Honor's Code

If you haven't seen slashhug's post on Dual Spec's you really should take a moment and check it out. It's fantastic. Link love incoming: http://www.slashhug.net/dual-specs-an-anti-rant/ Tuesday night was decision night for Honorshammer. I whispered Salvation's GM and told him I was going to take the Heroes offer. Then I told the officers. It was pretty much what I had expected. People were disappointed, and saddened by my decision. I had wanted to avoid that, but it just wasn't possible. I still consider all those guys friends and would help them out in any way possible. I hope they know that. I was feeling pretty low myself so I fired up the engines in the Gyrocopter and headed out to Storm Peaks to work on my Son Of Hodir rep. I've joked to a friend of mine that I'm going to hate the Sons of the Hodir by the time they love me (exalted). Not long after I got out to Dun Niffelum, something completely unexpected happened. I got a whisper from a Hunter tha

No one has commented yet, but I made a very subtle change to the background image for the blog. I hope you liked it. So I got tagged, but not tagged by Josh at Eye For an Eye on the Sixth Screenshot meme. I love screenshots. To me, WoW is like a vacation. It's a fun place to be for a short period of time. Screenshots are like the pictures that you can look back on with fond memories of the time that was. So here's the 6th screenshot in my screenshots folder taken in early March of 2006: This screenshot comes from a batch of screenshots I was taking of all the toon I had at that time. I think I was going to put them on my Geocities site, but I don't even remember. I had 4 toons. A Level 2 Dwarf Warrior and a Level 8 Night Elf Druid who were on the server Dark Iron. A Level 13 Human Paladin and Level 6 Dwarf Hunter were on Rexxar. The Paladin on Rexxar was a Human Paladin named Ittai, who was the very first toon I ever rolled in World of Warcraft. If you are observant, you ma

Yes, I’ve seen the 3.1 Patch notes. I’ll comment on them in a couple of weeks but we are still very early in the PTR cycle. Blizzard has even stated we don’t have all the patch notes just yet, so I’m going to wait before I post on them. I had given myself the deadline of 7pm yesterday to make a decision on which guild I was going to join. After some deliberation with myself, I requested and then graciously gave myself an extension to tonight to make a decision. I know I haven’t handled the situation well. Sunday night, when I logged in, I saw the Guild Message of the Day stating that everyone needed to start finding new homes. I was shocked, disappointed and saddened. I watched as toon after toon began to gquit and my emotions grew. Finally, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and gquit myself. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have gquit until I knew where I was going. I would later learn of a Warlock who has said he will stay in Mal Katai until it disbands or the GM kicks him, he will not

The Ten Commandments for Raiders: http://frostmage.net/index.php/ten-more-commandments/ Honorshammer gives this a BRILLIANT!! It's a great read. You laugh, you'll cry, and you'll learn a thing or two.

Anyone who has known me very long knows I’m an NFL fan. I love the NFL. This is the talent evaluation portion of the NFL season, and the time for Free Agency. Players whose contracts are up are pursued by teams that want them to join their team. Honorshammer has hit a time of Free Agency in his own virtual life. With the dissolution of Mal Katai, Honors basically becomes a Free Agent. Two teams have already made offers to Honorshammer. I’ll call them T10 and T25. Both have indicated a willingness to work their raid schedules around my own so I can attend most, if not all raids. It’s really nice to have people respect your in game ability and personality. On the other hand, it is difficult because I can only be on one team, be in one guild, so I have to choose. I can’t decide which guild is a better fit for me until I know what I’m really looking for, and what I really want out of a guild I want to be in a guild that is full of individuals who are good people as well as good players . I

I logged on Sunday night and found a message announcing the official end of Mal Katai as a guild. It will disband by the end of the week. None of us knew it, but the blowup last week was like a heart attack to Mal Katai. It hung around for a few days, but ultimately didn’t pull through. I’d like to thank Dora and Ryken, the Guild Masters of Mal Katai for all the hard work, time and effort they put into making Mal Katai the special place it was. I’m sorry for every time I ever ‘fussed’ at them, complained to them, or wrote negatively about them or the guild in this blog. Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth it, not then, and not today. I was just too blind to see that. I have a tremendous amount of respect for their leadership and what they built, and they should be very proud of all their accomplishments. I doubt they read the blog anymore but if they do, I’d like them to know that whatever they do, and wherever they go, I wish them nothing but happiness, prosperity and success. The remai

