crusade, but hadn't been able to run as much with as of yet in Wrath. We had 2 Protection Paladins (myself and one other) as tanks. Healers were a Holy Paladin, and Holy Priest. We had a Feral Druid, and Titans Grip Warrior as our melee. Rang

(This post contains major HUGE spoilers. If you haven't done these quests in Storm Peaks, stop reading, and go do them. Proceed at your own risk.) So I was continuing to quest in the Storm Peaks working on a chain from the Frostborn Dwarves. This chain was trying to find Norgannon's Core. You start off by having to find a Dwarf. You find him, dying, of course. He sends you to a Watcher named Creteus. Creteus sends you off to 4 Temples in the area to try find out what happened. The little probe goes around and determines some sort of battle took place. You get back he sends you into this cave where you have to defeat a ton of Water Elementals to get the Core. As soon as you do, everything changes. Two Frostborn dwarves show and tell you the cave is under attack by Iron Dwarves. You have to fight your way through the Iron Dwarves (who weren't there when you down into the cave). One of the Frostborn tells you that King Stormheart (aka Muradin Bronzebeard) is leading the

Thursday I logged in and saw that Mal Katai would be running Naxx25. I got my stuff together for both my Protection Set and Retribution Set and hung around Dalaran. I'm still not 100% sure how Mal Katai decides who is going to get an invite and who isn't. All I know is that sometimes I get invited and sometimes I get virtually ignored. I got a whisper from Cryak asking me what spec I was. I answered in the way I usually do, "Prot at the moment". I hope he takes that to mean that I'm prot right now, but if you need something else, let me know. Maybe I should just say that directly next time. He then queried me as to where my gear was at. I told him the truth, a mix of blues and epics and around 24.5k unbuffed health. He must have thought that was good enough because a few moments later I had an invite to the raid. The other tanks appeared to be Cryak and Zelena. So you had Prot Warrior, Feral Druid, Prot Paladin. Most of the trash was just an AoE fest with Cr

I know I stopped talking about my solo/questing as soon as I started raiding, but I wanted to give you an update. I'm still questing. I've continued working my way through the quests in Storm Peaks. The Titan Lore is really good and the quests are fun. There's even an Engineer only quest which rewards you with a schematic for a Scrapbot, which as far as I can tell is the new Repair Bot. Mats are fairly cheap only Saronite Bars. One of my favorite quests has you doing battle with a Giant Robotic Gnome. And you thought the real ones were scary! I've also reached the conclusion of the Thorim / Loken chain. Most everyone will start on the Thorim chain because it opens up the quests to start gaining Sons of Hodir rep. You continue the chain and ultimately there a mono y mono between Thorim and Loken. But my favorite chain thus far has to do with the Frostborn Dwarves. Once you start doing quests for them they send you out to take their Warrior test. On the way, your

One of the changes in 3.0.8 was a buff to the Tempered Titansteel Helm, adding a Meta Socket and a Blue socket with a Defense Rating socket bonus. So let's compare it to other helms around it's level. We'll compare it to the Armored Titanium Goggles, Thanes Tainted Greathelm, Platehelm of the Great Wyrm, T7 and T7.5. In most of my analysis you will see I disregard 'threat' stats like Strength, Hit and Expertise. This is done with the belief that threat is a minor issue right now. Gear decisions should be based on Survival stats alone. You'll get 'enough' threat stats that come along for the ride. Also each person has to evaulate the chioces based on their gear. Armored Titanium Goggles This is the Engineering only helm that you can craft use as early as 72. The trade off here is 12 Strength, 14 Defense, and 43 Expertise for 51 stamina. The Engineering helm has a yellow socket instead of a blue with an Expertise socket bonus. I wouldn't try to gem th

Last night had a bit of a rough start to it. On Altar of Storms, you couldn't stay logged in for more than about 10 minutes before you would get booted off. Then when you tried to get back on, you would get a World Server is down message. I finally got in and was able to stay online long enough to turn in all my Relics of Ulduar for Sons of Hodir rep, and do a couple of dailies. I check the Guild Message of the Day to see when various groups were running their 10 and 25 mans. It was really disappointing to see that Group 1 AND Group 3 would be running Naxx on Wednesday night. I had run as an offtank in Group 3 last week, and thought I might run with them again. I don't expect people to make their schedules around me. You have to run the groups when most everyone is available. I actually ran the idea by my wife of changing our schedule around a little bit to free up Wednesday night and that went over like the proverbial lead balloon. So after I turned in my Jewelcrafting d

Saturday night, I got an invite to join Snowson (Feral Druid) in Mal Katai Group 3 for Naxx. Group 3 had been created the previous evening when I had been offline. I got on really late, but managed to snag a VoA-10 run . That first night they had knocked out Spider, Plague and a couple of bosses in Military. We were headed for Construct, the only quarter of Naxx I hadn't seen yet. I pulled up Maintankadin's Naxx guide and read over each fight so I would at least know what to do. We had to PuG out final 2 spots in the group because we didn't have enough people in Mal Katai who didn't already have a Raid ID. I got really excited as the buffs started going up and I watched my hitpoints climb and climb. My mouth hung open as I looked at the final total, over 31k! The first Construct we would be facing was none other than Patchwerk himself. I've been playing WoW since Level 60 was the cap. I've heard so much about Patchwerk from back in the day and now with N