My online life felt like a soap opera since Mal Katai blew up. It turns out that Mal Katai didn’t just split in two like I thought. A faction of people split off and formed their own guild called Red Headed Step Children. The name was a statement of how they felt they were treated by the Guild. This is where the majority of my WoW friends went. I had thought this was the only split. It turns out another faction split off from Mal Katai and formed a guild called Tarmon Gaidon. The name is a reference to the Wheel of Time series. Yet another faction split off from Mal Katai and was absorbed into a guild called Misery. I have pretty much tried to lay low this week. Tuesday, I was invited to what was essentially a PuG for Naxx25. It was made up of half Red Heads, and half Tarmon Gaidon. It also had two people in the raid (one being your humble author) who still wore the Mal Katai tag. We ran 3 tanks. Myself, another Protection Paladin and a Warrior who was Raid Leading and as

As always bonus points for getting the title reference. Just remember that this is the blog where everything's made up and the points don't matter. That's right it's like spirit to a Paladin . Double bonus points for getting THAT reference. (Italicized text added after a great suggestion from a commenter). Last night, I logged on and sent a tell to my good buddy Raistilan to see if he'd like to run some Heroics. Strangely enough, he was putting a group together and just looking for a tank. Now where could he find a tank...hmm. I offered to go as DPS if he wanted to tank on his Paladin, but he was cool with going on the mage. So I had myself (Prot Paladin) and Raist (Mage). Also in the group were Sariahs (Mage), Wrinklerobes (Disc Priest), Ckcjake (BM Hunter). This was a 'Friends and Family' group. Everyone in the group were good friends or possibly family members like Wrinkle/Sariahs/Ckcjake. Raist asked which Heroic we wanted to run and as you might

I'm a tank, so what am I doing talking about the 4 healing classes today? Well I'm glad you asked! I've never enjoyed healing on my Paladin. Being a walking HoT just wasn't fun. Doing something with a game, by definition a fun activity, that I didn't find fun, kind of didn't make sense. I had wondered if it was healing that I didn't like or just the 'flavor' of Paladin healing. I had thought about rolling a different type of healer to see if I would enjoy it more, but never really had the inclination to do 1 to 80 again. Then I heard that some friends from my old guild Heroes Inc were rolling Horde alts. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out the healing side of the game. But which healer to roll? Moreso than just about any other role, a Healers life changes dramatically in that final ding. Most healers level in a spec that is not their healing tree. Because the experience can be so different I wanted to interview a healer of each type

It was something of a quiet weekend for me from a WoW point of view. I had a wonderful evening Saturday night. My wife and I went to a nice restaurant for dinner, and spent way more than we should have. Then we went home and watched a DVD. I don't know what it is about a quiet dinner that seems to make it really easy for us to talk to each other. You'd think after 13+ years of marriage we'd have just about covered all the ground there was to cover. But we talked and talked Saturday night, and it was really cool. In WoW, I sort of just laid low this weekend, trying to let the whole Guild situation work itself out. I moved my Hunter alt, Honorshummer from Mal Katai to Heroes Inc, and spent some time this weekend leveling him up. He's now up to 72. He tamed a Devilsaur from Netherstorm and is working his way through Borean Tundra. It's a bit slow going, mainly because he's attacked and killed by every Rogue and Death Knight on the server. Death Knights especial

The last time I did a 'Guild' post as back in late November. No one has been happier than me that I haven't had much to say about my guild. But here I am again. Last night, I knew I was going to be late for the raid. My wife's best friend lost her father and we were going to the wake to give our condolences to her. I left a message on my guild's message boards so they would know what's up. When I get online, I find that my guild has basically split in two. After talking with some of the guys that left, it seems there had been a growing schism between members of the guild, and last night was something of a final straw. Unfortunately, the Guild Leader of my guild didn't log in until the argument had gone all the way through officer chat to open guild chat and right out in to Trade. The net effect was about 90% of the people that I have enjoyed spending my time with online, including everyone I had been in Naxx10 with the night before, left Mal Katai last