Friday night, I had some time to kill I figured I would go do my daily penance before the great Sons of Hodir, so that some day they would see fit to enchant my shoulder pads. As I'm doing that I got contacted by a Snowson (Feral Druid). He was asking if I wanted to do Vault of Archavon with him. This is a 10 or 25 man raid in Lake Wintergrasp that can be accessed only when your faction controls it. Being a PVP, and generally outnumbered, it is not very rare that the Alliance on Altar of Storms owns Wintergrasp. Snowson puts the group together. It's basically a majority Mal Katai PuG, but I was happy because I was finally raiding as Protection, and not Ret. I've enjoyed raiding Ret and I hope I get to do it again, but Protection is what I enjoy the most. Despite my best efforts I couldn't find much on the Lore of Archavon. All we know for sure is that he is an Iron Giant guarding a Vault. The Iron Giants originally served the Titans and then came under the sway of

Good Day Honors, I am curious now that you are 80 and getting back into the swing of things with raiding how you handle comparing gear upgrades? I am a frequent reader of most blogs, Maintankadin, and tankspot and it seems like every place you look it has items listed in different positions on a best to worst list and everyone seems to think their math backs up their claims. Well I suck at math, and other than knowing I need to stay above 540 defense and work towards 102.4% after DR I am pretty much clueless and thus I depend on a lot of other peoples logic and math to assist me with looking at gear upgrades. The problem is with WoLK almost all the Tankadin experts disagree on what item is better. So in times of trouble I return to the person who has taught me the most about the tankadin class, you, for some assistance with finding my way again. Thanks for any insight you can give me. GunningForGear of Terokkar Making gear lists and the math behind them is one of the more fun meta-gam

As soon as we were done kicking dragon butt, I started spamming Guild Chat for Heroics run. I can't control if I get invited to 10s and 25 mans, but I can take responsibility for my own 5 man runs. I quickly found a healer who wanted to run Heoric Nexus for a Mace off the last boss. Finding 3 DPS was not difficult at that point. Since I had just completed a Heroic Nexus run the day before, I felt pretty good about knowing what to do. Of course you wouldn't have known that from the fact I wiped us on the Horde boss. See, I didn't pull him far enough back and the Death Knight in the party got feared into another group. My rogue (Sneakyfeet) kept telling me I could run out of the Bosses Whirlwind. For the life of me, I couldn't seem to time it right. The only time I actually avoided it was if I dodged or parried. Regardless, we managed to down him that time. He dropped the Cloak of the Enemy again which I let Reddrick (Holy Paladin) take for an offset. So we continued

I jumped on last night and headed over to Grizzly Hills because I wanted to buy the Venture Company Libram of Retribution. Unfortunately, once I got over there I saw that the Horde had control of the area, and that the Alliance vendor was not up. But while I was over there, I saw Cryak looking asking if anyone wanted to come to Sartharian 25. I offered my services. As has been the norm since I hit 80, I was once again told I would have to come as Ret DPS. Apparently, they had all their tank spots filled. I was a little disappointed that I wouldn't be able to go as Protection, but it would be 4 more Emblems of Valor and a shot at the Glove token, so off I went to Ironforge to respec. A few moments later, I was all set to lay down the hurt. First pull of 4 dragons and we send in a Druid named Zelena in to grab them all. My eyes about popped out of my head when I clicked on him and saw he had over 40k health. We burned through the trash without any problems. I managed to get m

Tuesday night I logged on, not entirely sure what would be going on. As far as I've been able to to tell Mal Katai doesn't have a set raid schedule. There are currently two full Naxx10 groups running. Both those groups fromed before I hit 80. There has been talk of a 3rd group forming, but so far I haven't heard anything about it. Not long after I logged in I saw Araxe (BM Hunter) looking for a tank for some Heroic runs. Araxe was one of the guys I was close to during my initial time with Mal Katai, so I quickly offered my shield to his cause. The group was filled with old familiar friends, Celoria (Resto Druid) and Deeslock (Warlock). Then we rounded out the group with a new face in Marktradegy (Mage). No one had a strong preference as to which Heroic to do, so we did Heroic Voilet Hold. Now I had attempted Heroic Violet Hold once before in a PuG, but we had not been successful. The group, as most PuGs tend to do, fell apart after the first wipe. That wipe had been cau

I had a pretty good idea about what I was going to do with my evening when I logged into World of Warcraft Monday night. I was going to head to Ironforge and buy the mats I needed to finish the last 5 skill points I needed in Engineering to get me to 440. Then I would craft both the Retribution and Protection Engineering Goggles. After that I would start advertising myself as a Tank for Heroics both in Guild Chat and in LFG. While waiting for a group I’d be doing Sons of Hodir quests in Storm Peaks. It was a solid plan, and I made it as far as Ironforge. While riding my Charger down to the Auction House, I got a whisper from Cryak. As far as I can tell, Cryak is the Main Tank in Mal Katai, and helps organize and lead our 25 man Raids. He wanted to know if I was available to raid and if I would mind coming as Ret. I told him I’d love to come, but I was honest with about my DPS. It was improving, but don’t expect me to pull 2k. He told me if it was a problem they would sub me out later

I've been really slack on posting screenshots of my latest adventures, so here they are. Consider this something of a slide show. First up we have Honors in his first 10 man Raid with Heroes Inc fighting Anub'Rekhan. Now we get ready to battle Instructor Razvious. Then we fought with Gothik. This is how Honorshammer looked in his Prot gear at the beginning of my raiding career. I haven't actually raided in this gear yet, because I keep getting invited as Ret. Now for the new loot I've gotten. First up, a major dent in the old pocketbook, my Titansteel Shield Wall. This parenthetical numbers are in comparison to my old Saronite Bulwark. The mod is a combination of Ratings Buster and EquipCompare. But I didn't stop there breaking the bank, I also got the Tempered Titansteel Treads. This is compared to....well...themselves because I was genius enough to vendor my old Saronite Boots before I took the screenshot. Brilliant! I recognize these aren't the strong