As you may or may not have heard Circuit City is going out of business. So I went down to the local Circuit City and picked up a new 19" Flat Screen monitor to replace my old 21" CRT. Even though the monitor was 'smaller', the screen space is much larger. I was able to increase my resolution from 1024x768 to 1440x770 (or something like that). The difference is very noticeable. The game looks 100 times better now, and I have much more screen real estate to put addons, and a much clearer view of my playing field. I got invited to run with a bunch of friends to Naxx10 last night. This is the kind of run I have been really enjoying in this expansion. It didn't matter if we wiped 4 times, like we did to Heigan, or one-shot boss after boss, which we did as well. Everyone was having a good time, killing bosses, getting loot, and enjoying the game. I didn't manage to snag any loot because my rolling fails. My super secret plan was to get my Ret gear from 10 mans (wh

The plan last night was to start work on Malygos-25. I quested around Borean Tundra abit working on my Loremaster of Northrend. My plan had been to be online, at the stone, and I was going to be the first person there. I had no clue if I'd get an invite or not, but I was going to make sure I was doing everything I could control. The actual invites are not in my control. The Officers were not satisfied with the group they could form out of those available online, so they decided to call the raid. This kind of thing would have really upset up back in tBC, but it didn't seem to bother me a great deal last night. We'll get there eventually, or we won't, and I'll tank Malygos in a 10 man at some point. Wintergrasp was about to start when we called the raid so we headed over there to fight the Horde. On my server, you never do Wintergrasp without at least a 3 stack of Tenacity. I've had it as high as 6 or 7 at times. (In case you don't know, Tenacity is a

Last week, Mal Katai ran Naxx25 again. It was a good run, and we only ran into trouble on Thaddius, and Anub’Rekhan. Thaddius was a simple issue of people needing to leave and the raid trying to kill him with 22 people. Then we lose 2 in the first transition. We just didn’t have enough DPS left to finish him off before the Enrage timer. We went back first thing the next raid night and one shot him. Anub’Rekhan was also a simple issue. Our Tank on Anub got disconnected. It happens. By the way, the Tank was not yours truly. I was engaged in the middle of the room tanking the Add. It was during Locus Swarm which meant I was tangled up with an Add, and if I got close to Anub I’d be silenced and unable to generate any threat outside of Hammer of the Righteous. By the time I realized what had happened, Anub had wrecked the raid. I’m not sure if I should use names in the blog or not. I mean the guys in Mal Katai who read the blog will pretty much figure out who I am talking about. Peopl

So by now you've probably seen the preview of the 3.1 class changes. I'm not going to pretend I understand any of the other classes, but I do want to comment on the Paladin changes. In case you haven't read them yet here they are. Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins. Thus shall end the great 'Who will spec Kings' debate. It's possible only the 1 point Kings is trainable (Increases all stats by 2%), and that the Improved Kings (4 additional points to get you up to the well known 10% to all stats) is still in the Prot Tree. Of course, the entire Kings (10%) could be trainable as well, we won't know until we see the new trees and the PTR is up. So this will free up anywhere from 1 to 5 points in my build. This was probably a balancing decision for the Devs. Do you assume Kings is available to the raid or not? If you balance the encounter that Kings is available, then it's harder for groups that don't have Kings

Monday night, Mal Katai got its 25 man raid team together to finish up with Naxx. All we had left was Plague and then Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. I got a little help from our resident Ret Paladin and Guild Leader as to where the adds on the fight would spawn. That aided me greatly in picking them up and I feel like I did a much better job, though one or two still seemed to get loose. As you walk into Noth's room, look to your right and you'll see some small piles of bones. When Noth starts blathering on about "Rise my soldiers, Rise and fight once more", look over at the piles of bone and you can actually see the adds start to come out of the bone pile. I actually stayed alive the whole way on Heigan. I tried to a watch our Main Tank to see where he put him, but very quickly I was having to concentrate more on keeping myself alive rather than trying to pick up something from watching him. Loatheb went pretty well. I actually picked up a Spore or two, and DPS

It is wonderful that Blizzard maintains the Official Forums to give their players a place to discuss the game. While solid in their own right, the Official WoW Forums have what I think of as a high low signal to noise ratio. In other words, there is some good information on the Official Forums, but you've got to wade through a morass of inaccuracies, trolling, elitism, and junk posts to find it. You might read one helpful post in 100, and that might be a little generous. To combat this, small groups of gamers with like interest have banded together to create communities outside the Official Forums. These places usually have a narrow focus, and the moderators of these forums tend to be a little more heavy handed with unproductive posters. The Tanks started their own small community with Tankspot . Regardless of color of your raid bar, if you like being a Dragon chew toy, you need to be on Tankspot regularly. Protection Paladins have found a home at Maintankadin . Maintankadin poste